The Pop’s Rhinoceros (14 page)

“Salvestro!” Bernardo jumped the gap between the vessels. The whole raft tipped beneath his weight, he almost fell.

“Silence!” the monk’s leader barked, then turned to his companions. “Walter! Willy! Hold the drowned rat by his ankles. Higher, good. Now, Brother Gundolf, punch him in the stomach.”

A monk stepped forward and began to pummel the lifeless body. The others clustered around. Ignored, Bernardo felt his rage replaced by apprehension. This had happened before; now it had happened again. He was alone amongst strangers with no one and nothing for company but the aftermath of a disaster. It was not his fault. Salvestro had gone and left him here and died. The bastard. What was he supposed to do now? They were going to be rich and live like princes. Like kings. He was exceedingly hungry, tired in his head, and he would like to simply curl up and sleep and awake to find himself far away from here. Home, wherever that was. He had been promised. Bernardo felt the raft yaw under his feet, watched the gray habits move about its deck, heard the monk’s fists thud against unfeeling flesh, and sniveled into his sleeve.

The corpse shuddered. Bernardo’s head came up. The corpse vented seawater, bile, fragments of half-digested herring, coughed, then puked, spattering the monks, who lowered him quickly to the deck. Bernardo shoved aside the nearest and knelt on the deck by his heaving, choking companion.

“Alive!” Bernardo shouted at the expressionless faces looking down on them both. “Did you find it?” he hissed. “Tell me, whisper it in my ear. …” The shouting monk was standing over them.

“Are you Niklot, son of the witch who once practiced abominations on this island and gutted fish for Brüggeman, was tried by water, and perished?” he demanded of the figure groaning on the deck.

“He is called Salvestro,” Bernardo said, but the monk ignored him.

“Are you?” he asked more sharply.

“I am,” managed the body on the deck. “Or was.” He looked up at his interrogator and saw a thin, ageless face topped with a mat of blond hair. The man might be thirty or fifty.

Bernardo looked blankly from one to the other. The monk turned away to shout orders at his brothers, and Bernardo bent his head closer.

“Whisper it now,” he whispered, and pressed his ear to his companion’s lips. “Tell me what you found.” His companion gasped for breath and let loose an acrid belch, then a great convulsion seized him. He puked, heavily, finally, the last of his stomach emptying itself down the side of Bernardo’s face.

“Nothing,” he spluttered.”! found nothing.”

They expected more. He saw it in their faces, in the ebbing flush of excitement, the strain of mere exertion, as Gundolf, Reinhard, Harald, and the others dug their paddles into slack water and propelled the raft to shore. He ordered the giant and heathen into their own vessel and towed it off the stern, where it dragged and rolled. The heathen seemed to have recovered well enough, lying back with one elbow propped insolently on the wales. The giant appeared inconsolable, staring down at his feet and muttering to himself. A boat, two vagabonds, and a barrel of seawater: not much of a catch to the innocent eye. He felt his own heart jerk and shudder at their prize.

Paddles plashed to either side of him, and the rotting ropes below the deck’s planking chafed against the logs. Jörg’s eye wandered over the ruin of the church, down the cliff to its foot. There was Gerhardt, flanked by the remainder of the brothers. They were drawn up along the waterline, still sentinels in gray, the island’s defenders. Only a little farther now. He glanced back at the boat lolling in their wake and the men within it. The giant seemed quieted.

Ashore, Jörg directed Florian and Matthias to clean and clothe their guests. Gerhardt was speaking with his back to him. A group of brothers was listening. The raft and boat were made fast, and then he moved quickly to scale the slope. Gerhardt blocked his path.

“I would have words with you, Father. …”

But Gerhardt’s words were chains, weights, sapping loads. He was too close for distractions, for Gerhardt’s sour face and his pique at losing the captaincy of the raft, and he muttered, “Not now, not now,” pushing past the man and hearing an answering mutter start up behind him as he strode up the side of the point. The prize needed to be better, and would be if he could only impel them to grasp it, to leap over their fears and reach it. They were close, but still too far. Brother HansJürgen was waiting for him in the cloister.

