The Pop’s Rhinoceros (5 page)

For these all but exhausted soldiers, the buckling on of swords and the forward march are crumbs to the ravenous appetites that have driven them onward and farther until here, the shoreline of the island, where ice became land and they halted to await the stragglers at the rear, light fires, to pitch and strike the last of a thousand camps.

The storm rolled over them. The skies lightened. They marched north across the island in good order, their feet bound in rags against the cold. The peat-bog crunched under their footsteps. Frost shaken off the branches of the beech copse fell as snow and dusted them in white. Somewhere beyond the treeline lay the city. The coasts swung in from east and west. The land narrowed to a point. They broke cover and stood there storm-scoured, rimed only with the memory of their dead, to find a crumbling cliff, placid water, a resigned silence broken by flaking shards of clay as they crashed and sank in the sea. Where the isthmus should have projected and broadened to form the platform of the city, they found a wound, the mark of a single and final severance. They stood back from the edge with the island behind them, the whole Nordmark behind that, with its marshes, swamps, and forests marked out with the crosses of their graves, the silent groves
covered in leaves of red and yellow, and beneath the corrosive earth the bodies of their ancestors serried and layered with the years. The Lion and his men looked forward and down and saw nothing but water. The city had disappeared.

Previsions return, now hoisted out of forgetting on the point of a contemptuous lance. Their voiceless rage has its almost muted precedent: Szczecin, which they will rename Stettin, not sixty miles from here and its siege not twenty years before, which gave them a taste of this almost saltless sea, a mere drop on the tongue expecting brine. Veterans of that campaign are dotted amongst these silent, resentful ranks and recall to themselves siege engines mired in the black mud of the Oder, the clerics hammering crosses into the swampy earth, Bishop Zdík’s shrill encouragements while they drew up the ranks of hauberks and the horsemen cantered behind the line. The palisades were low and unspiked, the faces that peered from within seemingly puzzled rather than grim. This would be an easy conquest, a rarity, for God and Saxony against the heathens. The momentum was unstoppable. They were ready, on the brink and toppling, eager again to dip their hands in godless blood. Freedmen heft the shafts of their weapons, horsemen tighten the reins, all coiled together, waiting, when a whisper runs through the ranks. A shudder of puzzlement. Matters are not as they first appeared, and their own expectations seem to turn on them. …

They looked up and saw crosses rising on the palisade; the gates were opening, and striding toward them over the glacis was a figure in full pontificals, Adalbert, Bishop of Pomerania, his every footfall dragging the conflict away from them into some haven of confusion and twisted purpose—an enemy they never understood—untwisted as Stettin’s conversion to the cross some hundred years before. They have converged on the point where opposites meet and cancel one another. A foretaste, the unhelpful rehearsal of this situation on the cliff where they found their purpose tangled once again, darker this time and inextricable as ever. They were masters of the island, and their goal as remote as ever. Where could they go from here?

The truncated limb of the point ended in a sheer drop, a clay-red rawness prickling with blood, and beneath lay only the water’s endless and opaque balm. Somewhere below its surface was the city they had come to sack, the temples to raze, men and women to cut down, children’s heads to dash against vanished walls, all disappeared, sunk out of reach, still to be done. The wound never bled. They were alone, and every man foraging in his soul found an appetite only sharpened by the stark disappearance set before them. A promise had been made, but the victory was ill defined and beyond them, in some inconclusive region of convections and sluggish movement. The last ditch should have been the city and every life within it, never this yellow-gray monotone, this limitless vista of nothing. A promise was made, and broken. Never the sapping extent of the sea.

