The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  For there was always noise. The air looped him in quick eruptions and outbreaks of clatter such as Nnunng and Tz-ztts and Lull-ooll. Differing sounds startled him and made him nervous: louder and softer grunts, grunts ending in sharp claps and hissings. … He began to nod when these little thunderclaps passed near him, to duck almost, as though their chatter were a physical force, the rustling, or crashing, or slithery approach of a hundred different animals ten or twenty times a day. There were regular sounds that went back and forth between the wagging tongues, others that seemed to keen or stutter. Sharp yaps and little strings of yips. He twisted about, jumped and started at their barking, and after a time they even stopped laughing at these nervy antics, so familiar and predictable had they become. And then, weeks after his “capture,” months even, perhaps—he was rolling a water bottle between his knees and one of the men was throwing little pebbles at him that were bouncing off his head—a sound came at him all suddenly, like SSoss-O!, which he had heard aimed at him before, and then two little gobbets of noise, like a half grunt, Oer-tt, and then a groan, ooOower… Like that. And he felt the muscles in his cheeks and tongue ache, the muscles he used to maneuver mashed food into position before swallowing, and he felt his tongue do something like peel itself dryly from the roof of his mouth, like skinning a very dry animal, and he opened his mouth and said, quite clearly, “Geddit y’self.” Then a gulp.

  “Shit.”

  Everyone stopped. An amazed hush swelled suddenly, an abrupt luxuriant silence that engulfed the odd creature he had spat at them, swallowed it whole, and his utterance wallowed and floundered about for footing. He blinked with the strain and said the same thing again. Their blank surprise trembled like a wall of deadening liquid behind which his tiny noise was unweighted and soundless. Then someone broke it with, “So Salvestro ain’t a deaf-mute,” and everyone else started laughing. He looked about blankly. “Well, what else was we to call you?” It was the same man, the one who had called to be passed the bottle, which now lay forgotten on the ground in front of him. “Groot,” he said, thumping himself on the chest. He was Groot. “Eh, Salvestro? Mister Geddit-Yourself-Shit, eh?”

  SSoss-O! Oer-tt-ooOwer!

  Salvestro. Water. He rolled the words in his mouth. Geddit ’self. Groot. Groo-oo-oot. Behind him, the forest was a jumble of little rustlings and sussurations; unguessable, without meaning.

  And these renaming vagabonds, who were they?

  They were: Fante the Dagger and Umberto the Pike, Shiner, Horvart, Hurst (or ’Urst), who was imperturbable, Heinrich Von Bool, dubbed Drool, for he had no tongue, and the Bandinelli twins, who, though they were near doubles of one another, had grown up in the same village and bore the names Aldo and Tebaldo, were unrelated. A certain Corprochet titled himself “the Admiral of the Adda”; Pandulfo was “Il Dottore” and alone of the company could read and write. He was composing an epical history in song of their exploits in the wars to the south. There was Criparacos the Greek, Low Simon, Sigismundo of the Fiery Eyes, and the Chevalier Gianbattista-Marcantonio di Castello-Molina di Fiemme. The one with the unnaturally smooth and garishly colored face was Powder Jack. But most fearsome of them all was the Teeth.

  Groot pointed them out and described them to him, advising him of their

  foibles and failings and explaining that these were not ordinary men but soldiers, tuned for combat and unpredictable in their humors. “Always approach from the front,” he warned, “and avoid shouting.” For in the days and weeks since he had rediscovered his speech, Salvestro had taken to yelling nonsensical phrases at the top of his voice every few minutes or so to keep his new faculty in trim.

  Their leader, known only as II Capo, was a black-bearded, blue-eyed, jolly-faced gentleman of fifty years or more who was carried about in a wicker basket construction resembling in equal parts a very small boat and a large but legless chair. II Capo had no feet.

  “The Christian Free Company, m’boy. That’s us. A nasty bunch of bastards we are, nasty as any you’ll meet this side of hell, the Alps, and Kingdom Come. Don’t forget that, young Salvestro. And don’t forget this, neither.” II Capo leaned forward in his throne, wheezed, gathered himself. “By Christ, we hate the French!”

