The Pop’s Rhinoceros (83 page)

“And so? Many ships trade here, do they not?” Teixeira could not fathom the man’s excitement.

“Yes, yes, they do,” Alema conceded. “But not there, and not now. When we left, the
Berrio
and
Esphera
were still looking for crews. We are the first this season. Perhaps it is a privateer, a Spanish vessel, or perhaps even French”—the latter was hazarded with a perceptible shudder—“but that does not explain her anchorage.”

“This ‘Rio Real’?”

“It is hardly a river,” said Alema. “The coast there is a kind of swamp, or a flooded forest, the same for fifty leagues. The people there are called Ijaws, fishermen. But there is no trade. No gold, no pepper, Malagueta or tailless, no slaves.”

They were almost at the beach now. Mesquita was already walking down the jetty, Dom Francisco blocked from view behind it. He listened as Alema explained that the mouth of the Real stood equidistant between those of the Fermoso and the Camarões. “If someone wished to trade with this all-powerful ‘Ezzery,’ then he would anchor there,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

Teixeira nodded agreement, but the pilot’s theory seemed outlandish, a tissue of conjecture. The vessel might as easily have been blown off-course or anchored there to take on water, or perhaps to buy fish from these “Ijaws.” It did not concern him. Only the beast concerned him. The pilot fell silent.

“You have done well,” Teixeira said as they reached the jetty. “I will recommend you to Peres when I see him.” That seemed to please the man.

“You will sail direct to Belem?” he asked.

“God willing,” he replied, tapping the letter pressed against his chest. Peres willing, he thought.

They parted there, Alema walking quickly down the jetty to the caravel. Teixeira watched him board, then continued along the beach. The bay’s black water broke into a white foam as it lapped and splashed up the beach, luminous in the light of the waning moon. Six tall figures were visible against it, then the boat, and last of all, a little way up the beach, he saw a prone figure. The
fidalgo
was snoring loudly, his knees tucked up against his chest.

“Horseflesh,” he murmured to himself. “Monster.”
And an evil one at that. …
He stood over the sleeper, waiting patiently for the saliva to gather in his mouth, watching impassively as it fell. The Negroes looked to him.

“Throw him in the boat,” he said.

Greetings, Dom Jaime, once again,

I write in haste from Ayamonte, where our situation is perilous three times a day and the waves every bit as forceful as those you face at sea, though different in kind
—
I grant you that much. …

Peres’s words, his voice, his hand. Teixeira felt the man’s presence in the parchment he held before him.

The
Ajuda
had sailed two days later, revictualed and repaired. Now, closeted in his cabin, he reread the letter, searching it for clues, for the things he had missed in that first hurried reading the night of Mello’s banquet. It was something to wave in Dom Francisco’s face. He heard the men shouting on the deck above him. In an hour they would be in open waters, and he could not trust the
fidalgo
while they were anchored in the bay; it had to be now, before Gonçalo turned them about and they headed south to pick up the trades that would take them home. Not south, he thought. North. Not away from the great continent they had almost circled, but toward it. … Dom Francisco’s reactions were invariable.

“What? That you can come to me and ask that, that. …”

The man spluttered and raged in full view of the crew, the two of them up
there on the poop deck with Estêvão, who tried to appear both deaf and blind to the man’s ravings, absolutely absorbed in the trim of the sails. They will need to be trimmed again, he thought idly while Dom Francisco blustered in his face, for he would have his will.

I will not rehearse all how we are brought to this pass. You are not alone—I must tell you that first—though the company is not such as I would have you keep. All my efforts at Ayamonte have been directed to the safeguarding of our King’s new possessions: those known, those yet to be learned of. That was my charge. Of the transactions in Rome, it was my wish that they never concern you. Our Orator there is Joao da Faria. It was he and Fernando’s Orator, Vich, who were charged with procuring His Holiness’s agreement to their sovereigns’ treaty, for Leo has promised and yet delayed, affirmed and yet prevaricated. The bull has languished in the Camera above two years now. I believe you know the price that is required of us to drag His Holiness’s hand to the inkpot. …

