Scales of Gold (41 page)

Nicholas had seen them. Gliding in and out of the shallows, never approaching the ship; a chain of swift, shallow troughs with their double line of upright, wing-capped, white-shirted Negroes with their short-shafted paddles; wholly unrelated to the eager mercantile canoes of the coast, heaped with meal bags and kola nuts. Nicholas said, ‘What will happen?’

‘You will be sent for,’ said Loppe. ‘And you go.’ He added no warnings. So far up the river, there was little to be done, they both knew, if the Kings took against them.

That night, the
San Niccolò
lay at anchor off the muddy banks of the river with their singing, croaking, rustling life, and the thirty-one men and two women on board passed the hours sometimes in sleep; sometimes listening to the cries of night birds and the sudden gurgle and swish of cloven water, or the low voice of Filipe, turning the hour-glass, and the mutter of Melchiorre, responding. Misted with wings, the great lanterns bloomed in the darkness, oiling the running waters with gold and touching the sleeping figures on deck, and blotted out, for fleeting seconds, by the leafy membranes of bats, silent as the watchers who waited unseen on either side, their shallow boats deep in the reeds. And
just above the threshold of silence, there vibrated the throb of conversing drums.

Nicholas spent the night with the crew in the open, his pallet laid in the quiet of the after-deck. Twice Jorge crossed to kneel and talk in a murmur. The first time, it proved to be nothing of consequence. When next he paused by his bedside Nicholas made room for him to sit on the mattress while he pulled himself up in the half-dark, embracing the large sheeted hump of his knees.

None slept completely bare with women on board, but both of them were stripped to the waist, so that Nicholas could see the white seams of old wounds furrowing the other man’s sinewy torso, and guess from Jorge’s curious gaze how much of his own chequered past could be read from his naked shoulders and arms, his ribs and belly and breast. Jorge said surprisingly, ‘You should appear thus to the King. You are going, this time, ashore?’

‘I should rather appear thus to his wives,’ Nicholas said, utilising one dimple with caution. ‘Of course I shall go, as you will, if we’re invited to meet Gnumi Mansa. I should like to leave behind the boy and the priest, but short of force I don’t think I can contrive it. We shall have to ensure their well-being by other means.’

‘But the priest must see the King!’ da Silves said. He lowered his voice. ‘Or else why are we here?’

‘I’ve told you. I’ll do what I can,’ Nicholas said. ‘But I’ve got to repeat. He and the boy are in more danger from the
Fortado
than you or I are.’

‘More danger than your servant?’ da Silves said.

It was clear enough whom he meant. Nicholas said, ‘Lopez is not my servant,’ and then wished that he hadn’t.

‘No. Forgive me. But if Lopez who is not your servant is in little danger, it is because the
Fortado
thinks him valuable. Lopez knows the source of the gold. He is going to lead you into Wangara. That is why you let him squander your cargo of slaves.’

‘Wangara. Is that why you are here?’ Nicholas said.

The half-lit face with its glimmering eyes seemed to change. They were very close, their voices low. ‘You gave an undertaking to my King, and to me. You promised souls and gold for the Order.’

Nicholas remained, with some effort, where he was. A challenge over souls and gold he had expected. Now he perceived they were also talking about Loppe and Diniz and presumably even (remembering Ochoa’s merriment) certain rumours from Cyprus and Trebizond. Making enormous adjustments, Nicholas picked his way towards safer ground. ‘Jorge, what Lopez knows hardly matters. Say you do find the way to Wangara. You’ll never induce
the tribe who live there to show where the gold lies, or where they take it to barter.’

‘And that is your answer?’ Jorge said. ‘What do these animals do with their gold? What would the Church do by comparison? You would hardly have to touch them – one blast of your cannon would persuade them.’

‘I expect it would,’ Nicholas said. ‘And then what? Another blast for the middlemen of the silent trade? They don’t know themselves where the gold comes from, and they certainly won’t step aside while we track it down and usurp their business. So do we kill them all too?’

‘You talk in extremes,’ said Jorge da Silves. ‘Did you murder your potential rivals when you sought to share in an alum monopoly, corner the Turkish supply of raw silk, control the royal Cypriot sugar estates? Some of them, perhaps; but not all. Do you know, sometimes I have a bad dream about you. Sometimes I think you and your Lopez want to track down the Wangara gold for yourselves, not for Portugal.’

