The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  Diego flicked his eyes toward the door. “How many stomachs does he have to empty?”

  Salvestro shook his head to clear it and rose.

  Outside, the sinking arc of the moon was crossing the bows of the Lucia, and from the stern of the ship it seemed that their vessel was being drawn down a long white corridor of reflected light. The masts were in shadow and the sails all furled save the foremain, which was reefed to a narrow strip of luminous canvas. The stepped decks were a confusing jumble of harsh angles and shadows, and at first he thought Bernardo was nowhere upon them. Then on the narrow apron of deck between the main hatch and the forecastle, a little before the foremast but obscured by the housing for the pump, he saw a humped shadow crouching down as though trying to hide. He squinted, but the moonlight through the ratlines dropped a confusing lattice of light and shade over the hunched body. It looked as though one figure were leaning over another, which was trying to get up. He saw a hand press firmly down on … something. He watched intently. A head.

  “Hey!” he shouted, scrambling down onto the hatch. But as he moved forward something caught him about the shins, sending him tumbling onto the wood with a loud thump. He glanced back—a large sack of something left carelessly on the deck, turnips, perhaps. He clambered up again to reach the two of them, challenging the aggressor, “What do you think you’re—”

  Bernardo turned around in surprise. He was kneeling beside a figure lying facedown on the deck. The figure was trying to get up and, at the same time, it seemed, trying not to. Terse grunts escaped from between clenched teeth.

  “It’s Jacopo,” explained Bernardo. “He’s hurt himself.”

  “Well, get your weight off his head, then,” he commanded, for Bernardo had the mate by the nape of the neck and would not let him rise.

  “Can’t,” muttered Bernardo. “He keeps trying to get up.”

  “Well, let him up—” Salvestro began to retort, then noticed that one of the mate’s arms was extended along the deck, that its hand appeared to be fixed flat to the planks, that its fingers were splayed, and that the reason for these contortions was a six-inch spike that entered the hand at a point a little below the junction of the thumb and forefinger, then continued through to pin the hand to the deck beneath it.

  “Ah,” said Salvestro.

  Jacopo turned his head carefully sideways. “Thought. He was. Going. Over-theside. Grabbed. Slipped,” he grunted.

  The cabin door opened.

  “Watch out! There’s a sack of turnips,” Salvestro shouted back to Diego, who avoided the hazard by simply leaping across the hatch.

  “Is that what it is?” said Bernardo. “I fell over it twice.”

  Diego reached them a second later. “Foot on the hand,” he said. “Then hand on the handle. Then pull.” Before anyone else had time to move, Jacopo let out a huge shout and his whole body seemed to spring up off the deck. Diego straightened and stepped back.

  “Strange tool to be using at this hour,” he observed, weighing the spike in his hand.

  Jacopo was wincing and fishing in his pocket with his good hand for a length of rag to wrap around the injured one. For a second it seemed as though he had not heard. Then he said, “I was marling the starboard jib guy when—” He looked about as he spoke and suddenly shouted out, “What the devil…”

  Usse had moved silently along the narrow gangway and now stood behind Diego. Jacopo stared at her in bemusement. “A Moor?” No one answered.

  “Of course,” said Diego, looking vaguely in the indicated direction. “The jib guys.” He turned and began making his way back to the cabin. He stopped at the door and prodded the “sack” with his toe. The girl said something to him, and he prodded it again. A grunt sounded. “Tomorrow we shall wake him up,” he told her.

  The moon had swung to port and now was dipping toward the horizon. Jacopo left them without a word and lowered himself slowly through the trapdoor in the hatch-cover.

  “He doesn’t want to kill us now, does he?” Bernardo asked.

  “No,” Salvestro replied. “For all the difference that makes.”

  He thought of the richly dressed men and women who had crowded to gether on the benches of the stand. The tiers of faces had formed a rising pyramid, and at its top had sat the Pope. He looked different from the man who had charged about on horseback before the gates of Prato. Fatter, possibly, or perhaps it was the robes. He and Bernardo had waved stiffly, as directed, until the crowd on the quay was a congealed mass of indistinguishable bodies and the men and women under the awning of the stand had shrunk to little puppets, jostling and clambering about under the direction of the string-puller above them. The coastline became a smudge of gray and then they were here, afloat in the middle of the sea.