  It was dusk. It had rained earlier. On the far side of the clearing, Powder Jack and Sigismundo of the Fiery Eyes were building a fire that stubbornly refused to ignite. II Capo stared at him as though expecting an answer.

  “The French,” said Salvestro.

  II Capo nodded approval. “Hate ’em!” he hissed. He rocked back into the basket’s inner gloom. There was a rustling then, the sound of him rooting around, several dull clanks. “You’ll be wanting to see ’em, then,” came from within.

  “The French?” said Salvestro, surprised. He had conceived “the French” as some kind of animal—noxious, probably large, unlikely to be found in II Capo’s basket. In any case singular. What was “them”?

  “Those bastards? Good Christ on the Cross, no!” exclaimed II Capo, emerging from the interior clutching a silvery metal box in each hand. “No, I meant you’ll be wanting to see the Feet.”

  “Vitelli cut ’em off him after Buti fell,” Groot explained later. “He was lucky, mind you. The arquebus men lost their hands and eyes. Did he show you the toes?”

  The Feet had been yellow and shiny, odorless, in a perfect state of preservation. Slightly shrunken, perhaps. The toes had followed, each in its individual box. A little stump of bone protruded where the flesh about it had dried and the toenails had detached themselves from their cuticles. The toes were a slightly darker color than the Feet, as though they had been stubbed shortly before excision.

  “The toes I don’t find so impressive,” Groot confided when Salvestro nodded, “but the Feet… the Feet, I think, are a miracle.”

  Salvestro looked across the gloomy camp to the barely visible hummock that was II Capo. His wicker lodging would sit inertly wherever they had decided to pitch camp that night, and from it would issue bellowed proclamations and commands: “Thirty lashes for anyone fouling within the perimeter!” or “Post guards! ‘Urst! Drool! Jump to it!” Fires would be lit, lookouts chosen and dispatched. Camps were pitched and struck. They moved on, stopped, moved on again. Ordered to “jump to it!” by II Capo, the men of the Christian Free Company by and large jumped. But try as he might, Salvestro was quite unable to see why. The source of II Capo’s authority was deeply mysterious. It had something to do with the Feet, he felt.

  Come morning, and all day long if they were on the march, it was Groot’s task to carry II Capo in his basket. Two poles extended stretcher fashion front and back. Groot was short and powerfully built. He took the front. Bringing up the rear was one more powerful even than Groot and standing two heads taller. Salvestro had become aware of him in a wary fashion, seeing that the other men treated him with an odd mixture of disdain and mocking affection and wondering if the company did not after all include one even more lowly than himself. II Capo’s rear porter was part scapegoat and part mascot. Amongst the confusion and clangor of his early days, Salvestro remembered the youth—for he was little older than himself—setting a pile of scraps before him. More recently, venturing into the underbrush to empty his bowels, he had come upon the giant standing patiently by the path leading to their camp. He had been there two or three hours already, sent by Simon to meet the Chevalier, who would be coming that way, having scavenged “a vital longweight.” The Chevalier was intermittently visible in the camp behind him, but the giant had drawn no conclusions from this. Salvestro had tried to explain that the men were playing a joke on him.

  “Not Longweight. Long wait” he explained.

  “That’s it,” said the giant.

  He had left him standing there and gone to shit. That night, sleeping, deep in the loose clasp of a pleasant and watery swimming dream, he had been awakened by something akin to a shovel striking him violently in the back.

  “Longweight,” an enormous face, inches from his own, had
exclaimed with delight. “Long”—the face paused for effect, dimly recognized now through the dark and blear of his sleep—” wait!” The face had begun to laugh.

  Now, in the cool afternoon light that offered itself between the lintel of the beet loft’s doorway and the mire of the field beyond, he observed his companion plod back in desultory fashion, limping theatrically in protest at his prodigal boot. It had shrunk, or his foot had swelled. The face retreated into memory with its idiot cheerfulness, returned again, blankly this time. Bernardo toting his end of the basket. Bernardo bringing up the rear. They had arrived a league or two short of a little village somewhere west of Innsbruck, and strange preparations were afoot. The village was called Muud.

