The Pop’s Rhinoceros (76 page)

As he approached the quay, his hearing began fitfully to return. Odd noises cut through the wadding packed into his skull, sharp cries and loud reports that might have been gunfire or hatches slamming shut. He stood amongst the clutter of the deck, looking up into the rigging as the hands hopped about under the orders of Gonçalo and Dom Francisco. He looked for Oçem but could not see him.

“In the hold!” Estêvâo Gomes finally shouted to him, when he had asked three times, pointing each time to his ears. “With the beast!” The boatswain indicated the open hatch-cover. Teixeira peered down, seeing only shadows moving
about, but he knew well enough what it looked like. If needed, he felt, he could describe it so exactly that another might draw it from his words. He looked up once again. The sails filled and emptied, tightened and slackened. The hands were clambering down the yards now. He heard muffled rhythmic grunts, which he understood as the shouts of the gang hauling in the thickest hawser on the
Ajuda,
her mooring cable. His hearing was returning. And then, as he looked up, every square of canvas on the ship, from the great lateen sail astern to the tiny pennant on her prow, all suddenly fell slack. The wind had died.

Everything stopped, and at that moment Teixeira’s hearing returned in full. The men looked up at the sails, then to each other. He heard the
Ajuda’s
thick and unbroachable silence. Gonçalo stood alone on the poop deck, looking away from all of them. Then, from the open hatch-cover a strange sound broke this hush, a kind of squealing. …

No, snorts that turned into squeals, the rise in pitch sounding like mockery. It was the beast: the animal that Oçem called Ganda. The image of the young man at Benasterim came to him then, the bafflement on his face, or what was left of his face. Gonçalo’s voice broke these thoughts.

“Furl those yards! Hurry!” He was pointing to different sails. The men looked to each other, bewildered, not understanding. Gonçalo pointed inland, and then they saw what he saw.

A great raft of black cloud was floating toward them. Lush green hills rose in the east, their forest canopies broken here and there by bright red patches of laterite soil. The storm was over them now. Nearer, silver riverlets and irrigation channels glittered as they passed through the
sorod
paddies of the natives. This is beautiful country, thought Teixeira, now that I am leaving it. He climbed the ladder to the poop deck.

“Wind enough there,” said Gonçalo. “Now we pray for water.”

Soon the longboats were pulling them about, the
Ajuda’s
prow nosing blindly into the current. Teixeira waited for the mainsail to pass across his line of sight, then looked again across the river. At first he saw nothing, but then a glint of light on the far bank told him that the Hidalcao’s men had moved their guns farther upriver. A shadow was racing over the inland plain as the advancing wind flattened wild grasses, reeds, and crops.

“Dom Francisco is belowdecks, raising the angle of the guns,” said Gonçalo, then he shouted to one of the men to haul in a lanyard that was swinging loose from the yard of the lateen above their heads. Teixeira scanned the crowded deck, but there was still no sign of Oçem. Two men leaning out amidships were taking soundings, their arms gathering the line, then falling limp as the plumb descended, calling out the depth in rhythm with each other, one and then the other.

“Three fathoms and rising!” called one.

“Twenty degrees port!” shouted Gonçalo, and peering down from the aft rail, Teixeira saw the dim shape of the rudder turn obediently in the water. The
Ajuda
came slowly about to its new course, a gentle curve that was taking her out into the middle of the river. An answering curve would bring her in close to the far bank. He had seen the charts of the channel they must follow, split with shoals and sandbanks that the Mandovi’s current carried down from the hills inland and spread about the bottom in random shifting patterns.

“Hold her there!” shouted Gonçalo, and with a nod to Teixeira he slid down the ladder, made his way over the deck, jumping from crate to bale to barrel, and took up his proper station on the forecastle. Estêvão Gomes took his place on the poop and began to relay the directions to the men on the rudder as Gonçalo shouted them aft. The linesmen kept up their soundings, but they were in the deepest part of the channel now and merely called out, “No bottom!” in the same rhythm as before. The wind found them then, and Teixeira felt the vessel’s timber bend before the strengthening blow, the ship moving forward as though a giant had put his shoulder to her stern and now leaned into his task, his weight slowly overcoming the dead tonnage of the overladen vessel. Gonçalo’s shouts came faster, and beside Teixeira, Estêvão’s voice was the pilot’s immediate echo. He understood Gonçalo’s earlier order to take in sail then, for though the
Ajuda
picked up speed, she handled sluggishly, turning long seconds after the orders were given.

