The Pop’s Rhinoceros (93 page)

They would eat fish and sometimes a porridgelike dish that was gray and sticky, washing these down with the sweet liquor the villagers called
tombo
. He would gulp as many cups as he could keep down, drinking himself into a stupor. The evening would wear on and his eyes would drop, though not from the liquor. Exhaustion riddled him like fever. His limbs ached with it. His head pounded. It seemed all he could do to stay awake. Yet he could not sleep.

Ants, he had thought that first night. Winged ones.

They had come upon three men in pirogues. The three men had led them through a bowerlike creek to their village, where they had eaten and drunk. It was their first night on solid ground since Rome, since the hard-packed dirt under the Sant’Angelo bridge. Usse and an old man who seemed to be the chief had talked quietly together in their own language. He’d understood nothing until the old man had begun drawing objects with his hands: different kinds of boats, it seemed. The fishermen had looked curiously at their craft, which was broader amidships and much shorter than their pirogues. The old man would be asking about the rowboat. Later they were given raffia mats to break the hardness of the ground. Usse took the slatted bed on the other side of the hut. He remembered his head sinking irresistibly to the ground and sleep overtaking him like a great warm wave. He drifted down, away from his companions to either side of him, away from the village, away from everything and into a snug darkness. Then it began.

The first time he awoke, he examined the coarse fibers of the mat, picking at a loose strand that he assumed had worked its way into his ear and irritated him back into consciousness. He snipped off a number of coarse fibers with his fingernail and sank gratefully back into sleep. … Or ticks! It seemed he was awake again, and ticks had been trying to crawl into his hair, or his ear, to lay eggs that would turn into more ticks, if ticks did in fact lay eggs. It must have been his ear, for it had been a sound that had awoken him this time. Insect-feet scraping across his eardrum. He could not hear it now. He was already dropping off again. It was
gone. He slept, and it promptly woke him once again: a whisper, very distant or very hushed. Ants? Winged ants? Or perhaps some larger beast crashing about in the undergrowth far away, its clumsy maneuvers amplified in the still night air. … Except the air was not still. A breeze blew. A breeze that rustled the leaves in the trees, leaves the size of skillets and leaves the size of thimbles, umbels, fronds, and lianas all scraping dryly together out there in the uncharted swamp. It was not that, either, the susurrating and sibilant twist of disturbance that curled itself in his ear and shivered there, a broken hiss that stopped the instant he woke and started the instant he slept. It had the character of voices, a fugitive rise and fall, different registers, but all incomprehensible and maddening. … He sat up. It stopped. Through the open door of the hut he saw the lightening sky, the water beyond just distinguishable from the towering mangroves, then a figure rising from the water’s edge and walking toward him. Usse? Yes. He let his head fall back, knowing dawn was not far off, an hour at most. A single precious hour. The voices had fallen silent. But the next night they were back.

So their near silent passage through the silent swamp went on, glossy dark green ferns appearing amongst the various palms and taller trees and dogtoothed perch breaking the surface in the late afternoons to swallow the hatching water-flies. The mangroves stopped and the creeks became wider, the land about them higher. Black rings formed about Salvestro’s eyes, and he spent these days lolling in the cramped boat, drifting in and out of sleep, knowing that only one night in two or three would be offered to him undisturbed. The creeks turned into long chains of lagoons. Then, a few days later, a stand of
abara-trees
was passing to their left, and behind them he glimpsed something glittering through the shade. The land there narrowed to a spit, then a point; the little rowboat rounded a last screen of bushes, and then there was open water: an enormous lake lay before them, its far bank visible a mile or more away. To either side there was only water for as far as the eye could see. Bernardo pulled harder on the oars, making for a ragged plume of smoke that Usse pointed to, though his course seemed to veer off the bearing the farther he went. They were traveling along a sagging arc, falling short for some reason. Salvestro looked back at the dense verdure through which they had traveled, a low hump of green, an unimpressive littoral. Their escorts had not followed them.

“It is a river,” Diego said abruptly. They were the first words he had spoken that day. Salvestro looked forward again in bafflement, unable to comprehend so large a body of water as a channel extending many further miles in both directions. It seemed formless and endless. Too big to move.

Bernardo eventually reached the far bank a few yards below a wide flight of steps formed from tree-trunks split down their centers and pegged in place with thick staves. A group of women wrapped in brightly colored cotton were washing clothes in the river, kneeling on the bottom step to pummel the sodden cloth, then dowsing it again in the opaque water. They stopped their work at the approach of the rowboat, watching its occupants with undisguised curiosity until,
when their craft was no more than ten yards away, Usse turned to observe them. Those nearest squatted down on the lowest step, seemingly frozen in place and transfixed by the lines carved in the young woman’s face, but the greater part did not even stop to pick up their washing baskets, wheeling en masse like a flock of birds and scattering up the steps.

They tied up the boat and stepped ashore. The remaining women watched warily as they mounted the steps. Usse led them along a path toward the wooden arch that marked the entrance to the village. Three young men were standing there, and Salvestro waited for them to bow, or crouch, or lower their heads as all the other villagers had done. Instead they grinned broadly at the young woman’s approach, embracing her and breaking into animated conversation. All three wore the same marks on their faces, identical to Usse’s, and all three carried heavy, elaborately carved staffs. Salvestro, Bernardo, and Diego stood there awkwardly while this reunion ran its course. From time to time Usse turned and indicated them, and the men nodded, their eyes running quickly over the three of them, appraising them. Eventually one of the three beckoned them forward, and all seven entered the village, which was larger than any they had yet seen and the mud-walls of the compounds much higher.

“Is this ‘Nree’?” Bernardo asked Salvestro.

