The Pop’s Rhinoceros (18 page)

The Christian Free Company then set off at a smart hobble, which slowed and grew more pitiful as they approached nearer to the village of Muud, ‘Urst and Drool leaning more heavily on their crutches, the Bandinelli twins swapping rhythmic
oohs
and
aahs
of discomfort, bandages being given a final smearing of paint, poultices moistened and refreshed, stringing out along the track until, when they reached the common, the four rangy cows grazing there looked up from their deep stupidity to stare at a column of stumbling casualties and the tethered goat ignoring the thistles it had been staked there to devour and instead busily destroying a stand of myrtle saplings left off its gleeful vandalism to eye a band of beaten warriors, bravery leaking from their wounds, carrying the glamour of the unfairly defeated, coverers of ignoble retreats, the outnumbered driven reluctantly from the last redoubt of honor. … There was also a measure of threat, it has to be said, for there was the cage, and within the cage was the Teeth. And tied behind the cage was Salvestro. The imagery was various and multiple.

There was too—and crucially—an element of urgency in the company’s limpings and hoppings, a strong signal of transience and wanting to be off. Of pursuit and even, did their obvious staunch and steadfast courage and reckless heroism not mitigate absolutely against it, something of their being in flight. Something horrible was out there, over the bluff behind them, beyond the village’s limited purview and ken, and yet in full view, bleeding through the bandages that the villagers assembling dully in their doorways eyed fearfully as the men dragged their spent bodies forward. Villagers conferred amongst themselves in low whispers as the company came to a halt before the well. The Wars, which they had heard as titillating whispers and scraps of rumor, other peoples horrors in the wilderness beyond the Alps, had come to Muud.

“Water!” cried II Capo. “Water for my men! We cannot tarry. Will no one give us water?” There was silence for a moment, before a black-bearded villager nodded to one of the others, who trotted to the well and began drawing a
bucket. “God bless you,” II Capo thanked the man, who stepped forward hesitantly, glancing to left and right at the desperadoes, to the cage and the youth tied up behind it.

“Water’s free to him who asks,” said the man.

“God preserve you,” responded II Capo, motioning for Groot and Bernardo to set him down.

“What brings you to Muud?” asked the Beard.

“Ah, my friend,” began II Capo, “there’s no need to mock us, even beaten as we are. We must be off, and if you. … Well, we must be gone. We thank you for the water. …”

“Mock you? I asked civilly enough,” protested the man. “Tell me now, what brings you here?”

“Can you truly not know?” A little knot of men and women was forming about the man, watching anxiously as these words flew back and forth. “Can Innsbruck blaze so fierce and its river run red and still you do not know?” One or two of the villagers shook their heads. “It is the Wars that have brought us here!”

“There’s no wars here,” the Beard said stolidly, but his voice carried no weight.

“And then at, at—” II Capo gestured down the road as though the name were too painful to utter.

“At Slime?”

“Slime!” It was a howl of anguish.

“Slime is but a day from here!”

“Slime
was
but a day from here, my friend. Today it is no more. They were too many, and too well armed, and the acts committed … We are hardened soldiers, not good men like yourselves, we too have killed when necessary, but the acts committed on the good people of Slime …” Other villagers had been lured from their homes by the prospect of juicy tit-bits of gossip. They surrounded the black-bearded man and swathed him in an appalled silence. II Capo seemed to gather himself within the horrors of Slime. “The main body will not find you; set your mind at rest on that, my friend—”

“Main body? Main body of what?”

“—but the forage parties will be here tonight, perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps they will miss you, too. We tried to beat them off, but… But …” It seemed that II Capo might almost be sobbing. “Yesterday I captained a hundred men. A full hundred!” He choked back his tears, and suddenly his voice came like a clarion out of grief and disorder and dark violence: “Pray with me!”

“What!” the man exclaimed, but behind him his own kinsmen and women, children, friends, neighbors, enemies, were bending to kneel in the mud of Muud, and in front of him the gallant wounded of the Christian Free Company were groaning in pain as they did the same, and so he too knelt.

“God!” II Capo’s voice rang out over the impromptu congregation. “God
Receive into your arms the souls of my brave hundred, good men who died in protecting the poor villagers of Slime.

“God!” II Capo sounded a desolate tocsin of waste and horror. “God! Guard and watch over the poor villagers of Muud, gentle lambs to the lion’s claws, for they are innocents and do not deserve their fate, it being so terrible.