The headlands of Diwadi and Chorao slid astern, and they were soon alongside the far bank of the river, no more than a hundred paces out. He looked forward and saw the gun crews waiting, their horses tethered well back from the bank. The guns themselves were angled toward them. The men on the lines kept shouting out the soundings, four fathoms on the port side, clear water to starboard. Gonçalo’s bearing kept them as far as possible from the shore, but then the port-side call would be three and a half and he would have to take the
Ajuda
off her line, ten degrees each time, nudging her back into the channel, nearer the waiting guns.

“They’ll try for two salvos,” said Estêvão, watching with him. “They’ll not have time for more. If we clear the bar.”

“Dom Francisco is with the gun crews,” said Teixeira. “We’ll not be defenseless.”

Estêvão snorted. “We’re overladen,” he said. “If he wants to help, he should throw them over the side.”

As he spoke, Teixeira saw the men on the bank gather quickly about their cannons and the guns themselves belch blue smoke out of their barrels.

“Heads down!” bellowed the boatswain, and an instant later the sound reached them, a jumbled series of dull cracks. “Impatient,” commented Estêvão as Teixeira looked about for the expected carnage. “Fell ahead of us.”

The
Ajuda
moved on imperturbably, and soon he could almost make out the gunners’ faces as they worked frantically to tamp down more powder and balls. Now us, thought Teixeira. The vessel was alongside the gun crews. Now, he thought, you fool, you arrogant peasant, and as if in answer, Dom Francisco’s
voice sounded through the hatch-cover, a hoarse bellow, another, and then the
Ajuda’s
guns fired.

At first he thought they themselves had been hit. Then that the magazine had blown. The explosion crashed out of the gun deck, a solid fist of air that rocked the whole vessel, and for a second the bank was invisible behind a thick curtain of smoke. It seemed that nothing might survive such a blow, but when the smoke cleared he saw that the gunners were untouched, unharmed, already back at work on their own cannon.

“Missed,” said Estêvão. “They have a clear shot at us now.” Teixeira watched them manhandle their guns, turning them after the departing vessel. Estêvão crouched down on the deck. “When you can see down the barrels, that’s when they’ll fire,” he said, grinning up at him. He dropped down beside the boatswain.

They had only to wait a few seconds before Gonçalo called again, “Heads down!” At the same moment Dom Francisco clambered out of the cargo hatch, his face blackened, cursing the gunners below. Teixeira saw him look about, then start as the nearest hand, an older man, dived at him from between two large crates. But the sailor fell before he reached his target, and then the dull cracks sounded again. Dom Francisco grinned at the miss, his teeth very white against the soot on his face. Teixeira remembered that afterward, and the strange way the sailor had fallen in midflight, as if someone had suddenly grasped him about the legs. But there was no one near. There were some splashes, a little ahead of them and off to port.

“Missed,” he said to Estêvão, who shook his head and pointed to the main mast.

“Not quite.”

The brace-line on the port side was swinging from the end of the yard. Below it the waist looked as though something had dented it. The wood was chipped there, and the brace-block had disappeared.

“This man’s sick!” It was Dom Francisco’s voice. He had turned the sailor over and was standing over him.

“I say this man’s sick!” he shouted louder, but none of the hands moved. They were looking forward. Dom Francisco looked about him in disgust. He caught Teixeira’s eye up on the poop deck, and his expression deepened. Then, finding no response, he left the man there and began climbing over the obstacle-strewn deck to join Gonçalo on the forecastle. The vessel was moving quickly now, moving out into the estuary and toward the open water beyond. The hands were silent, and the only sounds now were the shouts of the linesmen, who had given their soundings throughout both bombardments, their voices swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

Teixeira looked back and saw that the deluge had already broken over the town. The water in the river was choppy, the wind breaking up the surface in advance
of the storm, whose following rains flattened the waves and dulled the water’s sheen. He recalled the heavy warmth of the monsoon downpours, raindrops the size of a man’s fist. Black clouds massed and piled themselves in vast towers behind them, and the wind gusted stronger than before, coming in pulses of force. He heard the masts creak and grind against the timbers below, and ahead he saw confused waters, where the choppy surface of the estuary ceded to a broad swell, the place where the river became the sea. The bar was somewhere there, invisible beneath the agitated surface.

