‘I think I’ll sleep under the stars tonight,’ Osric commented, treating me to a meaningful glance. He, Walo and I were sitting by the embers of the campfire. We had finished our supper and Abram, who preferred to take his meals with his own men, had just rejoined us.
‘I’m the one who should sleep outside,’ I said. ‘There’s not much I can do about those dreams.’
‘What dreams are those?’ Abram asked.
I told him briefly about the elephant.
The dragoman smiled apologetically. ‘That was my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject of Hannibal and his elephants.’
‘What’s an elephant?’ interrupted Walo. He had been listening in.
‘An elephant is a remarkable animal that the great ruler of the Saracens sent as a gift to Carolus,’ I told him.
Walo’s voice had been hesitant but his half-closed eyes were bright with interest.
‘Some say that it is the largest animal that walks on land,’ I added.
‘Even larger than that one there?’ Walo gestured towards the aurochs in its cage.
‘Yes, much, much larger.’
‘What does it look like?’
I started to explain what I knew about an elephant, its size and shape, but my words soon petered out. I had never seen the living animal and, for me, everything was hearsay. Abram was looking on with an amused expression.
‘Our dragoman can explain better than me,’ I was forced to admit.
Abraham chuckled. ‘I doubt I could paint a word picture that would do justice to the strangeness of the elephant. For a start, its nose reaches to the ground and can be used as an extra hand.’
‘You’re making fun of me,’ Walo said. He sounded hurt.
Abram’s statement reminded me that there was a painted illustration of an elephant in the bestiary that Carolus had given me. Until now I had kept the volume carefully protected in my saddlebag. With a guilty pang I realized that I had never really explained to Vulfard’s son what had led up to his father’s gruesome death and why we were now halfway across Frankia. This was my chance to begin to do so. I went to our tent and brought back the book.
I had wrapped it for safety in a long length of heavily waxed linen. With great care I removed the layers. Walo came across and looked over my shoulder as I opened the cover of the book and turned the pages. The elephant was the sixth illustration. The copyist had drawn two elephants facing one another across a stream. They were coloured a sombre green. They had large, doleful eyes, white curving tusks, and their trunks were about to touch. I presumed they were male and female.
I heard Walo take an excited breath. ‘Their noses look like trumpets, not hands,’ he announced.
The artist had drawn the trunks so that they splayed at the tip like a musical instrument.
‘Rightly so,’ said Abram from the other side of the fire. ‘If you’ve heard the voice of an angry elephant, you’ll remember it for the rest of your life. It’s like the hoarse blare of a giant trumpet, far louder and more fearsome than anything you have ever heard.’
Walo could not tear his eyes away from the drawing. ‘If the elephant is so big and dangerous, how did they manage to catch it so that it could be given to Carolus?’
I wondered if he was thinking of his father and the deadly pitfall in the forest. Below each picture in the bestiary a brief paragraph gave selected details about the animaclass="underline"
‘The elephant has no joints in its legs,’ I read aloud, ‘so it never lies down because it would be unable to get back on its feet. When it sleeps it leans against a tree for support. The hunters cut part way through the tree so that it topples over when the elephant rests against it, and the elephant falls. Then the hunters secure the helpless elephant.’
I heard a barely stifled snort of disbelief from Abram on the other side of the fire. It occurred to me that the hunters would still need some way of getting the captive elephant back on its feet. Perhaps they dug out a sloping pit in much the same way we had handled the aurochs.
Walo reached out a hand to touch the picture with a grubby finger and hastily I moved the precious volume out of his reach. ‘It is also written,’ I told him, ‘that an elephant lives for three hundred years, and is afraid of mice.’
‘What else does the book claim?’ asked Osric. I glanced across at him. He, too, wore a rather sceptical expression.
I read aloud further. ‘The female elephant carries her unborn child within her for two years. When she is ready to give birth, she stands in a pool up to her belly. The male elephant remains on the bank and guards her against attack from the elephant’s most deadly enemy, the dragon.’
‘Will I get to see a dragon on this journey?’ asked Walo in an awed tone.
One of Abram’s servants was approaching. He bent down to murmur in his master’s ear. Abram rose to his feet. ‘Please excuse me, there is something I must attend to.’ Turning to Walo, he said, ‘I can’t promise you will meet a dragon on this journey, but you will see something almost as extraordinary: men riding in small houses fastened to the back of the elephant.’
Walo waited until Abram was out of earshot before asking me, ‘Is that really true, Sigwulf? Men living on top of elephants?’
I remembered Hannibal’s story. ‘They don’t live there. They climb up before a battle, and wage war as if from a moving castle.’
Carefully I shut the bestiary, preparing to wrap it up again safely. The copyists in the royal chancery had been in a hurry. The stitches holding the pages together were uneven, and the book closed awkwardly, the covers slightly askew. Gently I opened the book once more, to straighten the pages.
‘There’s our beast from the forest!’ exclaimed Walo.
He was pointing at a picture of a strange-looking creature. At first sight it did resemble the aurochs, for it had a bull’s head and body, four cloven hooves, and a long whiplash of a tail ending in a tuft of hair. Like our aurochs, too, the animal had enormous horns and there was an angry glare in its eyes. The copyist had coloured it a rich chestnut brown.
‘What does the book say?’ asked Walo excitedly.
I consulted the description. ‘It’s called a bonnacon. It’s not the same as our aurochs.’
‘Are you sure?’ Walo sounded disappointed.
‘According to this book, the bonnacon’s horns curl backwards so far that they are useless as weapons. The animal cannot defend itself with them.’
Walo giggled. He had noticed a comical human figure in the picture. A man dressed as a hunter was shown standing behind the rump of the bonnacon, his face was wrinkled in disgust. ‘Why’s he holding his nose?’ he asked.
‘According to the book, when the bonnacon is chased, it runs away at great speed deliberately shooting quantities of dung from its backside. The dung has a ferocious smell and burns anyone it touches.’
There was a furious outburst of barking from the tethered dogs. One of them had slipped its collar and was snapping and snarling at its neighbour. Walo jumped to his feet and ran off to deal with the situation.
Osric stretched and yawned. ‘I’ve never seen Walo so animated. The pictures in the book draw him out. Perhaps you should show more of them to him when you have time . . .’
He waited until I had closed the bestiary and carefully wrapped it back inside the stiff linen cover, then added, ‘Have you checked our pages from the Oneirokritikon for the meaning of those elephant dreams that have been troubling you?’