Scales of Gold (19 page)

Nicholas said, ‘I don’t mind what you call me. I would suggest you came and sat on the rug, but it might soil the skirt of your doublet. I thought you were going to Africa?’

‘Excuse me,’ said Gelis van Borselen. They both looked at her. She said, ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, you should retire to a tavern? Unless, of course, you came here to say something?’

Laughter, unwanted, began to well up again. Nicholas said, ‘I think we’ve both come to say the same thing.’

‘Have you?’ said Gelis. ‘Monsieur de Salmeton? You wish to assure us as well that you have no carnal longing for Madame Lucia’s son?’

‘
Gelis!
’ the blonde woman exploded.

The grey-haired woman thumped the hackbut on the floor. A dribble of powder spilled out. The young exquisite was gazing back at the Borselen girl, a gleam in his eyes. He didn’t look shocked.

Of course he didn’t: he’d been here before. That was how the Borselen girl had known the Bank was in trouble. And since Simon was not Portuguese, and Diniz Vasquez was away fighting Moors at a singularly inopportune moment – naturally, the Vatachino were here. ‘You want to buy St Pol & Vasquez. Toss you for them,’ Nicholas offered.

Sober, he would never have said it. Simon’s sister sprang to her feet, her face the only creased object between her immaculate yellow hair and her immaculate brocade bedgown. The woman called Bel picked up the hackbut and cradled it to her bosom. The girl Gelis van Borselen sat where she was. ‘You can’t afford us,’ she said.

‘Us?’ Nicholas said.

For the second time, her skin showed a pricking of colour. She said, ‘Katelina’s husband and his sister. What were you going to offer for their business?’

‘Promises,’ said David de Salmeton. ‘Part of what he hopes to bring back from Africa. He will give you, in a moment, a promissory note of some size. I, on the other hand, will match his offer in gold ducats now.’

Since there was no seat, the man had found a book-lectern and leaned on it, one aristocratic hand displayed on its edge. His shirt and pale doublet were embroidered, and he wore slippers, not boots. Nicholas, looking at him attentively, couldn’t see where he could be carrying more than a handkerchief. He frowned, and carried the frown, elevated, to Gelis van Borselen. She said, ‘It doesn’t arise. The company has received other offers.’

‘You haven’t heard mine,’ Nicholas said. It was only to see what she would say.

‘And we don’t want to!’ said Simon’s sister. ‘Do you think we should dream of selling the business to you?’

‘Yes, if it was failing,’ Nicholas said. He shifted on the cold floor. For one reason or another, he was going to have to leave soon.

‘And you would still buy it?’ Gelis van Borselen said.

‘Yes. Up till now,’ Nicholas said, ‘it hasn’t had me to run it.’ He sat, clasping his bloodstained kerchief round his dirt-encased knees, and let his smile spread and dimple under his matted hair.

‘It is a powerful argument,’ said Gelis van Borselen. ‘Very well.
Submit your offers in writing, and declare when and how you would settle. Madame will communicate in due course. You are both going to Africa?’

Nicholas looked at the prie-dieu, and the dark, liquid eyes returned the look. ‘Not together,’ Nicholas said.

‘Ah!’ said David de Salmeton. ‘I had hoped … That is, surely you planned, like myself, to call on the way at Madeira? The plantations of St Pol & Vasquez are there. I hoped your new caravel might offer me passage at, of course, the right price.’

‘Free,’ Nicholas said. ‘Provided I am the new owner of St Pol & Vasquez. Otherwise the ship will be full, I much fear, of inedible merchandise. Demoiselles, I must leave.’ He got up.

‘A cool drink?’ said Gelis van Borselen. ‘There is no hurry, surely.’

There was not so much hurry that he couldn’t make them all an extremely elaborate bow. He said to David de Salmeton, ‘Perhaps we shall meet in Madeira. Or elsewhere.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ the agent said. ‘There are Negroes enough for us all, although I envy you that young Guinea fellow you’ve tamed. He’ll take you straight to the pick of the bunch. I’m told the piccaninnies are charming.’

‘I’ll send you one,’ Nicholas said; and got himself outside quite adequately, he was so angry.

The plump, friendly woman was still in the tavern when he eventually called on his way back, and so was Father Godscalc, sitting in a settled way before a small, half-empty flask.

Nicholas paused. The woman had her foot on the steps. Godscalc said, ‘If you want them, the chamberlain has given me the addresses of three proper houses. You have one bastard too many already.’ Then he looked again and said, ‘Who did that to you?’

