The Pop’s Rhinoceros (92 page)

“A woman from here took a man whose brother lives in a village nearer the coast. The man died and she went with the brother, down by the coast. She comes back here sometimes. She makes baskets. They have those bamboo houses down there.”

The headman was cutting fillets for the rest of them now.

“Must get cold this time of year, harmattan time. Anyway, she sells those baskets at Ikolo, so she comes through here on the way. They have a market there each week. She comes through every tenth or twelfth week, talks to her family here. This brother is a good man. Plenty to eat down there. Do you know this place?”

Usse looked up at this, the first question she had been asked since their arrival. She swallowed the fish in her mouth and shook her head.

“They had Nri-men down there once. This was before she got there. The
brother told her about it. They had problems with a
ju-ju
the headman there had set up. Lost some men in the River. Bad problems. It was an Ijaw village, like here. Not Nembe-people. It’s better now.” He made a gesture with his hand, indicating the direction, perhaps, and Usse saw that his eye alighted on a covered calabash set up behind him. He turned back to her.

“This is good fish,” she said. “Not too dry.”

“You are thirsty?” He clicked his fingers at one of the three men, who rose eagerly and began dipping cups into the calabash. She sipped carefully. The palm-wine was sweet and thick, its fumes heady. Its heat warmed her to her bones.

“Drink slowly,” she told the three men sitting opposite. “It is stronger than it tastes.”

“Who are these people?” Diego demanded. “Are these the people you spoke of?”

She shook her head. The headman took a long draft from his cup, watching this exchange without understanding it.

“Sharks,” she said, suddenly remembering. “This village had trouble with sharks.”

The headman nodded. “It is much better now. They kill a lot of them after the rains when the water is high. We send them cutch for their nets. Good against rot. This woman says the headman has whole necklaces of shark’s teeth. He thinks his teeth will never fall out.” The headman grinned then, showing her a full set of shiny teeth. “Cutch works better. In my opinion.”

Diego’s head went back and forth as they talked. The other two got on with their fish, pausing only to slurp from their cups. More faces appeared behind the fence to the man’s compound. The village had been reached through a creek so narrow that the mangroves met above their heads to form a glossy green tunnel. It gave out onto a lagoon much like the one where they built their trap, except for a low island in its center on which stood a dozen or so fenced compounds containing mud-walled huts thatched with raffia palm, each one raised four or five feet off the ground on piles. Two children busy raking embers up and down the bottom of a small half-made canoe shouted and jumped up and down at their approach until the uncertain expressions of the men in the pirogues had silenced them.

“We had good crayfish this year,” the headman said. “We heard the harvest was bad again inland. They had yam-beetles. The people up there should eat crayfish. The traps are easy to make.” He began to describe the traps, drawing conical baskets in the air with his long-fingered hands, then miming the trigger mechanism. She nodded in an interested fashion. Her three companions paid closer attention, their heads moving in comic synchronization as they followed the man’s movements. She remembered her first weeks in the city, knowing nothing, understanding nothing. People’s hands had been the only language she understood then. There was a cult of the hand, called Ikenga, but it was for warriors and merchants and all its rules concerned either fighting or wealth. There should be a cult
for talking hands and for different tongues. … Her mind drifted through these thoughts while the headman went on to tell how snails could be caught in simple baskets. He described them in the same manner, and she understood that he was doing this partly out of hospitality for the three men who would understand nothing else, partly for the pleasure of it (the very traps he described were stacked in a corner of the compound), and partly, most obliquely, out of curiosity. There was no famine here. Their harvest had not failed. There was no war to calm, no souring of the earth to draw out, no spirit to banish. He wanted to know what she was doing down here: herself, the eldest daughter of the Eze-Nri, paddling through the mangroves with three ash-faced men. But he dared not ask. The
ichi
marks on her face forbade his curiosity. Nri itself forbade it.

She said, “These men are mine. We have come up from the coast. Tomorrow we must go on upriver. A great boat is in the bay back there, and there are two men we left, men like these ones. They must not come to harm.”

“There is a Nembe village near that bay,” said the headman, clearly relieved that her business did not concern him. “Some of my people know the people, but they are very fierce. And they hear the stories from along the coast. They hate the White-men. …” He poked the embers in the fire. “I will send men in the morning, and they will tell these Nembe what the Eze-Ada says. It may be too late.”

It was quite dark now. The whispering from beyond the compound fence had fallen quiet, though she could see a dozen or more of the villagers still waiting there, their eyes watching her and her charges. And what do
you
think of these people? she wondered to herself. She was impatient for the evening to end. The headman indicated that she should sleep in the hut in which they sat while he would sleep in the hut of his son, who was away trading mangrove-salt farther inland. He hesitated when his eyes swept over the three men, and she saw worry pass fleetingly across his face. She reassured him that they would do no more than they had done already, which was eat and drink, then sleep like ordinary men. Troublesome spirits sought out trouble and lived in the places where trouble began. In the morning she would level and cleanse the ground on which they slept in case they left a mark there. After she told him this, the man touched his right hand to his forehead. He beckoned to a woman outside the fence who entered with her eyes fixed downward, though she had been staring boldly enough before that. She scooped up the embers and began spreading them in a shallow firepit under the slats of the bed on which she would sleep. To warm her, the headman explained.

