The Pop’s Rhinoceros (82 page)

“What did he steal?” he asked tonelessly.

“Sugarcane. It is usually that. They eat it, you see. … You must understand, Dom Jaime, before you condemn Dom Fernão, you must understand that these men are valuable, that it is not greed, not greed for a stalk of sugarcane. …”

“How many are buried in there?” Teixeira asked, still looking up. The thief had already disappeared beneath a growing mound of megass.

“You must listen to me, Dom Jaime. When Dom Fernão first came here there
was nothing. Nothing at all. I have seen him. … I saw him once. He knelt, it was near here, he brought his hands together like this, and he looked up as though in prayer, but then he looked down, at the earth, and he drove his hands into the earth, he plowed it with his bare hands that day, and everything you see here, he built, with those same hands, those same soft hands, and now the King he has served here would revoke his contract and send a factor to take it all away, to ruin it. …”

The man was babbling. He was tired, sick. He did not want to hear. So Mello feared him, took him for Manolo’s spy. That the
Ajuda
might truly be here only as the barge of the beast dying on her decks? No, of course it was absurd. Mello would not give it credence for an instant. He turned his horse away. Pero came abreast of him, still talking, the apologist of a madman, his voice a nervous clatter. He listened instead to the Negroes’ chanting, which was unending and vast, an unbroachable pulse that filled and weighted the air. As they left the Negroes behind them, he noticed that their horses were walking in step with it.

“Joao Afonso de Aveiro, who is the factor at Gatò by the city of Benin; Dom Valentim Coelho and Dom Fernando da Montoroio, traders to the Mani-Congo; Dom Ruy Mendes da Mesquita, the master of the
Picanço;
and Dom Duarte Alema, her pilot. Myself, the Captain, yourself, and Dom Francisco. …”

They were walking their horses along the side of a number of large pens, all of them empty. Something in Pero’s recital caught his attention then, but he could not grasp it. He asked the man to repeat the list of Mello’s banquet guests and listened more carefully to the repetition.

After reaching the “fort,” Pero called for men to take their horses and then disappeared after them. Teixeira sat down on the terrace and quickly reread Peres’s letter, nodding with satisfaction as he confirmed his suspicion. He began to think how the encounter so obliquely signaled by the man a thousand leagues distant might be engineered, for it would have to be that night, at the “banquet in their honor,” whatever those two things might turn out to be. Laid out before him, the bay was a windless bowl in which the
Picanço
and
Ajuda
appeared embedded, the water flat and gelatinous. He could not see the Hill from here, but the sight of the living man’s burial was still before him. He wondered how many other such sacrifices had preceded this latest. And sacrifices to what? Mello? God? The reeking rot itself? He dismissed these thoughts, they did not help him. The bay was in shadow then, the
Ajuda,
too, and the structure on her deck. Where the Ganda was dying.

That night, the guests arrived in twos: Joao Afonso de Aveiro and Dom Fernão de Mello, the factor and the Captain, stood outside the fort to greet their guests. First him and Dom Francisco; then the slavers, Dom Valentim Coelho and Dom Fernando da Montoroio; last Dom Ruy Mendes da Mesquita, master of the
Picanço,
and Dom Duarte Alema, her pilot. They ate capons that were cooked on spits over a firepit in front of the terrace, where they sat. Negroes stood one behind each, fanning the eight men, who pulled hot flesh off the carcasses as they
arrived at the table and licked the grease off their fingers. They drank sweet rum that Dom Fernão told them was made on the island.

“I only wish we could sell it,” he said. “Could you sell this in Antwerp?” he asked Mesquita.

“Sugar,” said the
Picanço’s
master. “Sugar to Antwerp and slaves to Mina. That’s our run, when we’re loaded.” There was a note of complaint in his voice.

The slavers sitting to either side of Teixeira shifted on their seats and scowled. “Soon enough,” said the one called Montoroio. “This situation cannot last forever.”

“What situation?” Dom Francisco spoke up then, and it looked for a moment as though Montoroio would speak again. Mello cut him off.

“Scarcity.” He thumped the table with his fist. “That’s the heart of trade. No scarcity, no trade. No one turned a profit in the Garden of Eden, did they? I remember the time when a good healthy
peça
could be had for three shaving basins and a rusty knife. No longer, my friends. The Negroes are treacherous, and we are far from home.” The last phrase was spoken as a truism, familiar to the others, who smiled, all except Aveiro.

