The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  Salvestro gathered wood, built fires, watched their embers flare and pulse with the whims of the wind, ebbing to dull glows and sinking into the surrounding darkness. Sometimes around dusk the Chevalier would rise, seek out the Teeth, who sat alone and apart, and the two of them would stalk off together. He followed them one night and saw the Chevalier’s blade flashing and mazing the thickening dark, the Teeth a little way off, and then the blade swung flat about, hissing at the other’s head, which neither flinched nor jerked but made a tiny quick movement as a hand moving to crush a fly in midflight, and there was a dull, jarring sound. The Teeth had caught the blade in his mouth. He released it and both men nodded satisfaction before resuming their strange mock duel.

  Sometimes Pandulfo read to him from his poem, bloody battles and strange, contextless heroisms: I1 Gran Capitan smashing multitudes at Cerignola, Paulo Orsini drowning in his armor after Gaeta, the inexplicable calm of the Count of Pitigliano watching Trivulzio’s men cross the Adda … Each episode ended with the beating of a desperate retreat covered by mysterious forces that, although I1 Dottore did not say so, might well have been identified with themselves, the Christian Free Company. Either that, or the cutting out of the French from the body of Italy “like a wart,” one of his favorite expressions. Bernardo would often listen, too, though he seemed more mesmerized by the sight of Pandulfo’s eye and index finger moving over the black squiggles than by the story itself. Only during the harangues against the French, which were lengthy and numerous, did he pay any attention to the words, thumping the ground softly with his fist and saying, “That’s right, that’s right,” until Salvestro would tell him to shut up.

  Most of all, though, he would sit with Groot and Bernardo. In a previous incarnation, Groot had been, or had always wanted to be, a baker. “Up in the morning before everyone else, stoking those ovens, rest of the world asleep,” he would ramble fondly. He knew a great deal about different flours and meals and would draw fine distinctions between them. His share of their loot would be spent on bricks and mortar, a little shop with high chimneys, earthenware mixing bowls too heavy to lift, long-handled spatulas … He described how one could tell if a loaf was baked through by tapping a knuckle on the bottom and listening for a sound like a drumstick striking stiff leather. So they passed their evenings gabbing, with Bernardo throwing in confused recollections of a woman, a stone hut on a hot rocky hillside, a man he had seen from the rail of a boat that took him away over the sea. But when it came to Salvestro’s turn he found himself at a loss, unable to rake the coals from a fire dowsed in distant, placid waters and buried in a pathless forest, unwilling to offer the hard grit of memory or invent substitutes, and so, in place of his past, he spoke about Vineta.

  From Muud to Krems, from Krems to Schlien, from Schlien to Wys, and on to Orbach, and Cruuen, and Grunewald, and on: clusters of hovels with their gaunt livestock, and conniving inhabitants, their woodpiles, mud, and treachery. Winters made the villagers meaner, less credulous, and the company overbold. Four times they had fled with torches fanning out over the fields behind them and the thud of hooves and shouting in their ears. Two of those times children had been found, a boy and a girl, their necks snapped and the bodies otherwise untouched, left carelessly, in full view. The villages were Proztorf and Marne: the Proztorf girl, the Marne boy. No one talked about them. There had been alarms and hasty retreats.

  Salvestro had soon rebelled against his role in the pantomime. Being tied to the cage was dull and uncomfortable. He preferred to swagger about with the rest of the company, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a feather in it and a large, blunt machete. Once he had a woman in a barn. It was late summer, a blazing heat, the air was choked with the smell of straw. She was older than him, with red hair and very ugly. She rolled him onto his back and galloped him until the sweat poured off them.

  The Christian Free Company passed peddlers with their mules loaded high with boxes and bales, little bands of pilgrims, shepherds moving their flocks up and down the pastures. They took drovers’ trails and forest paths, weaving east and west through the forested plains and lake-spattered aprons of rock and grass behind which the mountains lay like chipped, ice-scoured teeth, the bones of long-dead giants. One summer they crossed those mountains.

