“Hey!”
“It’s Salvestro!”
“Leave him alone, Dommi!”
Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf were hopping about, sparrowlike in their cut-down habits, dancing over Salvestro while Dommi cursed them foully but with little conviction. Then they discovered Bernardo. Instantly they formed a circle, raised their arms, and began to chant slowly, “Ber-nar-do-oo! Rosserus! Ber-nar-do-oo! Rosserus!” Bernardo snored on.
Dommi interrupted the kicking to consider this. “You can stay one night,” he said, feet planted to either side of Salvestro’s head. “See that bit of wall?” Salvestro nodded gingerly. “You sleep there.” Dommi stepped backward, reached for something behind him, then swung it over his head. Salvestro cowered and tried to raise an arm. The object landed with a loud bang an inch short of his nose. Dommi patted it. “See this crate? I’m going to sit on it, right here, and I’m going to watch you all night, and if you annoy me, I’m going to kick you again. I’m going to kick you till your guts come out your arse and then I’m going to strangle you with them. That sound fair to you?”
Salvestro nodded.
“Good,” said Dommi. “Glad you see it that way.”
“What about his clothes?” a voice protested. “I could use that—”
“Shut up,” said Dommi.
Salvestro crawled slowly over to the wall. Small, sharp-beaked birds were hatching out his head. His groin was a cleft of floating pain that extended from his stomach to his knees. He rolled over and collapsed. One by one, the beggars too keeled over or rolled about on the earth until they found a piece of ground that suited them. A man with one arm snuggled up to an older woman, the two grunted and tussled for a few minutes, then fell silent. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf eventually gave up their chanting. Dommi sat on his crate, watching him.
It was very late, but, watched as he was by a man for whom annoyance was sufficient cause for a brisk disemboweling, Salvestro could not sleep. What constituted “annoyance”? Snoring? He closed his eyes and listened to the rise and fall of Bernardo’s snores, but his mind raced ahead to the morrow, where a ship awaited them both, passage away from this place where he had no place, this Ro-ma.
“Nobody wants us,” said Dommi after an hour or more of silence. He put the accent on the first word, as though it had taken many effortful trials to achieve so complete a state of unwantedness. Salvestro, as awake as ever, opened one eye warily. “That’s who we are,” Dommi continued, growing more vehement. “We’re the people nobody wants.”
Some response seemed to be required. Neither sympathy nor congratulation sounded fitting. … Would silence provoke the promised kicking? Salvestro remembered the ruffians who made their home in the ruins and began to tell Dommi of the encounter.
“We know about them,” the man cut him off. There was silence again. Salvestro tried a different tack. Perhaps he should respond in kind?
“We’re explorers …,” he began.
“We know about you, too,” Dommi said. “We know all about you two. Hear things, we do. Remember them. You’re a pair of clowns hired for Fat Bastard up there.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. “Pair of bloody clowns.”
Both men looked across the river at the dark stump of the Pope’s fortress, which loomed over the river. By night it appeared more massive than ever, as though it did not contain rooms, halls, passages, and cellars but was solid stone throughout. Then something caught Salvestro’s eye, a movement on the opposite bank. The ground from the embankment to the river’s edge seemed to be moving, rippling and raising ridges in the mud as though it were being plowed, but from beneath.
“Rats,” said Dommi. “They didn’t used to come down here. Now there’s more of ’em every night.” The rats covered the ground in a silent blanket of furry bodies, slithering and scrambling over one another. There might have been thousands, or tens of thousands. “Look at the size of them,” commented Dommi, not watching them now, but watching Salvestro. “They’re Borgo rats.” He spat. “Fat Bastard’s rats.” The river washed and sploshed against the piers of the bridge. They heard sheep-bells somewhere, far away. But no squealing. No squeaking. Clambering and sprawling over one another’s bodies, the rats did not make a sound.
