Scales of Gold: The Fourth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘The way you struck Filipe,’ Gelis said. ‘You lost your temper. How childish.’

  ‘I wanted a matching pair,’ Nicholas said, displaying a shell in each hand. The half-healed pits of her bite crossed one palm; the cuts of the hour-glass the other. He said, ‘I take it, then, that despite the evident dangers, you have spurned my passionate pleading and intend to stay with the ship? Bel will be surprised.’

  ‘Arrive in Ethiopia,’ Gelis said, ‘if you really wish to ruin all Bel’s predictions. What are you aiming for?’ The oyster shells, like two blinkers, filled the cavities of either eye, and the date stone stuck in his teeth, primed and canted.

  ‘That,’ he said; and spat; and heard her exclamation as the stone landed. There was a hiss and a stink of hot oil. He uncovered his eyes and found himself, rather pleased, in total darkness. He had managed to extinguish the lamp. ‘I thought I could do it,’ he said.

  The wick reeked. He could hear her breathing; she sneezed. He got up and pulled back the curtain to let in air, and some light from the deck, and also to show the way out. She accepted, he supposed, that it was not only a joke, but a form of dismissal. As she rose, he looked to see how much she minded.

  He expected contempt. He wouldn’t have objected, this time, to contempt mixed with a tinge of amusement. He saw, as she went, only her habitual indifference beneath which lay something else that, as always, he could only guess at.

  He went off to deal with Filipe.

  Chapter 20

  NEXT MORNING, obedient to whatever prompting, Father Godscalc held a special mass for the San Niccolò, entering perilous waters, as was in any case seemly for a ship of her name on that day.

  In Venice, the first week in December would have brought cold high tides and raw air, and Margot would be opening the shutters of the Casa di Niccolò upon banks of grey mist through which boat would pass ghostly boat, as Julius travelled to the Rialto to balance ducat against groat and écu, and to count his reserves. This week in Murano, friends would warm their hands at the winter-long glowing furnaces of Marietta Barovier, who might tease her timid protégé the Florentine into raising a glass to a Venetian Pope.

  In Bruges, ice might have filmed the canals, requiring Cristoffels to warm the pumps in the dyeyard, and Tilde and Catherine de Charetty to light the fire in their office as they paid out their wages and pored over their ledgers, and worried about the future of the Medici agents, now that the old man Cosimo, pater patriae, was dead.

  And on two distant islands, the wheels of the sugarcane mills would be turning fast in the rain. On Madeira Gregorio, anxious, resentful, determined, would toil at his desk, and perpetually plod the muddy track between Ponta do Sol and Funchal; while on the other … The King of Cyprus would now be twenty-five years old and tired, no doubt, of his stolen mistress and petulant, perhaps, because David de Salmeton was no longer there; or even regretting, briefly, the banishment of his once-cherished Nikko. Zacco’s mother would want her son to marry. His queen might already be chosen. The King of Cyprus would not, this St Nicholas Day, need to think of Famagusta.

  And on the Guinea coast, one man celebrated his twenty-fourth Feast in tropical heat, and high expectation, and enough foreboding to make the blood race, and obliterate all the abominations of the past. On the San Niccolò, the caulking-pitch spat and sizzled in the shimmering radiance while below, the horses drooped, listless. Dolphins shouldered aside the warm sea, and sometimes the vast back of a whale rose and dipped, while sea birds perpetually swirled and swooped and perched on the caravel’s rails and spars. And across the water the sounds of Africa reached the ship as well as the smells: an outburst of faint, rapid drumming would strike the ear from among the tall trees behind the green of the mangroves, although no huts could be seen, and there might be nothing on the beaches but the delicate white plumes of the egrets.

  In time, the drumming became intermittent and faint, and as the final hours of the approach to the Gambia went by, there came to those on the San Niccolò another experience: the sensation of being watched; a conviction that the distant trees held more than wildlife; that the movements among the dunes were not always those of birds. And finally men became visible, gazing intently from the shore or paddling their canoes through the winding shallows until, as if by consensus, there came the moment when they came darting out to the ship and, rocking, encircled her.

  Ten years before, poison arrows from these same canoes had greeted all foreigners. Now Loppe said, ‘I will go to them. It is safe,’ and slipping down the side stepped into the nearest, sitting hunkered in the deep wooden cavity.

