The Pop’s Rhinoceros (79 page)

Estêvão was harnessed to the foot of the mizzen, his mouth open as he bellowed up into the rigging. Eight men were working up there. Teixeira hauled himself across deck, clinging to the ropes lashed about the cargo. At the ladder to the poop deck he looked up again. It seemed unimaginable, but there they were, clinging to a spar jutting from a wooden pole that swung, and bent, and shuddered, doing all in its power to shake them off and drop them into the sea that boiled fifty feet below them. They were naked but for strips of cloth about their loins, wrestling with a corner of the lateen that two or three of them would grasp, then pull on, while the others scrambled to tie it down. But the wind would not have it, ripping the canvas from their hands as soon as they offered it to the blast. The heaving sea, the gale, the rain, these howled together at a volume that made them indistinguishable. The vessel shuddered as he climbed the ladder, and he cringed like a child. Heavy men were beating one another to death in the storm breaking over his head, their blows thudding and impacting with unimaginable weight. Estêvão shouted something down to the men on the tiller.

“Here! Hold here.”

Teixeira clung gratefully to the offered rope.

“What are you out here for?”

They had to shout to make themselves heard. He did not know. Estêvão looked up again. One of the hands had made his way out to the far end of the spar and was gesturing to the nearest of the others. It seemed all he could do to cling on there, but then an arm came free and through the rain pelting his face Teixeira saw him grip a water-stiffened rope and put a bight around the spar.

“Good man!” Estêvão yelled up, but they ignored that or did not hear it. He turned again to Teixeira. “Get below, Dom Jaime. You have no business here.”

He clambered down and pulled himself hand over hand to the hatch-cover. As he lowered himself down he glanced forward. There was something on the deck of the forecastle, a man-size mound wrapped in a cape against the water that the
Ajuda’s
prow smashed from the sea and sent up in cascading towers of foam. The shape made no effort to escape either the continual drenching or the biting winds. Gonçalo, thought Teixeira, and slipped below, pulling the hatch shut behind him.

The air down there was heavy with the smell of the men, of their wet clothes, their ammoniac urine, the swilling ballast, but most of all with damp. A man was vainly trying to coax the firebox into life but succeeding only in adding reeking smoke to the dead air that hung between the decks down here. A few lanterns swung from the beams and threw pools of weak yellow light into the darkness. The men nearest them turned to look at him. The storm was a dull hammering down here, but the ship’s motion seemed more violent than ever, a random jolting and seesawing. He clung to the ladder for support. Ocem appeared out of the darkness.

“Dom Jaime! You have come to visit us, and already I am ashamed. No
chi.”
He gestured to the firebox. “Not even a bowl of rice, unless you prefer it dry?”

A sudden lurch threw him off-balance and he almost fell. Oçem caught him by the arm.

His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom. More faces appeared, and more behind them, and then more still. The men were crowded together like cattle amongst the tied-down guns, crates, barrels, coiled ropes, rolls of canvas, and timber that was stacked in depots up and down the length and breadth of the lower deck. The headroom was less than the height of a man, so the hands crouched and bent their necks beneath the beams.

“You would be worried about the Ganda,” Oçem said then. Teixeira glanced back quickly, but there was no light back there. He could not see. Only darkness, and neither movement nor the sound of movement. The beast might as well be dead. “We are trying to train him to piss in a bucket,” Oçem went on, looking back with him now, “but this is not successful. He pisses on the deck.”

It was the beast’s urine he could smell. He noticed that though Oçem had swept his hair into some semblance of order, his clothes were filthy. The other men watched them incuriously. His head began to ache from the foulness of the air.

“Would you see the sick men now?” Oçem asked him.

“Sick? Which sick men?”

“We have almost a dozen now. Did you not know this? No, no, I see you. … And why should you, when the weather is as it is?”

His head was beginning to spin, the train of Oçem’s thought a snapped cable slithering over the side, lost. … Sick? Sick of what? He followed numbly, grasping onto the beams overhead, stumbling after Oçem, who moved more easily. The men moved aside for them or, rather, for his guide. He leads them, he thought suddenly, already wondering why something so obvious had not occurred to him before.

“Here they are!” Oçem said with a little flourish.