‘Simon’s sister,’ Nicholas said, ‘hit me on the head with a brick.’ He sat down, overwhelmed by the humour of it. He said, ‘The Vatachino were there.’

Godscalc said nothing.

Nicholas said, ‘And Gelis. Gelis van–’

Godscalc said, ‘So what of it? You knew what to expect.’ He waited and then said not unkindly, ‘And they are not alike. You would hardly think they were sisters.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas.

He heard Godscalc throw a coin on the table and get up. Godscalc said, ‘Come. I have a horse. Time you were back on board ship.’

Chapter 10

S
TRANDED WITH THREE
thousand Portuguese and two thousand Burgundians on one of the Pillars of Hercules, Diniz Vasquez was far too stubborn to admit that he had made a mistake in coming to Africa.

From the hill-top fort to which he had been posted, he looked across fourteen miles of water to the opposite Pillar, named Jabal Tariq by the Moors who had occupied the rock until practically yesterday. To his right was the Middle Sea. To his left was the Ocean Sea of the West. Behind him on its narrow peninsula lay the Christian city he had come to relieve, called Septem Fratres by the Romans, and Ceuta today.

The name referred to seven hills and not to any visible record for brotherhood. In seizing it fifty years ago, the King of Portugal had proclaimed a number of charitable aims, such as gaining access to the desert beyond, and hence to the savage blacks of the south whose souls required to be rescued. He wished to stop Barbary pirates from preying on Christian shipping. He wanted to sap Muslim confidence. He had his eye on all the other Moorish garrisons on the coastal strip (which, once dislodged, would have no use for their hinterland cornfields). And he also wanted to remove from unworthy hands the greatest African mart in the West.

All the riches of Africa and the Indies came to Ceuta, brought by caravan up through the Sahara. The Turks might throttle trade in the east, but to Ceuta on thousands of camels came the goods that the Genoese, too, saw and coveted; the rice and the salt, the silks and peppers and ginger, the elephants’ teeth. The slaves. And the gold.

The theory was excellent. In practice, Portugal managed to conquer little but Ceuta. In the outcome, ringed by enemies, they found it impossible to penetrate the Sahara. And the Moors of Ceuta regretfully shifted their caravan terminal a shade to the east, leaving twenty-four thousand stalls crumbling and vacant.

In the years that followed, the displaced Moors returned quite a lot, often with shiploads of friends from Granada, and had to be beaten off once again, with many fine feats of arms. A German knight errant dispatched a Saracen champion here in single combat, during the wave of Christian feeling that followed the fall of Constantinople.

That was when the Duke of Burgundy held his great feast in Lille, where a giant dressed as a Saracen had brought in a weeping damsel, representing Holy Church lamenting oppression, and mounted upon a plaster elephant. Upon which everyone present, including the Duke’s illegitimate sons, had sworn to perform high deeds of arms and wash their hands in the blood of the Infidel. Eleven years ago, that had been.

That was why two of the bastards were here, and not before time: the older would never see forty again. All the commanders were old, and famous for jousting, and anxious about their immortal souls. The knight Simon de Lalaing was probably sixty, and his two sons were no chickens: Ernoul was close by Diniz now.

Ernoul’s cousin had been one of the most famous knights of all time. Ernoul’s father and cousin had jousted in Scotland when Diniz was two, and Ernoul assumed Diniz had heard all about it. Ernoul was bountifully scathing on the subject of skulking Islamic dogs who abandoned their siege the moment the relieving force landed and, instead of offering battle like men, lured soldiers out through the gates and then fell on them.

Skirmishing parties returned with half their numbers or not at all. Guides were few and irresolute. And although heralds emerged and challenges were read out in all the customary language of chivalry, even ordinary decency seemed to have gone. No one replied. Ernoul, who was destined for the Church, had received in a matter of weeks all the reinforcement his faith might have needed. He hated the Saracens.

Diniz Vasquez, who for personal reasons had learned to hate at least one man of Muslim persuasion, began, on the contrary, to find his convictions diminish. He had come because of what had happened on Cyprus, and to escape the clutches of grandfather Jordan. But in defying Jordan, he had left his mother unchampioned, and her livelihood in the hands of an agent.

He had thought – he still thought – that her brother Simon should take care of it all, but of late he had had doubts about the warlike, brilliant Simon. He had had doubts about beauty, in men and in women. He was eighteen years old, and a passionate virgin.