  Anything Loppe wished to do, Nicholas allowed. He couldn’t keep perfectly still, but paced idly back and forth until from the boat the massive shoulders rose, the white teeth gleamed, the face turned, and Loppe was running up the ladder and back, with a basket of fish and the news for which he had taken the risk. ‘They say a fine blue ship came down a day and a night ago and stopped at the island by the Gambia estuary. They say she bought all that traders could sell, and did not turn back, but turned into and sailed up the river, seeking more goods and gold. They say the under-Kings Gnumi Mansa and Bati Mansa will receive them and us, if we mean to follow, for these lords rule over parts of the region, and both are greedy. They say we should trust them only if we have many presents.’

  ‘The same Kings!’ Diniz said. ‘The same Kings the caravels met! Gnumi Mansa is a Christian, isn’t he, Nicholas? And Bati held a great congress for Diogo Gomes, far up the river. How they will welcome the padre!’

  ‘We hope so,’ said Nicholas. ‘But time has passed since Gnumi was dipped by an abbot, and I doubt if Bati was ever brought to the fold of the Faithful. We can only hope that if they possess any venom, they expend it on the Fortado. For, my braves, it seems she is not sailing home: she is ahead of us.’

  There was no need to underline the implications of that, and no time, then, to explore them. Ahead, within the vast lake of its estuary, lay the mouth of the Gambia, cumbered with shoals and flats and a tidal stream of two knots on the ebb which posed problems seldom found in the Middle Sea, and would test, very soon, the kind of crew the San Niccolò had made for herself. Let them enter the Gambia. There would be time enough after to plan.

  Jorge awaited slack water, and launched the caravel boldly into its passage. With a lookout at the masthead and two in the bows; with the lead splashing and splashing and the ship answering keenly as a veteran to her helm, the caravel threaded her way from hazard to hazard. The master had been to the Gambia outfall before. He had the measure of its famous swamp of an island, barely one mile by three, and knew to sail its length to the preferred anchorage in the sandy mud of its eastern end. He moved cautiously, watching for masts.

  The Fortado was not there, nor was there sign of any vessel other than the upturned canoes on the beach. There was no evident danger, but much emerging inconvenience: a lack of any one of the services that Arguim and Senagana had possessed: no store of timber or rope; no provision for meal or for water. There was scant welcome as well: the few blacks they’d seen had vanished by the time Jorge took his small party ashore, tying up to the drunken jetty some exasperated ship’s carpenter had knocked together and left. Beyond was beaten sand and bushes and trees, and a few mud-brick huts, and a row of crooked boughs upholding tattered straw awnings over nothing but pressed and mat-patterned sand.

  Jorge reported an hour later to Nicholas. ‘There’s nothing left. Doria bought what they had, and took all the provisions and even the water. The traders had a little gold to sell, but not much. They’re sullen: Doria bullied them, and told them we would be worse, and had almost nothing to give them, which is near enough the truth: we must save what we have for the Kings. I don’t want to careen here. There’s an island we can get to tomorrow, where we’ll have peace to look at our patches.’

  Nicholas said, ‘Did Doria say where he was going?’

  ‘No. Just that he wanted to trade up the river. It is nine days’ sa
il, as we know, to the rapids. Of course, they say he means to land there and go further. They say he seeks the source of the gold.’

  ‘What did they think of that?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘They laughed,’ Jorge said. ‘They always do. Don’t you hear the drums? Long before any ship can arrive, all seven hundred miles of the river know what is happening.’

  ‘Then,’ said Nicholas, ‘there is no particular reason for stealth. All right. I assume it’s safe to stay here at anchor tonight, and move on in the morning. Unless the padre wants to reconnoitre the settlement?’

  ‘I should go ashore,’ Godscalc said. ‘There may be men of faith, left by other expeditions.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said Jorge da Silves. ‘Father, it is for you to say.’

  ‘Happy?’ said Nicholas to Bel of Cuthilgurdy.

  ‘There were tortoises on the beach,’ Diniz said. ‘And I saw a silk-cotton tree with an ape in it.’

  ‘So you see,’ continued Nicholas to Bel of Cuthilgurdy, ‘the whole expedition has been worth while.’

  The next afternoon (the island having proved deficient in grace), the caravel turned her back on the ocean and set her course upstream and into the interior, stopping only to deliver four of her slaves to the river-bank. The Mandinguas departed unbaptised, and with a frail enough prospect of ever reaching their homes. Godscalc took leave of them miserably and they embraced him; and wept on parting with Bel and with Loppe, watched without pleasure by Jorge da Silves.

  Instead of more than a score of slaves he had two, but at least they were of high quality, and one of them, the bearded and articulate Saloum, even offered himself as a pilot, for he had used the waterway of the Gambia, he said, many times.