  “The village is called Muud,” explained II Capo, flurries of action already welling up about him. Sigismundo and Horvart were stripping hazel saplings out of the hedgerow and the Chevalier was trimming them with a hand ax. Low Simon disentangled numerous short lengths of rope from one another, and other members of the company were unrolling and applying filthy bandages to their limbs. Powder Jack moved amongst them, daubing rust-colored paint over these rags or else administering dollops of bright red paste to proffered arms, legs, and foreheads, which would then be bound up and and the paste seep through as though open wounds were bleeding beneath. Hovering about the fringes of all this, the Teeth lurked, inactive and menacing as usual. There were rehearsals of limping, and several crutches appeared.

  “Look lively!” shouted II Capo. “Full bellies tonight!” Low Simon was tying the saplings into large square grates, then tying the grates together—a boxlike structure was taking shape, with an improvised door on top and poles slung beneath to lift it—a cage. Powder Jack had taken out a mouchoir and was scraping at the caked powder on his face, which came away in lumps and slabs to reveal, on his left side, a landscape of deep pockmarks and craters, and, on his right, a deforming jagged valley running from ear to neck so deep that it seemed it must cut through the cheek altogether. Then Salvestro saw the Chevalier call to the Teeth and open the door of the cage. The Teeth approached, and then, without a murmur of protest, he climbed up and lowered himself inside.

  The Christian Free Company then set off at a smart hobble, which slowed and grew more pitiful as they approached nearer to the village of Muud, ‘Urst and Drool leaning more heavily on their crutches, the Bandinelli twins swapping rhythmic oohs and aahs of discomfort, bandages being given a final smearing of paint, poultices moistened and refreshed, stringing out along the track until, when they reached the common, the four rangy cows grazing there looked up from their deep stupidity to stare at a column of stumbling casualties and the tethered goat ignoring the thistles it had been staked there to devour and instead busily destroying a stand of myrtle saplings left off its gleeful vandalism to eye a band of beaten warriors, bravery leaking from their wounds, carrying the glamour of the unfairly defeated, coverers of ignoble retreats, the outnumbered driven reluctantly from the last redoubt of honor. … There was also a measure of threat, it has to be said, for there was the cage, and within the cage was the Teeth. And tied behind the cage was Salvestro. The imagery was various and multiple.

  There was too—and crucially—an element of urgency in the company’s limpings and hoppings, a strong signal of transience and wanting to be off. Of pursuit and even, did their obvious staunch and steadfast courage and reckless heroism not mitigate absolutely against it, something of their being in flight. Something horrible was out there, over the bluff behind them, beyond the village’s limited purview and ken, and yet in full view, bleeding through the bandages that the villagers assembling dully in their doorways eyed fearfully as the men dragged their spent bodies forward. Villagers conferred amongst themselves in low whispers as the company came to a halt before the well. The Wars, which they had heard as titillating whispers and scraps of rumor, other peoples horrors in the wilderness beyond the Alps, had come to Muud.

  “Water!” cried II Capo. “Water for my men! We cannot tarry. Will no one give us water?” There was silence for a moment, before a black-bearded villager nodded to one of the others, who trotted to the well and began drawing a bucket. “God bless you,” II Capo thanked the man, who stepped forward hesitantly, glancing to left and right at the desperadoes, to the cage and the youth tied up behind it.

  “Water’s free to him who asks,” said the man.

  “God preserve you,” responded II Capo, motioning for Groot and Bernardo to set him down.

  “What brings you to Muud?” asked the Beard.

  “Ah, my friend,” began II Capo, “there’s no need to mock us, even beaten as we are. We must be off, and if you. … Well, we must be gone. We thank you for the water. …”

  “Mock you? I asked civilly enough,” protested the man. “Tell me now, what brings you here?”

  “Can you truly not know?” A little knot of men and women was forming about the man, watching anxiously as these words flew back and forth. “Can Innsbruck blaze so fierce and its river run red and still you do not know?” One or two of the villagers shook their heads. “It is the Wars that have brought us here!”

  “There’s no wars here,” the Beard said stolidly, but his voice carried no weight.

  “And then at, at—” II Capo gestured down the road as though the name were too painful to utter.

  “At Slime?”

  “Slime!” It was a howl of anguish.

  “Slime is but a day from here!”

