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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘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 fa
miliar 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.

  Chapter 30

  TWO DAYS AFTER Gelis made her wager, the Wangara gold reached Timbuktu.

  Unlike Diniz, Nicholas failed to rush to meet the camels as they lurched in from the wharf at Kabara, although he guessed what was happening. Since first light, he had been in the first-floor storerooms of the Qadi And-Agh-Muhammed, which were empty of gold but contained many books, some of which he wanted to study merely for the quality of their illustrations and the pigments they used. Their sources, being similar to those for his dyes, told him sometimes as much as the text about their age and their origin. He enjoyed patiently tracing the clues, and the words made him think, and kept other thoughts out.

  When he heard the tambours rap in the streets, he thought of the other drumming he had heard in the night, signalling something of moment. And then the distant shouting outside had erupted into the yard of the caravanserai where he sat. After a while, he went out on the long, wooden balcony and looked down upon turmoil.

  Solid in the midst of the running feet, the throwing open of great doors, the scurrying of servants and clerks stood the turbaned person of the old Tuareg, his son al-Mukhtar at his side. He looked up and saw Nicholas. ‘Hah! Is there gold coming, do you think, or has some mother-defiler spoiled the silent trade for a second time?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Nicholas said. ‘I suppose those men who are not blind will see the panniers coming, full or empty. Or those who were blind will see the panniers empty and know that they are thieves and debtors.’

  ‘You speak of these trifles?’ the merchant said. He lifted a string from his waist and waved the glittering thing at the end of it. ‘I hold you a thief and a liar. You said I would see. I see your face on the balcony, but I do not see my book. I would rather see my book.’

  ‘Then,’ said Nicholas, ‘you need two pairs of spectacles. I shall think about it, when I have seen whether you have gold or not.’ He waited, smiling, while the old man roared with laughter, plucking his turban and flinging his arms in the air.

  It meant – that conversation – that the gold had arrived, and that his pact was remembered and honoured. It meant that he was as wealthy, or wealthier than he had been on the day he came back from Cyprus, provided the San Niccolò returned with her cargo. Provided the gold stayed secure until he returned from the mountains. Provided he returned from the mountains.

  He did not go home immediately, but waited until the calls for prayer had ceased, and walked quietly through a city virtually silent except for the chatter of captive monkeys and the bad-tempered groan of camels tied in the shade. The rise and fall of murmuring voices warned him, in this lane or that, to give way to a group prone in prayer. When he passed the wall of the Grand Mosque, the Jingerebir, the sound from the thousands behind was like the resonance of a beehive, firm and steady and confident as the voices you heard, too, in San Marco. He arrived home, and opened the door of his chamber, still thinking, and found Umar standing there.

  In Latin dress, Umar had always had a presence. He had more than that in the white garments and cap of the justiciar, pure against his black silken skin; moulding the power of his shoulders and body and arms. His face was as it had always been from the day he dived into the harbour at Sluys, and Nicholas first came face to face with him. He stood as if he had been waiting for some time.

  Nicholas said, ‘You’re not at the mosque?’

  ‘No,’ said Umar. ‘They are thanking Allah for the safe acquisition of the gold.’

  ‘I see. Sit down,’ said Nicholas. He kept all sign of irritation out of his voice. ‘Sit down, Umar, and let me sit down too. You know I need the gold?’

  Of course,’ Umar said. ‘Or you wouldn’t have come. You need this gold, yes. But you don’t need to leave now it’s here. You don’t need to find Prester John and come back with more. There are no rivers of gems. There is no miraculous mirror. You know that.’

  ‘There is Father Godscalc,’ said Nicholas. ‘I gave him a promise. I gave you a promise.’

  Umar said, ‘I didn’t put you at risk of your life.’

  ‘I thought you did,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not, of course, over the slaves; but afterwards. It didn’t strike you, apparently, that you were the person I was concerned about. You believed I was determined to find the mines at Wangara, and you misdirected me accordingly. It doesn’t matter. Except that now you think my whole object is to tap the wealth of Ethiopia, and you would like to misdirect me again, by telling me it doesn’t exist. That is not why I am going.’

