The Pop’s Rhinoceros (48 page)

A door behind the staircase led them up a flight of steps to the back of a storeroom filled with oddly shaped blocks of stone and incomprehensible machinery: wooden frames, wooden-toothed wheels, rope, an oversize funnel. They picked their way past hoppers of stone dust and racks of chisels to a door opening onto a deserted yard. The street beyond the archway opposite was crowded with men carrying sacks, pushing covered barrows, leading reluctant mules laden with cages and crates. One pulled a sled upon which clods of earth had been piled; as he passed they saw that the clods were vegetables of some kind. Swedes? A ragged old woman asked if they wanted to buy a flower for their sweethearts. They did not.

“We should be getting back to the Stick,” said Bernardo. “It’s almost dark.”

Salvestro looked up at a sky tinged with pink to the west and otherwise bright blue. “It won’t be dark for hours,” he retorted. “What’s the matter with you?”

“We’ll be late,” Bernardo went on. He seemed perturbed. “I don’t like it.”

“What? Don’t like what?” Salvestro was growing exasperated.

Bernardo shifted uncomfortably and jerked a thumb back at the courtyard. “All that. I didn’t like it before. I don’t like it now.” He had colored slightly. Salvestro realized that he was talking about the women.

“Well, Anjelica certainly seemed to like it,” he said, “from what I heard.”

“Oh, she liked it all right,” said Bernardo with some emphasis. “Just like that other one. But I didn’t like it.” He squirmed and fell silent.

“What other one? Since when did you—”

“That one with all the sisters, when we were still with Groot and the others.” He touched his head. “Red hair.”

Salvestro sighed. “That was me, not you. And she didn’t have any sisters.”

“It was you first,” Bernardo retorted. “Then it was me. Then after she’d done it she brought all her sisters and they did it too. She had four sisters. I counted. … What? What’s so funny?” Salvestro had begun to laugh. “Anyway, I didn’t like it.”

“Let’s go up here,” said Salvestro. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back at the Stick soon enough. In the meantime we’ve a bag of silver and the whole of Rome before us. You liked Lucullo, didn’t you?”

“Don’t treat me like a fool,” Bernardo snapped. Then, as they set off up the street, he added, “I’m not a horse, you know.” Salvestro lengthened his stride and pulled a pace or two ahead. He remained silent.

The two of them weaved a path through the oncoming porters and small tradesmen. Little workshops and stalls were set into a row of crumbling arches. Opposite these stood clusters of wooden shacks, each one flying a mixture of tattered clothing and rags from a pole projecting through the roof. A weak southerly breeze stirred these pennants, carrying before it dust lifted from the dry slopes of the Capitoline visible behind them, scents of horse and cow dung, the odd fishy whiff from the market about the Pantheon, and something else, something acrid. Salvestro sniffed cautiously.

“Lime,” he said.

They turned the corner at the Church of Saint Nicholas and a new vista opened before them. The shacks gave way to little windowless brick huts, a few larger ones amongst them, each topped with a chimney from which opaque white smoke issued up into the sky. The street dissolved into myriad little paths that wound their ways among them. Looking in the open doorway of the first, the two of them saw a red eye of fire in the darkness, winking as a blackened figure moved back and forth to feed logs into the flames. Heat shimmered on the bricks, and the smell of lime grew stronger. He stopped abruptly.

“What?” demanded Bernardo. “What is it now?”

After the first week, after the dye-houses and basements where the Pratesi were tortured began to excrete the cadavers of the more stubborn or penniless in greater numbers, after the outlying wells into which those cadavers were tossed had been filled and rats were feeding in packs on the corpses left in the streets, a company of pikemen was ordered to dig pits. They were deeper than the height of a man, six or seven of them. For the bodies. He had come across one in his wanderings around the city, stood over by three men carrying shovels who had hailed him and shared a flask of fiery liquor. A fourth was in the pit, methodically raising his shovel and bringing it down on the topmost skulls of the dead. Salvestro had looked down at the heads and tangled limbs: a hand, a foot, another hand. There was part of a crotch, a man’s crotch; there a shock of red hair. His eye wandered over limbs and fragments of limbs. Then something moved at the edge of his vision, something twitched. He watched carefully, and the next time he saw it plain. A hand was lodged between a head and part of an arm; the fingers grasped feebly. One of the three began shoveling a pile of light gray powder over
the corpses. The air grew acrid with it. He sat with them and drank. After a while, one of the men cocked an ear. A faint rustling or scrabbling sound was audible in the pit behind them, then another, and perhaps a third. “Lime’s beginning to bite,” said the man.

