Scales of Gold (60 page)

He felt here a hunger for books as great as he had heard to be the hunger for salt, when a man rotting and lost in the rainforest would eat his own arm for the life in it. He saw his first library in the home of the imam, and trod in silence through its chains of rooms, lined with crumbling wood shelves, upon which rested copies of the Chemail of Termedi, the Djana of Essoyouti, the Risala of Abou-Zaid of Kairwan, the Hariri, the Hamadani. He counted two thousand volumes in all.

Returning, he described it to Nicholas. ‘Some damp, some covered with mould, some eaten by insects. The roofs leak, and the air itself weeps, they say, when the summer rains come. How can they be protected? There are books there that I swear have never been read since they were written: that are unique in the world.’

‘Umar showed me,’ said Nicholas. ‘The Qadi’s library is the same. The city is an emporium of knowledge, Greek and Arabic and Hebrew, and unless it is copied it will dissolve as the city dissolves every summer. But it can’t be renewed.’

‘How would you protect it?’ said Godscalc.

He spoke without thinking; and only realised his mistake when Nicholas replied coolly, ‘Do you really want me to tell you?’

Gelis, encouraged by the gentle invitation of Zuhra, ventured to return to the harem at the palace. The attraction, as the deadly heat grew and grew, was the fresh, scented opulence of the baths, now efficiently operational at the expense of her ankles. She said, lying back in their waters, ‘You have so many learned men. Why are there none to care for the city?’

Zuhra, naked, was like an ebony houri from Paradise, with minute pointed breasts and a spine shaped like a lyre. She had just attained her fifteenth birthday. She said, ‘Because they talk of the meaning of life and only slaves care for pumps.’ She broke off. ‘I have spoken unwisely. Your lover is a great man, and powerful. He is as big as my Umar.’

Gelis swallowed water, and returned to the surface coughing. It was not worth correcting. She said, ‘Umar will make a fine husband. You were young when he was captured?’

‘Yes. No one else,’ Zuhra said, ‘has a husband who has travelled so far, and has such powerful friends, and speaks languages. And I shall be his first wife. I shall give him twenty sons: he will hardly need to take others. Does your lover have wives?’

‘Two,’ Gelis said. She was beginning to enjoy herself.

‘Ah!’ said Zuhra wisely, but her eyes had grown very large. ‘And you, for his pleasure? He is a strong man, like Umar. And how many sons does he have?’

‘I’m sorry, I have misled you,’ said Gelis. ‘He has had two wives, but one is dead, and he is unmarried at present. He has no legitimate sons.’

‘So!’ Zuhra said. ‘He is old, like Umar, and is hoping to breed some on you. You are fat, and white, and are like the cows of plenty my father has always favoured, who drop their calves in due season, and make milk, and are fruitful. Why are you laughing?’

‘Because I like you,’ said Gelis, and got herself out of the water, still laughing.

‘Well, you
are
fat and white by her standards,’ Nicholas said, when she described the scene at supper that evening. ‘Why do I never get invited to the baths? I ought to qualify,
minus potentes
, as your mechanical lover.’

‘I shall ask Umar to warn her that you’re not,’ said Gelis. ‘Just then, it seemed a pity to spoil it. As for the baths –’

‘I didn’t mean it,’ said Nicholas.

‘Of course you did,’ Gelis said. ‘I know the rattle of a rutting goat when I hear it. The baths are forbidden. You may, if you are invited, come to one of the entertainments that follow. There’s one tomorrow. Umar will bring you.’

‘It doesn’t sound very licentious,’ Nicholas said.

She said, ‘Then perhaps it needs some attention, like the pumps. If you put your mind to it, you may evolve another Tendeba.’

‘The comparison,’ said Nicholas, ‘leaves something to be desired. If it’s a glutton-feast, I might come. Shall I take a puzzle?’

‘You’ve made another one?’ she said. They sat on the same side of a trestle set up in his chamber, and a black eunuch was serving
them. Another stood by the door. Godscalc was not there, but she was well protected if she wanted to be. Equally, she could have dismissed them both, and no one would have cared. It was a liberal society, that of Timbuktu.

Nicholas had been watching her. He said, ‘Yes. It’s over there. You have to tilt the box so that the ball is steered round the traps.’

‘It looks easy,’ she said.

