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

  ‘Yes. He must have protested, in the end, as you did. It is in his favour,’ said Godscalc, and adjusted his harness with hands still bleeding and soiled from the burial. ‘There are only five of them left.’

  ‘Will they ambush us?’ Diniz said. He was burning with fever.

  ‘They don’t know we’re coming,’ Nicholas said, coming up. ‘How is Bel?’

  ‘Shellfish,’ she said, her ravaged face smiling grotesquely.

  ‘You will indulge,’ he said, and smiled back at her. There were mountains on the horizon. He had no means of hurrying now, with his sick to carry, and the five renegades already far off and mounted. And as Saloum said, they were too late for Lopez. He said to Godscalc, ‘Decide. Do we go on?’

  ‘The gold is not worth it?’ said Godscalc. Then he said, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘No. My postulatum was almost as objectionable. Are these five men worth it?’ said Nicholas. But he knew what Godscalc was going to answer. And he would have kept on, himself, no matter what the rest did.

  It was Saloum who ended the matter. ‘Lord, there is no choice. In such heat, these people cannot walk back. It is not the gold that will save them, it is the river.’

  They didn’t reach it that day, or the next, for between the Senagana and the silent market was a valley, and hills. Events blurred in the memory; reduced this, the first white man’s march past the Gambia, to the daily routine of the Calabrian peasant: the perpetual grubbing for food – the prize of a small flock of guinea-fowl – the forage for wood for the nightly bonfire; the watch for arrows, or animals. The stoicism of Diniz; and the growing evidence that Bel, their anchor, was succumbing to the hateful ailment she had so often nursed.

  Gelis walked by the camel, and wiped Bel’s brow, and fed her the milk that, wherever they were, Nicholas found. There was no shortage of water. Half the drama of the bald, infertile landscape was contained in the steep, tree-filled chasms and dwindling waterfalls. But it was not a country for crops, or for people, and the pyramid cities of termites were all that seemed to thrive in it.

  Three of their porters ran off. The camel bore, without complaint, what extra burdens it might, and obeyed Nicholas, who talked to it in Greek and sometimes called it Chennaa. The loss was of small consequence, except that the harder work had to be shared. They passed some meagre settlements, but met with shut doors rather than the bold curiosity of the past, and the asses’ hoofmarks in the dust told them why.

  They paid desperate prices for goats’ milk and dried meat and millet, and crossed a valley and plodded up broken slopes which made the camel complain, but called no sound from Bel. Diniz watched her. Eventually, he said, ‘Nicholas? She is too weak to be jolted. If I walk, you could carry her.’

  Nicholas let him walk, with Godscalc’s help, for a while, and rode the animal in his place, the bundles about him and Bel, swathed in his arms, stained with vomit and blood. He hissed and crooned as he rode, and controlled the steady pace of the beast with a little stick he had made. She said once, ‘Who was Chennaa?’ and Gelis, watching, saw his face touched with a smile. He said, ‘A love I once had.’

  Then, in a while, he made Diniz mount once again and gave Bel to Gelis to care for, while he and Godscalc turned a mat into a shape between harness and a stretcher so that they could take her on foot. Carrying her, Gelis noticed, he crooned and hissed the same way, and sometimes sang under his breath. Once, she thought she heard a whisper from Bel, joining in. They came to the mountains.

  That night, even Diniz was silent, but Saloum said, ‘Do not fear. It is cool. Over there, cattle graze; there are people. We have only to climb. Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you will see it.’

  They saw it sooner than they had feared for, late that day, collecting dusty earth-nuts and berries and roots, Vito found two of their stolen donkeys, quietly grazing in a sparse copse of trees. One had a deep slash crowded with flies on one shoulder. There was no sign of the other three beasts, or of Jorge’s five men who had taken them.

  ‘I should say there has been a fight on the plain, near the market,’ said Saloum. ‘These animals have been chased back to the hills, and some days ago. That is not the wound of an assagai, or an axe, or an arrow.’

  ‘They met Doria’s men down there?’ Nicholas said. He didn’t expect Saloum to agree. He didn’t expect Lopez really (he convinced himself) to have led Doria over these hills to the market.

