The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  Bernardo did not move. “So why is he doing it? Why is he even here?” he persisted, a sulky tone in his voice that Salvestro recognized as the usual prelude to the giant’s reluctant acquiescence.

  Salvestro was bent over the rope, his fingers trying to dig a first bight from the stubborn and complicated knot. “Because he has nowhere else to go,” he muttered, then added more loudly, “Are you going to help me with this or not?”

  “Just pull it in.”

  Salvestro looked up and saw that the Lucia was more than a hundred feet away. The rope was sinking into the water. He rubbed his arms, still sore from the afternoon’s lead-swinging, then hauled it in hand over hand until he held the end and saw in the fitful moonlight that it had not been untied, but cut. The stern of the Lucia receded, a black wall sinking into the night. Bernardo picked up the oars. Salvestro dropped the rope-end into the bottom of the boat. They were alone.

  So they rowed then, Salvestro directing Bernardo to turn the boat to larboard and Bernardo pulling powerfully, soon settling into a rhythm and grunting to himself, “One, two, one, two …” The night tented them in darkness and reduced their surroundings to a narrow apron of water. The boat occupied this little patch of ocean, where it bobbed up and down and lurched from side to side. When the swell deepened, as it did some hours later, Salvestro gripped the sides of the boat with both hands. They climbed up and down the troughs, the nose of the boat sometimes sending up a curtain of spray. He was soon soaked, but the night was warm. Another hour and they would see the surf breaking on the coast, a luminous white in the moonlight. Or perhaps the beach would simply rise beneath them and lift the hull clear of the water before they so much as saw the land.

  Another hour passed. Bernardo asked for water and Salvestro realized that he had made no provision for this. Later Bernardo asked when they would be reaching their landfall, for he was beginning to tire. The swell was no heavier than before, but now it was knocking the nose of the boat off her bearing and Bernardo would have to stop and bring her about. In the dark, in the monotony of the ocean’s surface, where their only coordinate was themselves, the boat’s motions were lost in the larger motions of the sea and it seemed that they were going nowhere. Bernardo would dig the nose of the boat from the troughs into which she pitched and haul her up the corresponding slope. Each dip in that sea was the mouth of a tunnel that sucked at their vessel, drawing her beneath the surface. Eventually they swapped places, but after only a few minutes on the oars Salvestro’s shoulders felt that they were loose in their sockets and the cavity had been filled with burning sand. He strained against the weight and drag. His hands blistered and his numbed fingers began to slip. After he had dropped the right oar for the third time, Bernardo motioned for him to move aside.

  “The sun’ll be up soon,” he said as they shifted places. “We’ll be able to see the coast then.”

  They did not speak after that.

  The sky lightened, but not off the stern. Salvestro watched the horizon gradually form itself to starboard as darkness lifted off the sea. Strange pink lights extended glowing ribbons in the upper air, radiating from a still invisible sun. The shadowed sea crawled about them, coal black against the dawn. It seemed an age before the first fiery sliver of sun showed itself, but by then the sky was already light and, standing precariously in the boat, Salvestro could see the horizon that ringed them as though they were the center of a world of water and its only inhabitants. Their little patch of benighted sea had swollen overnight into a sea, but they were as confined as ever and their dominion’s new extent gave them nothing. Salvestro gazed east. The sun slowly hoisted itself clear of the sea. There was no coast.

  The sun rose higher, the same sun that had warmed them pleasantly aboard the Lucia. Now it burned down on them, forcing the two men to drape their shirts over their heads and screw their eyes tight against the glare. Salvestro’s mouth dried and his tongue shrank to a flap of leather. Gravel scraped in his throat when he swallowed. The boat had turned through ninety degrees in the night. He had Bernardo row due east, directly at the sun, for the coast must be there, he thought. They must have run alongside it in the darkness; it was easy to believe that. They continued, although Bernardo was at the limit of his strength and the oars that he had earlier sunk deep with every stroke, searching for purchase in the water, now skimmed inches below the surface and raised dashes of strength-sapping spray. The merest current would be enough to overcome this effort, Salvestro realized. He took another turn at the oars, and Bernardo slumped in the bows. When sleep overcame the big man a few minutes later, his head knocked against the gunwales and Salvestro did not trouble to rouse him. Crusts of salt had formed around his eyes. His lips cracked and bled. His feeble efforts on the oars grew feebler still, then stopped altogether, and he found it took all his strength to draw their weight through the row-locks and stow them in the bottom of the boat. Salvestro hugged his knees to his chest. He looked at Bernardo, who lay still as a corpse across from him. He tried to call the giant, but the name emerged from his parched mouth as a croak. The red clouds that drifted in the very periphery of his vision were afterimages of the sun, stamped on his eyes by a burning hammer. Waves slapped the sides of the boat, knocking her through a jerky circle. Bernardo’s mouth fell open. The sun hit him full in the face, and his head dropped. The boat turned and turned, rocked gently by the sea’s motions. They drifted.

