The Pop’s Rhinoceros (74 page)

The next year the drought began, and the year after that the famine. She began to travel with Namoke as he moved among the villages. Sometimes they were gone for weeks at a time, for Nri-men were needed now in villages that had never wanted them before. She thought about Enyi and Ezodu from time to time, but it still did not make much sense to her, and she was beginning to think that it was one of Iguedo’s jokes, a little more “coco-oil to help swallow all those dry words,” as the woman had once explained when Usse had confronted her with a particularly outrageous fabrication. No one else told those stories. Then she and Namoke were called to an Ijaw village that was farther down the River than they had ever been before.

These Ijaw lived by fishing and making salt, which they sold in a market on a great sandbank half a day’s paddling from their village, which was a collection of stilted huts on a mangrove island. They were good fishermen, but every year one
or two would be taken by the sharks who swam in the waters about their village. In return they killed as many sharks as they could, and then the sharks would take their revenge. And so on. One or two men a year.

The headman was a very stupid fellow who had a small
ju-ju
set up in his hut with some teeth and old fishing-poles in it. Usse listened as he told Namoke that the shark’s power was so great that the only solution was to make it their god. If, the man explained, he could swallow the shark’s power himself (he patted his stomach when he said this; Usse had to stop herself laughing), then he could use that power to get rid of the sharks. So he had made his
ju-ju,
and he had forbidden his men to kill sharks. But the sharks had taken eight men that year. What should he do?

Namoke had begun to talk about one of the
alusi
. She was called Onishe. “Big woman,” he said. “Breasts down to here.” He slapped his hands on his knees. “She has her place in the forest behind the point at Asaba, and at night you can see her throwing torches from the top of the cliff down into the River. …” They were already waving their arms and protesting that it was too far. “No, no, no!” Namoke shouted them down. “You don’t have to go there. She’s a River-spirit. You can sacrifice here as well as there. …” The headman began nodding again, then asked what they should sacrifice.

“Sharks,” said Namoke. “As many as you can kill.”

The Ijaws baked a fish called
odinki
for them that night. The young Ijaw men stared at her curiously, but none had the nerve to approach. Namoke and the headman exchanged an unending series of compliments and drank palm-wine, which Namoke always brought as his share of the meal. (” With enough palm-wine it is possible to eat anything,” he had confided to her one night. “Even dogs’ feet.”) Now the headman was drunk and had forgotten she was there.

“Have you heard about the sickness on the coast?” he asked Namoke casually.

“A little,” said Namoke in a tone which told Usse that he knew nothing.

“First the eyes go red,” the headman said, “then the skin turns the color of this
odinki,
and then they start to sweat. At the same time, they shiver and have to wear as many clothes as they can. That is only the outside, though. The worst is here—” He thumped his chest. “Their
chis
turn into devils. They forget how to speak. A Calabari was up here telling us about it. …” He prattled on, absorbed in his own tall tales: outrageous breaches of hospitality and manners, blatant robberies, pointless acts of violence. “It comes from farther along the coast, plenty of days away from here,” he said. “The Calabari man said you couldn’t do anything with them. You had to tie them down or kill them. Nothing else to do.” He shook his head.

Traveling back up the River the next day, Namoke said very little, apart from remarking that if the Ijaws could stir their bones to sacrifice at Asaba, they could barter their fish and salt there at the same time and for almost twice the price.

Ezodu’s back, thought Usse, perhaps not then, but later, when everyone knew
it was not a sickness, but a people. No one she or any of the Nri had yet encountered had claimed actually to have seen one of them. At present, they were on the coast. Where did they come from? Where were they going?

Stupid questions, thought Usse, grinning to herself. They come from here. Here is where they are going. Ezodu’s people. …

She thought the same again kneeling outside a door a world away from Nri. The two men were talking inside. She understood that these people did not know where they were going or where they came from. They had no remembrance of the animal. The streets were like rivers in spate, blind and furious. The men and women were boiling surges and undertows. No wonder their Pope groped for his beast. They had traveled farther than their memories. Very dangerous, and a warning to herself, perhaps. When the soldier’s hand had slid over her cheek to cover her mouth, when the thick cable of his arm had circled her waist to hoist her off the floor and carry her noiselessly upstairs, when he had released her and hissed, “What do you
know?”
his face full of a rage that had nothing to do with her, when he had expected her to stand there dumb with shock and saying nothing, a silly little serving girl, she had said, “I know everything. …”

She had given herself to him that night and seven times since. But not last night, she thought now, watching from the window as instructed by her fish-skinned Oboni, her six-fingered conqueror. The river was dotted with little boats, many of them anchored and waiting for the same vessel she sought in the glare of the water. Someone must have ridden down from La Rocca with intelligence of its approach, for a crowd was streaming out of the inn and making its way over to the landing stage. The people who had gathered outside the warehouse drifted across to join them. Her lover and the other two were still inside. Presently they reappeared, walking quickly, almost running against the flow of people emptying out of the inn. She glanced out of the southward-facing window. The ship that would carry them away looked indistinguishable from the one that had brought her to this place three years before. Men were moving about on her decks. Turning back, she glimpsed the three men just before the sill barred them from her sight.

She heard their footsteps on the stairs and thought of her own tramping up and down the staircase of Fiametta’s house. Three years of that, but finished now. She had waited for her father’s instruction in the sanctuary of her bedchamber, but his
mmuo
had never come. That was good. It meant they had not buried him. It meant her three foolish brothers yet believed she was alive: Onugu, Apia, Gboju. She told herself only the Eze-Ada might wash the body of the Eze-Nri. Only the Eze-Ada might crown his successor. She looked down again.