“Their treachery is the same as ours,” he said. “Only now they know the value of the trade. Or did.”

“Did? The situation? What is this
situation?”
Teixeira could see that Dom Francisco’s color had risen, his temperament with it.

Aveiro answered him calmly. “They’ve stopped the trade,” he said simply. “I oversee the factory at Gatò, have done for thirty years. The Oba there, that is their King, sells his slaves to me. Until a month ago. A month ago he stopped the trade, then refused to see me, and then a week ago I was pulled out of my bed and thrown into a canoe and paddled down the river to the coast. …” He stopped there and spread his hands in bewilderment. His face, though, remained unsurprised.

“It is the same down the coast at Mpinde,” said Montoroio. “The Mani speaks, the Congo Negroes obey. About a month ago. Since then, nothing. And nothing we can do about it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Coelho. He was younger than the other and more pugnacious in his expression. “There’s still Ndongo, and other places upriver of there—”

“I won’t hear that!” Mello broke in fiercely. “I won’t listen to a man talk of breaking his license. I won’t have it, Coelho. Do you hear me?”

For a moment it looked to Teixeira that the two might rise from the table and come to blows. Across the table from him, Alema, the pilot, who had said nothing all evening, looked between them in alarm. Then Aveiro’s voice cut through the rising heat of the row.

“Caught a real little pirate before I left.” He spoke calmly, as though the other two were noisy children and would subside if simply ignored. “Walked into Benin cool as you please, tattoos from head to toe: a real old
laucado,
I reckon. I’d
heard of him, of course. Been up north in the forest trading with the Warri for ten years or more. Claimed he didn’t know that he needed a license. …” This produced guffaws of disbelief from around the table. “Anyway,” Aveiro went on imperturbably, “this villain knew something about trade, and he knew something about why it was stopped, so he said.”

The others went quiet at that, leaning forward and suddenly attentive, all except Mello. He sat back in his chair and his eyes roved around the table. He has heard this already, Teixeira thought.

“He was up in a village near the head of the Fermoso. A little over a month ago, about two weeks after the rains stopped, a man walks in, not a villager, a man from some other tribe, carrying a
ju-ju,
that’s a kind of holy stick they have,” he explained for the benefit of the newcomers. “The villagers greet him, treat him with respect, and then they hold a meeting, from which our
lançado’s
excluded. A few days after that he’s woken up by the man he does business with and told to leave. Before he can even gather his goods, some more men arrive, men he knows well, mind you. They put a spear to his guts and march him out of the village. When he looks back, they’re burning his hut and everything in it. That was his story.”

“The same as your own,” said Montoroio. “Except for the man with the
ju-ju.”

Aveiro nodded. “So I thought. But then I remembered something from my first year at Gatò, the same year the Oba there was crowned. There was a vast ceremony going on for days, eating, drinking, masquerades, and so on. And then, right at the end, a fellow turns up and, this is the odd thing, the whole thing stops. The whole city—and it’s a huge city up there, big as Lisbon—the whole place comes to a halt. This fellow walks in alone, enters the Oba’s compound, and when he comes out, the Oba’s been crowned. What I remember is that he carried an odd-looking
ju-ju,
just like the one my pirate described.”

“And this fellow crowned the Oba of Benin?” Montoroio sounded incredulous.

“As I remember it. I asked about him then, but no one would tell me for a long time. In fact, they regarded me very strangely if I so much as mentioned it. …”

“So you never found out,” said Montoroio.

Aveiro snorted. “Of course I did. In the end I got a man drunk. He told me this fellow was from a tribe to the north and east of Benin. He was called ‘Ezzery,’ or ‘the Ezzery,’ if I remember right. No one goes up there, though. The Oba doesn’t like it.”

“Nor the Mani,” said Montoroio. “North of the Rio dos Camarões. Have you marked that?”

He addressed this to Coelho, who nodded, saying, “The same area, only reached from the south—”

“So what are they hiding up there? This ‘Ezzery’?” Mello broke in. No one
answered. He turned again to Aveiro. “We must question this
laucado
of yours. Where have you got him?”

