The Moghul

smaller, but with the same temperament and strength. Each elephant had five keepers and was placed under the training of a special military superintendent—whose responsibility was to school the animal in boldness amid artillery fire. The keepers were monitored monthly by Imperial inspectors, who fined them a month's wages if their elephant had noticeably lost weight. Should an elephant lose a tusk through its keepers' inattention to an infection, they were fined one eighth the value of the animal, and if an elephant died in their care, they received a penalty of three months' wages and a year's suspension. But the position of elephant keeper was a coveted place of great responsibility. A well-trained war elephant could be valued at a hundred thousand rupees, a full lakh , and experienced commanders had been known to declare one good elephant worth five hundred horses in a battle.
    Hawksworth studied the elephants, admiring their disciplined stride and easy footing, and wondered again why the army had stationed its stables so near the Imperial camp. Did Arangbar somehow feel he needed protection?
    "They're magnificent, don't you think?" Shirin emerged from her tent to join him, absently running her hand across the back of his jerkin. It had been six days since they had left Agra, and it seemed to Hawksworth she had grown more beautiful each day, more loving each night. The nightmare of the past weeks had already faded to a distant memory. She was fully dressed now, with a transparent scarf pinned to her dark hair by a band of pearls, thick gold bracelets, flowered trousers beneath a translucent skirt, and dark kohl highlighting her eyes and eyebrows. He watched, enthralled as she pulled a light cloak over her shoulders. "Especially in the morning. They say Akman used to train his royal elephants to dance to music, and to shoot a bow."
    "I don't think I'll ever get used to elephants." Hawksworth admired her a moment longer in the dawn light, then looked back at the immense forms lumbering past, trying to push aside the uneasy feeling their presence gave him. "You'd be very amused to hear what people in London think they're like. Nobody there has ever seen an elephant, but there are lots of fables about them. It's said elephants won't ford a clear stream during the day, because they're afraid of their reflection, so they only cross streams at night."
    Shirin laughed out loud and reached to kiss him quickly on the cheek. "I never know whether to believe your stories of England."
    "I swear it."
    "And the horse-drawn coaches you told me about. Describe one again."
    "It has four wheels, instead of two like your carts have, and it really is pulled by horses, usually two but sometimes four. It's enclosed and inside there are seats and cushions . . . almost like a palanquin."
    "Does that mean your king's zenana women all ride in these strange coaches, instead of on elephants?"
    "In the first place, King James has no zenana . I don't think he'd know what to do with that many women. And there are absolutely no elephants in England. Not even one."
    "Can you possibly understand how hard it is for me to imagine a place without elephants and zenanas ?" She looked at him and smiled. "And no camels either?"
    "No camels. But we have lots of stories about camels too. Tell me, is it true that if you're poisoned, you can be put inside a newly slain camel and it will draw out the poison?"
    Shirin laughed again and looked up the hill toward the stables, where pack camels were being fed and massaged with sesame oil. The bells on their chest ropes sounded lightly as their keepers began harnessing them, in strings of five. Hawksworth turned to watch as the men began fitting two of the camels to carry a mihaffa , a wooden turret suspended between them by heavy wooden poles. All the camels were groaning pitifully and biting at their keepers, their customary response to the prospect of work.
    "That sounds like some tale you'd hear in the bazaar. Why should a dead camel draw out poison?" She turned back to Hawksworth. "Sometimes you make the English sound awfully naive. Tell me what it's really like there."
    "It is truly beautiful. The fairest land there is, especially in the late spring and early summer, when it's green and cool." Hawksworth watched the sun emerge from behind a distant hill, beginning to blaze savagely against the parched winter landscape almost the moment it appeared. Thoughts of England suddenly made him long for shade, and