The Pop’s Rhinoceros (41 page)

A cliff of bodies fissuring and crumbling, tumbling and cracking into shards, clods, atomized crumbs, until what was solid and whole reaches the hungry waters as a fiberless chaos of fragments, sops dissolving into mud. The breach sucked them in. There was the Colonel, poised briefly atop the cannon-smashed masonry. A press of bodies surged up to the narrow opening, jostling like grains of sand in an hourglass to force their way through the waist. A gate opened to the right of the breach, and strings of men peeled off to make for it. Men-at-arms gathered their reins and drove forward through the crush, spurring their mounts to buffet aside the common troops. Not an arrow, not a bolt, not a charge was fired from the walls. The men poured in. Winter chains glaciers to the crags and faces overlooking the lake they cannot reach. Then spring, and release, and the lake can only wait for the frustrated acreage of slabs and strata to collapse and reemerge as boiling torrents that roil down the ravines to spear its placid waters, to make them foam. … But, in the dark of the dormitory, Salvestro thinks of Jörg’s implacable calm as the soldier raised his fist, the soldier’s bafflement in the face of this, his defeat. Had the Pratesi thought they could save themselves like that?

The three of them found themselves amongst men they did not know, running past the great turret of the gatehouse, where some troops were struggling with the crossbar against the unwitting pressure on the gates from without, past others holding some local men at swordpoint, running into an open cobbled area, which narrowed, becoming a street, then streets, with low houses of brick and wood, the lower stories arched but boarded shut, across little wooden bridges that traversed narrow stagnant canals when their feet would thunder like hooves for a second or two, a few of them turning into streets that split away every so often, until, eventually, the three of them halted to catch their breath in a street the width of a cart, Salvestro and Bernardo leaning on their pikes, Groot bent double and wheezing. Except for their own panting and the soldiers whose shouts they heard only distantly, they were alone. The town was silent. Empty. They looked up and down the street.

“Let’s head back,” said Groot.

They turned and retraced their steps carefully. In response to the town’s compulsive silence, their voices dropped to near whispers, then they themselves were silent, walking slowly through deserted lanes. They rounded a corner and crossed a ramshackle footbridge. Salvestro kept glancing up at the upper-floor windows and stumbling slightly. The ground was rutted. No faces appeared. Then he felt Groot’s hand on his arm. He looked ahead.

There was a group of soldiers, a score or more who filled the narrow street. They stood in a tight ring with their backs to the trio, looking down at something within. One or two glanced around blankly as they approached, nudged a neighbor, who glanced, too, then turned back to whatever was going on inside the circle. The men were silent as the streets, as the whole town. The three of them came up, Groot nodding a curt greeting, which was returned. The men
shifted grudgingly aside for Salvestro, then looked down again. On the ground before them a woman was being raped.

Two men knelt to either side of her lower half, holding her legs. They frowned in concentration, grimacing quickly when the woman’s spasmodic struggling prompted them to renew their grips and lean back to splay her legs farther apart. A third man sat on his heels, the woman’s head tilted back and trapped between his legs. He wore thick leather gauntlets and the woman was silent, for he used one gloved hand to press down on her nose and mouth. Strangely framed by the leather gauntlet and the cloth of the man’s hose, her eyes rolled about in their sockets. Her arms seemed to be pinioned somehow behind her back. A soldier with black curly hair cropped short was lying on top of her, arching awkwardly while his arm fumbled beneath him, at his crotch.

“That’s it, lad. Take your time,” said the man holding her head. The woman struggled again, and he pressed harder on her face.

“Watch her breathing, Cippi,” said one of the men holding her legs.

“I’ve got her,” Cippi said. Then, “That’s it, lad, that’s it,” as the soldier pulled his arm out from under him and his hips jerked quickly. His head was turned sideways, away from the woman’s, so that Salvestro saw that he was young, not much more than a boy. When he was done, Cippi looked up again, his glance taking in the three of them before passing on around the ring of impassive faces. “Who’s next?”

Two others of them took her. A nod to the one called Cippi as they stepped carefully around the woman. Then they knelt, spat on their palms, went into her. She seemed to suffer most in the intervals between them, her torso twisting ineffectually and her breathing coming very fast. The last of them was more brutal than his predecessors. “That’s it.
That’s
it,” Cippi urged him as his hips rose and fell.

