The Pop’s Rhinoceros (12 page)

“He has it over his head now. He is swaying. … Keep your balance, giant! Good, good. He is going to hurl it into the sea, Father.” Matthias picked himself up and scurried out last, leaving HansJürgen alone, still relaying his comentary from the window.

“Here he goes, one, two, three …”

“NnnGAARHH!”

Bernardo heaved the barrel and its contents head-high—teetered in the pitching boat, tottered as it yawed—then threw, the barrel catching the very edge of the wales and crashing into the water,
bang, ker-sploossh!
The splash caught him full in the face as he fell and landed with a thump in the bottom of the boat. The rope and signal line were already running quickly over the side, pulled by the sinking barrel. He grasped hold of the rope and put a turn about the oarlock. The boat rolled sideways. Balance, remembered Bernardo. To do with sides.

He leaned back, the craft settled, and he began to pay out the line more steadily. When thirty feet or more had disappeared into the water, he stopped and gave a tug on the signal line. The morning fog seemed to be clearing. He waited for his companion’s response, but the line remained slack. There had been a bang. There had been a splash. Had there been a third noise in the course of the launch? A dull report sandwiched between the bang and the splash? The seconds lengthened, and Bernardo began to grow agitated. His launch had not gone as smoothly as anticipated. Swinging the barrel by its rope had been Salvestro’s notion. When both had crashed against the mast he had peered anxiously through the spy-hole. A furious face had risen out of the blackness to press against the glass and shout at him. Flustered, he had shouted back. Simply throwing the stupid contraption had been his own idea. Catching the side of the boat was just bad luck. He tugged again, more violently this time. That second thud. The sound, perhaps, of bone on wood, of a skull dashing itself against barrel staves. … Bernardo waited. It would be better, he thought, if Salvestro were up here on the boat, directing his efforts and telling him what to do as usual, rather than down there, where he was silent and invisible, quite possibly dead and no help to him at all. Salvestro had dragged him to this muddy little island, hatched this stupid expedition, then left him to cope when it all went wrong. Yes, this was Salvestro’s fault—not his—and he was about to start hauling up the body in its coffin, when it came: a tug, a faint answering pull damped by the intervening fathoms. He tugged back with vigor. A single pull, was it? One, he recalled, meant down.

Gnaarshter-rummpssh
… shudders down the fathoms and mushrooms over the stony sea-floor. The signal rolls and spreads, dissolves and dies. Something is coming down. Surface crashings grow cloudy down here, blunt themselves, and disperse through the almost empty waters. The shoal has moved west along the coast, leaving the spawning ground to winter amongst the more temperate shelves of the Belts. Now only the stragglers remain: undernourished sprat, the oldest and sickest fish, which dart and scatter as the intruder plunges past. As the freeze moves south, a vanguard of gales sweep down from the northern gulfs to suck up autumn heat. The sea grows barer, thinner, less sustaining. Young fish
freeze. Old fish die. Sick fish weaken and sink toward the bottom. Odd swirls of current rise up to meet them. Big-bodied movements down there, in the dark.

Indifferent to season and oblivious of spawning, the cannibal herring are sluggish for now. Eels will arrive again with the turn of the year, and the herring shoal a little time after. In the meantime they resort to crunching fishlice and chasing the faint blue puffs of night-feeding ostracods, nosing the odd whiff from the bottom-sand and nipping each other’s tails. They hover about the lip of the ledge. Below them lies a lightless chasm. Above, the prospect of choicer fare. It is all a matter of lurking.

Dull twitchings and vibrations alert them first. Somewhere above, something descending; herring-thoughts turn to eating. Patrolling begins. And waiting, until there, overhead in the light-shot water, a wobbling blot appears. The cannibals gather as it grows larger and darker. More waiting. Further descent. It is fish, perhaps. Or meat. They have known meat, but rarely. Usually floats. Meat, then? Fish?