“And God!” Now he was wrathful, a fire-hardened sword of vengeance hanging over bestial skulls. “God! Flay their flesh and grind their bones, let their souls be racked and tortured with hot irons, as they did to the poor villagers of Slime, without mercy and eternally, for they are abominations,
abominations!
Vile creatures, scum, filth, they are the … they are the …” II Capo stuttered, spluttered, choked on the hateful syllable.

“What?” asked a villager.

“They are the, the … I cannot say it, I cannot. We must go. We have stopped too long.”

“You cannot leave now!” a woman’s voice cried.

“For the love of God, protect us!” came another, and soon the whole crowd began to clamor, many already weeping and begging for protection, in the midst of which II Capo resumed his prayer.

“They are,” he declaimed in a voice of dread, hauling himself forward out of his basket and upright, wobbling, turning to gesture at the only one not to have knelt, the prisoner in his cage, the Teeth, whose jaw muscles Salvestro saw from behind as they swelled into great muscled knots, whose bared rictus he saw reflected in the villagers’ stupid, terrified faces, in their horror of what was to befall them,” the French!”

Pandemonium.

It usually went like that. After the hapless villagers had implored their reluctant saviors to stay, sentries would be posted and travelers on the routes leading to the village would be encouraged to take some other path by men supposedly shivering from a terrible plague raging unchecked farther up the road. They would stay a few days, a week at most, but it was that first moment, that crisis of terror in which the villagers’ placid world seemed on the brink of shattering and crashing about their ears, that gave, as II Capo termed it, the best yield. Rings would be slipped off fingers or from around necks. Little boxes would be unearthed from the packed dirt of hovel floors and their contents magically presented. There was sometimes a stone or two, fake often enough, but touching and accepted.

Thereafter, a slow decline. Feasted like kings to begin with, by the second or third day the company was usually supping on vegetable stews, and the beer or wine that had at first flowed so freely now suffered puzzling accidents, souring, spilling, simply disappearing. Then, when another day had gone by without the promised apocalypse, the villagers would begin to mutter amongst themselves, to avoid the men who camped idly about their miserable huts and barns, to wonder
if they had perhaps panicked too soon. The women would skirt about them, the men eye them uneasily, and sometimes the sentries would pick up a boy slipping through the line with a basket of eggs and an implausible tale, and Salvestro, the “captive,” with the Teeth the visible evidence of an invisible peril, would feel the aura of the villagers’ fear peel off him and crumble like Powder Jack’s facepaint. II Capo was tuned to that. The villagers looked at Salvestro and the Teeth. II Capo looked at the villagers. The company looked to their leader. He knew. When the moment came they melted away like darkness chased by light, and then always, one morning, they would be gone.

Salvestro gathered wood, built fires, watched their embers flare and pulse with the whims of the wind, ebbing to dull glows and sinking into the surrounding darkness. Sometimes around dusk the Chevalier would rise, seek out the Teeth, who sat alone and apart, and the two of them would stalk off together. He followed them one night and saw the Chevalier’s blade flashing and mazing the thickening dark, the Teeth a little way off, and then the blade swung flat about, hissing at the other’s head, which neither flinched nor jerked but made a tiny quick movement as a hand moving to crush a fly in midflight, and there was a dull, jarring sound. The Teeth had caught the blade in his mouth. He released it and both men nodded satisfaction before resuming their strange mock duel.

Sometimes Pandulfo read to him from his poem, bloody battles and strange, contextless heroisms: I1 Gran Capitan smashing multitudes at Cerignola, Paulo Orsini drowning in his armor after Gaeta, the inexplicable calm of the Count of Pitigliano watching Trivulzio’s men cross the Adda … Each episode ended with the beating of a desperate retreat covered by mysterious forces that, although I1 Dottore did not say so, might well have been identified with themselves, the Christian Free Company. Either that, or the cutting out of the French from the body of Italy “like a wart,” one of his favorite expressions. Bernardo would often listen, too, though he seemed more mesmerized by the sight of Pandulfo’s eye and index finger moving over the black squiggles than by the story itself. Only during the harangues against the French, which were lengthy and numerous, did he pay any attention to the words, thumping the ground softly with his fist and saying, “That’s right, that’s right,” until Salvestro would tell him to shut up.

