The Emperor's Elefant

Chapter Seven

I spent most of the next day alternately arguing and pleading with the treasury’s senior bookkeeper. A stickler for detail, he demanded full and proper accounts for the funds I had taken to Kaupang. When I was unable to provide them, he showed his displeasure by restricting the amount of silver allowed for the new mission. He provided instead a document authorizing me to requisition supplies from royal stores along the road. I considered going directly to Carolus to put a stop to this bureaucratic nonsense but was wary of being seen again in the royal apartments. There was too much risk of encountering Princess Bertha, and early the following morning I slipped out from Aachen feeling relieved that I had avoided her. I was on my way to rejoin Osric and the others. As arranged, Abram was waiting for me an hour’s brisk ride along the now-familiar road. With him were three mounted servants in charge of half a dozen packhorses. The men had the vigilant yet patient manner of seasoned travellers and I guessed they were Abram’s regular attendants.

‘I hope we don’t run out of money,’ I confided to Abram after explaining my tussles with the skinflint in the treasury.

‘I can arrange cash for us along the way,’ he answered.

‘As far as Baghdad?’

He gave an easy smile. ‘As far as necessary.’

The sun was burning off the dawn mist and the day promised to be blisteringly hot. The horse provided to me by the royal stables had already worked up a sweat and we paused for a few minutes to allow the animal to cool down. The dragoman took the opportunity to introduce his attendants to me. One of them was a cook, good at producing a decent campfire meal, and another was handy with making running repairs to the tents and other equipment strapped to the horses. There was no need to ask about the third man. He had a serviceable-looking sword dangling from his saddle and was evidently a bodyguard. Never before had I felt so well prepared when starting on a journey.

‘Does your cook prepare special meals for you?’ I asked as we moved off at a gentle amble. It was a leading question for I was curious to know more about my travelling companion. I presumed his attendants were his co-religionists but he had made no mention of the fact.

‘I try to follow the dietary laws of my faith,’ Abram replied. ‘Fortunately, Radhanites are allowed broad dispensation due to our wandering way of life.’

He turned in the saddle to check on our little pack train, and I stole a sideways glance at my companion. He rode well, his handsome face alert as he watched the passing traffic.

‘Alcuin told me about the constant wayfaring, but that’s almost all he knew about your people.’

The dragoman showed no sign of resentment of my probing. ‘We originated in Mesopotamia many centuries ago, according to one theory. Others say that we came out of Persia.’

‘What do you believe?’

‘Under the present circumstances I prefer Persia. In that country’s language “rah” means a path and “dan” is one who knows. So a Radhanite is “one who knows the way”.’

‘Then Persian is one of those dozen languages that Alcuin said you speak.’

He acknowledged the compliment with a graceful shrug. ‘Once you’ve acquired six or seven languages, the rest come easily.’

‘I’ve yet to reach that stage.’

‘So Frankish is not your mother tongue?’ He regarded me with polite interest.

I shook my head. ‘No, I grew up speaking Saxon. I learned Latin as a child, Frankish and Arabic later.’

‘Then, like me, you are a wanderer.’

‘Not by choice,’ I admitted, and found myself confiding to him how Offa had forced me into exile.

He heard me out, his expression turning to one of sympathy. When I finished I realized that instead of learning more about Abram, it was the reverse.

‘Is there anything about our mission that worries you?’ I asked him, hoping to divert the conversation back to what I had intended.

‘Getting the animals across the Alps before the first snowfall of winter,’ he said, guiding his horse around a deep rut in the road surface.

‘The ice bears would enjoy seeing some snow,’ I said cheerfully. I was relaxed and carefree, happy at the thought that I had a dragoman to recommend how far to travel each day, where to spend the night and find our food.

‘You might consider taking a different route, avoiding the mountains entirely.’ He made the suggestion diffidently.

‘The royal chancery decided we go by river barge along the Rhine as far as possible. At some stage we’ll shift the animals onto carts and haul them over the mountain passes.’

