The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “Home!” she shouted at them. “Home!”

  V

  NRI

  Consider, a tiny spring spills out of the wall of a ravine, wets the moss on a rock, and collects in a pool of dark red granite. A stream flows from the pool and is soon joined by two others hardly larger than itself. They mix together, their banks no more than a single stride apart—the Tembi, the Tamincono, and the Falico—bubbling and gurgling, glittering as the shade of the ravine is exchanged for the arid savannah below, flowing north and east in accordance with the slant of the rock. An ocean waits to receive this rivulet: a tight redoubling of its infant channel and two days’ westward flow would bring this watercourse to its end. … But, hedged between the highlands of their birth and the desert to the north, swelling with minor tributaries, nosing blindly over floodplains that have not tasted water since the greening of the Sahel, the stream becomes a wide and shallow river bouncing along, oblivious of the flattening of the landscape under the twin hammers of the sun and wind. The tributaries give out, but the river goes on. The clouds hanging provocatively over distant mountains are pregnant with nothing but dust. The mountains themselves are dunes, the degree zero of a landscape. What happens when there is nothing left to happen. Sand.

  And the river happening through it. Sometimes it backtracks. Sometimes it splits and fans out into arms or throws backwaters and swamps into the stony monotony of the surrounding desert. Treeless banks rise and fall. Its channel narrows and widens until parts of it might better be considered as lakes and other parts as waterfalls. Little labyrinthine regions of creeks and sandbanks mark its suicidal progress into a desert, where dried beds, salt pans, and wind-eroded watercourses that the heat has baked to stone warn of other unluckier rivers. On it goes, north and east, an immense glittering calm traveling into dry oblivion. Then, sixteen hundred miles from its source, it turns.

  Rain falling in the wet season spatters the ground with its fat drops, percolating patiently through fissured granite and porous sandstones, welling in muddy pools and puddles whose spillage trickles and drips, collecting and gathering into little sumps and runoffs that themselves regather and join forces, grow and flow through a riverine hierarchy of rills, gills, runnels, and streams to reach any one of a hundred rolling swollen floods, great muddy gurges in which uprooted trees flop and rear, beaching themselves on dwindling sandbanks before being lifted off again by the waters’ increase and carried down to the confluence, which might be a lazy arm reaching back into a floodplain, or a foaming gash in the cliffside, or a trickle, or a swamp, or the dripping of wet moss. … Drainage being inevitable, all rivers meet in the River.

  And the River turns southeast, away from the desert and down into the savannah and forests of its lower course, sucking hungrily at its lower tributaries, swelling, growing, rolling mud and rocks before it, bursting its banks and creating doomed lakes and backwashes, curving down toward the ocean like a scythe or the wound such a scythe might make if its blade were two and a half thousand miles of razor-edged steel slicing open a mile-wide vein of silver. For it glitters, despite its muddiness, and is placid, despite its enormity. And it slows, despite the nearing of the ocean that is its end. It lazes, and its meanders redouble so tautly and perversely that channels often form between their cusps. It divides, and subdivides, and sits in inert malarial pools, which leach brackish and sluggish liquids into the innumerable creeks that now make up its channel. Mud collects too, sometimes forming little islands. Were this a sea, these eyots and sandbanks would add up to an archipelago. It is not. It remains a river, though a reluctant one down here, this near to its egress and the dwarfing bulk of the ocean with its brine and its recalcitrant unriveriness. Successive alluvial washes only redistribute the landscape, and the little mud-islands it offers as a bulwark against its own momentous flood simply drift about, dissolving and accreting, disappearing and reappearing …

  Father …

  … never quite land and never quite water. It is a landscape of local compromise, lodged in its protean phase, a soupy swamp, a delta, a stubborn remnant of the unsettled soft land that Eri hardened with a blade forged for him by an Awka blacksmith.

  Daughter? Have you returned?