This: an awkward, hesitant, defenseless intruder plunging down the fathoms to hang on the very lip of the ledge. Below is the darkness where they dare not venture. Cannibal herring circle slowly about, nosing, tasting. Its attributes spell food, and yet … It is too big. Too hard, and strangely shaped—utterly unfishlike. Utterly unmeatlike. Juices curdle disappointingly in their stomachs. They cluster more thickly. It has tendrils—one thick, one thin—which grow up toward the death-light and twitch,
plick,
in the shielding water.
Plick, plick
. It has an eye, or a vent, set in the middle of its stomach, which spews a murky yellow glow. Wintering is the time of waiting, of weathering, of thinning the shoal. But this … This has always been out of season, always out of kilter. Its freakish reappearance is almost to be expected. Their own frustration stirs them up, reawakens appetites, provokes a dormant curiosity in the creatures overhead: the sea-crawlers and wave-thrashers, the gougers and sinkers who batter their way from nowhere to nowhere. Blunt-nosed herring butt against the dangling trespasser. Ever since the first leaky skin-boats and hacked-out klovaskepps nosed gingerly out of the river mouths and scuttled across the face of the coasts, they have been sending down such tokens. At other times, in other guises, this has been here before.

Old memories rise like bile. Cannibal herring and their ancestors have watched cold-eyed as pine dinghies, umiaks, and plank-built jekter hop between the bays. Farther out, harpoonists stand on the prows of gut-sewn karves, white sails hoisted high to attract the dull-witted basking shark, while oarsmen beat the surface and send their thuddings into the depths. Viking freighters, byrdingers, and knarrs dart across the open water to the islands of Bornholm and Gotland; flat-bottomed scaphas prefer to hug the coasts. Coracles swell into coasters, galleys into snake-headed longships. In Usedom’s lee, the
Long Serpent
is surrounded by Harald’s dragon-ships, boarded, and cleared, her crew put to the sword, and blood drips off her clinker-built sides to stain the Achter-Wasser a tasty red. Olaf Tryggvasson leaps overboard, sinks in his chain mail, rots on the bottom with his slaughtered bondsmen. Nothing is learned. The sea is air-loss; the air sea-loss.

Floating and sinking are the functions here. Surfaces are murderous. Simple enough: some herring must die for the good of the shoal. Is it then their
own
compelling cull that leads these creatures to lumber forth in their cumbersome tubs, to pitch and yaw and overturn, to thrash and drown so consummately? And why are their sacrifices so often made during storms?

It is a puzzle, or rather the pieces of a puzzle. Hulks and caravels lurch and split and spill their cargoes into the sea. Prams spring leaks. Barges overturn. Menapian traders pull snarling bears out of the Finnmark for service in the circus of Rome; short swords and Gaulish wine travel north in return. Imperial courtiers send up from the Moselle for feathers, fur, and slaves. Colleges
of nautae
carry glassware from Cologne, Samian ware, and terra sigillata. Old amber routes are rediscovered and grow crowded as the counts of commerce in distant Moesia and Illyria usher Frisians, Franks, and Saxons through the tariff gates. Border patrols and river flotillas on the Rhine and Danube cannot stem the flood of bronze, iron, wine, olive oil, a hundred forbidden trade goods; the Pax Romana is not so balmy these days. The northern sea grows thick with sinking freight as the Abodrites and Rani move north and west to cut the Geatish trade routes and force the merchants afloat: Pontic beaver skins, Birka jars of wheat and wine, rolls of
pallia fresonica,
wax. And threading passage through the Aland islands from the distant marts of Persia, overland, and up the Elbe from the cities of the south come all the coins to pay for them—sesterces, dirhems, dinars, soldi. The turning faces of emperors and caliphs mix, glitter, and sink together in the water’s terminal democracy; Hadrian and Caliph Walid, Augustus and Hisham, King Ivar Widefathom and Louis the Pious. Cracked-open casks from cracked-open hulls spill beer and stain the surface muddy brown (investigating herring grow wobbly and sink). Below, the darkening liquids urge strange meetings and conjunctions, of Frankish swords and Saxon plowshares, wolf pelts and lambskins, Charlemagne and Harun al-Raschid. Pearls and cowries deck the waters in tropical jewels, salt-cargoes turn it saline. This sea wears the clothes of its disciples, eats their food, drinks their wine; chokes on their generosity. Its swimming minions pay a wary attention, listening as finless beasts roar, bellow, neigh, and bleat from within the punctured holds. They watch, puzzled, as woolly creatures leap the rails to follow their leaders down the fathoms. They scatter, sensibly, as furious bears and panicking horses kick, and claw, and drown. They track a barge under escort the length of the coast, east from the mouth of the Vistula River, by the Gulf of Danzig and Cape Arkona on Rügen, through the Mecklenburger Bucht to Lübeck. Aboard her decks is a camel.

