The Pop’s Rhinoceros (95 page)

It was Iguedo’s voice. He tried to shut it out, but then the old man started grunting along with her, perhaps even trying to drown her out himself, for his
noise was at least as loud. He recalled Usse’s face, but all that came to mind were her
ichi
-scars. She would look different now in any case, he reflected. He reached down to his groin again. He had gone soft.

Her hair had been braided in locks that shot out of her head in all directions, then fell about her face like the stems of a fleshy carnivorous plant, stiff and dyed red with cam-wood. Dark blue welled in her
ichi
-marks where
uli
-berries had been rubbed into the scars. She had chewed them, too, darkening the inside of her mouth until her teeth flashed white as ivory when she spoke. Her brothers stood behind her, impassive and unsmiling.

“Come. We go now.”

Salvestro, Bernardo, and Diego variously concealed their shock at her transformation. She did not appear of this place, or anywhere, for that matter. They trooped down to a large pirogue manned with nervous-seeming paddlers who bobbed their heads at her approach. Soon they were cutting through the water, the paddles slicing down to pull them forward, then stilled and dripping in the hands of the men, then stabbing down again, a dozen blades and a dozen wounds a second in the unprotesting liquid that healed itself effortlessly behind them.

Usse watched the first sandbanks appearing, low humps of gritty mud exposed by the River’s falling flood. The land farther upriver sent down its flotsam, which beached itself upon them: broken branches, rafts of river weed, drowned livestock that the crocodiles would tear up and lodge in grim stores beneath the surface. The voices in the River were all jumbled and unlimbed. The gaws of Gao a few weeks upstream threw their gods into the flood each season, and they were in there now, damaged, discarded, powerless down here. She paid them no attention: Baana, Gangikoy, Moussa, Mama Kyria the leper. The White-men sat forward of her, placed there to keep them away from the paddlers, who feared their touch but were too scared to tell her directly. All around them was the slow churn of the River, a vast slack muscle whose mischievous twitches reminded her that it might—if it chose—sweep all before it in a single wave, splintering forests, smashing mountains, turning the land back to its original mud. Where would Eri be then? Nothing kept this from happening, unless Nri. The White-men were a warning. Namoke had understood that and had said nothing. It was she who had dived into the blinding water, let it wrench and pummel her as it pleased. She undrowned herself and came back; the River’s voice drummed in her ears, a voice she alone had dared to hear. She was painted and armored, moving her own mass against the current.

Behind her, her brothers talked obliquely amongst themselves of the meeting at Onitsha, using odd turns of phrase and obscure proverbs so that the village men would not understand. They were excited and anxious; she heard that much in their voices. Last night she had hardly slept, so insistent were they to hear of
her time with the White-men, all three of them wide-eyed, asking after their shrines (vast and built of stone, but filthy), their priests (richly robed and powerful as their own), their kings (of whom she knew nothing). Were they a warrior-people, or a smithing-people, or a farming-people? They were all of these, all mixed together with hardly an idea of any of them. They lived in huge cities, almost as huge as that of the Bini, and their houses were built of stone, but— again—quite filthy with dogs wandering in and out of them and fouling the floors. They washed only rarely. She did not mention Fiametta’s fondness for baths. Their food was very rich and stank. The winters were ten times colder than harmattan time, but they could not follow her description of snow. She caught them looking at one another in disbelief, and then she realized that they had not changed at all. She spat on the floor in front of them, her three foolish brothers. There had been no time to ask what was happening at Onitsha. The village women had braided her hair, their nervous fingers tugging and pulling out the strands, then rubbing in the thick cam-wood dye. She was clearheaded now, strangely weightless. She had not sought her father’s dreaming spirit, and if it had sought her, it had not found her. She had told her brothers the stories they wanted to hear, and she had told them of the men sitting in front of her now. They had nodded in the manner of wise old men, all three together.

“Yes.” she wagged her finger at them. “Just as I told you. Did you believe me then, eh? Did you listen to your sister, Usse?”

She made them feel her wrist where it had been broken, the little nodules of bone in there.

So she had shamed them, and now they were all together in the pirogue, pressed up against each other with the White-men, too: cadavers and their rags. She glanced forward at the soldier, recalling the episodes she had left untold. His had shocked her, merely how hot his skin had felt when she had lain with him and the violence in his face while he’d performed the act. His sweat, a White-man’s sweat. She watched his back when it showed around that of the giant. The third was the one who had watched her in the night, the first night, when she had sought and found her father in the Ijaw village. She was sure of it, and now she thought of him as the Thief. Soldier, Giant, and Thief. It was like the beginning of a children’s tale: “Tortoise and Leopard were out walking in the forest …” or “Hare and Dog met one day at the water-hole …” She felt drowsy even with the motions of the boat, the muddy-watery smell in the air, the little grunts of the paddlers, whose rhythm never changed. Soldier, Giant, and Thief went in a boat to a strange country with a fierce princess called Usse. They wanted to catch the ugliest beast in the world. …

Ezodu and Enyi were walking in the forest. … Eh, Usse? Remember that one, my fierce little princess?

She woke with a start. River-glare. The men paddling. Apia reached forward and touched her on the shoulder. She shrugged him off, reaching into herself for the source of the voice.

Father?

