No days were given over to preparations. Rations were low: no time to squander food on a wedding feast. A few words, a few rites, and Rusti and Borte would be man and wife. Well, boy and wife.
The marriage took place under a full moon as round as a battle shield. The moonbeams came down white as blades. Rusti waited for his bride in the rain, sitting astride his horse, watching the beast’s ears swivel uneasily, its breath turn to steam. From here and there in the darkness came the wailing of mourners keening over the death of child or parent, wife or husband in the floods.
But the neighbours gathered round, as they might gather round a brawl and cheer on the fighters. They grinned toothless grins at Rusti and shouted dirty jokes he did not understand, hacking up phlegmy coughs and cheers that sounded like jeering. They saw it as a chance to drown their troubles. After the ceremony, they would drink every drop of koumis, eat every morsel of food left in Cokas’s tent, then go, without leaving any presents, blaming the mud and bad luck.
Rusti lifted himself clear of the saddle to let the rainwater empty out from under him. The bride was so long in coming that even the snorts of laughter had fallen silent by the time the gossips fetched her out of the kibitki. She looked like a sacrificial beast being led to the slaughter. Her women friends yodelled and warbled wedding chants, but the struggle had worn them out. It had taken all their energy to persuade Borte to let down her hair and to prise her out of her rattling underwear of loot.
“Someone will steal it,” she greeted her bridegroom, hissing the words in his face. “If it gets stolen, it’s your fault.” And her face was livid with rage and cosmetics. Her pony bit into the flank of Rusti’s mount, whose feet were too deeply sunk in mud to kick back.
The ancestors were summoned to witness the marriage.
“My father would never have let this happen to me,” said Borte under her breath.
The mention of fathers brought childish tears to Rusti’s eyes. He liked what he remembered of his own father, a powerful, big man who might have fathered other sons for Borte to marry, if he had not died: sons Borte would have preferred: sons more like Cokas. Marriages are terrible for making you miss people who ought to be there and are not. That night, Rusti even missed his mother – and she had been dead so long he did not even remember her.
A drink of koumis was served to bride and groom in a single cup. Borte drank first then thrust the cup so sharply at Rusti that its contents slopped into his hair.
The maulana mumbled a prayer and invited them to join hands. Rusti reached out to do as he was told, but Borte had clenched her two hands into a single fist, shut so tight that her knuckles felt huge and glossy. She seemed to be forbidding her hands from giving anything at all to Rusti. Their knees banged together. The ponies began to circle each other, spooked by the mood of their riders.
Just then, Emir Tamburlaine, borne on his litter, passed by on one of his nightly tours of inspection. Noticing the little knot of spectators, he ordered his bearers towards it. So, like a man riding a magic carpet, he floated miraculously into Rusti’s line of vision. For the first time in weeks, the Emir’s lined, leathery face broke into a smile. “A marriage!” he said. “My elephant boy is marrying!”
The crowd (for all it was obliged to fall respectfully to its knees in the mud) was overjoyed. The evening was suddenly lucky. The bridegroom soared in their estimation: a personal favourite of the Gungal Emir! The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction had turned the light of his face on the happy pair. The women forgot their weariness and began to sing.
“Many sons to you,” mumbled the Emir and floated on his way, but the guests (they were guests now, not just spectators) took up the blessing.
“Many sons to you, elephant boy!”
Rusti coloured with delight. Now perhaps Borte would think better of him too and remember that he was, after all, a warrior of the Horde.
“Live long Rusti, and have many sons!” chanted the neighbours.
Borte leaned towards him across the gap between the two ponies and whispered to him in a voice too low for anyone else to hear:
“Die young, like a dog in a ditch…tajik.”
Bad luck was indeed ruling the heavens: it was a terrible season among Tamburlaine’s nomadic army. After the floods came disease. The Royal Chronicler Shidurghu wrote of the mud, wrote of the sickness, wrote of the setbacks that so unfairly afflicted the glorious Gungal Emir.
Nobody wrote about Rusti’s sufferings. Under the great rolling wheels of History, the story of one young boy is easily pressed into the mud. Besides, there must be worse things than being married to a shrewish wife who hates you.
