The Pop’s Rhinoceros (29 page)

All three move forward, Faria and the Pope in a broken stroll with pauses for emphasis and vague hand gestures. Vich finds himself setting off, then halting abruptly while the other two continue an extra pace, or overshooting them by the same. He turns, and the two men are behind him somehow, walking away. He follows and they stop, so he stops. The two of them continue.

“Holiness, His Majesty Dom Manolo would have me convey his keen anticipation of your gift,” announces Faria. They are halted before a bed of bright peonies. “He has commissioned a fine gilt cabinet for its display which will be inscribed with his thanks. Dom Manolo wishes it known he understands the value of such a donation.”

“A mere bauble,” murmurs the Pope. They have crossed the terrace at a ragged diagonal. Ahead lie the sweeping curves of the steps that link the first two terraces. Faria is protesting.

“The whole of Portugal will understand your gift, and every Portuguese, whether he serves against the Saracen or loads his vessel in the Indies or works humbly in the fields, or towns, even in Rome herself. Every toiler at home, every campaigner and trader to the far shores of Afric or the Indies, will know behind their own callused hand lies a greater hand. Surrounded with the wailing of savages, they will hear your call. As their bodies fail, they will see their souls take wing. …”

“You are too poetic,” mutters the Pope.

“… a great enough crown to girdle an empire. A wall of gold to defend the defenders of the faith. Dom Manolo expressly commands my words to you, though their extravagance be my own. Would that our mutual grants and treaties hold good into eternity and beyond.”

“Dom Manolo has hitherto sealed our compacts most generously.” The Pope is gazing farther up the hill. The Ambassador nods gravely.

“The meager tokens in our gift are ever at your disposal.”

“Your late token thrives, as does the compact he seals. I confess myself enamored of the beast. In eternity, you say? Or does Dom Manolo?”

“He might not ask without leave. Nor ask for leave without instruction. Nor seek instruction empty-handed.”

“Dom Manolo’s courtesy makes me mindful of my own. As the mason in the arts of stone, so His Majesty in generosity. In good faith, how might I instruct either?”

“Kings seek guidance as masons do, else the edifice exceeds proportion and collapses—”

“I would ask, Holiness,” Vich breaks in at this point, “why it is that our late petition, lodged by us some months back, far from receiving your clerks’ attention, seems only to have reached the cooks’ and even there is mocked by scullions and turnspits, for my man overheard them not a week past, he said its misdirection was a matter of policy, a mark of disfavor, too. …” The Pope’s expression is undeniably cold, growing colder as his sentence unwinds its coils and begins to stumble over its own wilder outgrowths, finally collapsing into silence, himself red-faced, his audience politely silent.

“You mentioned proportion?” the Pope prompts Don João. Their conversation continues, Faria’s provocations edging forward and his counterpart’s silence growing ever more furious, until a thrust at “that empty-handed type of Christian” breaks the dam of his restraint.

“Damn you, Faria!” He cannot keep silent any longer. “Damn your thread bare insolence. …”

“Threadbare, eh?
Baron
of Llauri, tell me, how many fishing smacks constitute the fleet of great Llauri? Remind me, please, of its paved streets and great halls, I beg you, Don Jerònimo. Describe for me its cathedrals and churches, its numberless armies, those feared men of
Llauri. …”

The Pope stands between them, hands clasped before him, inclining his head to each as he speaks. Don Jerònimo grows heated under Faria’s gibes, speaking faster and more vehemently until every second word is in Spanish and every other a curse. The Pope’s expression is of mild surprise. Why are ambassadors so turbulent?

“Come,” he commands abruptly, and begins climbing the stone steps that lead to the second terrace. His escorts fall silent and follow.

Just as the steps that lead to the second level swell in a wide semicircle from the front of the terrace, so the receding tiers of the staircase that will take them to the wilder garden are gouged from the back. The three men find themselves in a place of bare white stones where the Pope stands a little apart from Faria and Vich, as if their bickering has driven him off. His large head turns from side to side. His eyes sweep up the empty steps.

