Scales of Gold (57 page)

‘But then,’ Umar said, ‘you could not go to Ethiopia.’

It was like a dance, Godscalc thought: each of the innocent proposals represented a hidden interest; no one acting from purely unselfish motives except himself and, he thought, Bel. Nicholas said, ‘I haven’t forgotten Ethiopia. That is why I have said, let us wait two weeks until the caravan comes. Then we shall talk again.’

There followed a curious two weeks. The sun blazed; the city seethed with activity; and no one now slept even at noon at Kabara its port, for the linking pool and canal were already shrinking, and soon the river would fall, and all the easy trading would cease.

The rains that formed the Joliba fell from February to July upon the distant hills at its source and took a year to creep along its full length. By July the height of the flood had reached the low-lying land two hundred miles before Timbuktu and turned it into the single vast lake they had crossed, weakening and slowing the surge so that Kabara did not enjoy true high water till January. Then from April to July, the river diminished to its lowest, most difficult level. So the harvests by the Joliba took their season from the flux of the river, and so did the gold-mining, confined to the space between January and May, between the fall and rise of the flood. By summer, the city would pant and crumble in silence.

Umar was prepared to talk of these things, and Godscalc listened. The rift between Umar and Nicholas had ended, and the friendship between them, always positive, seemed heightened by the past contemplation of loss.

It was more difficult to persuade Umar to talk about Prester John, and when he did so, the news always seemed to be bad. The travellers who crossed the desert to Cairo spoke of the way to Ethiopia as a hopeless journey through waterless sands or, further south, of dripping, shuddering rainforests full of animals and of heathens who ate human flesh. Beyond that were terrible mountains, terrible even for travellers, and impassable for a Christian army.

‘Is that what you fear?’ Godscalc said to Umar, when for the second time he had heard such a tale. ‘Yet you knew I had sworn to find my way there if possible. I have undertaken to you and the Koy not to parade my faith, or attempt to obtain converts here. Those heathens you speak of are the ones I must see. And if, as you say, the way is too hard, then I shall bring back notice of that, and you will be spared visits from others less amenable. I think I am being fair.’

‘You are never less than fair,’ had said Umar gently. ‘If you wish to go, none will stop you.’

They had seen the gold. It lay with other goods behind locked doors in the large storeyed warehouses where the resident merchants had their homes, and where the traders came to stay and to buy. The central courtyards were full of roaring camels, and scavenging birds jostled about on the roof-tops. There was, as Umar had said, a reasonable amount. There was enough to make a return trip to Lagos worth while, if they wanted to make it. They
entered into the first preliminary talks that might, in time, lead to a bargain; and, before he left, Nicholas sometimes mended their pumps.

It amused Gelis, Godscalc saw, this eternal preoccupation of Nicholas’s with the practical. The rusting machinery of the palace gave him pain, and he arranged twice to go there, and spent a contented few hours in some courtyard. He was not excluded from the public part of the harem, although Gelis had never returned. The day after their audience, the Timbuktu-Koy had sent young girl slaves to serve Diniz and Nicholas.

They were older than Tati had been, and experienced. Nicholas did what Godscalc had given him leave to do, and the priest hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry. He was sorry that Diniz, too, should find restraint impossible, but he kept silent. They were neither of them promiscuous, and the governor had had his reasons. If Bel and Gelis also noticed, they had said nothing to him.

Umar had thought he was referring to it when, walking in the street with him one day, Godscalc mentioned slaves. They were talking Flemish and could not be understood, but even so, Umar slowed a little before he spoke. ‘They are both young men, Father; and without wives.’

‘You’re over-tolerant,’ Godscalc said. ‘You are not old, and celibate so far as I know. But that was not what I meant. I questioned your logic. You accept slavery here, despite all that occurred on the
Niccolò
?’

‘You think we exploit them?’ said Umar.

‘I think, from what I have seen, that you treat them as the Portuguese do,’ Godscalc said. ‘In a wealthy community, they are needed as servants, and seem happy and comfortable in that role. They wash, they market, they cook, they carry burdens, they bring water. They tend gardens and plant herbs and run errands. We said on the
Niccolò
that the lives of such slaves were pleasanter than they would have been with their families, except that they are not hired by their own choice, and have lost their homes and their dignity. And the more they are needed, the greater their value in money, and so the trade is debased.’