  “I think,” said Bernardo. “I think I’m going to …”

  Salvestro looked out over the black waters in which the ship drifted. The Lucia creaked gently, and the waves murmured amongst themselves. Bernardo’s stomach emptied itself in a sudden gout, followed quickly by two smaller ones that spattered over the sea’s surface, twin yellow slicks that lengthened, stretched, and finally broke up. He yawned. Bernardo spat. The stars above glimmered indifferently. Below them the air was all but still and the ship, more or less, sailed on.

  Captain Alfredo …

  “Captain Alfredo di Ragusa! Wake up, you drunken sot!”

  He had been shouting for the best part of an hour, or so it seemed. Diego felt his throat grow hoarse. Initial gentle prods had become firm kicks to the ribs before an arm emerged and groped about in the immediate vicinity of the deck. A brisk volley of slaps brought the head up briefly, though neither of its eyes opened. Then the head disappeared again. The arm was retracted. The remainder still looked like a sack.

  Diego redoubled his efforts, and presently a leg made its first appearance, shyly extending itself sideways as though the foot were searching for something solid to rest on and the larger but more timorous member was being cajoled into following. A second foot followed its trailblazing twin and came to rest beside it. The sack-that-was-Captain-Alfredo paused to gather its energies. Next, fumbling, hesitantly exposing itself to the Tyrrhenian light as if this cloud-diffused glow were a volcanic blast of skin-shriveling fire, entering wakefulness with the circumspection of one of the sleepers of Ephesus, then wriggling quickly over the soggy mossy boards, came a hand. The other hand followed, flopping down beside its mate with a fleshy thump. Fat, hairy fingers groped weakly at first, then more urgently.

  “I think he’s looking for something,” said Salvestro. The other crewmen watched attentively.

  “Bottle,” wheezed the heap at their feet, still sacklike but becoming more Captain Alfredo-ish in its responses to these unpleasant stimuli. A little moan followed, and the head began to rise again. Thinning curly gray hair parceled out the captain’s head into patches of leathery skin broken by outgrowths of steel wool below which the skin was mottled with patches of red and striated with broken veins. The redness intensified about the nose—an oversize purplish conk whose pimples had exploded long ago, leaving a rabbit warren of holes above the nostrils, which were cavernous and choked with hair. A number of teeth had been buried in his mouth; their gravestones leaned at odd angles to one another. After making its plaint, the mouth simply remained open, allowing this inspection, or perhaps waiting for the insertion of the requested “bottle.” When it became clear that this was not forthcoming, the eyes opened.

  Captain Alfredo’s eyes were held in place by fat flanges of pink eyelid flesh that puckered and wrinkled as they retracted to disclose the eyeballs themselves. Their pupils were the blue that waits within the gray of stormclouds for the sun to dissolve and spread it over a cloudless sky, a startling bright cobalt, set off in this case by the equally startling scarlet where the whites should have been. The eyes peered up at the faces looking down at them. The mouth mumbled something (” Ah, the slug”?), then realized it was still open and closed. Nothing more was heard or seen f
or a minute or so. Diego considered a bucket of water, but before he could act on this thought, beginning somewhere in the midst of the human heap that was Captain Alfredo, a slow eruption began, a business of rumbles and grumbles, groanings and moanings, the creak of eroded cartilage and the scrape of old bones as stiffened muscles flexed and tensed, booze-furred blood-pipes squirted venous and arterial liquor to dormant extremities and vital organs tried to remember their functions. Salivary glands eked out a phlegmy paste from which the tongue recoiled, and digestive juices trickled into an empty stomach in a preemptive strike against the anticipated “first one of the day.” A fart sounded its wan trumpet, and the battle with gravity commenced. The limbs began to move: a leg, another leg, an arm, another arm … A grunt-filled minute later Captain Alfredo’s head was topmost and his feet were bottom-most. Technically he was standing.

  “Is he really awake?” asked Arturro a few moments later. His fellows looked closer.

