The Pop’s Rhinoceros (9 page)

Uppp … through the layers of fish, catching full grown, near grown, leaving sprat and fry. Ploetz strained on the ropes. Ploetz heaved in the net. Ewald stared at the bottom of the boat. He bit the flesh around his nails and scratched at his cheeks. Ploetz lugged. Ploetz tugged. The boat lurched and bobbed. Brüggeman stared at the cloudy sky. A dark mass of herring grew brighter and nearer, rising through the water. Ploetz hauled, intent, working hand over hand. The catch was good, the net almost full. He braced himself, grunted. The gunwales dipped, the whole boat lurched, unbalanced. Ewald started, looked across, saw, knew.

Too late.

The boat tipped them both into the freezing sea, rolled, and almost capsized. Ploetz gasped from the cold, shouted, spat mouthfuls of water, striking down with his feet as the water filled his boots. Brüggeman surfaced like a madman, lunging at the hull. Underneath their bodies the net was opening, wriggling, unsnagging. The herring were escaping and diving back to the shoal.

They would right the boat and clamber back in. They would gather dead fish from the waters around them and row to shore. Ewald would curse him, but the balance of the boat was a matter for them both. Ewald would know this, know too he was worried, lax on the job.

Later, when they had dragged the boat up the beach and the two men had sunk soaked and exhausted beside it, Ploetz turned to the vessel’s master.

“You tipped us in,” he said bluntly.

Ewald nodded absentmindedly. He was gazing out over the water. Another week now and the boat would be out for winter. Perhaps they should haul it up now? His heart was not in it, and he told the other man as much.

“Don’t tell me you don’t like the work,” Ploetz burst out. “We both hate the work. If you’ve got two vagabonds in your drying-shed, that’s your concern. Turn them out if they trouble you, but don’t turn me out of the boat. We might have drowned out there, and for what? Because Ewald Brüggeman doesn’t like his new lodgers!”

Ploetz snorted.

“It’s worse than that,” Ewald replied after a few moments’ silence. “If they were just vagabonds … It’s worse, that’s all.”

“Worse? What do you mean,‘worse’?” Ploetz made no attempt now to hide his contempt.

For the first time in the exchange, Ewald met the other’s eyes. “It’s Niklot,” he said. “One of them’s Niklot. He calls himself Salvestro now. He asked for the use of the drying-shed, and to borrow the boat. …”

“Niklot? You mean the Savage?” Ploetz’s voice was incredulous. “But they drowned him! How can he … What does he want with the boat?”

Ewald was shaking his head now, saying, “The other one is a giant. I don’t know what they want with the boat. I don’t know why they came here. I don’t know what they want with me. …” His voice died away.

Terrified, thought Ploetz.

Aloud, he said, “You should have told this before, Ewald. Our fathers knew what to do with his kind, didn’t they? … Eh, Ewald?”

He would tell them of the world beyond Usedom, of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which lay joined together in the midst of an illimitable ocean. The center of the world was Jerusalem. To the south, in the desert wastes of Africa, lay the torrid zone, so hot that no man might cross it. To the east, in the Indies, were manticores and elephants, single- and double-humped camels, serpents that swallowed donkeys. Summer and winter came twice a year, and on the easternmost edge of the world were the Serians, who made silk and bartered it in silence.

“How?” asked Brother Joachim-Heinz.

“I do not know,” replied Jörg. He considered briefly. “Hand signals.”

His diagram had grown cluttered as he marked in the islands of the Middle Sea: Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, Candia, Nigropont, and Pharos. East, and the world breathed harder, tides grew stronger, rushing past Icaros, Melos, Carpathos, and Rhodes to dolphin-filled Hellespont, where Christendom faced the Indies. Thrace was where the fearsome cranes drove the Pygmies from the third coast of Europe. Every winter they flew east carrying stones for balance, led by one bird, then another, as their exhausted chieftains fell from the sky. On the island of Ortygia the quails would arrive in autumn, cluster in a flock, and fly low across the sea. Nothing would deflect them, neither sails nor boats, which would be
shredded or capsized, such was their fury. Even the goshawk would be turned aside, the leader flying wide to offer himself in sacrifice that his fellows might alight in safety. …

“I see it!” Now Brother Volker had leapt to his feet. Jörg inclined his head. “The mystery of the quails is very simple to penetrate: the quails are souls who fly alone in their confusion. Only together can they find the true path. Their leader is Christ, who sacrifices himself that the rest might be saved and the boats and sails are their travails on earth, which they must pass through to reach the heaven of the island. …”

“Heretical nonsense!” Brother Georg rose from his seat. “Heaven cannot be on earth. The quails are sinners led astray by their prophet, a false prophet justly slain by the sword of the church. That is the true meaning of the goshawk.”

