The Pop’s Rhinoceros (89 page)

“Clear!” he shouted, and threw out the lead again. The coast was falling away more rapidly than he had thought. The weight tugged dully at his arm, pulling him down into the water, should he wish it. … He looked down at its chaotic troughs and scends. Now? He pulled on the line, turned his head away, spat. He knew he would not jump.

“What next?” Bernardo shouted up at the poop deck, where Captain Alfredo had been joined by Don Diego. The captain was pointing to the sails, then down at the water. Diego was nodding. Salvestro realized that their vessel was turning very slowly sideways. The two men spoke quickly amongst themselves, and then Alfredo bellowed down to the man on the tiller,” Hard a-port! Hard as you can!”

The ship stopped, then continued to turn.

“Damn!” cursed the captain. Enzo, Luca, and Bernardo looked up at him while he deliberated.

“For’ard, you men,” he shouted, and then he was jumping down from the poop and taking the gangway at a run. The three men followed him to the forecastle. “Got to get some more canvas up there,” he said, pointing to the foremast. “Got to get her nose around or we’ll be on that shore in no time.” The stern of the ship was pointed directly toward the coast, and they were drifting backward. Luca jumped on the ratlines, followed by Bernardo, but neither was even within reach of the mainsail when the mast itself lurched. A stay snapped on the port
side, those to starboard went slack, and the remainder of the crow’s nest crashed to the deck in a cloud of sawdust and splinters. Everyone froze.

“Climb down steadily, lads,” said Captain Alfredo. The mast quivered again as Bernardo stepped back on deck. The captain looked warily up at the sail, then down at the water. “Eddy of some sort,” he muttered to himself. “Plenty of wind, though. If we can catch it…” His eyes went back and forth, his brow furrowed. Apart from Piero on the tiller, everyone was on deck now, even the girl, who watched the approaching coast in baleful silence. Salvestro raised and sank the lead, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. The sea was rougher near the coastline, he saw now. There were low cliffs and rocks below them. The sea foamed as it broke over these. He would have drowned there.

“The boat!” Alfredo shouted suddenly. “Arturro, Bruno, in the hold. …”

It took some minutes to persuade Bernardo, and several more to lower the boat over the side, for it seemed determined to capsize on any contact with sea-water. There was a short discussion as to the proper length and weight of the rope and a vaguely panic-stricken hunt for anything forward of the foremast solid enough to take the strain, but in the end everything and everyone was in place: Piero on the tiller, Diego and Usse on the poop, a sawdusty Salvestro in the chains, a grim-faced Alfredo on the forecastle, and a dripping wet Jacopo beside him. Ruggero hammered a last nail into the most solid of the knight-heads, and Enzo, Arturro, Roberto, Bruno, and Luca hovered over the rope against the possibility that the nail would not hold. Then Bernardo began to row.

He rowed to port, which brought the ship about, and then he rowed forward, as if tugging the ship behind him. The stern of the little boat dipped to within an inch of the water, and the rope that attached her to the prow of the
Lucia
rose clear out of the sea while Bernardo churned the oars with such force that it seemed they must snap. Presently the wind again filled the
Lucia’s
sails, the rudder pushed against the strange current, and the vessel began to gather speed. Bernardo simply continued, keeping a generous fifty feet between his own craft and the battered two-and-a-half-master, and when Alfredo had led the crew in several rousing cheers for their oxlike savior and shouted for him to come in, the giant merely yelled back, “No!” and kept rowing. He rowed diagonals, then zigzags, then several wobbly circles. The rope flopped after him and the crew cheered again, none louder than Salvestro, who was also laughing uproariously. The Pillars of Hercules inched past, the last cape slid abaft, and before them was the ocean. Bernardo was standing upright now with the oars angled downward, threshing glittering droplets from the water. The rowboat bounced and spun in the heavier swell, zooming about in front of the larger vessel as though the latter were a dim-witted predator being lured out into the open water. The
Lucia
lumbered after the smaller boat, her fabric sagging like a half-filled wineskin, her masts and yards creaking and groaning, her stanchions and transoms and futtocks and poles and posts and planks all grinding squelchily against one another: a soggy, wormy, mutinous, beastless boat.

