His Majesty's Elephant

  His Majesty’s Elephant

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  January 29, 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-240-2

  Copyright © 1993, 2013 Judith Tarr

  Dedication

  To

  Brett and Jason

  and Shenita

  Prelude

  His Majesty’s Elephant was Abul Abbas, gift of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid to his friend the Emperor Charlemagne. Along with him came many other wonders, including a golden Talisman containing a fragment of the True Cross on which Jesus died. This Talisman was found by Napoleon, tradition says, on the breast of the Emperor in his tomb, and hangs now, a gleam of gold at the end of a long corridor, in the Tau Palace at Rheims.

  This much is history.

  But suppose that the Talisman was more, and that the Elephant had a part in its magic....

  One

  Rowan saw the Elephant the day it came to Aachen. People had been talking about nothing else for days. It was vast, they said, like a rock rising out of the sea, and grey like one too, and its ears were like sails, and its snout like a snake, long and supple. The Caliph had sent it, a gift from the lord of the East to the Emperor of the West, and its coming toward Aachen was like a king’s processional.

  It was smaller than she had thought. That was the first thing she noticed. She stood among the princesses, right by the throne under its golden canopy, and watched the dark bearded men in their turbans and their silks, bearing gift after gift from their lord and master. The Elephant was the last. It filled the gate of the hall, a looming shadow; then it was inside, draped in silk and gold, and there were knobs of gold on its tusks. It was a splendid thing, but it was hardly bigger than a peasant’s hut, and as its handlers prodded it down the long aisle, she thought that somehow it looked sad.

  Her father stood up to greet the Elephant, which was a mighty honor. It bowed down in front of him. That made him smile under the sweep of his mustache. Some people were afraid of the great strange thing—Gisela had fainted dead away, and the maids were quietly frantic—but the Emperor was delighted with the gift. His voice rang out over the buzz of the court, light and thin for a man so big, but pitched to carry. “Thank our friend and brother,” he said, “and tell him that we shall treasure this most of all the riches he has given.”

  The Caliph’s ambassador answered just as graciously. Then he added, “One gift yet remains, a little thing, but the Commander of the Faithful bade me bear it direct from his hand to your majesty’s. His prayers and his blessing lie on it, and his hope that your majesty will cherish it as the gift of brother to brother.”

  The Emperor’s brows rose.

  This was interesting. Rowan edged closer to the throne.

  Her sisters and their women stood in a knot, goggling at the Elephant. Once Rowan was free of them, she took a deep breath and leaned forward a little, the better to see what gift the Caliph sent his friend the Emperor.

  The Caliph’s ambassador took something from a fold of his robe, something wrapped in a shimmer of silk. He uncovered it carefully.

  They had seen so much gold already: a kingdom’s worth at least. But this was different. It was a pendant, perfectly round, as broad and deep as a child’s palm. There were jewels around the rim, red and green and blue and white; and in the middle, a great cloudy crystal with a flaw in its center.

  The Caliph’s man handled it with great respect, never touching it directly, but keeping it nested in the silk. “This,” he said, “is a holy thing, a blessed Talisman set with a splinter of the Prophet Isa’s Cross.”

  “The True Cross.” The Emperor’s voice was low, reverent. He held out his hand.

  The Caliph’s man hesitated, then set the Talisman in it, still shielded in silk.

  The Emperor held it up. His face did not change expression, but Rowan thought she saw him start.

  As he held the Talisman, she could see the flaw more clearly. It was a splinter, as the infidel had said, set in the crystal as if it had grown there.

  It made her desperately uneasy. She wanted to back away from it. At the same time she wanted to edge closer, to hold it in her hands.

  It would be heavy, she knew without knowing how, and smooth, and neither warm nor cold, but something in between. The holiness in it was proper Christian, even if it came from the leader of the infidels, and yet there was more to it than that.

  Rowan was used to odd feelings. They came, people kept telling her, with being a woman. But this one was odder than she knew what to do with. She started to melt back among the princesses.