Abram sighed. ‘The Arabs have a saying: “Only a madman or a Christian sails against the wind.” It seems that a Christian also chooses to travel against the current.’

‘Is there an alternative?’

‘You could use the river Rhone instead . . . and have the current help you.’

I wondered if this was an excuse for Abram to be among his own people. Alcuin had said that the Radhanites in Frankia clustered along the Rhone. ‘Let’s see how far Osric and Walo have already taken the animals along the Rhine before we change our plans,’ I replied cautiously.

*

The sound alerted me three days later – a familiar yowling and yapping. The noise came from the direction of a low ridge that ran parallel to the highway, the width of a field away. We turned aside and when we topped the slope, found ourselves on the crest of an artificial earth embankment built to protect the neighbouring fields from flood. In front of us was the broad river, and we were looking down on a barge firmly stuck on a shoal a few yards out. The two ice bears were in their cage at one end of the vessel. The aurochs occupied a larger, heavier cage at the opposite end. The dogs were tethered between them, tied to a thick rope. They were jumping up and down, quarrelling and lunging at one another, tangling their leashes, and ignoring Osric’s shouts of exasperation. Walo was nowhere to be seen. Closer at hand, standing on the muddy foreshore, was a huddle of what I took to be the barge men. They looked disgruntled and mutinous.

Osric glanced up and saw me. With a final angry yell at the dogs, he clambered over the side of the barge and squelched his way across the ooze to come to speak with me.

‘Didn’t expect you back so soon,’ he said. His legs were slathered to the knees with grey sludge.

‘Where’s Walo?’ I asked, dismounting.

Osric gestured upriver. ‘He’s gone ahead with a cart. Took the gyrfalcons with him.’

A sudden apprehension gripped me. ‘You didn’t let him go off on his own? Anything might happen.’

My friend was calm. ‘He’s training the birds. He does that every day. Says that they need exercise or they will lose condition. He’s got them flying on a length of line, and coming back to a lure. Besides, one of the barge men went with him, to find some oxen.’

‘They’ll need at least twenty,’ said Abram. He too had got down from his horse and was standing beside me.

Osric had begun scraping the mud off his legs with a twig. ‘The barge men say that we can rely on the flood tide only for another fifty miles or so. After that, we’ll have to haul and row the barge,’ he said.

In a language I did not understand, Abram called back to his servants waiting at a discreet distance. One of them slid from the saddle, handed the reins of his horse to a companion, unlaced a bundle attached to a pack saddle, and hurried forward with a small folding table.

As the servant opened up the table and set it firmly on the ground, I caught Osric’s eye. ‘Abram has been appointed as dragoman to our embassy,’ I explained.

Abram removed a leather tube from his own saddlebag, and extracted a scroll wound around two slim batons of polished wood. When the servant had withdrawn, he rolled the parchment from one baton to the next – it must have been thirty feet long at least – until he came to the section he wanted, then placed the scroll face up on the table. The parchment was sprinkled with tiny symbols carefully drawn and coloured. The most frequent symbol was a double-fronted house, its twin roofs coloured red. A number of oddly elongated dark brown shapes resembled thin loaves, and a few drawings looked like large stylized barns. Many symbols were linked, one to the next, by thin straight lines ruled in vermilion ink. Near these lines were written numerals in Roman script.

‘We are here,’ Abram said, placing a finger beside a double-fronted house. Next to it in small, neat lettering was written ‘Dorestadum’.

It was an itinerarium, a road map, something I had heard of but never seen until this moment. An itinerarium was greatly prized, and I doubted if even the royal archive in Aachen possessed such a treasure.

‘How far does your itinerarium extend?’ I enquired. I noted that Abram had taken care to reveal only a small portion of the scroll.

The dragoman rewarded my knowledge of the map’s name with a slight smile. ‘My people would not thank me if I told you. They spent generations in assembling the information it contains.’