“But why she hate you?” asked Kavi, as they led the elephants down to a river to wash them.
“She calls me a tajik,” said Rusti. The injustice of it baffled him. Maybe Borte thought of the elephants as tajiks, and that he had taken on their “tajik-ness” in the same way that he had taken on their smell. Phoolenda the bull-elephant sank onto his side in the water, and Rusti began scrubbing extra hard at his wrinkled grey skin. “Maybe it is just the worst bad word she knows,” he said miserably. “Maybe she just thinks I’m unlucky.”
“That cannot be,” said Kavi. “Crooked Pig Emir like you. You do not die in flood. You do not die in sickness. You have luck big like elephant.”
Rusti wondered if his “luck” was too big, and that was why it did not fit inside the family dwelling. He certainly did not feel lucky whenever he had to go home to his bride. “Maybe I’m too young?” Yes, perhaps that was it. Perhaps Borte thought that his twelve years made her, at twenty-seven, look foolish and old. “Or maybe she blames me for being alive when Cokas isn’t. The ancestors should have taken me instead. I’m not handsome like Cokas.”
Kavi gave a snort of laughter that Cokas should be called “handsome”, with his saddlebag cheeks and mean, puffy eyes.
“It’s true, I look nothing like him. I’m never going to be big like Cokas was. I never seem to grow.” A familiar, wistful regret swept through Rusti, and he stood looking at his slender little shadow lying along the riverbank.
“But she hate you before. You say. She hate you always. Before Cokas die.”
And it was true. Long before Rusti had given up trying to grow tall and handsome and clever, Borte had loathed him. “Maybe she knows about you, then.” But even as he said it he knew it could not be true. Borte would have killed Kavi on the spot if she had realized her slave-girl was a boy in disguise: an enemy in the camp.
“You kill her, yes? You kill her when she sleep!” suggested Kavi enthusiastically.
Rusti laughed. These days Kavi often came out with remarks like that: his thoughts circled the idea of murder, round and round, like flies buzzing round raw meat. And it was funny to hear such bloodthirsty words coming out of this small willowy person in a dress. Besides, the idea of Rusti murdering Borte was like a mosquito plotting to stab an elephant to death. So Rusti laughed and gave Kavi a friendly kind of push.
Inside Kavi’s head there was no laughing: none at all. Kavi remembered the massacre of the prisoners. Kavi remembered the fall of Delhi. Kavi remembered the carcasses of the dead elephants lying like so many bloodstained boulders on the plain. He also remembered how easily these same all-conquering Mongols had been killed themselves by a few drops of rain.
Now, each time the Horde passed through a gorge, Kavi found himself trying to conjure landslides. When they were fording a river, he pictured dangerous currents and hidden depths snatching them under and drowning them. When the Horde entered forests, he tried, by force of will, to make a single tree fall, fetching down another and another until the whole forest would come crashing down and bury the Mongols under trunks and branches. When they camped around a lake, Kavi tried to conjure crocodiles by the thousand, with jaws the length of a man and an appetite for flesh.
Forced to play the gentle, harmless girl on the outside, he made up for it on the inside, with thoughts of blood and slaughter… And he did not need Rusti’s permission to wish Borte dead; he already prayed for it night and morning.
It was harder to go on hating Rusti. Rusti would persist in being friendly! Kavi would have liked to keep things simple. He would have liked just to hate every Mongol alive, with all his might and main. Why, he only had to catch sight of his own girl’s clothing, or smell the scent of the almond oil on his hair, to fan the embers of his hate. The Crooked Pig Tamburlaine had reduced him to this – robbed him of family and freedom and dignity and turned him into something ridiculous. So Kavi spent a lot of time thinking about dire revenge. He imagined putting a poisonous snake into Borte’s bed. He imagined setting light to the crimson robes or golden brocaded white kibitki of that crippled butcher Tamburlaine. He imagined slicing the heads off all the officers of the Royal Court.
I might just let Rusti live, “Kavita” told himself each night as he combed scented oil into his long, luxuriant hair. If he gets down on his knees and begs.