Saxon: The Emperor's Elephant (22 page)

It was always a challenge to find a way of engaging Walo’s attention. He seldom spoke to others and kept to himself, passing the hours in his own special world, apparently in a half-daze.
Yet he must have been taking note of what was going on around him because, like a shutter briefly being thrown open, he would come out with a sudden perceptive remark. He was at his happiest and
most alert when dealing with our animals and that, in turn, provided me with a means to draw him out of his isolation: he loved to hear more about the exotic creatures depicted in the Book of
Beasts. Whenever I joined him on the boat, I would sit beside him on the deck leafing through the pages until he pointed to an illustration that caught his interest. Then I would read out the
information written underneath. In nearly every case the animal was as unknown to me, as it was to him.

‘What’s that lion with a man’s face?’ he asked one hot afternoon. Our boats were passing low gravel cliffs where the river had undercut its bank. Sand swallows had
burrowed into the cliffs, and a cloud of the small brown and white birds whirled over our heads as they made their way to and from their nests.

‘It’s called a manticore,’ I told him, reading the accompanying text.

‘Those great teeth must mean it is a meat eater,’ Walo commented.

The creature had the head of a man attached to the body of a lion. The artist had drawn a human face with a straggly beard and a wide open mouth armed with sharp fangs. The staring eyes were a
cold blue but all the rest of the animal had been coloured blood red.

I quoted the text: ‘
The manticore has three rows of teeth and eats human flesh. It is very active and can leap great distances. No one can out run it. Its voice is like a whistled
melody.
’

Walo was intrigued. ‘I would love to see such a wondrous creature, even if it is dangerous.’

‘But you would not want to come too close,’ I said. ‘Apparently the manticore can shoot poisoned spines from the tip of its tail.’

Walo detected the note of scepticism in my voice. ‘Surely the book is telling the truth.’

‘We’ll never know. It says that the manticore lives in India, and we are only going as far as Baghdad.’

I could sense Walo’s disappointment. His grasp of geography may have been non-existent, but he had a simple, direct shrewdness. ‘We can test the truth of the book. Read out what it
says about an animal we know, then we can judge whether it is right.’

I turned the pages until Walo pointed to an illustration of a flock of half a dozen tall birds standing in a group. They had long necks, pointed beaks like herons and stilt legs. The nearest
bird was standing on one leg and gripping what looked like a round stone with the other foot, holding it up from the ground.

‘Cranes!’ exclaimed Walo. ‘Flocks of them pass over my forest every spring, high in the sky, but they do not stop. They must be travelling to their summer home in a place I do
not know. In autumn I see them as they return. Going back the way they came.’

‘
Their Latin name is
Grus,’ I said, reading. ‘
They travel large distances, flying very high so that the leader can see the lands to which they are
going.
’

Walo nodded approvingly.

‘
When the leader is tired, he changes places with another in the flock. As they fly, they post some of their number at the end of the line to shout orders and keep the group
together.
’

‘I’ve heard them calling to one another in the air. The voice is like a bugle,’ said Walo triumphantly. ‘You see the book tells the truth.’

‘But what about the crane in the front of the picture,’ I said, ‘the one holding something in its claw? The book says that when a flock of cranes rests at night, one of their
number stands guard. While the others sleep, he stays awake, holding up a stone in his claw. If he falls asleep, the stone drops and awakens him.’

Walo thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know about that. But why shouldn’t it be true? Let’s check on another creature that we both know. How about a wild boar?’

I found the relevant illustration. The picture was certainly accurate, a pig-like creature with a curly tail, cloven hooves, dangerous-looking tusks and a malevolent expression as it charged
across the page. Even the colouring – a greyish black – was correct.

‘
The Latin name is
Aper
, and it is named for its ferocity
,’ I read. ‘
The boar is very rough when mating, and before they fight with one another, they rub
their skin against the bark of trees to toughen it
.’

‘I’ve seen boars doing just that,’ Walo confirmed. ‘In the forest you find places where the bark has been torn away. Boars also prepare for battle by whetting their
tusks, sharpening them against trees.’