  Something made her stop. Her father still had not touched the Talisman with his bare hands. He folded it in its wrapping and tucked it into his sleeve, almost as if he had forgotten about it, except that he remembered to thank the Caliph and the Caliph’s man with proper courtesy.

  But that was not what held Rowan still.

  The Elephant had stood quietly through the last of the gift-giving. Suddenly it moved, stretching out its long strange snout as if looking for something.

  One of its handlers rapped the end with a stick. That must have hurt. The Elephant curled its trunk under its chin and flattened its ears. It was not submitting, though maybe its handlers thought so. The eye that Rowan could see was wise and sad, and said as clearly as words, that the Elephant bided its time.

  oOo

  “They say it will live three hundred years,” Rowan said to her mother.

  Her mother was dead, which made it easier to talk to her, because one could do it anywhere, but harder too, because then one had to explain what one was doing.

  Which was why Rowan was kneeling in the little chapel beside the women’s hall, her head bowed devoutly over her folded hands and her voice lowered to a mumble. The stone floor was hard under her knees. She could hear her sisters and their ladies chattering in the hall, sounding like a flock of magpies.

  “It is the most amazing thing,” Rowan went on. Sometimes she liked to imagine that the wooden Virgin beside the altar was her mother. Her mother had been beautiful like that, but never so mild. “It looked so sad, and so wise. I wonder what it was thinking?”

  Probably it was homesick, said the voice in Rowan’s head that might be her own, but then again might be her mother’s. It was something, that was all she knew, that felt like a woman, with a woman’s solid common sense, but warmth too, and something that felt like affection.

  She could not see any shape to go with it, either spirit-form or earthly flesh. But whatever it was, it knew about homesickness. Heaven was all very well, but one missed one’s kin.

  “I shouldn’t miss them,” Rowan said with sudden temper. “I should like to go as far away as the moon. Then I wouldn’t have to listen to Rothaide. She was at me this morning again, about how she might be a concubine’s daughter, but I’m born of a witch. She said that, Mother, right to my face. I hit her. It wasn’t womanly, I know it wasn’t. Men are the ones who do all the hitting. But I had to do it. Rothaide is always saying dreadful things about everybody, but she isn’t going to say them about you.”

  And what if what Rothaide said was true?

  Rowan forgot to keep her head down. She glared at the gentle somber Virgin who after all looked nothing like her fierce gold-and-white mother. “You were not a witch! You were a queen. You didn’t let people forget that. Some of them don’t forgive.”

  Including Rothaide, the concubine’s child. Bitter, beautiful Rothaide, with her terrible tongue.

  “Oh,” said Rowan, letting her head droop forward again. She was not going to weep. She had given up weeping. But her throat was tight. “Mother, I wish you hadn’t died. You would know why I’m in suc
h a tangle. You wouldn’t smile the way the others do, and nod, and talk oh so wisely about how a child becomes a woman. I don’t want to be a child. I don’t want to be a woman either, or a princess. I want to be just Rowan.”

  And was Rowan not Rowan already?

  “I mean all the time,” said Rowan. “Not just when I’m riding my pony or talking to you.”

  But everyone had to be more than one’s simple self. Particularly if one was a princess, and meant for the great things of the world.

  “If Father would ever let any of us out of his sight,” said Rowan. “He keeps us like birds in an aviary. We can have anything we want, do anything we please—except fly away.”

  And did she want to?

  Rowan stood up. Her knees were stiff. The women were quieter now: one of them was telling a story. Rowan loved stories, but not today. Not with a whole live Elephant to think of.

  She was running away from her mother’s relentless good sense, she knew that very well. But some things she was not ready to face.

  She remembered to cross herself, in case anyone was looking. No one was. She tucked up her skirts and made sure her braids were wound tight about her head and her veil secure over them, and set off toward the stable.

