The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  Estêvão nodded that he understood. “She’s beginning to list. Not much time now.”

  The cargo piled on deck had all been shifted forward, and the forecastle seemed to have gained a story, a solid mass of crates, chests, and casks lashed together and buttressed with planks where the construction threatened to tip over the side. Teixeira saw that the deck was indeed slanted now, the starboard side of the vessel noticeably higher than the port. Rain washed over the decks in waves, overflowing the gutters and slopping against the gunwales. The sky was simply black, a solid darkness meant to crush them into the sea.

  He saw Gonçalo wave him forward.

  “Have they finished below?” he shouted.

  “Only the beast is left,” Teixeira shouted back. The wind battered them, throwing them off-balance. A series of dull bangs sounded from below, and he looked about in sudden fear.

  “Closing the gunports!” Gonçalo’s explanation. He nodded gratefully, looked up at the masts, which bent before the wind, the topmost spars shuddering and the loose lines thrashing. A second later he fell forward and slid across the deck.

  The vessel had tipped.

  For a moment the pilot seemed to freeze, then he was racing forward, gathering the hands as he went.

  “Everyone for’ ard!”

  Teixeira picked himself up and followed. The Ajuda seemed to bend amidships as the bows dipped, her beams creaking and straining in protest until it seemed that she might break in two, but then, with agonizing slowness, as though the sea had congealed about her timbers and she was being pried loose with infinite care, the stern began to rise. She hung there for a moment, then slid forward. …

  And then stopped.

  Teixeira looked to Gonçalo, whose face in this moment was stripped of everything but despair. Then, from below, a noise forced its way through the din of the storm, and the men huddled together in the lee of the forecastle glanced about, nervous and distracted. Heavy thuds started up but were instantly drowned out by shrill shouts and cries, many voices all raised together, and then one voice raised itself above them all, and that voice was a scream, long and louder than seemed possible. It stopped abruptly, stifled or cut off, and any other noise that followed was buried in the cacophony of the storm.

  Then the ship moved again, her whole bulk and weight sliding forward into the water, a slow unstoppable thrust. Teixeira looked up at Gonçalo, balanced precariously on top of the piled cargo. It seemed to him that the Ajuda was simply burying her prow in the waves, that she would dive forward and down and never rise. The vessel tilted and tilted, and he thought of the weight in her bows dragging them forward and down. He crossed himself and closed his eyes, waiting for the first cold slap of water.

  But, though the bowsprit dipped as low as the sea’s surface and, as Estêvão later told him, the vessel’s rudder was a foot clear of the water astern, the ship slid slowly forward off the bar, the prow dipping, then rising; the stern rising, then settling finally in deep water. The vessel listed to port and starboard, rocking until she found her new equilibrium. Teixeira opened his eyes.

  They were clear. So released, the wind abaft thrust the Ajuda forward, westward, out into the open waters of the ocean.

  Two bodies were sewn into sacks and the sacks thrown into the sea. Dom Francisco stumbled through the prayer for the dead, and then the men gathered about the firebox, where they lit incense and chanted in their own tongue, a meandering drone that the hands seemed to join haphazardly, now one, now many, returning to it as their duties permitted while Oçem tended the fire and the little resinous blocks cast into it, arranging them so that each one was burned to a snow-white cinder.

  “The Ganda has sand under his hide; do you know that story, Dom Jaime?”

  He shook his head.

  “Another time. The slightest thing will anger him, and then”—Oçem mimed the lighting of a fuse—“boom! Like Dom Francisco’s wonderful cannons. Very short-tempered, this Ganda of ours. And these foolish natives, they lose their heads at the first sign of trouble, and then they lose their land too and become sailors, but that is another story again. Also very foolish.”

  The beast had got loose and crushed a man. There had been a frantic scramble, panic in the dark down there, and by Dom Francisco’s account only the animal had remained calm, trapping his man against the barrel of the gun, then leaning forward. “With great deliberation,” had been the fidalgo’s phrase. The screams, thought Teixeira. The ship had moved off the bar, and they had recaptured the Ganda by boxing him in amongst the cargo. It had taken an hour. Not foolish, Teixeira thought now, but brave, or nerveless, at least. He did not say this to Oçem, who continued to manipulate the little blocks of resin with a pair of slender tongs, moving and replacing them with care so that they burned evenly.

