The Pop’s Rhinoceros (17 page)

“What?” (The Prior’s expression will be quizzical, one eyebrow raised, a little tilt of the head.)

Heart thumping against his ribs, mouth filled with spit, he liked to creep close, out of earshot but close, smell the carcass roasting over the glow, see the red flames flicker, watch the hunched figures shuffle about and nod to one another. They excited him, these wounds in the forest’s play of soft lights and shades and subtleties of dark. He liked to blind himself with the glow. The forest was briefly nothing then and would unclasp him, cut him loose to drift and blink the hot light out of his eyes. He liked to crawl about the camp, circle it inch by inch, slowly drawing spirals in the forest’s rustling growth. … He wanted always to get close, and closer, and closer still. That was how they caught him.

“Who?” (Put bluntly, a retraction of the earlier hint of curiosity. The Prior will not be curious. He will be businesslike and matter-of-fact.)

“Pull him out by the ears!”

“Bark his shins!”

“Box his ears!”

Perhaps these were the words they shouted, which he heard as sudden noise and chaos and terror while they beat him. It was a whirl of light and huge faces looming in and out of view, of noise, above all noise. … They brandished themselves like clubs, knocking him about, colliding amongst themselves with great thuds. If he flattened himself against the earth, he could disappear in the shadows

and they would forget him, walk away like the bear or clatter like the deer. Flatten himself. Disappear.
Run, run to the sea. …
They were huge booming men, strange smelling and deafening. He clasped his head in his hands to shut them out, but they were stubborn and forceful. They refused to vanish. One punched him on the ear. Another kicked him on the leg. He was rolled up in a resistant ball. They unrolled him. He was almost naked, he realized, and as tall as they. How had that happened? He wondered about this, amazed and somewhat hopeless.

There was a night of this, and then a dawn. There were great explosions of din and racket. Days fell out of the sky.

He remembered a sloping ridge of ground choked with grasses into which his feet sank spongily as they traversed and rose to the crest. It was sunny and he was being led along on a length of twine. Just that.

Another time, he was sleeping, near the fire for once, and dreamed that heavy sheets of material were being draped over his body, like animal skins, growing heavier and heavier. Mice burrowed beneath him and produced fantastic litters of young. Dozens upon dozens of squealing bodies.

Here was a different place, where the turf had been worn through to the damp black earth beneath and thus a path was etched between little hummocks and anthills. He lengthened his stride over the long thin puddles and added his own footprints to those already printed in the impressionable earth, for he was marching along near the back that day. A meadow ran up to the very edge of the forest, and the tree-trunks with the darkness beyond them appeared as a palisade forbidding entry or the bars of a monstrous cage roofed with green.

Another time they entered a village with fierce whoops and shouts. There was a long low interior in which the air had been breathed over and over until it smelled of the insides of men. One of them was scrabbling about on the floor, where meat bones, corn husks, crusts, and bottles were scattered. Three others spoke together in low tones at the far end, falling silent as he came near. These men were different and strange, smelled different. They were not his men. There was a table running almost the length of the room. The scrabbler rose from beneath it and placed before him a large pile of scraps. He was suspicious. The other mimed eating and then, when this produced no response, plucked a bone from the pile and commenced to strip the remainder of its meat with his teeth. He understood then and fell on the pile like a wolf. The three men murmured to one another, and from outside there was shrieking and a few shouts. Opposite him, his companion pointed to himself and made a sound like
Aar-aar-Oood
. They left there in the night, quietly, disturbing nothing. He liked that. He was the quietest of them all. The next morning, though, the din began again.

For there was always noise. The air looped him in quick eruptions and outbreaks of clatter such as
Nnunng
and
Tz-ztts
and
Lull-ooll
. Differing sounds startled him and made him nervous: louder and softer grunts, grunts ending in sharp claps and hissings. … He began to nod when these little thunderclaps passed near him, to duck almost, as though their chatter were a physical force, the
rustling, or crashing, or slithery approach of a hundred different animals ten or twenty times a day. There were regular sounds that went back and forth between the wagging tongues, others that seemed to keen or stutter. Sharp yaps and little strings of yips. He twisted about, jumped and started at their barking, and after a time they even stopped laughing at these nervy antics, so familiar and predictable had they become. And then, weeks after his “capture,” months even, perhaps—he was rolling a water bottle between his knees and one of the men was throwing little pebbles at him that were bouncing off his head—a sound came at him all suddenly, like
SSoss-O!,
which he had heard aimed at him before, and then two little gobbets of noise, like a half grunt,
Oer-tt,
and then a groan,
ooOower…
Like that. And he felt the muscles in his cheeks and tongue ache, the muscles he used to maneuver mashed food into position before swallowing, and he felt his tongue do something like peel itself dryly from the roof of his mouth, like skinning a very dry animal, and he opened his mouth and said, quite clearly, “Geddit y’self.” Then a gulp.