There was a silence. From the invisible bank came the plash of an idling paddle and, further off, the pealing cries of a hyena, answered by a rush of cackling sound. The drums pattered. Nicholas changed his position. He said, ‘If you are here for the Wangara mines, then you may as well go home.’

‘You do want them!’ said Jorge. His eyes gleamed.

Nicholas said, ‘Every white man on the Guinea coast wants them. Doria for the Vatachino. Gomes, when he came here, for Prince Henry. You. And me. Of course I want them, but I’m not going to get them; I’m not going to try. Mention them to Gnumi Mansa or Bati Mansa and they’ll kill us, as they would Doria and Crackbene. They’d slaughter anyone they thought would betray them, including Lopez, which is why neither you nor I will ever ask him whether or not he knows the way.’

‘I look at you, and still I cannot be sure,’ the master said. ‘You want gold. It seems to me sometimes that you are interested in nothing but gold. You insisted on promoting Lázaro, and it is useless.’

‘Vicente is a good trainer,’ said Nicholas.

‘Oh, yes. But now the ship has half his attention. The ship should be your concern, too.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Nicholas, ‘Of course it should. I must have seemed a very poor comrade.’ He paused. ‘Over the gold. I am hurt that you doubt me, but it’s easily tested. When we leave the caravel at the end of the Gambia, you will be with me. I am not going to Wangara, but I mean to buy gold on our route to the east,
at the caravan posts where the middlemen bring it. Lopez will take us to these.’

‘If,’ Jorge said, ‘he has not already gone to Wangara with Raffaelo Doria and Crackbene. He is not your servant, you say.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘But he is still my friend, as you are, and friends do not betray one another. I am thirsty. Will you give me a drink from your flask?’

Their hands touched as he received it; he drank, and rubbed his eyes as if weary, and presently the Portuguese spoke to him softly and, rising, went away. Bel of Cuthilgurdy came up from below and lowered herself where he had been. ‘Oh Christ no,’ Nicholas said.

‘I woke,’ she said. ‘I thought ye were going to marry him. Will he go for the Wangara gold on his own?’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. She had her head in a towel again.

‘Unless he bribes Lopez or follows Lopez and you. Will Doria go on his own?’

‘No. He’s waiting for Lopez and me,’ Nicholas said. ‘That’s why the Vatachino have sent him.’ He resettled himself, crossing his legs like a Turk, his hands light at his ankles. The air seemed freer already.

‘And you’re not going to Wangara, you say.’

‘You heard me say it,’ he said.

‘Oh, aye,’ she said and, leaning forward, smacked a fly off his chest and pitched it aside. She said, ‘And tomorrow. Ye thought the priest and the lad might be expendable. D’you mean to protect them?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Nicholas said. ‘Till death us do … No. That came from some of my other marriages.’

‘Um,’ she said. ‘But will ye manage to save them, d’you think? You’re namely for guile, but maybe it’s less a talent for tactics, and more a kind of instinct of nature like the beasts have. Whiles it works, and whiles it burns the skin off your elbow.’

‘Elbow? You’ve been listening to Godscalc,’ he said. ‘I think it should be all right. The
Fortado
will have showered Gnumi Mansa with gifts, but we have some other credentials. Having freed the slaves, for example.’

‘Well, it’ll prove your poor business sense,’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy. ‘Which might be an asset in its way. But will ye get thanks for it? I thought the King was in there selling rival blacks with the best of them.’

‘He didn’t sell Saloum,’ Nicholas said. ‘I haven’t wanted to disappoint the padre by telling him, but when we bought Saloum, we set free a marabout.’

‘I once had them all round a hat,’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy. ‘But they got tashed very quickly.’

The dough-like face remained, as ever, unchanging, and his sense of ease, as ever, increased. He said, on impulse, ‘You do this for me. Why not for Gelis?’

‘You’re easy,’ she said. ‘And maybe ye get frightened more often. And don’t flatter yourself. If you make mistakes, we all suffer.’ And getting up, she hitched her clothes and walked off below.

Chapter 21

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, Nicholas made no mistakes that he knew of. As the
San Niccolò
sailed the thirty tortuous miles to her next anchorage, the canoes that haunted the shores slowly grew bolder; and by the time she reached the place called Tendeba, they had silently surrounded the ship. Then Loppe, dressed in white as they were, went to the rail and spoke to the oarsmen.

