I crawled out of the tent and together Abram and I headed at a fast walk towards the three waggons, dimly outlined against the sky where a sliver of moon hung close to the horizon. The bonfires were still alight, but had been allowed to die down. Firewood was scarce.
‘My man guarding the water tank thinks he saw someone near the cages, about an hour ago, but he couldn’t be sure,’ said the dragoman.
‘What about the caravan watchmen?’
‘I haven’t asked them. I wanted to report to you first.’
We reached the aurochs’ cage. The door was hanging half open. There was enough moonlight to cast faint shadows in the marks made in the sand by the animal’s great hooves as it jumped down from the waggon. I clambered up and checked the hinges of the gate. They were undamaged. Normally the door was held shut by two heavy wooden bars, thicker than my wrist. They fitted into deep slots on either side of the frame. Both bars had been removed and placed to one side. I ducked inside the cage itself. There was a half-full fodder net, a bucket of water, and several piles of pungent aurochs dung. The aurochs had not broken out. It had been set free deliberately.
Abram’s assistants were standing beside the waggon as I jumped back down to the ground. ‘Are the ice bears safe in their cage?’ I asked them.
‘They were, just a moment ago,’ answered one of the men. ‘I woke Walo and he’s gone to make sure that no one has interfered with the gyrfalcons.’
‘The dogs?’
‘All present and unharmed.’
So it seemed that only the aurochs had been targeted by the mysterious attacker. A figure loomed up. It was Walo.
‘Everything all right with the gyrfalcons?’ I asked him.
He nodded.
I became aware of an increase of noise from the hobbled camels, a hacking cough as someone cleared his throat, then spat, a stirring among the shapes of camel drivers sleeping on ground bundled in their cloaks. The camp was waking.
‘We must track down the aurochs as soon as there’s enough daylight. It should be easy enough to follow.’
‘And when we find it, how do we recapture it?’ asked Abram.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, suddenly despondent. After my first, active response to the crisis I was beginning to succumb to an overpowering weariness as I grasped the extent of the setback. ‘We’ll think of something. Right now we must pack our gear as usual and be ready to move. The caravan can’t linger or Modi and Madi will melt.’
It took another hour for the caravan to get under way. First came the morning prayer, then the camels were given their ration of fodder and the men sat down in small groups to breakfast on flat bread and a handful of dates washed down with a few gulps of water. By the time the camels had their packsaddles and loads securely in place or had been harnessed to the waggons, the tracks left by the aurochs were easy to see. It had walked straight into the desert.
Leaving Osric in charge of our remaining animals, Abram, Walo and I set off in pursuit. We had gone no more than a mile and were still within plain view of the caravan behind us when we topped a small rise in the ground and came to a sudden halt. We were looking down into a shallow depression in the desert’s surface. The floor of the depression was a flat expanse of gravel dotted with small boulders. Stretched out on the gravel lay the body of the dead aurochs, the head and long horns twisted at an unnatural angle. Crouched on their bellies and feeding on the corpse were five lions. They were tearing and ripping at the flesh, their heads half buried in the entrails. One of the lions noticed our arrival. It raised its head and stared at us with its great, yellow eyes. We were close enough to see the jaws smeared with fresh blood.
For a long moment we froze, too shocked to move. Then, very slowly and cautiously we backed away, down the slope and out of sight of the great beasts.
My voice was unsteady as I whispered, ‘There’s nothing we can do. We must get back to the caravan.’
‘What about the horns?’ asked Walo.
I was so dumbfounded that I just stared at him.
‘For the king,’ said Walo. Only then did I remember the great silver-mounted aurochs’ horn in Alcuin’s room on the day when he had told me that I had an audience with Carolus. That time seemed impossibly far away.
‘No, Walo. It’s too dangerous,’ I said. It would have been the duty of Vulfard, Walo’s father, to present the horns of any large game animals to the king.
‘If we wait until the lions have stopped feeding-’ Walo began.
‘No!’ I hissed, angry now. I took a grip on his elbow in case he tried to get past me. ‘We leave the aurochs where it is.’
We trudged our way back to the caravan, with frequent glances behind us to make sure no lion was following. In a strange way I was feeling relieved. From the moment I had first laid eyes on the aurochs in the forest I had disliked and feared the brute. It was a danger to anyone who approached it, even to give it food or water. Always angry and malevolent, it had killed both Vulfard and Protis. If the opportunity arose, it would kill again. Perhaps it was fanciful of me to think in such terms, but I detected something deeply wicked about it. Of course I regretted all the months of wasted effort it had taken to bring the beast so far, only for it to be torn to pieces in the desert. Yet I was thankful that it was the aurochs that had died, not the ice bears. I resolved that there was no point in brooding over the fate of the aurochs. What mattered now was bringing Madi and Modi and the other animals safely to Baghdad.
For that, I needed to find out who had set the aurochs free.
The answer was presented to me as soon as we caught up with the caravan. Osric had been making enquiries among the camel drivers.
‘A man is missing. He disappeared from the camp during the night.’
I felt a surge of excitement. ‘Does anyone know anything about him? Where he comes from?’
‘Apparently he joined at the start of the caravan, offering to work as a general assistant for almost no pay. The other camel men were puzzled. He wasn’t very good at his job. They say he behaved more like a town dweller than someone who had worked with the caravans. He got himself bitten by a camel.’
‘Do they have any idea where he might be now?’
‘The camel drivers think that he will have gone ahead. The road is easy enough to follow and we’re little more than a day’s journey from al-Qulzum. My guess is that he slipped away in the night before he was questioned.’
‘As soon as we get to al-Qulzum we’ll track him down and find out who he’s working for,’ I said grimly.
As it turned out, the interrogation was not possible. We resumed our march and not long after the halt for midday prayers there was a shout from the head of the column. A cloak had been spotted on the ground a few yards off to the side of the track. Someone ran to investigate and found the garment was bloodstained and torn. Another shout came from a man pointing towards a clump of thorn bushes some fifty paces away. Five or six hyenas could be seen trotting off into the desert, their loping strides unmistakable. The caravan halted and after a hasty conference between the camel drivers, a group of half a dozen men, armed with spears, headed cautiously towards the bushes.
Abram and I made our way to where the leader of the caravan was surrounded by several camel drivers. They were passing the torn cloak from hand to hand, talking among themselves in local dialect.
‘They are fairly sure that it belongs to the man who ran away,’ Abram translated for me.
Streaks of dry blood on the dusty ground were signs of a struggle. A line of scuffmarks led towards the distant thorn bushes.
‘I’d say the lions got him as well, poor wretch,’ said Abram. ‘Then the aurochs came along and offered a better meal and they abandoned the corpse and went after larger prey.’
An empty water skin lay among the stones close to where the cloak had been found. A few paces farther on was a cheap cloth satchel with a shoulder strap.
I picked up the satchel and looked inside. It contained half a flat loaf of bread, a lump of mouldy cheese and a handful of dates. More than enough to sustain a man for a day’s walk to al-Qulzum. I took out the food, set it aside on a flat rock, and checked the satchel again. There was nothing that might give a clue as to the identity of the owner; no money, no document. I put my hand inside and felt around. A cloth divide separated the interior, and my fingernail snagged on something lodged in a seam. I picked it out and held it up to show Abram. ‘Do you know what this is?’