The Pop’s Rhinoceros
Read The Pop’s Rhinoceros Online
Authors: Lawrance Norflok
Praise for The
Pope’s Rhinoceros:
“One of the most original, energetic, and ambitious novels of recent years, It marks the emergence of a major writer.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegiac, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual license and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in a West African rain forest. Running through this variegated fable is the search for the rhinoceros. The exuberance, the sheer proliferation of incident and scene, are disciplined and controlled by unerring narrative pace and cunning.”
—Barry Unsworth,
Daily Telegraph
“Bawdy, baroque-punk prose of marvelous fluency, overlaid with a gloss of heavyweight erudition … an astonishing achievement, little short of a masterpiece.”
—William Dalrymple,
Independent on Sunday
“A gargantuan, dazzling fable by Britain’s brightest young writer.”
—Steven Poole,
Guardian
Also by Lawrence Norfolk
L
EMPRIÈRE’S
D
ICTIONARY
I
N THE
S
HAPE OF A
B
OAR
A NOVEL
Lawrence Norfolk
Copyright © 1996 by Lawrence Norfolk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Originally published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1996. First published in the United States in 1996 by Harmony Books.
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicalion Data
Norfolk, Lawrence, 1963-
The Pope’s rhinoceros: a novel / Lawrence Norfolk.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9942-3
1. Papal States—History—Leo X, 1513-1521—Fiction. 2. Portugal—History—16th century—Fiction. 3. Leo X, Pope, 1475-1521—Fiction. 4. Ocean travel—Fiction. 5. Rhinoceroses—Fiction. 6. Large type books. I. Title.
PR6064.O65P66 2003
823’.914—dc21
2003042182
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
For Vineeta
Thanks are due to Thomas Harder for his translation from the Italian of Iacopo Modesti’s eyewitness account of the sack of Prato and to Professor Hermann Walter of the University of Mannheim for a copy of Sigismondo Tizio’s
Historia Senensium
found in the Vatican library by his colleague, Ingrid D. Rowland of the University of Chicago.
All fishes eat. All fishes spawn. Few fishes spawn where they eat
.
— Arne Lindroth
VINETA
T
his sea was once a lake of ice. High mountains overlooked a glacial plain frosted with snow and scoured by the freezing wind. Granite basins curved up from under the ice-tonnage to rim it with irregular coasts. In ages still to come, boulder waste and till will speak of the ice pack’s tortuous inching over buried rock and sandstone; moraines and drumlins of advances and recessions that gouge out trenches and shunt forward ridges. The sea-floor here was prepared long before there was a sea to cover it. In the interim came the governance of ice.
Fault lines and fractures healed and welded, grew invisible, until the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, of Riga and Gdansk, were indistinguishable from the central basin that joined them. Northerly blizzards left their drifts of snow, which compacted down and thickened until the earth’s very crust tilted under the weight. Veins of frozen oil ran like the hawsers of a ruined fleet, looping and meeting in the dark far below the surface. Grit speckled the ice pack as though blasted out of the earth and suspended in midair, boulders shattered and hung immobile in the dark of this catastrophic freeze. Nothing breathed here. This must once have been the deadest place on earth.
This surface interruption: a pale disk of light germinating in the snow-flecked sky suggests a radical tilt to the axis below, gales cede to gusts and vicious whirlwinds, ice giants shout in the night. An inch of silt marks a thousand years, an aeon means a single degree of arc, and by this scale a thaw is under way. There will be a century of centuries of snarling ice, an age of glacial strain until the first crystal’s glistening melt to liquid spreads and seeps and creeps north across the frozen surface to make of it a mirror wherein the sun might see its face. Light slaps and dazzles the ice, sends thick fronts of heated air against the polar cold. Meltwaters dribble between ice and rock, refreeze and melt again. The nights are cold enough to strip the lungs of any beast foolish enough to venture on this wasted acreage, the wind that blasts across the vista turns hide and flesh to stone. An ice-blink sky glares down at the nights’ reverses, which are boulder waste, scree and brine cells locked in rime. There are shelves where the sun never reaches, and salts forced by the pressure lie as powder on the surface.
But the days grow longer, water-sheets spread, mean temperatures rise and vent mists that boil off the blazing ice. Secret cables of water are trickling down and prising the frigid bole from its case of rock, meeting and joining on the stony floors that the sun cannot find. A thousand miles of ice floats in an inch of water.
