The Pop’s Rhinoceros (105 page)

The ground began to rise. He looked along the coast and saw flat marshes broken by stands of saplings, beech and ash, but no sign that the island had ever been inhabited, no huts or fences. That was wrong, he thought to himself. There was a people here before this. He saw the great holm oak in the distance, the curve of the strand. He looked forward again. Ahead, the army had formed a line. They could march no farther, and their noise was changing in character, the war cries and boasts breaking up and becoming low groans, baffled anger, disappointed sighs: the sounds of failed purpose, of frustrated need, of their lack. Little by little, their voices died in their throats. They were halted there on the edge, at the limit of the point. They were silent.

He fought his way through them and looked down into the yellow-gray waters that crawled lazily about the cliff. The Water-man looked up at him, aping the motions of his limbs. He looked ridiculous, his arms and legs flopping about, his body hanging in the water down there while his own teetered on the raw edge above, amongst the serried ranks of the Lion’s men. He watched the shape of himself stretch and distort. The Water-man was breaking up, coming apart, his mouth widening impossibly. To swallow him?

Niklot!

Not yet. The men around him are silent, their long-sought coordinate invisible, unreachable, as they search for missing walls and ramparts, listen for the hum of voices, clatter of footsteps, for the clangor of drowned Vineta. …

Salvestro!

But they see nothing, hear nothing. They will turn away. They will carry stones from quarries as far away as Brandenburg to build a church here, as a monument to their bafflement. … The Water-man was telling him this. He glanced down at him again, then stared. Now how had he failed to notice that before? The Water-man was black.

“Salvestro! Salvestro, wake up!”

“Niklot,” he mumbled, coming blearily awake, “I am called. Or was.”

There was a face staring into his, a black face, not old, not young, and not the Water-man’s, either. A youth, he decided. Diego had fallen silent and seemed—he blinked, one arm searching for the floor to push himself upright—to be kneeling in front of the corpse. Bernardo was standing beside him, looking up. Then the youth said something he did not understand, turning as he did to the one figure not in the pit, whose reply he also did not understand but whom he recognized, beneath the thick lines of her facepaint and the braided coils of her hair.

“Get up,” said Usse.

Bernardo looked at him anxiously. Salvestro rose slowly to his feet, but Diego remained kneeling in front of the seated figure.

“All of you.”

Again, the youth addressed the woman standing above them. When he fell silent, Usse shook her head.

“I am the servant of the King of Nri,” Diego said suddenly, still kneeling, speaking as much to the dead man as to the living woman behind him. “I attend him. I remain with him. My fealty is owed him.”

There was another short exchange in their own language between the two of them. At the end of it Usse merely shrugged. Salvestro wondered how it was that he was awake, that he could dream the island and yet wake to this.

“Then stay,” she told the kneeling soldier indifferently. “You two”—pointing first to Bernardo, then to Salvestro—“follow me.”

The dust in the courtyard looked like white sand. The roof of the Oba cast a sharp black shadow under the moon’s glare. Outside the compound a faint orange light wavered, just visible above the wall. The torches of the waiting men, he thought. Fenenu watched the two White-men slide hesitantly around the massive wooden door, the smaller one first, then his companion.

“Where are they going?” he asked the woman standing beside him.

It was she who had commanded them, speaking to them in their own language.

“Where have you sent them?”

“The River,” Usse replied.

There was some shouting then. He heard the White-men’s voices rise above the hubbub. They sounded harsh, like the roaring of animals.

Consider the tripartite nature of rivers. Source, course, and mouth. Rivers fatten as they approach the sea; they widen, or deepen, accumulating the donations of their watersheds, which have in turn accumulated rain. Rain falls. Rivers flood. The relationship is directly causal—hydraulic simplicity itself—and as, hereabouts, at least, the rains come once a year, so one might expect a correspondingly singular annual flood. Instead the river offers two: major and minor, a full-blooded bank-bursting walloping torrent followed about ninety days later by a sort of bore-in-reverse, a watery bump or weak echo that raises the water level by a foot or two, then falls away. … An anticlimactic and unengaging mystery, known around Idah, where it sometimes carries away the odd unmoored canoe, as the
yangbe
.

Consider the triply troubled nature of this particular river, the disjunctions and segments of its upper, middle, and lower courses. Top and tail flow through forests and savannahs, gurgle through ravines, and spread themselves over beds surrounded by greenery and growth. The wet season here is genuinely wet. The middle, however, flows through a baking desert, meandering and evaporating under a blazing cloudless sky. No clouds mean no rain. No rain means no flood. This part of the river is a noncontributor, a sponge, the sagging center in a fluvial amphimacer, mere delaying distance that the upper course’s flood must negotiate to reach the lower, whose own flood is always long gone by the time of its depleted late arrival some time after the departure of the harmattan. It’s not much more than a swell by then, a local curiosity for the remainder of its passage. In a good year it might raise a little spray around the rocks at Ansongo, but this apart it is more or less ineffective, a sad and somewhat useless little water-bump, unable to raise itself above anything except the lowest lying of the river’s sandbanks. …

Not too high but satisfyingly broad, the sandbank that sits midstream between Onitsha and Asaba is usually the venue for a noisy market. The
yangbe
races down from Idah as though already anticipating at last getting some land underneath it, sweeping away the market women, rolling up and over the gentle hump, and doing some proper
flooding. …

But usually the market has already gone, its traders happy in the knowledge that the
yangbe
never lingers long. Usually the sandbank is an empty gentle hump, but not this year. This year—tonight—it is crowded. with livestock tethered to rafts.