  The foothills rose in successive ridges and peaks, their calm grassed slopes rising and breaking about outcrops of granite, growing harsher and more fissile with the altitude. Mountain pines with stunted branches forced their roots into the thin soils. Springs gouged deep channels and ravines, splashing the gray boulder waste with jet black. Salvestro thought he had never felt water so cold. They had spent the first winter this side of the mountains on the high slopes in the thin air, and it had killed Low Simon. The second had driven them south into the Duchy for the hardest months. They crept east and then south, left the road after Ferrara, and struck out across country for the Valle di Comacchio. They came to a tiny hamlet called Viemme.

  “The village is called Viemme,” II Capo announced beforehand. It was wrong from the first. The villagers were sullen and too dull-witted. II Capo had blustered, haranguing them for a full hour before the good people of Viemme had turned to each other in doubt and worry, another hour before the bargain had been struck, and thereafter they had been ignored as though this transaction were no different from buying a yearling or a hogshead of young wine. Viemme sat in swampy ground some hundreds of yards from the shore of a vast lake. The land about was as flat as the water, and they had posted no sentries. Salvestro overheard Sigismundo talking in a low voice with II Capo, who said in reply, “Nor me. We leave tomorrow night.”

  They awoke surrounded by soldiers.

  How much did this Prior desire to know? How much must he dredge up to satisfy him? The Thought was still present, but quiet now, attending him in this deliberation. He remembered the Spanish captain’s words as Groot and Bernardo bent to pick up II Capo: “Not him. Leave him.” They had been marched in column with the crossbowmen to either side. He had looked back at the first cry. The villagers had wasted no time. II Capo was on all fours, trying to crawl away. A few villagers, five or six, measured and deliberate in their motions, were taking turns kicking him. He heard high wails cut off abruptly by the softer reports of the kicks, a moment of silence, the noise start up again, stop, start up again, kicks and screams and kicks and screams. Eventually there was silence.

  “And then?” (Merely helping him along by now; this mild interrogation will be delivered in the blandest of tones.)

  And then the camp, which was the shouts of brutish men called Sergeants, idleness and disease. Horvart died there, and the Bandinelli twins simply disappeared, slipped miraculously past the sentries and vanished into thin air. After the camp, the battle, which was Ravenna, when they stood across the rough moorland from the French lines, too distant to be frightening, and ‘Urst said, “I see nothing here to perturb me,” seconds before the bombardment began and Salvestro saw him literally explode and disappear in a spray of blood and bone. There was smoke and noise and terror. Groot dragged him into a rillet with Bernardo. His sense of direction had disappeared; he had no idea whence the cannon were firing—he had not even seen cannon—nor whether the stumbling figures in the smoke were friend or foe. A covered cart rumbled out of nowhere and disappeared again with its team bridling and rearing, no sign of a driver. Toward the end there had been a thunderous flash and his face had prickled with heat. He had fouled himself but could not remember when. Bernardo and Groot wore black faces, powder-burned like his own. It was a glorious victory.

  They had spent that night stumbling about the battleground, making for a little line of fires that might have been twenty miles away for all they knew, coughing gunsmoke out of their lungs and avoiding the gangs that roamed the field looting the dead and dying. They came upon a man-at-arms, helmetless, kneeling as though about to pray. He breathed and regained his balance when Groot nudged him slightly, but that was all. A crossbow bolt fired from below and behind had f
ound the soft channel where the skull meets the back of the neck and driven itself up into the brainpan. The knight’s head had ballooned to near twice its natural size. He wore a cloth cross, but they could not make out its color. Groot was for taking his sword, but Bernardo and he were already walking away. He could taste the smoke, his head full of it and pounding, his snot bright yellow. The din of the bombardment still echoed in his skull, along with occasional sharp cries as icy hands went about their work under cover of the darkness. Dawn revealed a fluttering clump of colors, with men stumbling toward it from all directions, a few marquees. No one seemed to be in charge.

