Saxon: The Emperor's Elephant (30 page)

I sat back on my heels and thought about the Anglo-Saxons that Abram and I had met on our way back from St Peter’s Basilica. It was possible that one or more of them were King Offa’s
hirelings, paid to get rid of me. But there, too, I saw a difficulty: releasing the aurochs and the two bears into the arena was not a sure way of getting me killed. Protis had died, not me.

Of course there was the simpler explanation: the spectator had been there by coincidence. Nevertheless, I was left with a disagreeable feeling that the shadowy watcher had known what would
happen.

Carefully, I gathered up the half-shells and put them in my purse along with Offa’s coin.

‘T
HE ANNUAL
N
ILE FLOOD
– a great mystery,’ Abram remarked. The two of us watched a fisherman throwing his net
in the mud-laden current. The graceful flare and splash of his net was endlessly fascinating. Standing in a tiny, unstable boat hollowed from a tree trunk, he gathered up the fine mesh hand over
hand, swung it inboard, and shook out a silver shower of fingerlings.

‘Why a mystery?’ I asked.

‘The river rises when there is no rain in Egypt. So where does the water come from?’ he answered.

‘Doesn’t your itinerarium provide a clue?’ I asked.

‘The itinerarium only extends so far,’ he replied, pointing upriver with his chin. ‘The source of the river is unknown.’

He had produced the map when we went to the Nomenculator to report what had happened with the aurochs. Paul had pressed us to leave Rome as soon as possible, saying it was for our own safety. He
knew of a large party of pilgrims leaving for the Holy Land and he could arrange for us and the animals to accompany them to the port of Brundisium. From there the pilgrims would sail for Jaffa and
Jerusalem and we could continue overland to Baghdad. Diffidently, Abram had proposed a quicker route by ship from Brundisium to Alexandria in Egypt, then onward. He unrolled the scroll to show the
Nomenculator what he was suggesting.

‘This is Alexandria on the Egyptian coast,’ he had said, pointing to a symbol of a castle. ‘Those lines, like a tangle of green worms, represent the delta of the Nile, each
river finding its own way to the sea. And here’ – he had slid his finger to a straight black line that met the most easterly of the rivers – ‘is a canal that links the Nile
to the Erythrean Sea. From there one can sail all the way to Baghdad itself.’

The Nomenculator had taken the opportunity to show off his erudition. ‘Herodotus wrote about the canal, if I’m not mistaken. Built by the pharaohs. Emperor Trajan had it dug and
cleared when it silted up.’

‘Are you sure that the canal is still usable?’ Paul had given Abram a worried glance. ‘Shifting sand is difficult to keep at bay.’

‘The map has been a reliable guide so far,’ the dragoman had replied reasonably.

Paul had then turned to me. ‘Sigwulf, I think your dragoman is offering good advice.’

‘Then we go through Egypt and use the canal,’ I answered. Months earlier in Aachen, Alcuin had suggested this same route, and indeed our voyage from Italy across the Mediterranean
had been uneventful. In Alexandria we had been met by customs officials and taken to an interview with the city governor. His overlord was the caliph and when he heard of the purpose of our
journey, he immediately gave his permission for us to proceed. Abram had slipped the port captain a generous bribe for his dockworkers to shift our animals without delay onto two large riverboats
that regularly plied the river.

Now, less than six weeks after departing Rome, we were gliding along the braided waterways of the delta heading deeper into Egypt. Watching the fisherman cast his net again, I was confident that
I had made the correct choice.

‘That night in the Colosseum, did it involve those Saxons you were so worried about?’ Abram asked.

The abruptness of his question caught me off guard as I kept my suspicions to myself, and I could only answer feebly, ‘How do you reach that conclusion?

‘The knife attack in Kaupang you described to the Nomenculator. Then Protis loses his life in the arena in the Colosseum. You could have been the victim just as easily.’

‘Maybe someone wanted to harm the animals and damage Carolus’s embassy to the caliph, as you had feared,’ I said.

The dragoman tilted his head, squinting through half-closed eyes at the fisherman who was disentangling what looked like a twig from his net. ‘We need to keep alert.’

I was taken aback. ‘Even here? In Egypt?’