There are goats, hogs, dogs, and rats. There are squirrels, geckoes, monitor lizards, and fruit-bats. Crates of varying sizes fashioned from interwoven sapling-branches and elephant grass hold chickens, crested guinea fowl, hornbills, parrots, and fruit-pigeons. Other crates hold toads, frogs, hermit-, ghost-, and hairy mangrove crabs. Special submersible baskets hold fish. There is a raft of baboons, and several of chimpanzees, and one that supports a solitary morose gorilla. Three antelope
share a shifting platform made of balsa logs, and small hornless cattle are corralled in groups ranging from two to seventeen on pontoonlike structures with rails. There is a bull. There is a turtle. There are snakes tied to sticks.

And, in consequence, the benighted sandbank is loud with bleats, oinks, barks, squeals, chatterings, hissings, squawks, caws, tweets and twitterings, croaks, roars, pules, screeches, chirrups, wails, mooing, and ultrasonic whistles, for, weak as it is, the
yangbe
is now creeping up the edges of the fragile island, raising the water level and lapping at the outermost of the makeshift rivercraft. Three trays of chaffinches have already floated away, their feathered crews cheeping plaintively before being audibly devoured by waiting crocodiles. Several baskets of toads will soon follow. The cacophony began even before the men who had towed them here had climbed back into their pirogues and disappeared into the darkness. Now, as the cattle stamp, the chickens flutter, the snakes writhe, and the dolorous ape ineptly attempts to free itself from its bonds, it seems that every animal capable of sound is making as much of it as possible. Except one.

The largest of all the vessels assembled here sits in the very center of the sandbank. Perhaps this accounts for its passengers calm. Or passengers. There are three of them, though only the most massive is visible, standing proudly erect on a raft built of whole tree-trunks lashed together lengthwise and widthwise with a pair of canoes extended one on each side as outriggers. So far, he has not made a sound or moved a muscle. He simply stands there in the midst of the din, waiting for the water to lift the raft off, and the other two passengers with it. They are in the canoes. Tied up.

“Salvestro?”

The two men had emerged from the compound and come face-to-face with the waiting mob. They had been seized, trussed, and bundled into two tapered coffins, or so it had appeared to Bernardo. He had lost sight of Salvestro as he was raised up and carried head-high through the forest, the men’s shouts ringing in his ears and his head knocking against the wooden sides, for his captors moved at a prodigious rate. Suddenly the canopy had broken and the men had fallen silent. Bernardo had heard water and then felt his coffin being lowered into it. He was afloat. Men were splashing about in the water around him. He felt the tug on his craft as it was towed away from the bank. At first there was only the rhythmic slaps of the paddles in the water, but gradually these were superseded by a stranger noise and more mixed: unrecognizable wailings, shrieks, and growls.

The canoe was too deep or his bonds too tight for him to raise his head above the sides, but as the silent men had dragged his canoe ashore and hauled it over the sand to tie it to the raft, they must have passed directly beneath the animal. One minute, he was staring helplessly up at the stars. The next, a huge head swung over and blotted out the sky. A head the size of a water barrel. Eyes like a snake. A horn on the end of its nose. It looked down at him. He looked up at it. Then it swung back out of sight, the men dragged his craft around to the side of the raft, and he was left with his earlier view of the stars.

“Salvestro?” he tried again.

Over the last hour, the noise of the panicking animals had risen gradually to an earsplitting din, then—just as gradually—it had subsided in a manner he did not understand. Until now. Now he could hear the water lapping at the sides of his canoe. One end was rising as the water tried to lift it off the sand. There were other movements, too, but he did not want to think about those. They were coming from the raft. From the Beast.

“Salv—”

“Ssshh!” hissed Salvestro. “What if our voices startle it? Keep quiet, Bernardo.”

He tried to keep quiet. Salvestro was scared, too. He heard it in his voice. His canoe was more or less floating now. Only the raft prevented it from drifting down the river like the animals. Where were the animals? The last sound he had heard was desolate mooing, growing fainter and fainter. Then nothing. … Silence. Just the water. He listened to it for a while.

The raft jolted.

He shouted, “Salvestro! I can’t swim!”

“Keep calm, Bernardo!” Salvestro called back. “We’re moving off the sandbank, that’s all.”

The raft began, very slowly, to scrape along the bottom. After about a minute of this, Salvestro called out again.

“Don’t worry, Bernardo!” Then he added, “We’ve been in worse scrapes than this, haven’t we?”

Bernardo felt the raft wheel about, his canoe swinging with it, shuddering as it scudded over the sandbank. Worse scrapes than this? He recalled running out of villages with the rest of the Christian Free Company in the middle of the night. Then, cowering in a ditch under the guns at Ravenna, and after that the woman at Prato … the one in the street. Then their own escape, Salvestro making him dive under the black water, choking down there. He was frightened. He hid under the tables in the Broken Wheel because Salvestro had left him there, and he couldn’t pull the barrel out of the water because it was stuck somehow. It wasn’t his fault. The monks arrived and lifted it out. Anything else? He had lain all night in a bog after a little girl dressed in white had skipped away and left them both there. …