“Take our guests to the beet loft,” he told the monk. “Give them straw and a slop bucket. They may take their meals there. Bring the one calling himself Salvestro to me before Vespers.”

More monks appeared, then the paddlers, breathing heavily from their exertions and the steepness of the ascent, and last of all Brothers Florian and Matthias with the giant and his companion. HansJürgen followed as they were led to the well and watched as they stripped to have buckets of water poured over their heads. Naked, the giant looked if anything even bigger than before. His companion was rather puny. HansJürgen found it difficult to connect him with the islanders’ ill-defined fears. What had these vagabonds hoped for? What had they sought out there, beneath the sea’s opaque surface? He waited as they dried themselves and dressed, then led them through the cloister, past the dorter to a stone lean-to tacked onto the back of the kitchens..

The beet loft was wider than it was deep and higher than it was wide, perhaps twice the height of a man. Lines of lathes on which the beets had once rested were set into the back wall, pointing out horizontally and rising in cobwebby shelves up the back wall. Three kinds of confusion—momentary, resigned, fundamental—peered through the door, for between it and the lathe-ends there was barely room to stand.

“You will stay here,” HansJürgen told the two men. “You will be brought straw and food later. You may remove these sticks as you see fit.”

Sounds of hesitant, then determined destruction followed him as he walked back through the cloister.

Once Bernardo had removed the last of the lathes the two men entered and sat down. The beet loft smelled of dry rot and long-abandoned chicken coops. Gloom descended.

“Nothing!” Bernardo burst out after a minute’s silence. “How could there be nothing?”

Salvestro looked up absently. “Not nothing,” he murmured to himself.

“What, then?” demanded the other.

Salvestro did not reply. They could sell the rope, he calculated. The market at Stettin was held on a Saturday, or had been when last he heard. Today was Sunday. Ewald’s boat would have to be returned and Bernardo’s other boot fetched from the drying-shed. Barns, woodsheds, caves, stables, scrapes, and bivouacs; in the forest beneath the boughs of the trees, the open sky. Now a beet loft. All the miles since Prato had fetched them up on a packed-earth floor with a view through the open door of a pile of sticks and a flat muddy field. Little enough. But down there, in the blackness and the disorder of his wits … Something. He had pulled back. He fingered the bump on the back of his head, which began once more to throb. Seated opposite him, Bernardo shifted on one buttock to release a long-withheld fart. Salvestro looked over at his companion, who prodded the ground aimlessly with his finger and would not look back.

“There is a market quite near here. We’ll be able to sell the rope, and there’s a good few suppers right there, that’s just for starters.”

Silence.

“Listen, Bernardo. These monks didn’t fish us out just to throw us back in. They probably need a couple of fellows like us about the place. We can winter here as well as anywhere, and in the spring—”

“I don’t like it here,” Bernardo said abruptly. “I didn’t like it when we arrived and I don’t like it now.” He paused and thought. “It’s a shit hole.”

“It may be a shit hole, Bernardo, but it’s a shit hole with a roof, with walls. …”

“That fish shed was a shit hole, too. I don’t care if you were born there or not. This island’s a shit hole, and that dump we stopped in on the mainland before we got here, now that was a real shit hole. …”

