The Pop’s Rhinoceros (90 page)

Bernardo wrestled with this new construction of the events. He was still arranging the old construction into some semblance of sense. There was the surrender-that-was-not-a-surrender, and then the question of whose fault this was, and then the men-that-were-not-Diego’s. Himself, Salvestro, and Groot. Now the beast was involved in all this too and was the solution to most of these problems and misunderstandings. There was also something about “Fernando’s ear” and gaining its attention.

“When we have this beast, though—” he began.

“Beast?” Salvestro cut him off. “You mean the animal with armor in place of a hide, the beast which is lured out only by virgins, which has a great horn that it uses like a sword to cut the guts out of its enemies?” He stared disbeliev-ingly at his companion. “It doesn’t exist, Bernardo. It never did, any more than dragons do.”

“But Diego …”

“Diego is insane. This business sent him mad, or he was mad before, or he was born mad for all I know. Here we all are aboard a ship that the first storm will send to the bottom, sailing to a coast full of savages who will probably slit our throats, in search of an animal that does not exist to give to the one man in the world who most wants us dead.”

“If all that’s true, then why is he here?” Bernardo protested. “How come you’re so much cleverer than everyone else, Salvestro? If it doesn’t exist, then why is he—”

“It’s a fool’s errand,” Salvestro hissed, checking the deck of the
Lucia
again and worrying that he had heard someone upon it. “And Diego knows as well as anyone. Now help me get this rope loose.”

Bernardo did not move. “So why is he doing it? Why is he even here?” he persisted, a sulky tone in his voice that Salvestro recognized as the usual prelude to the giant’s reluctant acquiescence.

Salvestro was bent over the rope, his fingers trying to dig a first bight from
the stubborn and complicated knot. “Because he has nowhere else to go,” he muttered, then added more loudly, “Are you going to help me with this or not?”

“Just pull it in.”

Salvestro looked up and saw that the
Lucia
was more than a hundred feet away. The rope was sinking into the water. He rubbed his arms, still sore from the afternoon’s lead-swinging, then hauled it in hand over hand until he held the end and saw in the fitful moonlight that it had not been untied, but cut. The stern of the
Lucia
receded, a black wall sinking into the night. Bernardo picked up the oars. Salvestro dropped the rope-end into the bottom of the boat. They were alone.

So they rowed then, Salvestro directing Bernardo to turn the boat to larboard and Bernardo pulling powerfully, soon settling into a rhythm and grunting to himself,
“One,
two,
one,
two …” The night tented them in darkness and reduced their surroundings to a narrow apron of water. The boat occupied this little patch of ocean, where it bobbed up and down and lurched from side to side. When the swell deepened, as it did some hours later, Salvestro gripped the sides of the boat with both hands. They climbed up and down the troughs, the nose of the boat sometimes sending up a curtain of spray. He was soon soaked, but the night was warm. Another hour and they would see the surf breaking on the coast, a luminous white in the moonlight. Or perhaps the beach would simply rise beneath them and lift the hull clear of the water before they so much as saw the land.

Another hour passed. Bernardo asked for water and Salvestro realized that he had made no provision for this. Later Bernardo asked when they would be reaching their landfall, for he was beginning to tire. The swell was no heavier than before, but now it was knocking the nose of the boat off her bearing and Bernardo would have to stop and bring her about. In the dark, in the monotony of the ocean’s surface, where their only coordinate was themselves, the boat’s motions were lost in the larger motions of the sea and it seemed that they were going nowhere. Bernardo would dig the nose of the boat from the troughs into which she pitched and haul her up the corresponding slope. Each dip in that sea was the mouth of a tunnel that sucked at their vessel, drawing her beneath the surface. Eventually they swapped places, but after only a few minutes on the oars Salvestro’s shoulders felt that they were loose in their sockets and the cavity had been filled with burning sand. He strained against the weight and drag. His hands blistered and his numbed fingers began to slip. After he had dropped the right oar for the third time, Bernardo motioned for him to move aside.

“The sun’ll be up soon,” he said as they shifted places. “We’ll be able to see the coast then.”

They did not speak after that.

The sky lightened, but not off the stern. Salvestro watched the horizon gradually form itself to starboard as darkness lifted off the sea. Strange pink lights extended glowing ribbons in the upper air, radiating from a still invisible sun. The shadowed sea crawled about them, coal black against the dawn. It seemed an age
before the first fiery sliver of sun showed itself, but by then the sky was already light and, standing precariously in the boat, Salvestro could see the horizon that ringed them as though they were the center of a world of water and its only inhabitants. Their little patch of benighted sea had swollen overnight into a sea, but they were as confined as ever and their dominion’s new extent gave them nothing. Salvestro gazed east. The sun slowly hoisted itself clear of the sea. There was no coast.