“Come on,” Bernardo said now.

Salvestro shook his head to clear it. He hawked and spat a gobbet of thick white phlegm. Beyond the lime kilns, the ground fell away to one side. On the other, a barnlike brick building extended two windowless wings, defining a courtyard in which sacks were piled in large depots. Men were wheeling handcarts filled with powdery gray rock to an entrance somewhere at the back. A dull pounding boomed behind the barn doors at the front. As they listened, a shrill whistle sounded and the pounding quickly became irregular, then stopped entirely. A few seconds later the doors were thrown open.

At first it seemed that the manufactory’s interior was not so much dark as opaque. A cloud of gray-white dust bulged in the gaping doorway, swelled there, became a falling wall of fog that billowed forward across the courtyard toward them. Then Salvestro saw that there were figures moving within it, white as wraiths, and out of the cloud the men began to emerge. They staggered forward coughing, their eyes screwed tight against the burning powder, dozens of them stumbling out of the lime as white as ghosts.

“Who’s that?” Bernardo said.

The lime-workers seemed not to see them as they stumbled past. Salvestro looked into one or two of the ashen faces, but they did not look into his. “No one,” he said.

“What? No, over there.” Bernardo pointed. Beside a stand of strange white trees perhaps fifty yards away, a man on horseback was visible, his back turned to them. He seemed to be talking to the figure standing beside him and gesturing forward from time to time at something lower down the slope. The figure on foot wore a habit.

“It looks like Gerhardt,” said Bernardo. The habited figure turned obligingly.

“Yes,” said Salvestro. “It does.” As they watched, the horseman nudged his mount forward and disappeared down the slope. The monk followed.

They walked forward until they stood beside the same trees, not white but covered with lime dust. The ground dipped before them, becoming an immense bowl scooped out of the earth. Within, it appeared to Salvestro, a whole city had been built, then razed a foot from the ground. Foundations, little stone piers, broken columns, and toppled arches lay scattered about, and amongst them swarmed a locust-army of pick-swingers, hammerers, and barrowmen. Gerhardt and the horseman were visible moving amongst them far below. The bowl echoed with the workers’ shouts and rang with the sound of metal on stone.

“What’s he doing here?” Bernardo asked.

Salvestro shook his head. What indeed? All he knew or wished to know of Gerhardt was contained in the desperate minutes he had endured on the shore of
the distant island. Under the islanders’ kicks and blows, he had glimpsed the monk’s cowled head, then his eyes, just visible outside the circle of his pain, watching him calmly and without excitement until panic had flashed across his face, he had turned to flee, and an instant later Bernardo had fallen on the islanders like a huge, implacable animal. Bernardo had not seen Gerhardt that night, and Salvestro had not told him of the monk’s part. Now, receiving no answer to his question, Bernardo lost interest in the scene before him. “We should get back now,” he said.