  They were marched to Bologna. He thought that he spied the Chevalier and the Teeth as they entered the town, amongst a group of Spaniards lounging near the statue in the Piazza del Nettuno, but he never saw them again. The rest of the Christian Free Company seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. He, Bernardo, and Groot listened to a fine speech by the Viceroy of Naples and joined a company of pikemen composed mostly of Sicilians who spent their days insensible from drink and, when they woke, loved nothing more than to stab each other. The company articles were read to them, an oath administered, and fifty soldi completed the process. Later they were issued with pikes, and three days a week they marched out of the town to practice on the fields of the campagna. By late summer, with the muster still growing, the swelling soldiery lodged in Bologna were ejected and took up residency in those fields. Bales of canvas were unrolled and slung over timber frames to form tents, a gibbet erected, hay stacked, fires lit, water fetched. Strings of horses were led about and heavy carts drawn up in endless rows. The camp-wives followed, contemptuous, furious women who swatted at each other and screamed at their men, seeming to fear nothing. One who rode about on a horse was dubbed by the Spaniards Nostra Senora d’Espuela for the spurs on her boots, by the Sicilians as La Cavallerizza Sanguinosa for the uses to which those spurs were rumored to be put, or perhaps the red of her hair, which was bright copper. Salvestro eyed her from a distance but had no money for women and was cowed by her in any case. Dismounted, she swaggered about like a man, would disappear for a few days, then return to shout insults at her lovers around the camp, who were numerous and tight-lipped on the subject of her charms. One of the Sicilians told Salvestro that she carried no weapon but a small hook-knife that was used for only one purpose. He dreamed about her hair dragging across his face and blood welling up where their crotches were joined, her amazement.

  By the end of summer, gun carriages were arriving, and their arrogant bombardiers, and the camp had spread until it took an hour to walk from one end to the other. Tongues wagged of a return to Ravenna, of digging in at Bologna, or sacking Florence, La Crasa Puta, as the Spaniards dubbed her. The rumor-mill ground idleness and boredom into a cloud of whens and wheres: tomorrow, or a week hence, the feasts of Apollinaris, or Domenico, or Cosmas and Damian. There was wild talk of Paris by Martinmas, or ringing in the New Year in Jerusalem, but when they were finally formed up in lines and saw the Viceroy Cardona and Cardinal Medici canter past holding cross and sword, when those lines began to inch forward and Salvestro marching near the back of the long column could see its distant head only as ants through a thin haze of dust, when the baggage train rumbled out and the field was bare of everything have the black scars of the campfires, rumor had yet to be replaced by fact, and Salvestro had the sensation that he had enlisted in a grim, unstoppable pilgrimage to a shrine that could never be reached. And when, eight days into the march, outside a town called Barberino, their destination was cried through the camp, the fact itself proved slippery, escaped them, leaped ahead, and lost them, for it would turn out that they were marching on not Florence—as they were told—but Prato.

  Enough.

  Bernardo would return soon, for the familiar cooking smells were creeping once again through the wall. The light would fail soon, too. Sometimes the winter sunset would catch the surface of the sea and swoop up in a great wash to flood the eastern sky in reseda and pale turquoise. Garish pinks and reds would play out a gaudy pantomime on the western horizon, but the greater dome of the sky would be imperturbable and luminous, undisturbed by stars in these brief minutes. Then the perfectly even light would fail, or the teetering ember of the sun would drop, or the sea suck the sky’s rival ocean dry to its bed, or darkness would fall and this twilight end, and so it was that night.

  There he was, having reemerged from the left side of the copse (a distance of eighty-two yards), hugging the straggling line of the fence, walking back in hangdog fashion, fit of temper forgotten or fading into forgotten. … Salvestro felt the Thought swell tightly in his skin, congruent now. He thought about the two islands that were called Usedom and the years that held them irreparably apart. He thought that soon the three young monks would come with their supper and that after them the monk called HansJürgen. He thought he would sit in front of the Prior once again—tonight, perhaps—and perhaps many times after that in this strange ruin of a monastery, answer the questions put to him simply and directly.