The beast: he rehearsed that to himself in the days that followed. The Ganda, the sick monster.
And an evil one at that. …
He looked again for the face that had appeared at his cabin door to warn him, scanning the watches as they changed with every eight turns of the glass. The man did not appear. He confided in Estêvão, who could tell him only that fifteen men had died of disease between the night of his visitation and their landfall at São Thomé. “Perhaps he was amongst them,” the boatswain told him, leaving unsaid his clear conviction that the man was imagined, a harbinger of the sickness that was to overtake him, too. Perhaps it was so. There was time to turn it over, to consider and ponder as the ship made her way north, for the winds were light and contrary, the currents likewise. Gonçalo sat as always on the forecastle, silent, watching the water. Oçem spent his days on deck, sometimes adding his weight to the ropes, for they were short-handed now but usually sprawled beside the cage, into which he would poke armfuls of hay in the morning only to retrieve it, uneaten, in the evening. The beast was silent in there. Each day, at different times and without routine, he would catch the keeper’s eye and the question would pass across his face. Each day, Oçem would wordlessly return the same answer, and then Teixeira would consider whether he should broach the matter that lay between them.
He eats horseflesh. …
The keeper looked away. Tomorrow perhaps he would ask, or one of the tomorrows that would follow that one. Not today.

Now know this: that the Spaniards too seek the animal which resides aboard the
Ajuda.
This much was allowed in our negotiation, it being among our purposes to entertain His Holiness, albeit as a means of making him our own. Rivalries amuse this Pope, according to the astute Doctor Faria, and thus, being good Christians, we conjure for him the image of a rivalry. A contest, between ourselves and the Spaniards to procure for him a certain beast. And so, my dear Dom Jaime, you find yourself our elected champion. I hope the picture affords you some amusement of your own, for it is no more than that. A likeness of contention, sketched by myself at Ayamonte, colored by our Orator at Rome, and so lifelike that His Holiness already claps his hands and fingers the laurels which he dreams of placing
on the victor’s head. But now, like a statue stepping from its plinth and swinging blindly amongst all our causes—Dom Manolo’s and Fernando’s, mine, your own—the image becomes the fact
.

He read the letter every day, or almost every day, and came to know it by rote. Peres’s “likeness of contention” teased him, framing as it did a circumstance the very opposite of his own. What of the contentions that have no likeness? he wondered. The soundless, unlit struggles … what of those? Fifteen men. The animal: eater of horseflesh. Oçem’s little shrug, repeated day after day, until finally he sat down heavily beside the man, knowing already what his questions would elicit, unsurprised when they came, hardly even angered, the method used even exciting a vague admiration, for he had underestimated his man.

“What will you do, Dom Jaime?” Oçem asked him then. He was nervous, as close to apprehension as Teixeira had ever seen. Fearing bloodshed, he supposed.

“What can I do?” he answered frankly. What could any of them do? The animal stank. He recalled the man in the hammock, his mouth open under Oçem’s gentle prompting and the breath foul with rot. He had recoiled then. Now it was familiar. Forward of the main mast, the door to Dom Francisco’s cabin banged open. Oçem glanced at him again, but his expression was unchanged.

A ship has sailed from Rome, a ship captained by two fools recruited for the purpose and intended by the Spaniards to offer no more than a pretense of their intention. Their Orator claims now that a renegade captain commands her, a murderer and thief, his booty being the vessel herself and—mark this, Dom Jaime, as I marked it—a rutter containing regimens for sailing east along the Guinea Coast from Cape Palmas as far as Cape Santa Caterina. She is called the
Lucia,
and the cutthroat who captains her goes by the name Diego. …

There was more. The phrases went around and around in his head as the days passed and Gonçalo piloted them north toward the coast. Alema’s briefly glimpsed caravel would be this caravel. Or it would not. It would be there, or it would be gone. It would be a mirage, a specter, or as solid as the
Ajuda,
whose decks rocked beneath his feet. These possibilities mingled and collided, and their different players merged within them.

The coast appeared, a darkening cut between sea and sky. They stood a league or two off and sailed west, Gonçalo gradually lengthening the legs of their tacks as he beat against the weak westerly currents prevailing here. In his mind’s eye Teixeira saw the Ganda stamping and roaring again, killing his man “with great deliberation,” then rooting up and trampling such objects as rotting fruit, rats, firewood, a miter, starchy vestments, heaps of shells, wooden angels carved from brittle yellow timber, a great mash of these things in which he snorted and whinnied, his trunkish feet pounding up and down. And in his wilder leaps, slipping into view at only the most abrupt kicks and twitches, Teixeira fancied he might glimpse the animal imprisoned within this one’s leathery tegument, dancing madly in there. …He yawned and stretched. It was nonsense, of course. There
were no “wild leaps” now. No “twitches,” either. The stench was getting worse, and it was possible he had offended Estêvão, shouting at him when he had mentioned this. That was yesterday, or the day before.