  The second man had fallen during the bombardment. Estêvão examined him on deck surrounded by a crowd of hands, his friends, perhaps, though they seemed more curious than sad. At first the boatswain could find no mark on the man, no spot of blood, not so much as a bruise. Dom Francisco ordered that he repeat the exam. Lifting the man’s head to begin it, Estêvão let out a little gasp and let it fall. He pressed his thumb to the head again. It was soft. The skin was unbroken, but the skull at the back had turned soft as wet clay. Estêvão looked up, baffled.

  “It was the ball that struck the ship,” said Teixeira. He pointed to the splintering where the cannonball had hit the waist. “If it glanced off his head like this—” He mimicked the passage of the missile, and the hands understood him then, nodding their agreement.

  Dom Francisco would not address him, saying only, “Then he died in my defense. I will make provision for his family. As a matter of honor.” He assumed a grave expression and the men all nodded again, very pleased by this, but then looking down at the body as though it worried them in some way.

  “They like this Dom Francisco,” Oçem went on then. “He is a real fidalgo. They know what that is. To give money to Vijar’s family after he has been so stupid will bring him great goodwill amongst the men. To be hit on the head by a flying stone! How ridiculous.”

  “I will remind Dom Francisco of his promise, when the time is right,” said Teixeira.

  “Do not trouble yourself, my friend. Vijar’s stupidity is such that, even dead, the foolish man cannot take advantage of his opportunities. He does not have a family.”

  “But the men were pleased. …” He was bewildered.

  “Very generous of Dom Francisco,” said Oçem. “Even a useless gift is a gift. Do you not remember Muzzafar’s gratitude at your offer of a fort?”

  “I will remind him anyway,” Teixeira said stiffly.

  “But I do not think Dom Francisco will wish to be reminded of anything by Dom Jaime, will he?”

  Teixeira eyed the smaller man narrowly. The first time he had set eyes on him, Oçem had been sitting by the side of Muzzafar and the King had been fighting to stay awake. “It is the opium,” he had confided later. “Pay no attention. Tell me again why you wish to build for us this magnificent fort. …”

  The fort, predictably, had not been built. They had returned with a gilt chair, a dinner service; less predictably, the Ganda; and least predictably of all, Oçem. It had not at first been apparent that the King’s trusted minister was in effect being banished. He was “Muzzafar’s Ambassador to the great Duc d’Albuquerque, servant of the great King, Dom Manolo of Portugal,” but an Ambassador without the trust of his master, and perhaps in worse odor than that. This had dawned on them slowly, and Oçem had slid correspondingly in their esteem until he had reached his present station. “Animal keeper!” he had exclaimed when Teixeira had finally challenged him. “Oçem the Ganda-herd!” The man had laughed happily as though the downturn in his fortunes were the most wonderful stroke of luck, and his good humor was used thereafter to deflect even the Duc’s bluntest questions. He never revealed the reason for his disgrace, alluding only to the natural enmity between the Musselmen and his own people, th
e conquered Rajputs of Cambay. Teixeira suspected that he knew no more than he said. In place of explanation, he offered wild tales of his former master’s fondness for opium and the pleasures of the zenana. Muzzafar’s mother had fed him increasing doses of poison since birth to inure him to their effect. As a result, insects alighting on his skin would die instantly, and his concubines dreaded his attentions—naturally enough, for they invariably proved fatal. Even the Duc would laugh at these concoctions.

  Teixeira would remind himself that the man was not his friend, or the Duc’s, or his King’s. Then Peres had written from Ayamonte, and at the bottom of the dispatch was the barbed order: “And enlist this Oçem, since you speak of him so fondly.” So he was here, this onetime minister of kings, tending to the brute in the hold.

  “He is vexed with you,” Oçem went on. “Over his horse, is it not? Why is his horse not here?”

