The Pop’s Rhinoceros (102 page)

Salvestro soon realized that the view from the rim of the valley had deceived him, for the forest down here was broken by little groves and clearings where plots of land had been planted, all quite invisible from above. Where the land had been cleared, the soil was piled up in large regular mounds, as though monstrous turnips were swelling there. Groves of young palm trees were hung with bright red fruit. The path snaked between these little sunlit plantations, darting in and out of the shade of the forest, which was quieter than the forest they had left. The noise of the birds was muted and sporadic.

To begin with, a few smaller paths would lead off to left or right, but after only a few minutes’ trudging, these ceased. A little farther on the plantations ceased, too. The path continued, winding its way between the trees that supported the canopy above, running along the northern edge of the valley floor, according to Salvestro’s observations, curving slightly and broad enough for the three of them to walk abreast if they should so choose. In the event, the old woman led, Diego followed, and the other two dawdled behind him. They saw no one.

“Where are the people?” asked Bernardo.

No one answered. Presently the path began to narrow. Encroaching shrubs and clumps of grass squeezed it to a single line that appeared and disappeared, its breaks growing longer and longer until they were once again walking through forest that betrayed no sign that humans had ever set foot there. They weaved their way through the tree-trunks with the old woman, who seemed as certain of her destination as ever. With her as their guide, Salvestro surrendered to his ignorance. He was going wherever she was taking them. They all were.

To their right, and insensibly at first, the ground began to drop. When it leveled out again they found themselves in a clearing. The steep slope that enclosed the valley to the north was visible through the gap in the canopy. In the center, the soil was charred and gray with ashes where someone had once lit a bonfire. Salvestro put his hand to its remains. Cold. The old woman was already beckoning
them on. He heard water, a little stream. The ground fell away on the far side of the clearing to form a little scarp, no more than the height of a man, which the stream below had presumably cut and then taken as its near bank. They jumped down one by one, landing heavily and having to scramble up the other side. In front of them were several huge cottonwood trees, then some coco-palms, and behind those a forbidding thicket of bushes with dark purple leaves. The old woman turned away. They were to follow the water downstream.

“What’s that?” Bernardo said a few minutes later.

Earlier, Salvestro had only shrugged at the giant’s question. He had no more idea where all the people were than his companion did. Perhaps there were no people. The plantations might be some freakish caprice of the forest, the paths worn by animals. The old woman might be leading them around and around for no better reason than her own amusement. Now his gaze followed the giant’s outstretched arm. To the left of the stream the trees were beginning to thin, and between their trunks, perhaps a hundred paces away, he saw sunlight falling directly on some smooth surface, a high wall, perhaps, or an unnaturally smooth bank of earth. The vista was interrupted, broken up by the tree-trunks into segments that his eyes could not make sense of.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

The old woman had not waited, nor had Diego. They were standing a little way ahead. The two men quickened their step to catch up and, when they reached them, found themselves standing at the edge of a dusty apron of cleared ground that served as a kind of forecourt to the structure behind.

The object they had glimpsed was indeed a wall, made of smooth mud and fifteen or even twenty feet high. It formed one side of a rectangular enclosure whose extent they could only guess. It stretched from the apron back into the forest until it was lost to view. Its frontage, if it was a front, was broken only by a small door set so deep into the wall that the shadowed recess appeared at first to be a tunnel. After the jumbled lines of the forest, the scale and regularity of the walls seemed shocking, a disruption.

“I think we’re here,” said Bernardo behind him.

The old woman began chattering in her own language, its strange sounds and rhythms only reinforcing the alien character of the structure. Still chattering, she led them to the door. Carved faces pushed their features out of the wood. She pressed her palms against two foreheads as though trying to force them back into the timber. She was trying to explain something, but they could not understand her. Then she buffeted the massive door with her shoulder, stepped aside, and pointed to Bernardo.