Hammocks had been improvised and strung between the foremost bulkhead and the nearest crossbeam. They stretched across the width of the deck, careened like a row of small boats. Oçem called in his own language and a man hurried forward, bearing one of the lanterns. The hammocks swayed, and the men’s faces stared up at him from the bottom of narrow trenches formed from the rising sides of the canvas. It would be easy to simply sew the narrow openings shut and inter them there, each in his shroud of canvas. He passed along the row. The sick men were expressionless, not reacting to this intrusion.

“What is wrong with them?” he asked.

Oçem reached down into the last of the hammocks. His fingers touched the sick man’s mouth, and he said something that Teixeira did not catch. The man’s mouth opened.

Teixeira almost retched. The stench that hit his nostrils spoke of decay, of
flesh fit for maggots. The man’s teeth were long as a dog’s fangs; the gums had peeled away from them, and the remaining flesh was black. The tongue, too, which was swelled to twice its normal size, a fat ball of rot in there. He turned away, and found that the men had crowded around him and were watching him expectantly while the ship continued to pitch and roll, the sea butting her from side to side.

“What can I do?” Or anyone? Oçem eyed him for a second, then let his gaze fall. The men began to turn away. He had failed something, some test. That was why Oçem had led him here, to show that he was powerless.

“This one has stopped eating,” Oçem said then, and shrugged. “Cannot swallow, you see?”

He nodded. It was intolerable, being down here with these men.

A commotion then, a rise in the storm’s noise. The hatch was opening, and the men from the watch coming off duty were hardly bothering to climb down, preferring to let themselves fall and then simply lie there on the deck. Their fellows picked them up without surprise. One began shouting, marshaling the next watch. Teixeira moved aft again and watched as a score or more of them clambered out to take the places of the exhausted men. A great wash of water spilled down the hatch and doused him from head to toe.

“Dreadful weather,” Oçem called out behind him. He was being mocked somehow and did not reply.

Crawling back to his quarters, he saw men from the watch just come on duty begin clambering up the mizzen. The lateen had come loose again. Spray falling on the deck barely made the gutter before the next mountain of water broke against the
Ajuda’s
sides, sending up great columns of freezing brine. The sea’s violence was a kind of insanity, a thousand armies all fighting without allegiance or strategy, mere murder. Slopes of black water yawned open before them, and they plunged forward. Mountains broke apart, became precipices, hurled themselves against other mountains, smashed them, smashed against the ship. … That they might survive a moment in this chaos was a miracle. At Ayamonte they were trying to draw a line through this, he thought, but he could not laugh.

After that, he saw the storm out from his cabin, leaving it only to join Estêvão and Dom Francisco in the latter’s quarters. There they chewed on dried sticks of meat and drank brackish cask-water and a fiery spirit that Dom Francisco tapped from a small barrel. They sat huddled in damp blankets and shivered, concerned only with the warmth of their bodies and the filling of their stomachs. Their silences were not awkward now. The storm had worn them down to this. The
fidalgo
drank moderately but constantly, and his face glowed from the alcohol. From the few words that passed between the latter and Estêvão, Teixeira understood that they were drifting in this tempest, that the winds were blowing them north and west, that the Cape was somewhere out there, and that it would wreck them if they were blown upon it.

“We might have already passed it,” Estêvão said dully. Dom Francisco nodded.
There was nothing they could do in either case. They dared not sail any farther off the wind for fear of turning the
Ajuda
broadsides to the storm. It might take a single wave then. Or it might take two. The ship would roll and keep rolling until she buried herself in the sea. It would be quiet down there, thought Teixeira. Just a few fathoms below this madness was an immeasurable silence. A wrong turn of the tiller would do it. No more than that.

Gonçalo never joined them, and to Teixeira’s eyes he never left the deck, though that was impossible. The pilot hauled himself about by the ropes strung from the rails, shouting directions to the men unlucky enough to be sent aloft and cursing the teams on the tiller if they left his bearing by so much as a single degree. The freezing rain and wind lashed at him. He cinched himself to the foremast and watched the sea’s rage for hour after hour. On the splinter of tossed wood that was his vessel, amongst the beams, planks, spars, ropes, canvas, and the flesh and bone that wrestled and fought with these, he alone was immovable, and irreducible. Everything and everyone else were ground down by cold and exhaustion to mere matter, failing resistances, bodies that bled their warmth into the sea. There were twelve sunless days and thirteen moonless nights of this. And then Teixeira woke to stillness and silence, and for a moment, shut up in his cabin and wrapped in his sodden blankets, he believed that the sea had indeed swallowed them and they were dungeoned on the ocean floor, at a peace beyond the slightest shudder or sound. He stood in the doorway of his cabin and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Sunlight flooded the deck. The storm had passed.

