The Pop’s Rhinoceros (3 page)

“Just tell the story properly,” said Bernardo. “Without leaving bits out. What about the people who lived there?”

“They were a water people,” Salvestro resumed. “The people who lived here then were fishermen, boatmen, pirates, and they made their homes in the marshlands. They built great cities to guard the river mouths, and the greatest of them all had walls built of huge tree-trunks and broken by four great gates. The slave market covered an acre and traders came to barter there; by ship from the lands of
ice to the north, by horse and foot from the dry valleys of the south and the plains of the east. It grew to become the wealthiest city on earth. …”

He had found his stride now. This happened. That happened. The story rolled forward. He said, “The people of this city loaded their temples with silver, and in every house in every one of its stone-paved streets a table groaned under the weight of the food. Merchants flocked from every port to share the spoils, and in time, its very name came to mean abundance. This city was called Vineta, the most prosperous and peaceable you could imagine.”

“That’s better,” Bernardo muttered approvingly. “That’s one of the best bits. About the food, and the temples with all the silver.”

“Yes,” said Salvestro, nodding. He remembered his earlier self leaning forward across the fire to catch his mother’s words as she told him of their ancestors’ city and its riches. Fabulous visions of it had formed in the firesmoke, bursting the walls of the mean hut that was their home. Now it was Bernardo who strained to catch the same words.

“Then the newcomers came,” he resumed.

“Henry the Lion,” said Bernardo. “And his army.”

“No, you’re muddling it up, Bernardo. Henry the Lion was later. Either listen or tell the story yourself. The first of them were…” He paused, unsure whether his mother had told him what they were or not. Perhaps he had forgotten.

“Planters,” he declared with authority. “They called the lands here the New Plantation. There weren’t very many to begin with. They built churches and drained the marshes. Anyway”—he was picking up the thread again—” they felled the forests and sowed grass for their cows. More and more of them came, and they hated the people who were here before them. They muttered curses against their temples, and against their god Svantovit until Svantovit cursed them back. Then there was a war.”

“The war that lasted a hundred years,” said Bernardo.

“Yes,” said Salvestro. “A hundred years, a thousand battles, and it ended here, on the island. When Henry the Lion reached Vineta.”

Sometimes his mother had paused there. Sometimes she had gone on directly to what had followed.

“They camped on the mainland—near the place where we crossed, Bernardo.”

Bernardo nodded quickly, eager for him to get on with it. But he was reluctant now. This part of the story was stranger than that which preceded it.

“They could see the smoke from Vineta’s fires, and the water was frozen to ice. They could have crossed that night, but they stopped. I don’t know why. They pitched camp on the mainland, and that night there was a storm.”

He thought of the women, the children, the priests, the last of their beaten armies all cowering behind the walls of the city amongst their jewels and their silver, great chests of treasure consecrated to the gods who could not save them.

“There was a storm,” he repeated.

“The storm which lasted a single night,” prompted Bernardo.

“It came from the north,” Salvestro continued, gathering his thoughts. “A terrible storm, the worst they had ever seen. Waves broke through the ice and the winds flung boats into the air. The ice itself was broken into huge slabs. … It was the most fearsome storm that any man had lived through, and Henry and his army could do nothing except pray for it to end—”

“And God answered their prayers,” Bernardo interrupted then.

Salvestro glared at him. “Yes, Bernardo, he did. The storm died away as suddenly as it came. When dawn rose, the sky was clear. They crossed the broken ice. They marched across the island. Vineta was built on an arm of land that stuck out into the sea. They climbed up to the point—”

“And what did they find then?” Bernardo burst out.

Salvestro regarded the big man across the fire. He was agog, his thumbs twiddling with excitement, though he knew the answer as well as himself.

“Nothing,” said Salvestro. “Vineta had disappeared. Where it had stood there was only water. The storm had torn it loose with the land on which it rested and cast them both to the bottom of the sea.”

His mother had usually stopped then. He would be left suspended, rooted to the top of the point and staring down into the water as though he were actually amongst the conquerors and prey to the same bafflement. He looked across at Bernardo, who was rocking back and forth on his haunches.

