The Pop’s Rhinoceros (85 page)

The longboat was launched and scurried about among these floating platforms, collecting two or three and then towing them back to the
Ajuda,
where men waited to slaughter goats and wring the necks of the chickens. It was soon clear, however, that they could not hope to eat the superabundance of livestock that floated down the river and now began to drift out of the mangroves to either side. The crew contented itself with watching. A large ape sat impassively on the deck of his barge, looking up at the faces that peered at him over the rail. A struggling bull capsized. The rafts seemed to get bigger during the course of the afternoon, with whole herds of animals standing rigidly, their legs planted apart against the water’s motion. One ill-constructed platform struck the
Lucia
and broke apart, spilling a whoop of baboons into the water, where they drowned or were eaten by patrolling sharks.

By sunset the flow had hardly lessened. Teixeira looked about at the creatures that surrounded the vessel, then out to sea, where a score or more were wallowing in the swell. Oxen, for the most part. He turned west and shaded his eyes against the glare of the great fireball now sinking below the horizon. A little way along the coast, a lizard the length of a man had drifted amongst a squealing squadron of hogs, panicking them. He turned east: a fleet of creatures adrift on their arks.

“He has gone.”

Oçem stood behind him. “You are looking for the Ganda, Dom Jaime. He has disappeared.”

The man was right. He had been searching for the cadaver without thinking. “Where are they coming from?” he wondered aloud. “Whose purpose can this serve?”

Oçem did not reply. He was gazing upriver, scanning amongst the bobbing heads and bodies that even now were floating toward them. Teixeira saw that a strange expression had come over the keeper’s face, nor did it change when he opened his mouth to speak and addressed Teixeira in an absent tone.

“I did not say it was impossible, Dom Jaime.” His eyes were fixed on a single distant raft.

Teixeira looked from the watcher to the object that gripped his attention, not clear yet at such a distance, but growing in definition as it advanced. It appeared more substantial than the other rafts, raised a foot or more clear of the water and prevented from heeling to either side by two outriggers resembling small canoes. It was larger, too, more than adequate for the single animal upon it. Some of the hands were watching with them now, and on the forecastle above, he could see Dom Francisco and Gonçalo were standing still as statues, eyes fixed on the same object. It passed behind the spars of the
Lucia
then, inching forward so slowly that it might have been dragging an anchor. The minutes passed and the
Ajuda
fell silent, every man aboard watching. A few stole alarmed glances at him, as though he had willed this, as though his need were a hawser pulling the craft toward them. It reemerged from behind the caravel. The animal raised its head then, sil— houeting itself against the water. Teixeira felt his doubts crumble to dust. He looked up and saw Dom Francisco staring not at the beast, but at him, his face slack with shock.

Estêvão called out, “Look! Look there!” He was pointing to the outriggers, which were indeed canoes, Teixeira realized now. Thick ropes had been wound around them, partly to lash them them to the raft, but also to contain their cargo, for as the whole contraption drew nearer, Teixeira saw that each narrow canoe held a captive: two men were bound hand and foot, two sentries struggling in their boxes, divided from one another by the motionless beast, a resurrected Ganda that paid no more attention to their contortions than to the wriggling of two maggots.

T
he same old trouble, the usual problems. …

“There was …” is too blunt, sets off on the wrong foot entirely, soon blundering into such obvious epistemological booby-traps as “Is it at all?” and “If it is, how do we know?” “It would appear …” sounds a casuistic note, its tone of doubtful hauteur a perpetuum mobile of backtracking. “It would be perceived …” is less worse, or “sensed,” perhaps, though the latter imposes a priori-type difficulties on the subject, as does “subject,” come to think of it. … And “think”! More of the same, the same problem, the usual trouble. This is fancy footwork, sleight of hand when the thing itself demands rough handling and workmanlike brutality. “If it
were
(as it were), it would be …”