It took the big man two heavy blows before the barrier so much as shuddered. All three set their shoulders to the task, forcing an entrance inch by inch, dislodging clods of dry mud that rained down on their heads, and gouging a semicircular weal in the ground. The door turned out to be fashioned from a single slab of hardwood, no higher than Salvestro but thicker than Bernardo’s chest.
Time, damp, and heat had warped the frame in which it was set until its sagging hinges had deposited its weight on the ground. They set to again, heaving and pushing, sweating and cursing, until eventually the crack widened to a gap through which even Bernardo might squeeze. He gave it a last tremendous buffet and turned to the old woman in triumph.

She was gone.

The ground was cleared for fifty paces or more in any direction. The three men looked around them, but she was nowhere in sight. The trees stood in a halfcircle around the open area as though they had advanced that far and then been stopped abruptly by an unseen force or prohibition. An hour ago the men had been walking beneath their canopies. Now they appeared forbidding. Something was different, Salvestro thought vaguely. The old woman seemed to have disappeared into thin air. A door that seemed not to have been opened in years had been forced. … Something else. He looked about uneasily and saw that Bernardo was still looking about anxiously.

“She guided us here,” Salvestro said uncertainly. “Now we’re here, why would she stay?”

He addressed this last remark to Diego, but the soldier only stared at his boots, nodding to himself with a half-smile on his face, at once resigned and amused at some private realization.

“But what now?” Bernardo burst out. He looked about him at the encircling forest. “What do we do now?”

There was nowhere else to go. Diego was already sliding around the door.

A courtyard: a wide strip of open space stretching widthwise between the side walls. At its center stood a structure that reminded Salvestro of the one Diego had entered after they had climbed out of the boat. A roof fashioned from intertwined palm branches had been raised on stout poles, but the fronds had dried and shredded, and now they lay scattered on the ground. Its sides were open. The three of them stood beneath the bare lattice on which the roof had once been laid and stared at the wide front of a building that as far as they could make out filled the entire remainder of the enclosure. A number of low doorways punctuated the forewall at irregular intervals. They were quiet. Salvestro realized that the source of the strange apprehension he had felt only a few minutes earlier was, in effect, an absence. This courtyard, the great low building that squatted before them and stretched back out of sight, the clearing outside, and the surrounding forest were all perfectly silent.

He looked again at Diego, but the soldier was intent on the doorways, his gaze sweeping over them as if whatever he sought might suddenly flicker in the interior darkness, disturb it somehow and reveal itself. Salvestro recalled the man’s last words, spoken on the ridge overlooking the valley. The certainty he had invested them with. The soldier was lost, adrift, clinging to the fraying thread of his quest. It had happened on the river, or in the rear room where he, Salvestro, had
discovered him “at prayer.” Or on the ship. Usse could bring him back, perhaps, or the Beast. He would find neither of them here.

Instead chambers. And more chambers. And more chambers again beyond those.

They entered the building and began moving through its divisions. Sunlight entering by the open doorways illuminated the foremost rooms, but as they moved deeper into the structure the three men were reduced to squinting into a darkness lit only by the faint glimmers that penetrated the thatch. The chambers varied only slightly in size and were linked by unframed archways that seemed to have been carved directly out of the same smooth mud that formed the walls. Their angles and corners were curving planes, and their floors bowed up so that it was impossible to say exactly where they stopped being floors and started being walls. Only the roof was constant, uniformly flat and suspended out of reach above their heads. Gradually their eyes adjusted to the gloom, and, advancing hesitantly through the irregular enfilades, they began to realize that the building was not simply uninhabited. It was empty. None of the chambers contained anything.

To begin with they drifted through together, one leading the way, then another, one poking his head through a side opening while the others went ahead, then reconvenings, then more individual detours, which grew longer and longer until Diego grunted and marched off to the left and, a little later, Bernardo seemed to forget his earlier unease, simply wandering through the opposite door to Salvestro. They went their separate ways, not so much by design as by the fact that there seemed no compelling reason to stay together. Soldier, Giant, Thief: a disbanded trio or dissected amphibrach: a humpless dromedary trudging in three different directions at once.