  Umar always sat well, his head up, his back straight, his hands now clasped in his lap. They were clasped so tightly his nails glittered pink-white. He said, ‘So how do I stop you?’

  Nicholas tilted his head. ‘Several ways. Kill Father Godscalc.’

  ‘Do you think I am joking?’ said Umar. He raised his hands and lowered them slowly as fists on his knees. ‘Why should I do this? Why should I come here, knowing what you will say? Do you think I do not know you? You make promises, extravagant promises, in the hope of obliterating what you think are your mistakes. I did not, I do not deserve the promise you gave me. Now I know it; now I can tell you. You owe nothing either to the padre. He is a good man: his cause is good; he depends on you. But your own nature pushed you into making an undertaking that was senseless. Nicholas, you have a place in this world. Men will lose more if you die than they will ever gain if Father Godscalc reaches Ethiopia.’

  Ending, he had leaned forward a little, his back rigid; his hands outspread on his thighs, Nicholas saw, to stop them trembling. Nicholas uprooted himself from his seat and took two strides away, and then made himself turn. He put both hands in his belt. ‘Two groats up on the ecu?’ he said.

  ‘That,’ said Loppe. Umar. ‘Money management, yes. Management of estates: I ran Kouklia, but you designed it. Management of a people, if one were to find a man wise enough to take you as his counsellor. Let me tell Father Godscalc. Let me tell him you must not go.’

  ‘Have you done that already?’ said Nicholas. He had spent the day in the grip of fear, and apprehension, and joy. Now he felt only pain.

  ‘No,’ said Umar. ‘He will say yes. He is half ready to say it already. If you withdraw, he will accept it.’

  ‘And go alone to his death,’ Nicholas said. ‘So that no Christians will come to or from Ethiopia.’

  Umar rose too. The trembling had stopped. Nicholas looked him in the face, and saw what he had done. Umar said, ‘I am sorry. I see that of course you must go, and that it would not be right for anyone of my kind to stop you. But if you will allow – although I am not of your faith, and although I can give you no Christian safe conduct – if you will allow, I myself will come and guide you.’

  Then Nicholas said, ‘No! No, I am sorry,’ and took a step forward, gripping Umar’s arm with his hand. Beneath his fingers, the flesh felt like wood. He said again, ‘No, I was unfair.’

  He dropped his hand. He said, ‘I’m going with Godscalc; I must go. I understand, I think, what you’re saying. You may be right; I accept it. Another time, perhaps it could be different. But not this time. I must go. And of course, you mustn’t come with us. If you thought I had a plac
e, yours is even more clear. Your place is here, with your people.’

  ‘It makes no difference,’ Umar said. ‘If you go, then so do I.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas. They stood facing one another and Umar’s face looked, he thought, hollow and weary, as if it had been the face of his own father or grandfather. He wondered if his own looked the same, and was swept with disgust.

  He could think of nothing to add. Umar said, ‘How do you think you can stop me?’ Then he turned, and walked out of the house.

  The gold was in the house by next day, thirteen camel-loads – four thousand pounds of it, enclosed in iron boxes with many locks which had once contained books, before they rotted. The next night, the Timbuktu-Koy gave a great banquet in the palace, so that all might rejoice over the safe return of the traders with their chief expedition safely accomplished. There would be more gold, diverted this time through Djenne, or other gathering-places. The white traders who had come from the sea had taken much of this load. But in return they had cowries, and promises, and whether the promises came to anything or not, they owned the twinkling moons, bright as diamonds, which none in Timbuktu had ever seen before, much less possessed, and which the greatest kings of the world would still gaze on in wonder. They had spectacles.

  Umar did not come, as he usually did, to lead Godscalc and Gelis and Nicholas to the palace with the pomp of his full family retinue, and they made their way with their own servants, mounted for dignity’s sake, and attired in brilliant light silks. Gelis, unveiled, had dressed her hair in Italian style, winding it with the pearls she still had, and it shone like wheat, and hung before her ears like barley-husks. In return for his gifts, the Timbuktu-Koy had not been niggardly, and her arms clicked with heavy, smooth bracelets. Godscalc, too, had left behind his white gown and wore a caftan of silk, with a cap of the same colour on the pruned and tamed bulk of his hair.