The Pop’s Rhinoceros (104 page)

“… never happen. Never will. He’s in the clay. Come back? He can’t come back. Crack the clay? The clay won’t crack. He’s like a maggot in there. Wriggling and writhing, trying to worm his way out. But he can’t. He won’t. Never. …”

The bronze began to melt. The boy looked over the old man’s shoulder and saw the taut surface begin to quiver. For a second it deepened in color, then the whole heat of the fire seemed to pour out of the metal, an unwatchable glare, one moment the color of honey, the next no color at all. It was light, a pure blinding white light that the boy could not look upon directly any more than he could stare into the sun.

“Now we dig him out,” murmured the old man, and as he spoke the molten mass of light seemed to swell. Suddenly the topmost sprue began to spit. A colorless liquid spurted out into the waiting fire, which turned it into twists of acrid smoke.

“Smells bad, doesn’t he, boy?”

The boy did not answer. The old man took up his heavy tongs and gripped the mold around the middle. The iron bands glowed red and white as he began to lift and tip the mold, pouring the molten metal, draining the contents of the crucibles into the groove of each opposing channel until the streams of light and heat met. The old man’s arms shook from the weight. Cords of muscle rose on his back. Inch by inch the old man tilted the mold, his whole body rigid with effort. Slowly the bronze sank into the mold. Then it seemed to flow more quickly. And then suddenly it was gone.

The old man fell back, his chest heaving. Water bubbled in the bucket as the tongs sank within it. The boy pushed past Iguedo and stumbled outside. His skin seemed to burn and meeting the cool night air was like diving into cold water. His legs felt weak, his whole body feverish. He sat down next to the remnants of his charcoal pile. He may even have slept then, but for how long he could not guess. He did not know if he heard or dreamed the sounds that erupted out of the hut. When Iguedo shook him by the shoulder it was still dark.

“Fenenu. Fenenu, get up. Come inside.”

He rose and shook his head in an effort to clear it. In the hut the old man was slumped on the ground. Shards of the mold lay scattered about him. He looked up at the boy’s entrance, and the boy saw his face had changed in some way. There was a dullness to it, and behind that was something else: age. Before he had been old. Now he was ancient, and the boy was at a loss to explain in what exactly the change inhered. The boy approached, both fascinated and appalled at the old man’s transformation.

“Eri cut the rivers,” the old man mumbled. His voice was little more than a whisper. “Eri hardened the land. He planted yam. …”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Iguedo broke in, her voice harsh and impatient. “Eri made the sun shine and the grass grow and the birds sing and the fish swim. All these things, and yes, Eri hardened the land. And yes, Eri planted the yam. But now the land is hard. Now the yams grow. The rivers are cut. What good is Eri now?”

“Old woman …”

“What good, eh? Time to put Eri in his pit. Give him an Enyi-tusk to remind him of his sons. …”

“And his daughter? The first of the Eze-Ada?”

“Mind your mouth, old man!”

She shouted this, taking a step forward and even raising her arm. Caught between them, the boy tried to shrink back into the recesses of the hut. The old man caught him by the wrist. His grip was feeble now. The boy could have broken it easily if he had wished.

“Ifikuanim was not wrong,” he said. “Not wrong. Not right, either. He made Ezodu, him and Enyi together. …”

“Yes?” the boy prompted. He understood none of it. There was something
wrong with the enmity that had sprung up so suddenly between Iguedo and himself, something old and tired in it.

“It’s for you to decide now,” the old man said.

“Decide? Decide what?”

The old man shook his head. He felt Iguedo’s hand on his shoulder.

“Come with me.”

“Decide? Decide what?” he insisted.

“Usse will tell you. Now come with me,” said Iguedo.

The old man looked away.

He got up and moved toward the door but found when he got there that Iguedo had walked to the back of the hut and was rummaging about in the darkness there. She gestured brusquely for him to join her. The old man kept his tools somewhere here. A great pile of old baskets, broken bits of furniture, worn-out raffia mats, coconut husks, odd sticks, and other unnameable rubbish were heaped up against the wall. Iguedo was clearing it away, throwing it all behind her, where it formed a new heap in the center of the hut. He bent to help her, and soon all that was left was a rickety frame of some kind in which palm fronds had been interwoven to form a screen. Iguedo knocked it aside to reveal a low doorway.

“Through here.”

He had expected to find himself amongst the bushes that, he had assumed, surrounded the compound on all sides. Instead there was another room, very narrow this time. He could feel dried leaves underfoot, packed earth beneath those. The wall behind them was a kind of partition, then, and this one in front of them was the real exterior. Iguedo led him to the left, and they ducked down again. Another room. Or a chamber. Underfoot, the leaves had disappeared. Above, the roof seemed to have got higher.

“You can see?” she asked him.

He said that he could, although he was not at all sure how this was possible. An archway to one side led via a raised threshold to a chamber larger than the last, and the next one was larger again. Several smaller ones followed. Their walls and floors were made of hard mud, smooth and cool to the touch. The floors dipped and curved up to meet the walls. He ran his fingertips around the arch of the next, and it was only then that it struck him that the old man’s compound could not possibly contain so many rooms or extend this far. How far was this? Where was he?

He stopped, suddenly apprehensive. Something knocked against his leg. Iguedo was carrying a basket. Heavy, by the feel of it. He knew what must be in it.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Where are we going?”

Her face was impassive, calm. “You wanted to see the White-men,” she reminded him.

“White-men?” He shook his head, and as he did so he saw a smile spread across her face. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said quickly. “I want to go back.”

… too late …

“No, it’s not,” he protested. “We just turn around, go back through there, then turn. … He tried to remember. We turn …”

“Can’t go back,” she said. Her hand closed about his wrist. Her grip was like iron. “River only flows one way. Take this.” She handed him the basket.