He must have slept. He awoke to the faintest lightening in the blackness of the sky. A solitary boat carrying a solitary passenger was passing under the far arch of the bridge. A mist had settled on the water, as thick and white as smoke. Dommi was still there, awake on his crate. He rubbed his eyes, thought about getting up, decided against it, and dozed. When he came to again, Dommi was gone and the first boats had appeared on the opposite bank. The rats had disappeared.
A tall figure wearing an elaborate hat and ornamental sword climbed carefully down the steps, where he paused to inspect the terrain. He tested the ground with the toe of his shoe, then stepped forward cautiously. The watermen were unloading planks and laying them over the worst of the mud patches to form a gangway from the steps to the water’s edge. The man waited patiently for them to finish. Salvestro sat up stiffly and looked around for Bernardo. He was sleeping soundly next to a heap of tangled limbs belonging to Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf. He woke the big man gently.
“I was having a dream,” Bernardo protested blearily.
“Come on,” said Salvestro, gesturing across the river. “Don Antonio’s already here.”
There was a bridge, the river, three snoozing boys, and an empty crate. The dream was already fading. There had been no dogs in it, nor rocks. A breathing heap of rags groaned and rolled over some feet away. Bernardo looked about him in perplexity.
“Where am I?” he asked.
The foreman’s mallet could still be heard, its dry reports signaling the soundness of his construction as he moved methodically along the benches, bending and tapping, gradually ascending the stepped tiers of the stand for the second time that morning.
He had begun at daybreak, and when he had reached the little platform on the top he had stopped and looked first west out to sea, then south down the quay, where the last of the sardine smacks were putting out to sea a little beyond the jetty to which the Santa Lucia was moored. Stanchions rose at the stand’s four corners to support a trellis of joists and beams. A canvas awning would protect His Holiness from the the sun, to be draped over the frame later that morning. Lastly the foreman had turned north, toward the inn, where from the topmost room Diego gazed back at the man whose labors had awakened him.
The man had stood there for several minutes. He descended carefully, taking the benches as oversize steps, as though the stand were a staircase extracted from the vanished house of a race of titans and leading now to a phantom piano nobile, to nothing. … Wrong, Diego corrected himself. His Holiness would have a fine view from the platform up there, attended by a small and favored coterie. The steps led to the Medici Pope. The rest would sit below.
Then the foreman had walked around to the back of his construction, where the undersides of the tiers were so many overhangs, a sound-box from which his mallet had boomed and echoed. She had stirred then. He had reached for her in the night, and she had refused him. He was unsurprised, though there had been no warning, no particular coolness between them. It was a realignment in their relations, or in their contract. She slept naked, like a whore. He could have forced her if he had wished.
Men and women began to gather on the quay, local people. He recognized the chandler and the woman from the sail-loft. Word had got around in the past week that the Pope was coming to bless a ship—the Santa Lucia—and the ship would be sailing to the ends of the earth. A fisherman carrying creels slung on a rope over his shoulder sat down on the lowest bench of the stand and was shouted at by the foreman. He got up wearily and continued down the quay, past the jetty to his right, past the sail-loft to his left, eventually lost amongst the little sheds and scattered outbuildings that spilled out of the main town and were halted only by the sea. The sea was calm. Later a middling to light nor’east
erly would get up, as it had on the last two days, and carry the vessel out past the breakwater into the open waters beyond.
More people were arriving, clustering together in little knots, gossiping and speculating. Sight of a Pope was better than a day of penance in warding off damnation. A mere touch of his hem guarded against quartan fever. His blessing cured certain kinds of blindness and—it was rumored—genital warts and perhaps the French pox, too. Men and women and their children had closed their shops and houses to come and be anointed by the Servant of the Servants of God. He would sit up there, amongst them in a sense, on the platform there. Above them, in a sense. Cut him down, Diego thought vaguely. He turned away.