“In Llauri—” Don Jerònimo begins to speak, but stops as his voice returns louder than before, the words garbled in their ricochet off the facing steps. Faria glares at him, but the Pope seems not to hear this noise. Something holds his attention in the garden above. Set back some ten or twenty yards, a canopy of foliage clears the sight-line of the wall. A crash sounds from somewhere within it.

“Christendom has its natural enemies,” the Pope says softly. “The Turk, the Saracen and Moor, all those who would blind their peoples to Christ’s teaching
and domain … And then there are those who are born blind and must be made to see. Are they our enemy, too? Perforce their eyes must be opened, and yet when they resist our ministry so fiercely, when their sight is restored by extinction, I wonder what kind of enemy is this?” He turns to his companions as though they might serve him with an answer. Sunlight skates off the blank stones. He hears undergrowth rustling and crackling above. But the enemy is a distant specter, more report than reality; a shape-shifter. The men who stand and wait avoid one another’s eyes. They are too alike in their petitions: Faria for a blessing to wave in the faces of the Spanish; Vich the same for his Fernando. They are too alike. They cannot see the real enemy.

“Come,” he says again. Neither will answer his question, nor would he wish it. He climbs the steps to the third and last of the garden’s terraces, wheezes, waits for his petitioners. Distant battles are being fought in his name. Castles fly his standard over baking plains and deltas a thousand miles distant. Pennants flutter in the thick poisons of the air, but he is left behind to gasp in a vacuum. The war is a far-off clangor of faceless men pulled farther away by the racing frontier. Blood flushes the skin while the organs cool and slow their efforts within. The heart kicks sluggishly, lungs barely swell. He wanders in a shell of stone while generals spill their lifeblood on the frontier, and he wonders how the fight might return and who will bring the enemy to his champion. The sky is so bright that his eyes have screwed themselves shut. Dull red spots blot the darkness of his inner eye. Faria holds a gift in his box of manners; a second beast, by Ghiberti’s estimate. The Pope is clear. Ambassadors, their kings, their secretaries: all clowns, all tumbling after one another and kicking each other in the backside, falling and rising, laughing and crying about him. He looks down at the bare stones and sees the actors floating in air, shrieking and wielding swords, limbs falling to the floor, heads rolling down the steps, still chattering and shouting and screaming. Ribs burst and splay like the claws of some vast bird. Bones crack in the sewers under Prato.

“Holiness?”

Stone-pines loom above the trio, and sunlight glints in the high yew hedges as they walk deeper into the gardens. Faria is chattering of their mutual enemies.

“The proofs of his idiocy grow more blatant by the day,” says the Pope of one.

“So vast an error from so small a mind. Its birth is miraculous,” replies the Ambassador.

“You have added blasphemy to your talents, Faria. It sits well with the others.”

Vich is silent while this talk continues. From time to time, the Pope glances at the man, who nods curtly in return. The garden grows wilder and less penetrable. They walk easily enough, but it is hardly so clear where they are going. Great crashes sound distantly, then nearer. The Spaniard looks around at these, but the other two merely continue with their small talk. They seem oblivious of the approaching racket.

They pass by fruit trees staked with sturdy poles and collected in little groves. Fountains rush water into space. Great pines shade the men from the sun and carpet the garden in needles. They have halted beside a bank of tall shrubs with lavender flowers. Faria is smiling smugly. A joke is being enjoyed.

“I am, of course, divided by your dispute,” the Pope remarks generally. He considers a pun on his “worldliness,” rejects it. The day has gained an unanchored quality already. His gardens abstract him. “I am no geographer—” He raises a hand to ward off Faria’s anticipated protest; he does not wish his sagacity praised just yet. “Be assured that these questions of proportions and distances lie close to my heart. I recognize their import.” A crumb for Vich now? Yes. “Their complexity vexes all who delve into these matters, including my own deficient clerks, Don Jerònimo. It is appropriate care, not the concoction of jokes, which delay these matters. I have promised a settlement, and a settlement there will be, mark my words, for it pains me to repeat them.”

The note of reproach is quite perfect. Both men have leaned forward intently during his discourse. Suddenly both don their masks once again. Don João is a charming courtier, Don Jerònimo a sullen child. The Pope scuffs the turf with the toe of his slipper. A dove flaps and glides until its bowed path takes it beyond the taller trees to the west. He should resume work on the wall there, although the foxes must surely discourage the rabbits. Enemies and champions: inevitably the one must become the other. Julius had at least taught him that much. They would have him draw lines around the world, across lands and oceans they had never seen, which might not even exist for all they would know. The Borgia Pope’s legacy.