“What is it?” he asked, the weight of the bronze confirming what he already believed.

“You know what it is.”

True, he thought, I know. But it cannot be for me. Only the Eze-Nri carried his image in bronze.

“Give it to Usse,” the old woman said. “And do not ask me questions to which you already know the answer. Only the Eze-Ada may wash the body of the Eze-Nri. Only she may crown his successor.”

“Usse? But she—” He broke off. Another question to which he already knew the answer. He looked away, taking in the implication of what she said. He knew he would hear no footsteps in those moments, no movement, no sound at all. All he could hear was the beating of his own heart. And he knew when he turned that she would be gone; that when he eventually decided to move on he would not find her; that when he called her name she would not reply. Questions and their answers. All known. None of them understood. He could only blunder forward, advancing through the chambers of his ignorance.

“Iguedo!” he shouted, and he kept on shouting until her voice sounded in answer:

“Iguedo? That’s a story only women tell, Fenenu.”

Her voice, but not her.

“… and so, sire, it is this manner and for these reasons that I bring greetings from Fernando the Catholic, King of all Spain. I am Don Diego of Tortosa, as I mentioned before, the servant of my King, who bids me salute you in his place. So greetings, King of Nri, from the King of all Spain, whose wish it is to give a beast to Pope Leo the Holy Father, our Pope …”

So it went on, so-this and therefore-that, louder, then softer, and for hours, it seemed to Salvestro. Diego stood above them and delivered an address that swelled and stretched, turned back on itself and jumped sideways, offered paraphrases and explanations, repeated itself and took tangents that had so far encompassed Diego’s deeds at Ravenna, his betrayal at Prato, his humiliations in Rome, and his journey to this place, which was Nri. From time to time it would rearrive seamlessly at its opening salute, and the words “King of Nri!” would signal its beginning again, although as time went on—and the speech with it—this reference to the dead man seated next to him in the pit assumed more of the character of a punctuation mark or an anchor by which Diego and the freight he carried might
swing themselves through the current of this diatribe, the better for it to carry him off again. There was within it, however, a certain progression, or intensification, Salvestro thought, or imagined, or dreamed. Diego was waving his sword about now.

“And therefore, King of Nri, I stand before you now as a cipher of my master, the King of all Spain, Castile and Aragon and Navarre and Granada and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as I described them to you earlier, called Fernando the Catholic. My so-called master. And the master, it would seem, of the Pope, who far from being holy is a murderer, and my enemy, too, and the agent of my disgrace. I would spit him on this sword if I could. And … And Fernando, too, for my fealty to him is broken, and not by me. He threw me to them through the efforts of his creature Cardona, that puffed-up coward, that aptly named ‘Viceroy,’ and he will have me hanged, if I return, for the murder of a preening courtier, which was a mistake. Yes, King of Nri, the injury done me was done by all of them. I imagine them wriggling together like skewered snakes on the point of this blade. … Anyway, King of Nri, for all these reasons and injuries and slanders, I stand before you now and offer myself as your servant.”

He must have dreamed this, Salvestro decided. It was not so much this last bizarre conclusion, or the exhaustion overtaking him, or even—for all its fire— the lulling monotony of Diego’s speech, that convinced him he was actually asleep. It was the voices.

They hummed, then buzzed, and then the buzzing grew louder, with odd shouts and cries rising faintly above the general noise. These were muffled, though, or blurred, smoothed over, or weighted down and unable to rise high enough for him to distinguish them, and whenever they grew louder the groundswell of noise beneath would rise to match them. It was getting closer. Coming toward him. He was alone—nothing new about that. But where?

He remembered skies like this, milky hazes of diffused light too bright to look up at directly. He seemed to be in one at present, with no discernible up or down, no extent in any direction. He must be standing on something, though? Yes. Grass. So there was that. And a pond off to the side, and beyond it some beech trees and then a little orchard of wild greengages. An eel slithered past. These things appeared not as though emerging from mist, but as though his eyes had been sun-blinded and were now returning to normal: these things had always been here. He had not been able to see them, that was all.

Next, the source of the noise appeared, which was a crowd of men, or an army, or a vast mob, for more and more of them came into view the farther he looked, their bobbing heads and waving weaponry—short thick swords, pikes, weighted clubs—rippling forward like a human sea … Toward himself. Time to run, he decided vaguely.

Too late. …

True, for they were already upon him, the time for running was gone, and yet, far from falling upon him like a pack of hungry dogs, their clubs thudding
into his flesh and splintering the bones beneath, as he expected, the army of men flowed around and about him, swept him up and carried him along, burying him in their midst, where their noise engulfed him, their din pounding in his head, where each individual voice was drowned out and dulled by the volume of all the others: a cacophony of muddled need, each and every one of them lost within all the others. For they seemed to have been marching for so long, and so far, and they were desperate for it to end.

He looked about and began to spy faces he knew amongst the sea of heads about him: Diego first, shouting along with the rest, his face red with excitement or the cold; then Father Jörg, his sight miraculously restored, waving a silver cross and yelling out a field Mass for the men who were to die, Bernardo, too, although he seemed to be the same height as everyone else; then others of the monks, Gerhardt spitting against the heathens, HansJürgen beside him; and beyond him were some men he recognized from the Broken Wheel but had never spoken to in his life. And then, on the far edge of the mob, he saw her, separated somehow from the ragged men around her and skipping along quite unconcerned, hopping over the tussocks in her spotless white dress: Amalia. Impossible. For one thing, she was too short for him to see her over the bellowing cursing heads that surrounded him. Also, he thought, she had no place here. No role in what was to come, for he knew now where this army was marching and what they were here to do, or fail to do.