It is more than odd. Marten and sable skins unfold and flap down through the shoal’s tight ranks. They taste the bittersweet of pine-honey and smell the deathly stench
of liquamen
. Downwardness and dispersal apart, it is difficult to relate these things, and when the great storm came and the city sundered and offered itself entire—its surpassing shudder still palpable, echoing dimly even now in herring-memories—they could only stare blankly at the purposes laid bare before
them in the streets and crowded marts of Vineta. The very volume presses upon them purpose, but what can these thrashers and sinkers hope for from so various a tribute, a profusion so incoherent? So massive a plumb, the very question so mazed in detail, the need behind it clogged and baffled as it thuds down into the depths. Such persistence signals enormous cause, its expressions only lumpishness: millstones, ring money, walrus hides, and soapstone. Where is the question these foreign bodies frame? Bone, horn, flesh, skin; the surfacers themselves. Off Usedom’s coast some twenty winters back, two men and a boatload of their netted fellows. What can they want? What are they fishing for down here? Wondering herring note the rupture of delicate cycles: spawning, feeding, the sea’s exchanges and slow circulations. Water-layers balloon out of true with the crash of cargo, which shakes and unsettles them and unhouses them from themselves. Two years before, billowing red clay from the foot of the shoreward cliff fogged the night waters, massive stones crashed down from nowhere and bedded themselves in the soft offshore ooze. An altar followed. A cross. And now this.

The intruder tilts. The cannibals are drawn to the creature’s dim yellow eye. Tilting and toppling are perhaps those mechanisms of the air that have brought them their useless harvest. This is, perhaps, the awaited key to the drip of tribute. They peer in at the glow, and yes, this might be it, for there is a surface-creature within. A live one, too. Feeding is briefly forgotten while they observe its measured, intent maneuvers. Fascinating. Surely its queer activity will now begin to link and pattern its predecessors, to extend tendrils as far-reaching as those that stretch up toward the surface, which twitch, arc, flex, and now seem to drag its body in lurching hops across the bottom, toward the mouth of the chasm?

The cannibals follow. A herring with peeling scales and yellowish gills drifts down. They eat it. The creature teeters on the lip—there is no doubt now where its destination lies. There is no specific prohibition on the black mouth below, no known danger down there. And yet, since that first meandering investigation many winters ago, no herring has turned tail, flipped, and swum down. Quite why eludes them. This particular blackness has nothing to with the soft squirts of spawn, or the straining of creature-rich waters, or even the chomping of other herring. If another sick fish should choose this moment to offer itself, that would probably suffice to divert their curiosity. The creature seems almost to be waiting for them, hovering there while its tendrils thrash more urgently. They cannot resist as it wavers and leans, then rights itself with a jerk. Its tendrils straighten as it swings out over the edge to begin the plunge. They follow.

A more active sea would have healed this gash. Turbid currents should have shunted flocculated clays and argillites over the lip of the ledge to drift down gently as the barrel and its herring-escort do now and build up in oozy layers. A light dusting every few days or so over forty millennia would have filled this canyon to the brim. Dumping down a city smacks of impatience and desperation. Steady accumulation is the key. But, vague and island-obstructed outpourings from the debouching Oder and Peene apart, the bottom waters hereabouts are al
most motionless, almost airless, too, hence the mad flappings of the cannibals’ gills as they dive with this challenge to their dim comprehension down the ice-scoured, plantless sides of the chasm, peering in at the creature within and seeing their own agitation mirrored in its fluttering contortions—holding its head, waving its arms, voiding its food—cannibals, big creature, creature within the creature, all of them sinking down the fathoms to Vineta.