Different orders are coming down the line. Crevasses and canyons rive the surface and snake forward, cutting loose immense crystals that shatter and collapse. Water runs at the bottom of ravines a thousand meters deep, eating out the lowest levels of the ice pack and rising until the whole is cut with rivers fed by their own corrosive increase. The landscape resounds with the crash of ice-columns and ice-arches, the unheard thunder of a million wrecks. Glassy ridges sink and settle in pools that lengthen and rise, become fissures, until this territory of waste is neither solid nor liquid, but an archipelago of drifting icebergs dwindling in a sea of their own dissolved bodies and a fog so thick with damp, it is neither air nor water. Unhinged mountains collide in the green subsurface light and send up rafts to the surface, where the sun can melt them. Small floes bob and rock in the water’s cradle while sunbeams draw them into the sky as clouds, which spread in filaments, snap, and shrink to nothing. Where there was ice, is water.
Still,
this
is an empty expanse. More temperate, more fluid, but the gulfs sprawl north and east, the central body curls south, then west, much as they did before. The change is local, confined to the westernmost strait, or most perceptible there. Are the northern mountains less towering, the Aland islands less numerous? Is the Landsort Deep sunk lower than before? The rise in water level is a matter of feet in a landscape of leagues, the product of differing coefficients—water expands, ice contracts—and yet this alone is not enough to drown islands and creep up cliffs. The movement runs deeper, reaches back farther. A compacted weight has lifted, an oppressed floor is rising, tilting back, and tipping water south and west toward the Belts and Sound of Zealand. Low rocky sills seem to shrink before the slow surge of the lakewaters, are overrun as the thaw reaches the northernmost coves. The breach is made and water races west to join the seething gray of an ocean that has waited some million years for the arrival of this, the last of its tributaries. Rocky lowlands offer little resistance to the forward flood; these shelving plains were always meant to be seabeds. Faster now, welling up and spilling over the scarps, forced on by the tilting basin at its back, the flood follows the lowest contours to meet the greater ocean. The battered coast is outflanked and overrun in one extraordinary moment as the first tongue of water trickles out of the dunes and runs down the shore, laps at the lapping waves, and tastes the ocean’s unfamiliar salt for the first time. An hour old and raw from the breach, it is the youngest sea on earth.
The thousand-mile ridge of rock that bars the northern gulfs from the ocean collects snow all through the dark of winter. Spring brings meltwaters tumbling down the mountainsides to boil in the ravines. A water table of distant plateaus and barren fells feeds great rivers to the north and east. Showers are frequent, though rarely sustained for long. Short hot summers give way to drizzly autumns. The first men to gaze on these waters would have found a placid, temperate sea, thick with reed-beds. About its southernmost coast—for they came from the south—the waters meandered haphazardly, prising intricate spits and bodden out
of the coast, baring reddish sandstone to the blast of the odd winter gale. Healing drifts of clay covered the ice-scarred granite of the seabed, purple heather shaded the long humps of eskers and drumlins back into a boggy foreshore. They were easy waters, and the thick forests of oak and beech through which they must have traveled might have supplied the timbers for a vessel. But something deterred them and sent them east along the shore rather than north across the sea. Some journeys are irresistible, some no more than the thudding of feet. They set their sunburned faces toward the interior mysteries and left behind them vague currents, placid convections and stirrings. Drift.
This strange and gentle sea, reed-fringed and resting in a granite cradle still rocking in the aftermath of ice, dotted with islands and bounded with stony northern coasts, fed by melted snow and rainwater, almost enclosed behind the jut of the peninsula, yet appears somehow lacustrine, an outbreak of water arrested at the edge of the ocean, frozen in the moment of joining. The bulk and heave of brine calls from beyond the strait, but its newest dominion still clings to an earlier being, of a freezing and preservative stillness. Weak inflows through Skagerrak and Kattegat signal distant oceanic storms, but mostly the sluggish currents roll under the impetus of debouching rainfall and snow. These yeasty yellow waters are almost saltless, almost tideless, almost stagnant in the deeps of Arkona or Landsort. The northern gulfs still freeze over five winters in ten. This sea will always keep something of the character of ice.