The Pop’s Rhinoceros (2 page)

The first men never returned. Peat-bogs, beech scrub, and moorland lay undisturbed for centuries while fish entered by the Belts, spawned in the brackish waters, grew fat on sea snails, brown shrimps, bristle worms, and soft-shelled crabs. Atlantic salmon sped east with the sea trout and grayling to spawn in the great rivers whose mouths in summer would choke with the bodies of spent lampreys until shrieking gulls and goosanders plucked them from the water. Flounder, dab, sand eels, and lumpsuckers grazed the saline bottom waters while gudgeon, pike, and dace hovered about the freshwater outflows. Cod spawned in Arkona Deep, grew huge, ate each other. The spring and autumn herring founded their colonies in the nearby shallows off the islands of Rügen and Use-dom. A million undisturbed existences floated, swam, spawned, and died before the first keel cut the waves above and the nets descended to haul the sea’s fat harvest ashore. Invasions, battles, and slaughter were a vague clangor, dim thuds in the deathly air; the pale bodies sank quietly, watched by lidless, curious eyes. Spars and planks drifted off the exploded coast. Dim shapes sank amidst the skerries.

Herring-lives circled such interruptions; supple cycles of eating and breeding stretched to allow their passage. Storms had brought no more than the puny challenge of barrel staves and broken oars in the past. As the rising wind churned the surface they would sink, whole shoals diving for shelter in the lee of the cliff, until the swell died down and they could rise to feed. This storm was different, its course bending away from them, its first shudders familiar enough, but then exceeding
all they had known before. They dived and waited, but the storm only roiled and thudded overhead, a bludgeoning throb reaching deeper than ever before. In the deep off Usedom, they shook as the tempest tore loose sea-grass and kelp, sent fogs of clay billowing out of the trenches, buried its violence in the depths. They never suspected the transaction taking place above, so stubbornly held by the spit running off the line of the coast, so violent a wresting as the waves clawed this gift for them from the land. The thrashing surface-creatures above were yielding up a surpassing tribute to the waiting shoals, greater and more intricate, different in kind as well as scale, and more enduring.

The herring knew the coastal cities as compacted secrets, the ends of tunnels emerging at night under a moonless sky. Looping wakes converged there, linking each to each, one confirming the next as the vessels passed overhead with their dim shouts and the pressure of the hulls fumbling dully in the depths like minor showers on their way to somewhere else. The herring tracked them home to port, suffered gray death in the nets that were hauled aboard with the full-grown fish strung about the middle, trying to jackknife free and drowning as the threads tightened over their gills. A foaming cloak of scum protected these places from prying herring eyes, thickening about the piers, breaking up in the wash beyond the headlands. Such a traffic, such a thickening of these solitary creatures. Hungry places, these cities. But beyond the vague maw, the strange tightening and deadening of currents, where were the teeth, the gullet, the stomach?

This: felt first as a distant disturbance in the storm’s fury, a vast crumbling or drawn-out collapse. Out of the battered cliff, great shards of clay were coming loose. Slabs of sandstone tumbled free, crashing down the sheer edge and dropping into the deep. The sea took great swings at the spit, cutting away until the weight above drove down its own foundation and followed it into the waters. A massive submergence, a vast pulse of pressure, clay misting and clogging their eyes and gills, clearing and revealing to them the scale of the displacement. Greater than the greatest vessel, this awaited mystery still locked in the aftermath of its deliverance, too strange and exceeding them all as it lowered itself to the seabed. There it was, laid out below the shoal, with all its people, buildings, carts, and livestock stretching farther than they could see with the reek they had tasted before only from a distance. Here it was thick and strong, all the tantalizing stenches blended together and curling thickly through the water. They waited and felt the surface grow calm. They saw each other’s fat silver bodies turn this way and that before the yielded gift. And then the first few flipped their tails and descended. The thrashing creatures above had delivered as tribute a city.

The older herring swam with its citizens, circled their temples, and overlooked their marts. Paddling in and out the doors and windows, they sought out the clumsy giants in flowing robes who promenaded through the drowned streets. Lurching in the waters’ flow, they were more like plants than men. The herring rose, and sank, and rose again. Other shoals gathered about them. The upper waters glittered with fry. They would never forget the pact forged in the
storm. The city would grow familiar to them as the sea-floor itself, and in time indistinguishable.

Gifts and years: bladderwrack creeps closer to the shore, loamy soils flocculate and wash away. Near tidelessness means the survival of low landscapes and improbable islands. Sharks’ teeth and whalejaws are the oldest bones in the sea. Weed rafts drift and are blown by northerly gusts into estuaries and lagoons. Sinking canvas wheels down into the darkness, goblets and bracelets glitter and are eclipsed. Spear shafts, scabbards, rope-ends, and corn sacks take their own trajectories through the fathoms. Smashed hulls lurch while mastheads dive, but all are voided and deposited on the seabed. Surface-creatures drown. If the ice was a barrier no object could breach, then the sea that took its place will accept all; a subtler poison, for everything sinks in the end. The herring understand. Not since the city—and that was a hundred generations before—have they clustered so thickly and so curiously as now. The tribute from above is always puzzling and clumsy, always awkward and misshapen; this is no exception. And yet it neither floats nor sinks, seeming to hover in the water like themselves. They move closer, and it begins to shake. They feel the waters agitate around it. A booming sound resonates with their otoliths, and their fins begin to twitch. It is almost invisible in the murk of these depths; something hangs beneath it. What? Is this finally the key to the mystery of the city? Something snakes away above, tautens as they circle slowly, comes loose, and disappears. The larger fish butt against the intruder. These are herring waters and this is the coldest water-layer. But perhaps they were mistaken, for it seems to be sinking now, tumbling down out of sight. Some turn away as deepwater currents take the intruder, weird tribute from above, drifting in the saltless tideless waters fed by meltwater springs, racked by memories of ice, scourged by serrated coasts, darker and deeper and farther down toward the city. Lost? No, not quite. Blunt herring noses butt against its sides. Their curiosity sustains it; its own weirdness buoys it up. But what? In this sea a barrel is sinking, and in this barrel is a man.

