The Pop’s Rhinoceros (13 page)

Salvestro comes to in darkness, head throbbing from a swelling the size of an egg. Water is pooled about his feet. He feels for the candle and tinderbox. Illuminated, the inside of the barrel seems smaller even than before. Peering through the window gives him his own reflection superimposed on a vista of utter blackness. The air is already foul. He reaches down for the guide-rope and gives a single sharp tug. There is a long pause, then a lurch, and succeeding it a strange swaying motion as his craft begins its descent.

His head quickly begins to throb more painfully. He tries to fix the candle in its holder, but, perhaps due to his shivering, perhaps the odd motions of the craft, he seems unable to marry the stub to its hole. He begins to feel nauseated, but also strangely unconcerned. The candle simply will not go in its hole, and the water in the barrel simply will not stop rising. Up to his chest now. His eyes are playing little tricks on him—swiveling the wooden walls of his chamber about, turning the air yellow. Amusing? Something is wrong.

Trailing his arms in the rising water, Salvestro begins to laugh to himself. It seems very funny that he cannot find the guide-rope and, when found, hilarious that it is slack. He laughs and laughs—until he cries, until he gasps and then pukes in a sudden yellow spray of fish-bits and bile. His breath is coming very hard, his laughing head seeming to wrest itself free from his convulsed shivering body, to rear up weightlessly and peer down into a landscape of twitching tubes, trembling membranes, the lungs’ flooding and draining sponge. Air-starved blood gluts the lacework of his lights, bulging and swelling, offering taut surfaces and eager membranes, but there is no air, or not enough. Salvestro’s blood chokes on the barrel’s dead gases, his eyes roll in their sockets, and his body begins to turn in on itself. His gullet is a glistening chute leading into ventral darkness. The prickling surfaces of his lungs are interfaces of air and liquid, the press of a night sky on a night sea, and suspended between them a body with skin white as bone—the moonlight, perhaps—a child’s body floating on the Achter-Wasser. Vineta calls, and this time he descends, becomes the creature he did not become then. The child floats on, unconcerned, unknowing, to be washed ashore at Greifswald, to crawl exhausted into the forest and find the first of a thousand roofless sleeping-places. The sun will wake him next morning, buried deep in the undergrowth. He will walk deeper into the forest. He will lurk at the edge of villages, keep to the woods. He will be the face glimpsed at dusk, or in the penumbra of the fire-light, by which parents frighten their children into bed. The winters will drive him south, this scavenger, a denizen of outskirts and the forest.

Through the Achter-Wasser’s strange refractions and distortions, the other
path he might have taken winds beneath the water’s surface; the creature he might have become watches him shrink and disappear. Not properly of air or water, the shape of a Water-man waits in the shadows of shallows, in the breezes scooping troughs from the sea’s surface. He is one of the secrets the waves whisper amongst themselves, here now, spectral, still half-realized but growing more definite with the fathoms, of a piece with drowned Vineta. Thickening with the press of the depths, the Water-man molds himself new limbs, strikes attitudes, grows congruent once again with the flesh and blood that abandoned him in the Achter-Wasser all those years ago. …