Salvestro pulled in the lead and coiled the line. Bernardo was off the larboard, keeping level with the prow and showing no sign of tiring. Two or three leagues separated them from the coast. Africa, Salvestro realized. Behind him someone shouted for everyone else to get their grub, and at almost the same moment a small splash sounded forward. He glanced curiously over the side. The bowsprit floated past.

Jacopo hopped to keep the weight off his ankle, and greasy hair flopped over his forehead. Six doubting faces eyed him. The punctured hand dangled in its sling. “Tonight,” he said. “And no more mistakes.”

Piero nodded, but nobody else did. Here they were again, thick as thieves in steerage. His failures had stripped him little by little of the steely aura and title they had invested him in. Jacopo the Hand of Death … Now, Jacopo the Clown, the dripping buffoon who spat seawater onto the deck and whined about “whatever came over me. …” They did not fear him, but they feared his dereliction, for that would turn their gaping faces on each other, all tense and white tonight, crated together like cattle and shifting uneasily from foot to foot. Skeptical already, they would be sneering if he failed again. They wanted to know how. He told them. More nods. More shifting about. The dank boat-smell that clung to every corner of the vessel mingled with the oily lamp-smoke and their unwashed bodies. They could smell each other down here. Lacking rats, the
Lucia
had them.

“We take Bernardo first,” said Jacopo, bringing his hand down on the tiller. “Then the others, chop, chop, chop.”

“Salvestro! Look!”

Bernardo stood upright in the boat, leaning back to force the nose out of the water and waiting for the next oversize trough to deliver its corresponding peak. His arms tensed, then dug the oars deep into the water, pulled heavily once, twice, thrice, and the little boat launched itself skyward up a ramp of seawater, shooting clear of the surface for a second before crashing down again in a great splash of spray. A grinning Bernardo waved triumphantly. Salvestro waved back.

Later in the afternoon Captain Alfredo had Salvestro detach the rope from the knight-heads and drag it around to the stern, where it was retied to the taffrail, so that Bernardo’s antics would cease pulling the ship off her heading. Little by little she was moving out from the coast, which was now little more than a smoky blue line far off on the larboard side, dwindling and thinning. Removed to this new location, Bernardo amused himself by leaping the ship’s wake, then, by stabbing down at the water with one oar while in midflight, he discovered that the rowboat might be made to pirouette. Perfecting this maneuver took several more hours, broken only by his stopping to eat. The rugged motions of the smaller boat had settled his stomach where the larger’s soft yaws and pitches had upset it, and his appetite had returned in force. Salted fish and pork disappeared down his gullet, followed by bannocks that Arturro baked in the hot embers of
the firebox. Bernardo gulped a round dozen of these ashy dough-cakes, then resumed his rowing.

“A marvelous thing, to be afloat on a day such as this,” said Captain Alfredo. His pink-rimmed eyes roved over the men at work aloft, then off the stern to Bernardo’s sploshings and whoops. “That lad can pull an oar,” he marveled. “Hasn’t held down so much as a herring since we left port and now look at him.” He tapped a tentative foot on the deck. “She may not be well-founded, I mean in the conventional sense, but still she’s a good ship, our
Lucia,
is she not?”

Salvestro agreed that she was. The coast had slipped below the horizon, and the setting sun was a thin red disk slicing deep into a pink sea. The nearest landfall would be twenty miles away, perhaps more. He heard the cabin door open and Don Diego walked a little way onto the gangway joining the poop to the forecastle. He looked over the side, then up at the darkening sky. When he turned and saw the two of them standing there, his gaze swept over them as if he and Captain Alfredo were simply part of the deck clutter. Since the first night of the voyage he had barely addressed a word to anyone on board save Captain Alfredo, preferring to stay in the cabin with the girl, who was seen even more rarely. Salvestro realized that, disengaged from the past injustices heaped upon his head, the soldier became vague and abstracted, a half-man, only truly animated by the choler that darkened his face and brought the blood flushing about his throat when the Medici was mentioned. If the Pope were to die peacefully in his bed, Salvestro mused, on the other side of the world, Diego would relapse into a torpor indistinguishable from death. Without his anger and its object, he was as he appeared now: mooning and idle, gazing sightlessly into the water as though he had once lost something within and could not drag himself away. He stood there a few minutes before offering the two of them a perfunctory nod, then disappeared back into the cabin.

