The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  There were clues, if he could scratch them up: it being Medici who had ridden ahead to parley with Tedaldi and Prato’s “defenders,” who had returned with a tale of being driven off a mile or two short of the city. “No cause for concern, though,” he said lightly. “They will talk—when the time comes.” The army was three days’ march away then. Cardona nodded complaisantly. There was a studied quickness to their exchanges.

  Rehearsed, thinks Diego in the night-silenced embassy. The silky sergeant has disappeared, just as he had in fact disappeared somewhere along the march. He has no memory of him until Prato, where he is spied again here and there amongst the very worst of the militias, sauntering about, at once purposeless and purposive, at large. … They called him Rufo. Sergeant Rufo; was that his name? He never knew what the man did, nor Medici—precisely. Nor Cardona. Prato surrendered and yet was sacked. And Tedaldi died. And his family was killed.

  Not by me, thinks Diego. And that was not how it appeared at the time. His disgrace had been carefully prepared. With the army bivouacked in the lush fields about the town, the town itself resting in the soft earth, on a river that, though it swamped land a little upstream of the city walls, never flooded, in the soft warmth of late August. They carded wool—the Pratesi—the town was built on it. Softness, warmth. … He is reaching for something, in the unconnectedness of the two, army and town, the horrendous implausibility of what was to happen the next day. He must have been already marked and as ignorant of his fate as the Pratesi were of their own.

  And now in the dark and its gripless substance, in his dark keep, he reaches again for his sword. Tonight has changed everything. Cardona, Medici, his “Sergeant Rufo …” Now, though? “Now the fourth player.” Drag him up. … The sword wavers over a white neck, the waxy flesh. Pull him out from under Colonna’s trained apes and stand him on his feet, this Salvestro. He had thought him lost, escaped. Here he was. Peace has always made fools of men like us. … But not always. Come now, lift him up and look him in the eye, the one not swollen shut. Regard, a pawn even more miserable than himself. Watch him run away through the streets of Prato with his tame giant in tow. There are horsemen chasing him; himself among them—how foolish he was. Letting him hide in a bog and letting him escape. He knows the rest, this golden pawn—the how of it, if not the why. Was it Salvestro who actually held the knife? Who actually did the cutting? It does not matter. An enormous calm wraps itself about him.

  The vagabond is still standing there, waiting apprehensively. I place great faith in you, he tells the wretch. You seem a resourceful fellow, the sort to survive. You will find me again when I need you. Diego is a magnanimous warlord, his sword cradled in his arms. You may go now. … You will find your way back, he calls after the man, who has turned tail and is fleeing into the distance; there’s no escaping me. … Footsteps downstairs; His Excellency’s return. How much longer now will he be His Ladyship’s mastiff? The secretary is ambitious. He will help. Almost asleep now. Almost at rest. … Come back! Does he shout this? Perhaps, for the footsteps stop, above him now, Vich’s apartment. Silence: the sound that listening makes. A kind of chuckling—his own. But look at the wretch come back! Bounding and sprinting and racing to the rescue, just look at him … scrawny, tousled, unwashed, unfed. Look at him run, with his swollen eye and filth-stained rags. Look at his surprise, being pulled to his feet, noticing Diego for the first time.

  Welcome to Ro-ma, Salvestro. …

  My savior, thinks Diego, laughing to himself. My savior, the throat-cutter. He will have the truth cried in the streets, present his case, appeal to the King. He will restore himself.

  Darkness again, although different in kind—more absolute—the eyeless blackness of a mine-shaft or a ship under fifty fathoms of pitch; this rearmost chamber is an inky pit stirred only now, by whispering.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It was.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Asking after the Pilgrim’s Staff earlier that afternoon, Father Jörg, Salvestro, Bernardo, HansJürgen, and rest of the monks were directed from the piazza to turn left into the “dismal rat-hole at the side of the Albergo del Sol,” left again down “the open sewer of the Via dell’Elefante,” to “follow the most depressing of the three alleys running east until you feel like killing yourself” and eventually find themselves in front of “something that looks like Sodom after Lot left—you’ll know it by the gloom.” This soon revealed itself as flattery.