  So: a recoiling River, procrastinating and delaying behind a thick mat of mangroves and one hundred miles of accumulated river mud. Its creeks and islands make up a spongy labyrinth that the River would be happy to wander forever, drifting, stagnating, never quite emerging onto the raw and bristling coast. In the meantime there are slow fluxes and convections, false currents, leakage, all kinds of watery evasion. But the drift is always seaward. All rivers end in the sea, dissolving there and being sent aloft to fall as rain on some distant watershed, the beginning of another river, eventually another dissolution. The water of this silent floating world waits in pools and inlets, in false lagoons and deceptive lakes. The channels between the mangroves are flat brown mirrors of water where exposed and reflected root systems strive doubly upward and downward, as though suspended over bottomless ravines. The sky appears as a powder-white glare, and mirrored birds fly upside-down, fish eagles and egrets, the odd pelican, rising out of the virtual depths to scoop fat carp and perch: a splash, a glittering fillet of fishmuscle sinks wriggling into the mirror-world or rises into the sky. Surface commotions and ripples edge the mud-banks with a liquid sheen. The mud is pastel blue or black, or a marbled mixture of the two. It stinks, drowning the more delicate smell of the water. When the banks widen and this jungly sprawl opens out into a little lake or lagoon, a faint peaty scent lifts off the surface and hangs in the air, spiced with waterweed and marsh gas. Bracelets of blue-black oysters ring the stiltlike roots of the larger mangroves. Colorless crabs rest on the mud underneath. A tree drops a ripened seedling out of its dark green canopy, its heavy taproot spearing the soft mud and startling the crabs, which scatter. A heron clatters heavily into the air. The water is mostly still now the floods have subsided. The harmattan blows, but it is mild here, a watery shiver, a night-breeze. The thin poles of an isanga-trap project inches above the surface of a quiet, tree-fringed lagoon. Three pirogues with a man in each are maneuvering their craft to draw the trap shut. Raffia palms grow in tall stands behind the mangroves. Something caws, invisible in the undergrowth. Something moves in the water—the fishermen can hear it—splish, splosh, splish, splosh … Strangely regular. Their heads come up. A little rowboat rounds the bend in the creek and paddles slowly into the lagoon.

  Later, a solemn-faced headman delicately lifted the charred skin off a fat edofish, prized open its belly to pull out the bones, and offered Usse the first of the smoking fillets. Through the gaps in the fence of his compound she saw faces peering in at them, though whether it was a visit from the Eze-Ada that drew them or the appearance of three white faces, or simply visitors, she did not know. The three fishermen who had guided them back to the village sat on their haunches a little farther back from the fire. The headman was very old and smiled to himself as she praised the food with polite extravagance. The fishermen glanced between her and her companions, though whenever she glanced back in their direction they would pretend to be looking at something else entirely. Her fellow travelers were another matter. They were inspected frankly and closely, as though they were intricately carved effigies whose bizarre workmanship had to be minutely appreciated. When Diego made as if to swat one of the fishermen away, the headman spoke sharply, and after that they confined themselves to watching from a distance.

  “A woman from here took a man whose brother lives in a village nearer the coast. The man died and she went with the brother, down by the coast. She comes back here sometimes. She makes baskets. They have those bamboo houses down there.”

  The headman was cutting fillets for the rest of them now.

  “Must get cold this time of year, harmattan time. Anyway, she sells those baskets at Ikolo, so she comes through here on the way. They have a market there each week. She comes through every tenth or twelfth week, talks to her fa
mily here. This brother is a good man. Plenty to eat down there. Do you know this place?”

  Usse looked up at this, the first question she had been asked since their arrival. She swallowed the fish in her mouth and shook her head.

  “They had Nri-men down there once. This was before she got there. The brother told her about it. They had problems with a ju-ju the headman there had set up. Lost some men in the River. Bad problems. It was an Ijaw village, like here. Not Nembe-people. It’s better now.” He made a gesture with his hand, indicating the direction, perhaps, and Usse saw that his eye alighted on a covered calabash set up behind him. He turned back to her.

  “This is good fish,” she said. “Not too dry.”

  “You are thirsty?” He clicked his fingers at one of the three men, who rose eagerly and began dipping cups into the calabash. She sipped carefully. The palm-wine was sweet and thick, its fumes heady. Its heat warmed her to her bones.

  “Drink slowly,” she told the three men sitting opposite. “It is stronger than it tastes.”

  “Who are these people?” Diego demanded. “Are these the people you spoke of?”

  She shook her head. The headman took a long draft from his cup, watching this exchange without understanding it.

  “Sharks,” she said, suddenly remembering. “This village had trouble with sharks.”

  The headman nodded. “It is much better now. They kill a lot of them after the rains when the water is high. We send them cutch for their nets. Good against rot. This woman says the headman has whole necklaces of shark’s teeth. He thinks his teeth will never fall out.” The headman grinned then, showing her a full set of shiny teeth. “Cutch works better. In my opinion.”

  Diego’s head went back and forth as they talked. The other two got on with their fish, pausing only to slurp from their cups. More faces appeared behind the fence to the man’s compound. The village had been reached through a creek so narrow that the mangroves met above their heads to form a glossy green tunnel. It gave out onto a lagoon much like the one where they built their trap, except for a low island in its center on which stood a dozen or so fenced compounds containing mud-walled huts thatched with raffia palm, each one raised four or five feet off the ground on piles. Two children busy raking embers up and down the bottom of a small half-made canoe shouted and jumped up and down at their approach until the uncertain expressions of the men in the pirogues had silenced them.

  “We had good crayfish this year,” the headman said. “We heard the harvest was bad again inland. They had yam-beetles. The people up there should eat crayfish. The traps are easy to make.” He began to describe the traps, drawing conical baskets in the air with his long-fingered hands, then miming the trigger mechanism. She nodded in an interested fashion. Her three companions paid closer attention, their heads moving in comic synchronization as they followed the man’s movements. She remembered her first weeks in the city, knowing nothing, understanding nothing. People’s hands had been the only language she understood then. There was a cult of the hand, called Ikenga, but it was for warriors and merchants and all its rules concerned either fighting or wealth. There should be a cult for talking hands and for different tongues. … Her mind drifted through these thoughts while the headman went on to tell how snails could be caught in simple baskets. He described them in the same manner, and she understood that he was doing this partly out of hospitality for the three men who would understand nothing else, partly for the pleasure of it (the very traps he described were stacked in a corner of the compound), and partly, most obliquely, out of curiosity. There was no famine here. Their harvest had not failed. There was no war to calm, no souring of the earth to draw out, no spirit to banish. He wanted to know what she was doing down here: herself, the eldest daughter of the Eze-Nri, paddling through the mangroves with three ash-faced men. But he dared not ask. The ichimarks on her face forbade his curiosity. Nri itself forbade it.

  She said, “These men are mine. We have come up from the coast. Tomorrow we must go on upriver. A great boat is in the bay back there, and there are two men we left, men like these ones. They must not come to harm.”

  “There is a Nembe village near that bay,” said the headman, clearly relieved that her business did not concern him. “Some of my people know the people, but they are very fierce. And they hear the stories from along the coast. They hate the White-men. …” He poked the embers in the fire. “I will send men in the morning, and they will tell these Nembe what the Eze-Ada says. It may be too late.”

  It was quite dark now. The whispering from beyond the compound fence had fallen quiet, though she could see a dozen or more of the villagers still waiting there, their eyes watching her and her charges. And what do you think of these people? she wondered to herself. She was impatient for the evening to end. The headman indicated that she should sleep in the hut in which they sat while he would sleep in the hut of his son, who was away trading mangrove-salt farther inland. He hesitated when his eyes swept over the three men, and she saw worry pass fleetingly across his face. She reassured him that they would do no more than they had done already, which was eat and drink, then sleep like ordinary men. Troublesome spirits sought out trouble and lived in the places where trouble began. In the morning she would level and cleanse the ground on which they slept in case they left a mark there. After she told him this, the man touched his right hand to his forehead. He beckoned to a woman outside the fence who entered with her eyes fixed downward, though she had been staring boldly enough before that. She scooped up the embers and began spreading them in a shallow firepit under the slats of the bed on which she would sleep. To warm her, the headman explained.

  She lay down and waited for the three men to fall asleep. After a time, and when no further sounds reached her from the other huts, she rose quietly and walked down to the water. The harmattan was a cool breeze that barely moved the leaves in the trees but still raised gooseflesh on her arms. She sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. The journey behind her was no longer the force that pushed her forward. She had felt the new pull as soon as the giant had propelled them in amongst the mangroves, a troubling impatience. The journey thrashed behind her like a useless tail. She cut it off. None of that mattered now; she was being drawn by her destination. She closed her eyes, imagining the mangroves around her, then herself pushing them away, flattening a great swath of them with a single fan of her arm. That left the water. She thought of it simply flowing away. But where? Where was the place that would hold so much? Its smell filled her nostrils. She raised a dome in the earth, and the water rushed down its sides. The ground was solid beneath her. She pushed herself off it, rising, letting it fall away from her at extraordinary speed. There was nothing now. She was alone, not here in an Ijaw village, on a little island of river-mud, but where? She waited. Eri fell from the sky, or so the story went when little children were told it. Iguedo had told her there was a sky behind the sky one saw. This was that sky, not the familiar blue one, with its familiar clouds, its familiar sun. That sky. This sky. Never go too far when you dream. … Iguedo’s cackling and hectoring. Little girls like you get lost. … Usse was somewhere far below, sitting by a lagoon with her prizes snoring behind her. Eusebia was dead, and good riddance. She was the Eze-Ada, eldest daughter of the Eze-Nri.

  Father?

  Eri fell from the sky, which was the image of where she was now. He fell to the shaking earth, the soft and thunderous earth, and calmed it and hardened it with a blade from an Awka smith. She waited for a time, squatting there on the ground, listening.