He had spoken with vehemence, but Umar showed no offence. They were stopped, twice, by acquaintances before he replied. Then he said, ‘I told you that you were free to go to Prester John’s land, but if I am not eager, then this is the reason. Yes, the slaves here are happy, although some masters are more just, as in every country, than are others. They come to the city from the lands round about. Some were brought in or were captured, but many came from choice, and most of these were idol-worshippers from
the forest, who are now of my faith. Also, at present the city is orderly: it cannot itself be plundered of people. Hence the situation is very different from the coast, where tribe despoils tribe, and the traders pass up and down every hour, collecting their booty. It could become like that here, if the Christians come.’

‘Or even if the Mamelukes come,’ Godscalc said.

‘Yes,’ said Umar. ‘You might find black faces in strange places then. I think I see Nicholas over there. I am glad you asked me. I should perhaps tell you that it was not intended that I should be celibate. My family have chosen a wife. Her name is Zuhra.’

Godscalc halted in his surprise. He said, ‘You are happy?’ He wondered if Nicholas knew.

Umar smiled. ‘It is my duty. Of course.’

‘Then you plan to stay here?’ He realised too late that it was an uncivilised question.

‘I think,’ said Umar, ‘that Europe will manage without me.’

Gelis, too, became familiar with the narrow lanes of the city: the sludge walls and soft, rounded corners where the rains had dissolved the grey rough-cast and left melting, half-repaired shapes of booths and houses and workshops, shrines and markets and mosques. The secret of baking mud-bricks and using mortar had come, it was said, from the masons of the towns of Dia and Djenne, two hundred and fifty miles to the south-west; but there was clay to be had at Djenne, whereas the villages along the Joliba made their bricks from mud mixed with gravel and dung, so that families lived through the rains in homes made of half-liquid ordure.

In Timbuktu there were mud-and-straw huts on the outskirts, but the wealthy could afford to import something more permanent. Many of the merchants’ houses were built of clay-covered stone as was the Andalusian mosque, although the rest seemed to cling to the primitive fashion, rising tall as monuments made of cuneiform blocks and webbed with shadows cast by the rods men scaled like flies to repair them. The exception was the Grand Mosque they called Jingerebir, built in the style of the palace and likewise mismanaged, so that water for the ablutions had to be brought from outside.

Nicholas had not been allowed there, but the pieces of its irrigation system had somehow found their way to his lodging, so that whenever Gelis entered the courtyard, she burned her ankles on fragments of metal. Then, apologising, he would remove them into the shade and resume what he had been doing, which was sometimes nothing to do with metal at all, but an idle pastime such as carving a
farmuk
, with which he entertained the hordes of black children from the slaves’ quarters.

Gelis had seen one before: he had sent a toy like it from Florence when Tilde de Charetty was a child, and she had tried to force Tilde de Charetty to give it to her. It was only a split wooden ball that rode up and down on a string, although he could make it do much more than that. She stayed sometimes with the children, watching him with it. Watching him. He was always careful to talk to her, and once remarked on her new robe. She wondered what sort of compliments he paid to his little black girl, who went about wearing nothing at all.

She had a new robe because she and Bel had been visited by a man with bales of cloth made in Florence. The man said his employer had some from Syria, too. The regular Barbary galleys left Pisa in April and unloaded at Tunis, Algiers and Oran before going to Almería and Málaga in July or later. The goods they brought came south over the al-Sahra with the next camel-train. They would know when it came.

Gelis and Bel bought what he had, and even found someone to sew it. Directed to a wide portico covered with straw, they had discovered a group of white-shirted men seated cross-legged beneath it, their black heads stooped over their needles. To one side, an old man read aloud, a great book in his hands.

He was robed, and had a pair of Murano spectacles clipped on his nose. Gelis said, ‘So how did that come about? Maybe the price of the girl?’

‘Do ye want to take her place?’ Bel of Cuthilgurdy enquired. ‘If ye don’t, dinna mention it. The folie love of lichory is doing well enough in this city without you. There have been, I understand, some advance negotiations in the matter of gold: a case of making wee, tempting pre-emptions while the prices are high. If ye look over the wall at the Sankore, ye’ll see the scholars all walking about bumping into each other.’

