The Pop’s Rhinoceros (84 page)

The forecastle was no more than a platform raised a foot above the main deck. Dom Francisco was standing on it, waiting for him. Teixeira prized the lid off the water butt, which was lashed to the mainmast: almost full, teeming with tiny swimming creatures. They moved aft to the ship’s only cabin, which was built into the poop. The
Lucia
smelled dank, unused. A small table, a chair, two box-bunks: the cabin air was musty. Dom Francisco knocked open a hatch-cover.

“They took everything with them,” he said.

Teixeira watched the man’s broad back, which shifted clumsily about the cramped cabin, the fat neck. An awl such as the men used to sew canvas would sink into the flesh there and hardly leave a wound. He was powerful and stupid, the worst kind.

They moved out on deck again. Anchored no more than a few hundred paces away, the
Ajuda
appeared huge, a wooden leviathan compared with this craft. Teixeira looked up. The mainmast had been patched. Bright new wood took over near the topmost spar. The sails were furled neatly. New canvas by the look of it. Dom Francisco was busy sticking his cutlass into the deck, then leaning out to do the same thing to her sides.

“She’s rotten,” he said. Teixeira did not reply.

Together they raised the hatch-cover and lowered themselves into the hold. There was barely headroom to stand down there, and they felt their way about in the gloom, ducking under the timbers that supported the deck above. The stench from the ballast was overpowering. Cracks of light showed between the planks where the caulking had dried and shrunk. Teixeira stepped forward gingerly, feeling with his feet for stray ends of rope, loose planks, whatever might trip him. A
great column of wood directly in front of him would be the mizzenmast. He edged around it, and then he found the cage.

It had been built into the ship’s end-timber. Thick posts had been stepped into the deck below and the beams above. Three square-cut beams formed a kind of skirting, and planks were nailed crosswise up from these to the deck above. The back wall was formed by the bulkhead that divided the hold from the steerage. The
fidalgo
clambered about at the other end of the ship. Eventually he noticed the other man’s silence and joined him. They stared at the construction for a few moments, then Dom Francisco reached out and struck one of the posts with his cutlass. It bit and hung there.

“Sound,” he said. “What’s this for, I wonder?”

“Horseflesh,” said Teixeira.

“What?”

It eats horseflesh
. … “It was the revenge of a peasant,” said Teixeira, and he saw the man stiffen at these words, astonished perhaps that the accusation should come so late and so naked. “What did you use?” he went on. “Saltpeter? Wormwood? You dared not harm the knight, so you slew his horse. …”

“If you were not mad, I would kill you here and now.” The
fidalgo’s
tones were measured, untroubled. “Your ravings are nothing to me, or anyone. And it is you who are the horse-killer, if you recall.” Teixeira felt his anxiety swell and clot, unsure how he had been prompted to this. The cage, though, the empty cage. Was he sick still, his wits deranged?

“Why would I wait until you fell sick?” Dom Francisco continued. “Do you truly imagine I was alone, climbing down there each night with my bottle of poison, as you put it? Do you think there is a single man aboard who would take up your cause and stand in my way? Oçem, perhaps? Dom Estêvão? Our pilot, whose name you threatened to blacken across the Indies? The men whose companions died with their mouths full of blood that you might read a letter from your precious patron?”

There was a man, he thought, a man who came to warn me. His name, though … And dead now. Dom Francisco had pushed him up against the bars of the cage. “I could nail you in this cage, we could sail away, and no one would say a word. I could saw off your head and throw it over the side. …”

He felt sick; the stench down there and the closeness of the air. The man’s face was in his own, a clot of shadows following him as he tried to look away.

