She said, ‘I wondered …’ Below his hood, his face was in shadow.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not persuaded him. Did you think that you might?’
She said, ‘He must be tired.’
‘He is not sleeping,’ Godscalc said. ‘And there is no one with him.’ He sounded curt. But for that, she would have thought he had been weeping.
She made her presence known by rapping on the post of his door. She said, ‘Nicholas.’
His voice said, ‘Gelis.’ He had begun to answer, she thought, from his pillow, but had risen to finish the word. When she entered he had pulled himself up on the coverlet, his back to the wall. His shirt had been unfastened but not yet pulled off.
She said, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I wondered if you wanted something to drink. My nursing instincts.’ She sat on the edge of the bed.
His smile was so slight that it didn’t rouse either dimple. ‘You haven’t any,’ he said. ‘You’ve come to cut off my hair.’
‘I have,’ she contradicted. ‘Nursing instincts. You’ve forgotten.’
‘I like forgetting,’ Nicholas said. ‘That is what I am going to be famous for: not remembering. Africa has given me a clean sheet, and I like it. Don’t you like clean sheets?’
‘Until December,’ she said. ‘You only have until the San Niccolò leaves in December. So why not face it all now?’
‘Because,’ said Nicholas, ‘there are certain advantages. This way, Diniz will do all the dirty work. He might even kill Simon.’
‘You want that,’ said Gelis.
His eyes, like those of Godscalc, were set in black shadow, but of their own making. ‘Did I say so?’ he said.
‘No. But you won’t do it yourself. You’ll never harm Simon yourself, only his business. And Jordan can scar your face if he wishes, you won’t strike him back. I didn’t understand,’ Gelis said, ‘until you told me.’
‘It isn’t a fever that kills,’ remarked Nicholas, after an interval. ‘Or not directly. There is a difficulty about all this being known. Arigho … the child Henry is being reared as Simon’s heir.’
‘Difficulty!’ Gelis said, and then quietened. She said, ‘Arigho? Is that what you call him?’
‘His name is Henry,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t call him anything. I can’t acknowledge him. