Then undips—plop!—catching the eye of the master of the cargo.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“The water. It sort of, well, dipped.”
The master of the boat hangs out from the ladder.
“Looks all right now.”
“It dipped. I saw it.”
“Probably a fish.”
The master of the cargo looks doubtful. “Funny sort of fish.”
They climb down into the boat and begin the punt back to the palace, calling out a final warning to the lone figure sitting on the podium before they disappear inside. Father Jörg hears the gentle plash of their departing boat, then, “Whatever you do, don’t stand up!” then nothing. He is alone, undistracted. Outside, it would seem, and in some sense “aloft.” The bells of San Damaso are silent. A crow caws, but far away. And there is a kind of bustle. Voices?
Possibly it is the languorous awakening groans of the denizens of the dining-hall or the more plaintive ones of those bivouacked in the passageways below. It might be the poets, limbering up with a few macaronics before breakfast, or perhaps the rumbling stomachs of King Caspar and the Mauritians, arrived last night but too late for supper, or the shrill yips and yelps of His Holiness, who ate his own later still and is now enduring some difficult negotiations over his ermine-padded chamber-pot (a gift from an anonymous donor, although Bibbiena is strongly suspected). Indeed, it might even be the latter’s snoring, for he has over-slept deliciously and later will be late to a degree just this side of fashionable. Or Guidol’s muttering? There is something peculiarly penetrating about his rolling r’s and elongated diphthongs. He is up already and busy in the kitchens, piping intricate whorls of oyster-cream over the corquignolles while keeping an eagle eye on a bubbling pot of thick orange marmalade to which he will shortly add the six braces of plucked pigeons resting in a basket beside it. A wailing or screeching noise reaches his ears, a stringy ululation. The musicians, Guidol thinks balefully. He caught them literally red-handed last night with their fingers in his blood sausage vat and, unable to bear their whining (nothing to eat since Montepul-ciano three days ago, faint with hunger, the usual nonsense), chased them out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver, shouting after them that Montepulciano was less than two days’ walking away, even encumbered with violas. A chef must be feared above all else. He has a disturbing tendency toward diffidence but has been exorcising it through his regular encounters with the poets, who are even worse, turning up bright-faced in the morning with paeans to his “honest toil.” More nonsense. Cuisine is the art of deception, and the rest is elbow grease and heating. None of them have yet appeared this morning. Whatever His Holiness told them last night seems to have rather cowed them. Guidol finishes up the oyster-cream and reaches for the bucket of pike spleens. Corquignolles are a demanding dish worthy of his talents. Now, how many spleens?
He looks down, and there, his gaze passing over the rim of the bucket, he notices a little stringy thing, white and wriggly, perhaps a sinew cut from a fillet of pork or a fragment of blanched asparagus. However, the important thing is not what it is, but where it is, for it is on the floor. Guidol frowns. As a test he picks up one of the pigeons and hurls it into the corner. Then he waits. He watches, and then, looking around the kitchens, he notices all kinds of detritus on the flagstones that normally would not have lain there more than a second: cabbage hearts, bits of gristle, snippets of intestine… He glances back to the pigeon. Still there. He should be joyful; after all, no chef worth his salt wants a plague in his kitchen. But instead the continuing presence of the pigeon worries him. He feels strangely unnerved. Where have all the rats gone?
Plop!
The water dips again.
Not voices, or not human ones. Something is shifting down there. And it’s not fish because there are no fish. Father Jörg can hear it, but nobody else can. He cocks an ear. He puckers his brow. What is it?
Well, hard to credit without at least a dry sob, it’s actually Towser the cat. …
Yippee! Yahoo! Over here, Towser! Come on, Towser. Towser! Towser…!
Boing. … And up on the worktables, paws in the fish-basket, paw-prints in the pastry: Towser, a long-haired ginger tomcat. In the kitchens of the Vatican, no one and nothing walked prouder than Towser. Watch him spring. And hiss! Fangs bared, claws out, Towser stalked the corners, a terror to all. Towser could leap the length of the boiling room, traverse the scullery with a single bound, fling himself though fires, scale impossible heights. On his birthday, the pot-boys would weave him a garland of rat-tails, which Towser would destroy in under a second. The mere sniff of a rat was enough for Towser, sending him into murderous frenzies. He would froth and foam, sometimes even vomit with anger, and when he had a dead rat beneath his paw he would not be content with merely biting off its head; he would skin it, too, and eviscerate it, and drag its guts around the floor to loud prolonged cheers before stowing them safely in somebody’s boots. From the most elderly of the sauce-stirrers to the youngest of the carrot-peelers, all were agreed: Towser was the greatest ratter of them all. The cooks knew it, and the sub-cooks knew it. Pot-boys, wood-carriers, fish-gutters, meat-trimmers, and stock-boilers harbored no doubts. From Neroni all the way down to the amazingly decrepit old man whose job it was to carry away the excrement squeezed from the bowels of freshly slaughtered cows, anyone in the kitchens asked to identify the most tireless, talented, hardworking, and popular exponent of his or her allotted task would point directly to the same furry candidate: Towser the cat, Ratter Supreme.
Except, unfortunately, the rats.
Observation. Report. Response. Via devolved command chains and relay-systems, an ultrasonic klaxon of squeaks carried the usual warning from beneath the kitchens through the culverts, crawl-spaces, and geometrically planned tunnel-system of the colony to the outlying subsurface bastions and outposts as far as the garrisons by the river. Cat alert. Location: kitchens. Designation:Towser. Decision: Assess risk.
Accordingly, a few mice were released by night into the kitchen and Towser’s performance gauged. Next some shrews. Then cockroaches, finally woodlice and worms. Stage one of the assessment was ended, and from the result the Vatican rats might have predicted what would happen next. Towser’s capture rate was nil, and stage two was a rat. Neither the largest nor the smallest, although possibly the most fearless, for the rat’s mission was to scamper about in front of Towser, as close as possible and as slowly as possible, to get nearer (Towser watching), nearer (Towser rising), nearer (Towser tensing), and nearer yet…
Towser running away.
The rats dubbed Towser “the Executioner.” (Even the Vatican rats have a sense of irony.) Towser never actually caught a rat. Instead the rats fed him their old and sick, their recidivists and degenerates, those hopelessly wounded in skirmishes with the Rome rats guarding the river, and the failures from their selective inbreeding programs, limbless two-headed monsters and the like. They killed them first, then tossed them out to him. One day, they reasoned, they would have a use for Towser. Strategically, in the long view, Towser was best left in place. The Vatican rats can afford to wait, for a cat as easily as a kingdom. The habit is ingrained in them as the counterweight to rattish impatience, the tendency to rush and dart, the impulse to be impulsive when the best policy is to advance slowly and methodically, to discipline their racing hearts into slower rhythms, to watch and wait. Sometimes, very rarely, in the early hours before dawn, one or two of them will scrabble up the eastern wall of the Belvedere and gaze out over the city of their rivals. Colonies weaker than their own are waiting for them over there, over the dark flood of the river. They watch, and sniff, twitching as strange blends of adrenaline and glucocorticoids roar through their arteries. They want to run forward and rip and bite and kill, but they do not. They observe. Conquest will come with discipline and restraint. They wait, just as they wait for Towser and the day they find a use for him, for it will come just as surely as the day when th
ey break out of the Borgo and sweep through the city to unleash their dammed-up rage and bloodlust, killing every alien rat in their path. And then, with a drip, and a drop, then a trickle of water into one of the highest and driest chambers of the colony, the point one would choose if armed with a blueprint of its every tunnel and junction one wished to wash every rat in the Borgo clean into the Tiber, Towser’s day arrived.
Plop!
Here, boy, over here. Here, Towser. Here! There, then; yes, there… Oh, forget it, Towser, wherever you’ve got to … Anyone seen Towser? Towser!
Poor silly Towser, lured down a tunnel with a string of cow-guts. Throat slashed, tail trimmed off, lugged north toward the Belvedere. The most artifice-ridden artificial lake in Christendom has sprung a leak. For the sub-Vatican colony, the leak is a potential catastrophe. For Towser, a final fatal flaw. The Vatican rats are using him as a bung.
Plop! Plop! Plop!
Stop.
An hour passes, or several, time in which the seconds drift in and out of synchronization with the twitches of Jörg’s sinewy heart, advancing, overtaking, recurring, coinciding. He too is waiting, and his faith is like coal, a patient black crystal guarded in a battered body. The little light appeared last night, a little time after the three mocking impostors left him to his contemplations, which were of winter and the memory of stones falling into placid black waters far away and long ago. No church protected him from the soaking and freezings then or now. No buttress held him upright, or gaudy-colored window lit his way. His little chunk of coal will burn briefly and brightly when the flame is put to it, this being adequate and in due proportion to the needs of a faithful fool. His inner pilgrimage is almost ended. His followers have almost all fallen away. HansJürgen remains, but who else? He smiles to himself, enjoying the fine irony of his elevation after his long confinement in the monstrance of the Pope’s palace. Little breezes play about his feet. Little sounds play in his ears. A dulcimer tinkles, or a hackbrett, perhaps. The silver knob that terminates the armrest grows warm under his sun-warmed palm. He listens to the silence of the water and then the disturbance of that silence. The crow starts up again, then men’s voices, things being dragged, and dropped, and coaxed, and cursed. Various splishings and sploshings.
Plop!
This is something he does not hear. So far, the soggy moggy is holding.
The commotion grows more complex, new sounds arising out of a general background hum of activity, intermittent tapping and hangings and squeaks. And hoots! Someone on his right shouts, “Poets over here!” and from the direction of the palace he hears a strangely rhythmical mumbling start up. He is surrounded, he realizes. A fanfare begins and is cut short in midtoot. Oranges thunder out of buckets and thud into barrels. “Will half the poets please move over to the other side of the water! Now!” Footsteps and massive murmurings. The cries of commemorative brooch-hawkers. A single colossal splash followed by many smaller ones. His own slipper-clad foot taps softly on the podium. He grips his staff. He adjusts his miter. Jörg hears the noise made by a city inured to spectacle and pomp, a dull and watery wail overlaid with grumbling and shuffling, jostling and elbowing, thousands of voices ringing him with their jabbering, their wit, their well-turned bon mots and badinage. It fills the registers, swamping everything except itself and clogging his ears until, seeming to arise from somewhere exterior, or anterior, somewhere primitive and shorn of trimmings and ornament, he hears a chant. Rather crude and monotonous, but vigorous, too: a guttural grunt sung out to a simple one-two rhythm, an aural battering ram that seems to pick up speed as it gets louder and nearer, finally bursting into the arena by the spiral stairway with its champion held high, its champion’s deliverer perched on top of it, and their chanting followers following in an unstoppable charge of mud, rags, ropes, sticks, vigor, bad temper, and rudeness.
“Ross’rus. Ross’rus! Ross’rus! Ross’rus! Ross’rus…!!”
“So that’s Rosserus,” murmurs the Pope through the din, enthroned on his deck and ensconced amongst a selection of his favorite cardinals. The ambassadors too have gained places in this most favored vantage-point, along with those there by merit of precedence: senior curialists, the more powerful conservatori, a scattering of old barons, the more patient and generous of his bankers. “And that thing he is sitting on,” he continues. “That, I presume, would be the Beast?”
For a moment, Ghiberti does not answer. His eyes, like those of the robed dignitaries around him, the capped curialists, the bejeweled bankers, the black-garbed poets waiting in their bobbing gondolas below, Hanno lurching amongst them, vainly attempting to coordinate the four floating rowboats disguised as miniature galleons that have been attached to his feet, the hoi polloi and lower members of His Holiness’s famiglia jammed together on the benches and crammed into the loggie to either side, everyone’s eyes—the eyes of Ro-ma—are fixed on the animal that stands amidst the mob of chanting, mud-encrusted beggars like a gray rock rubbed smooth by the tossings of a rubbish-choked sea. The plan, Ghiberti realizes, is already going awry. The naumachia was to have been a sedate and balletic affair with poets rowing out in twos and threes to face each other across a notional battle-line in allusion to the demarcating bull and there to declaim poetry at one another as loudly as possible and perhaps to hurl things if this were to become too boring. Little floating arsenals have been set adrift on the water stocked with decorous missiles: oranges, grapefruit, the odd melon, caged doves. The parody-Pope was to have adjudicated from the podium (with considerable guidance from the real one), while the two animals were to be maneuvered about until one or the other decided to attack, and then … Well, the plan was silent after that, but there were to be winners and losers, honor and disgrace, various ironic prizes. Commemorative medals might be struck. Now, however, taking in the Beast—its lumps and bulges, the ragged stitching crisscrossing its belly, the silly horn and ratty tail, but above all its immobility—Ghiberti is realizing a fact that should really have been rather obvious before, a fact that has already voided the plan and is now turning what should have been a triumph of popish whimsy into a day that almost everyone connected with it will probably want to forget. So, for a moment, Ghiberti does not answer.