‘It is,’ he said, ‘until you play it in spectacles. What makes you nervous? The girls? They don’t come when you’re here.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I wondered what Diniz had done with his offering.’

‘Sent her back to Akil,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept mine. She spies on us all, and it’s useful.’

‘But she doesn’t know Flemish,’ said Gelis. ‘Why should Akil spy on us?’

‘Because we might upset the balance of power,’ Nicholas said. He was fishing for bits of duck with his fingers. ‘Akil’s got the authority, and the army, but they don’t want to stay here: they move about; they’re nomads and brigands. The old man stays and rules, and reluctantly gives up what is owed Akil in tax money. He probably cheats, and in return Akil occasionally descends on the city and tries to shake out more profits, which the old man resists.’

‘The Timbuktu-Koy,’ Gelis said.

‘Yes. The Timbuktu-Koy does nothing, as is plentifully obvious, about irrigation, or building, or stock-breeding, or food storage or the simplest measures of defence. But he makes sure the city’s trade is run well, and the imams are respected, and the schools flourish. If he didn’t, Timbuktu wouldn’t make money. If he did it alone, without Akil, he’d probably be tempted to skim off too much for his own use and wreck it. So while these two are at odds, the traders actually flourish. The imposts are not too high, and there’s some sort of order.’

‘So how do we threaten it?’ said Gelis. She forgot to keep her voice even. ‘Damn you! You’ve finished the duck.’

‘Look, I’ve left all the rice. We don’t, at the moment. We might, if we attract other traders with ships. We might, if we were to help the Koy in some way that increased his power. Re-establishing his domestic water system so that you can dance around in the nude isn’t going to upset Akil too much, unless he sees you.’

She said, ‘It didn’t impress you overmuch.’ Now that the days were so hot, the nights, too, were warmer than was sometimes comfortable.

He said, ‘You weren’t dancing. I waited and waited. Anyway, I was already intellectually enslaved. I should have spoken to you
before about what you did on that island. The goats and the lamps.’

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you took obedience for granted. I the ball, and you the master’s hand on the box.’

The eunuch had come with a basin and napkins. His head bent, Nicholas slowly wiped his hands clean. Then he laid his fist on the table. It had a knife upright in it. The eunuch looked at her, and then moved quietly away. Nicholas picked up her hand where it lay and put the knife into it. She let it stand in her grasp. He took his hand away.

He said, ‘I take you for granted as much as it is prudent for any person to do so. I trust you as far as is sensible. I enjoy your company as far as it is allowable. I will banter with you and expect you to banter with me just so far and no further. I have confided in you, by accident, more than was wise but probably not enough to make any difference. I shall not do it again.’

His eyes were grey, and pale, and perfectly steady. He said, ‘It is hot, and we are often alone. You have two weapons, one of which is that knife. I expect you, sometime, to use one, but I don’t want you to use the other.’

She said, ‘I remember. You don’t want me to cut off your hair. But you gave me the knife.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That is what I am trying to tell you. I gave you the knife. I have no cause for complaint. I expect you to use it.’

‘I thought I had used it,’ she said. ‘I thought you had felt it for four months. I thought you knew it had blunted.’

There was a drop of blood on the table. He said, ‘It has bitten you,’ in a wry voice. Then, differently: ‘No. I am sorry, let me take it from you.’ He drew the knife from her fingers and, laying it down, looked at the small cut in her palm.

He said, ‘Too much rhetoric altogether. It’s time I left Timbuktu. You will take the gold to Gregorio?’

She said, ‘You have still to receive it. You have still to leave. You have still to come back.’

There was a silence. She said, ‘So you will come to the harem tomorrow? I might dance.’

‘So might I,’ he said, and got up, and smiled.

He went, next day, to the feast at the palace harem, held when the increasing heat of the day had yielded to the passive warmth of the night. He was a good guest, and a natural entertainer: the invitation brought many more. Gelis, among her own increasing numbers of friends, watched him carolling along with the singers, inventing
stories when the marabouts required it, making music, making verse, talking. He told long jokes in Arabic which made people cry with laughter. Twice, he made her laugh, although she stopped quickly. Zuhra said, ‘I like your man.’

It was a good-humoured, easy society. Sometimes the feast lasted through the night and into the next day, and men and women slept in the shade, while the pastilles of incense were renewed, and the fountains refreshed, and the baskets prepared with fresh pastries and sweets, honey-cakes and wheaten biscuits, kous-kous and pigeons and mutton.