  Some minutes passed, or hours—they drifted in and out of different kinds of waking and exhaustion, time counted only by the boat’s slow rotations. Angles and edges dug into their sleep-starved bodies. The boat held and chafed them, pulling them out of their stupor for a few moments at a time. Sunlight glittered and shot off the water, its stabs seeming to reach through Salvestro’s eyes to the inside of his skull. A knot of inflamed flesh throbbed and pulsed there. The sun was either a few hours away from sunset or had risen only recently. He did not know east from west. Sleep wrapped him in a murderer’s cloak. His head pounded, though it was painless now and sounded like the loose spars that floated in the Lucias slopping ballast when they knocked against the ship’s sides. He had heard that sound while he slept. Tap, tap, tap … Another life. It came again, an irregular and muted tattoo. Salvestro shook his head. He tried to open his eyes, but they had crusted shut. He reached deep into his mouth and rubbed spit into his gummed eyelashes. Prizing one eye open, he let his head flop over the side. Jacopo’s face stared up at him.

  He started, which made the boat rock alarmingly. There was no doubt. The eyes were open, the hair as remembered. He floated alongside the boat, subject to the same vagaries, the water’s little butts and nudges. His head bobbed loosely against the side. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.

  A sound came from Bernardo, a groan. Salvestro rubbed the salt from his other eye. Water washed over the mate’s face, but the eyes stared up unblinkingly. He was dressed as usual in a shirt and loose trousers. Bernardo grunted again and pointed. He looked around.

  They looked like half-submerged logs, a little flotilla of them bobbing up and down in the water. Six? The nearest was no more than twenty feet away. Bernardo reached for the oars and together they fitted them into the rowlocks. The farthest was fifty yards away and the object of attentions other than their own.

  The sides of the Lucia rose out of the water like great cliffs. Her masts were spires and her sails were flags too heavy for the wind to lift. Ruggero was alone on her deck, leaning out over the water and fishing for the nearest body with a boathook and a length of chain. He cast the chain out beyond the body and let its weight pull the cadaver toward him. He stopped when he caught sight of them. Bernardo caught hold of the chain. Salvestro rolled the body over by the shoulder. It was Luca. His throat was cut, too. They left the boat tied alongside and climbed wearily aboard.

  Ruggero’s face was dull with shock. They drank hungrily from the water-butt, then turned to him.

  He stared at them in silence, though whether he was dumbfounded by the e
vents of the night or their own reappearance, the two men could not tell. A man’s voice began shouting somewhere belowdecks, and Ruggero clapped his hands over his ears as if he could not bear to hear it. Usse’s shriller tones rose against the bellowing, and it was from that alone that Salvestro knew the man shouting down there was Don Diego. His voice sounded thick and uncontrolled. Ruggero was crouched on the deck and was now muttering to himself, “Terrible hours, terrible hours …” Diego’s bellowing ceased suddenly, and Salvestro gently prized the man’s hands away from his ears.

  “What has happened here?” he asked. Ruggero shook his head and turned his face away. They left him crouching there.

  Captain Alfredo lay spread-eagle on the poop deck, an open bottle in one hand and several empty ones around him. He was holding the bottle above his face, then tilting it gradually until a thin flow spilled into his mouth. At their appearance, he swallowed quickly and tried to raise himself on one elbow but gave up after a couple of ineffectual attempts.

  “Thought we’d seen the last of you,” he said. His words were slurred and hard to follow. “Cut you adrift, didn’t they, the poor bastards.” He belched loudly. The effort seemed to exhaust him.

  “Who?” asked Salvestro. An empty bottle rolled against his foot. He took the full one from the captain and sat down. The liquor burned like fire.

  “Jacopo. All of them, except Ruggero. Came at us like dogs. Died the same way.” He gurgled softly and his head knocked gently against the deck. “Two shipwrecks. Boarded three times. Marooned once. More storms than I can remember. Now this.” He patted the deck softly. “And who’s going to sail the old girl now?” he murmured.

  Salvestro’s neck prickled. It was the silence that alerted him, a tautening in his attention. He turned around slowly. Diego stood there with his arms folded over his chest. His face was blank and somehow loose. He did not seem surprised at their presence. He and Salvestro watched each other in silence, then Usse appeared behind him. The soldier hung his head and stared at Salvestro until the other was forced to look away. When he looked again they had gone. He heard the girl’s voice in the cabin below them. He knelt beside Captain Alfredo and shook him until the man’s eyes opened blearily.