The sun rose higher, the same sun that had warmed them pleasantly aboard the
Lucia
. Now it burned down on them, forcing the two men to drape their shirts over their heads and screw their eyes tight against the glare. Salvestro’s mouth dried and his tongue shrank to a flap of leather. Gravel scraped in his throat when he swallowed. The boat had turned through ninety degrees in the night. He had Bernardo row due east, directly at the sun, for the coast must be there, he thought. They must have run alongside it in the darkness; it was easy to believe that. They continued, although Bernardo was at the limit of his strength and the oars that he had earlier sunk deep with every stroke, searching for purchase in the water, now skimmed inches below the surface and raised dashes of strength-sapping spray. The merest current would be enough to overcome this effort, Salvestro realized. He took another turn at the oars, and Bernardo slumped in the bows. When sleep overcame the big man a few minutes later, his head knocked against the gunwales and Salvestro did not trouble to rouse him. Crusts of salt had formed around his eyes. His lips cracked and bled. His feeble efforts on the oars grew feebler still, then stopped altogether, and he found it took all his strength to draw their weight through the row-locks and stow them in the bottom of the boat. Salvestro hugged his knees to his chest. He looked at Bernardo, who lay still as a corpse across from him. He tried to call the giant, but the name emerged from his parched mouth as a croak. The red clouds that drifted in the very periphery of his vision were afterimages of the sun, stamped on his eyes by a burning hammer. Waves slapped the sides of the boat, knocking her through a jerky circle. Bernardo’s mouth fell open. The sun hit him full in the face, and his head dropped. The boat turned and turned, rocked gently by the sea’s motions. They drifted.

Some minutes passed, or hours—they drifted in and out of different kinds of waking and exhaustion, time counted only by the boat’s slow rotations. Angles and edges dug into their sleep-starved bodies. The boat held and chafed them, pulling them out of their stupor for a few moments at a time. Sunlight glittered and shot off the water, its stabs seeming to reach through Salvestro’s eyes to the inside of his skull. A knot of inflamed flesh throbbed and pulsed there. The sun was either a few hours away from sunset or had risen only recently. He did not know east from west. Sleep wrapped him in a murderer’s cloak. His head pounded, though it was painless now and sounded like the loose spars that floated in the
Lucias
slopping ballast when they knocked against the ship’s sides. He had heard that sound while he slept.
Tap, tap, tap
… Another life. It came again, an irregular
and muted tattoo. Salvestro shook his head. He tried to open his eyes, but they had crusted shut. He reached deep into his mouth and rubbed spit into his gummed eyelashes. Prizing one eye open, he let his head flop over the side. Jacopo’s face stared up at him.

He started, which made the boat rock alarmingly. There was no doubt. The eyes were open, the hair as remembered. He floated alongside the boat, subject to the same vagaries, the water’s little butts and nudges. His head bobbed loosely against the side. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.

A sound came from Bernardo, a groan. Salvestro rubbed the salt from his other eye. Water washed over the mate’s face, but the eyes stared up unblinkingly. He was dressed as usual in a shirt and loose trousers. Bernardo grunted again and pointed. He looked around.

They looked like half-submerged logs, a little flotilla of them bobbing up and down in the water. Six? The nearest was no more than twenty feet away. Bernardo reached for the oars and together they fitted them into the rowlocks. The farthest was fifty yards away and the object of attentions other than their own.

The sides of the
Lucia
rose out of the water like great cliffs. Her masts were spires and her sails were flags too heavy for the wind to lift. Ruggero was alone on her deck, leaning out over the water and fishing for the nearest body with a boathook and a length of chain. He cast the chain out beyond the body and let its weight pull the cadaver toward him. He stopped when he caught sight of them. Bernardo caught hold of the chain. Salvestro rolled the body over by the shoulder. It was Luca. His throat was cut, too. They left the boat tied alongside and climbed wearily aboard.

Ruggero’s face was dull with shock. They drank hungrily from the water-butt, then turned to him.

He stared at them in silence, though whether he was dumbfounded by the events of the night or their own reappearance, the two men could not tell. A man’s voice began shouting somewhere belowdecks, and Ruggero clapped his hands over his ears as if he could not bear to hear it. Usse’s shriller tones rose against the bellowing, and it was from that alone that Salvestro knew the man shouting down there was Don Diego. His voice sounded thick and uncontrolled. Ruggero was crouched on the deck and was now muttering to himself, “Terrible hours, terrible hours …” Diego’s bellowing ceased suddenly, and Salvestro gently prized the man’s hands away from his ears.