“Surely not,” riposted Brother Bernd. “Surely the goshawk is a test, and the quail which flies too wide has strayed too far from the path. …” Brother Walter nodded sagely. Brother Hanno disagreed. Brother Christoph thought it ridiculous and Brother Harald clearly true. Soon everyone was debating, disputing interpretations, constructing hypotheses, and quoting the
Psychomachia
at one another. The island was a paradise, an Eden, a second Promised Land. Or a fleshpot, a Sodom, a hell on earth. The quails meant angels to some, agents of the Devil to others. Saints, thought Wulf. Sinners, thought Wolf. Wilf did not know.

“No! No! No!” shouted Jörg. “Can you not understand? The quails do not mean anything. They are, quite simply, quails!”

But they did not understand. They sat blankly, baffled in the chapter-house while he told them of Scythia, where the blue-faced Tartars wore the skins of their enemies as clothing, where the white-haired Albans of the coast trained dogs to bring down bulls and lions, even elephants. The brothers’ response was to talk of popes converting Ostrogoths to the service of the Church. The bulls were tyrants, the lions Moors, the elephants were other tribes of the East. When he told them of the elephants of Mauritania guiding hapless travelers out of the wilderness, the elephants became Moses, horned on Mount Sinai, and when he spoke of the same beasts marching in the armies of the Indies, then they were the Pharaoh’s armies that pursued Moses and were drowned. Jörg grew vexed.

“The elephant is a beast of surpassing size,” he told them. “He is as large as a house and has the tail of a rat. He has a hide of armor, but his belly is soft and his enemies will always attack him there. He eats trees, stones, but loves oats above all else. Crossing seas, he will not go aboard without firm pledges to return and can only be tamed with malt beer. His enemy is chiefly the dragon, which sucks the coolness from his blood till the scaly beast be bloated, and many times the elephant will fall upon it and thus it bursts. This is the nature of elephants.”

But he had lost them. He traced the lands of Ethiop, Numidia, and Egypt, described the rivers of Oxus, Indus, and Ister. The brothers took them for ciphers, symbols, abstractions. The terrible camelopardalis was a figure of rapacity, the
chameleon an emblem of apostasy. He talked of parrots, popinjays, tigers, and tapirs. Then he would wait for Brother Bernd to rise, or HansJürgen, or any of them.

“Father, the tapir then would be a beast connoting lust?”

“The tapir is simply a tapir,” he would intone. “It is a pig with hooves and lives beyond the isle of Taprobane.”

There would be a short silence then, and following it, a brother would venture, “Taprobane, I believe we determined, would represent a false and beguiling paradise, not the earthly Paradise of the legends of the East, but a jewellike imitation to tempt men from …”

“No,” said Jörg

“… the path of righteousness.”

“You are on the wrong path entirely. It is not a point of doctrine, but an island. This is the world wherein we live.”

Privately he knew it was not so. For all their trampings about the island, their accustomed contact with the islanders, his monks remained locked within their church. Bent within its round they saw no farther than its walls, and now the church was failing, its foundations giving way beneath them all. He imagined it pitching slowly down the cliff and sliding into the sea with his monks perched atop like so many bickering commentators:

“Fear not, brothers! Our church is meant for a second Ark, which we will sail to the Ararat our Lord has raised for—”

“No, no. We are all Jonahs and our church is the whale sent to pluck us from our fellows.”