Ezodu and Enyi were once the best of friends. They used to meet at the water-hole, eh? Heh, heh, heh, heh …

And then he was gone. She sat up quickly. Gone as abruptly as he had come. Her father playing tricks on her? Strange. Not like him. Had his dreaming made him playful? Then she noticed the Thief.

He was sitting bolt upright, a puzzled expression on his face that she could see only because he turned his head to left and right; his baffled, startled, searching head. With its spying eyes and its thieving ears. Could he have heard, too? Was it possible that a White-man could hear such voices? The Thief was the one she would watch most closely. Now he was settling back again, readjusting his ragged hat and pulling it forward until it covered his eyes. Sleep, then, she thought, or feign sleep. Nri would reveal him. Nri would reveal all of them.

Their course began to take them in toward the right-hand bank, where a single dense thicket of greenery marched up to the water’s edge and rose at their approach until solid cliffs of vegetation loomed over them, the canopies of the great cottonwoods appearing as teetering shelves and overhangs. Closer yet and the wall dissolved into boughs and branches, bristling bushes decked with tiny scarlet flowers and looping lilac convulvulus. Here and there were gaps through which she glimpsed the cool shade of the forest’s interior. Then the bank fell away again, and a little later the Engenni River broke through the forest to mix its brighter brown waters with the great flood beneath them and the pirogue was pushed farther out by its current. They were almost at Ndoni and the afternoon was well advanced, but they would not stop. Later, the Orashi would come into view in a similar fashion, sweeping in from the right with its bunched meanders seeming to recoil from the greater mass of the River, and beyond that confluence would be Osomari. And they would not stop there, either. The paddles rose and fell, rose and fell. The backs of the men bent and strained, yet they did not slacken their pace. Atani was where the River widened and the far bank dwindled to a distant puny ridge, where years ago, in another life, a boy had fished in a pool of shadowed water and she had sat digging her toes into the cool earth, watching him. They stopped there.

At first the White-men were a sickness and no one knew what to do. They came across the sea in great white-winged boats, and their mouths were full of blood and lies that they spat on the people whom they met. Their weapons were light machetes, slightly curved, and fire-sticks that they held up to their eyes. There was a soft bang, some smoke, and then whomever it was pointed at fell down dead. Their chests were thick as tree-trunks, and their legs were thin as twigs. They were silent, often for days at a time, and then they would begin shouting while keeping their bodies very still. Most were exceedingly ugly and
stank. They did not bury their excrement. They were quarrelsome, and powerful magicians. They had no women. Their speech sounded like coughing. The land frightened them, and they spent as little time on it as possible. When sufficiently angered, they would wave one arm and whole villages disappeared. The ground where they stood was churned up and the soil so hot that it smoked. They were impossible to insult. Nobody knew what made them so angry, or ugly, or white, or red, or whatever color they were, no one amongst the Ijaw, anyway, so it must be a kind of sickness, or madness, a bad spirit that squatted in their heads, shat down their throats, and could not be expelled. Much of this, Namoke knew, was nonsense.

The rains had come and gone four times since he and Usse had sat in the old Ijaw man’s hut and listened to him ramble and grumble about the Nembe down the coast, the sharks in their fishing-ground, and then after a calabash of palm-wine the White-men. … Anayamati was not yet in his dreaming, but it was not far off, and he was cautious, their Eze-Nri. Too cautious for his angry, restless daughter. The titled men had sat down together, broken the kola-nut, passed the calabash amongst themselves, scratched their behinds, and talked of what these “White-men” portended. And talked more. And talked more again. She was too impatient, Anayamati’s daughter, and too wild, eventually bursting in and mocking them for their circumspection, strutting before them, spitting out the suspicion that none of them would voice before storming out in frustration. Had she been right? Anayamati had shaken his head at the disgrace, then broken the heavy silence. “Sometimes I think she is Ezodu herself. …” He had rolled his eyes in a comical fashion, and they had chuckled along to spare his feelings, gone back to their
tombo
and their jawing. Had she heard them? They were cautious old men, proceeding as cautious old men are wont to do, making cautious old men’s decisions. She would have left anyway, Namoke told himself.

Later they learned that the Bini across the River to the west had several of the White-men already at Ughoton, although they kept them out of the city, and there were more of them down on the coast, where they had built a stone fort. The famine took Nri-men farther afield than they had ever been before and wherever they traveled they listened now for tales of these White-men. To the east and south as far as Mpinde in the lands ruled by Nzinge Nvembe, to the west and north as far as the land of the Dyulas, they heard the same stories over and over. One day great boats hung with white sails appeared off the coast, then smaller boats rowed to shore, and within these were the White-men, who traded well or badly, and then they were gone again until the next year. Each year they would stay a little longer, and sometimes a few would stay behind (as ransom? punishment?), and sometimes build houses for themselves. According to Nvembe, they had reached Ngola of Mbundu after him, just as they had reached the Calabaris before him, and the Nembe-people and Ijaws before that, and so on west through the lands of the Bini and the Warri, then north up the coast as far as the desert, where nothing grew and where the tribes who lived there built nothing
but each day woke and fled from the fierceness of the sun until nightfall, when they would drop to the ground and sleep again. The north was where the White-men came from. Usse had gone in pursuit of them. Now she was coming back. Nri-men had listened to these tales and observed the unease of their tellers. The White-men were weak and few in number, but there was something fearsome in them. Something hidden even from themselves. Perhaps the foolish Ijaws were right, Namoke thought now: the White-men were a sickness.