  Teixeira remembered such questions from the negotiation at Cambay, the tone of puzzlement, the fainter tone of apology beneath it. It had been his tactic to counter these inquiries with bluntness, his own version of Oçem’s feigned naïveté.

  “I shot it,” he said.

  Oçem raised his eyebrows.

  “Shot it? But this is Dom Francisco’s language, not yours, my friend. I fear you might have said something offensive, albeit in ignorance of local custom.”

  They were both close to laughter now, acting out parodies of themselves, or the selves they had been ashore. Oçem’s expression grew serious. “You should soothe him, Dom Jaime. One angry animal aboard ship is enough, I think. …”

  “His anger means nothing,” Teixeira responded, a note of contempt entering his voice. “He shouts and blusters. And that is all he does.”

  They parted then, Teixeira returning to the tiny cabin in the forecastle, where he improvised a rough table, building it from the chests piled against the partition until Dom Francisco’s voice barked, “Silence!” angrily through the thin partition. He looked about his quarters despondently, fell on his bunk, and slept.

  The days that followed passed insensibly, divided from one another not by sights or sounds, which were always the same, but by the wind. With every gust the sails pumped like huge lungs, but now out of sight of land, Teixeira felt that they were merely riding up and down on the swell, going nowhere. The winds were capricious and feeble, blowing and dying, swinging about the compass, so that the men spent their days scrambling to trim sails that would need to be trimmed again within the hour if their precious force was not to spend itself in useless flappings of the leaches and lurches of the hull. They sailed west, Dom Francisco and Gonçalo alternating watches in accordance with every eighth turn of the hourglass, though it was the pilot who effectively commanded the ship. Gonçalo erected a little canvas awning on the quarterdeck and spent his days beneath it, watching the water for changes in the wind. Since that brief moment when it had seemed that they were lost and the pilot’s face had collapsed for an instant into hopelessness, the man had betrayed no emotion. He spoke rarely, and though Dom Francisco had insisted as a matter of ship’s discipline that they should take their meals together, these were spent in uncomfortable silence, he and the fidalgo avoiding one another’s eyes. Sitting up there on the forecastle for hour after hour, relaying directions to Estêvão, Gonçalo was more an adjunct of the ship herself than a member of her crew. Walking the deck at night, for the heat in his cabin was often stifling, Teixeira would observe him standing erect and very still, his eye glued to a small quadrant trained on the Pole Star, waiting sometimes for a full half hour before the movement of the deck would cease long enough for the instrument’s plumb-bob to come to rest. Then he would mark down the reading and hurry back to his charts and rutters. One night, Teixeira followed him.

  “We are here, if my reckoning is right.” Gonçalo placed his finger at the end of a line that began at a legend marked “Goa” and zigzagged forward, describing a jagged parabola. Teixeira’s curiosity seemed neither to surprise nor to caution him. He spoke quietly and almost tonelessly, these matters too familiar and too ingrained in him to be of interest. “We may sight land at Guardafui. Perhaps not until Delgado.” He pointed to two capes, far apart on the coast down which they would sail. “After that the Moçambique channel. We will need the right winds to get through, but our chances will be better by then.”

  Teixeira looked at the island of São Laurenço. “Why not sail direct?” He traced a straight diagonal to the tip of the continent.

  Gonçalo shook his head. “Too early in the season, and there are the shoals of Garajos. … Here.”

  Teixeira ran his fingertip over the chart, tracing a course up the other side of the continent to São Thomé, a tiny dot in the bight of the great landmass. “We must make a landfall here,” he said. “There will be orders waiting there.” Gonçalo frowned but said nothing. “Does Dom Francisco understand this?” he went on. Gonçalo shrugged and was silent for a few moments.

  “It has to do with the Ganda,” the pilot said eventually. Teixeira realized belatedly that this was a question. He nodded quickly.

  “The animal is our whole purpose. Why else would the Duc have given us leave to sail so early?” He wanted to say more then, but Gonçalo had sensed his purpose, which was to draw him in, to make of him an ally. He held his tongue. The other began to fold away his chart. Teixeira was rising to leave when the man spoke again.

  “The gun deafened you, when you shot his horse.”

  Teixeira nodded, surprised at any conversation that the pilot initiated.

