The Pop’s Rhinoceros (23 page)

“So you’re going to slit my throat, are you, you filthy savage?” spat the other.

“I’ll deal with you myself.”

He swung the hook in front of him, his eyes seeming to fix on Salvestro, then to lose him, to find him again. His face was bloodless, and Salvestro realized that he was terrified, panicking, and these words were for himself.

“Come now, Ewald. It was a stupid joke. Why would I kill you? Don’t be so stupid. …” As he spoke, Ewald stepped forward and swung. He ducked, the bow of the hook glancing painlessly off his head.

“They should have drowned you like they said. Like they did your mother. That’s what we’re going to do. Drown you, or hang you on this hook and burn you.”

He was edging around the table.

“You had to come back, didn’t you. Well, I was waiting for you. And now I’ve got you.” He swung again. Salvestro rocked back, not thinking anymore, only
watching the other’s movements, weight shifting from foot to foot. “Why do you think I came back?” Ewald’s voice was a whining imitation of Salvestro’s.” I know why you came back. We all know why you—”

Salvestro moved forward suddenly and caught Ewald by the throat. His other hand drove forward into the stomach and up under the ribs. Ewald bent forward, choking. The hook fell with a clang to the floor. Ewald followed. Salvestro looked down at him, then dropped, sitting astride his chest, knees pinning the winded man’s arms to the dirt floor. He picked up the hook. Nice heft, sharp.

“Please …” Ewald gasped, but Salvestro seemed not to hear him. He waved the hook to get the feel of it. He was tired, his stomach full of beer. If he were to drive the hook through Ewald’s eye, he would be able to drag the corpse around like a log. This hook was for dragging logs. That was its purpose.

“I came back,” Salvestro said, looking about him, “because … I didn’t come back to kill you, Ewald.”

“Liar,” hissed Ewald.

“If I’m lying,” said Salvestro, “why haven’t I stuck you through the eye with this hook?” He got up, throwing the hook on the table. “You always were a coward.”

There was a long silence. Then a few snuffles started up. Ewald’s. Ewald gathered himself.

“You have to get out of here,” he said. “Leave the island. Now. Tonight.” “Tonight?”

The sounds of the sea were very faint, soft rolls of noise somewhere outside. Nearer, a breeze slid through the scrub, scratching dryly at bare twigs and branches. There were little rustlings and silences. The embers hissed and popped in the hearth. The next instant, these sounds were overtaken by a shout from outside the hut. Several voices together, but shouting a single word.

“Heathen!”

“Heathen!”
The second shout came louder than the first. HansJürgen stopped, cocked an ear, then moved forward again.

“What are we doing?” asked Bernardo for what seemed like the twentieth time.

“Lead the way,” HansJürgen directed.

The giant moved more stealthily than he would have believed possible, picking a way through the undergrowth, seeming to sense the low overhanging branches and, when they had quit the path, swerving about impenetrable sprawling bramble patches to find narrow channels and gaps, paths of least resistance. The moon was low and miserly, disappearing for long minutes behind banks of invisible cloud. It came into view now, blank and luminous, gauzed in vapor. The ground rose before them, then steepened. A tracery of branches tessellated the
dimly lit sky. Bernardo’s broad back swung and dipped before him as they climbed the bank. He was a large, patient animal nudging aside the whippy trunks and branches. From the brow they looked down onto the beach. Brine and wood-smoke in the air. Brüggeman’s place was a block of darkness and showed no lights. His excitement was feverish and papery over the deep well of his exhaustion. Bernardo ran down the bank, bringing himself up short at the bottom. He followed, the turf having the dead feel of the coarse sand beneath. The sea lapped and washed at the shore fifty paces away. The door was half-open. Little scraping sounds came from within.