‘That is what the book also says,’ I admitted. ‘The book claims, too, that a boar eats a plant called origanum to cleanse its gums and strengthen the tusks.’

‘That I didn’t know,’ said Walo, looking over my shoulder as I turned the page to look for another familiar animal.

As luck would have it, the next page had an illustration of a large serpent. For a moment I wondered if this was the same sort of snake whose picture Abram would show me in Rome. But the man was
not Adam, for he was fully dressed and there was no sign of Eve or an apple tree, and the serpent’s home was a hole in a barren-looking hill that did not resemble the fertile Garden of Eden.
The serpent body tapered to a pointed tail and, oddly, the creature had curved itself around and thrust the tip of its tail into its own ear. The artist had drawn a face on the snake, and the
animal was grimacing, clearly in distress.

‘That man is calming the serpent,’ said Walo at once.

It took me a moment to see what he was talking about. A little distance from the snake a man was playing a stringed instrument. I recognized a viol from Carolus’s banquets when musicians
entertained the king.

‘
The asp, or serpent
,’ I read out, ‘
kills with a venomous bite. When an enchanter summons an asp out of its cave with incantations or music, and it does not want
to go, it presses one ear to the ground and covers the other ear with its tail.
’

I paused and took a second look at the picture. ‘Surely that’s a fable,’ I said. ‘Serpents don’t listen to music.’

Walo looked at me reprovingly. ‘If ice bears do, why shouldn’t serpents be the same?’

I returned to the book. ‘It also says that there are many kinds of asp, and not all are harmful. The bite from one kind kills by causing a terrible thirst; another that is called the
prester asp moves with an open mouth, and those it bites swell up and rot follows. Then they die. The bite from a third kind of asp brings on a deep sleep from which the victim never awakes. That
one is called the hypnalis and it is the asp that killed Cleopatra the Queen of Egypt who was freed from her troubles.’

‘We’re going to Egypt, aren’t we!’ breathed Walo eagerly. ‘Wouldn’t it be magnificent if we found a hypnalis. I could play my pipe to lure it from its
hole.’

The sun’s glare was giving me a headache and I closed the bestiary and replaced it in its wrapping. If only I had paid closer attention to what Walo had just said, our journey might have
turned out very differently.

*

By the tenth day of our journey along the Rhone it was evident that we were approaching the mouth of the great river. The current had become sluggish and the river had widened
to nearly a half-mile from bank to bank. Far behind us were the prosperous farmlands; now we were passing through a flat, wild landscape of windswept marshes and lagoons. A few greyish-white humps,
Abram told us, were piles of salt crystals scraped up by the inhabitants and awaiting collection. It was the only crop they could wrest from the waterlogged soil. Despite the lateness of the
season, the weather continued fine and sunny with clear skies that produced spectacular sunsets. On just such an evening Walo and I stumbled on a discovery that obliged me to admit that the
verderer’s son had reason to believe in the strangeness and variety of the animals.

As was their custom, our boatmen selected an isolated spot to spend the night well away from the nearest settlement. They tied up our boats to the bank in an area thickly overgrown with tall
bushes. Though it was difficult to get ashore, Walo and I managed to clamber onto the bank and found a faint path, leading inland. We followed it, Walo in the lead, until he stopped suddenly. He
had seen something in the undergrowth. He veered off the path to investigate, then beckoned to me to join him. Lying on the ground in a small clearing was the body of a dead bird. From a little
distance I thought it might be a swan. But as I drew closer, I saw that it was a bird unlike anything that I had remotely imagined. It was as if someone had joined the body of a large heron to the
head and neck of a goose. The creature had once stood on very long sticklike legs and must have been nearly five feet tall.

‘I wonder what food it eats?’ wondered Walo aloud.

I looked at him sharply, then remembered how he had immediately deduced from the terrible teeth in the mouth of the manticore that it was a meat-eater. The dead bird lying on the ground before
us had neither the flat shovelling beak of a duck nor the stabbing lance of the heron. Its beak was over-size, a misshapen excrescence like a large bean that curved downward at the tip. At the top
of the beak were two long slits like nostrils.