They would build a church. They would carry stones from quarries as far away as Brandenburg to build this monument to their bafflement. They spurned the local sandstones and sent south and east for granite. Full-laden barges plied
the Elbe and Saale for five summers until the foreshore of the island was paved with gray-black stone. Wagons loaded with toises cut to the length of a man a hundred miles hence crept laboriously about the Achter-Wasser, across the island to the limit of the shortened point. Foundations were laid which sank in the soft earth until piles were driven underneath and the creeping collapse arrested. Wooden outbuildings, hasty sheds, and shacks straggled inland from the site. The lodges of the stonecutters and masons spread until they cut the road to the works, were demolished and rebuilt nearer the beech copse. A stables was thrown up, and dormitories for the laborers. The smithy sent the tannin-reek of oak chips billowing into the sky while nails, pegs, tie-bars, horseshoes, ironwork for the carts, and tools for the workmen piled up at the back of the forge. Caskwood, roof-beams, rough planking, and scaffold poles lay stacked in depots next to the tiles. Workshops were built, and wheel-hoists. Ropes were measured and cranes constructed. The laborers dug their trenches with ease in the island’s soft substance. In spring, the carpenters arrived.

Not stone but wood will form the first of this structure’s guises: the skinless skeleton of a church. Groin-vaults, arches, towers, and walls rise from the foundations through the inference of scaffolding and lathes, a trellis for the church to grow into. The site is crowded with workmen: a hundred, then two, more when the work is at its height. Mortar makers grind lime in pestles, hands scarred white from the burns, sand, gravel, water, stiffening to the paste the mason’s trowel can spread and layer; the stonesetters wear gloves and their scars are different, crushed fingers, jagged and crudely healed cuts, bruises welling under the thumbnail, calluses hard as bone. Treadwheels turn and the stones are raised. Hardcutters saw at the facing blocks, sanders sand, plumb-lines swing and fall. Soon, elevations rise off the plan and the walls begin to climb skyward.

Two winters pass. Two towers face the sea. Roofers scramble across the beams and hammer pegs to hold the tiles. Ribs are being carved to replace the caskwood supports within the nave. The last year has been a year of haste. Now the laborers are slipping away, the masons tamping down whichever stone comes easiest to hand. Work will begin at Strassburg within the year, five hundred miles south from this eerie, deserted place: no easy journey. Plasterers work from before dawn till after dusk. A window is cemented inside out and left. Statues are misplaced. The priest to consecrate this church arrives by boat from Lübeck and speaks before the altar of victories over the pagan, of abundant seas and fertile lands. Winds blow off the water, find the unplugged eaves, and whistle in the echoing roof-space. Plaster dust rises off the floor. Twenty workmen listen in silence while the prelate battles with the wind. They watch him leave, then leave themselves. The church stands silent and deserted, empty on an empty island.

It was the decision of distant bishops; they could not have foreseen the indifference of Flemish and Saxon settlers to herring. Boats and nets are alien tools in hands used to the ax and plow. There is the border to be reckoned with, too: the very shoreline is under dispute. From the east, Boleslav will move his squadrons
across the Oder to challenge the Lion’s crusaders, and God will be claimed by both. There will be meetings between Bohemian and Saxon bishops at Stargard and Hamburg, but the ragged coast about the mouth of the Oder resists the compromises drawn up in their ill-tempered conferences. About the Trave, islands seemed to loose themselves from the foreshore and drift ambiguously into the sea—discrete landmasses, sandbars, shoals, tiny peninsulas cut and rejoined and cut once more—the confusion baffles their efforts to apportion it until the whole morass is dispatched south, to Rome for elucidation, and sent back with the Pope’s blessing and acceptance of their gift. Further ill-tempered conferences: they had not foreseen this particular solution; more, they resist it utterly. The decision stands. The Holy See will create the missionary diocese of Kammin to minister to the heathens’ needs and collect their tithes. There is a Bishop, it is rumored, but he is not seen at Kammin, Wollin, Stettin, across the Oder, and east as far as Stargard, nor even on the island that lies like an ill-fitting stopper in the mouth of the estuary: Usedom. Yet he must have existed, his permission would have been needed. The monks who were to take up residence in this place must have sought him out and found him somewhere. In name at least if nothing more, this was, after all, his church.

They crossed the Achter-Wasser in boats hired farther down the Peene. They came from Prémontré in the forest of Coucy and spoke neither the glottal dialect of the Flemish nor the guttural accents of the Saxons, let alone the gibberish of the Slavs. They retraced the steps of the Lion’s army, the toings and froings of the workmen who followed, north across the island until they reached the site of their new home, the church built to mark the Saxon triumph. They brought chalices, missals, psalters, breviaries, copes, crucifixes, and censers. Their Abbot bore a chest filled with books wherein he carried hopes of a library, together with the implements and parchment to add to it. Their thoughts were of a famed and feted foundation, the beginnings of a northern Rome. It was Saint Martin’s Day, and brilliant winter sunshine pierced the canopy of beeches. A psalm echoed among the tree-trunks, and their hearts were filled with happiness as the monks broke through the scrub. They saw the ground rise and narrow, and at the limit of the point they found their church.