“But I will not do that,” the man said then. “I will discharge my duty and deliver you safely to your beloved Dom Peres. I will wear my stupid peasant face and threadbare clothes. I will obey you, and be blameless. But what will you be, my puffed-up courtier, with your flowery phrases and an empty cage for your efforts? What will become of you then?” The man was pulling him forward, then pushing him back against the cage, a little harder each time. He did not resist. “He’s dead,” the man hissed. “He’s
rotting. …”

Once back aboard the
Ajuda,
Teixeira went below. He could not watch what
he knew must follow. From his cabin, Teixeira heard Dom Francisco shouting to the hands, organizing the work-party that would first pull off the canvas and fold it, then set to with hammers and crowbars. There was banging and the creak of nails being prized from the wood. The resonant reports that next echoed about the vessel and reached him sitting there alone, those would be the posts and planks being thrown into rough piles ready for storage below. A silence followed, or what followed next was silent. He remembered Oçem telling him that he had smeared its skin with lanolin. It would slide smoothly across the deck. Suddenly the voices rose, and Dom Francisco’s joined them, rising above them all, “Ready, u-uupp. … One, two, three!” A pause, for which he held his breath, hands pressed over his face, then the great splash, and finally the cheers of the crew, which were loud, and long, and sounded to him like mockery.

His Holiness plans a tournament, according to the good Doctor Faria, a contest to try the fabled enmity of this “Ganda” toward the elephant. Many writers tell of it, Dom Manolo has already supplied him with the first of these beasts, and preparations are under way. Our Pope is resolved. Does this amuse you, Dom Jaime? As it does myself?

Oçem came to rouse him from his cabin at dusk. He lay on his bunk with the letter clutched in his hand. The two men were silent for some time.

“The Ganda died two days out of São Thomé,” the native said eventually.

He nodded but did not reply. He could hear Dom Francisco and Estêvão talking on the deck above.

“You would not be told.” It was offered almost in apology. He nodded again.

“He was rotting, there were maggots …”

“I know! I knew that!” The conversation above stopped abruptly. Dom Francisco laughed. The two men listened to this.

“Amongst the Rajputs, my people,” Oçem said, “the body is very unimportant. When dead, I mean.” He was half smiling, speaking lightly as though musing to himself. “Usually we burn it, or throw it in a river. The part that you call soul comes back anyway, sometimes in a stone, or a toad, a bird … Anything at all. It is a matter of luck, or the nature of the life led before death. Subtler doctors than I dispute this point, and their views differ, as you may imagine. Perhaps the Ganda will come back to you, Dom Jaime. As a fish, or a lizard, or perhaps a man, perhaps even someone you may meet.”

“But will he come back as himself?” Teixeira asked in the same tone. He swung his legs down from the bunk. “Is that ever remarked by your subtle doctors?”

“I have not heard of it,” said Oçem, considering this. “It is not impossible.”

He walked out onto the deck. The corpse was floating some hundreds of paces off the larboard. Its legs and swollen belly projected out of the water and formed a platform for scavenging birds that alighted in small flocks, flapping and screeching at each other as they pecked at the animal’s flesh.

“The current will carry it away before tomorrow,” Oçem said.

He turned away and climbed the ladder to the forecastle. Dom Francisco, Estêvão,
and Gonçalo looked up in surprise at his appearance there. He sat down, and for a minute no one spoke. It was Estêvão who broke this uncomfortable silence.

“When do we sail?” he asked.

“Sail?” Teixeira exclaimed lightly. “But we have only just arrived!”

“Dom Jaime, we understand your disappointment. Your mission …” Gonçalo spoke softly.

“My mission, yes. I think Dom Francisco here understands my mission as well as anyone, do you not, Dom Francisco?”

“I am at your command,” the
fidalgo
said levelly.

“We all are,” said Estêvão. “But you understand, Dom Jaime, our supplies are limited. The weather might change and strand us here. …”

“Strand us? I think you are confusing January with August, my friend. And as for supplies, we are anchored in the mouth of a river of sweet water with, unless my eyes deceive me, an abundance of fish.” He looked from face to face.

“We stay,” he said with sudden authority. “We stay until the villains whose ship lies anchored before us return.”

His tone silenced them. Gonçalo and Estêvão exchanged looks. “And if they do not return?” asked the latter.

“We stay,” he said again.

This time both men looked to the
fidalgo,
whose face had remained expressionless throughout.

“Well, Dom Francisco?” Estêvão appealed in exasperation. “Have you nothing to say about this?”

“Correct, Dom Estêvão,” the man replied. He addressed the boatswain, but his eyes were fixed on Teixeira. “If Dom Jaime commands that we stay, then we stay. There is no more to be said.”