From the east window he could see the river curling through the flat plain of the Romagna, marshy and desolate on the north bank, dotted with fishermen’s cottages to the south. Two hundred paces upriver from the inn was a dilapidated warehouse with barn doors on its landward side. One stood open, and some children were wandering about outside it. Next to the warehouse, a landing stage extended tentatively from the riverbank, supported by salt-encrusted piles to which the watermen tied their boats. When the current caught them, the whole structure swayed gently. River weed collected underneath, rotted, and eventually floated into the estuary. They had arrived the night before last, a soldier on leave and his widowed sister, the latter so pious that she wore a veil. That, at least, had been the explanation he had offered the innkeeper. Concealed behind her mask of lace, Eusebia had snorted derisively.
“Her grief,” Diego offered weakly. The skeptical innkeeper had nodded without replying.
A soldier and his commanding officer’s wife had been the consensus amongst the regulars at the Last Gasp after they had retired. The following morning, the “soldier” had spent freely but shrewdly in the workshops and storehouses of the quayside tradesmen, directing his purchases to the Santa Lucia. So he was a Spaniard, like the other Spaniard, who had spent less freely, and less shrewdly, and was vaguely but broadly disliked. On any other week he would have excited more comment, but the Pope was coming, His Holiness himself, whose breath smelled of violets, whose urine was thick as honey, whose piercing gaze could cure goiter, calm storms, kill cats at a distance of fifteen paces, sometimes more. … He called himself Captain Diego and carried a short, businesslike sword. No one inquired further.
The previous evening, the boatman had run aground twice in the approach to the landing stage, each time pushing off with an oar. It was a Roman wherry, keeled and drawing a good foot of water to negotiate the currents and eddies of faster and deeper waters than these. The local boats were closer to punts, flat-bottomed to skim above the sandbars of the estuary. There had been three moored there the previous night. There were still three this morning. Someone had strung bunting around the rails. Diego watched the river, the morning sun full in his face so that he squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand. Still early, he told himself. Somewhere within the inn, boards creaked under stumbling footsteps, sleep-thickened voices shouted at each other, then doors and shutters banged open as the Last Gasp took its first gulps of the morning air. The river’s meanders bristled with light, a silk rope dropped carelessly from heaven. Diego blinked and rubbed his eyes, then looked again. Minutes ago it had been a dot of black floating in the glitter and glare of the water. Now it was a boat, and now a high-sided boat, with a tall stem-post and a man standing there using an oar for a rudder. She joined him at the window then, watching with him as it neared the landing stage, cutting smoothly through the water, its three passengers motionless and looking away from one another, not speaking.
“Which is the one you fear?”
Her voice broke his reverie. “Not fear,” he corrected her. “I am wary of him. He is not amongst them.” The landing stage was too open, too exposed, and his instincts would warn him off. The Pope’s smiling sergeant would not arrive by boat. “He might be here already,” Diego said. “He will not show himself yet.”
Rufo’s business was with the three men now stepping out of the boat, stretching their legs, yawning, and looking about. The giant scratched his stomach. Stay close to them, he told himself. Rufo would circle, wait, choose his moment. The three men climbed the steps from the landing stage and walked toward the inn. Wary of showing himself at the window, he stepped back and lost sight of them as they drew near. They would bolt if they saw him, Seròn too, perhaps. But Seròn he could not avoid. He had business to conduct with the secretary. A singular decision to inform him of.
Diego walked quickly across the room to the south-facing window, picking them up again as they filtered through the crowd in front of the stand, the big man easy to track, his companion harder. Seròn was leading the way, talking to them over his shoulder as they made their way farther down the quay and paused there before turning onto the jetty. A man watched their approach from the deck of the Santa Lucia, then ushered them aboard. The mate, he thought, though the distance was too great to make out his features. He smiled to himself, thinking of the conversation that must now be passing between them. The secretary’s surprise, his anxieties and ensuing calculations. They will do you no good, Don Antonio, he counseled. No good at all.
“Which is the traitor?” she asked. She stood behind him, so close they might be touching. He shook his head impatiently, absorbed in his own calculations. The crowd would be safe, big now and in constant movement. He could move there unseen, wait for the secretary, snatch him as he passed. He smiled again then: more anxieties and calculations, a morning full of surprises for Don Antonio Seròn.
