The Pop’s Rhinoceros (4 page)

Then she said that Svantovit had once been strong all over the island, and the mainland, too. The people who had worshiped him built a great city here. But there had been a war and a storm. The city, she said, had been called Vineta.

After that she told him everything, and as many times as he wished until he knew the whole story by heart. He began to comb the northern beaches, quartering the sands under the eye of the monastery that stood at the limit of the point, a grim keep overlooking the sea. The fishing boats rarely cast their nets in the waters there. When Ewald’s father said they came up empty and often torn, he thought of Svantovit ripping them open and feeding on the catch. He never found anything on the beach except driftwood and crabs. He tried to imagine Svantovit himself, but if his mere claw was the size of the island, then the rest of him exceeded anything he had seen, except the sea and sky. He threw stones at the goats until the neatherd drove him away, watched boats sculling over the Achter-Wasser, pissed in the pond behind Riesenkampf’s manse until it stank. Svantovit and Vineta were the best secrets he had ever heard.

He had been waiting under the beech trees as usual. He watched the men pulling the fish-barrels into his mother’s hut, Ewald dawdling behind them. When the men were inside he waved and Ewald ran across to him. He was out of breath, but instead of talking he simply grabbed him by the wrist and they both ran off into the woods. Ewald had a secret to tell him, something better to show him than eels and sticklebacks.

They ran and ran, past the herring-shed, past the Ronsdorffs’ hives, until Ewald pulled him up short and told him what he was about to see was his best secret, he must never tell anyone, and swore him to silence. He nodded eagerly. He had no one to tell, in any case.

They ran again. They slipped by the monastery. They wove a path through the strange mounds about Krumminer. Behind the next rise was the Stenschke farm. They crept along the side of the chicken run and through the yard. The Stenschke dog knew Ewald and hardly raised its head, but he was scared. Stenschke had let the animal loose on him once when he had walked along the top of his field, and his daughters had screamed that the Savage was coming to get them. That was what the other children called him. All except Ewald. The dog had bounded after him, but he’d lost it in the peat-bog. Ewald squatted down and pressed his face to the wall. He could hear the low bubble of talk inside. Ewald rose and beckoned. There was a crack for him to look through. He crouched and took the other’s place. Inside were Stenschke’s daughters. They were pouring water over each other and the steam was all around them like clouds while they scrubbed and rinsed and unwound white sheets from their bodies, which were naked. He watched and felt Ewald watching him. He thought of his own confidings: plums, peat-bogs, eels, swimming. Ewald’s was a different kind of secret.

They walked back by the path through the woods. Scrubby little ash trees started tripping them up and Ewald wanted to go around the longer way, but he kept on walking. Ewald said he was definitely going to marry Eva; his father knew Stenschke pretty well, and he used the boat sometimes. Erica was all right, too. Why didn’t he say something?

He thought of the three girls pouring water out of the jug, their arms plump and red from the steam, the dog chasing him into the swamp, his running away. Ewald was right beside him, but his chatter was distant and tinny. It was almost dark and the trees were black skeletons jumbled together in the sky. They were almost at the clearing. He stopped and Ewald stopped, too. He knew the secret he was going to tell. He exacted the same oath from Ewald he had sworn himself, and they crept forward in silence until they stood before the oak. He took off his clothes and told his companion to do the same, then they joined hands about the tree and he began to tell Ewald about Svantovit. When he told him about the islands and Svantovit’s claws, Ewald started to cry. Then he tried to get free. The oak seemed to grow colder. It was dark, and the moon was hidden by clouds. Ewald was struggling. His chest scraped against the rough bark and his hands were clamps about the wrists of the other, who was jerking to get away. Words were coming from his mouth, harsh and guttural, the same chant over and over again. He heard them fade and be replaced by forest silence, the clash and scrape of wind-stirred branches, the secret creak of roots. His hands released their captive. He saw Ewald run howling into the wood. He dressed slowly. Walking back to the hut, he began to wonder what he had done.