Usse turned and told him shortly that it was not. One of the three men asked her something and nodded when she answered. Men and women began to appear in the doorways, their eyes following the odd procession as it passed between the huts and compounds. The three of them were led to a small doorway set deep in a wall.

“Tomorrow the people here will take us upriver,” Usse told them. “Food and water will be brought to you. We leave at first light.”

She was turning to go when Diego broke his silence. “Who are these men?” he demanded, indicating the three waiting for her. “How do we know we can trust them?”

“They are my brothers,” Usse said shortly.

The door led to a little courtyard walled on three sides. A long low building fronted by a raised terrace closed off the back. A cooking pit in the center of the courtyard had been swept out. There was a hutchlike structure to one side, carefully thatched but containing nothing. The three men were left alone.

The foremost part of the building was divided into three rooms, each with two doors giving out onto the terrace in front and a much larger room behind, its roof supported by stakes of a dark hardwood. Two rearmost rooms were reached across this darkened area, for there were no breaks in either the walls or the roof. They were as narrow as corridors, placed one in front of the other and the doorways staggered so that the last was in complete darkness and Salvestro was able to make out its dimensions only by running his hands along the smooth walls. The whole place was clean, but a musty smell hung in the air as though no one had entered for a long time. A pile of mats had been stacked on the terrace.
Salvestro spread these out, and he and Bernardo lay down on them. Diego stood there for a few moments as though undecided whether or not he would do the same. Eventually he turned away and wandered back into the building.

“Diego is sick,” Bernardo said when the man had disappeared. “I saw him last night. He was shaking.”

“The only place Diego’s sick is in his head,” Salvestro retorted.

“What do you mean, ‘in his head’?”

“Be quiet or he’ll hear,” Salvestro hissed, nodding toward the inside of the building. “He doesn’t know what to do. He hardly speaks. He knows no more than we do.”

Bernardo thought about this.

“And we don’t know anything!” he burst out.

“Right,” said Salvestro. “We don’t. So what are we going to do?”

Bernardo shook his head in ignorance.

“We’re going to keep our heads down and get out of this somehow. And if that means Diego leading some animal along by the nose and us following with a shovel, then that’s what we’ll do.” His fingers minced with exaggerated caution past the tip of Bernardo’s nose

“Like at Prato,” said Bernardo, watching the walking fingers. “Or Rome.”

Like Muud, thought Salvestro. And Proztorf, and Marne, and all the other villages he had crept away from in the dead of night. Like the island.

He said, “We’ll be back at the Broken Wheel scoffing Rodolfo’s pies before you know it. Who knows, we might even find a use for the bread.”

“The bread,” echoed Bernardo, savoring several confused memories. “And beer?”

“Beer too,” confirmed Salvestro. “Barrels of it.”

Their stomachs rumbled nostalgically.

The promised food arrived later, carried in an earthenware cooking pot by two old women who set it inside the door to the courtyard, placed a large calabash of water beside it, then retreated without once having glanced at the two men who watched this operation from the terrace. The cooking pot contained a gray stew in which maize cobs had been boiled whole. Bernardo dipped a finger in.

“Salty,” he said. “Where’s Diego?”

Diego was in the dark of the rearmost room.

“Sire, I bring greetings from Fernando the Catholic, King of all Spain. I am Don Diego of Tortosa, the servant of my King …”

No. The words tasted of ashes. They fell off his tongue like stones. He began again.

“Sire, my King bids me salute you in his place. Greetings, from Fernando the Catholic, King of all Spain, whose wish it is to give a certain beast to Pope Leo—to the Holy Father, Leo, our Pope—to Medici, neither holy, nor a father, my
enemy and the agent of my ruin. And yet it is the wish of my King and so it is my wish too that this be done. Thus and therefore I come before you, King of Nri.”

He was on his knees. He saw their shapes in the darkness of the empty room, their dissolving bodies: Medici, Cardona, the whisperers and slanderers.

“He is my enemy. I wish him dead.”

His own voice sounded odd to his ears, thickened, perhaps. He curled his tongue around his teeth. When he delivered this speech, Usse would be standing at her father’s side. She was a different person. He no longer knew her. The Princess of Nri.

“Sire,” he began again. “It has been my great pleasure to lie with your daughter seven times, in which art she has proved most dexterous. I have had her in different places and several diverse manners, including the Turkish. In sight of this fact, I beg of you a Beast, called
Ezodu
in these parts, and hereby promise you that I will, on the horn which grows upon the end of its nose, impale a certain fat Pontiff, called Leo in my country. I am Diego of Tortosa, though I have not been there in many years and have no plan to return, and I am the servant of Fernando the Catholic, King of all Spain, though I have not served him since the butchery of Prato and his creatures will most likely hang me anyway. …”

He stopped again. He felt laughter rising in his throat, a strange wheezing sensation that bubbled and gurgled up from his chest.

“These, my companions, are called Salvestro the Fleet of Foot and Bernardo of the Brawny Arm. They are from nowhere in particular. I, however, am Diego of Tortosa …”

He stopped again. Was he laughing? Was this laughter?

“I am the servant of Fernando the Catholic.”

It made no difference what he said.

“I am the servant,” he began.

It felt as though he were laughing, his sides aching, his insides racked with hiccups of mirth that forced their way up to his throat. His mouth opened and closed. His body shook, but there was only silence. If this was his laughter, his laughter made no sound.

Two clean-picked cobs already lay on the ground beside the cooking pot when Salvestro emerged again.

“Mmmn?” asked Bernardo.

“He says he will eat later. We are to save his portion for him.”

“Whhhth?”

“He is praying,” said Salvestro, “and does not wish to be disturbed.”