Free The Pop’s Rhinoceros by Lawrance Norflok Page A

tanning. Ronsdorff scraped the honey from its combs, and Haase gathered resin from the fruit trees. Dunkel’s daughter gave birth to a girl who howled in the thick summer heat.
    All through the harvest, Jörg squinted, sneezed, and read on. He sweated, and sometimes the characters would swim on the page as he bent his head to the book. His orbits swung out beyond the island and mainland to the countries at the ends of the earth. He frowned and worried. His days were filled with heat and distance; his nights with dreams of strange animals. On Saint Lambert’s Day he called Brother Herbert and told him to plaster the wall of the chapter-house; on Saint Sequanus’ Day, to paint it. He thought of spiny-backed dolphins leaping over ship masts in the waters of the Euxine, of enormous sea tortoises, of elephants tramping the plains of Africa guided by the light of the stars, and the single-horned asses of the Indies. Their stupidity, their fierceness. Sometimes he wondered idly what these creatures might look like, but his dreams gave him only shape-shifting and fakery. And the brothers were impatient, Gerhardt stirring them up. They did not understand—how could they yet? All in time, he thought, and heard the sea’s clepsydra washing away the clay. Seconds ticked in the cliff’s subsidence, days in the lazy swipes of the tide.
    When the paint and plaster had dried, he gathered the brothers in the chapter-house. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes fixed him from the tiers of the gradines. He stood before them, holding a baton. Behind him, marked upon the wall, was a circle and within it a T, which divided it in three. He thought of their wideningcircuits about the island, their commerce with the islanders. Perhaps this was their limit, and here was where their impetus would stall. Here was the challenge that Usedom had thrown down, the same but writ in letters the size of continents, bellowed babel-tongued and louder than the ears of man might stand. Would their curiosity help him now, draw them further, take them with him? Twenty-nine baffled faces watched him carefully while he traced the circumference of the circle, then tapped the three areas within it. They awaited his explanation.
    “The world,” said Father Jörg.

    To the north, Rügen’s chaotic shorelines straggled in and out, intersecting and breaking, forming tenuous capes and headlands within a jumble of spits and bays. Balkers stationed on the distant cliffs were dancing insects, directing the fishermen west. Tiny rowboats were rounding the thick nub of Stubnitz on their way to Cape Arkona. South, offered the flat sweep of Usedom’s seaward coast, its sheer extent broken in half by Vineta Point—what remained of it—the ruin of the church atop. He tugged on the nets, and Brüggeman lifted himself to free them. His employer was distracted, preoccupied. Ploetz cast. They were off the coast at Greifswald, half a league out from the Oie. The net arced out over the side of the boat, the impact slapping on the surface, spattering seawater like the briefest, most local of rainshowers.
    Submergence then, disappearance and unseen distortions. Nets trace the motions of an invisible sea: twisting, curling, pulling pocks from the lattice. Sea-heat and sea-cold, rolling convections and subsurface currents collide and recoil, mingle and subside. The buffered thud of water masses percuss the sea-depths and merely add to the turmoil. Moving water needs ciphers and signals; scraps of reed, shells of whelks, flotsam, sea-grass, a waterlogged spar. Or a net. Water has its own kind of darkness, its endless equivalence. Brine too needs its badges of state. It sinks, this net, silently and stressfully, the banner for an army of armies. Every competing stipple and thrust, swell and outflow, diving seiche and deepwater stillness means a ripple, a jerk, a new twist to its fabric. Mere descent means the weights tied at its edges; but everything else, every twitch and shudder, ripple and yaw,