The Pop’s Rhinoceros (115 page)

Plop!

This is something he does not hear. So far, the soggy moggy is holding.

The commotion grows more complex, new sounds arising out of a general background hum of activity, intermittent tapping and hangings and squeaks. And hoots! Someone on his right shouts, “Poets over here!” and from the direction of the palace he hears a strangely rhythmical mumbling start up. He is surrounded, he realizes. A fanfare begins and is cut short in midtoot. Oranges thunder out of buckets and thud into barrels. “Will half the poets please move over to the other side of the water! Now!” Footsteps and massive murmurings. The cries of commemorative brooch-hawkers. A single colossal splash followed by many smaller ones. His own slipper-clad foot taps softly on the podium. He grips his staff. He adjusts his miter. Jörg hears the noise made by a city inured to spectacle and pomp, a dull and watery wail overlaid with grumbling and shuffling, jostling and elbowing, thousands of voices ringing him with their jabbering, their wit, their well-turned bon mots and badinage. It fills the registers, swamping everything except itself and clogging his ears until, seeming to arise from somewhere exterior, or anterior, somewhere primitive and shorn of trimmings and ornament, he hears a chant. Rather crude and monotonous, but vigorous, too: a guttural grunt sung out to a simple one-two rhythm, an aural battering ram that seems to pick up speed as it gets louder and nearer, finally bursting into the arena by the spiral stairway with its champion held high, its champion’s deliverer perched on top of it, and their chanting followers following in an unstoppable charge of mud, rags, ropes, sticks, vigor, bad temper, and rudeness.

“Ross’rus. Ross’rus! Ross’rus!
Ross’rus! Ross’rus…!!”

“So that’s Rosserus,” murmurs the Pope through the din, enthroned on his deck and ensconced amongst a selection of his favorite cardinals. The ambassadors too have gained places in this most favored vantage-point, along with those there by merit of precedence: senior curialists, the more powerful conservatori, a scattering of old barons, the more patient and generous of his bankers. “And that thing he is sitting on,” he continues. “That, I presume, would be the Beast?”

For a moment, Ghiberti does not answer. His eyes, like those of the robed dignitaries around him, the capped curialists, the bejeweled bankers, the black-garbed
poets waiting in their bobbing gondolas below, Hanno lurching amongst them, vainly attempting to coordinate the four floating rowboats disguised as miniature galleons that have been attached to his feet, the hoi polloi and lower members of His Holiness’s
famiglia
jammed together on the benches and crammed into the loggie to either side, everyone’s eyes—the eyes of
Ro-ma
—are fixed on the animal that stands amidst the mob of chanting, mud-encrusted beggars like a gray rock rubbed smooth by the tossings of a rubbish-choked sea. The plan, Ghiberti realizes, is already going awry. The naumachia was to have been a sedate and balletic affair with poets rowing out in twos and threes to face each other across a notional battle-line in allusion to the demarcating bull and there to declaim poetry at one another as loudly as possible and perhaps to hurl things if this were to become too boring. Little floating arsenals have been set adrift on the water stocked with decorous missiles: oranges, grapefruit, the odd melon, caged doves. The parody-Pope was to have adjudicated from the podium (with considerable guidance from the real one), while the two animals were to be maneuvered about until one or the other decided to attack, and then … Well, the plan was silent after that, but there were to be winners and losers, honor and disgrace, various ironic prizes. Commemorative medals might be struck. Now, however, taking in the Beast—its lumps and bulges, the ragged stitching crisscrossing its belly, the silly horn and ratty tail, but above all its immobility—Ghiberti is realizing a fact that should really have been rather obvious before, a fact that has already voided the plan and is now turning what should have been a triumph of popish whimsy into a day that almost everyone connected with it will probably want to forget. So, for a moment, Ghiberti does not answer.

“Dear Ghiberti, please correct me if I am wrong.” The Pope sounds almost genuinely puzzled. “My eyes are weak, my understanding poor, but would I be mistaken in believing that this much-vaunted Beast—forgive me, but there is no delicate way to put it—is dead?”

Vich and Faria stare forward, their faces immobile. La Cavallerizza scratches at her enormous codpiece and hisses to her husband that, just as she suspected, the animal’s horn is two or three times the size of her own. “Look to the other one,” Vitelli whispers back. “The one on its withers. That is the one it uses to rip the elephant’s belly open. Sharper and crueler, the very image of your own. …”

She sees and nods, whispering back, “Tighten me again. One more notch. …”

Arriving late, Cardinal Bibbiena slaps her on the behind as he passes by. “Dead?” he inquires of the Pope.

