The Pop’s Rhinoceros (77 page)

They divided the crew according to the watches, Dom Francisco taking the lower deck, Gonçalo the upper. Teixeira climbed down the ladder with the deckhands chattering around him. He descended into chaos.

Choking gunsmoke still hung between the decks, clinging to the underside of the upper deck in a fat layer below which the air was hot and thick with the men’s sweat and the stink of the ballast. Light entering by the gunports and the open hatch barely penetrated the fug, and the lower deck was even more chaotically laden than the upper. The partitions intended to keep the
Ajuda’s
cargo orderly only hampered the men, who now hurried back and forth in the subaqueous gloom, dim flurries of movement urged on by the shouts of Dom Francisco. They manhandled huge boxes and chests, casks, bales, and more bales. A load of hardwood was toted forward trunk by trunk like so many battering
rams. A line of barrels rolled out of the aft darkness whipped along by hunched shapes, wood rumbling over wood, crashes, thuds, the grunting of cursed and cursing men. Teixeira had stepped back beneath the open hatch when the storm proper broke above them. A sheet of rain dowsed him, soaking him from head to toe in an instant. He looked up and glimpsed boiling black clouds. Another sheet caught him full in the face, sending him back again, farther into the stern.

“Jaime! Dom Jaime!” Oçem’s face loomed forward out of the darkness, barely visible in the light from the sternmost gunports, even dimmer now in the green gloom of the storm. The vessel shook under a buffeting wind. “Are they mad, these white devils?” Even now, Oçem’s face was fixed in a mocking grin. “What are they doing?”

He explained Gonçalo’s plan to rock the
Ajuda
off the edge of the bar, shifting the movable weight forward into the bows. Oçem was already laughing quietly, bringing his hands together in a silent clap of applause. “Mad white devils! All of you. …” His face was a jumble of shadows back there. He seemed to revel in the disaster awaiting them, but then he went on, “Gonçalo is a clever man. And mad, like you, Dom Jaime.” Then the wiry man looked back, into the pitch-dark behind him. “They will want to move him, won’t they? He’s heavy, old Ganda. Move him forward with the rest. …”

“Yes,” said Dom Jaime.

“Sssh!” Oçem hissed. “He’ll hear you. …” He was laughing now. Teixeira shook his head.

“Oçem! Where the devil. …”

Dom Francisco’s shouts served advance warning of his presence as he strode up to them. Teixeira’s presence stopped him dead. He scowled, then addressed the smaller man. “This animal—” He pointed into the darkness. “Get him forward. Quick as you can.” He turned as though to reenter the chaotic activity and noise now concentrated in the bows.

“How?”

The question was Oçem’s. Teixeira nodded curtly to both men as the
fidalgo
rounded on the keeper, then made his way back to the hatch, pursued by Dom Francisco’s outraged voice, “How? You have charge of the beast, you tell
me. …”

Water was pouring in from the open deck above. He climbed the ladder, the rain slapping his face until it stung. The wind was a gale now. He stumbled and fell to his knees. An arm pulled him up.

“Are they done down there?” Estêvão shouted in his ear.

“Almost! The beast, they’re trying to—”

Estêvão nodded that he understood. “She’s beginning to list. Not much time now.”

The cargo piled on deck had all been shifted forward, and the forecastle seemed to have gained a story, a solid mass of crates, chests, and casks lashed together and buttressed with planks where the construction threatened to tip over
the side. Teixeira saw that the deck was indeed slanted now, the starboard side of the vessel noticeably higher than the port. Rain washed over the decks in waves, overflowing the gutters and slopping against the gunwales. The sky was simply black, a solid darkness meant to crush them into the sea.

He saw Gonçalo wave him forward.

“Have they finished below?” he shouted.

“Only the beast is left,” Teixeira shouted back. The wind battered them, throwing them off-balance. A series of dull bangs sounded from below, and he looked about in sudden fear.