“Shit.”

Everyone stopped. An amazed hush swelled suddenly, an abrupt luxuriant silence that engulfed the odd creature he had spat at them, swallowed it whole, and his utterance wallowed and floundered about for footing. He blinked with the strain and said the same thing again. Their blank surprise trembled like a wall of deadening liquid behind which his tiny noise was unweighted and soundless. Then someone broke it with, “So Salvestro ain’t a deaf-mute,” and everyone else started laughing. He looked about blankly. “Well, what else was we to call you?” It was the same man, the one who had called to be passed the bottle, which now lay forgotten on the ground in front of him. “Groot,” he said, thumping himself on the chest. He was Groot. “Eh, Salvestro? Mister Geddit-Yourself-Shit, eh?”

SSoss-O! Oer-tt-ooOwer!

Salvestro. Water. He rolled the words in his mouth. Geddit ’self. Groot. Groo-oo-oot. Behind him, the forest was a jumble of little rustlings and sussurations; unguessable, without meaning.

And these renaming vagabonds, who were they?

They were: Fante the Dagger and Umberto the Pike, Shiner, Horvart, Hurst (or ’Urst), who was imperturbable, Heinrich Von Bool, dubbed Drool, for he had no tongue, and the Bandinelli twins, who, though they were near doubles of one another, had grown up in the same village and bore the names Aldo and Tebaldo, were unrelated. A certain Corprochet titled himself “the Admiral of the Adda”; Pandulfo was “Il Dottore” and alone of the company could read and write. He was composing an epical history in song of their exploits in the wars to the south. There was Criparacos the Greek, Low Simon, Sigismundo of the Fiery Eyes, and the Chevalier Gianbattista-Marcantonio di Castello-Molina di Fiemme. The one with the unnaturally smooth and garishly colored face was Powder Jack. But most fearsome of them all was the Teeth.

Groot pointed them out and described them to him, advising him of their

foibles and failings and explaining that these were not ordinary men but soldiers, tuned for combat and unpredictable in their humors. “Always approach from the front,” he warned, “and avoid shouting.” For in the days and weeks since he had rediscovered his speech, Salvestro had taken to yelling nonsensical phrases at the top of his voice every few minutes or so to keep his new faculty in trim.

Their leader, known only as II Capo, was a black-bearded, blue-eyed, jolly-faced gentleman of fifty years or more who was carried about in a wicker basket construction resembling in equal parts a very small boat and a large but legless chair. II Capo had no feet.

“The Christian Free Company, m’boy. That’s us. A nasty bunch of bastards we are, nasty as any you’ll meet this side of hell, the Alps, and Kingdom Come. Don’t forget that, young Salvestro. And don’t forget this, neither.” II Capo leaned forward in his throne, wheezed, gathered himself. “By Christ, we hate the French!”

It was dusk. It had rained earlier. On the far side of the clearing, Powder Jack and Sigismundo of the Fiery Eyes were building a fire that stubbornly refused to ignite. II Capo stared at him as though expecting an answer.

“The French,” said Salvestro.

II Capo nodded approval. “Hate ’em!” he hissed. He rocked back into the basket’s inner gloom. There was a rustling then, the sound of him rooting around, several dull clanks. “You’ll be wanting to see ’em, then,” came from within.

“The French?” said Salvestro, surprised. He had conceived “the French” as some kind of animal—noxious, probably large, unlikely to be found in II Capo’s basket. In any case singular. What was “them”?

“Those bastards? Good Christ on the Cross, no!” exclaimed II Capo, emerging from the interior clutching a silvery metal box in each hand. “No, I meant you’ll be wanting to see the Feet.”

“Vitelli cut ’em off him after Buti fell,” Groot explained later. “He was lucky, mind you. The arquebus men lost their hands
and
eyes. Did he show you the toes?”

