The Pop’s Rhinoceros Read Free Page A

man rose. They were both awake, and there was no use pretending otherwise. He knew what would follow.
    “Tell me again,” Bernardo said. “Tell me about the city.”
    They had practiced in Ewald’s pond, but it had not gone well. It was deep and still and black as night, and he had almost drowned. He drew a deep breath and stared into the fire. The city… They were too close now not to believe in it. The day after tomorrow he would be in the barrel, sinking down, the fathoms to Vineta. There would be no one then to carry his lumpish craft to safety. There it was, leaning against the wall, the severed head of a monster, its black mouth open to swallow him. The glass glinted on the ground beside it. Oak chips crackled in the fire and sent a harsh white smoke into the rafters, where Ewald’s herring hung on strings. It was the same smell, the same sight. Salvestro thought back to his mother twisting her knife in the fishes’ white underbellies, spitting out the guts like a mouthful of worms.
    “Well?” demanded Bernardo.
    He sighed inwardly.
    “There was a city,” he began, “and to the men and women who lived there it was the greatest city on earth. There was a war that lasted a hundred years and a storm that lasted a night—”
    “Stop!” Bernardo interrupted him. “You’ve missed out the part about what the city was like.”
    “How many times have I told you this story, Bernardo?” he retorted. “If you know it that well, why don’t you tell it yourself?”
    “Just tell the story properly,” said Bernardo. “Without leaving bits out. What about the people who lived there?”
    “They were a water people,” Salvestro resumed. “The people who lived here then were fishermen, boatmen, pirates, and they made their homes in the marshlands. They built great cities to guard the river mouths, and the greatest of them all had walls built of huge tree-trunks and broken by four great gates. The slave market covered an acre and traders came to barter there; by ship from the lands ofice to the north, by horse and foot from the dry valleys of the south and the plains of the east. It grew to become the wealthiest city on earth. …”
    He had found his stride now. This happened. That happened. The story rolled forward. He said, “The people of this city loaded their temples with silver, and in every house in every one of its stone-paved streets a table groaned under the weight of the food. Merchants flocked from every port to share the spoils, and in time, its very name came to mean abundance. This city was called Vineta, the most prosperous and peaceable you could imagine.”
    “That’s better,” Bernardo muttered approvingly. “That’s one of the best bits. About the food, and the temples with all the silver.”
    “Yes,” said Salvestro, nodding. He remembered his earlier self leaning forward across the fire to catch his mother’s words as she told him of their ancestors’ city and its riches. Fabulous visions of it had formed in the firesmoke, bursting the walls of the mean hut that was their home. Now it was Bernardo who strained to catch the same words.
    “Then the newcomers came,” he resumed.
    “Henry the Lion,” said Bernardo. “And his army.”
    “No, you’re muddling it up, Bernardo. Henry the Lion was later. Either listen or tell the story yourself. The first of them were…” He paused, unsure whether his mother had told him what they were or not. Perhaps he had forgotten.
    “Planters,” he declared with authority. “They called the lands here the New Plantation. There weren’t very many to begin with. They built churches and drained the marshes. Anyway”—he was picking up the thread again—” they felled the forests and sowed grass for their cows. More and more of them came, and they hated the people who were here before them. They muttered curses against their temples, and against their god Svantovit until Svantovit cursed them back. Then there was a war.”
    “The war that