The fire was almost dead. Ewald sat on the floor at the far end of the room. He was trying to pull himself upright as the two of them approached. One of his eyes had closed; the other watched expressionlessly until Bernardo towered over him. Dried and drying blood were mixed on his face. His head jerked to the right, once, twice. Something had been poured into his hair. The two men stood in the near dark, looking down at him, hearing the wheeze of his lungs. Ewald shifted again, winced. His mouth was puffy and shapeless. This time he used his arm, indicating again to the right. HansJürgen saw that they had broken his fingers.

Outside again, along the beach, which was striated with bands of shingle and fine sands running in strips along the shoreline so that the two men would pad noiselessly for a minute or two until a spit of pebbles thickened and spread to cross their path along the strand and the shingle crunched beneath their footfalls. Then they moved up the beach. Bernardo had said nothing after Brüggeman’s place. HansJürgen panted after him, the sand sucking the strength from his legs. He was falling behind when he saw them, a red glow of torchlight in the darkness ahead of them. And in that moment he saw a silhouette pass between that light and themselves, a figure habited and cowled like himself. Bernardo’s footsteps quickened and he could no longer keep pace with the giant. The darkness swallowed him and he was alone.

He stopped and rested his hands on his knees. He wanted to lie down in the cold sand and sleep. He wanted to sleep more than anything else in the world. Farther up the beach, the cluster of torches appeared to him as an eye of fire, shifting and melting in the black of the night. It was moving toward the sea, down the beach. He began again to walk. From time to time, men’s bodies would pass before the shapeless glow. The figure bent double in the middle would be Salvestro. They were marching him down to the water. It was not too late. Nearer: he would fall as they clubbed him about the legs and head. They would club him as he rose. Their shouts were audible now, though echoless and flat on the beach. Then came the much larger shape he had been waiting for, the torch-light seeming to crowd and throb about it. He gathered himself and ran forward as fast as he was able, toes stabbing into loose shingle, throat burning. Now the torches were scattering and whirling no more than a hundred paces away, the shouting at once louder and abbreviated to yelps and sharp cries. Faster and faster
he ran; faster and faster and faster, hardly able to keep his head raised, to look ahead, even, blind to the dark pillar whirling out of the night, rising out of the sand, falling like a sky of granite to meet and fell him with a single blow, which seemed to brush him softly, for he felt nothing, and which seemed a phantasm of his own suspicion made hard flesh and bone, for it was Gerhardt he met in the soundless clangor of their collision. Then his falling began, which seemed to go on and never to end.

“Is he dead?”

“No.”

Large crabs painted fiery red like torches shifted and slid about in the black sand, grouping and scattering, melting into one another, then shooting apart. Two moons hung in the sky, wearing faces like the men leaning over him. His senselessness was imperfect, lying there.

“He’s dead.”

“Shut up, Bernardo.”

“What shall we do with him, then?”

“Get him off this damned beach. Us too.”

He had come to in the different darkness of the woods, slung over Bernardo’s shoulder like a sack of fish. His temple throbbed where he had been struck. Several times, the two men had stopped and crouched low, saying nothing until the source of their alarm, whatever it was, had passed them by. At the eastern lip of the sky a tongue of light slavered and drooled blue. HansJürgen asked to be set down. Salvestro’s face was swelling badly and his left leg dragged. Otherwise he appeared unharmed. Dawn was breaking as they reached the monastery. Florian awaited them at the gate.

“Where were you?” he asked as soon as they approached.

HansJurgen ignored the question. “The Abbot?” he demanded.

Florian looked away. “An hour ago. It was very violent at the end.” Florian had been his confessor. HansJürgen touched him on the arm. Florian shook himself. “Gerhardt has declared himself already. They are all in the cloister now.”

“Father Jörg?”

“Not him. He is in the Abbot’s cell, in prayer.”

The cloister fell silent as they walked in. Gerhardt was expressionless, watching the four of them. HansJürgen motioned for the others to stay and walked across alone, the monks parting before him, closing behind him. He felt their eyes on his back, their coldness. What had Gerhardt sucked out of them? He climbed the steps.

