The Pop’s Rhinoceros (107 page)

And yet there would be a shipwreck, in the night and less than a league from the shore and invisible as foretold in the child’s grotesque performance, in a storm that smashed the vessel and drove her down, pounding and ripping at the corpse of its enemy. Tattered flesh and splinters of bone. Exorbitant victory. That she should “think too deeply”? Pah! Not deeply enough, she would decide then. Brother Bishop was the silly and greedy fool he had always been and would always be. The child had been right in her rudeness and in her strangeness, and she
had been right about the ship. Her mad circuits had narrowed until she was almost marching on the spot, her little head jerking from side to side, her half-controlled limbs twitching like a puppet’s. Violetta turned from this vision in distraction, which, she told herself later, was only the prelude to her running to the child. … She turned to the window, the encroaching night, the rising sea, the thunderclouds descending like hammers to smash whatever might fall to them.

To a ship. At first she saw only a distant speck or mere interruption of the darkening storm that, it seemed, was about to overtake it. Violetta stared as the speck grew in definition. A vessel under near bare spars was running before the wind in a hopeless dash to drag itself out from between the great black plates of sea and sky that met like millstones to crush it. But it was still leagues away from landfall. She turned back to Amalia in amazement. The child had fallen silent.

“You knew?” she demanded softly. “But how could you know?”

“Whoosh,” Amalia mumbled. She sat down quickly and bent her head. “Whoosh, whoosh. Three more souls.”

She appeared crumpled, skeins of her black hair scattered about her face. Violetta glanced out the window, and at that moment the wind blew the first spatter of rain into her face. Even at such a distance the vessel seemed to lurch as it toiled north and east in the heavy sea. Making for the gulf, she supposed. Night would fall within the hour.

“Oh,” the child said behind her. She repeated it, as though she had just remembered or realized a fact that now surprised her.

She was picking at the linen of her dress, face still mostly covered by her hair. She hiccuped, then sniffed. Violetta watched her curiously. The mad marionette of a minute ago was a limp ragdoll. The ragdoll sniffed again, then wiped her nose on her dress.

“Amalia,” she exclaimed, never having witnessed the phenomenon before, as much surprised by the sudden realization of its earlier absence as by its appearance now. Why had she never remarked it? “You are crying.”

But the crying seemed to end as suddenly as it began, and when the child looked up her eyes were hardly reddened.

“Whoosh,” Amalia said quietly. “Bernardo’s going to drown.”

“Who is Bernardo?” asked Violetta.

“Bernardo is Salvestro’s friend,” replied Amalia.

Violetta awoke to a monotonous endless drumroll, the sound of rain beating against the shutters. When darkness had fallen she had closed them, and the two of them had sat in silence. There was nothing more to be seen or done. The storm began to batter in earnest, a shrieking gale driving it onto the coast. The seas rose up and pounded furiously on the beach, the normally inert gray waters releasing their store of noise for hour after hour. Eventually the din had numbed her and driven her down into an exhausted stupor, where thought of the fates being suffered in the watery turmoil outside had been unable to find her. Now the
predawn light, entering through the cracks in the shutters, etched the room’s roughly hewn stones and roof-beams in cold bluish-gray light. Her neck ached. She looked blearily about her: a small wooden chest, a crucifix hung high on the wall, a small puddle of water where the rain had found an entrance. The nest of blankets in which the child made her bed was empty. Amalia was gone.

Outside, the rain fell in sheets, each new gout of water slapping down onto the beach and disappearing there as though the surface of the gritty mud were a taut sheet of gray silk that the pelting droplets pierced insensibly, driving on into some airy emptiness beneath. The sea’s surface prickled under the same assault. Violetta’s shoes sank into the mud as she climbed down the scarp. The blanket she had thrown over her head was already soaked through, and rain trickled between her fingers where she clasped it bunched beneath her chin. When she looked back, the turret was no more than a thickening of darkness through the rain, the eastern sky a steel gray screen behind it. The palazzo sank into the foreshore. They would not have seen it, she thought, if any had made it ashore. She stood on the rain-lashed beach and shivered. The bare sea heaved and stretched away