  “Slime was but a day from here, my friend. Today it is no more. They were too many, and too well armed, and the acts committed … We are hardened soldiers, not good men like yourselves, we too have killed when necessary, but the acts committed on the good people of Slime …” Other villagers had been lured from their homes by the prospect of juicy tit-bits of gossip. They surrounded the black-bearded man and swathed him in an appalled silence. II Capo seemed to gather himself within the horrors of Slime. “The main body will not find you; set your mind at rest on that, my friend—”

  “Main body? Main body of what?”

  “—but the forage parties will be here tonight, perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps they will miss you, too. We tried to beat them off, but… But …” It seemed that II Capo might almost be sobbing. “Yesterday I captained a hundred men. A full hundred!” He choked back his tears, and suddenly his voice came like a clarion out of grief and disorder and dark violence: “Pray with me!”

  “What!” the man exclaimed, but behind him his own kinsmen and women, children, friends, neighbors, enemies, were bending to kneel in the mud of Muud, and in front of him the gallant wounded of the Christian Free Company were groaning in pain as they did the same, and so he too knelt.

  “God!” II Capo’s voice rang out over the impromptu congregation. “God Receive into your arms the souls of my brave hundred, good men who died in protecting the poor villagers of Slime.

  “God!” II Capo sounded a desolate tocsin of waste and horror. “God! Guard and watch over the poor villagers of Muud, gentle lambs to the lion’s claws, for they are innocents and do not deserve their fate, it being so terrible.

  “And God!” Now he was wrathful, a fire-hardened sword of vengeance hanging over bestial skulls. “God! Flay their flesh and grind their bones, let their souls be racked and tortured with hot irons, as they did to the poor villagers of Slime, without mercy and eternally, for they are abominations, abominations! Vile creatures, scum, filth, they are the … they are the …” II Capo stuttered, spluttered, choked on the hateful syllable.

  “What?” asked a villager.

  “They are the, the … I cannot say it, I cannot. We must go. We have stopped too long.”

  “You cannot leave now!” a woman’s voice cried.

  “For the love of God, protect us!” came another, and soon the whole crowd began to clamor, many already weeping and begging for protection, in the midst of which II Capo resumed his prayer.

  “They are,” he declaimed in a voice of dread, hauling himself forwa
rd out of his basket and upright, wobbling, turning to gesture at the only one not to have knelt, the prisoner in his cage, the Teeth, whose jaw muscles Salvestro saw from behind as they swelled into great muscled knots, whose bared rictus he saw reflected in the villagers’ stupid, terrified faces, in their horror of what was to befall them,” the French!”

  Pandemonium.

  It usually went like that. After the hapless villagers had implored their reluctant saviors to stay, sentries would be posted and travelers on the routes leading to the village would be encouraged to take some other path by men supposedly shivering from a terrible plague raging unchecked farther up the road. They would stay a few days, a week at most, but it was that first moment, that crisis of terror in which the villagers’ placid world seemed on the brink of shattering and crashing about their ears, that gave, as II Capo termed it, the best yield. Rings would be slipped off fingers or from around necks. Little boxes would be unearthed from the packed dirt of hovel floors and their contents magically presented. There was sometimes a stone or two, fake often enough, but touching and accepted.

  Thereafter, a slow decline. Feasted like kings to begin with, by the second or third day the company was usually supping on vegetable stews, and the beer or wine that had at first flowed so freely now suffered puzzling accidents, souring, spilling, simply disappearing. Then, when another day had gone by without the promised apocalypse, the villagers would begin to mutter amongst themselves, to avoid the men who camped idly about their miserable huts and barns, to wonder if they had perhaps panicked too soon. The women would skirt about them, the men eye them uneasily, and sometimes the sentries would pick up a boy slipping through the line with a basket of eggs and an implausible tale, and Salvestro, the “captive,” with the Teeth the visible evidence of an invisible peril, would feel the aura of the villagers’ fear peel off him and crumble like Powder Jack’s facepaint. II Capo was tuned to that. The villagers looked at Salvestro and the Teeth. II Capo looked at the villagers. The company looked to their leader. He knew. When the moment came they melted away like darkness chased by light, and then always, one morning, they would be gone.