Jörg was kneeling at the Abbot’s side. He crossed himself as HansJürgen entered, then rose.

“Are they safe, our guests?”

“They are.”

“Good. Your face is bruised.” The Prior had changed, had reached the moment
where his purposes might be understood. HansJürgen imagined smooth pebbles heated to unimaginable temperatures burning in the other’s chest. “Gerhardt means to oust me, you know that?”

HansJürgen nodded. There was a short silence.

“He will not,” Father Jörg said abruptly. “Assemble them in the chapter-house. I will address them there.”

HansJürgen turned to leave. Sunlight was stabbing at the clouds as he regained the cloister. Again the monks’ eyes fixed him, colder than fishes’, and his words seemed to sink in wet sand, so silent was their reception. But Gerhardt was smiling, his moment come, too. He was ushering his followers through the doors, the disdain as they passed him unmistakable on their faces. The Prior’s creature. He wanted to shout that he was not, that he was as unsettled as they.

HansJürgen slipped in behind them and took his place on the gradines. Gerhardt’s men shunned him, Gerhardt himself moving to and fro among the monks, whispering urgently, persuasively. The younger brothers twisted about on their seats, the elders watched hawk-eyed. They understood the transaction taking place here. He saw Florian amongst them. Lines were being redrawn, and the chapter-house buzzed and hummed as Gerhardt’s faction swelled. The ruffians slumped outside the door were inexplicable as the islanders, as the Prior’s scrawlings in this very hall. As the collapse of the church. The brothers craved explanation. Hurry, HansJürgen urged his Prior. Georg glanced over at him with ill-concealed contempt. Yes, there was no doubt now: he was tainted, infected, wedded to the madness of their Prior’s impenetrable schemes. Gerhardt’s sanity would have no place for him. The Prior’s creature: how had he become that? What had he been thinking, chasing rumors around the island? He looked down at his lap, and the whispers grew louder, doubting tongues flapped harder. Then, quite suddenly, there was silence. Father Jörg stood in the doorway.

“I say with Cyrus of the House of God, Let the house be builded, the place where they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Will any man here speak against me?”

There was silence. Their eyes followed him as he walked the gauntlet between the tiers, then turned to face them again.

“I say with the Lord, to Jacob as Isiah saw, To the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof. That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.”

Again he paused, and this time the question was written on his face as he scanned the faces before him. No one spoke.

“Henry the Lion stood here once. Stood here, I say, and saw a church. And built the church he saw to stand guard over a heathen city. This church, my brothers. Our church, where we have prayed and labored together. The lives of the Israelites were made bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, in brick, and in all
manner of service in the field: I feel your weariness, my brothers. We have surveyed the forests and marshes, tramped the shores and fields, walked among the people, and the scales have fallen from our eyes. We have unrolled the world’s fabric and spread it over these walls and wondered at the sights we saw therein and been sometime dazzled: I stand in your blindness, my brothers. Now will you stand with me in mine?”

Again his eye roved over the faces turned toward him. HansJürgen felt himself flush as the Prior’s gaze swept past. Gerhardt’s head was inclined to Georg, who sat behind him and murmured in his ear. He was nodding imperceptibly. The other monks kept glancing at him and looking away.

“In my blindness I see a city of towers, and bells within them and fair churches below them,” said Father Jörg. “I see us in the streets which wind between these churches. We are returning home, for this is a distant city and difficult to reach. A hard journey lies ahead of us, and yet our hearts are light. For our church will be restored. Our church will be built up by masons and laid on a new foundation. The ruler of this city has sent them to do our bidding, which is more than we might do alone. They are his gift to us; they are our petition to him. He is whom we must seek. In my blindness we have found him. We are looking back on this day and laughing at ourselves for ever doubting that we would. We are forgiving those who doubted most and praising those who doubted least. I share your doubts, my brothers, but the church is broken and will not mend. We cannot stay. Walk with me in my blindness, my brothers.”