Is it the deadness of this unconvected watermass, an oxygen-starved twitch of apprehensive herring-brains? Are they deceived as their dorsal lines shudder at the pressure pulse that presses from the chasm’s ill-defined sides? The watermass seems suddenly to shunt itself upward. Surely they have already passed that particular band of sediment? A weirdly deferred rumble succeeds the water-shudder, growing, building, shaking the eyeballs in their sockets. Stunned cannibals gather their wits and reorientate; the creature is still sinking, its tendrils speeding past them. Oddly, they can see it more clearly now, etched against a thinning of the sea-floor’s darkness, a glow punctuated by flashes of light, as of objects puncturing the surface and sunlight catching the splashes. Small chunks of cliffside are coming loose and impacting on something down there—they are traveling with a few lumps themselves—but what exactly? The water is growing absolute, airless, utterly liquid, and they should turn back, ascend, get out. They continue, blood thickening, organs pumping, the light seeming to pulse as the pressure inside them swells. The creature is plunging on and the flashes now appear to them as eyes, hundreds upon hundreds, all opening and closing. The water has a fist around them, and up is no longer possible. There is a burst of brightness as the creature crashes through, and they are following hopelessly, knowing now that this was an error as they dive on after. Absolute water is a mouth closing over their gills in the lightless fathoms; absolute air signals choking in the sky’s high brightness above—or below; the two are confused. They have arrived at both and found them hinged together like jaws. The creature sits motionless, still mysterious, booming dully as they flop and drown about it and the city creeps over the curve of their lidless eyes. The Water-man gathers himself above, hangs there. The rope that spears him through the midriff jerks and straightens, seeming to slice him in two. He dangles and shivers as the creature tips, then begins to rise.

The rope quickened its slither over the side, then stopped as suddenly. Bernardo hitched the remainder securely about the oarlock and settled back to wait for the next signal. Salvestro had reached the bottom.

More times than he cared to remember he had fallen asleep to the sound of his companion’s voice telling him of this city beneath the sea. It had soothed the
blacknesses of mood that would overtake him and goad him and that he could not marshal. Even unseen this sea had dissolved his frustrations a hundred times before now. Sitting about the low campfires with the black rocks tumbling in his brain, he listened, and Salvestro’s voice would reorder his thoughts and lead them toward dulling sleep. The urge was a hunger he could soothe but never satisfy. Never remember satisfying, at any rate. Even after Prato. “This will be good,” his companion had told him as they stood on the boggy foreshore and looked across the Achter-Wasser to Usedom. He had nodded, for as someone had once told him, a starving man will eat coal.

Lazy troughs spread themselves in shallow basins about the gently rocking boat. Waves curled and relapsed. He was alone. Bernardo busied himself with recoiling the little that remained of the rope. Only minutes before, Salvestro had plunged overboard and sunk beneath the waters’ crawling surface. It seemed like hours. Years. Another age, already the day he would remember as the “the day when …” Too distant. He began uncoiling the rope, then sat in the center of the boat, the boat itself surrounded by sea: a pointless speck in the expanse of gray. The signal line tautened and slackened with the boat’s motions. Pull, he silently urged his sunken partner. He felt very faintly sick, from the boat or hunger he could not tell. Possibly Salvestro had drifted directly to the richest of the promised temples. He would be counting the treasure they would raise. Estimating weights and loads, like their rehearsals in the pond. Organizing matters properly. That was still possible. But it was growing less and less possible with the passing minutes. Salvestro had discussed the matter of air with him; he had forgotten the exact nature of the problem. Not enough, perhaps. And balance, another problem. He had liked the rowing and that was good, and the launch, too, apart from the bump; but the line remained still and he wished Salvestro were here to make this particular decision that the minutes were pressing upon him, for he did not like it and gave the water about the boat a great roar of frustration.

Bernardo reached across and gave the line several fretful tugs. It came free with the last. Or snapped, perhaps. Most probably it snapped. He was too big and too stupid. His caresses too often became assaults. Necks could snap like candles. He began to sniff and sob a little. Salvestro was a certain bastard, but without him he was hesitant and unsure what to do. There should have been a signal. He had been promised signals. Perhaps it was not too late. He moved to brace himself crosswise between the oarlocks. He untied the rope, took hold of the free end, and heaved. Somewhere below, down the black fathoms and through the waters’ dragging bulk, he felt the weight of the barrel and its occupant rise off the bottom as they began their passage to the surface. The fog was almost lifted now. Hand over hand, Bernardo hauled in the stiff wet rope and sweated in the wintry sunlight.