  “We could have put them in irons,” he said. “Had them tied up below, we did. All trussed up, but not”—he gulped painfully—” not for that. They screamed like pigs.”

  “Jacopo and the others?”

  The captain moaned, protesting his drunkenness. Salvestro would not let him alone.

  “You had them tied up,” Salvestro pressed him. “For what?”

  Something in his tone registered in Alfredo’s liquor-soaked brain. His eyes opened wide, and one hand tried to paw at Salvestro or grasp his shirt. “Not for that,” he repeated. “Diego promised me.” He choked and wheezed as he spoke. “He went below. The girl followed him. She made him do it. I heard them, I heard how she did it. And then Diego cut their throats.”

  His hand found Salvestro’s shirt and gripped it as he got these words out. Salvestro was shaking his head. “How?” he demanded. “What do you mean, ‘She made him do it’?” It made no sense to him.

  “She has a hold over him,” Alfredo went on. He coughed, then pulled Salvestro closer to hiss into his ear, “Who else is steering us? Who else, Salvestro? It’s her. She has the hand over all of us now. …”

  Sharks ate the bodies. Alfredo sobered up. The ship sailed on. Salvestro understood that they had rowed a wide and perfect circle that night, circumnavigating the as-good-as-stationary Lucia to rearrive off her bows. Whether they had veered westward, out into the ocean, then in again, or east, in toward the coast and out, he never knew. He considered their passing across the face of the coast, the curve of their bearing bringing them nearer and nearer until the single point in that trackless darkness, no more than a single pull from Bernardo’s exhausted arms, perhaps, when they must have stood no more than a fraction of a league offshore. A cruel joke, and one that they had played upon themselves.

  The Lucia” s reduced crew improvised watches, hauled together on the ropes, pumped, steered, messed, and slept. Ruggero sawed and hammered in the hold. He built a cage and patched the pump. Bernardo spent a single nauseating afternoon pumping out the water in the hold, then returned to the rowboat that the Lucia towed, as before, off the stern. When the sails had to be trimmed, Usse worked with the men, shinning up the masts and swinging herself out to the ends of the yards, where she tugged on the stiff canvas, putting on more sail or reefing it in as required. Her black skin shone with sweat as she dropped down onto the deck, panting to catch her breath, then splashing water into her mouth from the scuttlebutt. The merest movement of her limbs raised small flat islands of muscle. Salvestro watched her hungrily. Then he would remember Jacopo and the others, and he would remember that Diego watched her, too. The soldier grew even more taciturn in the days that followed, abstracted, dazed. There was a madman in him, the one who had bellowed and lashed out wildly in the hold. He was silent for now, but Usse spoke to Diego in an undertone, as if she feared to break the fragile spell that chained this part of him, and the other four were careful in his presence, alert to the menacing something that was in him. Ruggero showed Salvestro the gouged beams in the hold where the soldier’s sword had bitten, then the rotting ones, then the compass timbers and sprung planking through which fat waterdrops seeped and dripped before running down the sides and pooling in the bottom.

  “We tied them up down here,” he said, sinking his nail into the mainmast where it was stepped into the keel. “Back to back. She went around the circle of them. … Enzo was dead already, I think.” Ruggero stared at the thick stump. “Not the others, though.”

  Salvestro looked about the leaking hold. Ruggero’s oil-lamp cast a subaqueous light in the confined space, while the ship’s timbers threw exaggerating shadows along her sides, the shadows of a vessel twice her size. Sitting with their backs to the mast, they would have been waist-deep in the water. They would have seen the girl climb quietly down, watched her wade toward them, puzzled by her presence. … He turned for the ladder. Ruggero went back to his tests and repairs.