But he knew what he had done, he thought now. Bernardo was motionless, perhaps already asleep. I knew even then, he thought to himself. He had told Ewald his best secret because Ewald’s secrets were better than his own.

The following week the catch did not arrive. It had never happened before. He waited under shelter of the beech trees for his friend to arrive until darkness fell, but no one came. His mother had to call him in. She waited through the week that followed, but when Ewald’s father failed to appear for the second time she told him to build her a drying-rack. The stench in the hut was overpowering. The herring were beginning to rot. He set to work where the trees ended and the cleared land in which their hut stood began, carrying bundles of staves back and forth from the woodland. Dropping the final bundle, he looked down and saw that there were footprints in the earth, a confusing jumble of them, and, a little farther on, behind an alder bush, a pair deeper than the others, as though a man had stood there for hours without moving.

He should not have told Ewald his mother’s secret. Dead leaves crunched underfoot and brambles snagged his shirt as he stalked the woods about their home. He left the paths and crept through undergrowth, his gaze sweeping left and right. Each night he quartered the wood, and once he thought he saw the figure of a man, far off and barely visible through the moonlit trees. But as he watched, the man turned and melted into the night. Perhaps it was the man who left his footprints by their hut, perhaps another. He knew why these men were here and whence they came. Svantovit was angry, so he had sent these demons to frighten him. He dreamed of heads rising out of the sea, bodies marching up the beach, men coming to get him and drag him down to Vineta. He was fearful of what he had done. They were waiting for something, and he wondered what it was. If it
was not himself, then it was his mother. He wanted to tell her everything, but he did not. He said nothing.

When the third week came, she rose unexpectedly one night and left the hut. He almost told her then, but instead he waited until her footsteps had faded into silence and followed.

It was late summer and the moonlight fell in white shafts where the canopy opened. He crept forward into the wood, imagining that at any moment his mother would leap out and collar him and march him back to the hut. He was some way short of the grove when he saw them, two men standing stock-still amongst the tree-trunks, barely distinguishable at this distance, facing toward the clearing. He stopped dead in his tracks, then ducked behind a bush. The two men turned to each other, and he saw that one of them was Ewald’s father. They moved forward. He thought of skirting around them. A thicket of little elder trees would hide him, he could run and not be seen. He could reach the clearing before them. He rose and was about to run when a hard hand grasped him about the neck, another clamped his mouth, and he was hoisted into the air. It was the man from the boat, the one who shunned him, and with him was another. He twisted like an eel, but there was no escape. The two of them waved across at the other pair, and then he was lifted and held under the man’s arm. He tried to cry out, but the hand stayed over his mouth. As they started back for the hut he saw the other two move forward toward the clearing.

He struggled against his captor with all his strength, but the man carried him and contained his rebellion with ease, striding forward in grim and purposeful silence. At one point he was set down and hit three times on the side of the head. The blows dazed him and made him feel sick. The moon kept swinging about the sky, a strong white glare reaching deeply into the darkness, disappearing, reappearing. Out of the wood’s blackness a thin shriek was rising, climbing high into the bareness of the sky. His own? They were going to put him in the water butt. He felt himself lifted by the ankles, his arms pinioned for the moment it took to lower him, then the water closed about his head and he was upside-down in darkness, trapped, his arms thrashing and his head thudding madly against the barrel. He was drowning.

It was Ewald’s father who saved him. He was lifted out and thrown on the ground to choke and puke up water. When he looked up all four men were staring down at him. On the far side of the clearing, other men were twisting a white shape with flailing limbs, tying her up with something. A hand muzzled him, as it muzzled her, staring at him until he was dragged off, down to the shore where a small boat waited. He was too frightened to run.

The boat pulled away from the shore. One man rowed, the other sat facing him. For a time there was silence broken only by the dip of the oars and the hoarse breathing of the oarsman. He saw the island shrink to a dark strip off the stern. Then the other man began to mutter that he was the luckiest vermin alive and they should have dealt with him properly in the water butt. His kind were
nothing but heathen vermin, the spawn of the Devil. His kind loved nothing more than to foul the souls of Christian children with their filth.