He turned to face me. I noticed how much browner he was now, tanned by the Mediterranean sun. He could have passed for an Egyptian himself. ‘Make no mistake. Our arrival in Alexandria was
noted.’

‘But we are in the caliph’s territory now. That is security enough.’

He treated me to a sceptical glance. ‘Did you listen to the dock workers in Alexandria, or to the port captain when he spoke with his assistants?’

I failed to see the point of his question so he added, ‘They were speaking Greek. Alexandria may be part of the caliph’s possessions but in their hearts its citizens still think of
themselves as Greeks. They were proud members of the Byzantine Empire for centuries and, if asked, they would still serve Byzantine interests.’

He did not have to explain any further. In Aachen, Alcuin had warned me of the hostility of the Greeks when they learned Carolus was sending gifts to their Saracen enemies. To them, the caliph
was a foe. I also recalled the Khazar slave traders in Kaupang who would have passed through Byzantium on their way north. They had vanished a few days before I was attacked, and Osric had
suspected them as being Greek agents. Unbidden, there sprang into my mind an image of the Greek priest in his dark robes officiating at Protis’s funeral. The largest foreign community in Rome
was Greek. They had their own churches, shops and guilds. For every Saxon pilgrim you might encounter in the streets of Rome, you were rubbing shoulders with fifty Greeks. They had the means and
resources to organize the events that led to Protis’s death.

‘Protis was a Greek,’ I said. ‘If the Greeks have been trying to prevent our embassy reaching the caliph, we have to remember that Protis lost his life helping us.’

The dragoman was unimpressed. ‘Protis was a Massalian. His Greece was the homeland of ancient heroes. Neither he nor his city had any ties to Byzantium.’

Both of us turned at the sound of a high-pitched cry of delight. It was Walo. He was in the bow of our boat, waving and shouting incoherently. I hurried forward to find out what was the
matter.

‘There! There!’ he babbled.

His finger shook as he pointed at the reeds that fringed the river.

I looked in the direction in which he was pointing. The countryside of the delta was so utterly flat that my view was the empty washed-out sky and the thick wall of reeds, taller than a man, on
both banks of the river. Wherever there was a small gap in the reeds, it offered only a glimpse of foreshore, a pattern of cracks and fissures where the water level had fallen and the sun had baked
the mud into a pale brown crust. I saw nothing unusual.

‘What is it?’ I demanded irritably. I was still trying to come to terms with what Abram had just told me and Walo’s simple-mindedness could at times be exasperating.

‘There! Right down by the water!’

Osric had come forward along the wide deck and joined the two of us. ‘What’s Walo so excited about?’ I asked him.

‘A crocodile.’

Then I saw it. I had mistaken it for a dead tree submerged close to the reeds. A gentle ripple spread out. First a broad snout, the colour of wet bronze, and nostrils appeared, then two
protruding eyes. The full size of the beast revealed itself as its armoured back and spine quietly broke the surface followed by the ridge of its long thick tail. I judged the beast to be fifteen
feet in length. Beside me, Walo let out a gasp; part delight, part fear. Despite myself, I stepped back a pace, wondering if the animal could swim the short distance and lunge at our vessel. But
our Egyptian boatmen appeared untroubled as we glided past the creature and it sank back down, reverting to being a drowned log.

Walo was breathless with excitement. ‘Could you see tears in its eyes?’

‘It was impossible to say,’ I answered.

Walo had pleaded with me on the voyage from Italy to consult the bestiary and to make a list of the animals we could expect to encounter in Egypt and beyond. I had done so, though the book
seldom made it clear which country each creature lived in. The crocodile was an exception. The bestiary stated that the crocodile was born in the Nile, and that its skin was so hard that it did not
feel the blows of even the heaviest stones. It had fierce teeth and claws and laid its eggs on the land where male and female guarded them, taking turns. It was unique among all beasts in that it
could move its upper jawbone.

‘Walo, crocodiles can’t weep,’ observed Osric. Like me, he was not convinced that the information in the bestiary was always accurate. The book claimed that a crocodile shed
tears just before and after eating a man, and from then onwards could not cease crying.

‘You saw the creature for yourself,’ said Walo obstinately. ‘It was exactly like its picture.’

‘But the book also says that the crocodile takes to the water only by night. It remains on land by day. So something is not right,’ Osric pointed out.