  Apart from a few of the most inaccessible attic rooms, the hostel is window-less. By day the main door is left open—this helps—but the tenement opposite stands a full story taller, the doorway itself is prefaced by a porch, and the building faces north. Drizzles, downpours, and damps find a welcoming home in the cracked roof-slates and disintegrating pointing: the crumbling fabric of the shambles squatting in the Via dei Sinibaldi is permeable to most kinds of weather. … But illumination? Its passageways and drafty stone staircases are black with candle-smoke, its ceilings gluey with tarry fumes from oil-lamps carried by the denizens who stumble from room to room, dragging immense shadows behind them, skewed brockenspecters that stalk their owners through the corridors and enfilades, sliding along the soot-streaked walls like murderers. The Borgo is the dankest quarter in the city, the Via dei Sinibaldi the dingiest street in the quarter, the Pilgrim’s Staff the most dismal building in the street, and the rearmost chamber the darkest in the whole building. Well-known poets have spent nights here in search of the authentically “Stygian.” Sunlight staggers in only to die.

  “Had the windows walled up,” the proprietor explained. He pointed to some patches of brickwork. “Stop the bastards who won’t pay crawling out and not paying. I’m Lappi. There’s a big place at the back, get you all in no trouble. Good lock on it, too. Got straw?” The dormitory room would cost them twenty-three guilii a week, in advance. “Bit gloomy back there, but then you’re Germans. You’ll be used to gloom.” Lappi was squat, wiry-haired, long-armed. His face resembled a cowhide stuffed with violence into a sack. It uncrumpled, briefly, when Father Jörg threw open the chest, handed the man a heavy silver goblet, and asked how many weeks would it buy? “Where’d you get that lot!” he blurted out at the sight of the silver and gold plate.

  “So that’s what was in it,” said Bernardo, who had carried the chest for the greater part of the journey.

  Holding aloft a single candle, Lappi escorted them into the bowels of the building. A cavernous chamber yawned before them. Volker, Henning, and some of the others were sent out for the cheapest palliasses to be had; these were set down on the floor, and then Signor Lappi was sent for again.

  “I wish to know where we might give thanks,” asked Father Jörg of the hosteler.

  Lappi’s earlier astonishment had already given way to suspicion. “Oh, you do, do you?” he retorted swiftly, eyeing his latest guests. Then he remembered the chest. “Well, that’s reasonable. Thanks is a fine thing, very fine. Given a few myself over the years, off and on. Can’t say as I have a specific place for it, though. …” He limped on through a few more improvisations. “Why don’t you give thanks here? Bit dark at the moment, but there’s a few candles in the store. I could spare a couple, on the cheap. Got candles, have you?”

  “We wish to celebrate Mass,” said Father Jörg, at which light dawned in Lappi’s face and something else too, perhaps, in Salvestro’s view. He was eyeing Lappi, as he had eyed the innkeepers throughout their journey, from Stettin down the valleys of the Oder and Neisse to Gölitz, to Dresden, through Chemnitz and Zwickau to Plauen, on to Nuremberg, and Regensburg, the Alps rising above them, then under them, then behind them, the country changing almost from day to day, the little and greater towns that led them south, Piacenza, Carrara, Viterbo … Rome, eventually. Innkeepers in all of them.

  “Mass!” exclaimed Lappi. “Well, you’re in luck! It’s Philip and James tonight. Used to go to it myself. …” He began to give directions. “The first thing is to put this gloomy shambles
behind you and get yourselves across the river. …”

  Salvestro watched Lappi point this way and that. Innkeepers, he had decided, fell into either of two categories. There were the brutish, near silent ones, prone to rare but spectacular rages, public displays of wife-beating, and insolence. They were usually huge and red-faced. Then there were the helpful ones, overflowing with suggestions, tips for the route, attentive at the table, happy to turn their own staff out of their beds to make room for late-coming weary travelers. These were the ones who swindled their guests, pilfered their possessions, and organized surprise ambushes an hour or two farther up the road. To Salvestro’s way of thinking, Lappi was probably one of these.

  “… so, you’re across the river. Go north past the Sanguigni Tower. It’s fairly tall and square, but don’t confuse it with any of the other fairly tall square towers, Sanguigni’s the one you want. Keep Citorio on your left then swing east past the Mitre; there’s no sign, but you’ll know it from the smell of cabbage—never did understand that—bear right, across the Via Lata by Saint Mary’s, right again, and you’re in Piazza Colonna. Santissimi Apostoli is smack in front of you. Get there early, mind you. Usually a bit of a crush.”