  “Pretty thick back there.” Bernardo tramped past Salvestro, reentered their makeshift quarters, and sat down. “Trees and whatnot,” he added as though the other had sent him to reconnoiter.

  Salvestro nodded. He thought too that, branded twice as a liar, the Prior would listen to those answers and either explode with indignation or not believe a word. But the Prior’s reaction, when it came that night, or the next, or in any one of the subsequent interrogations that stretched ahead of him, draining and inevitable as the winter whose nights they would fill, proved quite other, for far from throwing up his hands in horror at the rapacious beast squatting in his cell or recoiling in disgust at a tale whose incidents were chiefly of murder, theft, and rape, the monk would fix him with long unblinking stares punctuated with near imperceptible nods and occasional unsurprised hmms that suggested, if not acceptance, then a bland indifference, and if not indifference, disinterest, and if not that… As the winter wore on, Salvestro would realize with a mounting sense of resentment that not only were many of the elements of his life already known to this Prior, but most of the remainder elicited only nose-scratching, inspection of fingernails, the picking of imaginary specks of nothing in particular from the surface of the paper-strewn table over which his words seemed to lose their impetus and fall lifelessly into his interrogator’s all-accepting boredom.

  He would leave puzzled and troubled by the pointlessness of it all, picking over the midden he had happened to pile up that night, scratching up the occasional prize: Jörg’s leaning forward in his chair as he related the Christian Free Company’s passage over the Alps; his impatient, “Go on,” as he detailed the correct method of traversing a bog; the sharper nods that prodded him through the navigational problems encountered in rafting down the Oder, and then, again, boredom, as he described its course northward until it debouched into the very sea whose soft suckings and slaps, audible outside, hushed him eventually and on each of these occasions to silence. Tedium again, and bafflement: unintended the one, the other unwanted, both of them his own.

  Jörg read:

  On Saint Leonard’s Day, or the day after that, the monks of Usedom espied from their house a strange craft at work in the sea before them. Two adventurers were rescued from their folly, which was to disturb and loot a city sunk here many years before, by name Vineta, and brought ashore to rest here through the winter for the sake of charity. …

  That last was not quite true, Jörg thought to himself as he read over the manuscripts of his Historia. He had taken up his account again a week or more after fishing this catch from the sea. That evening, the one called Salvestro had grown frank, even effusive, and had been ushered out, not expelled as twice before. He had cut a quill and scratched the lines before him now in a strange excitement whose origin he could not then fathom. Leonard watched over captives of war according to a passage copied from the Vita and bound into one of the battered volumes locked in the case behind him
.

  They go by the names Salvestro, which I know to be a lie, and Bernardo. This “Salvestro” is of middling height, his features flattish but not unpleasing, white in color but with black hair. I believe him sly and full of deceits, though they are small for the most part. His companion is swarthy and broad in the chest and legs, stands two full heads taller than any of my brothers, Volker and Henning excepted, and is weak in his wits, like a child.

  My brothers. That may have been true then. How true was it now? Gerhardt’s face swept past his mind’s eye attended by viperous acolytes. He himself moved less freely about the monastery’s precincts than before. Conversations buzzed and stuttered to a halt at his approach, started up again behind him. Backs were turned on him. Hands turned against him? He had long given up his lessons in the chapter-house. Athos-shadowed Lemnos, vineless Carmania with its fish-skinned natives, Ægypt, where the year was calculated by, what was it, the passage had moved him, by “driving beasts into a holy grove where, when the motion of heaven is come to its determinate point, they express their understandings by such signs and talents as they are able. Some howl, some low, some roar, some bray, diverse run together into the mire and wallow. …”