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

  ‘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

  THE 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.

  Som
e 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?’

  He had promised Nicholas he would not become angry, but it was impossible. Jorge at least knew that it was impossible. He saw Nicholas and Loppe glance at each other again; then Loppe began to translate.

  It was extremely brief – so brief that he had hardly finished when the King shouted a question to which Loppe replied at length, without translating. The King, like Godscalc, knew when names were being omitted. The King, it was apparent, was even angrier than Godscalc at being deceived. He stood, continuing to exclaim; and the rustle behind him became an array of sloped spears and stretched bows. The King waved a fist at Loppe, and Loppe turned again to Nicholas.

  ‘He heard the names of the abbot and Prince Henry. He knows therefore the padre is a genuine priest who may carry back tales of his backsliding. He continues to pretend therefore that he is a sorcerer. Father Godscalc, will you permit Saloum to speak? Our lives are lost otherwise.’

  ‘He would kill a priest?’ Godscalc said.

  ‘No. He would let the leopard kill a priest,’ Loppe said softly. ‘And then he would make sure none escaped with the tale. Those on board the ship, too.’

  He had to allow it. He had no idea how a marabout, a Muslim holy man whom – God in heaven – he had spent a week trying to convert to Christianity could save the lives of a boatload of men and women of the opposite faith. It was with amazement therefore that he saw the short Mandingua Saloum step forward with his fellow slave Ahmad – clever, polyglot Saloum with his curling black beard – and by merely naming himself and his companion, cause the vast, feathered figure before him to fling out his arms, and the twinkle of weapons to shiver and halt.

  The King’s narrowed eyes studied the three black men before him, and he asked a question. It was directed at Loppe, but Saloum answered. He answered at length, during which a murmur passed through the armed men standing waiting. Then the King asked a last question, and was answered. For a long moment he stood, then, lifting his hands, he clapped them loudly. From somewhere behind, a horn wailed. Drums began to beat. The King tossed his head with its white feathers and, advancing, stopped before Nicholas, taking his hand and then releasing it. He snapped his fingers and spoke.

  ‘Gnumi Mansa says Peace, peace’ Loppe said. ‘Repeat it and bow.’

  The King moved on, and stood before Godscalc, repeating the ceremony. Then the King clapped his hands once again, and this time a man came forward and laid before him a box. Once, it had been identical with that of Godscalc. Now the leather cover was frayed and furred over with fungus and the contents, when it was opened, were tarnished and sickly and crumbling from two years of insects and rot. The King spoke.

  ‘He has kept your God for you,’ Loppe said. ‘He wishes you to eat your God with him, and will have fresh blood brought, since the old blood has dried.’ And bending solemnly, he received from the King and held out a shallow worm-eaten receptacle in which still reposed the furred scum of wafers.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Father Godscalc, ‘that before God I commend his safe keeping of such articles, and will willingly celebrate the mysteries with him presently, using the box and the wine I have brought. Meanwhile, will he introduce me to the other Christian men of his following?’

  They began to walk together among the chiefs and Godscalc, listening to the King and to Loppe, took the hand of smiling black men called Jacob and Nuño, who cracked their finger-bones at him and offered him all their houses and the houses of their grandfathers for his sole use. He was aware, as he smiled and blessed these black recipients of the evangelical doctrine, that many more of both sexes were pouring into the grassy space, both from its confines of high trees and bushes and from the village on top of the rise, and forming a circle were moving round the Baobab, ululating and clapping their hands, while others brought mats so that all the meeting-place under the tree became floored.

  Then, accompanying the King back to his carpet, Godscalc saw that the horse left by Nicholas on the shore was now being led into the arena by Lázaro, the splendour of its harness disguising the state of its lubberly legs. And behind it, conducted by Vicente and carried on the stout shoulders of Vito, Fernão and Luis, the strongest of all Jorge’s men, was the mighty roll of flax canvas which contained, Godscalc knew, the fabric of a tent which would offer shade the equal of another Baobab tree to its new owner.

  It looked in fair condition for an object brought two thousand miles for this purpose. The King, already erect and rustling forward at the sight of the horse, exclaimed and chortled with pleasure when the pavilion was spread and explained to him. Then Nicholas presented him with his spectacles.

  When the platters of food began to arrive, Gnumi Mansa would have them taken nowhere else but the new tent where, lenses glinting, he sat in state with his chiefs, flanked by Saloum, Loppe and Ahmad, Nicholas and Jorge, and the other seven white men from the ship. Godscalc did his duty as well as he could, thrusting his hands into bowls of rice and maize and stiff breads, of improbable fish and melting fruits and unwieldy meats including, he suspected, the component parts of several dogs; and duly exclaiming with rapture over a dish of cooked elephant. His fingers, his robe and his chin all became unavoidably greasy and his throat ached as he conversed as well as any man could against the uproar of the King’s feasting subjects outside.

  The liquor, when it came, was all the more welcome, although it proved to be no juice of the grape but the yeasty stuff Diniz had already described, made from the sap of the palm tree, and with the appearance and flavour of whey. He was mildly thankful, draining his gourd, that along with fresh wafers he would be able to provide a flask or two of something more seemly for the Mass he was to hold, it had been agreed, tomorrow morning.

  Nicholas, settling beside him said, ‘Diniz was right. It’s strong wine, Father.’

  ‘I had al
ready decided,’ said Godscalc. ‘Not at all suitable for the altar, although I shall have to draw on your stocks to give a sip to the numbers of communicants that our Muslim friend seems to have conjured up from this community of raging recidivists.’

  He stopped, wiped his lips, and continued. ‘I still cannot understand how such a thing came about. One moment, the King was fit, I swear, to kill the lot of us; and the next, Saloum the marabout had not only pleaded our cause, but exhorted the company to manifest its adherence to the Christian tenet.’ He knuckled his chest and repeated, ‘Manifest.’

  ‘Saloum owes his freedom to you,’ Nicholas said. ‘He and the King both recognise it.’

  ‘But his beliefs!’ Godscalc said. ‘Were I saved fifty times over, I could not have repaid my rescuer by damning the souls of my flock; by ordering them to embrace heresy, for so the Christian religion must appear to him.’

  ‘It happened: why worry?’ Nicholas said. ‘Gnumi Mansa—’

  ‘Henry,’ said Godscalc. He kept his eyes open.

  ‘Henry Mansa wants the good opinion of the Portuguese and only needed to be reassured that you weren’t shocked by his respect for Saloum, or by any small disarray in his Christian practices. They’ve even brought out some goods to barter – a piece of civet and some half-dozen skins, and a sack of malaguetta in the pod. The visit is a success.’ He stirred, as if about to get up and leave, but was prevented by the appearance of a young, brightly robed woman with pleated hair who stooped smiling before them with a dish of wild dates.

  Godscalc found two or three and let her pass; the girl was one of a dozen, all charmingly dressed and gold-adorned, whose sole task had been to serve the King and his guests. Godscalc stared at the dates in his palm and spoke to the man beside him with sluggish bitterness. ‘Why do you lie to me? I have been spared out of gratitude. I am allowed to say Mass out of gratitude, and commercial expediency. And the marabout feels no embarrassment because none of it is genuine. They are no longer Christians, and when I have gone, they will revert to whatever state they have lived in since the abbot departed. Tell me I am wrong!’