The vessel, or the pieces of a vessel, was all around her. Up and down the beach as far as she could see, embedded in the sand at strange angles, were broken spars and beams, massive curved compass timbers, smashed planks, and barrel staves. A section of decking the height of two men seemed to have been peeled off entire and driven into the mud like an ax-blade. A splintered line of railings pointed jaggedly out to sea, appearing now as futile late defenses against the slopping waves. Farther down the beach a single massive pole with a crosspiece near its top stabbed the shore in an exact vertical as though a huge hand had wielded it like a sword. She tried to grasp the force that had snapped it off and planted it here, a great mocking cross to mark the men who had died beneath it. They were here, too, or some of them. Scattered amongst the detritus were low and irregular humps, unexceptional accumulations of tatters and rags: the ship’s human jetsam.

A light caught her eye then. A door had opened in the palazzo, and three or four of the women were making their way out to the beach. She saw them hesitate and huddle together beneath their shawls as the rain greeted them with its first cold slaps. The wreck’s transitory monuments studded the strand to north and south: rope-ends and flapping canvas snagged in splintered poles and planks, the timbers themselves set in mud, water, and sand. Amalia emerged from behind one of the larger piles of wreckage, heaped up and dumped some two or three hundred paces away. She was carrying a stick. Violetta squinted. The child seemed oblivious of the rain, moving about in a methodical fashion between the low humps and using the stick to poke at them. Two pokes, a short wait, another poke, and then she would move on to the next. Violetta was already thinking of the work to be done before the tide swept in that afternoon. There were twenty corpses, at least, and each one would have to be dragged up the scarp. The tide would probably fetch up more. It might go on for days, she realized grimly. Down the beach, Amalia came to a halt. The ground about the palazzo was marshy even
in summer. Now it would be waterlogged. How would they bury them? she wondered. Amalia had sunk to her knees now, as though she were prostrating herself. … No. As though she were wrestling. But with a corpse? Violetta took two curious, wondering steps, then broke into a run. Beneath the child’s clumsy assault, the corpse had moved.

It was lying facedown, trying to rise. The feet scraped and scratched, searching for purchase in the mud while its hands grasped handfuls of the same stuff as though trying to pull itself up hand over hand. It was naked except for the rags of something that once had been a shirt, and the cleft between its legs opened and closed with these spasmodic efforts. The limbs were emaciated and spattered with mud that seemed ingrained in the flesh, for the rain did not wash it off. Where the skin showed through the filth it was either bone white or broken with rashes and sores, and when the “corpse” at last managed to raise its head its face was that of a blind man, staring ahead and seeing nothing. Amalia was trying to turn the body onto its back. Him, she forced herself to acknowledge, for it was a man, though he seemed bestial somehow, something that had yet to become human or had been driven beyond that by his privations. She came to herself with a start, took the sodden blanket from her back, and knelt beside the child. The man was trying to speak, but his incoherent mumble made no sense. With her own help, the little girl rolled him over onto the blanket. The man grunted again, struggling to speak.

“I’ve told you three times already,” Amalia said in a tone of girlish exasperation. “He’s drowned. They’re
all
drowned, except you, Salvestro.”

The man’s eyes closed. The eyebrows that wolves have, thought Violetta, instantly shaking her head at this irrelevance. Practicalities, she insisted to herself. The child’s discovery had unnerved her. How to carry him inside.

“He’s going to die,” said a voice behind her. “When they stop shivering, that’s when they die. I’ve seen it before.”

A woman who called herself Minetta was standing behind her. The three others she had seen were beside her, all four looking down at the still body, which had indeed stopped shivering. Had he been shivering before? Violetta could not remember.

“No, he’s not!” Amalia sounded outraged at the suggestion, as though it were a personal slight.

“We’ll get him up to the house,” Minetta said then. She was moving to wrap the blanket around their burden when one of her companions let out a little shriek.