“Nonsense! The Lord has cast us from his garden as sinners. Feel. This water is very cold, is it not? Brothers? Brothers! …”

In his own darker moments Jörg would envision the day of the church’s conception, when Henry the Lion, his margraves, and their armies stood together at the limit of the point, baffled, frustrated, suddenly arrested when they needed above all to continue, forward over the cliff into the steely gray waters below. Their church was a dam, the final halt for an army of dead men. Still they pressed forward, driven by the need to finish what they had begun, which had led them too far and would not stop, farther into Vineta’s oblivion. Yes, Jörg too would be there as they careered down the cliff, adding his voice to the pointless debate, “We are crusaders, Christ’s soldiers, sent to finish what was begun, to break the stalemate of Henry’s thwarting”—bleating his own doubtful gloss while the nef pitched forward, its splintered prow breaking the surface, and the cowled mariners squabbled aboard their sinking ship of fools. He saw such battles play their havoc across the faces of the brothers as they filed past him out of the chapter-house, fought his own in the secrecy of his call, endured them, won them, watched them return. Brother Gerhardt watched him from his place on the gradines, contributing nothing, waiting for his failure.

He persevered, leading them in a flattened loop about the shores of the Middle
Sea from Pontus to the pillars of Hercules, thrusting inland, chasing vistas of burning sand and blistering heat, lands of perpetual ice where the sun would rise but once a year and a single night outlast the winter. He drew paradises of lush green grass and restorative fountains, infernos of blazing black rivers and fire-spitting mountains. His voice grew louder, his gestures wilder, as he traced the world’s extremities. Their puzzlement only deepened. Each day they gathered dutifully after Sext to hear him rant of monsters and marvels, listening in near silence, their occasional comments as wrong-headed as ever. Each day he would notice a few more avert their eyes from his own as they left for their chores or some errand about the island, he would see the grin beneath Brother Gerhardt’s impassive features broaden, and alone in his cell his own doubts gathered force. He needed their curiosity, at least. His plan was going awry, foundering before any one of them had set a foot beyond Usedom’s shores. They were blind, or would not open their eyes. They would stumble and fall. He returned to his books, poring over them until the candlelight ringed his eyes with strange aches and the characters clouded and merged. He could not find what he needed, and the brothers were whispering, conferring amongst themselves. He had pressed their faces against the island until they could not help but accept it. Beyond it, they understood nothing.

Autumn came, and the festivals of thanksgiving. Coppery beech leaves drifted on the forest floor, and approaching winter began to suck the sunlight out of the sky. His lectures continued through the shortening days while the islanders turned to the mending of fences, digging of ditches, their women to preserves for the months ahead. The island’s pulse beat slower, and Jörg too found his turning thoughts slow, as though he were not yet resigned to the failure that was their conclusion. He could see no way forward but could not bring himself to stop. The brothers were a weight he could pull no farther. He was emptied and all but stalled. Then, on Saint Bruno’s Day, with the sea and sky meeting in gray equivalence on the winter’s drab horizon, Brother HansJürgen climbed slowly up the steps to his cell to inform him that two strangers had arrived on the island, soldiers, in flight from a war far away to the south.

Jörg nodded slowly at the distraction. Soldiers and a distant war. What of it? But then his thoughts quickened. His mind jumped and began to spin. Of course, he thought, yes. A thousand times yes. His heart began to pound as the thought gathered force. Behind him, in the semilight of the doorway, the monk waited patiently for his response. These vagabonds might prove his deliverance, prayed for even unknowing, the makeweight for all their shortcomings. When he finally spoke his voice was neutral, casual seeming, and bled of all intent. “Concerning these new-come ruffians,” he said, “I would have you find out more, Brother.” HansJürgen nodded acceptance of the commission, turned, and left the Prior to his studies.

In the days that followed, the monks would note in Father Jörg a moderation of his choleric humor, a most welcome calming of those passions that had led
him to bellow the names of distant islands and peoples, to beat upon the wall with his stick, and even to galumph up and down the chapter-house in imitation of the manticore—a figure denoting promiscuous gluttony, as they recalled. When he told them of the tree-living Hyperboreans—who signaled, they decided, the state of the eremitic soul in its passage from earth to heaven—it was in quiet, casual tones. And when Jörg described for them the thirstworm and sleep-worm of the deserts beyond the Nigris, their conclusions as to the meaning of these serpents—obviously, drunkenness and sloth—went unchallenged but for a murmur that those actually bitten might differ from this view. They took his calm for resignation, a sign that he would soon give up his lectures altogether. From his post in front of the chapter-house wall, he noted a softening in the serried faces of his monks. He fancied he saw the first hint of condescension in Brother Gerhardt’s increasingly elaborate salutes. They were marking time, merely waiting for his madness to run its course, and believing he was doing the same. Wrong.