  And indeed, as the river unfolded its steaming, tortuous course, full of currents and shallows and freakish suckings and surges of tide, Saloum proved their most precious possession. He it was who, repairs and careening over, guided them from point to point on the banks, enabling Father Godscalc to attempt to land at this village or that, so that he could see what religion, if any, the inhabitants followed, and talk to them with Loppe or Saloum as his interpreter. There was no immediate hurry, Nicholas said.

  For Diniz there was no hurry: it was a time of rapture. The shining, slow-moving river, three miles wide, moved beneath him, obeying its own motion and that of the moon, while the seamen deployed all their skills to harness the uneven wind and turn back and forth among the sandbanks and islands and streams, between one low, leafy green bank and the other.

  Strange birds soared over their mastheads and disappeared in blurs of scarlet and green, dun and rose-colour into the dense margins of bushes and trees, from which came a wicked chorus of noise, a screaming and twittering, mixed with the hoots and cries of unknown animals; while by night the frogs and cicadas performed a different chorus.

  Impelled by the special enthusiasm of Diniz as well as the padre, the San Niccolò on the second day turned off to sail between the towering mangrove bushes of some ample creek which led forty miles or more, Saloum said, to the south; and, anchoring finally, sent her boats to penetrate even further.

  From that expedition Father Godscalc returned with a manner which hourly became weightier and more silent, while Diniz ran up on deck, wet and bitten and glowing, to talk until he was exhausted of the wonders of the swamps – he had seen the man-eating lizards, monster upon monster, asleep in the shallows. He had seen apes, great baboons, carrying their children lovingly on their backs. He had been put to sit with a lot of people under a tree while Godscalc talked to them, helped by Loppe, and had been given beans and millet in bowls and offered two black girls to sleep with. The black women had hair like braided wool, and wore cotton shifts woven in strips by their menfolk, and three of them had circles of gold on their arms, but Loppe wouldn’t translate any questions about them. He had tasted a gourd of palm wine.

  ‘So I see,’ Nicholas said. To Loppe, apart, he said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘The people are uneasy,’ Loppe said. ‘In some villages they ran away. In others they allowed the padre to speak because we gave them presents, but were glad when we left. It is not the leper-white skin or the caravels: they have seen traders before. Their holy men have told them that Father Godscalc is a sorcerer who will cast a spell on their millet, and cut the hair of young girls for his mattress, and who has incurred the hatred of trees.’

  ‘The hatred of …?’

  ‘It is a belief.’

  Nicholas could be stolid as well. He said, ‘But they are subjects of Gnumi Mansa?’

  ‘I fear,’ Loppe said, ‘that Gnumi Mansa’s Portuguese falcons may have died, and the houses built by his Portuguese mason abandoned, and his faith in six years has likewise melted away. The reproaches of a genuine priest would injure his dignity here at home, and harm his reputation abroad with his sponsors. He was baptised, as I remember, after Prince Henry.’

  Nicholas said, ‘You are saying that it would suit Gnumi to believe that Godscalc is an impostor? And that since he isn’t, we may all be … what? Prevented from seeing him? Or killed so that we don’t carry tales?’

  ‘Either is possible,’ Loppe said. ‘The Fortado perhaps will advise him.’

  Carefully, they were allowing the Fortado to lead. It laid them open to traps but possessed, meanwhile, other advantages.

  ‘Doria and Crackbene, carrying out the orders of the Vatachino and Simon,’ said Nicholas. ‘I think I can guess what they will advise.’

  ‘Can you?’ said Loppe. ‘They haven’t turned. They’re still trading.’

  ‘All right,’ Nicholas said. ‘If all they want is a cargo, they’ll go to the two Kings and Cantor and turn, having primed Gnumi Mansa to slaughter us. Do you think that will happen?’

  ‘It may,’ said Loppe. ‘It may not. Saloum will count in our favour. On the other hand, your first theory is probably right. They’ll load and wait at the falls beyond Cantor. Then they’ll try to track where we go when we land. In which case we’ll survive until then.’

  ‘Some of us,’ Nicholas said. ‘They don’t need Father Godscalc. And whomever they do want to preserve, this King may have other notions. Where is Gnumi Mansa to be found? Do you know?

  ‘I can guess,’ Loppe said. ‘He came to meet Doria at the river-bank at Tendeba: we should reach it tomorrow. He moves about his domain with two hundred warriors and his wives; he won’t be far away. Those are his almadias, his canoes, along the river-bank.’

  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.’