Most of all, though, he would sit with Groot and Bernardo. In a previous incarnation, Groot had been, or had always wanted to be, a baker. “Up in the morning before everyone else, stoking those ovens, rest of the world asleep,” he would ramble fondly. He knew a great deal about different flours and meals and would draw fine distinctions between them. His share of their loot would be spent on bricks and mortar, a little shop with high chimneys, earthenware mixing bowls too heavy to lift, long-handled spatulas … He described how one could tell if a loaf was baked through by tapping a knuckle on the bottom and listening for a sound like a drumstick striking stiff leather. So they passed their evenings gabbing, with Bernardo throwing in confused recollections of a woman, a stone hut on a hot rocky hillside, a man he had seen from the rail of a boat that took him
away over the sea. But when it came to Salvestro’s turn he found himself at a loss, unable to rake the coals from a fire dowsed in distant, placid waters and buried in a pathless forest, unwilling to offer the hard grit of memory or invent substitutes, and so, in place of his past, he spoke about Vineta.

From Muud to Krems, from Krems to Schlien, from Schlien to Wys, and on to Orbach, and Cruuen, and Grunewald, and on: clusters of hovels with their gaunt livestock, and conniving inhabitants, their woodpiles, mud, and treachery. Winters made the villagers meaner, less credulous, and the company overbold. Four times they had fled with torches fanning out over the fields behind them and the thud of hooves and shouting in their ears. Two of those times children had been found, a boy and a girl, their necks snapped and the bodies otherwise untouched, left carelessly, in full view. The villages were Proztorf and Marne: the Proztorf girl, the Marne boy. No one talked about them. There had been alarms and hasty retreats.

Salvestro had soon rebelled against his role in the pantomime. Being tied to the cage was dull and uncomfortable. He preferred to swagger about with the rest of the company, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a feather in it and a large, blunt machete. Once he had a woman in a barn. It was late summer, a blazing heat, the air was choked with the smell of straw. She was older than him, with red hair and very ugly. She rolled him onto his back and galloped him until the sweat poured off them.

The Christian Free Company passed peddlers with their mules loaded high with boxes and bales, little bands of pilgrims, shepherds moving their flocks up and down the pastures. They took drovers’ trails and forest paths, weaving east and west through the forested plains and lake-spattered aprons of rock and grass behind which the mountains lay like chipped, ice-scoured teeth, the bones of long-dead giants. One summer they crossed those mountains.

The foothills rose in successive ridges and peaks, their calm grassed slopes rising and breaking about outcrops of granite, growing harsher and more fissile with the altitude. Mountain pines with stunted branches forced their roots into the thin soils. Springs gouged deep channels and ravines, splashing the gray boulder waste with jet black. Salvestro thought he had never felt water so cold. They had spent the first winter this side of the mountains on the high slopes in the thin air, and it had killed Low Simon. The second had driven them south into the Duchy for the hardest months. They crept east and then south, left the road after Ferrara, and struck out across country for the Valle di Comacchio. They came to a tiny hamlet called Viemme.

“The village is called Viemme,” II Capo announced beforehand. It was wrong from the first. The villagers were sullen and too dull-witted. II Capo had blustered, haranguing them for a full hour before the good people of Viemme had turned to each other in doubt and worry, another hour before the bargain had been struck, and thereafter they had been ignored as though this transaction were no different from buying a yearling or a hogshead of young wine. Viemme sat in
swampy ground some hundreds of yards from the shore of a vast lake. The land about was as flat as the water, and they had posted no sentries. Salvestro overheard Sigismundo talking in a low voice with II Capo, who said in reply, “Nor me. We leave tomorrow night.”

They awoke surrounded by soldiers.

How much did this Prior desire to know? How much must he dredge up to satisfy him? The Thought was still present, but quiet now, attending him in this deliberation. He remembered the Spanish captain’s words as Groot and Bernardo bent to pick up II Capo: “Not him. Leave him.” They had been marched in column with the crossbowmen to either side. He had looked back at the first cry. The villagers had wasted no time. II Capo was on all fours, trying to crawl away. A few villagers, five or six, measured and deliberate in their motions, were taking turns kicking him. He heard high wails cut off abruptly by the softer reports of the kicks, a moment of silence, the noise start up again, stop, start up again, kicks and screams and kicks and screams. Eventually there was silence.