The Feet had been yellow and shiny, odorless, in a perfect state of preservation. Slightly shrunken, perhaps. The toes had followed, each in its individual box. A little stump of bone protruded where the flesh about it had dried and the toenails had detached themselves from their cuticles. The toes were a slightly darker color than the Feet, as though they had been stubbed shortly before excision.

“The toes I don’t find so impressive,” Groot confided when Salvestro nodded, “but the Feet… the Feet, I think, are a miracle.”

Salvestro looked across the gloomy camp to the barely visible hummock that was II Capo. His wicker lodging would sit inertly wherever they had decided to pitch camp that night, and from it would issue bellowed proclamations and commands: “Thirty lashes for anyone fouling within the perimeter!” or “Post guards! ‘Urst! Drool! Jump to it!” Fires would be lit, lookouts chosen and dispatched. Camps were pitched and struck. They moved on, stopped, moved on again. Ordered to “jump to it!” by II Capo, the men of the Christian Free Company by
and large jumped. But try as he might, Salvestro was quite unable to see why. The source of II Capo’s authority was deeply mysterious. It had something to do with the Feet, he felt.

Come morning, and all day long if they were on the march, it was Groot’s task to carry II Capo in his basket. Two poles extended stretcher fashion front and back. Groot was short and powerfully built. He took the front. Bringing up the rear was one more powerful even than Groot and standing two heads taller. Salvestro had become aware of him in a wary fashion, seeing that the other men treated him with an odd mixture of disdain and mocking affection and wondering if the company did not after all include one even more lowly than himself. II Capo’s rear porter was part scapegoat and part mascot. Amongst the confusion and clangor of his early days, Salvestro remembered the youth—for he was little older than himself—setting a pile of scraps before him. More recently, venturing into the underbrush to empty his bowels, he had come upon the giant standing patiently by the path leading to their camp. He had been there two or three hours already, sent by Simon to meet the Chevalier, who would be coming that way, having scavenged “a vital longweight.” The Chevalier was intermittently visible in the camp behind him, but the giant had drawn no conclusions from this. Salvestro had tried to explain that the men were playing a joke on him.

“Not Longweight. Long
wait”
he explained.

“That’s it,” said the giant.

He had left him standing there and gone to shit. That night, sleeping, deep in the loose clasp of a pleasant and watery swimming dream, he had been awakened by something akin to a shovel striking him violently in the back.

“Longweight,” an enormous face, inches from his own, had exclaimed with delight. “Long”—the face paused for effect, dimly recognized now through the dark and blear of his sleep—” wait!” The face had begun to laugh.

Now, in the cool afternoon light that offered itself between the lintel of the beet loft’s doorway and the mire of the field beyond, he observed his companion plod back in desultory fashion, limping theatrically in protest at his prodigal boot. It had shrunk, or his foot had swelled. The face retreated into memory with its idiot cheerfulness, returned again, blankly this time. Bernardo toting his end of the basket. Bernardo bringing up the rear. They had arrived a league or two short of a little village somewhere west of Innsbruck, and strange preparations were afoot. The village was called Muud.

“The village is called Muud,” explained II Capo, flurries of action already welling up about him. Sigismundo and Horvart were stripping hazel saplings out of the hedgerow and the Chevalier was trimming them with a hand ax. Low Simon disentangled numerous short lengths of rope from one another, and other members of the company were unrolling and applying filthy bandages to their limbs. Powder Jack moved amongst them, daubing rust-colored paint over these rags or else administering dollops of bright red paste to proffered arms, legs, and
foreheads, which would then be bound up and and the paste seep through as though open wounds were bleeding beneath. Hovering about the fringes of all this, the Teeth lurked, inactive and menacing as usual. There were rehearsals of limping, and several crutches appeared.

“Look lively!” shouted II Capo. “Full bellies tonight!” Low Simon was tying the saplings into large square grates, then tying the grates together—a boxlike structure was taking shape, with an improvised door on top and poles slung beneath to lift it—a cage. Powder Jack had taken out a
mouchoir
and was scraping at the caked powder on his face, which came away in lumps and slabs to reveal, on his left side, a landscape of deep pockmarks and craters, and, on his right, a deforming jagged valley running from ear to neck so deep that it seemed it must cut through the cheek altogether. Then Salvestro saw the Chevalier call to the Teeth and open the door of the cage. The Teeth approached, and then, without a murmur of protest, he climbed up and lowered himself inside.