Gerhardt had got down on his knees. He was peering at the ground, then gesturing up at the horseman, then looking down again. Salvestro’s eye wandered across the scene. Lines of men pushing barrows snaked through the ruins to the west side of the bowl, upending their loads onto piles that rose like anthills at the foot of the slope. Steps had been cut into earth, but steps for a giant, each one eight or ten feet high. The lime-workers toted sacks that they balanced on their backs, and thus bent double, they scrambled from one platform to the next on ladders set side by side, so close that they appeared as the ratlines of a ship’s rigging or a huge mesh in which the porters struggled blindly, crawling up and down, up and down. … Below were depots of sacks, and sacks being filled, and sacks being lifted onto backs, and on the floor of the great crater the ant-army hammered, swung, scurried about, and the work of destruction went on. Salvestro thought of the shovel’s rising and the gristly thud as it fell, of the cadaver’s imperturbable grin. Only fill this sump with water, he thought. The dead give up their flesh; the drowned not even that. Was this what had awaited him, down there, in the black fathoms? Did the scavengers below know the builders whose arches and walls they tore down to feed their kilns, whose flesh they flayed to the irreducible bones?
Lime’s beginning to bite. …
The grin was in the skull, he knew that, and even lime had not dissolved their skulls.

“We have to go,” Bernardo broke in again. “Have to get back to the Stick.”

Salvestro nodded. “We’ll go back now,” he said.

“How long has this been going on?” he hissed, but Jörg only pursed his lips and looked away. HansJürgen looked around the chamber at the monks who had returned so far. He would have to go out again soon. “How long?” he demanded.

“It is unimportant,” Jörg said. “I see well enough to pray.”

But not well enough to tell a church from a mason’s yard, thought HansJürgen. The gale of helpless laughter had blown over the Prior while he had turned this way and that, blinking stupidly in the sunlight, stamping off abruptly in a baffled rage. HansJürgen found him seated against a water-trough amongst the cattle-drovers and hawkers waiting to pay their dues to the officers at the Porta Pertusa. He had given him his arm and guided him back, but when the two men reached the site of his humiliation the monks had scattered. A few were wandering
about the stone piers of the “church”; more were found in the piazza. Henning, Volker, and a few others had returned directly to the hostel. Florian arrived shortly after they did with the news that Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf had run off in the direction of Santo Spirito. Jörg seemed to have grown weary and spiritless. HansJürgen guided him to his pallet and went out with Florian to search for the others. As the afternoon wore on, they drifted in of their own accord in ones and twos. Now only the three novices, Joachim-Heinz and Heinz-Joachim, Matthias, Georg, and Gerhardt were unaccounted for. The silence of those already returned was an oppressive weight bearing down on the chamber. Their eyes followed him as he rose to continue his search.

I see well enough to pray
. … But was prayer enough, here, in Ro-ma? The monks already looked to him for a sign, an indication as to what they should do, but he had nothing to tell them. Their faces were apprehensive and questioning. Henning had asked him if they would be returning to Usedom soon.

The sun was falling behind one of the low hills in the westernmost quarter of the city as he walked down to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. The pilgrims and tradesmen seemed to carry him along in a great noisy flood of bodies. He gave himself up to it, the alien jabbering, the smell of sweat, the cheap wine on their breath. Tonight the Prior would have to address them, present himself again as their shepherd. They would follow, if led. They would follow. He clung to that as the crowd jostled in the little square before the crowded bridge. He craned his neck to look ahead and saw a sea of bobbing hats. The crowd inched forward through the square, slowing further as it squeezed onto the bridge. He had made only a few stuttering steps when a voice at his elbow said his name.

Salvestro was leaning over the parapet. An expression of mild confusion passed over his blotched face. “We didn’t know you were with them,” he said defensively.

The same confusion surfaced amongst his own features. Them?

“Who?” he asked, at which the other pointed down to the riverbank where pilgrims and boatmen were crowded together, arguing fiercely about the price of the passage downriver, then holding up the hems of their cloaks as they minced down narrow planks laid over the river mud and boarded the nearest of a fleet of jostling pirogues. The boats swayed wildly, knocking against one another as they darted in and out from the bank to take on their passengers. The boatmen cursed and shoved, wielding their oars like barge poles to get clear, then they disappeared under the bridge and were off down the river.

HansJürgen overlooked this scene, uncomprehending, and was about to demand some further explanation when outraged shouts echoed from beneath the bridge and Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf shot out, tearing hell-for-leather along the bank, weaving a deft and mud-defying path through the startled pilgrims, who swayed and waved their arms for balance. The shouting beneath the bridge increased in volume, and a second later Bernardo erupted into view.