They had rounded the point of the island. The line of the coast fell away and they were moving into open water. The other man shouted at him not to look him in the eye, he knew all the tricks his kind liked to get up to.

He was numb, and the words were no more than a noise, like the breathing behind him. The oarsman said nothing. He watched as the man drew two lengths of cord from his pocket, and he was rigid, as if they had already bound him hand and foot. The oarsman stopped rowing. He felt the boat shift. Then, as the man’s hands reached to grasp him, his limbs unfroze. He sprang forward and hurled himself into the water.

For the second time that night he felt the shock of the cold. He dove deep and swam forward until the blood thudded in his head and his chest would burst unless he rose. He broke the surface thirty feet from the boat. They were standing one on either side, looking down at the surface, waiting for him to appear. The mainland was less than half a mile by his estimate. They would never catch him. He struck out for the shore. Cutting through the gentle swell with the sea’s black liquids buoying him up, the general drift sweeping him across the face of the coast, he felt invincible. He swam like a fish, then like a seal. He could swim like this forever. He floated on his back and gazed up at the sky while the wash of currents slid under him. The sea held him softly, burbling and murmuring, until he fancied he heard the hum of jumbled voices rolling up from the depths. He might dive beneath the surface and swim the fathoms to the city, or he might float here, bobbing between sea and sky, in the shift of their agreement. They were a water people; water would always favor them. And this was a strange sea, almost saltless, almost tideless, carrying him in safety toward the shore.

“And they are still there, Bernardo. All still there with everything they owned, their houses, their streets, their temples filled with silver. Vineta sank entire. Do you hear me?… Bernardo?”

Bernardo slumbered beneath his blanket, a giant with his mouth agape. His companion listened to the rhythm of his snores, their thunderous advances and recessions, until he heard beneath them a different wash of sounds, latent in the quiet of the night: the dying echo of storms returning to calm or the muted shudder of water turning to ice. He thought of the first men to cast their unbelieving eyes over the waters’ expanse, then the army of newcomers, who stood at the limit of the point while the city’s disappearance rose in a backwash, scending the cliff to reach it. He shifted, mind drifting and sinking, allowing the fraying thought to unravel under the sea’s bland interrogation, to come apart as liquids dissolve in other liquids or purposes fail in wider needs. Vineta answered, climbed out of a still sea to gather in the soldiers’ lack: unrealized city, waiting to engulf them and drown them in themselves. He was hung there with them, held in the moment’s fierce suspension, in the soundless geal of their frustration.

Henry the Lion and his captains, their sergeants, and the platoons of March-men crossed the smashed, refrozen ice of the Achter-Wasser expecting Wendish blood on their weapons, a sky stained with purple-black smoke, a final cathartic cleansing. They had fought their way through marshes, rivers, forests; survived hunger, cold, and disease. Ice, they believed, was no different. But they stumbled on the island’s frosted glacis, the few remaining horses skidding and laming themselves on the jagged ledges and unexpected scarps, freakish reminders of the previous night’s violence. Behind their broken progress lay the families left behind the Elbe, the pressing host of colonists come from Holstein, Frisia, as far away as Zealand, the rhetoric of bishops urging them forward against the verminous enemy “until with the help of God either their faith or their nation be exterminated,” memories of the fleet burning at Lübeck and Niklot’s squadrons firing the banks of the Trave, their weariness and the winter damp settling in their bones, crusted blood on the faces of the monks with crosses carved in their skulls driven through the villages, their crossings and recrossings of the Elbe, advances and their repulse with the name of Kruto a battlecry their grandfathers’ grandfathers would flee still ringing down the years from when Mistivijoi’s slaughter and Bishop John’s bloodless blue-tongued head, mounted on the altar of the Veletians and eaten with the maggot-years would cry them on to setbacks and laments, sad stumblings over broken ground, dead counts, and the nameless margraves gathered about Otto’s spiritless corpse in the silence of the chapel to recount the Saxon’s deeds, his mournful
comitatus. …