His voice and the quick impacts of the bodies were the only sounds in the street. The three men were silent as they performed the act. The others were silent as they watched. The last of them raised himself carefully off the body on the ground. Cippi looked about him. Salvestro’s face felt to him oddly stony, like bags of gravel hung there. And the woman’s white legs were like clubs somehow, heavy and brutal. The men holding them were too drained, too lifeless, to pull them free. It was like that. He was too weak. The hush was a hand clamped over his mouth a long time ago.

“All right, where is he?” Where’s our little fairy, eh?” Cippi was saying. A few men grinned. The last soldier was using a handful of grass to wipe the blood from his member. The ground between the woman’s legs was wet where she had stained it. She urinated now, prompting Cippi to shove down on her face once again. He turned his head the other way, and Salvestro saw that his right-hand cheek was scarred, the Tifatani scar.

“Here he is!” exclaimed Cippi in a parody of welcome as a fair-haired boy was pushed forward, white-faced, staring down at the ground between his feet.

“Careful,” warned the same man as before. The woman’s struggles were growing faint.

“Don’t tell me my business, Pietro,” Cippi warned him back, but his hand came up a fraction and the woman’s body jerked as she fought for a lungful of air. The blond boy was on his knees between her legs, his hands fumbling at his crotch, head bent forward. Salvestro noticed that the woman’s heels were grazed, the skin there all torn and bloody. It struck him that this was strange. The ground was of packed earth, hard but unabrasive. How had her heels been cut about like that? Then he saw the boy’s hands fall away from their labors and hang loosely at his sides. His head remained bent forward. He had begun to cry.

“You bollockless fairy,” Cippi growled in disgust. “Go on, get up. Wipe the snot off your face.” The boy got up, still crying, and pushed his way out of the circle. “Anyone else?” Cippi scanned the faces around him. The woman was almost still now, her uncovered legs slack in the grip of Pietro and his counterpart. “Visitors, eh?” said Cippi as his eye found them again. “You want to take a turn?” He was talking to Bernardo, who recoiled slightly, embarrassed, with a foolish grin on his face. “Well, big fellow? She’s still got a couple of goes in her. A pole the size of yours’d wake her up a bit.” Bernardo was shaking his head. “No?” He turned to Groot. “How about you?” The soldiers were watching them now, a faint contempt in their grins.

“I’m getting a bit old for all that,” Groot replied levelly. Cippi stared at him, then quickly at Salvestro, then down at the woman. The men were silent.

“No one else?” said Cippi, head bent down. “Anyone?” No one answered. “Well, you’re not much use, then, are you?” he said to the woman. Then he looked up and his eyes found Salvestro’s. “Not much use, then, is she?” he demanded. Salvestro said nothing. “I
said,
not much use, eh?” he repeated, more aggressively this time. A long moment passed. Then Salvestro shook his head. Cippi scowled and looked away. “Steady, lads,” he warned the men on her legs, then pressed his weight down on her face.

At first there was no reaction. The woman lay there, limp and inert, even her eyes hardly moving. Salvestro realized that he was counting, silently, one, two, three … Cippi looked up at him again. Eleven, twelve. Her struggling began very suddenly, her shoulders twisting, her head twitching in Cippi’s grip. “Bit of life in her yet,” murmured Cippi, looking away, pressing down. “That’s it,” he encouraged the other two, for her legs were thrashing now, or trying to, and the men were sweating. “Ever had a dead one?” Cippi asked Pietro at one point, but no one smiled now. Pietro shook his head without looking up, brow furrowed with effort. “It’s not so bad.” He pressed down harder. Gradually the woman’s movements grew spasmodic: no less violent, but more infrequent. She was twitching, and lying still for a moment, then shaking, and lying still for a moment. Cippi was muttering instructions to the other two: “Hold on now, they kick out at the end, not long now, keep at it…” The woman was hardly moving.

“What about me?”

I said that, thinks Salvestro in the dormitory’s darkness.

His voice sounded strange as it broke into the circle of their grim concentration, hollow and reedy. Cippi’s expression dared him to continue. Some words went back and forward, something. They didn’t like it. He handed his pike to Bernardo, and then he was kneeling where the others had knelt before him. The compounded silence fell on him and he was water, not flesh. Her dress had slipped down. He pushed it up to expose her. She was bloody, her pubic hair matted where the blood had dried. The insides of her thighs were brown with it. He had the sensation of hearing her screaming—impossible—which thudded and slammed him all the worse for being stifled, for being part of the men’s silence. “I’ll have her,” he had said. “If you’re finished with her.” He saw Cippi’s expression modulate into something else, something narrow-eyed and shrewd. “Always heard the Tifatani were an open-handed lot,” he added, meeting Cippi’s gaze. Then he slapped the woman’s thigh. “To work, eh?”