They had practiced in Ewald’s pond, amongst the greasy weeds and fish-bones. Islands of leafmold drifted in from the beech copse and stank along with the part-dried fish and stagnant black water rising off its scum-flecked surface. It lay behind the herring shed set back fifty yards from the shore. The summer before last Ewald had tried to drain it. To the left, the ground fell away; a trench cut through the turf and sodden earth beneath would draw the pond water off, but the sides of the cutting had collapsed a day later and the pond filled up accordingly. Returning from the market at Wollin, Ewald had contemplated his pond’s reappearance. He had fetched beer and sat at the back of the herring-shed. When he had drunk himself into a morose rage, he had primed his fox-traps, then thrown them one by one into the stagnant water so he would never be tempted
to try so foolish an enterprise again. They were still there, unsprung. He had warned the two of them, tried to discourage them, but they had gone ahead anyway.

“Higher, Bernardo! Higher!”

They had built a derrick, but it had not worked well, so now three poles lashed together in a tripod with a longer one balanced in the fork served the same purpose. From one end of the pole a barrel was suspended over the pond. From the other hung Bernardo, who clambered up and down its length as muffled commands issued from within the tun. They had caulked its staves and cut a tiny window in the side into which fitted the glass filched in Nürnberg, then cased the whole in leather with lacings for the window and the top.

“Now down, Bernardo! Down!”

He heard a
whump
as the barrel hit the water, felt it sink, then settle with six inches of barrel showing above the surface of the pond, the waterline cutting his viewing hole in two. The barrel had been borrowed from Ewald’s store—inevitably, it stank of fish. It gave him splinters, too. He saw the pole from which he was suspended running back overhead and Bernardo clinging to it like an over-grown sloth. He tried a wave, and the barrel rocked alarmingly. The ballast-rock would cure that. Bernardo waved back, a great extravagant wave, which was actually Bernardo losing his grip, falling, and releasing the pole, which reared up at one end and fell heavily at the other. He braced himself—
dunt
—a direct hit on the barrel, which tipped slowly onto its side, then overturned, and he found himself upside-down in utter darkness and panicked.

Afterward, prising the fox-trap off Bernardo’s foot while they dripped and shivered before the fire, contemplating the necessary repairs to their vessel, lying leaking by the pond, he was forced to concede that punching out the glass had been the course of action most likely to turn mishap into disaster.

“That was coming here in the first place,” muttered Bernardo. He yelped as the trap came free.

It had been so sudden, so swift a descent in the lightless water, and the dark so close; choking him in an instant, the water and his own terror somehow dissolved in one another and the world turned upside-down. He could not stand it for a second, had to get out. He had punched out the glass and the water had rushed in. He was nailed inside the tub. He had begun to fight and scream, but only barked his knuckles, and the water had a dreadful thickness to it, like molasses. He had punched out the glass in a panic, and Bernardo had strode in there to rescue him.

“Shut up, Bernardo,” he told him now. He had been lucky. Not so much the rescue—Bernardo did not know fear, and fox-traps would not teach him—no, in a crisis Bernardo’s presence could be counted on. Nor in the manner of the rescue, which was straightforward, a simple lifting of the barrel and its contents from pond to shore. But in the man himself, there fortune had favored him. By himself he could barely shift their contraption when empty and on dry land. His partner
stood almost seven feet tall and was built like an oak; he had lifted the vessel over his head, filled with water and himself, then waded back to shore with a fox-trap on his foot. Bernardo was not clever, but he was big.

Later, hungry and cold as they lay in damp clothes, breathing smoke from the temperamental fire, the two men tried to rest. For a while the hut was silent but for their tossings and turnings. Neither slept. Tomorrow they would restore the glass and experiment with the ballast-stone. They would work with a strained enthusiasm to ready themselves and cheer their spirits, and in his own case to banish the fear that had got a grip on him with their late mishap. He was thinking that the pond was nothing to the sea, whose waves had advanced on the near inlet throughout the past weeks’ effort, seeming sometimes to beckon him on and sometimes to warn him off. The day after tomorrow Ewald had agreed to lend them the boat. He shifted irritably on the damp earth and heard Bernardo do the same. At length, the other man rose. They were both awake, and there was no use pretending otherwise. He knew what would follow.

“Tell me again,” Bernardo said. “Tell me about the city.”

They had practiced in Ewald’s pond, but it had not gone well. It was deep and still and black as night, and he had almost drowned. He drew a deep breath and stared into the fire. The city… They were too close now not to believe in it. The day after tomorrow he would be in the barrel, sinking down, the fathoms to Vineta. There would be no one then to carry his lumpish craft to safety. There it was, leaning against the wall, the severed head of a monster, its black mouth open to swallow him. The glass glinted on the ground beside it. Oak chips crackled in the fire and sent a harsh white smoke into the rafters, where Ewald’s herring hung on strings. It was the same smell, the same sight. Salvestro thought back to his mother twisting her knife in the fishes’ white underbellies, spitting out the guts like a mouthful of worms.

“Well?” demanded Bernardo.

He sighed inwardly.

“There was a city,” he began, “and to the men and women who lived there it was the greatest city on earth. There was a war that lasted a hundred years and a storm that lasted a night—”

“Stop!” Bernardo interrupted him. “You’ve missed out the part about what the city was like.”

“How many times have I told you this story, Bernardo?” he retorted. “If you know it that well, why don’t you tell it yourself?”