The downstairs room was already crowded, the tables and booths all taken and men standing with mugs in their hands, talking loudly to each other. The woman from the sail-loft was there; no business would be done today. She nodded to him as he moved quickly through the crush. The sunlight outside was dazzling. Men and women were dawdling about outside, and he forced himself to dawdle with them, gradually traversing the open ground that separated him from the cover of the crowd.
“Brave, very brave. …” “Foolhardy, I’d say.” “The one’s t’other, but in my book it’s brave.” “Book? What book? They’re fools. That ship’s not fit for firewood. …”
Their voices drifted in and out of his ears, an irrelevant soothing noise. He was coiled tight with purpose, as if on the eve of battle. He jumped when a hand touched his shoulder. An old woman was selling apples, her whining voice pursuing him as he moved away, “Sir? Oh, sir? Would you …”
He calmed himself, ambling slowly among the chattering groups, looking down the quay to the ship every few seconds. Two dwarfs passed him, strolling arm in arm and blithely ignoring the stares that attended their progress. The time seemed to pass very slowly, but this too was familiar. He kept near the edge of the crowd so that their bodies might not block his view. He must have glanced at the Santa Lucia fifty times before they reemerged, there on the deck, then the jetty, then walking toward him, toward the crowd, all three of them together. He sank deeper into the mass of bodies, watching them approach. They stopped. A discussion of some sort? Seròn was pointing down the quay to the sail-loft. He saw Salvestro nod and then point the other way, the big man following obediently. To the inn? Surely they would part now; yes, Seròn was retracing his footsteps, away again. Diego slipped through the crowd to intercept the secretary, moving swiftly and surely, intent only on his quarry …
He saw a man impale himself once. On a pike. It was a skirmish outside Piacenza, an accidental death in an accidental fight. The man had been charging full tilt and had simply run onto it. His assassin had done nothing, a halberdier frozen with fear, only stood there with arms presented. One moment, the dash forward. The next, stopped dead. Diego wondered what had passed through the dead man’s mind as he’d looked down at his chest, the point in as far as the crosspiece. His legs had continued running for a second. What had he been thinking in that moment, in that absolute disjunction? Now he knew. He stared through the crowd, and the shock of recognition knocked him
backward, already turning and ducking, reaching within his doublet for the short knife there, his sword useless in a crowd, stupid thoughts in a stupid head. … Rufo was standing directly in his path.
He caught himself before breaking into a run. He looked down. The knife was in his hand. Rufo behind him. Walk calmly, he told himself. Put the knife away and do nothing. His mind was fogged. He had lost concentration. Move slowly away—this was better—drift, merge with the others.
He found himself on the far side of the crowd, the side nearest the inn. Salvestro and his companion were nowhere in sight. Nor was Seròn, who had walked away down the quay where he could not follow, not yet. Rufo had not seen him, perhaps a glimpse of his back amongst a hundred other backs. He had been lucky. Now he must think quickly. Stay in the crowd or risk the hundred yards between the stand and the inn. Rufo in the crowd. The two men at the inn. He felt shaken and strangely relieved. The thought that the Pope’s sergeant might not be waiting for him here had tempted him, taunted him. It was not fear, but it was close to that. He stepped out of the crowd’s cover. Seròn would have to return to the inn to collect his men; he would have to content himself with that. The back of his neck prickled. His limbs felt awkward as they mimed the stroll to the doorway of the Last Gasp, a tiny rectangle that grew larger with agonizing slowness.
The interior was more crowded even than before. He settled in a corner, barricaded behind a group of five men too busy with their beer to notice him. He scanned the room for Salvestro and his companion, who should at least be easy to spot. It does not matter, he told himself. Seròn in the crowd or Seròn as he approached the inn to collect his charges, the two men who must be here somewhere. He scanned the room again. Then a third time, and then a fourth. … He began to curse under his breath. A tide of unease rose within him, growing turbulent, on its way to becoming panic. The two men were not there.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 52