  Saloum said, ‘Doria’s men would not be alive. The salt traders kill every stranger, and so do the men from Wangara. It is how the secret is kept.’

  The next morning, they passed through a cornfield and up rising ground where brilliant flowers grew among rivulets. The path wound about rocks and climbed higher, enclosing them in chasms of stone. Saloum walked, and Vito and Godscalc dismounted, allowing Gelis, who was lighter, to ride. For a while Nicholas also walked by the camel, with Bel and Diniz strapped above him in silence. Then he said, ‘Give me that poor ass for a moment,’ and, lifting himself to its back, rode off and left them. The donkey’s hooves echoed ahead, where the track twisted and plunged through a gulley.

  They all heard him halt. Gelis looked at Godscalc, then trotted after. She had anticipated some blockage, a barrier, but as it descended the path became suddenly broader; became a ledge; became a plateau stark in the sun, which blazed from the south-east ahead of her.

  Nicholas sat in the opening, the reins on his knee, looking outwards. He had seldom ridden in Bruges. If he had, Gelis thought, he would have looked like this, stolidly equestrian on the ridge of the wall, except that the sky would have been paler, and there would have been a windmill beside him. There was wind, now, where he had stopped. It fluttered the cloth at his shoulder, which was otherwise still. Gelis dismounted, and walked her mount down beside him. He said, ‘There it is.’

  She saw, again, what had been given her from the deck of a caravel, which was a vision of space. The manuscript of the sky, stained with blue, franked by the seal of the African sun. Below it, a horizon so far that the haze of distance made it uncertain, a haze which lay not over the Ocean of Darkness but an ocean of light, of a fertile land of golden grain and green grass and the terracotta of alluvial soil, sprinkled with the deeper green of great trees and freckled with cattle. And through the plain ran a broad silver highway, rimmed on its far side by hills and edged by miniature townships, neat as constellations of straw.

  She wished to ask what the highway was, but could not. Saloum’s footstep, careful, courteous, sounded behind them. He said, ‘It is the Joliba, senhorinha. The great river you know of. It flows east, no man knows where. The caravanserai you seek is fourteen days from here, close to its banks.’

  ‘And the silent market?’ Nicholas said.

  Saloum came to his side. The donkey shifted. ‘It is there,’ Saloum said. ‘On the stretch of river you see, over the plain.’

  No one spoke. Then Nicholas said, ‘I see no fires.’

  And Saloum said, ‘No, my lord. The trade will be done.’

  It was done. They descended the slopes. When next day they moved over the shining, flowery grass it was evident that there was no one there on the banks of the Joliba, although on their journey they saw that the soil of the meadow had been roughly churned here and there, and pitted by uneven footmarks, and the agitated small prints of donkeys. Of the five men who had probably died, there were no bodies visible, and in the rich soil, no trace of spilled blood.

  The river-bank consisted of fine, ruddy shingle smoothed by the water, so that they could see where cattle had stood, and the slots of a leopard, and the scuff of hurrying rats. Further up, the grit was dry and tumbled and littered with what had been left when the water shrank. Further up still, it was mixed with grass, and on one spot they found a great heap of wood ash, half blown about and quite cold, with some chicken bones lying, and the kind of detritus a group of men left when eating and waiting together.

  When they walked down the shingle again, at a different place, they could see where severa
l canoes had been hauled to the bank, and some mooring posts sunk, with bits of Baobab rope still wound about them. Then, much further up, Vito found the trading-station itself.

  It had been set up on a stretch of hard ground, reinforced in some places by boulders. As on the Gambia, the booths had been placed in a line, and the sockets and mat-prints still showed although the thatched roofs and uprights had gone. One of the mats was still in place, with the oblong imprint of the salt slabs plainly visible. Two of the places were blackened and Vito, kneeling, picked up a piece of charred cloth. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘They don’t often sell cloth. Why should they burn it?’

  Those who could walk were hastening towards him, Godscalc keeping with Nicholas, and Gelis passing Saloum. Saloum said, to Nicholas rather than Vito, ‘If they cannot agree, if the trader cheats, if the tribesmen are angered or fearful, sometimes they will burn the dealers’ merchandise and take back their gold and go home.’