Teixeira rose and returned below. From his bunk he heard their murmuring start up. They whispered to one another far into the night, but there was no more laughter.

The Ganda was still there the next day. Mobbed by scavenging birds, its limbs in tatters of flesh and skin, it bobbed about in the water, drifting through its own eccentric orbit, now nearer, now farther, but always in clear view of the
Ajuda
. Succeeding days brought more and different birds to the sharp-billed egrets and gulls: a heron, a hawk once, which carried away one unwary scavenger but dropped its prey over the mangroves. Two vultures flapped lazily out of the sky, tore open the stomach, and gorged until they could no longer fly. Teixeira watched the cadaver’s flaying and reduction from the main deck. The Ganda’s legs were no more than bones festooned with gristle and the belly a gaping wound black with dry blood and decay. The river should have pushed it out to sea. The weight of its bones should have sunk it to the bottom. The water threshed and foamed when the sharks found it, but still it floated, a stinking and ragged island, irreducible, going nowhere.

“There is no river to ‘push it,’ as you say,” Gonçalo told him shortly when his curiosity finally prompted him to ask. He took it as a snub and was about to walk away when the pilot spoke again. “Rather there is the current which runs along the edge of the mouth, so weak it can hardly be called a current. This river, as we thought it, is no more than that. But somewhere behind there”—he gestured at the acreage of mangroves that stretched back inland for as far as they could see— “there is a river, and a river the like of which we have never seen or dreamed of.”

“But is this not its mouth?” Teixeira persisted.

“Perhaps the very edge of it. But its mouth? We have sailed across its mouth already, a mouth choked with silt and the trees which have taken root there. It took us better than five days. Think of it”—he seemed only dimly aware of Teixeir’a’s presence now—“a river whose mouth is sixty leagues across. It would have currents running in it greater than the Tagus. Storms on one bank might never even be glimpsed from the other. …” He gazed at the stunted and misshapen trees as though, through the exposed roots and branches, he might catch sight of this oceanic flood.

Teixeira looked with him, but his gaze was drawn to the
Lucia
. Where are you? he asked of her vanished crew.

That night, the silence that normally descended over the ship and the waters surrounding her was broken by a strange sound. A faint crying, bestial and distressed, prompted the sleeping lookout on the forecastle to rouse first him, then Dom Francisco, then Teixeira. They gathered on deck to listen, and soon found themselves joined by the better part of the crew. The sound grew louder, then seemed to fall away, then grew louder again. They looked to one another, baffled as to its origin and unable to discover more in the darkness.

“Animals?” Estêvão said at one point. The noise seemed to be all around them and yet no closer than before.

Daybreak explained all and yet begged questions more troubling than any contemplated in the cocoon of the night’s ignorance. The sky lightened in the east, grew luminous, and the familiar line of the coast rose clear of the water like a palisade of shadow. They could make out dim shapes then, teasing and ill-defined silhouettes. The noise seemed quieter and more intermittent now. Weak wails and bleats. The men looked to each other, still puzzled. The shapes grew in definition but made no more sense than before. There were more than a score of them, and others presumably in the patches of water still in shadow. It was one of the hands who saw it first. He shouted out, or would have, but the cry had already turned into hiccups of surprised mirth.

“What? What is he saying?” demanded Dom Francisco, but his explanation was superfluous, for Estêvão too finally understood what his eyes had been telling him for some minutes now, though his mind had been unable to accept it.

“Good Christ!” he exclaimed.

They were to port and starboard, fore and aft, grouped together in twos and threes, heads bobbing up and down as though grazing, bleating in consternation.
The men of the
Ajuda
looked about them in amazement. They were surrounded by a herd of goats.

“And look there!” shouted Estêvão. He was pointing upriver, beyond the
Lucia
.

Another flotilla was advancing.

“Good God!” said Dom Francisco. “Pigs!”

And more goats, and small oxen, and whole flocks of squawking chickens. … They were tethered to rafts constructed from a light wood so soft that one could sink a thumb into it, the trunks bound together with vines. Soon the open water around them was filled with these craft, varying in size depending on their passengers, which bleated, and roared, and lowed, and screeched. A long raft of chattering monkeys drifted past, then one of birds with bright yellow beaks, and upriver the waterway was filled with more.