When the sun fell below the horizon, Captain Alfredo had the men take in the sails. Jacopo supervised them. Night fell quickly, and it was almost dark before the canvas was brailed and they descended wearily belowdecks. A fat moon hung in the sky, its wan light disappearing altogether for minutes at a time when it drifted behind the clouds. Salvestro found himself alone on the deck, looking off the stern at the rowboat that rocked and seesawed on the end of the rope hitched to the taffrail. Bernardo dozed within it. He looked around quickly, then took hold of the rope and began to draw it in. When the boat was all but bumping against the Lucia’s stern, Bernardo stirred and woke up.

“What are you—”

“Sssh!”

“But—”

“Shut up!”

Salvestro clambered over the rail and began climbing down to the boat. He used the end-timbers and larger beams as steps, feeling for them carefully as he
worked his way down the sheer stern. From within the closed hatches of the poop cabin, a human voice droned. Diego’s. Below that, a faint light showed around the end of the tiller. He peered in and glimpsed Jacopo and the others gathered together in steerage. Then Bernardo took up his oars and maneuvered the bobbing platform directly beneath him. He waved a foot about, searching for the bottom of the boat, whose motions seemed to grow more erratic the nearer he approached.

“Jump down,” whispered Bernardo.

“I
am
jumping down,” he hissed back.

He fell on Bernardo, who fell back himself, and the oars clattered loudly in the quiet of the night. The little boat drifted back, away from the
Lucia,
until the weight of the rope brought them to a halt. Salvestro looked back anxiously, but no one appeared and there was no sound save the slap of the water against the boat, the creaking of the
Lucias
masts, and his own breathing.

“I’m not going back on board,” said Bernardo. “I’ve been sick since we left and I’m not going back, so before you start telling me, I’m going to tell you: I’m not going back and that’s that.”

“You’re not sick now, are you?”

“That’s not the point. If I was up there”—Bernardo pointed to the
Lucia—
” I’d be heaving up again in a minute, just like before. Same thing. You don’t know what it’s like being sick all the time. You wake up, sick. You stand up, sick. You eat, sick. Drink, sick again. You lie down, sick, so you can’t sleep, still sick—”

“Bernardo—”

“—and even your dreams are about being sick, when they’re not about dogs, and if they are about dogs, then the dogs are sick, too—”

“Bernardo, if you’d simply—”

“—and they’re sick on you, because when you wake up again there it is all over you. Sick. You can be sick even when you’re sleeping, so don’t think for a second that I’m going back on board just to be sick again—”

“Bernardo, shut up. Neither of us—”

“—because I’m not. It was you that had us spend a winter in that fish-shed, and it was you that made us go to Rome, and that’s how all this started—”

“Bernardo, neither of us is going back on board.”

“—so this is your fault… What?”

There is such a sea as this, a loose-limbed body of water whose surface is a membrane of clear resin that sags and stretches under the tonnage of the hulls that slide upon it, dipping, creasing, opening deceptive troughs under blankets of spoon-drift. Fat filaments shred and fly in high winds; skeins of its fabric unravel or snap. Taut bubbles swell, then pop, becoming the mouths of deep sumps, long watery throats leading to the bottom of the ocean. The surface blisters and peels like varnish in a brazier. The water beneath is loose and molten: abruptly skinless. Its frameless mass upholds nothing, neither vessels nor the men who sail them.
This sea was once
… This was not that sea. The
Lucia
towed a near waveless pond of wake-water, wherein a rowboat, wherein the two benighted men who sat upon her thwarts and argued.

“I said,” said Salvestro, “that neither of us is going back. We’re going to make for the shore, then coast up bit by bit. We can’t be more than fifty miles from a friendly port. We’ll do it in stages. Now, give me a hand with this rope. …”

“Row home? You want
me
to row all the way? …”

“You’ve been rowing all afternoon,” Salvestro countered. “You didn’t complain then.”

“But what about the others? What about Diego? What about the beast?” Bernardo’s voice had risen in complaint.

“Diego? Weren’t you listening to him? Do you think the Pope is going to sit politely while we tell the world that he is no better than a murderer of women and children and brave Colonel Diego is innocent as the day is long?”