The first time Nicolò saw an elephant was in the middle of a courtyard in Fustat. He was sweat-stained and foot-sore from travel, but all thoughts of a washcloth and a bed were driven from his mind by what stood in front of him: a huge, grey beast with the tusks of a boar and a snout that could move like a serpent. A quick prayer to the Virgin sprang to Nicolò’s lips, though no one else within the wikala’s walls seemed at all perturbed by the sight.
Nicolò took a cautious step back.
“There are no elephants to be found in the lands of the Franks, I take it?” Yusuf said next to him.
Even ten years ago, Yusuf would have said that to needle him, and ten years ago, Nicolò would indeed have been needled—would have snapped that he was no Frank, as Yusuf well knew. Now, Nicolò didn’t even need to look over at Yusuf to know that his expression was a teasing one, for he could plainly hear the fact in the tone of Yusuf’s voice.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Nicolò said truthfully. As a youth, he had heard tales of a fearsome eastern war beast called an elephant, but he had never imagined a war beast that could flap its ears in such a manner. “And who knew a snout could do such a thing?”
“It must be a very useful thing to have,” Yusuf said. He stepped forward and picked up a piece of tree bark from the pile near one of the elephant’s great feet. He held it up to the animal, which sniffed at it delicately with its snout before taking it and wolfing it down in one great mouthful. Yusuf threw his head back and laughed with delight, and then patted the creature—Marzuq, its handler called it—on its huge flank.
Nicolò was startled to realise that this sight—Yusuf, happy and at ease—was as familiar to him now as the elephant was strange. The realisation stayed with him as they shouldered their packs once more and headed in search of a free room on the upper floor of the wikala. When had that happened, he wondered? When had been the change? Nicolò walked behind Yusuf up the narrow stairs, and remembered a time when Yusuf would never have dared turn his exposed back to Nicolò—and would have been right to do so.
There were many nights when Nicolò had lain awake, watching the licking flames of their campfire and wishing that he had never taken the cross: that he had remained at home in Genoa and never known war or another horizon. Now, as he claimed his usual bed in such places—the one nearest the door of the room—Nicolò thought for the first time that maybe there was truly some good to this strange life of his. Of theirs.
If he had stayed in Genoa and fulfilled all his mother’s most heartfelt prayers by becoming one of the cathedral’s canons, well, perhaps one day he might have read some ancient sage’s description of an elephant, buried within a bestiary’s pages. He would have learned what part the elephant played in the Lord’s creation, and what useful lessons a believer could learn from its life. But Nicolò knew now that his untried imagination would never have let him truly picture such a beast as the one that stood in the courtyard below.
Nor would it ever have encompassed all of Nicolò’s unnatural deaths, or stranger resurrections, or the fact that he could come to walk alongside a Saracen and call him friend. I like him, Nicolò realised, watching Yusuf rummage through his pack in search of a fresh tunic. Perhaps it should not have been so surprising or sudden a thought, after twenty years together, but there it was: another impossible thing that Nicolò had been granted the grace to finally see.
“Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands,” Nicolò murmured to himself as they went back down together to the hammam. There, Nicolò bowed his neck and let Yusuf pour a jug of water over his head: clear and cold and so very welcome after the long day’s travel. Nicolò closed his eyes. He thought of all of the wide world they had walked so far, and how much there was yet for him to see, and wondered how many new things there might yet be for them, under the rising sun.