“Closing the gunports!” Gonçalo’s explanation. He nodded gratefully, looked up at the masts, which bent before the wind, the topmost spars shuddering and the loose lines thrashing. A second later he fell forward and slid across the deck.

The vessel had tipped.

For a moment the pilot seemed to freeze, then he was racing forward, gathering the hands as he went.

“Everyone for’ ard!”

Teixeira picked himself up and followed. The
Ajuda
seemed to bend amidships as the bows dipped, her beams creaking and straining in protest until it seemed that she might break in two, but then, with agonizing slowness, as though the sea had congealed about her timbers and she was being pried loose with infinite care, the stern began to rise. She hung there for a moment, then slid forward. …

And then stopped.

Teixeira looked to Gonçalo, whose face in this moment was stripped of everything but despair. Then, from below, a noise forced its way through the din of the storm, and the men huddled together in the lee of the forecastle glanced about, nervous and distracted. Heavy thuds started up but were instantly drowned out by shrill shouts and cries, many voices all raised together, and then one voice raised itself above them all, and that voice was a scream, long and louder than seemed possible. It stopped abruptly, stifled or cut off, and any other noise that followed was buried in the cacophony of the storm.

Then the ship moved again, her whole bulk and weight sliding forward into the water, a slow unstoppable thrust. Teixeira looked up at Gonçalo, balanced precariously on top of the piled cargo. It seemed to him that the
Ajuda
was simply burying her prow in the waves, that she would dive forward and down and never rise. The vessel tilted and tilted, and he thought of the weight in her bows dragging them forward and down. He crossed himself and closed his eyes, waiting for the first cold slap of water.

But, though the bowsprit dipped as low as the sea’s surface and, as Estêvão later told him, the vessel’s rudder was a foot clear of the water astern, the ship slid slowly forward off the bar, the prow dipping, then rising; the stern rising, then settling finally in deep water. The vessel listed to port and starboard, rocking until she found her new equilibrium. Teixeira opened his eyes.

They were clear. So released, the wind abaft thrust the
Ajuda
forward, westward, out into the open waters of the ocean.

Two bodies were sewn into sacks and the sacks thrown into the sea. Dom Francisco stumbled through the prayer for the dead, and then the men gathered about the firebox, where they lit incense and chanted in their own tongue, a meandering drone that the hands seemed to join haphazardly, now one, now many, returning to it as their duties permitted while Oçem tended the fire and the little resinous blocks cast into it, arranging them so that each one was burned to a snow-white cinder.

“The Ganda has sand under his hide; do you know that story, Dom Jaime?”

He shook his head.

“Another time. The slightest thing will anger him, and then”—Oçem mimed the lighting of a fuse—“boom! Like Dom Francisco’s wonderful cannons. Very short-tempered, this Ganda of ours. And these foolish natives, they lose their heads at the first sign of trouble, and then they lose their land too and become sailors, but that is another story again. Also very foolish.”

The beast had got loose and crushed a man. There had been a frantic scramble, panic in the dark down there, and by Dom Francisco’s account only the animal had remained calm, trapping his man against the barrel of the gun, then leaning forward. “With great deliberation,” had been the
fidalgo’s
phrase. The screams, thought Teixeira. The ship had moved off the bar, and they had recaptured the Ganda by boxing him in amongst the cargo. It had taken an hour. Not foolish, Teixeira thought now, but brave, or nerveless, at least. He did not say this to Oçem, who continued to manipulate the little blocks of resin with a pair of slender tongs, moving and replacing them with care so that they burned evenly.

The second man had fallen during the bombardment. Estêvão examined him on deck surrounded by a crowd of hands, his friends, perhaps, though they seemed more curious than sad. At first the boatswain could find no mark on the man, no spot of blood, not so much as a bruise. Dom Francisco ordered that he repeat the exam. Lifting the man’s head to begin it, Estêvão let out a little gasp and let it fall. He pressed his thumb to the head again. It was soft. The skin was unbroken, but the skull at the back had turned soft as wet clay. Estêvão looked up, baffled.

