The Pop’s Rhinoceros (67 page)

“Ask yourself why he’s here at this hour. Ask that,” said Gerhardt.

“I don’t have it,” said Salvestro.

“I shall ask one more time only … “Jörg began.

“You thought he’d stop at this?” Gerhardt held up the silver scabbard, which Salvestro lunged for. He was knocked to the ground by Hanno. “This was in his mattress.”

“It’s mine,” protested Salvestro.

Gerhardt looked down at him. “We pulled you out of the sea, fed you, clothed you, and this is how you repay us? You’re the same savage you always were. Thief! The islanders should have drowned you at birth.”

“Give it to him,” said Jörg. His voice was cold and hard. “Now let him up.”

HansJürgen watched Salvestro take the scabbard and rise. The other three monks held their tongues.

“Come here,” said Jörg. He extended a hand, which rested first on Salvestro’s head, but then slithered gently over the man’s face. “Do not think I cannot read you,” he murmured, though this seemed directed principally at himself. Then, “We have come a long way to fail here.” HansJürgen could see that he was struggling to control himself. Then, “I shall ask you for the last time. …” Salvestro was already shaking his head. Jörg’s arm dropped and his face hardened.

“Go,” said Jörg.

“I came back to—” Salvestro began to say.

“Go!” repeated Jörg.

Salvestro protested again, his face contorting oddly to Hansjürgen’s eye. Jörg erupted then, his mouth twisted with anger, bellowing at the wretch as though his mere presence were suddenly unendurable, “Out, out! You barbarian!”

The five men watched Salvestro hang his head for a second. When he looked up again his expression was as blank as ever. He paused at the door, but Jörg did not turn around. There was silence. The barbarian made a quick, contemptuous
movement, and the scabbard clattered across the floor. HansJürgen bent to pick it up. When he straightened, Salvestro was gone.

Ah, the deer-nibbled verdure of La Magliana and the Campo di Merlo, its fuzzed and furred undulations, its grassy creases and meadows cropped close as the pubic scrub of a Venetian courtesan. Such turf! Such happy ground! Heat-sopped by day, it now repays the sun’s largesse with nocturnal emissions of warming air that blanket the
campagna
in earthy fugs and fogs: the night air and its pleasant smells. The fatly black and languid, bendy Tiber advances and recedes, the flowing moat of abandoned bastions and never built castle walls. A barge is moored there, pennanted and decked with bunting embroidered with the
pallia
of the Medici, ready for the passage downriver to Ostia on the day after tomorrow. Little stands of trees stand in stooks, stalkily bundled and clumped by giants. And—hark now—a dulcimer.

Or a hackbrett, perhaps. Tinkling plinks and plonks drift and twist, fading and returning, the very gentlest of bugles heralding tomorrow’s slaughter. The windows of the Sala dei Muse are glowing slabs of light hung high in the blackness, a row of luminous interruptions emoting the jingle-jangle of high spirits and homey entertainment. Cowering in their copses and thickets, giddy deer tremble at the papal merrymaking, rabbits scrabble, and squirrels scramble for cover. The badgers are inconsolable with dread. An ominous python of ox-drawn baggage carts topped with the prelates belonging to that baggage, of noisy pike-bearing Switzers in their green-and-gold livery, of horses, of the Pope’s carriage, this dragged itself here two weeks ago for the purpose of having fun. Now horses whinny in the part-built stables, the ostlers bury themselves in straw, and the workmen hired to finish the upper story wrap their habits tight about their limbs and sleep the sleep of the blessed, arranged in a snoozing defensive semicircle about their trowels, lines, plumbs, and picks. (Builder-ostler relations have been vexed.) Tomorrow is a day of idleness, their foreman being in Rome, his two sidekicks, too. …

Across the fosse with its slimy trickle of water, westward a few hundred yards, the
gazzara
is softly astir with billings and cooings, feathery palpitations and columbine heartache. The heron retains his cool, sitting for hour after hour on his perch while all around him the cages of partridges, woodcocks, snipes, landrails, pheasants, and magpies rustle with their occupants’ apprehension. The dulcimer, or hackbrett, plays on. The killing-ground was cordoned with white sailcloth earlier in the day, two thousand braccia of brilliant, animal-blinding white to funnel the game onto the arrows and lances of the huntsmen. Leo likes to hunt in the French manner, and firearms are forbidden.