It was a shell, a tomblike accumulation of stone sticking up like a single rotted tooth with its substance eroded, its lines awry, and the whole structure frozen in a seeming stagger as though it were lurching toward the sea.

The masons had worked through the winters without troubling to cover the stones in straw. Now the frost had cracked and flaked them. Some had been laid across the grain, and those nearest the foundations had crumbled under the weight of those above. The walls bulged out and the roofline sagged. Winds blowing in off the sea had lifted tiles so within this echoey shell rainwater stood in stagnant pools. The plaster had drawn damp out of the air and fallen off the walls in slabs. Fragments of mortar lay scattered on the flagstones of the floor. On the seaward side, one of the towers leaned alarmingly toward the overhang. Its piles
had sunk at the corner and the foundations disappeared into the clay. Thirty white-robed monks and their Abbot slung back their cowls to view the church that was their home. They climbed the stairs of the one sound tower and cast their eyes south and east across the deserted island, saw peat-bog and beech copse, mixed forest and scrubland cut haphazardly with tiny streams, minuscule islands standing off the landward coast. To the north, the sea. Their own presence was the result of distant, protracted debate to which they had never been party. They had not been told the island was deserted, their church a new-built ruin. Their Abbot felt his heart being fingered by despair.

They set themselves to the work of rebuilding their crumbling domain: mixing new mortar and plaster, repointing the walls, resurrecting the smithy to forge claw hammers and roof-pegs, replacing the tiles, cutting timber to buttress the leaning tower and the western wall of the church, which leaned, too, as did the south, though less, and the east, though less still, and the north, which they only suspected. They ordered stone from the quarries of the Uckermark, built a dorter and the beds to fill it, a refectory, a kitchen, infirmary, and chapter-house to enclose a cloister behind the church. They drained water from the nave, watched it seep back, drained it again, and again, finally lifting the flagstones to discover them laid on bare ground more resembling mud than earth. So they dug drains, and more drains, culverts and a channel for the reredorter. Still the floor of the church sagged, as though it were fashioned from planks floating in a lake of liquid, and the arches of the bays sank under the load of ill-conceived masonry.

Their Abbot began a history of their works on the island,
Gesta Monachorum Usedomi,
a rough account scratched out in a cursive hand, which he would write by candlelight in the hours between Lauds and Terce.

Sent by Abbot Hugh de Fosses in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and seventy-three to found a monastery on the isle of Usedom, we arrived on these shores on Saint Martin’s Day of that year. Much toil awaited us. …

The monks planted vegetable gardens, barley fields, and plum orchards. The first settlers arrived and they collected rents, but the tower still leaned, the whole place sagged, and the Abbot watched his income dwindle and disappear into sodden foundations, collapsing roofs, and all manner of improvements that somehow failed to improve. His
Gesta Monachorum Usedomi
grew to become a never-ending list of building works, and when the Abbot noticed that he had written
This week was spent by the brothers relaying the stones of the cloister
three times in as many months and
Straightening one corner of the chapter-house has pulled the others out of true
five times, then he gave up his history and consigned it to the chest containing the books intended for the library, which somehow he never found the time to unpack. He felt the same fingers of despair tighten about his heart and began to believe that even the task of maintaining their church was beyond them. The Lion’s endowment was long spent, his monks exhausted from their labors—surely Norbert himself had not intended his order to dissipate itself in such labors? He sent to Magdeburg for help but received from the Archbishop only a message de
scribing Usedom and its monastery as “peculiar”: meaning subject not to his jurisdiction, but to that of the diocese of Kammin and its Bishop, if there was one, and if not, then to the Curia and thence the Pope; meaning no. His absences at the annual seminars of abbots at Prémontré were noticed but not discouraged.