  “Thank you,” said Father Jörg.

  “That’s a real Mass, that is,” Lappi reminisced fondly. “Not many like that nowadays. Anything else before you go?” Father Jörg shook his head. “Well, the Church is a whore, as they say,” said their host. “Enjoy her.”

  “It was.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Salvestro and Bernardo are whispering. It is a whisper-inducing darkness.

  The monks who had stridden confidently out of the hostel earlier that evening reentered it demoralized, bewildered, jarred. Wulf had cried. Father Jörg had rebuked him, “We set out to give thanks. We gave thanks. Now be silent.” He should have said more, rallied them somehow, Salvestro thought. In the melee of the church, Jörg had retreated into himself, gazing sightlessly forward in prayer. He was untouched and untouchable. Salvestro had looked to him for some sign, a command, but there was nothing. It was Gerhardt who had given the lead, striking out fearlessly, forcing the brawling celebrants to their knees. Now he wore an air of silent contempt, and Salvestro himself was preoccupied with quite different concerns, his bruises throbbing. They were all locked in their own thoughts, and, preparing for bed in self-reproachful silence, the monks avoided one another’s eyes as though they had failed some collective trial and were consequently set apart from one another, each to ponder his failing alone. The silence was heavy with private bafflements and shock. They were unprepared for Rome.

  When they finally walked out of the church it was Gerhardt who led the way, as though Jörg had exhausted himself and lost his argument with the Cardinal, instead of winning as he had. Bernardo lingered near the back and was the last to join the huddle that regrouped outside, muttering, “Look what I got,” in a pleased-furtive manner and drawing back the flap of his coat to reveal a large cabbage. “Got itself stuck on a candlestick. …” Salvestro was looking at the cabbage, wondering why it was so wet, when a sharp burst of laughter sounded, nervous and high-pitched. Jörg had wandered a few yards away from them and tripped on the rough ground. Someone had laughed, that was all.

  With the candles doused, the sound of wakeful breathing filled the dormitory. Now that he was lying down, Salvestro’s ribs gave him no peace. One side of his face felt tight and huge with swelling. But the blows and kicks were as nothing to their aftermath. Him, he thought over and over, but without advancing beyond the quick blow of the recognition itself, which felled him each time he approached. Gradually, the breathing around him changed character. Inhalations grew deeper, exhalations longer, the first snores sounded. Some rustling on the other side of Bernardo ended with a stifled half-yelp; someone sleep-talking nonsensically on the far side of the room ceased finally or was silenced by his neighbor. Private nervous exhaustions slackened and loosened, sinews relaxing and unknotting, cordage unwinding and racing off the spindle, the bucket plunging down the well-shaft into oblivion. Salvestro waited in wakeful silence for the last of them to sink into sleep before reaching over painfully to shake Bernardo.

  “It was him,” he whispers.

  The giant stirs, comes more fully awake. “Who?”

  “The Colonel. At the church.” His mouth is swollen. It hurts to whisper.

  There is a short silence while Bernardo thinks about this. “It was not,” he says.

  “It was.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It was.”

  ” It wasn’t.”

  Someone stirs then, someone who might be the Prior, and both of them fall silent. Salvestro waits, counting interminable minutes before reaching over again, more painful still this time—the flesh around his ribs seems to be stiffening—to shake Bernardo. But Bernardo has fallen asleep and a little later begins to snore, and Salvestro realizes from past experience of Bernardo’s snoring that he will not be wakened easily, at least not without violence. He is far from sleep, alone but for the head that rears up like a grizzled monster out of the depths. Hobbling back to the Borgo, he’d kept glancing over his shoulder to see if they had been followed. When his companion had asked him whom he sought, he’d said nothing. Bernardo had not recognized him.

