The Elephants of Sind

The kingdom of Sind has many domesticated beasts – cattle and buffalo, goats, camels, sheep – but one is particularly associated with royalty – the elephant. There are still some wild elephants roaming the plains of the Sind Waste, travelling from waterhole to waterhole, their splashing and digging helping preserve the waterholes and their dung carrying seeds of plants and trees which grow up around the waterhole, providing shade.
The domesticated elephant would be thought to be a useful beast of burden with their immense carrying power, but long ago the powerful realised how devastating they are in battle – able to trample through opposing forces, knocking soldiers over with their trunk, providing an elevated situation for soldiers to rain down arrows and spears on the enemy, and providing an elevated platform for the commanders to view the battlefield. And so they decreed that only the army and the king could own elephants.
Of course such a large animal needs a lot of space, and so the royal elephant stables – containing several hundred elephants, along with the sheds for all the fodder and the harnesses and trapping – sprawls over a large area on the outskirts of the city.
When out and about, the king usually has a ceremonial elephant walking nearby, with an ornate canopied howdah on top, a mahout between its ears controlling and steering it, steel-tipped covers on the ends of its tusks, and an intricate fringed and jewelled headpiece hanging down its forehead. Some elephants even have jewelled earrings hanging from their ears, although these are left at home if there is any threat of violence.
Although apparently decorative, the elephant is also war-trained, and the steel-tipped tusks can gouge while the heavy weight of can trample, and the ruler knows how to swing up into the howdah swiftly, where they are under cover and out of reach.