She smelled of urine and sour sweat. He had expected that, but as he laid his length over hers, he felt the coldness of her flesh, its clamminess. He entered her quickly and turned his head away from hers, as the curly-haired boy had done, feeling himself shrink from her. She was formless. He felt nothing as he pumped and jerked about inside her. With his eyes screwed tight he imagined their positions reversed or himself somehow looking down on the act being committed, her legs spread apart and her back tensing, the ring of blood and then her screaming, the whiteness of her flesh, a kind of deadness … And the darkness that was the water in the cask, or only his eyes shut tight. Or the dormitory, here, now. … Or a long time ago, and there. And her.

Groot told him afterward that the one called Pietro had crooked his little finger suggestively, then winked, and the one called Cippi had given the signal for them all to let go, hoping that the woman would buck and struggle beneath him, throw him off, perhaps. But she had only flopped about like a drunkard and he had pumped away, eyes shut and unaware, his grunts so low that one of the men had had to cock his ear to his lips to make them out, then report derisively, “Misses his mother, this one.” Imitating his mewling,
“Mama, mama, mama, mama
…” A few of them had laughed. Then they had drifted away.

Bernardo had pulled him off, or lifted him clear. He remembered being propped against a wall and Bernardo shouting at him, “Why’d you do
that?”
The sun was lower now, casting a shadow down the center of the street that cut the woman in two. Groot said, “She’s stopped bleeding,” then pulled her dress down to cover her. They would have dragged her here, Salvestro thought to himself. That’s why her heels were cut. Groot said, “She’s not really breathing.”

He crawled over to the woman. Without Cippi’s hand over her face he could see that she was young and rather plain. Some brown hair had escaped from under the bonnet that was still tied under her chin. Her eyes would roll up into her head, then drop, then roll again, more slowly each time. Salvestro wondered where her shoes were or how she had lost them.

“We should keep her warm,” said Groot. “It’s the cold that’ll kill her.” She was like ice. The three of them took off their tunics and wrapped her in them. Then they stood about, looking down at her, not knowing what else they should do. She took quick, shallow breaths, which grew quicker and shallower until they amounted to no more than a shivering of her chest. Salvestro knelt and held her head off the ground. Her face was slack and her eyes saw nothing. The three of them waited, feeling awkward gathered together over her. They did not look at one another. Groot kept reaching across to pull down her dress, but it already reached her ankles. There was the faint rattle of her breath, growing fainter, failing. Slowly the shiver shrank to a tremor, then nothing. And then, once again, there was silence. The girl was dead.

The same silence? Salvestro asks himself, wakeful, benighted.

No.

They picked up their pikes and trudged back. Bands of soldiers were roaming through the town, kicking in doors and dragging those inside out into the street. “Why did you do that?” Bernardo kept asking, although he was mumbling it to himself, wide-eyed at what was taking place around them, not expecting an answer. He repeated it over and over until Groot burst out angrily, “He was trying to spare her. Now shut up!” It made no difference. Salvestro was silent.

In front of the Pieve da San Stefano they were preparing to burn a man. “The Moor called Nana has despoiled the shrine of San Pietro and violated a woman in defiance of guarantees of safe conduct given here. …” The Moor grinned stupidly as the charges were read out. Groups of soldiers were walking about in front of the church, mostly drunk. On the other side of the square, the Palazzo Pretorio was guarded by men who Groot said were the Colonel’s. It was almost evening.

They slept in the square that night and went hungry. The next day Salvestro woke early and roused the other two. They walked by the Via dei Cimatori into the quarter of the town called Gualdimare. The same scum-covered canals. The same streets. Yesterday’s silence. Two fortresses raised themselves clear of the surrounding buildings. Medici’s men stood outside one, Cardona’s outside the other. The two groups were waking up as they passed them. They moved deeper into the quarter, and the stone houses were replaced by brick ones, exposed stairways running up their fronts, all just as yesterday. Funny little mills backed onto the little canals. Between each house and the next, the narrow
quintani
were filled with stinking refuse. Again Salvestro kept looking up at the windows on the raised floors. Again no faces appeared. “Why did they not come out?” he muttered to himself. Then, “Not a sound.” The other two looked at each other. “Just let them take her.”