His Majesty's Elephant Read Free

Bertha is Rose, Hrotrud is Linden—”
    â€œTheoderada is Chatterbox.” The boy was sneering, she could tell, even if it was too dark to see.
    â€œAnd what,” asked Rowan, “do they call you?”
    She did not think that he would answer, but after a while he did, biting it off short. “Kerrec.”
    â€œKerrec,” said Rowan, “and Abul Abbas.” She took care to say it correctly. “How is it that you know about elephants?”
    That, he did not reply to.
    â€œI suppose you’ll be his keeper now,” she said, “since no one else can manage him. It will make a change from horses.”
    â€œWill you just,” he said tightly, “go away? So that Abul Abbas can rest?”
    Really, thought Rowan, he was rude beyond words, even if he was too much a stranger to know who she was. She was not in a mood to enlighten him, but neither was she so contrary as to argue with the dismissal. The Elephant had fought a hard battle. He would be tired, and he would want to do his grieving in solitude.
    Though maybe the grief would be less now, with Kerrec to keep him company. Rowan would have hated it, but she could see what kind of person Kerrec was: no time or sympathy for people, but a world of it for animals.
    oOo
    She had just enough time to saddle her pony and manage a canter around the knights’ field, which was empty for once, except for a hen that had wandered in from somewhere. The bird was too haughty or too stupid to care that it was in Galla’s way, and Galla made do, when necessary, by jumping neatly over it.
    It would have been better sport if they could have taken longer at it, and if the flies had not come to the feast. Galla’s warding of watered vinegar was wearing thin. When the pony flew into a bucking fit around the whole rim of the field, Rowan brought her in.
    Rowan liked to do her own stablehanding, even the stalls when there was no one near to be scandalized. Tonight the grooms were all either huddled in corners talking about the Elephant or absorbed in looking after the embassy’s beautiful little horses. Galla was half Arab herself, and it showed in her fine head and her elegant tail, but she had enough good Frankish cob in her to make her sensible.
    Rowan brushed the red-brown coat till it shone, and sponged on another bowlful of vinegar. Galla snorted at it, but it kept the flies at bay. A bit of bread mollified her, and a fistful of dried apple.
    oOo
    It was dark by the time Rowan left the stable. There were lamps lit in the yard, and one by the Elephant’s pavilion. She heard Abul Abbas moving about inside, but she did not go back to see him—and certainly not to see his keeper. “Good night, Lord Elephant,” she said softly. Maybe he paused, listening. Maybe he was only comfortable at last, and slipping into sleep.

Three
    The Caliph’s men stayed through spring into summer, feasting and hunting and talking politics. In the middle of that, more people came, dark bearded men from the east like the Caliph’s men, but these were Christians, and they spoke Greek, and called themselves servants of the Empress of the East.
    They hated the Caliph’s men. The Caliph’s men hated them. They were all excruciatingly polite, because Rowan’s father was stronger than any of them.
    The palace was bursting at the seams. The women had to double up in the little rooms behind their hall. They were sleeping crammed together like sheep in a pen, and falling over one another in the daytime, trying to stay out of the way of all the embassies.
    The little chapel where Rowan went to talk to her mother was full of sloe-eyed bearded priests. The stable was full of foreign horses—Galla was put out to pasture, and never mind what Rowan thought of that. There was no place to go to be by herself, except maybe one.
    She made an excuse, to begin with. She really was out of thread for the border she was embroidering, or