The Pop’s Rhinoceros (99 page)

The boy’s job was to watch for droplets of wax that would drip off the shaft
before the old man could plunge it into the bucket. When these hit the water they formed smooth white beads and quickly sank to the bottom. He was supposed to fish them out and throw them back into the bowl without interfering with the movements of the old man or interrupting his rhythm. Iguedo was somewhere outside, he assumed, for she had shrugged at the old man’s cantankerous greeting and when the boy looked up again she was gone.

The old man rocked back and forth, his arm moving forward and back, and the two of them fell into a rhythm that hardly wavered and that lulled the boy. The hut was warm. The fire glowed and faded between red and black in accordance with the movement of the air over the embers. They worked together in a silence disturbed only by the faint hisses and crackles of the fire, so the boy thought, until he gradually became aware of a murmuring or mumbling, at once very faint and very close. The old man’s lips were moving, but whatever he was saying was quite inaudible or too jumbled for his ears to disentangle and make sense of. It distracted him. He looked over at his work-partner and slid a hand into the bucket for the hundredth time. As he retrieved the little bead of fallen wax his wrist knocked against the old man’s arm. The old man stopped and looked him in the eye. He was expecting a comment on his clumsiness or inattention.

“Layers,” said the old man. “Smooth even layers.”

The clay stump was the core, and the clay in which they would later encase the wax was the mold. The wax itself was the image of the casting, and the casting was of the Eze-Nri, who was not one man but many, each one encasing the last all the way back to Eri.

“Difficult to get them all in,” he grumbled. “Gets more difficult every time.”

When the layers had reached the thickness of a man’s arm, the old man had dipped the wax into the water for the last time and bade the boy fetch the basket that held his modeling tools, which were little sharpened sticks and short-bladed knives as far as he could see. It was very late and his head ached with fatigue, though the old man had done almost all the work and seemed as lively as ever.

“Eri sat on an anthill,” said the old man, “and all around him the land was soft as mud. Useless. Couldn’t grow a thing in it. … Are you listening, cloth-ears?”

“Yes,” he mumbled. “Eri sat on an anthill.”

Everybody knew this story. He was supposed to be learning bronze-casting, not listening to tales his mother had told him when he barely reached her knee. The old man’s hands were moving busily around the wax, turning it this way and that while he hacked and pared at great speed, barely glancing at what he was doing.

“So the Eze-Nri sits down, because of Eri and his anthill. Look”—a fat plug of wax flew off—” this will be his lap. Knees here. What happened next?”

“He took a blade from an Awka smith. He used the blade to harden the land.”

“How?”

He recited by rote, “Eri cut rivers to drain the land, one to the east and one to the west, and where they met he cut a third to the south, which is the greatest River of them all.”

“So he did, so he did. Hard work, eh, boy? Harder than carrying a bucket of water. Harder than burning charcoal.” He turned to the door and bellowed, “Harder than boiling yam, too!” No answer came back. The old man shrugged. “Anyway, he cut the rivers. So?”

The boy thought. “We give him a blade.”

“Where?”

“In his hand.”

“Which one?”

“Right.”

“Otonsi
-staff goes there. Without
otonsi
the yams won’t grow.”

“Left, then.”

“Enyi-tusk goes there. That story comes later.”

“When?” He felt his curiosity struggle up through the numbing fatigue, but the old man shook his head impatiently.

“Later. And you’re thinking like a wood-carver.” He spat in the fire to indicate his contempt. “Eri’s already cut the rivers. He doesn’t need a blade, and the Eze-Nri carries no weapon, and anyway, casting something like that is too difficult. It always looks like a stick. Forget the blade. We give him big shoulders instead, strong spine down the back. All that hard work. …” The old man chuckled. “Now, what about his ears?”

So it went on. The old man picked, scratched, gouged, and whittled, swapping the wax from hand to hand, working usually with two tools gripped between his fingers and the rest in his lap, keeping up a constant commentary on the significance of this or that feature and prodding the boy to respond. A seated figure emerged gradually from within the smooth wax. To the
otonsi-staff
and Enyi-tusk the old man added a bundle of
ofo
-twigs, which were placed between the figure’s feet. A breastplate in the shape of a leopard’s head grew out of the chest, and a headdress of coiled and braided cord strung with beads sprouted from the top of the head. The old man added wristbands and necklaces, or rather scratched away at the wax until they suddenly appeared as though he had dug them out of the ground.

“Eri is always there,” he murmured. “Scratch the land, you find Eri underneath.”

But the boy’s head lolled. His eyelids drooped. The night, and the work that filled it, seemed endless. He no longer answered the old man but only nodded whenever prompted. He did not understand how he could still be awake.

Eventually the old man took a tool he had not used before, a knife whose blade was worn so thin that it more closely resembled a needle. Holding the figure in his lap, he began cutting long thin lines, each one beginning at the ear, running over the cheekbone, and stopping only at the edge of the mouth. He
turned his wrist to widen the lines into grooves. The boy watched as the
ichi-
marks multiplied to cover both sides of the figure’s face.

“Eri had two sons,” the old man said. He might have been addressing the face that stared blindly up at him. “You remember their names, boy? Hmm?”