  He was unsurprised—Bernardo was ignorant. He was ignorant himself, though his ignorance was different in kind. Colonel Diego was a familiar sight to any who had survived the march from Bologna to Prato that summer. Unlike most of the commanders, he traveled light. His tent, bedding, and armor went with the baggage, the rest with himself. He rode back and forth on a powerful roan, dressed plainly, always helmeted, his saddlebags bulging with kit; a point of reference in the bland contours of the Mugello, his comings and goings monitored almost instinctively. Even the Sicilians, if asked where one of their compatriots was that day, might answer without looking up that he was farther up the column, “about a stone’s throw past the Colonel” or “pretty much where the Colonel crossed the column this morning, just behind the cannon.” He hung on the valley’s lower slopes, this side, that side. He might disappear for most of the day, and the men would begin to ask casually if anyone had seen the Colonel, or angrily, “Where the hell has that damn Colonel got to,” as though he were late to a wedding. He was outside the stench and viciousness of the camp. In the days before they reached Barberino, the very worst, when Salvestro, Bernardo, and Groot slept sitting up, back to back, to ward off the throat-slitters, when even the Sicilians briefly stopped knifing each other in some show of self-preservative solidarity, the Colonel appeared unchanged and unchangeable, like an image struck for a medal.

  But his face, the human business of eyes, nose, mouth, hair, the flesh on the frame, that was lesser and unnoted. A recognizable man hid behind “The Colonel,” but for all their familiarity with the horseman who moved with such assurance about them, the man went unremarked. He was irrelevant to the soldiers who stumbled through the Mugello. He moved in their middle distance. The armature of his trappings fended them off, and without it the soldiers would not have known him. I saw him stripped of that, thinks Salvestro, once.

  But the clamor surrounding that moment seemed a far-off noise, someone else’s exhilarations and terrors. Their flight that night and the Colonel’s shocking naked face as he’d reached for them appears to him in the breathing darkness as a dream of escaping-without-escaping, the pursuer’s swipe missing by a fraction again and again. If not the Colonel, it was the islanders; if not them, then the villagers who had chased the Christian Free Company across darkened countrysides, the dogs that bared their teeth at the sight of him. … The forest was a kind of oblivion, a willed forgetting of them all. Always there is a man—himself—running at the limit of his strength. At his back are his pursuers, whose hardened fingers scrape at his spine, driving him forward, drawing them after him. He runs toward nothing. Here is the Colonel again, naturally, Welcome to Rome. … There are cold waters where he is
safe—tideless waters or nearly so—but they are far, far away. He will not reach them before the fingers close about his neck.

  Then there is the moment that stands adjacent to that of his capture, its only alternative, the possible moment when he stops. Imagine the doe turning on the dogs and charging forward, reckless and fateful. Or himself rising back out of the water or hurling himself on the mob. Imagine their surprise! Imagine the jolting stop, the body turning, the heart’s aghast pumping. Turn back, when turning back, in this instance, on this night of the Colonel’s reappearance, means the starving scramble that carried them into Prato. Turn on them.

  But the moment is futureless. Bernardo’s snores continue, broken by odd gulps and constricted swallowings. There had been a man on the march—a har-quebusier called Jaggetto—who carried a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Every night he would disappear, reappearing the next morning with his bag replenished, its new contents bulging through the thin material. When the weather turned warm, the bag stank. No one spoke to him or offered him violence. He was shunned, outside them. That a man should, that men in general, that they themselves might, if… It is the moment when the drawstring is loosened, the mouth opened, when something unfaceable is faced. A possible moment, but possible only because remaining undone, conceded as unthinkable. Unfutured. The three of them, himself, Bernardo, and Groot, stood with their pikes at the ready, the whole company drawn up, the whole army on the plain before the walls of the town, waiting there in the sticky heat. For most of the morning, cannon popped and puffed from a position way over to their left, and sometimes a ball would strike a gate-tower. They cheered then, but the cannonade was desultory and formal. They had been told nothing.

  The sergeants stood in a little group in front of their men. Salvestro thought of the hours before Ravenna; but there was little enough of Ravenna in what lay ahead. The walls before them were deserted, and although a breach gradually opened under the cannon’s peppering, no one appeared behind it. There was a company of men set forward of the others who called themselves “the Tifatani” after a desperate skirmish some years before in the pass north of Caserta. They had grown restive in the heat and boredom of the wait, nervous too, perhaps: it was waiting for relief that had decimated them in the col that split Mount Tifata, their cowering and waiting for the crossbows above to find them, the bite and the shudder as their flesh puckered about the shank. Then the pain, which came seconds later, and the screams of those who could not bear the pain. The survivors wore long scars on their right-hand cheeks in remembrance. And the hunger was there amongst them all, eating them from the inside and accepted now only on the promise of its satisfaction. Waiting then, like a breath gulped and held down, swelling until the lungs would burst. …