Well, what? How to get to grips with this? Work-shy fingers wriggle and procrastinate within the clumsy gloves of the conditional mood. The wrong questions get asked, and even with his eyes screwed shut, with his head buried and his brain pan stewing in treacly-sweet rum, even then it wells in his ducts, drips from his glands, begins to glow behind the hot screens of his eyelids. His imagined arms grapple with the rubbery corrugated skin; a wishful dream, which ends as always with his hurling it to the floor and kicking the acidic yellow day-lights out of it. He wants it dead, this throbbing blob of goo-excreting gristle, so he wrestles, grunts, dribbles onto his sleeve. He’s never seen it, but that proves nothing. He would know it in an instant as it oozed toward him, if he could ever get out of it in the first place. But he cannot. How many fish have seen the sea? It is enormous, and orange, and almost all gut. He knows it as “the Slug.

Resistance is futile. This slimy whopper is simply too big, too enveloping, and the most full-blooded blows only carom off its rubbery partitions—it has flanges and valves and enfilades of sphincters—redounding on the putative attacker so that his limbs thrum and bump like trampolining lunatics, so that his head balloons and bulges like a bag of drowning cats, until there is nothing to do but wedge his skull into the nearest flabby corner, press his face to the indestructible gum-smeared membrane, and weep with frustration. No, there’s no getting away from this slug. No escape. All assaults begin with a fatal misconception. You, we, they, he, she, it, and everyone else are not on the outside trying to get in, but actually on the inside and trying to get out.

The slug’s translucent tubes and multiple stomachs are the elasticated corridors and cells of an illimitable and eternal rubber prison. It’s dulled, muffled,
blurred, fogged. Siegfried has bounced his Balmung against these elasticated walls, Charlemagne his Flamberge, and Caesar his Yellow Death. Zadkiel’s knife sliced the gullets of a thousand goats before blunting itself in these mucus sumps, and Occam’s razor shattered on the fact that this particular entity has no desire or need to reproduce itself. Even a four-armed Mahomet wielding Halef, and Medham, and Al Battar, and Dhu i Fakar all at the same time succeeded only in wedging himself even tighter between the quivering membranes, the glandular secretions swilling about his ankles as he stabbed fourfold at the floor. It’s no good. They’ve all been through here, all suffered the rush of this homogenized stuff, the fakery of its affects, and its dreary occupation of the senses. Ansias, Galas, and Munifican applying the most advanced technologies yet dreamed by the armorers of Nürnberg to alloys forged from Thor’s melted-down hammer and the saw-blade used to quarter Saint James the Less may yet come up with some monstrous slug-shredder sufficient to the task, but in the meantime there’s only the age-old program of sufferance and a fistful of well-worn pieties. These hardly mitigate the orangeness or the sliminess, not to mention the “No escape” aspect. It’s so unpleasant, this “as-it-were-sort-of slug.”

But being in it is also vague and tantalizing, rife with inexplicable glows and aches and sudden metallic tastes, quick sweetnesses and little sounds: dry leaves being blown across a clipped pasture, a cane scraping down a wall. Icy stillnesses intervene and—this second, that second—teetering arches again fail to topple over. There are plains so muddy and flat that there is nothing left to fall, to make the slightest impact, to happen. … The next moment it’s a racket again, all flapping canvas, yelling, the
splish
and
splosh
of apples being thrown into the water that sits under jetties and stinks. Small boys are shouting that the old woman’s a witch. Someone’s going over to belt them around the ear, and parts of this are already sliding away to be replaced by other parts: a sensation of weightlessness, hands on him, sun on his head, and his brains boiling in there for hour after hour while the slug rocks him back and forth, lulling him, settling him within its chambers. He knows what that means but resists it anyway, burying his face deeper in the soft corners until the throb of orange fades to a calm darkness. This is better. Much better. He sinks, gently, deeper, away.

