He nudged his foot against the rancid lump, again wrapped in leaves, in the bottom of the little boat. ‘This is what I paid for.’
‘What is it?’
‘Phlegm!’
I thought I had misheard.
He cackled with glee. ‘Al-hoot coughs it up, though others claim it emerges from the creature’s backside.’
‘When it’s fresh and soft like that, it smells bad,’ the shipmaster explained, ‘but leave it in the sun for a week and it hardens and changes to a dark yellow, and the smell improves. Apothecaries in Basra pay a fortune for it to use as medicine and,’ here he smiled, ‘I will carry it in person to Baghdad and present it to Nadim Jaffar. He’s one of the richest men in the caliphate and will reward me handsomely, then keep part for himself and sell on the remainder to his friends.’
He prodded the evil-smelling mass with his foot again. ‘That’s the largest piece of it I’ve ever seen. A double handful will pay the entire cost of this expedition and will still leave an excellent profit.’
I failed to see what use the fastidious nobleman would find for a stinking ball of fish phlegm. ‘What does Jaffar need it for?’ I asked.
‘His perfume makers will melt it down, tiny morsel by tiny morsel, then add it to fragrant oils – rose, jasmine, all the flowers you can imagine. Just a few drops and their scents will be enhanced and last for many days.’
I thought back to my visit to Jaffar’s garden, to Haroun’s palace, and to a dozen other reception rooms in the Round City. Everywhere the air had been heavily perfumed. It was little wonder that the whale phlegm was so much in demand.
Sulaiman clutched the precious package to his chest as we clambered up the side of the ship, leaving me to show the strange beak to Osric and explain where it came from.
‘If that’s a rukh’s beak, how did it finish up floating ashore encased in whale phlegm?’ was his cautious reaction.
Walo, by contrast, was thrilled. He inspected the vicious pointed tip of the beak and assured me that it came from a large, flesh-eating creature that hunted other animals for meat. For him, there was now no doubt that we were closing in on a griffin or rukh.
*
The character of the coast changed as we sailed south. The vivid green of the woodland and jungle gave way to drier, more open countryside covered with sun-scorched grasslands, scrub and thorny trees. A brown, dusty haze frequently obscured what lay further inland. We noted that the people in these parts preferred to live in large settlements located on the bald hillcrests and they surrounded their villages with tall stockades. It gave an impression of a mistrustful, more dangerous place. Each night Sulaiman anchored as far offshore as possible for fear of being attacked. It was, of course, too risky to sail along an unknown coast in the hours of darkness. Our captain also showed the first signs of unease about the weather, frequently looking up at the sky or gazing out to the horizon. I asked what was troubling him and he told me that we were now close to the limit of the area where we could rely on favourable sailing conditions. To justify his fears, the winds were fitful, sometimes dying away entirely, and – more worryingly – once or twice they turned to the south, in the direction we were headed. Sulaiman warned that unless we came across the rukh very soon, we would have to turn back.
Our next landing was again to replenish our store of drinking water. All morning our helmsman steered as close as possible to the coast while the youngest and nimblest member of our crew perched on the great spar of the mainsail, high above the deck. Soon after midday, he called down that he could see a stream trickling down the face of a low cliff, leaving a stripe of green against the rock. The nearby beach appeared to be deserted. Sulaiman ordered the sails lowered, and we dropped anchor. Our sailors paddled cautiously ashore in the ship’s boat. We watched as they scouted the beach and then one of them returned to say that it was safe for the watering to begin. Osric, Walo and I helped to lower the empty earthenware jars into the boat and then went ashore ourselves.
With more than forty jars to fill and transport back to the ship, the men would be busy for a while. There was still no sign of the local inhabitants, so I suggested to Osric and Walo that we explore a little distance inland. A narrow gulley offered a way up from the beach and we made a short climb that brought us out on an expanse of open, rough country covered with tall, coarse grasses, parched and yellow. Rocky outcrops rose like small islands in the sea of grass, and here and there were stands of flat-topped trees, their branches offering patches of shade in an otherwise empty landscape.
Walo was the first to see it. He was looking towards a grove of leafy trees when a movement caught his attention. He gulped with excitement and pointed, his whole arm shaking. I looked in that direction and could only see something small and dark, flicking back and forth beside a tree trunk. I mistook it for a bird. My gaze travelled upward and I caught my breath. High in the branches something else moved, a head. I stared transfixed, unable to credit what I was witnessing. Beside me, Walo and Osric kept stock-still, not daring to move and equally astonished. A bizarre-looking animal now moved from behind the tree and into full view. It stood on four very long slender legs that were totally ill matched. The front pair were so much taller than the back ones that the creature’s body sloped downwards, ending in a cow-like tail with a tuft constantly flicking back and forth to ward off the flies. But it was the neck that made the creature so outlandish. Unnaturally thin and long, the neck alone was the height of two men and ended in a deer’s head almost twenty feet above the ground.