  Captain Alfredo was upright. His eyes were open. He breathed. But he seemed quite unaware of those clustered about him, let alone the ship and the sea in which she wallowed. Diego reached forward and tapped him on the nose. The eyes blinked once, then stared blankly as before.

  “Bottle,” said Diego.

  The eyes turned and fixed themselves upon him.

  “This way,” he said, pointing aft toward the cabin.

  Captain Alfredo followed.

  Salvestro was left outside with the crewmen, who scuffed their toes on the deck, folded and unfolded their arms, cleared their throats, and found things to fiddle with or lean against. No one spoke for a while. Bernardo was a little way forward, bent over the side and trying to heave. Jacopo squatted down, his arm in a sling. He winced loudly as his bandaged hand knocked against his chest and Salvestro saw the one called Enzo smirk. Nothing was heard from the cabin for some time. The door remained closed, and the men outside occupied themselves with idleness. Ruggero emerged from belowdecks with a length of planking in each hand, saw the cluster of men gathered there on the main deck, and asked what was going on. Jacopo jerked his good thumb in the direction of the poop.

  “Alfredo woke up.”

  Ruggero stacked his planks carefully beneath the gangway and made his way forward to inspect the damaged mainmast. Three poles had been lashed to the stump a little below the break to give the appearance that the mast was whole. He glanced curiously at the still-retching Bernardo. The men on the main deck continued their mooching. Presently, from the poop cabin, a loud voice shouted dis-believingly,

  “A what?”

  And, a few minutes later, “From where?!”

  It was a pensive Captain Alfredo who paced the decks in the days that followed. His drunkard’s totter evolved into a rolling swagger, an all-purpose amble that had been designed and perfected over the last three decades to keep him upright on decks rolling through anything under sixty degrees and which now propelled him about the Lucia to acquaint himself with his crew. Discovering that the “fishermen” recruited by his mate and pilot were of the rod-and-line rather than the boat-and-net variety made him more pensive still. Nevertheless he divided them into watches under himself and Jacopo, who was given the additional responsibility of showing them the ropes, for it seemed there was not a single man amongst them who could tell a vang from a brace, let alone a stay from a guy. Salvestro and Bernardo were posted as lookouts and stationed on the forecastle until the crow’s nest directly above on the foremast could be repaired. In the meantime it reminded them of its existence by shedding pieces of wood on their heads at regular intervals and once, during Bernardo’s watch, a large block of sandstone, though that turned out to be dropped accidentally by Jacopo, whose shout of “Look out!” came a split second after the arrival of the stone itself to the left of Bernardo’s head and was followed another split second later by the arrival of Jacopo himself, who tumbled through the bottom of the decaying structure and would certainly have broken his legs had Bernardo not caught him. Captain Alfredo added an intermittent stomp to his swagger, and his makeshift crew began to appreciate the subtle distinctions between, say, the ratlines (which were for climbing on), the clew-lines (which were for pulling on), and the gob-lines (which were for leaving well alone because the martingale had snapped off years ago and the bowsprit was about to follow it). Under his bellowed directions, the sails went up, and after long hours spent on the poop deck with charts, compass, crosspiece, tables of declination, brow furrowed and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, a course was set, too. Ustica was sighted, and a few days later the island of La Galita, from where hot, dusty winds blowing off the coast pushed the Lucia north and west. Ruggero loped about the ship with a sharpened nail which he would sink into various beams, planks, and rails, and a lump of yellow chalk, with which he would make obscure marks. Each time he did this he would hoist his tool-sack higher onto his shoulder, scowl and mutter to himself until his aspect became so forbidding that even Captain Alfredo kept out of his way. Twenty leagues south of Cartagena, two stays snapped with eerie simultaneity, sending the mizzen lateen yard crashing heavily to the deck with Jacopo atop it. Bernardo, who happened to be underneath, sidestepped neatly, then plucked the mate from the tangle of lines and canvas, and Jacopo hobbled away with a lightly sprained ankle. Bernardo continued his journey aft to the poop rail, where he duly emptied that mornings breakfast over the side: salted anchovies and biscuit. Similar deposits were made off Cabo de Gata, Punta de las Entinas, Cabo Sacratif, the Torre del Mar, Punta del Cala Moral, and many other points in between. Large yellow stains drifted in the Lucia’s wake, proving remarkably cohesive in these tranquil waters, the wind fanning them along, still observable at distances of up to two furlongs, where small fish fed on them and died. Diego was not seen on deck much and the girl not at all. When the Rock of Gibraltar was sighted by Salvestro, slightly ahead (” For’ard,” he corrected himself) and far off to the right (” Starboard”), they had been at sea for twelve days and the Lucia, her crew could not help but notice, was covered from bow to stern with little yellow hieroglyphs. Ruggero had completed his survey.