And there will be a surprise, a bristly and bad-tempered one. Boccamazza is attending to it now. He looks down on the beast, snorting and snuffling there in
its pit, squealing vilely as half a dozen brawny and leather-clad farmhands tussle and grapple with it, wrestling it down and pinning it still while the paint is hurriedly applied, the appendage tied on by his skeptical helpers.

“Are you sure we’ve got this right?” one calls up as the animal flexes and strains.

Boccamazza looks again at his master’s sketch. Monstrous. He nods. “It is intended to amuse,” he says.

He is unamused himself, this Pope’s chief huntsman, preparing elaborate practical jokes in the middle of the night. Come first light there will be the beaters to marshal: an unhappy mix of resentful Switzers and overexcited peasants. The hawks have yet to be chosen (gyrfalcons and sparrow hawks, some peregrines, kestrels?) and the hunters themselves graded diplomatically with the least inept to the fore and His Holiness, naturally, foremost. The men climb out of the pit in a scramble of arms, legs, sweat, ill feeling, bafflement, and droppings. He has an eye for droppings, the wormy slicks, pellets, piles, and spatters of the quarry. These are gray-brown smudges on the leather jerkins of his men, a crumbly paste. Technically, Boccamazza thinks to himself, remembering the fumbling chase of a few minutes ago, these would be fumets. He strides across the springy turf, his brain busy with the roles of tomorrow’s players and the vagaries of the hunt. The dulcimer—or hackbrett—winds down. The lights go out. The palazzo and adjacent stables are black mausoleums against the lightening blue-black sky. A mile away, the staked screens of sailcloth are luminous ribbons defining the V of the killing-ground. A happily preeminent knoll stands at their thwarted junction. Put the Pope on that, thinks Boccamazza.

The next morning dawns, burning fog out of the hollows, lifting dew off the turf. A line forms at the back of the woods with a
Hey
, a
Ho!
and many a rustic whoop. We’re off—
Forward!
—our whereabouts being hereabouts, a-hunting in the greenwood.

There are bushes and trees—myrtles, oaks, elms, and elders, willows nearer the river—juniper-scrub and patches of thorns. The beaters are armed with skillets and sticks, which fill the air with clanging and banging; there’s hardly room for their shouting, let alone their clumsy footsteps. So, a noisy peroration: the leaves hang like shriveled bags of washing or superbly camouflaged bats. A ferret is sighted. Hooray! And there’s a pigeon. … Yahoo!

Yahoo-ooo. …

Faint cries and irregular shouts reach Leo’s ears, the singing of the beaters to the accompanying clangor of pot and pan.
A dulcimer? A hackbrett
…? Perched atop his knoll, he squints through a tubular eyepiece at the sailcloths that run to left and right, widening until they embrace the khaki bulge of the woods. Set before him on their cadges, the hawks of the lure bate and flutter, still hooded but sensing the killing to come. The hawks of the fist are calm for the moment, goshawks for hare, rabbit, and pheasant, sparrow hawks for mice. His fellow
huntsmen surround him in a semicircle, settled on faldstools and cushions: Cardinals d’Aragona and Cornaro, Bibbiena and Dovizio, three visiting bishops, their chamberlains and valets, the ambassadors Vich and Faria, who are only here on sufferance, until he conceived his masterly joke, that is. … Now they are as indispensable as Fra Mariano, or Baraballa, who last night accepted Dovizio’s wager of twenty scudi to swallow a headless eel, then vomited it into the fireplace, still wriggling. What a good sport.
Otium, negotium, otium, negotium
… What fun it is to have fun!

Soon the first magpies show as black-and-white flurries in the cover of the trees. A snipe shoots out and flies south over the advancing line of beaters, descending to settle behind them. But the din is unstoppable, an impenetrable barrier sweeping up voles, ferrets, rabbits, hares, wild goats, roebucks, driving teal and heron alike to the meadow, where thistles shiver in the light breeze and the huntsmen wait. The hawkers are already swinging their lures, an array of mad windmills blowing the scent of dead pigeon across the field. Leo pats his cuirass through his robes. He wriggles his toes.