“The
lançado,
ah, a dying breed,” Aveiro sighed. “There was a time we’d have called him a true
pombeiro
and had him sitting at this table with us. But that was a long time ago, eh, Dom Fernão? Before the likes of Afonso da Torres with his ‘Contract for this-Coast’ and Dom Christobal de Haro with his ‘Contract for that-Coast,’ and their licenses, and their licensees, no offense intended”—this was directed at Mesquita—“and before our King signed treaties with the likes of the Mani and the Oba. There used to be a man, and each man had a price, and that was that. … A long time ago, as I said. Different now.” He reached for a bird from the plate before him and began pulling it apart. Teixeira realized belatedly that the factor was drunk. He had forgotten the question, and Mello had to prompt him to return to it.

“Ah yes, the
laucado,”
he said as though the matter had just then been raised. “Well, trading without a license. … I hanged him on the spot.”

Teixeira looked across the table. Alema was staring at him.

“Let’s have a song, shall we?” Mello appealed to the company then.

They sang for a while, then talked idly of the heat. Dom Ruy told anecdotes of the
Picanço’s
voyage and relayed the gossip from Mina, some two hundred leagues away on the mainland. Then he asked Dom Francisco the nature of the animal that, rumor had it, was stowed on the
Ajuda’s
deck.

“It is a kind of monster,” said Dom Francisco. “And an evil one at that.” He too was drunk by now, his tone sullen and morose. “It eats horseflesh,” he said finally, and shot Teixeira a look of frank contempt across the table.

The banquet broke up soon after, the traders and Mello stumbling inside while the others walked off to find, respectively, the jetty where the
Picanço
was moored and the boat that would ferry them out to the
Ajuda
. Dom Francisco took Mesquita by the arm and began telling him how they had blasted their way out of the harbor at Goa: “Two full broadsides in less than two minutes! How’s that for gunnery, Dom Ruy?” The
Picanço’s
master nodded politely. Teixeira watched them go.

“Dom Jaime?”

It was Alema, standing there waiting for him, hesitant. Nervous too, Teixeira saw. The man had scarcely touched his cup throughout the evening. Teixeira looked around casually, but the terrace was deserted now, except for the eight Negroes who had stood behind them through the hours of the evening and who still stood there, now fanning eight empty chairs. Dom Francisco’s drunken babble faded into the night.

“You may stop,” he told them. The men looked at each other but continued fanning. Teixeira shook his head, then turned back to Alema.

“You have the letter from Peres,” he said, and watched the relief that washed over the younger man’s face. Then the guarded expression returned.

“How did you know?”

“Mello’s letter contained nothing, as you probably know.” The young man shook his head at that. “You were mentioned as the
Picanço’s
master and Dom Ruy as her pilot. Peres does not make mistakes like that without a reason. You have the letter with you?”

Alema reached within his coat and handed it over. “Normally we would be long gone by now,” he said. “In other circumstances it would have been difficult to justify our wait here.”

“Other circumstances? What is your pretext now?”

“You heard them at table. We have been waiting to lade for a month now. There are no slaves. It was the same along the coast. In the past we have put in a few leagues before Axim to take on fresh water, fresh vegetables. The prices at the fort itself are ruinous and so … It is harmless enough. We know the natives there, and they know to keep quiet. But this time, nothing.” He shrugged, baffled. “They would not come out. We saw them watching us from the beach, but they would not come.”

Teixeira folded the letter away carefully, half-listening to Alema, half-thinking of the words he would soon be poring over in his cabin. Peres’s words.

“Did you meet him in person?” he asked the pilot. “Peres, I mean.”

The man shook his head. “One of his lieutenants.”

“Alvaro Carreira?”

“He did not give a name. A man a little older than myself.” Alema paused then and looked about him hastily. “There is another matter,” he began, speaking quickly and quietly. They were walking a deserted path whose curve unwound and gradually straightened, becoming the track that led along the waterfront to the jetties and the beach. Mesquita and Dom Francisco were visible a few hundred paces ahead, the latter now being supported by the caravel’s captain. “Dom Ruy is of a mind to keep quiet, for if Mello knew, he would have every ship on the coast up there.” He checked himself and organized his thoughts. “It was at the Rio Real. We had come too far along the coast, and drifted too far in. Even so, we were five leagues or more out, beating south against the wind. We only caught a glimpse of her, but there was a ship anchored in the estuary. That was a month ago now. Then I was thinking of what they were saying tonight, about the trade drying up. …”