  “I want to explain the markings to you before we start,” he told Captain Alfredo. They were crouching in the nose of the ship, legs splayed awkwardly amongst the ropes and hawsers piled there. Ruggero held up an oil-lamp to the massive compass-timbers that curved about them at waist level and on which a dot with a circle about it had been drawn. “This one, that looks like a man being sucked down a whirlpool, this means worm,” he said.

  Captain Alfredo said, “Right.”

  Ruggero rooted amongst the tangled fakes of rope ensnaring their feet and pointed down to where the bow timbers passed beneath the breast-hook. Here the symbol was a simple cross. “This one, that looks like a man floating facedown in the sea after his ship broke apart in a storm, this means rot. And this one”—he rooted deeper, uncovering an irregular oval—” this one that looks like a man’s mouth screaming in terror as the waves bury him beneath them, this means that I don’t know the cause but the timber in question has the resilience of a wet bootlace and the consistency of pork fat. Now, shall we begin?”

  There were other symbols, too, one for iron-sickness, another for mold, yet another for the luxuriant growths of white mushrooms that flourished in the hold, and one—a circle with a line through it, indicating a man cutting his own throat, according to Ruggero—that denoted bad workmanship. The latter was a phrase Captain Alfredo found increasingly irksome as Ruggero moved back through the lower deck, past the hammocks where Enzo, Arturro, and Piero were snoozing, amongst the barrels and casks lashed down to either side of the steerage, holding up his lamp to point out gaps in the planking of the wales where the apron had lifted off the stem-piece. The sharpened nail was produced and sunk to depths of four or five inches in timbers, which, following retraction, oozed unidentifiable black liquid from the puncture-hole. Matters were no better in the hold, where more barrels, lengths of rotting rope, the detritus of a hundred conce
aled breakages, and a small rowboat all floated in a foot of stinking liquid. Ruggero tapped beams and planks with his hammer until the hull resounded with soggy thunks and thwacks. Kneeling down in the soupy muck, he fished with his hammer until a distinct clang! rang out.

  “Ah,” said Captain Alfredo. Ruggero raised an accusing eyebrow, then struck the submerged object again. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to know what that is,” began the captain.

  “I know what it is,” Ruggero retorted. “It’s the anchor. What I want to know is, what’s it doing down here? Another thing, why is it that not a single stick of wood on this ship has seen a tar-brush in the last twenty years? Another thing, how is it that this wormy, rotting, moldy piss-pot is still afloat at all? This”—he pointed to the evil-smelling slop that swilled about their legs—” has got to be removed. The pump will have to be patched and the foremast, too. I haven’t even looked at the yardarms, but if the rest of this ‘ship’ is anything to go by …” He came to a halt there, his outrage being temporarily too great to contain. Captain Alfredo took this opportunity to look once again at the rowboat, which he could not remember seeing before this morning. “It’s the wood,” Ruggero resumed in a strangled tone, then fell finally silent, as though so deeply affronted by the abuse of this beloved material, evidenced all around him, that he could express only his own dumbfounded shock.

  “Well, yes,” replied the captain. “With ships, it usually is.”

  A voice sounded behind them. “Add a cage to that list, carpenter.” They turned to find Don Diego clinging to the ladder. He addressed himself to Captain Alfredo: “We’re entering the strait.” He paused, then added almost as an afterthought, “And Jacopo’s gone overboard,” then disappeared upward.