  Two

  Well before Rowan came to the stable, she heard what sounded like a battle in full cry, complete with trumpets. She hitched up her skirts and ran.

  There were no horses in the battle, at least. But there were men enough in the next courtyard over from the stable, and boys with them, and in the middle the Elephant.

  The great beast was holding them all off with trunk and tusks and short charges. There were ropes on it, but they swung loose or dangled broken. No one dared to run in close enough to seize a trailing end.

  As far as Rowan could tell, the men wanted to shut the Elephant in the pavilion that had been set up for it until they could build it a house in the Emperor’s menagerie. The pavilion was one of the Emperor’s old war-tents with three sides down and one rolled up, and the Elephant wanted no part of it.

  Rowan knew she should slip round the other way and do something that would explain her presence here, such as get her pony saddled and led out to ride. But she stayed where she was, backed against the wall.

  One of the grooms had taken the same refuge from the battle. He cradled a bruised hand, and he cursed the Elephant under his breath, till he sensed Rowan’s eyes on him. Then he blushed and shut his mouth.

  “Hasn’t it ever seen a tent before?” Rowan asked.

  “God knows,” said the groom. “These monsters have their own keepers, the infidels say. Raised with them, sleep with them, feed them and clean them and for all I know make water with them. This one’s keeper died of a fever somewhere south of Cologne. It’s been barely manageable ever since.”

  “Poor thing,” said Rowan. She got a grip on the boy’s hand before he could muster wits to stop her. “Not broken,” she said, and never mind his yelp when she flexed his fingers. “Wrap it in a cold poultice and don’t use it too much for a while.”

  She let him go. He hugged his hand as if it had been a wounded baby, and glowered.

  “It’s in mourning,” Rowan said, watching the Elephant’s fight. “No wonder it doesn’t want to do what everyone’s asking. Didn’t anybody think to ask it quietly?”

  Certainly the groom had not. Rowan was about to step into the fray herself, with no particular idea of what she would do when she got there, when someone walked out of the yelling crowd and into the circle the Elephant had cleared.

  The yelling changed focus. “You young fool! Do you want it to trample you?”

  The young fool paid no attention. He was Rowan’s age, probably, not quite a boy, not quite a man, slight and dark, in dusty plain clothes. He walked as calmly as if he were going out to the pasture of a morning to fetch a meek old pony. He had a knot of grass in his hand, too, fresh and green, and where he had got that in the middle of Aachen, Rowan could not imagine.

  The noise was deafening, and probably had something to do with the Elephant’s rage. Rowan could not hear what the boy said, but she saw his lips move. He was talking to the beast as if it could hear, let alone understand.

  The Elephant stood still. Its trunk was up, threatening, but it did not charge. It would let the boy get in close, Rowan could tell. Then it would crush him.

  Rowan bit down on the back of her hand. No one was making any move to distract the Elephant or to rescue the boy. She took off her veil. It was not much, but if she flapped it in the Elephant’s face—

  She got as far as the edge of the crowd before she realized what was happening. The boy had his hand on the Elephant’s shoulder, stroking it.

  The Elephant shuddered. Now it would move. Now it would trample him.

  Its trunk came down. Rowan poised to leap.

  As gently as a lady plucking a May blossom, the pink tip of the trunk curled around the end of the grass-twist.

  The boy let the twist go. The Elephant tucked it into the mouth that hid under the trunk and the tusks, and chewed slowly, solemnly.

  There was no sound but that, and the breathing of too many people pressed too close, and the boy’s soft voice speaking in a strange language. For a moment Rowan thought he was an infidel. He was dark enough for one, and his nose was a fierce enough curve.

  But he did not feel to her like one of the Caliph’s men, of whom there were many in the yard, and he was not dressed like them, either. His tunic was Frankish without a doubt, and his shaggy head was bare of a turban.

