*
There was a strained silence between Osric and me as we left Jaffar’s palace. Neither trusted himself to speak without the risk of causing further disquiet. The steward brought us to the same lodging house in the Round City that we had occupied months earlier, and at the doorway I muttered something about needing to have some time to myself. I told Osric that I would join him later. Then I set out to walk the streets. My thoughts were crowding in on me – memories of Osric from my childhood, of when I was sent into exile, of campaigning with him in Hispania, and, most recently, the journey to the Northlands in search of white beasts. Osric had been with me either as guardian, companion or advisor – and always friend. He would no longer be a constant presence. I felt disoriented. The recollections of Osric mingled with painful visions of Zaynab. I struggled to stop myself from thinking of her but it was impossible. She was so easy to picture in all her loveliness. Zaynab was deeply entwined in my emotions and it would take months, maybe years, to disentangle her.
It was late afternoon, and I walked for an hour or more, with these notions tumbling back and forth in my head. Eventually my footsteps brought me by chance to the tall double doors of the massive building that housed the royal menagerie. There it occurred to me to check on how Madi and Modi were faring. It would divert me from my inner turmoil. I went inside. The interior was just as I had remembered it – vast, smelling of hay, piss and dung, while muffled snufflings and other unidentifiable animal noises came from behind lines of closed doors to the stalls. I walked down the central aisle to where I had last seen the ice bears. The door to their pen was open. Their enclosure was empty.
I turned away, intending to find a keeper to ask what had happened to the bears. But there was no one about.
As I walked back along the central walkway I heard a gentle clinking sound. I stopped and went to look over the open upper half of a door to one of the larger stalls. A great grey elephant was standing in the straw. The sound came from a slim chain, polished from much use, around the ankle of its back leg. The other end of the chain was fastened to a metal hoop set in the wall.
I was standing there, gazing in at the great animal and wondering why it had been tethered when I was conscious of someone standing at my shoulder. I half turned. It was Abram, the dragoman.
‘There’s a certain season of the year when a male elephant is dangerous,’ he said quietly. ‘They become difficult to handle, treacherous even. That dark matter oozing from near his eye and then down his cheek is a sign.’
He gazed over the door thoughtfully.
‘Will you be accompanying the new mission to Aachen?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Another of my people will act as dragoman. While you were away, I’ve been building up my commercial contacts in the caliph’s empire. There’s a fortune to be made here.’
I looked back at the elephant. It was standing swaying gently on its feet, the ears fanning slowly.
‘Was the first elephant that Haroun sent really white?’ I put the question casually and waited for an answer.
There was a long silence.
‘Why do you ask?’ Abram said.
‘Because there was only your word that it was white. No one in Aachen ever saw it, and Nadim Jaffar didn’t seem to be aware of the fact.’
Abram did not reply. He reached into the pocket of his gown and pulled out a dried seed. He prised the shell open with his fingernails and popped the kernel into his mouth, then held out the empty husk on his outstretched palm. The elephant shuffled its great feet in the straw and took a few paces until it reached the end of its chain. Then it reached out with the long snake-like trunk and, very delicately, picked up the tiny offering. The trunk curled back and the beast placed the shell into its mouth and the jaws moved.
‘I was waiting for you to understand,’ he said quietly. I caught a faint whiff of a familiar smell on his breath.
‘On the voyage back from Zanj our captain Sulaiman had a great liking for those same seeds that you chew on,’ I said. ‘He told me they come from India.’
The dragoman was unflustered. ‘That is correct. They sweeten the breath.’
‘Those are the same shells that I found under the benches in the Colosseum on the morning after Protis died.’
Abram waited for me to go on.
‘I had many hours on the voyage back from Zanj to think about that sequence of mishaps that so nearly destroyed the mission,’ I said. ‘As far back as Rome I realized that someone was deliberately trying to prevent it succeeding.’
‘And what did you conclude?’ the dragoman was gently mocking me.
‘That, whoever it was, was remarkably well informed – wherever we were. It couldn’t have been Osric or Walo, which left only you or your servants. Also, on the two occasions when the aurochs was set free – in Rome and in the desert – the dogs didn’t bark. They knew the person or persons responsible.’
‘And when was the start of this campaign against you and your mission, do you suppose?’ Abram asked. He was supremely self-possessed.
‘In Kaupang,’ I told him. ‘Though the attempt to kill me there didn’t fit the pattern. I hadn’t even met you at that time and I couldn’t see how you might be responsible. Only later did I recall a remark that a shrewd sea captain named Redwald made to me. He warned me that money has a long reach. On another occasion Osric said something similar.’
The dragoman allowed himself a knowing smile. The elephant was again reaching forward with its trunk, begging this time. Abram extended his arm and allowed the tip of the trunk to thrust up his loose sleeve, exploring. When the trunk withdrew, the elephant tasted in its mouth what it had found, rejected it, and then the trunk stretched out in my direction.
It seemed natural to accept what it was the creature was offering. I put out my hand. The end of the trunk turned up and I saw something shiny and held in place by the fingerlike tip of the animal’s nose.
Something small and damp dropped into the palm of my hand, and I was looking down on a familiar coin – a gold dinar.
I admired the dragoman’s sense of theatre. ‘You didn’t need that conjurer’s trick,’ I said.
I took out my purse and found the dinar from Kaupang that Redwald had given me as a memento. As I anticipated, it was the twin of the coin that Abram had produced. Both bore King Offa’s name. ‘You were the paymaster who arranged the attack on me in Kaupang.’
A brief flicker of regret appeared in Abram’s eyes. ‘For that I apologize. I had not yet met you by then. Had that been the case, I would have considered a different, less violent course of action.’
I made a point of sounding incredulous. ‘You were behind all those other incidents, and yet you did not wish to harm me.’
‘Neither you, nor your companions. After I met you, I had no wish to hurt you, certainly not to cause your deaths. I tried to thwart the mission without anyone being killed.’
I gave a snort of disbelief. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘I managed to delay and divert the mission. I took it by a longer route, downriver to the Mediterranean and not over the mountains directly into Italy. I was hoping that something would go wrong, an accident that would make you abandon the mission.’
‘Yet when an accident did happen and that raft hit the bridge, you risked your life to save the boatman who had been thrown into the water,’ I said.
He gave a slight shrug. ‘I repeat: I didn’t want anyone to be killed because of me.’
My scepticism must have been very apparent because he added, ‘Think back to when Protis’s ship foundered. My plan was for the animals to drown, and your companions to get safely to shore. I overlooked the fact that ice bears can swim, and the aurochs too.’
I stopped him there. ‘That was something else that puzzled me. I couldn’t understand how you arranged for the ship to sink.’