Now, elsewhere in the thickets of the gardens, a disturbance. Further crashes, signaling large maneuvers at a distance or smaller ones nearby. The three of them stroll forward, and there it is again, moving closer. Vich stutters to a halt, but the other two appear quite at ease, as though the gardens were silent, puzzled even at his discomfort. He can hear trees and undergrowth being shunted aside. The bushes that surround them are higher than a man. He can see nothing.

“Don Jerònimo …?” The Pope prompts him, but the noise is louder and now moving toward them. He knows the scene they have inveigled him into now. He recalls the crowded balcony of six months before, the challenge laid down as the drummers of D’Acunha’s embassy marched forward onto the bridge, himself left stranded and impotent as the cardinals rushed to congratulate Faria, the new Medici Pope quite obviously besotted as the Portingales’ surpassing gift made its clowning obeisance below.

It is the animal. They can hardly not have heard, yet they betray no sign. Is Faria’s grin a smidgen broader? The Pope is nodding at his reply. The sound of wood being splintered. They are watching him, waiting. There is an instant of silence, and then an ear-piercing shriek blows all thought away.

The trees are riven apart and it is there before him again, above him this time, its body the size of a house. He looks up and there above his head is the
shrieking head of a monster. It has teeth, two huge white teeth that grow out from its face, a shoveling mouth, and in place of its nose an obscene member, a muscled intestine brandishing a tree. He steps back, and the club wavers above them. To their left a small brown wiry man dressed in ill-fitting livery emerges from the undergrowth. He is carrying, pointlessly, a short length of enormous chain. He hears the Pope’s voice as it addresses, what? It can only be the beast itself.

“Hanno! Hanno! Kneel down.” Don Jerònimo hears Faria’s smirk break cover as laughter. The balcony, these gardens, the miserable keeper, his master, and most of all the beast: his stalled negotiations, his failure, Fernando’s honor, and his own looming disgrace. The Pope is waving away the keeper. Don João turns to him in delight. Is this not absolutely priceless? The gift, its giver, and its recipient. Where is his place in this scene? The beast sways, but it will not kneel. The Pope shrugs.

“Hanno is lonely,” he tells the two men. The animal swings its head from side to side, eventually following its own momentum to turn about and amble back into the undergrowth. The small tree held in its trunk is cast aside as its gray bulk disappears into a dense stand of saplings. They listen to its crashings growing fainter.

“Your Holiness’s thoughts had alighted on the matter of a settlement,” Faria prompts gingerly.

He feels their attentions fix on him again, or advance upon him as two masses of interest and purpose, himself denied all but the narrowest corridor between them, a sliver of room to pace in, a sliver of unreachable light above. The subtlest of his doctors have pored over the settlements of his predecessors and found only the arguments the two men flanking him have represented to him in the last months. Manolo’s
Padroado
and Fernando’s
Patronato
. The Portingales to the east; the Spaniards to the west; and where they met was hazardous and inequitable. They hang a war above his head and ask for judgment.
No, you may not abstain
. … His curialists’ injunction bringing him up short in the benighted hours, the air breathed over and headachy, clogged with clauses and construals until there was no more talking to be done. And then one of them had spoken, reluctantly and to their weariness.
There is a way
. …

The Pope says, “‘And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor, and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard: then take thee balances to weigh and divide the hair.’ Do you remember that?” He holds up his hands as two pans, his head their fulcrum, his helpless talking head. “But my razor is too blunt,” he says. A little flock of small brown birds erupts from the foliage of a nearby mulberry tree, wheeling and disappearing. He thinks he sees Hanno’s back, a comical gray island mooching amongst little trees and bushes below. His hands jiggle up and down. He begins to talk of equivalences and balances, of perfectly weighted claims canceling one another out, of treaties and compacts and the web of his predecessors’ words, which snag and hold him fast.
“Your claims are too even,” he tells them. “Ezekiel himself could not split this hair. …”