Dovizio puts his finger to his lips, but Leo nods slowly, his mood crystallizing about the fact. Abruptly, he heaves himself upright. “I do not care!” he exclaims defiantly. “In fact, I prefer that it is dead. Let the naumachia commence anyway! You lot!” he shouts down to the massed poets. “Go and attack it!”

“You were born, O Leo, in fair Florence …
unk!”
says little Pierino as his father clouts him around the ear.

Ross’rus! Ross’rus!

“Right,” Dommi shouts over the racket to Salvestro, astride the Beast. “That’s Fat Bastard up there on the platform. The scum frothing around him are Fat Bastard’s friends. That’s the elephant underneath. The bunch dressed as crows in the boats are poets, they’ve been arriving for weeks. Don’t know who’s the lunatic on that wooden tower-thing, but he’s dressed the same as Fat Bastard. What d’you want to do now?”

Salvestro shifts uncomfortably. They had worked through the night, hacking at the cadaver he now sits astride, breaking up the cart and constructing from its timbers a frame. Dommi had knocked off the smaller of the two horns by accident, and they had nailed it to the crosspiece running across the withers to serve as a pommel. Groot had watched mutely after his force-feeding. Toward dawn he had begun to twitch. Then sweat. When they left him he was on his feet and dancing, perhaps with happiness at the fact that his bread had found its true use at last, although the rictus on his face was more suggestive of abject terror and the blue tinge to his skin of necrosis. The Beast is not just dead. It’s stuffed, the leathery products of Groot’s bakery proving ideal for fitting into those difficult niches and corners with which the Beast’s awkward gutted interior abounded. Salvestro spent several hours in there. A particularly rigid loaf is now digging into his left buttock. He looks across the lake to where the crows in the boats are being prodded forward on the end of pikes wielded—
hup! hup! hup!
—by a squad of Switzers, then back to the mud-masked beggars now improvising a badly coordinated war-dance to the rhythm of the Rosserus-chant, up to the faces peering down at them from the loggie, the hapless trumpeting elephant sliding in four different directions at once—is that Lucullo up there? Father Jörg is dressed as a pantomime Pope in the center of the water; Salvestro spotted him almost as soon as they got in. He is unsurprised. Nothing surprises Salvestro now. If the beast came to life and started walking beneath him, he would simply cling more firmly to the improvised pommel and bump up and down on its back. Fat Bastard on his platform. The water. It’s the wrong water, but it will have him if he wants. He smiles, not at all sure what will happen next, determined only, whatever it is, whenever and however it ends, that it be large, chaotic, noisy, with boats to overturn, barrels to smash, flailing men to hurl through the air: feats worthy of a giant.

“Salvestro!”

“Wake up!”

“What now, Salvestro?”

Salvestro looks down at the trio, then left and right along the battle-line of his army. They are silent now, all waiting, stalled there in front of the water. He clambers to his feet and balances precariously on the back of the Beast. A little flotilla of poets is advancing hesitantly, a boatload of the boldest almost at the podium. Salvestro gestures to the motley collection of punts and rowboats before them. He raises his arms, cries, “To the boats! Attack!” and plunges headlong into the water.

ROSS-err-oooss. …

Say this much for poets: they do not lack for nerve. Unnecessary to the well-ordered society and mostly incomprehensible to its citizens, they know all about advancing into the void of public indifference and hostility. This serves them well as their gilded gondolas paddle forward to the rhythm of Saturnians and hexameters chanted by their metrically minded coxes. Two or three adopt stately alcaics and drop back toward the rear, while the foremost whip out brisk heroic couplets, arms and lungs pumping, lobbing up the odd orange as a covering bombardment, speeding forward to meet the vanguard of the forces of Rosserus, half of whom are still struggling to get afloat while most of the others are manhandling the Beast into two of the least leaky-looking punts. Imperfect logistics will be the besetting fault of Rosserus, compounded by confusions at the level of command. Of their three potential strategists, one insists on saying three things at once, another submits entirely to his penchant for elaborate and unmanageable violence, and the third spends most of the battle underwater.

“That’s Rosserus,” the Pope informs Bibbiena smugly.

“Where?”

“Underwater.”

Salvestro dives and skims the floor of the lake, pulling himself forward through the cold drag of the water in a smooth glide. The lines of the flagstones slide under him and tumble away. This is dead tideless water. He is an arrow moving through vacant space, toward the center of the Lake of Mars, toward Jörg. His lungs burn the last of their oxygen. Time to rise.

