The Emperor's Elephant(116)

If Sulaiman had not sent two of his sailors to gather firewood I would have kept my word. But we needed to light a fire to cook and most of our firewood had been washed into the sea during the gale. What we still had on board was soaking wet. So the two men were despatched even before the tide had ebbed and we were waiting for the water to recede and the ship to settle on the sand.

They returned after a short while, bringing back an object that they had stumbled upon in the undergrowth.

They gave it to Sulaiman, who walked across to where I was standing with Osric.

‘I think you should see this,’ he said to us. It looked like a fragment from a broken bowl, no larger than the palm of my hand. Dirty cream in colour, the dished side was smooth and the outer surface was slightly rough.

I took it from Sulaiman and was surprised how light it was, much thinner than the heavy earthenware pots we had seen in Ifriquia.

‘Whoever made this does fine workmanship. The people living here must be very skilled craftsmen,’ I told him.

‘My men found at least a dozen similar fragments, all lying close together,’ said Sulaiman. ‘They believe that they were not made by any human hands, and this frightens them.’

I looked again at the delicate pot fragment. ‘I think we should go and judge for ourselves,’ I said.

Guided by one of the sailors we walked up the beach and over a low ridge to find ourselves on ground overgrown with rough grass and straggly underbrush. The sailor stopped at the edge of a circular patch some four or five feet across. Here the grass had once been pressed down flat though now it was beginning to grow again.

Scattered on the ground were several more fragments of the bowls. Most were the same size as the sample I had been shown. Others were larger, seven or eight inches across.

‘What do they remind you of?’ asked Sulaiman softly.

It was Osric who answered. ‘That looks to me like some sort of nest. Those fragments are bits of bird shell.’

I felt a fool for not seeing the truth sooner.

I stooped down, gathered up several larger fragments, and tried to fit them together into a single piece. The egg that they would have formed was enormous, more than a foot in length.

I looked up at Sulaiman. ‘What do your sailors think?’ I asked.

‘They believe they are the eggs of a rukh,’ he said. ‘A small one, but nevertheless a rukh. That’s why they’re scared. They are frightened that the creature might suddenly swoop down on us and pluck us away.’

Oddly enough, I felt cheated. In my mind I had already abandoned the quest for griffin or rukh. To find signs of its possible existence was unsettling.

‘Other creatures lay eggs,’ I objected. ‘Crawling creatures like the crocodiles we saw on the banks of the Nile . . . and serpents.’ After seeing a snake kill Walo, the sight of the huge eggs had sent a shiver down my spine. ‘If these are serpent eggs then the animal is huge and very dangerous. We should leave this place undisturbed.’

Osric disagreed. ‘These are bird’s eggs, Sigwulf. Serpents, crocodiles, turtles . . . their eggs don’t have hard shells. If Walo was here, he would tell you the same.’

Mention of Walo jolted me. I knew what Walo would have done. He would have known immediately that they were eggshell fragments from a gigantic bird, just as he had known that the mysterious black beak found in the whale’s phlegm came from a meat-eating creature. If he had been with us, he would have been thirsting to find the creature and learn more. The thought made me ashamed of my own timidity. If already I were responsible for bringing Walo to his death in Africa, soon I would find it even more difficult to live with the knowledge that I had chosen to throw aside the chance to carry out his last wish.

Standing there holding the pieces of a huge egg, I made my choice: I would locate a nest still in use by a griffin or rukh, take a couple of fledglings from it, and bring them to Baghdad and Aachen for all to wonder at. No one else need be involved.

‘Why don’t you and your men carry on attending to the ship,’ I suggested to Sulaiman, ‘I will see if I can find a rukh’s nest that has got complete eggs in it, or even chicks, and be back by dark. Then we can decide what we should do next.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Osric insisted. ‘Two people will cover more ground than one.’

The shipmaster did not argue. ‘If you’re not back by morning, my men will assume you have fallen victim to the rukh, and insist on leaving this place. I will not be able to prevent them.’

Without another word Sulaiman and his sailor headed back to the beach, leaving Osric and myself standing by the abandoned nest.

I gazed inland where the heat haze obscured whatever lay beyond forest-clad hills. I was thinking back to my search for the white gyrfalcons.