“Dear Ghiberti, please correct me if I am wrong.” The Pope sounds almost genuinely puzzled. “My eyes are weak, my understanding poor, but would I be mistaken in believing that this much-vaunted Beast—forgive me, but there is no delicate way to put it—is dead?”
Vich and Faria stare forward, their faces immobile. La Cavallerizza scratches at her enormous codpiece and hisses to her husband that, just as she suspected, the animal’s horn is two or three times the size of her own. “Look to the other one,” Vitelli whispers back. “The one on its withers. That is the one it uses to rip the elephant’s belly open. Sharper and crueler, the very image of your own. …”
She sees and nods, whispering back, “Tighten me again. One more notch. …”
Arriving late, Cardinal Bibbiena slaps her on the behind as he passes by. “Dead?” he inquires of the Pope.
Dovizio puts his finger to his lips, but Leo nods slowly, his mood crystallizing about the fact. Abruptly, he heaves himself upright. “I do not care!” he exclaims defiantly. “In fact, I prefer that it is dead. Let the naumachia commence anyway! You lot!” he shouts down to the massed poets. “Go and attack it!”
“You were born, O Leo, in fair Florence … unk!” says little Pierino as his father clouts him around the ear.
Ross’rus! Ross’rus!
“Right,” Dommi shouts over the racket to Salvestro, astride the Beast. “That’s Fat Bastard up there on the platform. The scum frothing around him are Fat Bastard’s friends. That’s the elephant underneath. The bunch dressed as crows in the boats are poets, they’ve been arriving for weeks. Don’t know who’s the lunatic on that wooden tower-thing, but he’s dressed the same as Fat Bastard. What d’you want to do now?”
Salvestro shifts uncomfortably. They had worked through the
night, hacking at the cadaver he now sits astride, breaking up the cart and constructing from its timbers a frame. Dommi had knocked off the smaller of the two horns by accident, and they had nailed it to the crosspiece running across the withers to serve as a pommel. Groot had watched mutely after his force-feeding. Toward dawn he had begun to twitch. Then sweat. When they left him he was on his feet and dancing, perhaps with happiness at the fact that his bread had found its true use at last, although the rictus on his face was more suggestive of abject terror and the blue tinge to his skin of necrosis. The Beast is not just dead. It’s stuffed, the leathery products of Groot’s bakery proving ideal for fitting into those difficult niches and corners with which the Beast’s awkward gutted interior abounded. Salvestro spent several hours in there. A particularly rigid loaf is now digging into his left buttock. He looks across the lake to where the crows in the boats are being prodded forward on the end of pikes wielded—hup! hup! hup!—by a squad of Switzers, then back to the mud-masked beggars now improvising a badly coordinated war-dance to the rhythm of the Rosserus-chant, up to the faces peering down at them from the loggie, the hapless trumpeting elephant sliding in four different directions at once—is that Lucullo up there? Father Jörg is dressed as a pantomime Pope in the center of the water; Salvestro spotted him almost as soon as they got in. He is unsurprised. Nothing surprises Salvestro now. If the beast came to life and started walking beneath him, he would simply cling more firmly to the improvised pommel and bump up and down on its back. Fat Bastard on his platform. The water. It’s the wrong water, but it will have him if he wants. He smiles, not at all sure what will happen next, determined only, whatever it is, whenever and however it ends, that it be large, chaotic, noisy, with boats to overturn, barrels to smash, flailing men to hurl through the air: feats worthy of a giant.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 86