“Urgh!”

She was standing on something that Violetta had taken for a large, gently rounded stone. It was gray, oddly textured, and when the woman offered it a prod with her toe, it gave beneath the pressure. She jumped back.

“It’s soft!”

“What is it?” asked Minetta.

The first woman looked helplessly to her companions, who looked back at her, then down again at the stone-that-was-not-a-stone.

“Well?” the woman appealed with an edge of hysteria in her voice that was as much a product of the rain and the cutting wind as the enigma buried in the sand.

For a moment or two no one spoke.

“I know what it is,” said Amalia.

She was smiling delightedly, hands clasped behind her back, her shoulders swiveling as she rocked with pleasure at their bafflement. She pointed to the creature in the blanket, who seemed to be trying to rise and perhaps move toward the object of their consternation. His efforts were too feeble to be sure.

“He knows what it is, too.”

The man croaked or coughed.

“What, then?” the woman demanded.

“Not telling,” replied Amalia.

A ship is marching on Rome: a three-master, square-rigged, pennants a-flutter to signal plague, which perhaps explains the paucity of reliable eyewitness accounts. It finds its dry docks a little way outside the walls of the cities, which it assiduously skirts, bedding itself down each night in the furrow of adjacent knolls or lodging itself within an impromptu scaffold of burly tree-trunks. Its topmost spars are glimpsed surmounting low hills, its fabric passes more or less concealed behind this or that copse of evergreens. So many planks are sprung off its frame that it seems to bristle with stubbly feathers. Presumably it once had wings, too. Four hatches cut in its barnacled underside allow its peculiar method of locomotion. From its punctured underside protrude four enormous gray legs.

Alternatively, far from being contained in the ship, the Beast is actually carrying it. Disassembled, naturally, but with cabins fashioned from its timbers to protect the heroic crew from the inclemencies of the Ligurian, or Tuscan, or Sienese, or Umbrian weather. It is said to be gray, rotund, and approximately the size of a cathedral. Some versions have it rescuing children discovered en route from under waterwheels or the tops of tall trees. Others have it laying waste the countryside in the manner of the Calydonian boar. Others still dispense with the ship, and some with the crew, too, though the latter version is rare. Vich and Faria are active in the city, and the nature of the crew is the main focus of their attention. Is this a Spanish Beast or a Portingale? The purveyors of rumor would hardly be so stupid as to exclude the minor but lucrative diplomatic market. But the deepest pocket is known to be papal, and his familiars in the inns and taverns, in the salons, streets, and naves, have made it more than clear that papal interest is focused on the Beast.

In consequence, the Beast changes shape and size with bewildering rapidity
—the rumor-market is nothing if not liquid—responding day by day to What His Holiness Wants, understood as a direct correlative of What His Holiness Pays, and a medium-size gush of soldi drawn from the Apostolic Camera and secured against the latest of a series of loans made by Filippo Strozzi, dispensed in dribs and drabs from the grubby purses of a motley collection of ambitious curialists, poetasters, costermongers, ne’re-do-well minor nobility on the slide, and well-to-do social-climbers on the make, has so far bought only the vague consensus that it is gray, that it is big, and that it has a horn on the end of its nose. If it exhibits any greater degree of vacillation and duplicity, His Holiness has observed to Ghiberti, they will have to invite it to join the League of Cambrai.

Anyway, the Beast has landed and is on its way to him. Has been for weeks now. A triangular swath of possible-Beasts with a base stretching from the Li-gurian Alps to the Comacchio valley has found its inevitable apex in Rome, a funnel of dwindling diameter down which the “real” Beast has been washed on a sea of specie along with its imitators to arrive, after a final sifting-out, here. Or almost here. The trend is clear even if the exact location is not. There was a rash of sightings around Montepulciano ten days ago and a speckling a little below Viterbo after that. The market in southerly and easterly reports has all but collapsed, and Beastly-possibilities in the west are going from bad to nonexistent. From the north to Rome is the most likely course, if it does in fact exist.