He blinked and struggled to clear his head. Two sons? Eri had
one
son. These were stories that everybody knew. One son. He was sure.

“Ifikuanim,” he answered. “He was the second Eze-Nri.”

The old man was nodding, gazing down at the image he had created. “The other had no name. Has a name now. But back then …”

He lifted the knife clear of the wax and placed it carefully back in the basket, then he held up the figure to the light. As he turned it slowly in his hands, the glow from the dying fire and the oil-lamps played over its scarified surface. The boy’s eyes ached, yet privately he marveled at the cleverness of the design. The tusk curving up the line of the chest was hardly more than a ridge and the
otonsi
staff mostly obscured by the arm that held it. The detail in the headdress was more suggestion than reality, and the leopard’s-head breastplate seemed to leap forward even though it was little more than a bulge with three holes in it. He counted fingers and toes. The
ofo
-twigs were a lump of wax with some grooves in it and yet uncannily realistic. It was the shadow that revealed these details, for when the old man moved it nearer the light, the figure appeared almost featureless. He
tutted
and frowned as he peered at it.

“Something wrong here,” the old man said. “You see that, boy?You see what’s wrong?” When he eventually shook his head, the old man regained his usual ill temper and began mocking him as before. “Can’t see it? It’s staring you in the face! What does the Eze-Nri look like? What do all Nri-people look like? Answer’s in front of your spotty little nose. …”

And so on and so forth. He was too tired to care. His eyes closed, and he knew that if he did not open them, the old man’s voice would drift away and the yammering, whining, goading mockery would fall silent. He wanted only to sleep now.

“What color is wax? Eh?” insisted the voice. A new tone, anger. At what? He did not care. Then the answer to his own question, spat out and succeeded by the silence of sleep:

“No color at all! Wax is the color
of nothing. …”

They walked in single file, for the paths they followed were narrow channels cut through waist-high ferns; and they walked in silence, for each time any one of them uttered a word the old woman would stop and clench a fist in front of her mouth as though to catch the sound and strangle it. Diego never spoke in any case, but Bernardo seemed unable to comprehend this simple interdiction. Every
few minutes he would turn to Salvestro, who was walking behind him, and the first syllable of some pent-up query would burst from his lips and be instantly quelled by the old woman’s increasingly vigorous gesture, so their conversation was effectively limited to “Wh…”

There was little to say in any case, and what there was had been said the previous night:

“She’s probably just keeping us here till the rest of them arrive.”

“Or fattening us up.”

“Or poisoning us.”

“We could just leave.”

“She’d follow us.”

“We’d have to kill her.”

“Or tie her up.”

“With what?”

“And where would we go?”

Silence. The flames of the fire, an eye-aching orange in the encircling darkness.

“So we’d better stay here?”

“At least till morning.”

“This meat isn’t bad.”

“What’s left?”

“Just the head.”

Chewing noises followed. Then some crunching, then sleep, and the next morning found all three following the old woman through the forest, up to their waists in a sea of ferns, arms flailing like three hapless canoeists: Salvestro and Bernardo without the least idea of where they were going or why they were going there, Diego locked in silence. Since attempting his speech by the river, he had not said a word. Monkeys chattered and crashed about in the branches high above their heads. Raucous birds shrieked and flew from perch to perch. The forest whirred and buzzed and chirruped and growled, and the little procession thrashed its way forward through fleshy fronds and tendrils, their sore feet padding down the path.

After an hour or more of this the ferns began to thin, then gave out altogether. The men’s legs reappeared, and the dim sunlight brightened as gaps opened in the topmost canopy, hard shafts and beams lancing the leaves of the lower trees. The forest grew quieter and the land rose in a gentle slope. At its summit the trees stopped and a vista opened before them.

Two diverging ridges ran forward in front of them, and between these the ground fell away, forming a ravine that deepened and widened, becoming a long valley whose wooded sides fell steeply to the floor far below. A ravine identical to the one they now overlooked formed the distant end of the valley that was thus shaped like the hull of a sharp-prowed ship, or so it seemed to Salvestro. The
canopies of the trees merged together to coat its sides and bottom in green. Like moss, he thought. Or, remembering the
Lucia,
mold. Here and there thin plumes of smoke rose up. Something glittered. Water?

“Where are we?” Bernardo asked finally, and this time the old woman did not gesture for him to be silent.

He looked to Salvestro for an answer, but Salvestro only shrugged. They had not crossed the river, which meant that they must be east of it. The back of the valley was still in shade, and from the position of the sun they were facing east now. The river was behind them. A steep valley was in front of them. Apart from these facts, he knew nothing. The old woman was beckoning for them to follow her down a path that ran at an angle off to the left and then disappeared into the trees lower down. Salvestro and Bernardo turned, but Diego simply stood there, motionless and transfixed. The woman beckoned again.

“Here,” Diego said.

Salvestro looked around in surprise at the breaking of the soldier’s silence. The old woman said something in her own tongue. Diego gazed into the valley.

“This is where I will find the beast,” he said.

Daughter…

Almost there now. The men had drifted back out of the forest in twos and threes, their fruitless pursuit abandoned and its fury expended. Their trails and noisy passages were wounds in the cool of the forest that healed as soon as made. She ran a finger down her cheek. They were shallow cuts, made for show.