“There!” shouts the Pope. “Look, Bibbiena! Rosserus!”

Bibbiena and Dovizio exchange glances.

Below, it appears the battle has now been joined in earnest. Most of Rosserus are afloat and punting vigorously to engage the enemy fleet. A detachment under Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf is already occupied in restraining Dommi, who has upended a scrawny rhymester and is emphasizing the gravity of a perceived flaw in the latter’s metrical technique—” How would you like it if I reversed one of
your
feet,
poetastro?”
—while Hanno seems to have achieved this already, fourfold, galumphing about in circles directly in front of the Pope’s platform and unaware as yet that his mortal enemy is at last being launched from the opposite side of the Lake of Mars, teetering and lurching away from the waiting punts, the unevenness of Salvestro’s stuffing making itself felt as it rears, twists, topples, and—
kersploo-oosh!
—crashes down into the water. “Hooray!” shouts little Pierino. A melon floats past. He tries to pick it up and hurl it. It’s too heavy. He starts sniffling.

“Try a grapefruit!” shouts King Caspar. “Yes! Over here!” join in the rest of the Mauritians. (No supper. No breakfast. They can hardly hear themselves think over the rumbling of their stomachs.)

Salvestro looks up at the faces looking down at him. He seems to have veered to the left and has surfaced beneath the crowded loggie. “That’s Salvestro,” Lucullo remarks with quiet pride to the
bancherotti
standing next to him. “Old friend
of mine.” They nod in agreement. Salvestro sees four gray legs sticking up in the air, the Beast’s stitched-up bobbing belly, a Rosserus-squad paddling furiously to the rescue. Motionless in the dross of his finery, Jörg might as well be carved out of stone. Salvestro dives again.

The black bodies of the punts pass over him like huge fish. He twists under gondolas whose paddles are the legs of scurrying watercranes. Pressed between air and stone, this sliver of water is his domain; Salvestro is the only thing alive in it. He kicks off his boots, then shrugs off his jerkin. He ripples forward noiselessly, the slick liquid running over his skin. Faster, he tells himself, for the surface is a fragile sheet of perfect ice. Find the depths. … There are no depths. The surface breaks about his head.

Krekk-unnch! Splosh! Arrgh!

Dommi is breaking boats with one hand and poets with the other, beating the latter rhythmically over the head with fragments of broken boat and melons, awkward but serviceable implements: “Now you’ve got the hang of the amphi-macer.”
Bish, bosh, bish!
” Let’s move on to the mysteries of the amphibrach, shall we?”
BOSH! BISH! BOSH!
The poets are wisely giving him a wide berth—it seems to be their ineptitude that enrages him—and most of the Rosserus-boats are, too. He is unrestrainable, now breaking a melon over the head of Marinano: “There! Now you know how Baldus felt!” Little Pierino is still plucking up the courage to grapple with a grapefruit, King Caspar and the Mauritians are still dying with hunger, Hanno is hooting miserably and clog-dancing through a watery hell, when to add to his anguish he sees that the Beast is up and heading toward him, towed by a flotilla of coracles and punts captained by mud-masked desperadoes waving sticks. Hanno panicks, tries to turn, and finds himself reeling through a medley of chaotic Sicilian folk-dances. The Beast looks as though it’s getting bigger and lumpier, as though … Its pilots look nervously over their shoulders. The spectators rub their eyes. It’s undeniable. The Beast is growing. Or, more accurately, it’s swelling. Inside its tautening, tightening hide, the impossible is taking place: Groot’s bread is starting to rise.

“There he is again!” shouts the Pope over the noise of the crowd in the adjacent loggie. They have begun chanting again. His Holiness points to the wet head surfacing like a seal to the left of the podium. “It’s Rosserus.”

Bibbiena drags his eyes away from the ballooning Beast. “No, it’s not,” he says flatly.

“Listen to your unwashed flock,” adds Dovizio.

Even as they watch, the head ducks down again. The chanting only gets louder and clearer, resolving itself into a vigorous anapest—
BISH!
(ow!)
BISH!
(ow!)
BOSH!
(argh!)—as Dommi explains to Pierino senior, even though in strict metrical terms the name that the crowd seems to have seized on as its rallying-cry is actually an amphibrach by stress and an amphimacer by measure. Why? Why—when Hanno (now capering his way through an inept tarantella) seems at last about to engage with his long-dreaded mortal enemy (now swollen to three