“Send in the hawks,” he shouts as a lone heron flaps sadly up into the sunlight, followed by woodcocks, more snipes, two ducks, and a superabundance of pigeons. Some pheasants amble out of the undergrowth, take one look at the greeting-party, and amble back in again. A cast of gyrfalcons is unbrailed for the ducks. Leo follows them through his scope, which he glues to his eye and waves this way and that like a thick brass wand, tracking upward as the birds reach their pitch, then seem to hang for a second before stooping out of the sun. A midai explosion of feathers, and the four birds are suddenly only two. A brace of dead ducks thumps on the turf as the predators return, exchanging their pelts for the perch. The heron, meanwhile, rings upward, ever higher to the empty spaces of the air where even the hawk’s wing will not reach. He’s not there yet, old yellow-beak, but flapping hard, climbing high, still unruffled by the ridiculous commotion below.

Partridges, magpies, teal, larks, several crows, landrails, more pheasants, and lots more pigeons, all are shortly clattering reluctantly upward into hawk-infested airspace. Some jays, too, and the first, most panicky of the game (rabbits). The goshawks and tiercels are set to work, shuttling back and forth between their airy playground and the hawkers themselves, who whistle and call to their charges, swing lures, and hold their arms at odd, falcon-enticing angles. Two half-tamed haggards are caught crabbing and leashed to their cadges in disgrace. The feathery dead become a pile, then a mound.

Well, this is a jolly prelude, thinks the Pope. He beams at his courtiers, who beam back. Leno waves. He does not wave back. Leno arrived this morning, uninvited, under the pretext of checking on the quality of the work on the stables. The work on the stables has been pronounced satisfactory. Why has Leno not left? Apparently Leno’s foreman has disappeared with two of his henchmen, ostensibly
to find Leno in Rome. Leno’s foreman has not been paid. He would like to ask the man why his workmen are dressed as monks, but Leno has not been paid, either. Leno is waiting for his foreman to return, so he says, but mostly he is waiting to be paid. So the Pope does not wave back. Enough of that. Where’s Vich? He scans amongst the little marquees erected to the rear of his knoll. … There. Talking to Faria. Rufo will report tonight, perhaps. Or tomorrow at Ostia. He will ask the man the exact time of death; it might be now. A mere fifteen miles away in the Borgo, it might be happening right now. He gazes happily at the neatly staked sailcloths, the grassy meadow, the trees, the blue sky with its blazing sun, and the hawks wheeling and hovering in perfect silence. He is happy, for he loves to hunt.
Loves
it.

Aloft, the slaughter continues.

Below, an unbidden popish
pensée
appears at the edge of his thoughts like the single black cloud portending a storm: Amalia. Did they drown her in a bog, those cutthroats of his? Or was she torn apart by wild beasts? By bears, perhaps. Or wolves. Poor little mite.

He catches sight of the ambassadors, who have moved a little way forward of his knoll and now stroll in the meadow to his left, Vich’s movements more graceful than he remembers, while Faria’s stocky figure plods at his side. Are they arm in arm?

“Fatso! Fatso!”

Bibbiena and Dovizio swagger across the grass carrying jugs of wine and crossbows, of which he disapproves and yet reluctantly permits, being no bowman himself.

“Good morning, Supreme Pontiff!” They hail him cheerily and resume their chant, singing it out across the thistly sward. He eyes the woods, then reaches for his scope, scanning left and right. Something’s wrong. …

“What is going on!” he shouts, suddenly perplexed. Heads come up, but no one answers. “Well?” Still no one speaks; is he really so fearsome? “Nothing is going on!” he elucidates. Puzzled faces turn blankly to the woods, and then Boccamazza appears at his side, assuring him that a lull in the beaters’ progress is for the best, allowing the beasts of the wood to spread out ahead of the marchers and shouters; ensuring a gradual serving up of furry and hairy victims, a steady stream is better than a glut. Besides, the beaters are having their lunch. Should not he be having his?

Lunch. Yes.

Strolling back to his knoll, he coopts Boccamazza and Vich, asking the former if the wind has not changed, the latter if he is enjoying his day out here on the Campo di Merlo, hunting with the Pope.