  “He said that he would have satisfaction. Not aboard ship, but as soon as we reach land. That is what he said.”

  Teixeira gave curt thanks for the warning and walked back toward his cabin, stepping carefully to avoid the sleeping bodies of the men. He lay on his bunk, marveling at Dom Francisco’s stupidity. Aboard ship he was the master, an absolute power that no later remonstrance would keep from doing as he pleased. Ashore he would be another penniless mouth returned from the Indies, scrabbling for favors, soon reduced to telling tales in the inns for the price of a mug of liquor. The streets of Belem were filled with them. And he was the envoy of Dom Manolo, protected and favored by no lesser power than Dom Fernão de Peres. …He smiled to himself, remembering the insults thrown in his face in a meadow behind a church in a town on the other side of the world. Then he remembered that São Thomé too might as well be considered “ashore.” They might prove evenly matched there. He is a distraction, he told himself then. Remember your purpose.

  Which was the animal: a distraction thrown out by Muzzafar, a tub for the Portuguese whale to nose about and sport with, then an inconvenience to the Duc and an afterthought in one of his dispatches, which had been seized upon by Manolo or Peres, then cargo, gross tonnage here aboard ship and a fantastic rumor in the slow coils of the negotiation at Ayamonte. …What it was now as it moved toward what it would become. Peres had speculated on unicorns, but the beast was gross, its little eyes receding into the smooth cylinder of its head, as if some delicate creature had been encased in a shell of gray plaster and now raged in there, trapped and maddened by its prison. It would be something that children would poke with sticks. The straight-faced clerks at Ayamonte would speak of it as “the other factor in our calculation” or “the subject of our private transaction” or some such, for it belittled them and was ridiculous. And His Holiness would clap his hands in extravagant delight: this was their anticipation, that he would do this and put his seal to the bull they craved, that the Pontiff and his beast would make a happy match. Teixeira thought too of the man brought up on deck with his chest staved in. It had killed a man, “with great deliberation.” The Ganda had been his pretext when he’d shot Dom Francisco’s horse.

  Now they avoided one another’s eyes as they avoided one another’s presence, a transparent fiction within the confines of the Ajuda. They met only to eat. Estêvão carried the desultory conversation, discussing their course with Gonçalo, who seemed less
inclined to talk than any of them. When addressed directly, Dom Francisco would reply bluffly, even deprecating his own seamanship. His suggestions as to the trimming of the canvas were filtered through Gonçalo before being passed on to the crew, and the pilot made subtle alterations, or delayed them until the wind changed, canceling out the fidalgo’s more dangerous absurdities until the flow of suggestions slowed and finally stopped altogether. At table, however, Dom Francisco was indulged by the two of them, who nodded sagely at his words on the understanding that they would remain just that. Gonçalo was the true master of the Ajuda, Estêvão his loyal lieutenant. He and Dom Francisco were bystanders, mere passengers, albeit with extraordinary privileges. This situation, the anomaly that bound them together, only highlighted the resentment that kept them apart. He knew better than to try to win over the pigheaded fi-dalgo. Ingratiation could bring him only contempt. So each day was punctuated with meals that were collections of long silences, stony and awkward occasions, uncomfortable tests of a precarious truce that Teixeira endured with his eyes glued to his plate while Dom Francisco chewed, and belched, and spat his leavings back onto his plate.

  They changed course, swinging south down the coast, and the ship’s smooth progress began to be punctuated with odd lurches. The current was weak but against them, while the wind blew from the northeast more steadily now. They never sighted Cape Guardafui, but the continent was visible from time to time, a smudge on the horizon far off to starboard, usually indistinguishable from the haze and the shimmer of afternoon heat rising off the water. The headlands of São Laurenço raised a cheer from the crew and an intensification in Gonçalo’s efforts, for dangerous shoals surrounded the vast island’s coasts, long humps and bars, invisible beneath the glare of the sea’s surface. “The channel is many leagues wide,” the pilot said, “and once in it the currents will guide us into deep water.” He fell silent again. Dom Francisco grunted. Teixeira sensed the anxieties beneath this unbidden reassurance. They ate.