“What has happened here?” he asked. Ruggero shook his head and turned his face away. They left him crouching there.

Captain Alfredo lay spread-eagle on the poop deck, an open bottle in one hand and several empty ones around him. He was holding the bottle above his face, then tilting it gradually until a thin flow spilled into his mouth. At their appearance, he swallowed quickly and tried to raise himself on one elbow but gave up after a couple of ineffectual attempts.

“Thought we’d seen the last of you,” he said. His words were slurred and hard to follow. “Cut you adrift, didn’t they, the poor bastards.” He belched loudly. The effort seemed to exhaust him.

“Who?” asked Salvestro. An empty bottle rolled against his foot. He took the full one from the captain and sat down. The liquor burned like fire.

“Jacopo. All of them, except Ruggero. Came at us like dogs. Died the same way.” He gurgled softly and his head knocked gently against the deck. “Two shipwrecks. Boarded three times. Marooned once. More storms than I can remember. Now this.” He patted the deck softly. “And who’s going to sail the old girl now?” he murmured.

Salvestro’s neck prickled. It was the silence that alerted him, a tautening in his attention. He turned around slowly. Diego stood there with his arms folded over his chest. His face was blank and somehow loose. He did not seem surprised at their presence. He and Salvestro watched each other in silence, then Usse appeared behind him. The soldier hung his head and stared at Salvestro until the other was forced to look away. When he looked again they had gone. He heard the girl’s voice in the cabin below them. He knelt beside Captain Alfredo and shook him until the man’s eyes opened blearily.

“We could have put them in irons,” he said. “Had them tied up below, we did. All trussed up, but not”—he gulped painfully—” not for that. They screamed like pigs.”

“Jacopo and the others?”

The captain moaned, protesting his drunkenness. Salvestro would not let him alone.

“You had them tied up,” Salvestro pressed him. “For what?”

Something in his tone registered in Alfredo’s liquor-soaked brain. His eyes opened wide, and one hand tried to paw at Salvestro or grasp his shirt. “Not for that,” he repeated. “Diego promised me.” He choked and wheezed as he spoke. “He went below. The girl followed him. She made him do it. I heard them, I heard how she did it. And then Diego cut their throats.”

His hand found Salvestro’s shirt and gripped it as he got these words out. Salvestro was shaking his head. “How?” he demanded. “What do you mean, ‘She made him do it’?” It made no sense to him.

“She has a hold over him,” Alfredo went on. He coughed, then pulled Salvestro closer to hiss into his ear, “Who else is steering us? Who else, Salvestro? It’s her. She has the hand over all of us now. …”

Sharks ate the bodies. Alfredo sobered up. The ship sailed on. Salvestro understood that they had rowed a wide and perfect circle that night, circumnavigating the as-good-as-stationary
Lucia
to rearrive off her bows. Whether they had veered westward, out into the ocean, then in again, or east, in toward the coast and out, he never knew. He considered their passing across the face of the coast, the curve of their bearing bringing them nearer and nearer until the single point in that
trackless darkness, no more than a single pull from Bernardo’s exhausted arms, perhaps, when they must have stood no more than a fraction of a league offshore. A cruel joke, and one that they had played upon themselves.

The
Lucia” s
reduced crew improvised watches, hauled together on the ropes, pumped, steered, messed, and slept. Ruggero sawed and hammered in the hold. He built a cage and patched the pump. Bernardo spent a single nauseating afternoon pumping out the water in the hold, then returned to the rowboat that the
Lucia
towed, as before, off the stern. When the sails had to be trimmed, Usse worked with the men, shinning up the masts and swinging herself out to the ends of the yards, where she tugged on the stiff canvas, putting on more sail or reefing it in as required. Her black skin shone with sweat as she dropped down onto the deck, panting to catch her breath, then splashing water into her mouth from the scuttlebutt. The merest movement of her limbs raised small flat islands of muscle. Salvestro watched her hungrily. Then he would remember Jacopo and the others, and he would remember that Diego watched her, too. The soldier grew even more taciturn in the days that followed, abstracted, dazed. There was a madman in him, the one who had bellowed and lashed out wildly in the hold. He was silent for now, but Usse spoke to Diego in an undertone, as if she feared to break the fragile spell that chained this part of him, and the other four were careful in his presence, alert to the menacing something that was in him. Ruggero showed Salvestro the gouged beams in the hold where the soldier’s sword had bitten, then the rotting ones, then the compass timbers and sprung planking through which fat waterdrops seeped and dripped before running down the sides and pooling in the bottom.