  They passed the Beach of White Sands and hugged the shoreline thereafter, for, mindful of Dom Manolo’s ordinance to throw the sailors of all ships other than the Portuguese directly into the sea, Captain Alfredo was eager to keep well east of the Canaries. On the eve of Saint Martin’s Day they watched the justly dreaded surf of Cape Bojador breaking on its northern bank and pushed out again into the ocean. The ship abseiled down the coast, bouncing from point to point in a series of flattened arcs linking the Bay of Fish to the River of Gold, though it was no river and contained no gold, then the Gulf of Gonsalo de Cintra, though it was really an inlet, and Gonsalvo de Cintra had actually been killed while swimming off the isle of Naar in the Bay of Arguin, which was some eighty leagues to the south, then the Bay of San Cipriano on Saint Gregory’s Day and the Cabo Santa Ana on the Eve of Saint Cecilia, the land falling away after the long spit of Cabo Blanco and reappearing as a purplish smudge off to larboard. The soft clatter of distant herons taking wing; then, for many days, nothing. There were no capes, or points, or rivers, and the coast, when they sighted it, was a low unending sand-ridge fringed with white surf. The sun rose behind it, climbed over the ship, and fell into the western ocean. They woke, worked, and slept. Ruggero constructed a davit to raise the anchor from the hold. Salvestro clambered up and down the ratlines. Bernardo let the blisters on his hands heal and the rowboat once again bounced around the Lucia, its jolly sploshings pointing up the undeniable leadenness of the larger vessel’s progress, while Bernardo stood in its stern and ceased clubbing the hapless water only to sleep or throw quantities of salted pork down his throat: a jovial two-legged seawolf, a-wolfing. He was better off there, in Salvestro’s opinion. A desultory air hung over the Lucia, the pall of their mutual ignorance and incompatible wants. Their course was the sum of different routes and differently hoped-for journeys,
a tangential, compromised bearing not truly congruent to any, unless that of the girl. They rounded Cabo Verde one dawn and the Cape of Masts the next, whose “masts” were a stand of three enormous and long-dead palm trees. The nor’easterlies blew steadily, and they trimmed the sails only by night. Alfredo sat on the forecastle with a compass beside him and in his lap Diego’s rutter, from which he would read out ominously opaque phrases: “The Senegal is the end of the land of the Tawny Moors and the beginning of the land of the Blacks” or “The Bijagos Isles are surrounded by shoals and sandbars pushed out by the Rio Grande some fifteen miles to the north” or, bluntly, “Tanguarim. Avoid.” Their bearing bent gradually more eastward as they sailed down the Malagueta Coast until, after rounding Cabo Palmas, the sun rose each morning directly over the prow and set each evening directly below the stern. That was their last sight of land, for the rutter told them that the Portuguese maintained forts at Axim and Mina and they dared not sail in sight of them. A dry wind blew off the invisible coast, coating everything and everyone on deck with fine red dust. Ruggero jointed and planed the last of the planks to fashion a new top for the foremast, and he and Salvestro spent a day balancing on the yardarm while Ruggero cut off the splintered end of the pole, sawed out a mortise, and fixed the tenon of the top-piece in place with three carefully fashioned pins. The crow’s nest was judged a lost cause, as was the bowsprit, and in any case there was no more wood.

  The watery wafts and surges of a gentle westerly current found purchase enough on her barnacled underside to drag the Lucia forward, and so, lurching, lolling, leaking, sagging, growing more jellylike with every passing league, her boards popping off her beams and the beams riddled with worm, her hold awash with a noxious liquid peculiar to the bottoms of decaying ships—ineradicable stood alone on the forecastle, a figurehead carved from ebony, her eyes fixed forward with such concentration on the narrow line of their bearing that had whales and whirlpools appeared to port and starboard, she would not have glanced at them. She fixed herself there and the Lucia followed, drawn by nothing more than the force of her will. She invited no distraction. Soon she would lead them within the vast and vague blur that they had skirted and sailed about. Its dust was already with them. Their futures were there, waiting for their lurching bodies to inhabit them and play them out while she skipped amongst them, unreadable as now. Watching her, Salvestro felt himself a thief. Only the most appalling determination could explain her. What had she felt as she’d wielded the knife above the mutineers? What gnarled and massive hand had enclosed her own as it had cut the signs of its purpose in their flesh? His observations told him nothing. Parted from her, Diego would fall into slack-faced reverie, an unwilled loosening of his fiber. With her, his purpose returned. He believed in her, and Salvestro saw the offering and withholding of her will reflected in the soldier’s torpor. She inhabited him as she pleased. She was the instrument of his redemption, if she chose. Or they were the instruments of her return and of no more significance than that. He did not know. It was Alfredo who called out, “Land! Land to starboard!” but she must have seen it long before the old sailor. She did not move or even turn around. They had sailed clear past the Mina Coast and the Slave Coast. They were to the east of these. A strange forest marked the shoreline here, extending up and down the coast for as far as they could see, a forest growing out of the sea, or set on innumerable islands, or riven with thousands of creeks and channels and composed of strange trees whose roots showed high above the wa-terline. They sailed along the face of this coast for the best part of a day and Usse said nothing. It was almost dusk when an outcrop of these peculiar trees fell aft, and in their lee a bay was disclosed to them. Fringed with palm trees and fed by a broad river, it was the first break in the vegetation they had found. Salvestro saw Usse’s body stiffen as she looked about, her eyes sweeping back and forth. Then she threw out her arms and shouted words in a language he did not understand. The men gathered on the deck and looked up at her. She was talking to herself up there, in her own tongue, outside them, already distant and as impenetrable to their gazes as the shadowed landmass that filled the horizon behind her. She whirled about, her face shocking in its sudden animation.