… and I need hardly conjure for you the wreck which will follow should this renegade succeed, our careful vessel’s reduction to flotsam, remote as such a feat may seem. …

No, you need not, thought Teixeira. If he should get up and walk among the obstacles on the deck to the enclosure at its back, if he should take the canvas and pull it aside, exposing the beast as he had at São Thomé. …

Yes?

Reading the tiny script of the legends that studded Gonçalo’s chart, he traced the Malagueta Coast until it became the Ivory Coast, which then became the Mina Coast, which became the Slave Coast, which became the coast they sailed now: a twisting ribbon of darkness separating the different glares of air and water, trees of some kind, he supposed, and punctuated by beaches that they could make out only by night when moonlight shot the heavy white surf with a faint luminescence. Gonçalo’s chart gave it no name. Oçem had turned against him by now. Each day he had to prompt the man to his duties, shoving hay into cage, raking out the spoiled stuff. These demands were met with neutral nods, although the keeper also shook his head in a melancholy way as he fulfilled them.

The sounders took up their places once again. Gonçalo brought the
Ajuda
nearer to the shore. Their voices called out the fathoms as regularly as ever, a lulling sound to Teixeira’s ears. Whole hours would go by when they were clear on both sides, but as Gonçalo gradually edged the vessel nearer in, the men would begin to call the fathoms again, eight to port, eight to starboard, then seven and seven, six and six. They were less than half a mile out. The coast became a low flooded forest of mangroves whose roots projected clear of the water and whose canopies sometimes merged into an impenetrable thicket suspended fifty feet in the air. The water here was neither sweet nor salt, but brackish. Sometimes the trees would run out and form great piers of greenery. Sometimes they would detach themselves and form small islands, or whole groups of them, which would merge with each other and form the coast again. Egrets and gulls perched in the branches, sometimes diving into the stagnant waters and coming up with fish wriggling in their mouths. After five days’ sailing, other trees began to appear, sometimes standing fifty feet clear of the mangroves. They looked outlandish after the monotony that had preceded them. But they appeared more frequently as the ship sailed east, and became more familiar. One morning Gonçalo hauled a brimming bucket over the side and declared it sweet. They were stood out three miles or more, for there was a headland forward that jutted out from the mainland. When they rounded it that afternoon, they found themselves sailing along a coast made up of islands of mangroves.

Teixeira, Gonçalo, Estêvão, Dom Francisco, and everyone else on deck crowded to the starboard rail. Innumerable creeks cut paths among the islands, meandering among the mangrove clumps, whose canopies sometimes linked in
midair to form bridges or shaded tunnels. The islands were sometimes little more than a single tree, sometimes a whole wood. They sailed across the face of this strange coast for more than an hour before someone shouted and pointed. The mangroves broke suddenly a few hundred paces ahead. A channel opened and a wide, slow river flowed forward between banks of contorted trees to debouch into the sea. They moved into the center of the flood, and then the men of the
Ajuda
stared in silence. In the mouth of the river, a ship was riding at anchor.

She was a caravel, smaller even than the
Picanço,
perhaps seventy feet in length and rigged identically to the
Ajuda,
though her masts were barely half the size. Minutes later Teixeira and Dom Francisco were sitting side by side in silence while six hands pulled on the oars of the longboat. As they drew near, Teixeira saw the name
Lucia
picked out in faded paint along her prow. He scanned her decks for some sign of life, but there was none. Unless her entire crew were hiding belowdecks or in the ballast, she was deserted. Soon the longboat was bumping against her sides, and Teixeira watched Dom Francisco’s buttocks strain, then flop forward as he pulled himself over the rail. He heard a grunt, then a metallic clatter, which would be the cutlass clenched absurdly between his teeth falling to the deck. He followed, unarmed. The boatmen looked up at him, not wanting to follow. He left them there.