“And Vineta is still there,” he murmured, “with all its temples and their treasure. …”

And its people, too, his mother had said. Our people. When the water was clear, she told him, you might see them walking in the watery streets. Svantovit was down there with them. He could not save them, but neither could he desert them. Salvestro’s thoughts drifted.

“So what was that ruin?” Bernardo broke in, and for once Salvestro was grateful for the interruption. He did not want to think about Svantovit. He did not want to think about his mother.

“Ruin?”

“On that cliff, where you said they were all looking down at the water. There’s a ruin there.”

For a moment he did not understand. The previous day they had stood on the beach and Salvestro had pointed down the coast to where the land rose and extended out for a little way into the sea. The point ended abruptly, as though the storm had cut it off with a sword. “There—” He had indicated the patch of water in front of it. “Vineta lies there.” Bernardo had stared and nodded, then looked inland again, to the top of the point.

Salvestro’s puzzlement disappeared. “It’s not a ruin,” he told Bernardo. “That’s the church. They built it after Vineta sank. To stand guard, so the islanders say. Monks live there.”

A suspicious look that Salvestro knew only too well spread slowly over Bernardo’s face.

“If it’s a church,” the giant replied, “how come half of it is in the sea?”

The church
had
looked different, Salvestro reflected. It had been so many years since he had last seen it and even more since he had paid it any attention. There was a monastery built about it, but no one ever went there. And no one, so far as he could remember, had ever seen any of the monks, except as distant figures clothed in gray, patrolling the precincts of their domain.

“Perhaps it collapsed.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. The monks won’t bother us. Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll fix the barrel and have another go in the pond, then I’ll talk to Ewald about the boat.”

There was silence. The fire hissed softly.

“And the beds,” said Bernardo.

“What?”

“You’ll talk to Ewald about the beds.”

“Bernardo, I never—”

“The beds you promised when you said,‘Bernardo, we’ll have plenty to eat, a roof over our heads, and proper beds to sleep on.’ Those beds. The beds your old friend Ewald was going to give us, along with the roof, which leaks as it happens, and the food, which so far as I can see is fish, and more fish, and more fish after that. In fact, Salvestro, I’m sick of fish, and I’m sick of sleeping on the ground, and I’m sick of this stinking shed. A dog wouldn’t live here.”

“It’s not a ‘shed.’ It’s a hut, and anyway it’s not so bad—”

“Not so bad!” the giant erupted. “It’s cold. It’s damp. I’d rather be back at Prato lying facedown in that bog. I’d rather be in the snow on top of a mountain. You promised beds, and what we get is this. I’d rather be in a ditch than here. How can you tell me it’s not so bad?”

“Just shut up, Bernardo.”

He was tired. He did not want to hear this.

“No, really, I want to know.” Bernardo sat up now and gestured around him angrily. “How can you think that this is ‘not so bad’? Eh, Salvestro?” The big man thumped the ground for emphasis and spat into the fire.

There was a short silence before Salvestro replied.

“I suppose, Bernardo, I think it’s not so bad because I’m used to it. This is where I was born.”

The short silence was succeeded by a rather longer one.

“Here?” Bernardo said eventually, trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice and failing. He sounded hesitant. The fight had gone out of him, Salvestro reflected. Bernardo’s fits of outrage never lasted long.

“We lived here, once,” he said. “My mother gutted fish for Ewald’s father.”

Bernardo grunted, digesting this fact.

“And that’s how you and Ewald are friends.”

“Yes,” said Salvestro.

He looked up at the fish strung high above their heads, row after row of them. How many had he strung by the gills and hoisted up there? Hundreds? Thousands? Whole shoals. ….

“He didn’t look very pleased to see you,” Bernardo ventured then, “seeing as how you’re such old friends. He didn’t look happy at all to me. In fact, he looked shocked.”

Salvestro shrugged, thinking back two weeks to the moment when he had knocked on the door of Ewald’s hut. What had he expected from the man who had opened it and stood there, not recognizing him at first, then his face falling when he did, his jaw dropping? Joy? Ewald had looked from himself to the giant standing silently behind him. The expression on his face had been worse than shock. Dismay?