Nevertheless, it had nothing like the cruel, indolent lubricity of a Trebizond. When the banquet was over, men returned to their affairs, and the slippers of Nicholas lay again outside this school or that library, and Gelis found Godscalc again with the camel-drovers, or in some book-store, or sitting at home, drawing and drawing. Not manuscripts, as he might have wanted, but maps.

The last time she discovered him so, it was the end of March. She said, ‘The gold has not come yet.’

He had lifted his head. The heat did not suit him: his big face was blotched and his hair, tangled and thinned, had grown grizzled. He said, ‘Gelis, I will stay till it does.’

‘But you are preparing,’ she said. He was making a rutter, a map that contained all the information he could glean about the roads east. It seemed either overwritten or blank.

He smiled. ‘It is not what you would expect, is it? But guides die. One must have something. And of course, one must prepare. It is a long way, they tell me.’

She said, ‘Is Nicholas helping?’

And Godscalc said, ‘Oh, yes. He has made every practical provision you could think of. As soon as the gold comes in, and has been bought, and has been made secure, we shall leave.’

‘But he doesn’t want to,’ said Gelis.

‘Of course he doesn’t want to,’ said Godscalc with calmness. ‘Why don’t you stop him? You probably could.’

‘I might,’ Gelis said. ‘But I wonder what good it would do? Without him, your chances are lessened. Without you, he would have to stay here until autumn anyway. There seems quite a lot for him to do. He might not go back to Europe at all.’

Godscalc’s gaze came up and met hers. He said, ‘Surely not. Too much rests on it. You remember Gregorio’s letter.’

She remembered every word of Gregorio’s letter, because she had been present every time they had discussed it, before Diniz had left. She knew the Vasquez business was failing; that Lucia, learning that her son Diniz had abandoned her to sail off to
Guinea, had taken ship for Madeira and, bursting in upon Jaime and Gregorio, had been thrown into fits of screaming by the news that Simon her brother had sold his half of the business and gone off to Scotland, and she was a pauper. It was why Bel had gone.

She knew that Martin, the agent of the Vatachino, had appeared in Bruges, and that some crisis in trade was approaching from which the Charetty manager was trying to shield the two girls. She knew that Julius, with whom once, at a very young age, she had thought herself in love, had sent a long and sombre report of the Bank’s doings in Venice, although she had not been shown the figures. She knew there was what Nicholas thought was a piece of good news: there was a new Pope, and he was a Venetian.

When Diniz left, she in her turn had given Nicholas every opportunity to think and talk about Gregorio’s news; about the gold and its future. She had enough van Borselen blood to understand about trade, and she could ask intelligent questions. Another man, she thought with annoyance, would have enjoyed it, but very soon Nicholas diverted the talk and presently Godscalc also, she saw, ceased to mention Europe himself and discouraged her when she opened the subject.

It was clear enough why. Nicholas, these last weeks, was steeling himself for the forthcoming expedition by not thinking beyond it. And Godscalc was brutally held to his cause, which hoped for the strong arm of Nicholas in the future, but which also needed it now. Gelis said, to the air, ‘Would anyone like to take a small wager?’

It was then April, and unpleasantly hot, and dangerously close to the rains. Far off on the Gambia, sick and weary and thankful, a boatload of people strained their eyes to see the masts of a ship, but long before the mangroves gave them their view, they heard voices shouting in Florentine and Portuguese, and saw shooting towards them a primitive boat, in which rocked the familiar persons of Melchiorre and Fernão, with other remembered faces cheering behind. And around them flocked the boats of King Gnumi Mansa.

The drums had done their work well. Diniz and Bel, Vito and Saloum had the welcome they deserved, and the crew of the
Niccolò
, weeping, saw their fellows again.

Three-quarters-way through April, the
Niccolò
left with five hundred pounds of pure gold for the north, sailing out to the sea past the empty wharf where the
Fortado
had once lain in wait for her. But Raffaelo Doria was dead, and the drums had carried the news long since to Crackbene, who had recognised that it was time to take his cargo home, and reap the rewards of patience and loyalty.

He had two months’ start. So it was that the
Fortado
arrived in Madeira before anyone, with the news that Diniz Vasquez had perished. For on board was Filipe, who had shot him.