Teixeira imagined a sweeping crescent, the burrow of a monstrous worm curled protectively about the river mouth. Such creatures were said to exist in the interior. In reality, as he knew, the bar was a thickening of the sandbanks that the Mandovi’s current would push this far and no farther, an irregular submarine plateau that the flat-bottomed
paquels
of the natives skimmed over with impunity. All other vessels waited for the tide. He had watched with a growing crowd when the
Cinco Chagas
had grounded herself out here, running before a storm as they were now. The storm had caught her and beat her for hour after hour until she’d listed over, then beat her again until she had broken up, splitting open amidships and her crew spilling into the heavy seas. She had been late. The ebb tide had caught her out, plucked the men from her decks, and pulled them out to sea, where they had drowned. Only five had made it to shore. Teixeira remembered then that Gonçalo had been one of them, but no blame had attached itself to him. The Duc’s doing.

Now they were almost exactly between the headlands, and their pilot had fallen silent, the bearing chosen that would carry them over the bar. Gonçalo was very still, very intent, looking forward raptly, reading the water. Even Dom Francisco at his side had fallen silent. The pilot would try to find a break, a breach somewhere in the bowed-out dike. Then, much sooner than he had expected, a soft shudder ran through the ship, a sudden slowing too quick even for the linesmen to catch, as though the hull had passed through a sump of tar. The
Ajuda
drove forward and she was clear.

“Jesu,” murmured Estêvão. “Jesu, Jesu, Jesu …”

“We’re through.” Teixeira turned to the man, grinning. But Estêvão was shaking his head.

“We’re aground,” he said. “That was not the bar. It was hardly a shoal. We’re too low. …”

Even as he said it, Teixeira saw Gonçalo raise his arm. It hung there for a second, then fell, and as it did so the same soft shudder ran through the
Ajuda’s
timbers, the water suddenly viscous. … Sand, thought Teixeira. A few buckets of sand. Will we founder on that? The ship slowed and slowed. And stopped.

Instantly the hands were running for the masts, scrambling up the ladders and lines and crawling out along the yards, not bothering to use the foot-ropes. On deck they were throwing aside crates and boxes to get at the cleats and blocks
then forming into gangs to heave on the halyards. Above his head, the great lateen sail was swinging loose at one corner as three men struggled up the angled yard.

“Cut the sheets!” Estêvão shouted up at them. “Let her fall!” He grasped Teixeira by the shoulder and manhandled him off the poop. A second later the huge sail fell heavily to the deck where they had stood. All about the vessel the hands wrestled with canvas, ropes, lines, blocks, tackle of all kinds, fighting to furl the sails.

Teixeira made his way forward. Two men not needed aloft were only now picking up the fallen deckhand and rolling him into a length of canvas. A quick glance at his face told Teixeira that the man was dead, though no wound was visible. He hurried past to climb the ladder to the forecastle and found Gonçalo leaning out over the waist, looking down at the water. Dom Francisco stood at his side, stone-faced at his arrival.

“Another foot of water,” Gonçalo said softly to himself. “Another knot of speed.”

Teixeira followed his gaze. The water under the
Ajuda’s
bows and as far back as the forecastle was deep and black. Then, abruptly, it was yellow. Sand, Teixeira realized. They were aground on the very edge of the bar, balanced there in little more than a fathom. The first spatters of rain fell audibly on the decks. All three looked up. The spars were almost bare, the last men inching back along the yards or climbing down the mast-ladders. Above, the sky was choked with thunderclouds.

“Just a storm,” Dom Francisco said gruffly. “We saw worse than this on the passage out. Emptied my belly like a chamber-pot, but we rode it out.”

“In open water,” said Gonçalo. “Here we will be smashed to matchwood.”

He looked over the side once again. The rain began to fall harder and the wind rose, whistling about the masts and spars. When Gonçalo turned to them again his face was transformed. “There is a way, perhaps. We are not lost yet.” He talked quickly, raising his voice to be heard above the wind. When he was done Dom Francisco began to bellow orders to the men.