When Ewald had finally recovered himself he’d offered a belated and half-hearted welcome. Bernardo and he could stay in the drying-shed, Salvestro’s old home. He loaned them the barrel, some old blankets, even the use of his boat when the fishing season ended. The day after tomorrow. … Another thing he did not wish to think about.

“He thought I was dead,” said Salvestro. “But we were close once. It was a long time ago.”

More than just close, he thought. Ewald had been his only friend on the island. And the island might as well have been the world. Now, across the fire, he saw Bernardo yawn. The giant was losing interest. Whatever substance it was that his complaining was rooted in was sinking, or dissolving, or seeping away. The hut
was
damp, and cold. It did stink of the fish and always had. He remembered his mother sitting where he sat now, one hand cradling a silver body, the other holding the knife.

She gutted fish for Ewald’s father and another man. When they brought the catch he and Ewald had to wait outside, so they used to play in the woods. Sometimes they fought, but Ewald always lost. He showed his friend three ways through the peat-bog and how to get into the Haases’ loft to steal cabbage. He tried to teach him to swim. They told each other their secrets.

He ran to meet the boat when it came, but Ewald would not speak to him with his father there, and the other man crossed himself and looked away. He spent his other days wandering the island, looking for things to tell his friend. Greengages grew wild on the eastern side in an orchard overgrown with nettles and whippy ash trees. Little sticklebacks swam in the peat-bog, and eels came ashore at night to cross the narrow band of land, winding through the stringy grass near Koserow. He could swim underwater with his eyes open and hold his breath until he fainted. He told all these things to Ewald, but his best secrets were not his at all. They were the things he heard from his mother.

She told him wolves ran in packs. They had yellow eyes and could see in the dark. In shape they were much like dogs, but bigger and with longer legs. They were frightened by fire. Bears were frightened of nothing. They stood twice as tall
as a man, could run like the wind, climb trees, and loved to eat children. They could not swim, though, and for that reason there were no bears or wolves on the island. If attacked by a bear, she told him, run for the sea. These things were on the mainland, where he had never been. Sometimes, from the south side of the island, he saw men riding up and down the coast road. He watched the fishing boats sail east in the morning and west at night. They berthed in a great port farther down the coast, his mother said.

She told him these things while she gutted the fish. She worked by firelight. By touch. He watched the knife slide down the belly until it found the vent, then, one two, up and down very quick, with a twist to cut them loose, and the guts would shoot out. He strung them by the gills and hung them in the roof. He sat in front of her when she worked, and if he talked too much, she made a quick movement with her hand and the guts would hit him in the face. She never missed. Once they landed in his mouth. He watched her hands moving in the gloom of the hut, the white of the fish-belly, the quick glint of the knife, the silver of her bracelet as it bumped about on her wrist. He told her she should take it off, but she said someone else had done that once and lost it forever. She had found it washed up on the beach after a storm. He could not remember how old he was then. Did he want to know where it came from?

He had nodded.

That was the beginning, he thought now. That was what had brought him back, or perhaps had driven him away in the first place. His eyes wandered around the hut where she had told him these things. She had been shunned by most of the islanders. They were different, she and her son. Vineta made them different. Vineta and her gods.

She told him about Svantovit, who had a hundred eyes and lived in the sky. He used to sleep on the smoke from their fires, she said, but when the fires were put out he fell into the sea and drowned. Now all you could see were his claws. The people who lived there now thought they were islands, but she knew they were his claws. He had tried to drag himself from the sea, but the water pressed down on his back and held him there until he drowned; but there were still places on the island where he was strong. He nodded, pretending not to understand. She meant the holm oak grove. One night he had followed her there, creeping noiselessly through the undergrowth. He crouched down under the brambles and watched her pick up sticks around the clearing. The oak in the center rose high over the beeches, the weight of its branches pulling them almost to the forest floor. He saw her stoop and straighten, moving closer and closer to the tree. His mother had the blackest hair on the island. He heard her cry out words he did not understand. He had crawled backward, watching her until all he could see was the great oak’s trunk and a blur of white wrapped about its base. He had fled.