‘We should ask the boatmen what they know,’ I suggested.

We squeezed our way around the aurochs’ cage, which occupied most of the midships of the boat, and went to where the boat master squatted near the helm. An old man, he was wizened and
scrawny, his white hair close cropped to stubble, and dressed in a grubby white gown. I questioned him about the crocodile and its habits, but he found my Saracen difficult to understand, and even
when we asked for Abram to help out with interpreting, he still looked puzzled.

‘Show him the picture in the book,’ suggested Walo.

I fetched the bestiary from my luggage. The crocodile was illustrated twice. The first picture showed the beast on a riverbank. From its jaws protruded the naked legs of a man it was swallowing
entire. The boat master looked at it with rheumy eyes, and nodded vigorously.

‘You see,’ said Walo triumphantly. ‘The crocodile does eat men.’

My efforts at miming the beast crying tears were not understood so I showed the second illustration. Here the crocodile had an unpleasant-looking creature bursting out sideways from its stomach,
through the skin. It was, according to the text, the crocodile’s main enemy, a hydris. It was a water snake that hated the crocodile. If a crocodile lay on the riverbank with its jaws open,
the hydris disguised itself as a ball of mud, rolled up to the open mouth and leaped in. From inside the crocodile’s stomach the hydris then ate its way sideways, killing its enemy.

The old man frowned for several minutes at the picture of the hydris, and then shook his head.

‘Why don’t you show him that other Egyptian creature we doubted?’ suggested Osric.

I turned the pages until I found the hyena. Neither Osric nor I believed the animal really existed. The humped shoulders, sloping backbone and ghoulish face were too grotesque. It was shown
straddling an open coffin, and gnawing on a human corpse. To my surprise the elderly captain recognized the hyena immediately. He nodded energetically and made a sound like an odd coughing grunt,
then smiled at us before spitting a gob of phlegm over the side. He pointed to the writing beneath the picture.

‘He wants to know what’s written there,’ prompted Abram who had come aft to join us. ‘If you read it aloud, I’ll try again to translate what it says.’

With the dragoman interpreting my words, I read out: ‘
The hyena’s jaws are so strong that they can break anything with their teeth, then they grind up the morsels in the belly.
The hyena is male one year, female the next. It cannot bend its neck, so must turn the whole body to see behind.
’

I glanced at the old man to see his reaction. He squatted in the sunshine, arms against his bony knees, expressionless.

‘
The hyena can imitate the sound of a human voice
,’ I read on, ‘
it calls travellers by their names so that as they emerge from their tents, they leap upon them and
tear them to pieces.
’

‘How would a hyena know my name?’ asked Walo with his usual unanswerable directness.

I ignored the interruption. ‘
If it wishes, the hyena’s cry resembles someone being sick. This attracts dogs who are then attacked.
’

‘That’s what the old man was doing – imitating the hyena’s cough,’ said Osric. ‘Mind you, if I heard that noise outside my tent at night, I think I’d
prefer to stay where I was.’

*

Our travel plans were thrown into utter disarray three days later. Our boats had progressed through the delta, sailing and rowing against the sluggish current by day, tying up
at night. The larger animals in our menagerie were bearing up remarkably well despite the increasingly ferocious daytime heat. The crew rigged awnings over their cages to keep off the Egyptian sun,
and threw buckets of water over the aurochs and the two bears whenever they seemed to be uncomfortable. The Nile water was tepid, but helped them cool off, and the ice bears had the good sense to
spend most of the daylight hours fast asleep in the shade, waking up at night. Walo had clipped the heavy coats of the dogs, and flew the gyrfalcons regularly for their exercise, watched by our
boatmen who regarded him with something approaching awe. They took to acting as his lookouts – scanning the banks of the river and drawing his attention to the creatures that he might
otherwise have missed. Crocodiles were commonplace. Often half a dozen of the ugly beasts were drawn up, side by side, on the dried mud of the bank, sunning themselves, mouths open. Walo
triumphantly pointed out to me that the beasts did indeed move their upper jaws, just as the bestiary had claimed. But we never saw the hydris, the crocodile’s deadly enemy, and it totally
slipped my mind that Walo and I had also talked about the hypnalis, the asp that killed Cleopatra the Queen of Egypt.