He turned his attention back to the map. ‘Here we are, still close to Dorestad. This red line -’ his finger slid across the surface of the map – ‘is the route that the chancery in Aachen would have us take. Here we would leave the Rhine and continue along this next red line up through these mountain ranges marked in brown, and down into Italy, and finally to Rome.’ His finger came to rest on a symbol, larger and grander than the others. It showed a crowned man seated on a throne holding a sceptre and an orb. Clearly the pope.

Osric was quick. ‘Those numbers marked beside the road are the distances between the towns, I presume.’

‘Or the number of days’ travel required for each sector,’ answered the dragoman. He shot me a mischievous grin. ‘In Persia the distances are stated in parasangs, not miles.’

‘What are you proposing? ‘I asked. From where I stood I could see that the short wavy blue-green lines represented the course of rivers. Areas painted a dark green were the sea. Every feature was distorted and out of shape, stretched in some places, compressed in others, so as to fit on the scroll. It was not so much a map as a stylized diagram that showed what mattered to a traveller – the important locations and the distances in between.

Abram looked down at the diagram. ‘The further we proceed up the Rhine, the stronger the current will run against us. We cover less distance each day and risk reaching the Alpine passes when they are closed by snow.’

He traced a thin red line that went south-eastward. ‘I recommend that we leave the Rhine at the tidal limit and go by waggon along this road to a different river, the Rhone. That river flows in our favour.’

I interrupted him. ‘What about the difficulty of transferring the animals from one river to the other?’

‘The road between the rivers is suitable for wheeled vehicles. It crosses low hills and rolling countryside, not mountains.’

His reasoning was sound, and yet I was reluctant to be persuaded. ‘Every extra mile by land means additional costs – relays of oxen, fodder to feed them, wages for waggon drivers. Our resources may not be sufficient,’ I told him.

His response was to point to a symbol on the parchment. It depicted a substantial building arranged around a hollow square. Even without the arches of what could only be a cloister, it was clearly the symbol for a monastery. I ran my eye along the new route Abram proposed. I counted five monasteries spaced at convenient intervals. I smiled to myself. I had told Abram about the skinflint in the royal treasury. The bookkeeper would regret giving me the written authority to requisition stores along my route. Every abbot in Frankia was obliged to obey that royal writ, and then reclaim the cost from the king. By the time I had finished providing for my waggon train that document would drain more money from the treasury than if the accountant had given me the silver I wanted.

Abram sensed that he had made his point. ‘At the mouth of the Rhone we charter a ship to take us directly to Rome’s port. The voyage lasts no more than four or five days,’ he said.

Osric cleared his throat. ‘The Rhone empties into the Mediterranean not so far from the territory of the emir of Cordoba.’

I recalled Alcuin’s warning that the emir was a bitter rival of the caliph in Baghdad, and if the emir could interfere with our mission, he would do so.

Abram was unconcerned. ‘When we reach the mouth of the Rhone, my contacts there will tell me if the emir’s ships are too great a risk.’

Osric was still cautious. ‘And if we cannot continue by sea?’

The dragoman fluttered a hand dismissively. ‘Then we follow the example of the great Hannibal. He came out of Hispania with his elephants, crossed the Rhone and took his elephants to Italy through the mountains. The southern Alpine passes are easier than those that the chancery in Aachen wants us to use.’

Abram began putting away the itinerarium. ‘When I was preparing to bring the caliph’s elephant from Baghdad to Frankia, I studied Hannibal’s route. I was thinking of using it, but in reverse. Unfortunately, I never got the chance.’

He slid the scroll back into its leather tube with a gesture of finality and turned to face me. ‘Sigwulf, the route is your decision.’

Involuntarily, I glanced down at the aurochs, still standing in its enclosure on the barge. After months of captivity, the huge animal was still angry and dangerous. It bellowed and flung itself from side to side, trying to get free.

I made up my mind. ‘I accept Abram’s suggestion. We go along the Rhine only as far as the tide can help us. Then we head south overland and follow the Rhone to the sea.’

There was little point in having a dragoman, I told myself, if one ignored his advice.