‘In return for what?’ Gelis had said.

Oh, the same,’ Bel had answered. ‘Gold or such-like. The doctors and imams here are all merchants. Ye remember what Father Godscalc was saying. It’s like Bishop Kennedy of St Andrews. If you can read the Good Book and count the holy angels of paradise, you might as well get into business.’

Gelis remembered. She remembered Godscalc’s expression on returning from his first excursion into that part of the city they had so far heard of and discredited, because the pursuit of learning for its own sake, the ability to set up schools and attract great men of letters, the purchase of writing materials, the hiring of scribes and the formation of great collections of books were the privilege of a few princes in Europe whose courts scholars were proud to attend. Centres of high education did not occur on the edge of the Sahara.

Of course, Muslim teaching had come early to Africa with the traders – even before Timbuktu itself had been founded. Under the Mali empire there had grown a tradition of learning. In Timbuktu, the first teachers, they said, had been black; and from Umar’s own family in Kabura, by the Joliba flood-plain. Tuareg settlers grew rich, and joined the ranks of traders and scholars, to whom in turn the ruler gave lavish concessions. Pilgrims came to dead scholars’ tombs, and students arrived from the south. The city became endowed with
Baraka
, divine grace. The word was written – they had seen it – in the palace. It was also thus, they had heard, in Granada.

They had been told there was a university within the arcades of the mosque of Sankore, the disciple of Cairo and Damascus. They had been told of pupils sponsored by merchants who, becoming distinguished pedants themselves, set up their classes in the courts of their houses and taught logic and rhetoric, grammar and history, prosody and astronomy so long as there was light.

Moving astonished through the city they had heard the calls to prayer, but also the rhythms of chanting, the drone of the solitary voice interspersed with responses, to the accompaniment of drumbeats and piping. Some of the choruses were formed of the shrill voices of children reciting the Koran as they exchanged their native Mandingua for stumbling Arabic. Others had not been young at all.

Godscalc had come back from his first visit to such men in silence, and then had talked for two hours. Bel said, ‘And what did Nicholas make of them?’

‘Was Nicholas there?’ Gelis had said.

‘Yes,’ said Godscalc. ‘It was Nicholas who found out the professors were traders. He stayed behind to look at some goods.’ His voice was sour. It conveyed a disappointment that Gelis saw reflected more sorely in Umar. Umar had thrown open the casements of Timbuktu’s spiritual wealth, and Nicholas had responded, as ever, to the dulcet call of personal profit.

Bel said, ‘What do you expect? With what he has on his shoulders, he doesna want to sit down and speir whether Moses lived before Homer.’

‘I see that,’ Gelis said. ‘He prefers to sit down and mend pumps. Pumps don’t argue.’

The next day, she found a teacher who would instruct her in Arabic, and thereafter visited him daily. The lesson lasted an hour, and she spent it poring over a washed wooden tablet, learning to recite the
Fatiha
alongside thirty-two black
pequeninos
, none of them aged over six. She felt ill with excitement.

The salt caravan arrived just before March. Diniz heard of it first, and burst in among them, his face blazing. Nicholas was carving a puzzle. He said, ‘Well, you know what will happen. The merchants go to deal, and the camels unload in the appropriate storehouses. Then they return to the
abaradiou
to rest and wait with their drovers. Until the storehouses are full, we do nothing.’

‘We could go and look,’ Diniz said.

‘We could,’ Nicholas said. ‘The traders would assume us to be rivals.’

‘Jorge’s whistle,’ remarked Bel. It had become a team-word for doom-laden tactics. It didn’t stop Diniz from borrowing robes and, convincingly turbaned, trotting a mule to the north of the city and going to see for himself.

It was not one of the largest caravans: not the ten-thousand-beast
azalai
of May, but there were more than a thousand animals in it, swaying in with slabs of salt on each flank, and the drovers trudging between them. The smell, the groans of the camels, the shrill cries of the men from the haze of sand that surrounded them were as thrilling as if every animal had been loaded with gold.