Salvestro found himself alone in a space rather longer than it was wide and tapered at one end. The next was narrower, and the next almost triangular. A dead end. He moved on. The hardened mud that formed the walls and the floor deadened the sound of his footfalls. He had a vague idea of continuing forward until he reached the building’s outer wall. He would then follow it around until he reemerged at the front or discovered some other entrance at the rear. He was not sure what benefit this information might confer on him, but nevertheless he advanced, passing slowly through the chambers and taking careful note of the angles at which they were set, for the building itself seemed to resist straightforward passage, its skewed honeycomb bending him away from his objective and forcing him to guess at every turn whether he was still maintaining his heading or had been subtly turned or diverted somehow. His steps grew hesitant, and realizing that this was adding to the problematic nature of the task, he strode forward more boldly, forcing himself to walk quickly. He passed briskly from chamber to chamber, almost running now, thinking that the very next dead end must indicate the building’s limit. Then he stepped confidently into one of the largest chambers he had yet seen and pitched forward into space.

“Bernardo!”

The structure was not, after all, quite empty. Or even uninhabited.

It took some time for the giant to find him. Guided by Salvestro’s periodic shouts, Bernardo moved in haphazard fashion toward the source of the noise, growing increasingly confused and impatient as he did so. He had been quite content to drift aimlessly among the chambers, but now they seemed arranged for no other purpose than deflecting him. Salvestro’s shouts increased and decreased in volume, booming out one minute, stifled the next, as the chambers trapped or amplified the sound. Several times he stopped to try to clarify his predicament, allowing Salvestro to yell away for a minute or two before resuming his search. His predicament grew no clearer. So he blundered forward through the gloom, calling out what he hoped were encouraging phrases such as “Over here, Salvestro!” and “Almost there!” and “Not long now!” until the variously muffled or resonant answering voice, instead of shouting his name, said quite clearly and distinctly: “Stop.”

Bernardo stopped.

He was standing on the edge of a smooth-sided pit. The chamber’s floor, though concave like the others, was hollowed to a far greater depth and the consequent depression shaped like the inside of an enormous inverted bell. Its impatient clapper was Salvestro, standing there looking up at him. And there was something else down there. …

“Come on, Bernardo! Get down here. Just sit on the edge and slide.”

“Then we’ll both be stuck,” he objected.

“What do you mean, ‘stuck’? I’ve been up and down half a dozen times already. It’s easy.”

Bernardo peered at the slope mistrustfully, then squinted into the pit.

“What’s that?” he demanded.

“Come and look for yourself,” retorted Salvestro.

Bernardo scrambled down.

It was a man, or one who once had been a man. He was seated upright on a chair that seemed—the light was even weaker than before—to have been carved from a single tree-trunk. He wore a headdress of some sort and a long robe that was open at the chest, disclosing some necklaces and a pendant carved with an animal’s face. Part clasped by and part resting against one arm, its base resting on the hard mud of the floor and its tip extending a little higher than his shoulder, was a massive ivory tusk, while the other arm held a thick staff with a few disks stuck on the end. A tightly bound bundle of twigs lay on the ground between his feet.

Bernardo stared into the man’s face. “He’s not breathing, is he?”

“No,” said Salvestro behind him.

The face, indeed the whole body, appeared in so perfect a state of preservation that both men had hushed their voices for fear of waking the seated figure.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Salvestro. Then he added, “Touch him.”

Bernardo poked tentatively at the robe. It crumbled where his finger touched. He nodded his satisfaction.

“No,” Salvestro said. “Touch
him
. His skin.”

The giant approached the body again, hesitating as he decided which part to touch. The forehead, it seemed. Yes. He extended his arm to press the palm of his hand against the figure’s flesh.

“Urgh!”

He recoiled in horror, springing back and crying out, “You told me he was dead, damn you, Salvestro!”