  ‘So they thought they were being deceived?’ Nicholas said. ‘Or saw that strangers were coming, and blamed the traders?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Saloum said. ‘Or perhaps the hollows scooped for the gold were thought to be unreasonably deep. The traders can sometimes be obstinate.’ He was speaking monotonously, his Portuguese worse than usual.

  ‘Where are the hollows?’ said Gelis. She looked for Vito, who was still on his knees. ‘Oh, I see. One, of course, by each booth.’ She walked up. ‘Why …!’

  ‘… There is something still in them. Move her away,’ Nicholas said.

  There were only six of them filled; but after all Doria had only had seven men to begin with, counting Lopez, and had probably lost more men and bearers than they had. Much of the flesh of the heads had been eaten, but some of the hair still remained, and you could tell which skin had been white, and which black. Doria’s eye-socket had an earring dropped into it. Nicholas couldn’t say which of the blacks had been Loppe. If there had been a body, he could have told from the hands.

  Vito was retching, but Gelis had not gone away. She said, ‘This was why he brought them here. That was what Saloum said, wasn’t it? This was why Lopez brought them here, and didn’t want you to follow. He knew this would happen.’

  She looked at Nicholas. He hadn’t lifted his eyes. She said, ‘He knew that if Doria brought you together, one of you would tell him the secret of Wangara.’

  ‘I didn’t know it,’ said Nicholas. Across the grass, Diniz had got up and was coming forward, shambling a little.

  ‘We had better bury them,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘Don’t you hear me?’ she said. ‘He saved Wangara, and the men from Wangara have killed him.’

  It was to be noticed that, from then onwards, few of the six who were left disputed with Nicholas, and the standing of Saloum, too, was secure. If Nicholas gave it much thought, which uniquely for him he did not, he would have discerned well enough the chief reason. He had not exploited his friendship with Lopez. Lopez had received from him the unconditional gift of the slaves and, faced with a conflict of loyalties, had reconciled some of them here, and shown himself ready to die for them. And Saloum had been faithful to both.

  Nicholas gave the subject no particular thought, since he was busy. His party had to, ride for a little. But once past the falls – a stretch of rocks and rapids and currents so fast that a craft could shoot twenty-five miles in three hours – the Joliba turned itself into his highway. A log boat fifty feet long had been purchased, with men to manage it, and the sale of the asses and of Chennaa – of his camel – had bought them a bountiful load of provisions, without recourse to his porcelain shell-coins. The heat, though at times disagreeable, was ten degrees less here by day than they had suffered, and by night was cool and fresh as a spring dusk in Flanders.

  The river, half a mile wide, flowed to the north-east, where they were going. Vito, nimble and bright as a marmoset, had manufactured extra rigging and canopies and made them beds and partitions within the roomy, hooded interior. The paddles splashed, and the skins of goats’ milk and water swayed overhead, and from the long cooking-trough there floated back the warm smell of partridge roasting in Kalita butter, or the bubbling of a fine piece of perch, or pieces of fresh beef cut up among rice. Borne on the smooth breast of the Joliba, Bel and Diniz began to recover.

  Godscalc no longer demanded to take his box ashore and carry the Cross to the princes of Guinea. It was not that the shores were unsafe, as were those they had found on the Gambia. Here, children played on the straw-littered strands, and women beat out their washing beside the twisting blue smoke of the earth-ovens, and herds of cattle, of camels, flocks of goats, lines of ponderous sheep picked their way through the scrub of the landscape. He saw men weaving cloth in the freshness of sundown: their looms like tangles of thorn by the waterside, their cotton as white as the egrets. That was before the bull-frogs took up their song, and the water-horses bellowed and splashed in the shallows, and the birds filled the air with their cries, wheeling like ash against a conflagration of sky and of river.