And Salvestro listened with diminishing interest as Bernardo began listing the watering holes, villages, and the scattering of wayside inns and camps that had served as the stations of their flight north, separating them into “shit holes” and “real shit holes,” beginning with “that bog you led us into outside Prato,” where they had spent the first night of their journey spread-eagled on the quaking frangible surface, listening to the shouts of the Colonel’s men as they searched for them around the marsh’s periphery, not daring to move until dawn showed them safe passage, and following it with the remembrance of an ill-chosen hiding place to which they had resorted with a whole village chasing after them (was it Ala? Serravalle? Somewhere before Trento, certainly before the mountains …) following Bernardo’s theft of a swan, and which, inasmuch as it was a silo built eight feet high, might be termed “a hole,” and which, inasmuch as it was a manure silo … Well, Salvestro admitted privately, it fell fairly and squarely into the second of his companion’s categories. The swan had proved delicious, though the “shit” in that particular “shit hole”—being actually shit—had added its now faint but still unscrubbable stink to the others in his weeds: old sweat, cooking grease, tiny bits of food more easily rubbed in than wiped off, beer splashes, milk … Milk seemed so innocuous at first, he reflected, but then give it a couple of warm days and it smelled worse than puke. Funny stuff, milk. Most lately herring. Under them all the smell of the woman at Prato, soaking into him, her fish-cold flesh sucking the heat out of him. That smell. Prato. No sense in dwelling on that.

He cocked an ear once more to his companion, whose rambling lament had gathered speed and now leaped a German mile north for every Italian one south, or vice versa, jumbling Cisalpine shepherds’ huts with Franconian hamlets, nameless clusters of hovels with the great marts of the Nordmark, redrawing the jagged line of their northward progress according to his own touchstones: Had they eaten? Had they been warm? Had they been chased? Hunger, cold, and dogs figured large in Bernardo’s imagination. For him, their journey had been little more
than endless trudging through varying obstacles and discomforts. His companion had never really grasped that it had a purpose, a destination, and when they had finally stepped off the small boat that had ferried them across the Achter-Wasser and he had said that they would stop here, they had arrived, Bernardo had become a child overwhelmed with gratitude and surprise, as though to merely stop were a gift too great to be longed for and its receipt an all-surpassing miracle. “Well, here we are. Here we are at last!” he had exclaimed over and over as they’d tramped across the island to the north shore. “Now, tell me”—he was beaming, standing there on the beach and drawing great breaths of the sea air—“where is the city?”

“… and Nürnberg. Nürnberg! Another shit-hole. …”

Salvestro picked at his nose. It had been for his own good, for the both of them and to save their skins—there was no knowing how far a man like the Colonel might pursue them and thus no knowing where exactly their progress had ceased to be a flight and become a journey—and Bernardo, the lummox, had wanted to stay. … But, had he—Salvestro—omitted a certain fact that, had it been known, might have severed the rope by which he had dragged Bernardo north? Emerging from the ravine that the Freiburg road took on its way to Dresden, he had pointed down the gentle slope of the valley and across the broad swath of the river to the great walled city on the far bank, saying, “Once we reach the island, Vineta is as near as that.” They were outside a little village called Plauen, which, an old man who gave them water there assured them, had long ago lent its name to the much larger city they had passed through some days before and never got it back. He was furious on the subject. An hour later they had crossed the Elbe and were walking through crowded, narrow streets. “As near as that. …” It was true, but was it the truth?

Bernardo had scanned the gray expanse before them, southeast to northwest, where his eye alighted hopefully first on Greifswalder Oie, then behind it the heights of Göhren on Rügen, the headland of the neighboring island just peaking out from behind that of Usedom’s own. Neither looked like the promised city of Salvestro’s tale, and the latter was pointing in the other direction, to where the sea lay unbroken before a truncated point of land on which some stone buildings huddled together all higgledy-piggledy. Not a city, though, and beyond it only the sea. …

“Where is it?”

“There.”

“But I can’t see anything. Just water. …”

There was a short silence.
As near as that. …
Had he, on one crucial point, as it were, deceived his reluctant companion?

“Underneath,” said Salvestro.

Bernardo had begun complaining that night, clinging to his grievances like so much driftwood from the wreck. This latest lament was nothing new and would run its course now as it had before.

“… then that raft, making me get on that thing. That G’litcz fellow, eh? A right pig in a poke till we sorted him out. Down that river …”