  He stroked the Elephant and talked to it, while everyone stared. After a while he seemed to notice that he was not alone in the world. He said in clear Frankish with a hint of a lilt, “You may go away now. Abul Abbas is tired of your noise. He says that he will go into his prison, if only he may rest there in peace.”

  Rowan found that her mouth was open. She shut it. She was a princess of the Franks, and she had seen a fair lot of arrogant young lordlings. She had never seen anything to match this stableboy in the dusty tunic.

  More startling still, people obeyed him. The Caliph’s men bowed in the way they had, touching brow and lip and breast. Her father’s people were louder and less orderly, but even they did as the boy told them. The few who stayed clearly had business to keep them there.

  The boy seemed to have forgotten them again. He took the Elephant’s trunk as if it had been a child’s hand, and led the great beast into the tent.

  oOo

  It was dim under the sag of the roof, with an odor of old canvas, and something indescribable that must have been the Elephant. There was hay laid out, enough to fill a cart, and water in a barrel, and a bed of good straw. The Elephant tasted the hay, using its trunk like a hand, and drank from the barrel in a way that made Rowan gape: drawing up a trunkful of water and sucking it into its mouth. She would have been horrified if it had not been so interesting.

  She stayed near the open side of the tent, for prudence, although the Elephant seemed quiet now. It looked at her once or twice, without any hostility that she could see.

  She did not know whether she found that comforting. Now that she understood its sadness, she had a powerful temptation to go to it and put her arms around it and tell it that she understood. Her mother had died when she was young, and her nurse when she was a little older. She knew what it was to lose something that one loved.

  If she did not go soon, it would be dark before she could saddle her pony and ride. The shadows were long in the yard. The Elephant was hardly more than a shape and a gleam of gold-tipped tusks. But she stayed where she was.

  The boy’s shadow moved apart from the Elephant’s. His voice was sharp. “Didn’t I tell you to go away?”

  “Why should I have listened?” Rowan asked him. She had been studying Gisela; she knew how to make her voice perfectly, maddeningly sweet.

  “You’re upsetting Abul Abbas,” the boy said.

  The Elephant was not upset. He was paying them no attent
ion at all. Rowan decided to follow his example and ignore the boy’s nonsense. “Is that his name? Abullabas?”

  “Abul Abbas.” The boy’s precision was insulting.

  “My name is Theoderada,” said Rowan, “but everyone calls me Rowan. Father Angilbert gave us all poetry-names, you see, when we were little. Gisela is Lily, Bertha is Rose, Hrotrud is Linden—”

  “Theoderada is Chatterbox.” The boy was sneering, she could tell, even if it was too dark to see.

  “And what,” asked Rowan, “do they call you?”

  She did not think that he would answer, but after a while he did, biting it off short. “Kerrec.”

  “Kerrec,” said Rowan, “and Abul Abbas.” She took care to say it correctly. “How is it that you know about elephants?”

  That, he did not reply to.

  “I suppose you’ll be his keeper now,” she said, “since no one else can manage him. It will make a change from horses.”

  “Will you just,” he said tightly, “go away? So that Abul Abbas can rest?”

  Really, thought Rowan, he was rude beyond words, even if he was too much a stranger to know who she was. She was not in a mood to enlighten him, but neither was she so contrary as to argue with the dismissal. The Elephant had fought a hard battle. He would be tired, and he would want to do his grieving in solitude.

  Though maybe the grief would be less now, with Kerrec to keep him company. Rowan would have hated it, but she could see what kind of person Kerrec was: no time or sympathy for people, but a world of it for animals.

  oOo

  She had just enough time to saddle her pony and manage a canter around the knights’ field, which was empty for once, except for a hen that had wandered in from somewhere. The bird was too haughty or too stupid to care that it was in Galla’s way, and Galla made do, when necessary, by jumping neatly over it.

  It would have been better sport if they could have taken longer at it, and if the flies had not come to the feast. Galla’s warding of watered vinegar was wearing thin. When the pony flew into a bucking fit around the whole rim of the field, Rowan brought her in.