His labor found a rhythm, a capable
one two, one two,
counted out in a mutter as the barrel’s weight grew more definite somewhere in the water below him. He heard first of all some irregular shouts, some splashes, on the shoreward side, but
intent on his task, he accepted these sounds with the quiet sloppings and wave-slaps and went on with his efforts. The sounds grew sharper, impinging more urgently.
One two, one two,
thought Bernardo. Then a barked command, louder, breaking the set of his concentration.
“Wait!”

He brought up his head, his hands frozen about the rope, and he saw them streaming down to the waterline in a long scurrying line. Gray-robed figures were scrambling down by the side of the cliff. Monks. They were shouting to one another, and several had already reached something he had earlier registered as driftwood; it looked like a bird nest built from logs. They were climbing aboard, one, the one who had shouted for them to wait, now struggling past his fellows to order some of them off and marshal the remainder with, what, they looked like paddles. Yes, paddles, most definitely, as a curtain of spray was raised and the raft lurched out from the shore. The monks aboard—ten, perhaps twelve—were vigorous but inexpert. Their raft wallowed and veered about wildly. The shouting monk yelled and waved his arms. His paddlers moderated their strokes. Bernardo watched openmouthed as the strange craft lunged one way, then the other, up the coast, down the coast, back toward the cliff, but more and more toward himself. The rope began to slip through his fingers; the barrel was sinking back. Bernardo looked down into the water, then up at the monks, and recalled himself to his task.
One two, one two
… The shouting distracted him, his long arms jerked at the rope, and the barrel seemed to shift position as the boat swung about. He grew frustrated and apprehensive. The monks were gaining some semblance of control over their vessel, and its course seemed set on collision. Bernardo yanked and heaved, the weight growing more definite by the second. More focused. His companion would be directly below him now. He breathed deeply, trying to shut out the commotion heading toward him.
One two, one two … Thunk!

Bernardo leapt to his feet and the boat tilted violently. The top of the barrel had surfaced under the boat’s curving side, knocking against the strakes. He fell back, then cinched the rope and advanced more gingerly, peering over the side and seeing their craft turning freely in the water. He manhandled the barrel about until the spy-hole was uppermost. Water topped with a yellow froth slopped against the glass, then a white shape rose out of the barrel’s interior darkness: eyes, an open mouth. Bernardo pressed his nose to the glass and watched as the face sank back beneath the liquid. He shouted again, then hammered with his fists.

“Ho there!” reached him across the water. He shut it out. Think, he told himself, then lunged for the barrel, and the boat tipped, hovered for a second between capsizement and relapse, fell back. Balance, he told himself, and braced himself once again to heave on the rope. But the barrel was wedged firmly under the angle of the side.

“Ho! Ahoy there!” Again. He ignored it, straining at his impossible task, thinking of the bloodless and slack-jawed face, the watery confines, Salvestro drowned or drowning. But the barrel would not rise, he knew it already, and the boat would not hold him as he plucked it from the sea, and so he bellowed at the
water, at the sky, at the monks, and kicked at the bottom. At the filthy island. The raft was almost on him. Rage and frustration hurled stones in his head. He stood upright as the monks paddled up. Ten. He flexed his fingers. His own familiar anger, closer now, closer, all ten of them as their captain started waving and pointing at the barrel, just a few more feet before he might jump the gap between them; he tensed, steadied himself.

“… grasp the end! Do it, you lumpish dolt!” The command stalled him. The raft collided with a clatter of waving paddles, and the shouting monk was shouting at him and pointing to the barrel that knocked and rolled between their vessels. He bent down, still uncomprehending, quite overtaken by the turn of events. Other monks were reaching down, and then he understood. Hands, thin and white from the raft, huge and red from the boat, grasped either side of the barrel, heaved it up, Bernardo thrust forward and the monks fell back, the tun rolling over the deck of the raft, where other hands fell to cutting away the leather and smashing in the lid. Greenish, evil-smelling water topped with a yellow scum spilled over the deck. An arm fell out, the back of a head.