‘I don’t remember seeing it in the Book of Beasts,’ I said, ‘though surely it should be in it.’

The most extraordinary thing about the animal was its remarkable colour. The body feathers were white shaded with a delicate pink that deepened in hue along the neck and towards the wing tips
and tail until it became a bright, luxuriant red. The stilt-like legs were a shocking deep vermilion. The colours were so striking that even the most skilled painter would have had trouble in
capturing its splendour.

‘Perhaps Abram can tell us more about it,’ I suggested. ‘We had better be getting back to the boats.’

We were about to turn back when there came a confused, discordant clamour like the honking of many geese. It came from above us and I looked up. The tall bushes allowed a view of a small circle
of sky. All of a sudden it was filled with the shapes of the strange birds, scores of them, gliding past on outstretched wings as they descended through the air, coming in to land nearby. They flew
with necks stiffly outstretched and long legs trailing behind them. There was a glimpse of black underwings.

‘Quick! We must go and see. Maybe they will appoint a guardian to watch over them while they are on the ground, just like the cranes,’ Walo blurted, pulling at my arm.

‘They’re giant herons,’ I guessed.

He shook his head. ‘A heron flies with a curved neck. They flew with their necks straight, like cranes.’

He plunged off through the undergrowth, heading in the direction we had seen the birds descend. After some minutes we worked clear of the bushes and emerged on the rim of a broad lagoon. I
caught my breath in astonishment. The lagoon was very shallow, no more than a few inches deep. Standing in the water on their weird stilt-legs were hundreds of the strange birds, clustered in a
vast flock. They lifted their heads on their long, sinuous necks as Walo and I appeared, and turned to inspect us. A few had their heads buried underwater, and as they raised them, the water
dripped from their glistening beaks. At that same moment the setting sun eased from behind a cloud and flooded the scene with reddish light. The slanting rays gave the birds’ plumage an
unearthly glow, infusing them with every hue of red from pink to bright crimson. There was not a breath of wind and the still surface of the lagoon served as a mirror, doubling the illusion. It
looked as if the entire spindly legged flock was about to catch fire.

*

As soon as we got back to the boats, Walo insisted that I search the bestiary to make sure there was no illustration of the wondrous creatures.

‘Their picture must be there,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m afraid not,’ I told him after I had checked every page. ‘A bird called a phoenix glows red. But that’s only at the end of its life just before it bursts into
flames. Besides, it lives in Arabia.’

‘Maybe the birds we saw flew here from Arabia, like those cranes that I see flying high over my forest each year.’

I was sorry to disappoint him. ‘According to the book, only a single phoenix is alive at any time and it lives for five hundred years. When it is ready to die, it builds a nest in the top
of a palm tree and bursts into flames. From the ashes arises another phoenix, a young one. It too will live for another five hundred years.’

Walo clung to his hopes. ‘What about the phoenix’s food?’

‘The book states that the phoenix lives on the perfume of frankincense.’

‘What’s frankincense?’

‘A sort of sweet-smelling gum.’

Walo’s face lit up with a triumphant smile. ‘Then those big slits in the beak are nostrils. That’s how the bird takes its food.’

Abram, who had been listening, came to my rescue. ‘They could have been huma birds,’ he said with a smile.

Walo turned to him excitedly. ‘What are they?’

‘Huma birds are found in Persia. They glow like embers.’

Walo was agog with anticipation. ‘Have you seen one?’

‘I’m afraid not. A huma bird spends its entire life high in the air, never coming to land. Great kings wear its feathers in their crowns. Some people call it a bird of paradise. It
is claimed that whoever sees the huma bird, even its shadow, is happy for the rest of his life.’

‘I would be happy to see either a huma bird or a phoenix,’ announced Walo firmly. ‘If people speak of such creatures in Persia or Arabia, then they must exist.’

A surly grunt from the aurochs reminded him that the great beast had not been given its evening feed, and he headed off towards its cage.

Abram waited until I had put the bestiary away safely before he beckoned to one of his servants. The man clambered across from the adjacent boat, carrying the leather tube that contained the
dragoman’s precious itinerarium.