  No, he didn’t refrain from going ashore because he was afraid, or because the need for haste wouldn’t allow it. There was no need for haste now. He abstained from the exercise of his mission because he had seen confirmed what he did not wish to believe: that he, a white man and a stranger, could not deliver his message to a simple people so alien. They heard him with fright. And even if they had received him with love and peace and full understanding, they were bound not to follow him, unless their King followed him too. His was not a mission to his fellow men, who must be heedless as those screaming baboons. It was a message only for Zughalin and Gnumi Mansa and Bati Mansa and those other great lords such as Prester John, to whom he was an envoy, a person to pamper or kill.

  But perhaps, most of all, he sat here with his faith locked within him because the people of these shores, he had been told, were practising Muslims, and that was Saloum’s creed. Once, he had despised Saloum for leading a priest to Gnumi Mansa. Now, he understood that he had saved all their lives.

  He had asked Saloum what Timbuktu was like, but had learned only what he already guessed: that it was a place of trans-shipment; a terminus where the camels, ten thousand perhaps in a train, could rest and feed and take water while the goods they had brought from the desert were moved to the yards of the dealers, and from there to the boats by which they would be dispersed when the floods would allow. A place of seasonal haggling, and gold. What your heart and your soul both have need of, Lopez had incomprehensibly said.

  He supposed Nicholas still needed gold, although he hadn’t said so: the journey had to be paid for, and the Ghost might not have arrived. Diniz, his shoulder still bound but dry and without inflammation, sometimes talked about that, and the surprise his mother would get when she found he had made her so rich, and how good Gregorio was, and what a fine job he and Jaime would make of the estate in Madeira now they could buy in more land. And how furious Simon would be, wherever he was, and the man David from the Vatachino. Diniz wished that everyone knew what had happened to Raffaelo Doria. He wished the same could happen to all the men still on the Fortado, including Michael Crackbene.

  ‘I don’t think you mean that,’ said Godscalc, but knew well, of course, that he did.

  Vito also spoke with satisfaction about the fate of Doria, who had wanted to kill them all under that hut. He was less comfortable with what had happened to Jorge da Silves, who had been the ship’s master until he had decided to make his own way to the gold. It sometimes worried Vito to think that the traders who killed the signor’s men might be in this place Timbuktu, and angry with Signor Niccolò for being white, and of the same party that frightened the Wangara men into burning their goods.

  Godscalc, who had had the same thoughts, said that he hoped that Saloum, whom they had freed, might protect them; and that the traders liked spectacles. If the place seemed too rough, they would simply pass it and proceed on their way.

  ‘To Ethiopia,’ Vito said, with a pleased, f
reckled smile. Although in awe of Nicholas, he had sailed with him all the way from Ancona and possessed for him an uncomplicated admiration, as well as a belief in all his works. Only now and then, when he saw a black lion motionless on the strand or a group of monsters with long marbled necks in a bush, he would speak of how he would shock all the oar-makers in Venice, but that they would never believe him. And he rambled on sometimes, too, about Melchiorre, who was the best fellow he knew, and likely to be recovering well on the San Niccolò, assuming that that King and his wives hadn’t exhausted him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Gelis, ‘we are all finding time to be homesick.’

  ‘Are you?’ Godscalc said.

  ‘I have no home to be sick for,’ she said.

  He had never heard her speak before with self-pity. He thought perhaps she was frightened, for last night the river had been joined by another, and this morning both had gone, to be replaced by a sea: by a lake that stretched from one side of the sky to the other, interrupted by shallows and islands, by outcrops upon which cabins perched, and fishermen mended their nets, and women waded in rice, or pushed out their boats and went visiting from this islet to that.

  ‘It is only the season,’ he said. ‘Saloum says January is the time for the flood. We shall find the river again.’ That morning they had travelled through grass: a meadow of tall, rustling reeds below which water glinted. Driven by poles, the bark had sheared its way through them, leaving behind it a trail bright as mercury. They crossed other trails, seeing no one, but hearing the crackle of reeds all about them. Next, they had floated through acres of lilies, white and lilac and yellow. Godscalc said, ‘Are you sorry you came?’

  In the shade, she had pulled off her headcloth. Her hair was bleached by the sun, the plaits smooth, although the threads of it curled at her temples. Her face, fined into hollows, was thin-skinned and brown, and so were her arms below the crumpled, bleached stuff of her cape. She said, ‘No. I promised myself that I would.’