Doubts about beauty, and doubts about faith. Ernoul of Burgundy said, ‘You realise His Holiness might even be dead, and
the Crusade called off before we can join it? Men are living in Paradise who helped fight for Constantinople, and I haven’t killed a Moor since I came here.’

‘Join the next foraging party,’ said Diniz; and then regretted it. The fault was hardly Ernoul’s. Ernoul begged daily to lead the next sally into the hills. Charging, drums beating, into oblivion seemed more proper for a man of birth, a future prince of the Church, than messing about bringing in fodder and unloading storeships. Hoisting in stores was routine: the food supply of Ceuta had never really been interrupted. Diniz had not, after all, come to the relief of a citadel that was in extremis.

He had begun to doubt, even, if he had come to kill Moors. The Portuguese, the Ghenters, the Burgundians fought for the greater glory of God, Christ against Antichrist, as well as for personal redemption. Diniz, son of a trader, had been reared to believe the division less arbitrary. Before coming here, he had fuelled his hatred with the deeds of one Egyptian Mameluke. Now he remembered a great Arab doctor, serving the Christian sick in the horror of Famagusta, with Nicholas at his side. And how in Trebizond, he had been told, Nicholas had taken arms against Turks, but the Turcoman Uzum Hasan had been his ally.

His unseeing eyes found they were watching a galley making heavy weather of crossing the narrows. The Spanish port of Algeciras lay behind her and, once past the Rock, the wind and the current were pushing her east. From the efforts she made to adjust, he saw that she was trying to come into Ceuta.

Afterwards, he remembered asking Ernoul if they were expecting a victualling ship, and being told that they were. It meant casks of arrows, and supplies of powder at least for the bombards, and pikes and bows and crates for the smiths and the armourers. And, usually, a nice selection of fresh fish and meat and some fruit. He helped unload if he had to. It made him feel sick.

Today, being on duty elsewhere, he didn’t have to; and by the time the galley arrived and found a place to drop anchor, Diniz was free and on his way down to the sea-moat and the isthmus, threading past the old souks and crumbling palaces in order to eat and play dice at the castle with a couple of bowmen from Lisbon. The galley’s captain went by, on his way up the stairs to the governor, followed by his clerk with his inkhorn and papers. The captain, he’d heard, was a Ragusan. The scribe was double the size that scribes usually were, and what his cap left uncovered was obscured by the whorls of two grandiloquent eyeglasses. They glinted at Diniz.

Diniz had to get up at midnight to take his turn at the watch on
the walls. He had been there an hour when he became aware that the ship’s clerk was standing beside him. The starlight glimmered on glass, and a voice he had missed for six months addressed him in almost inaudible French. ‘How much did you lose? The man you had on your left is notorious in twenty-five cities.’

Diniz turned, his throat closed. ‘Ah no,’ Nicholas said, and laid a large, calm hand over his. ‘Don’t give me away. Or, if you remember, we shall both be arrested for sodomy.’

He always went to the heart of the trouble. Diniz produced a sound which began as a laugh. He said, ‘It was awful. They made me. I wouldn’t have left you.’

‘I know,’ Nicholas said. ‘Master Michael Crackbene and I have had a conversation about that. Did your grandfather make you come here?’

This time, he managed a proper laugh, although quietly. ‘It was the last thing he wanted.’ And then, with sudden anxiety, ‘They wouldn’t believe me. Have you seen them?’

‘Your grandfather and Simon? No. They’ve both gone. I’ve seen your mother. And Gelis van Borselen is at Lagos.’ The calming grip loosened, and Nicholas, taking off the affair on his nose, settled his arms on the parapet, holding the glass in one hand. A bird cried in the night. He said, ‘So you’ve found your vocation? You are taking the Cross?’

Taking the Cross
. It was the sort of thing the Lalaing brothers were in the habit of saying. Diniz said, ‘Why are you here?’

‘Not because your mother sent me,’ Nicholas said. ‘She seemed … seemed to think I was lying as well. No. I had a call to make anyway. And I wondered if you knew that David de Salmeton was at Lagos? The Vatachino want to buy out your company.’

Doubts about beauty, and doubts about faith. David de Salmeton of the silken hair and feminine hands, annexing the dyeyard in Cyprus. Diniz said, ‘She wouldn’t sell!’

‘She will, to someone,’ Nicholas said. ‘She has at least two other offers. One of them from me.’