*

Abram sent his men ahead to make the arrangements. By the time our barge reached the Rhine’s tidal limit, they had paid carpenters to strengthen a massive four-wheeled farm waggon to carry the aurochs in its cage. Wheelwrights widened the axles so that the vehicle would not tip over when the beast thrashed about. A similar waggon for the ice bears was only slightly smaller. A team of four draught animals would pull each vehicle. A further three carts of a more normal size would carry stores and food. Nothing had been overlooked. There was even a lad hired to scurry up and down our line of waggons with a brush and a bucket of wool grease, daubing the grease on the axles so that they turned smoothly.

We lost no time in taking to the road. Our progress, after we had climbed from the river valley, was stately. We seldom covered more than a dozen miles each day, proceeding at a steady walk. The weather was glorious, with day after day of summer sunshine. As Abram had promised, the route was undemanding. Great tracts of rolling countryside presented little difficulty to the plodding oxen. July was the time for haymaking so their fodder was readily available. The meadows were full of workers scything the long grass, turning and stacking it when dry. The monasteries along our path owned extensive lands, and I had only to produce my letter from the royal treasury for the local steward to supply whatever we needed – loaves, ale and wine for the men, meat for the bears and dogs, pigeon breasts and day-old chicks to feed to the gyrfalcons. Each day we set out an hour after first light, rested at noon, then walked until the sun was halfway down to the horizon. One of Abram’s servants rode ahead. He identified the open ground for us to stop and rest the animals for the noontime halt. He also made sure that water was available in a nearby stream or pond or drawn from a well by local people whom he paid in advance for their labour. When we reached our chosen camping place each evening, it was to find our tents had been erected and a cooked meal was waiting for us.

Men and animals thrived. Walo made wicker cages for the falcons. By day they were hung from a framework on one of the carts. At night he covered the cages with dark cloths. His training of them progressed so well that whenever we stopped, he could fly them off his hand and let them fly free for exercise before attracting them back with a morsel of fresh meat. He also fitted the five white dogs with collars and each animal was attached by its lead to a different vehicle so it, too, was properly exercised. In the evening after they had been fed, they were tied to stakes placed just far enough apart so they could not fight. The aurochs remained as truculent as ever, attempting to attack anyone who came close to its cage. It was extremely dangerous to feed and water the beast, and clear out its vast piles of dung. But the job had to be done.

Most of all, Walo concentrated on tending to his beloved bears. Try as I might, I still found it difficult to identify which was Madi and which was Modi. To me they looked alike and I saw no difference in their behaviour. Fortunately, they adapted to the summer heat. They kept their appetites and, with shade and water within their cage, they showed no sign of distress. Walo fed and brushed them, played them tunes on his wooden pipe until they laid their heads on their paws and slept for hour after hour.

I envied them. Despite the idyllic conditions I was plagued by disturbing dreams. In the four weeks it took us to make our ponderous way across country to the Rhone, there was scarcely a night when I did not wake up in the darkness, my heart pounding, covered in sweat. Occasionally, I was shouting in panic. My nightmares always concerned an elephant. Sometimes I was riding on its back, high above the ground, feeling the creature sway beneath me as we moved across a depressing, broken landscape of grey rocks and harsh mountains. The motion made me feel giddy and I would wake up nauseous. In other dreams I was on the ground and the elephant was deliberately trying to trample me. I would turn and run for my life, pursued by the monstrous, enraged beast.

My nightmares often woke Osric and Walo, who shared a tent with me. Neither of them said anything until one evening shortly before we reached the Rhone. We had completed our day’s journey a little earlier than usual. Our road lay through an extensive forest of oak and beech and we had come upon a broad clearing where a spring of clean water had been channelled into a pool lined with stone slabs. Charred marks of campfires showed that previous travellers had rested there before us. Very soon our waggons and carts were drawn up in a neat line, the draught oxen unyoked, and all our animals had been taken care of. There were several hours of daylight left, so we were relaxing in the last rays of sunshine before the shadows from the surrounding trees spread across the clearing. All traffic along the road had ceased, and the place was so quiet that I could hear the low mutter of the ox drivers talking among themselves as they prepared to spread their bedding rolls beneath the carts. Even the white dogs had fallen silent.