“It was the ball that struck the ship,” said Teixeira. He pointed to the splintering where the cannonball had hit the waist. “If it glanced off his head like this—” He mimicked the passage of the missile, and the hands understood him then, nodding their agreement.

Dom Francisco would not address him, saying only, “Then he died in my defense. I will make provision for his family. As a matter of honor.” He assumed a
grave expression and the men all nodded again, very pleased by this, but then looking down at the body as though it worried them in some way.

“They like this Dom Francisco,” Oçem went on then. “He is a real
fidalgo
. They know what that is. To give money to Vijar’s family after he has been so stupid will bring him great goodwill amongst the men. To be hit on the head by a flying stone! How ridiculous.”

“I will remind Dom Francisco of his promise, when the time is right,” said Teixeira.

“Do not trouble yourself, my friend. Vijar’s stupidity is such that, even dead, the foolish man cannot take advantage of his opportunities. He does not have a family.”

“But the men were pleased. …” He was bewildered.

“Very generous of Dom Francisco,” said Oçem. “Even a useless gift is a gift. Do you not remember Muzzafar’s gratitude at your offer of a fort?”

“I will remind him anyway,” Teixeira said stiffly.

“But I do not think Dom Francisco will wish to be reminded of anything by Dom Jaime, will he?”

Teixeira eyed the smaller man narrowly. The first time he had set eyes on him, Oçem had been sitting by the side of Muzzafar and the King had been fighting to stay awake. “It is the opium,” he had confided later. “Pay no attention. Tell me again why you wish to build for us this magnificent fort. …”

The fort, predictably, had not been built. They had returned with a gilt chair, a dinner service; less predictably, the Ganda; and least predictably of all, Oçem. It had not at first been apparent that the King’s trusted minister was in effect being banished. He was “Muzzafar’s Ambassador to the great Duc d’Albuquerque, servant of the great King, Dom Manolo of Portugal,” but an Ambassador without the trust of his master, and perhaps in worse odor than that. This had dawned on them slowly, and Oçem had slid correspondingly in their esteem until he had reached his present station. “Animal keeper!” he had exclaimed when Teixeira had finally challenged him. “Oçem the Ganda-herd!” The man had laughed happily as though the downturn in his fortunes were the most wonderful stroke of luck, and his good humor was used thereafter to deflect even the Duc’s bluntest questions. He never revealed the reason for his disgrace, alluding only to the natural enmity between the Musselmen and his own people, the conquered Rajputs of Cambay. Teixeira suspected that he knew no more than he said. In place of explanation, he offered wild tales of his former master’s fondness for opium and the pleasures of the zenana. Muzzafar’s mother had fed him increasing doses of poison since birth to inure him to their effect. As a result, insects alighting on his skin would die instantly, and his concubines dreaded his attentions—naturally enough, for they invariably proved fatal. Even the Duc would laugh at these concoctions.

Teixeira would remind himself that the man was not his friend, or the Duc’s, or his King’s. Then Peres had written from Ayamonte, and at the bottom of the
dispatch was the barbed order: “And enlist this Oçem, since you speak of him so fondly.” So he was here, this onetime minister of kings, tending to the brute in the hold.

“He is vexed with you,” Oçem went on. “Over his horse, is it not? Why is his horse not here?”

Teixeira remembered such questions from the negotiation at Cambay, the tone of puzzlement, the fainter tone of apology beneath it. It had been his tactic to counter these inquiries with bluntness, his own version of Oçem’s feigned naïveté.

“I shot it,” he said.

Oçem raised his eyebrows.

“Shot it? But this is Dom Francisco’s language, not yours, my friend. I fear you might have said something offensive, albeit in ignorance of local custom.”

They were both close to laughter now, acting out parodies of themselves, or the selves they had been ashore. Oçem’s expression grew serious. “You should soothe him, Dom Jaime. One angry animal aboard ship is enough, I think. …”

“His anger means nothing,” Teixeira responded, a note of contempt entering his voice. “He shouts and blusters. And that is all he does.”