Men in elaborate hats were marshaling the crowd at the landing stage now, trying to push them farther back. A small boat approached from the river and was angrily waved away. Farther upstream, around the bend of the river, the Pope’s barge hove into view.

The balmy airs of the broadening river, the pleasant splish-splosh of the paddles as they dip and strike the water, the padded comfort of his seat, all these contribute to the Pope’s sense of well-being on this sunny morning. The number of people gathered to greet him has been described by Ghiberti as gratifying, although even at this distance—a few hundreds of paces—they appear to him as leaves shaking in a tree under strong sunlight, blurred and confused, uncountable except by God. So he places his faith in “gratifying” as the number corresponding to his perfect satisfaction, leans back in his throne, and listens to the anxious twitterings of his courtiers, functionaries, and guests, who have been herded together on the deck of the barge and are now having to be forcibly restrained from all moving over to the left-hand side, where the view of the nearing jetty is better. Capsizement would be unfortunate.

Minutes later, the barge secured, he is being carried head-high on a makeshift palanquin along the waterfront to the stand. The crowds are, as ever, importunate, shoving and grabbing, shouting for his blessing, which he distributes generally while the Switzers keep them off him with their pikes. There is a wooden contraption with a tarpaulin draped over it. A little way down the quay is a ship. He will sit and watch and be watched. The ambassadors? He cannot place them at present.

He alights from his palanquin and climbs the benches to his throne. The view of the ship is splendid, although, squinting as he does, the ship itself appears a little dilapidated. Somewhat the worse for her undoubted wear? He knows very little of ships. On the benches below, his fellow passengers are scrabbling for seats, the higher the better being the obvious principle. The spectacle is rather undignified. Leo smiles.

Then his smile disappears. There will be speeches soon that will describe his better qualities and deeds, and this artful anthology will excite no more than a wave of his hand. His titles will be recited and sweetmeats will be offered, but his titles will not rouse him and the sweetmeats will remain untouched. His smile will not reappear because now, at this instant, he looks down with the vague intention of saluting various portions of the crowd and sees amongst their excited faces one that he expected—indeed, would have been much happier to see—last night.

Standing on the ground below, Rufo is looking up at him. He is gesturing, mouthing something. He wants, it seems, to join him. He wants to sit next to his employer, the Pope.

Leo frowns. He turns away. This will be a day when he is unconcerned with the past. Rufo serves, Rufo and his ilk. They suffice. He does not want to attend to all that now. He desires only to be amused. Ah! he thinks, at last, here are the ambassadors.

The speeches that follow ruin whatever was left of his good humor, Vich and Faria displaying their leaden wits to everyone’s disadvantage. They point to the shabby-looking ship, then to its crew lined up on the deck who raise their hats and bow in rough unison when it eventually casts off. They look like mismatched dolls, Leo thinks sourly: a short one, a tall one, a short one, a tall one, and so on. One so much larger than the others that the ship itself appears undersized, an oceangoing runt that the orators describe in such extravagant terms that he almost laughs. But he is too bored to laugh now and too vexed. Why has he chosen such dullards as his clowns?

And worse than that, Rufo will not go away. He stands there below him, gesticulating and remonstrating with the Switzers who bar his path. He is there alongside his palanquin when he eventually climbs back into it and is carried back along the quay. He is on the jetty too, where, seeking to avoid the man’s eye, Leo gazes out to sea, where the runt-ship has now shrunk to the size of a rowing-boat. And then Rufo is in the barge, which is the final straw.

“What!’ he barks across the boat to his hireling, who does not answer, or not at first. Instead he turns and points to the selfsame object of his own late evasive gaze: a speck of wood topped by a shred of canvas, bobbing up and down on the tedious patch of water he has been faced with all afternoon. He looks at it, then back to Rufo.

“So?”

F
ive more puffs of smoke appeared, hung in the air for a moment, then dispersed in the easterly wind. Seconds later the noise reached them, a series of soft
phuts,
harmless at such a distance. The alarm had been raised at first light. A force of the Hidalcao’s men were marching on Gondalim. Trujillo’s men had pulled back across the river to the fort of São Paolo at Benasterim. The ford it overlooked had been held so far. Later there were panicked rumors of a squadron at Panjim, certainly false, and then the gunners had appeared on the far bank of the Mandovi, but two or three thousand paces upriver of the port. The men stationed on the islands of Chorao and Diwadi had stayed at their posts, and Goa itself was secure. The river channel was another matter, passing close to the bank for almost two hundred paces and directly under the guns. The cannon-fire was a warning. The wind gusted then, and the ship’s sails billowed as they were struck, a windy thud, a dull crackle of canvas as they fell limp again. The two men on the quay and the hands on the crowded deck all looked up quickly.

“This cannot last,” muttered Teixeira. “This wind will die and we will be here until Saint Martin’s Day.”

But a second later the wind picked up again, and the men resumed their work about the ship. She was a nao of two hundred tons, tubby-looking, castled high both fore and aft. She had made the
carreira
once already, but her beams were sound, her pins still tight, so the Duc had assured him. Boxes, bales, crates, and casks jammed all three decks and even projected from her sides where they had been lashed to planks and the planks nailed to the wales. Two longboats were held in canvas slings tied aft of the chains. Belowdecks, in the hold, the
Ajuda’s
true cargo was already aboard. The hands clambered over obstacles as the sails were unfurled and their lines coiled and stowed. They seemed to work quickly, in near silence and without orders for the most part. The men were native to this place, Canarim for the most part. They kept themselves close, aboard just as ashore. The thought came to Teixeira then as it had several times before, the tempting speculation or question: Was the man they awaited necessary?