Nicholas heard his voice as he stood back with da Silves, waiting. A beautiful voice, deep and gentle in speech; high as a woman’s when curving and soaring in counterpoint. A man whose musicality could encompass the Byzantine ritual of Trebizond and the purity of Gregorian chant, learned in the high Alpine snows of the passes. But a man who did not sing here, in the country he came from.

Loppe had tried one dialect and then another, and was understood. The sun, a few hours past its zenith, lit the white caps and shirts of the King’s messengers, and struck flashes from the sharpened iron that lay ready in every canoe. Loppe turned and said, ‘The lord Gnumi Mansa hears that there are guests in the river, and offers them hospitality. He will receive twelve men, none of them armed, but they may bring what presents they wish. They must also bring an interpreter.’

‘Tell him that we are honoured,’ said Nicholas. ‘We shall obey his every wish, and shall come when he desires.’

Godscalc had a portable altar. He carried it ashore an hour later in its box, along with pyx and vestments, chalice and censer and incense in the soft leather bag he had brought from Bruges to Venice, from Venice to Ancona, from Ancona to Lagos and south. When he met the priests of Prester John, he would set his crucifix beside theirs. Standing beside Bel he said, ‘You say Saloum is a Mohammedan. I am sad.’

And Bel said, ‘If he wasn’t, you’d get no hearing at all, and
Senhor Jorge would feed you to the big lizards. I wish I was coming with you.’

He was glad that she wasn’t. The two women stayed on board, and the two or three crewmen that were sick, and sixteen able men, including the boy Filipe and Melchiorre and Manoli, two of the three expert seamen from the
Ciaretti
. Bel and Gelis would be safe.

For himself, Godscalc was not afraid; only anxious in case of failure. The silent rowers who took them ashore did not speak; they landed among thick, stubborn mangroves and followed a path rich in mud to a grassy clearing as wide as a park, beyond which, on rising ground, he saw the straw roofs and smoke of a village. Diniz said, ‘There was a snake; they say they can swallow a goat. Did you see the snake on the path? Did you see the red and green birds? Look at that tree!’

The tree was immense: the kind he now knew was called a Baobab; perhaps twenty feet in circumference, and set in the centre of the broad meadow, with its shadow, a great pool of darkness, lying beneath it. Then he saw that the shadow was tenanted.

Some three hundred warriors, their arms glittering, stood in a crescent beneath it, and in the centre, upon a carpet, sat a single black figure of Oriental obesity encased – thick arms, rounded shoulders, immense thighs – in some twenty yards of flowered Florentine silk of the kind exported by the Medici in Bruges at five to six ducats a yard. On the King’s head was a crown of white ostrich feathers, and his ears, arms, neck and ankles were hooped and studded and bangled with gold. Behind him stood a group of chieftains in coloured gowns of a less expensive style, and to one side, manacled to a stake, lay a leopard.

Nicholas said, ‘My lord,’ and stepped forward. He bowed, without kneeling. Loppe, behind him, repeated the phrase, and a greeting in Mandingua. The King, ignoring Loppe and the two black men at his back, gazed in silence first at Nicholas, and then at Godscalc and Diniz; and then set himself to scrutinise the six seamen, beginning with Jorge da Silves, who bowed also. The King’s eyes returned to Nicholas. He spoke.

The words sounded angry: made more so by the jet of saliva that shot from a vacant socket between the King’s purple lips. His eyes, compressed by fat, seemed to glare, and as he spoke he scrabbled within the fringe of grey beard at his jaw as if his fingers were stinging or palsied. Loppe, listening, turned back to Nicholas.

‘My lord King says he thinks the white men must believe him rich, that they appear begging at his door so frequently. He says he has nothing to sell, but will offer them a gourd of wine, since he is a great lord. First, he wishes to ask if it is true that they travel with a sorcerer.’

‘I am no sorcerer,’ said Father Godscalc in anger, striding forward. From under the tree, light as wind, there came a muted rustle, and assagais and arrow-tips twinkled. Nicholas looked at Loppe. Father Godscalc thumped his box on the ground, unlatched its sides, and standing to his full monolithic height repeated, ‘I am no sorcerer. I am a man of God, from the same Church as the abbot of Soto de Cassa who came here two years ago to instruct you in the Christian faith, and who baptised you under its laws. Why do you use the name Gnumi Mansa when all the world knows you swore to worship none but God the Father, in token of which you bear the great name of the dead Infante Henry, whom you called brother?’