And then it’s back! Naturally: regular returns are something it does with mind-numbing dependability. The Soft Hammer treatment quickly follows, then the Drip-just-out-of-earshot and the sensation that finely sieved flour is being sprinkled into his ears. Horrible! He resists again, but he’s running out of time, that second, this second. … Next come the usual phantom gurgles and rumbles, a few random pangs (of what exactly is hard to say), an internal ticklishness, an itch just begging to be scratched. The slug wants him back, and he can’t put it off much longer now. It’s not really a slug, of course, this thing he’s in, and all of us, and all the time. It’s something else, something worse. Is whatever it is even nameable …

Captain Alfredo!

… from the rum-soaked nook he’s hollowed for himself in the furthest recess of his skull, this tyrannical itch, this skintight slime-sac we’re fitted with at birth? Of course it is. It’s—

“Captain Alfredo di Ragusa! Wake up, you drunken sot!”

Thirst. Men shouting. He smells sea-spray and staleness, the staleness of being himself. He opens one eye. It’s starting up again, as it always does. His head hurts (that being its function). Oh, it’s bad. He’s in it again. The sky is green as an orange. It’s—

No-ooo-o. …

Yes.

… consciousness.

The sails are sloppily furled, no lookout posted, the crew hunkered down belowdecks, steering by the rear compass and a lazy lean on the tiller. Captain Alfredo would have been amongst them with a belaying pin in his glory days, but those are far behind him now and he himself, as noted, is still doing a creditable impression of a sack of turnips, dead drunk on the deck above. The giant dragged him out and dumped him there on the orders of the one calling himself “Captain Diego” half a league out from the jetty. Now all four of them are closeted in his cabin, directly above this coven of shirkers. It’s dark, because they are in steerage; and it’s doubly dark, because it’s nighttime; and it’s triply dark, because their hearts are plump with evil intentions, reluctant camaraderie, and a leaking, blackening fear. They are talking themselves up in half-whispers, nodding a lot, and thinking of the quartet above: Salvestro, Bernardo, this “Diego,” and the mysterious and veiled girl accompanying him. Her too. They’re all in the same boat.

The previous week, in a discreetly concealed nook of the back room at the Last Gasp, a series of near identical meetings had brought together Jacopo and a procession of local hopefuls, attracted by talk of inordinate rates of pay for service aboard the rickety vessel that had been rotting in the water off the jetty for some months. The name of a certain “Don Antonio” was bandied about and confirmed as the same “Don Antonio” who had been paying without demur the inflated prices that the quayside traders had advanced more in a spirit of combative negotiation than realistic expectation. The drunk collapsed over an adjacent table during these furtive chin-wags was identified by Jacopo as their captain. The rates offered were, as rumored, generous to the point of absurdity, and there was, as most of these prospective seamen expected, a catch. The catch concerned the passengers, of whom there were supposed to be two. Now, it seemed, there was a further catch, an unexpected development or nasty surprise. The number of passengers had jumped to four.

“Don Antonio never mentioned the girl,” muttered Jacopo, mostly to himself. “Nor Diego, come to that. Don’t like the look of him much. Eh, Bruno?”

“He’s Bruno,” said the man addressed. “I’m Luca.”

“Luca, then,” said Jacopo. “What do you say to chancing your arm with this Diego?”

“Not me,” said Luca.

There were eight of them standing up in a wooden box no more than three paces wide and effectively divided in two by the heavy beam that was the
Santa Lucia’s
tiller. The compass hung above it told them that they were headed a degree or two west of sou’sou’west. The ship rolled lazily, almost stationary in the currentless and tideless waters.

“How about you, Enzo?”

Enzo shook his head. So did Arturro, and so did Piero. Bruno and Roberto scratched at some dry lichen on the tiller and did not look up. It had sounded easy in the back room of the Last Gasp three nights ago. Afloat, it suddenly seemed daunting. There were eight of them and half that number in the room above, one of them no more than a girl, or so they assumed. She had yet to lift the veil that covered her face. Perhaps she was a boy. Perhaps this Captain Diego’s tastes ran that way. It would be more palatable to kill a sodomite.