Rusti sits on a plain called the Rose-mine, outside Samarqand, capital of Tamburlaine’s Empire. Around him, like humps of earth left by a gravedigger, lie the captured elephants of Delhi. Tonight, they will parade in honour of the Emir’s new wife, the twelve-year-old Taman-aghan whom he married yesterday in among the gorgeous pavilions of fur and silk that sprinkle the Rose-mine. The elephants will bend their knees respectfully. They will stretch their trunks and bellow a trumpet fanfare in celebration of the happy event. There will be a circus and poetry, feasting and an ocean of drink.
Rusti has also married again – a sweet girl from Tashkent, whom he heard singing one day outside his window. All nationalities live in Samarqand; where they were born matters very little. His wife Ghazal does not ride into battle, a blue silk sash across her face and only her scowl showing. She is not a warrior. But then neither is Rusti. City men cannot hope to marry fighting wives. Ghazal’s delight is in breeding foals from Arrow. She made Rusti buy a pretty brood mare which cost him all of Borte’s loot and more. He did not mind in the least, but the fact remains: marriage is still a day-to-day terror for Rusti. This wife is so delightful that he cannot quite believe she will stay – that she will not simply wander off one day. He cannot quite believe that Ghazal loves him for anything but his horses.
Little does he know that Ghazal lives in fear and trembling, too. In the tiny family apartment hangs a pen-and-ink portrait of the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. Thinking it must be Rusti’s dead wife (whom he never, never mentions), Ghazal cannot imagine how she can possibly comfort him for such a loss, how she herself can possibly compare with such a beauty.
In one way, though, she is like Borte. Ghazal is afraid of elephants. So whenever Rusti goes to the zoo and sits with his animals and talks to them of God and lightning and India, he goes there alone. They regard him sorrowfully with their small eyes, nod their great heads in sorrowful understanding, caress his face sympathetically with the fluted ends of their trunks. We understand, they seem to say. We too have been enslaved by someone smaller than ourselves. He loves them too: his elephant confidantes, loves to lie along their bony spines on a night like this, counting the stars.
Inside Samarqand today there were silk banners in the streets and red apples floating in the public fountains. There was a royal hunting expedition with greyhounds and panthers, a polo tournament, and a reading of poetry. Rusti’s head is aswirl with the memory of it.
But though the wedding festivities will last for weeks, he knows Emir Tamburlaine will not stay. He never does. Cities are for tajiks. Soon the kibitkis and pavilions and travelling mosques will be packed onto carts again, and a new campaign will begin. The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction will lead his million-strong family out again on their perpetual journey of conquest…
Not Rusti. Rusti works now at the royal mint in Samarqand, striking coins which carry three planets and three words. Throughout Tamburlaine’s vast Empire, these coins pay for everything: bread and slaves and swords and bracelets and spies and paper and ink and towers of brick. The coins Rusti makes will travel as far as the edge of the world…but Rusti will stay at home.
Only at times like these, when the Horde reels home full of drink and loot and stories and scars and boasting and contempt, only then do the royal elephants come into their own again. As the acrobats string their tightropes and the clowns sew themselves into their animal costumes…then Rusti parades his real-life elephants out of Samarqand, onto the Rose-mine, to perform in the royal circuses.
Tamburlaine’s finest cavalrymen gallop their horses up and down, performing death-defying feats. They pick up their shields from the ground without ever leaving the saddle. They shoot their arrows into targets while riding at full gallop. They slice the heads from straw dummies and send them rolling in among the feet of the crowd, who bray like donkeys, with delight. But sadly Rusti is a tajik. So all he sees, as the straw head rolls to a halt between his feet, is a soft cheek, a beardless chin, a pair of eyes asking him a question he cannot answer.
No matter. A boy astride an elephant is taller than any warrior, and Rusti parades the elephants of Samarqand out onto the Rose-mine, to perform in the royal circuses.
He and Kavi, that is. For where would the elephants of Delhi be without their mahout? And where would Rusti be without his best friend?
Mumu lifts her trunk and snuffs the scent of roses, spices, feasting. She looks as if she is groping for the stars. But the boys know better. They know that elephants ask very little from life. Only Tamburlaine is ambitious to capture the stars and all the lands that lie beneath them.