Every hatch and door on the vessel was thrown open, lines were strung up, and soon the
Ajuda
more resembled a laundry than the deck of a ship as the crew stripped and dried their clothes in the strong sunshine. Salt crusting on the drying ropes and canvas fell to the deck and crunched underfoot. The sodden planking steamed. Gonçalo once again erected his awning on the forecastle while the men staggered about bare-chested, himself included, stretching and blinking, soaking in the sun’s warmth. The firebox was brought up and soon the smell of boiling stockfish drifted about the ship. Finally the men of the lower deck brought up their dead.

Teixeira watched as the same ceremonies were performed six times over: Dom Francisco’s mumbled prayer, the upended plank, and the sound the canvas made as it slid down the wood. A silence. A splash. Three of the sacks had not been weighted properly, and the winds being light, they floated off the stern in sight of the ship for more than an hour. The hands, as before, seemed unperturbed, placing little blocks of incense in the firebox, which Oçem tended carefully. One stopped, and he and Oçem exchanged a few words. The man turned as if to go, then changed his mind and resumed the discussion, which seemed to grow heated, though they spoke the Canarim tongue and Teixeira did not understand a word. A few of the other men looked around, but then Oçem barked something quickly and the man stopped in midsentence. Oçem turned away, and
Teixeira caught his eye. The keeper shrugged ruefully. The men went back to their work. Sails were unreefed, and two gangs worked their way around the rigging under Estêvão’s direction, finding two spars cracked along their grain and replacing them. The lateen, not needed in these winds, was suffered to fly loose until it dried. One of the longboats had been smashed irreparably and was broken up for firewood, of which there was precious little now. Teixeira watched the vessel he had known before the storm heal her wounds with magical swiftness and become again the
Ajuda
. It was a day of ease and respite, of exorbitant luxury after the privations of the fortnight past. Teixeira allowed himself that much, and then, when the cross of stars by which they navigated appeared in the sky a few minutes after sunset, he sought out Gonçalo.

He found the pilot on the poop deck, his eye fixed on the southern sky they were leaving behind them. The man appeared to rest upon some deep stillness that he found far beneath the gentle roll of the deck or the surges of the sea that rocked the vessel, pinned there by a beam of light sought in the night sky. Teixeira watched him for long minutes before the pilot lowered the instrument from his eye. Turning, he looked unsurprised at his presence. Teixeira followed him down to the space he had cleared for himself in the steerage and waited while he pored over tables of figures and made slow calculations. After that it was quick. Gonçalo unrolled a chart and drew his finger across it east to west, cutting across the very tip of the continent and then continuing out into empty ocean. The finger roved back and forth, narrowing their position to a line of thirty or forty leagues’ length. They were somewhere upon it, but, their bearings lost in the storm, they would not know where until they next sighted land. “Here,” said Gonçalo, indicating a dot to the north and west of them. “Santa Helena. We can take on wood and water there, fresh food—” He broke off. Teixeira was glaring at him.

“There—” He stabbed the chart at a point due north of them. “As we agreed. As I told you. As the Duc would have ordered if he were not in Cochin when we sailed. São Thomé.”

The pilot was shaking his head. “We will not reach her in time. We have water for sixteen days, food for less and much of it bad. The men we buried today will only be the first. …” He stopped again.

“We must talk with Dom Francisco,” Teixeira said crisply. “He will resist the notion, though for no better reason than his dead nag. I expect your support in this, do you understand me, Pilot?” The man said nothing, so Teixeira went on. “Here Dom Francisco is the master. Ashore he will not prove so valuable a friend. You wish to return to Goa, to your wife, and so you shall. But whether you sail in the first vessel of the season or the last in ten years’ time is more difficult to tell. What is certain is that you will sail in a ship in the service of Dom Manolo, and it is to Dom Manolo that I report on our return.”