She lay down and waited for the three men to fall asleep. After a time, and when no further sounds reached her from the other huts, she rose quietly and walked down to the water. The harmattan was a cool breeze that barely moved the leaves in the trees but still raised gooseflesh on her arms. She sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. The journey behind her was no longer the force that pushed her forward. She had felt the new pull as soon as the giant had propelled them in amongst the mangroves, a troubling impatience. The journey
thrashed behind her like a useless tail. She cut it off. None of that mattered now; she was being drawn by her destination. She closed her eyes, imagining the mangroves around her, then herself pushing them away, flattening a great swath of them with a single fan of her arm. That left the water. She thought of it simply flowing away. But where? Where was the place that would hold so much? Its smell filled her nostrils. She raised a dome in the earth, and the water rushed down its sides. The ground was solid beneath her. She pushed herself off it, rising, letting it fall away from her at extraordinary speed. There was nothing now. She was alone, not here in an Ijaw village, on a little island of river-mud, but where? She waited. Eri fell from the sky, or so the story went when little children were told it. Iguedo had told her there was a sky behind the sky one saw. This was that sky, not the familiar blue one, with its familiar clouds, its familiar sun. That sky. This sky. Never go too far when you dream. … Iguedo’s cackling and hectoring. Little girls like you get lost. … Usse was somewhere far below, sitting by a lagoon with her prizes snoring behind her. Eusebia was dead, and good riddance. She was the Eze-Ada, eldest daughter of the Eze-Nri.

Father?

Eri fell from the sky, which was the image of where she was now. He fell to the shaking earth, the soft and thunderous earth, and calmed it and hardened it with a blade from an Awka smith. She waited for a time, squatting there on the ground, listening.

Daughter, have you returned?

Eri was the first of the Eze-Nri. He sank his blade in to the hilt and felt it shiver and twist. He clung to it with both hands, softening and opening, drawing it out, then plunging it in again until the shaking shivered up the blade and stopped in his bones. He was a strong man. He held it in and looked about him at the earth. The earth was stained. Eri grew fearful at what he had done.

Will you calm my house? Will you wake me from my dreaming?

Father, I have brought the White-men. …

Eri said, “Ala, Mother of the Earth, I have stained you with my work. What am I to do?” Ala heard him and spoke with the other Alusi, with Igwe-in-the-Sky and Aro-the-Year, with Ifejioku who guards the yams and with Agwu, the trickster god. Igwe sent down rain to wash away the stain, but it was deep and dry and would not wash away. Aro looked into the future, but as far ahead as he could see, the stain was still there. Ifejioku said nothing. Agwu laughed at them all. Ala came to Eri then and told him to cleanse the land, for when Aro had rolled around enough times, the earth would begin to shake again and grow soft like a sea, and his people would have to calm it and harden it once again.

Eri said, “But how will they know when this time is to come? I am Eri, and I do not know. How will I tell them?”

Ala told him.

I will bring them to you
.

As you promised
.

As I promised
.

When she rose, the sky was already beginning to lighten in the east. Walking back wearily, she saw by this faint illumination a head lower itself gently—stealthily—onto the raffia mats that the headman had provided for the three men. She regained her bed and squinted across the compound, watching the three men under the pretense of sleep. But the three were indistinguishable: mouths open, limbs sprawled, eyes shut.

The mud changed color, exchanging its blues and blacks for a deep rust as they moved out of reach of the sea’s tidal fluxes and the water in the lagoons and creeks lost its salinity. Salvestro scooped up a handful and dashed it into his mouth. Still brackish, though less so than the day before and less again than the day before that. He understood that they were moving north.

Fan palms and huge cottonwood trees with strange mixtures of red and green leaves began to show themselves amongst the mangroves. The banks of the creeks through which they passed were choked with rushes and stunted bushes at the water’s edge, while a great tangle of fronds and lianas bound the screw pines, palms, and other trees that he could not name into solid cliffs of greenery. Swamp lilies covered some of the lagoons, and their craft would cut a channel of black water through the fleshy leaves, which would join together behind them as soon as they had passed, only to be cut again by the prow of the following canoe. Or canoes, for after that first night they were not suffered to travel alone. They set out each morning from whichever fishing village had offered them its hospitality with an escort to guide them to the next. The canoes were much faster than their row-boat, usually manned by four or six young men who kept a respectful distance whether trailing behind them or shooting ahead to cut away the lianas from a choked channel with heavy, razor-sharp machetes, for the undergrowth would often reach over the creeks and these waterways were cool green tunnels where the overwhelming silence of the swamp seemed to thicken into something unbroachable. Salvestro felt the urge to shout loudly and a corresponding reluctance to break the taut calm that tented this hushed landscape. Usse had warned them that crocodiles and water-snakes waited and listened in these quiet channels. His reluctance had nothing to do with that. They spoke to each other rarely, and then only in undertones. Bernardo rowed. Diego stared over the side, his face blank, as though exhausted beyond sleep. When they reached the village where they would stop the night, when increasingly elaborate obeisances had been made to Usse by the headman and elders, then it seemed a spell had been broken or temporarily lifted, for he and Bernardo would talk inconsequentially, Usse would exchange greetings with their hosts, often pointing to the three of them, there would be chatter, a human noise in the watery silence, but the soldier would say little or nothing at all.

The receptions in the villages grew more formal the farther north they went. The sun disappeared behind the green walls of the swamp, and long shadows crept across the water. Their escorts would draw a little closer then, hurrying them along. A bend would be rounded and suddenly the familiar stilted huts would appear with a small group of men standing on the bank, and the whole village behind them, all talking until their craft was spotted. Then silence. They would drag the boat up the bank and the whole village would bow their heads until Usse said something solemn in her language, whereupon they would stand normally and their eyes would rove between the young woman and themselves. Yet however cordial the greetings that passed between them, the villagers would avoid looking at her directly and would keep their arms fixed awkwardly at their sides. They feared her, he realized gradually, and this had something to do with the place where they were going, which was called Ree, or Nree. He had asked her. She had told them not to repeat it.