‘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 animal:

‘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?’

‘There’s nothing,’ I answered, rather more abruptly than I intended.

Osric and I had agreed that our fragments from the Book of Dreams were too valuable to leave behind in an empty house in Aachen. They were hidden in the outer, double folds of the same heavy linen wrapper that protected the bestiary.

Osric frowned, searching his memory. ‘Dreams of elephants were mentioned somewhere. Maybe in the complete version of the book. I remember translating them. What precisely have you been dreaming?’

‘Mostly, that I was riding on the back of an elephant. But sometimes the animal is trying to stamp me into the ground,’ I told him.

My friend thought for a moment. ‘If I remember correctly, to dream of riding on an elephant means you will meet someone of great power and influence, a king or an emperor.’

‘That sounds promising,’ I said with more than a touch of sarcasm. My vivid dreams were not only worrying. They meant that I had been losing sleep. ‘Maybe we will get to meet the caliph in person. What about the dream of being attacked by an elephant?’

Osric ignored my ill humour. He was serious. ‘If the elephant succeeds in crushing the dreamer, it foretells an early death. But if the dreamer evades the attack, it means the dreamer will face great danger yet escape with his life.’

‘I wake up before the dream elephant squashes me to pulp,’ I said. His words left me uneasy, and at that moment I felt the sudden sting of a biting fly on my neck. I reached up and slapped it. My hand came away with a tiny smear of blood and, despite my outward bravado, I wondered if it too was an omen.

My friend glanced across to where Walo had succeeded in calming the quarrelling dogs. ‘Did anything come of your dream of Walo with those wolves and the bees?’ he asked.

It was my chance to tell Osric that the bees foretold Walo’s death. But I shied away from admitting that earlier I had kept the truth from my friend. Instead I described how the sight of Walo in Kaupang seated between the ice bears in Ohthere’s bear pen was the fulfilment of my vision.

Osric heard me out in silence. ‘And now? Does anyone else appear in your elephant dreams? Like Walo with those wolves?’

‘Abram. I see him climbing onto the carcass of a long-dead elephant and delving through a slit in the grey skin. Then he pulls out great long white bones.’

A look of relief crossed my friend’s face. ‘Surely that dream is about the past, not the future. It’s about the death of the elephant that Abram was bringing to Carolus.’

There was a sudden flicker in the air as a bat swooped over the dying fire in pursuit of a flying insect. The night was drawing in. Though the air was still warm, I shivered. ‘I think I’ll stay in the tent after all. It’ll save me from the midges,’ I said as I got to my feet.

I made my way back to the tent, carrying the bestiary; something was nagging at the back of my mind. I crawled into our tent, slipped the book inside my saddlebag, and was fastening down the flap when, all of a sudden, I had a faint recollection that the Oneirokritikon did offer an explanation about elephant bones: someone seen extracting the bones from a dead elephant in a dream meant that the person would make a great profit from an endeavour. I racked my brains, wondering how the prediction might make sense. Then, in a flash of understanding, I knew: Abram was using our embassy as an opportunity to line his pockets. That explained the six laden pack ponies on the day he met me on the road outside Aachen, and the extra waggons hired for the overland journey to the Rhone. Our dragoman was carrying his own private trade goods, buying and selling as we travelled. As I tied the final knot in the leather lace, I wondered what items Abram was carrying that were so profitable. I decided I would not ask. If Abram wanted to keep his business dealings a secret from me, that was his affair. The dream of Abram and elephant bones was an omen. If he was to make a great deal of money from our journey then that, in turn, implied that our embassy would be a success.

That night, my mind at ease, I slept so deeply that Osric had to shake me awake when it was time to get up. He made some light-hearted remark that he and Walo had finally got a good night’s rest, without my wild dreams to disturb them. None of us could have anticipated that what lay ahead was to be as bad as any nightmare.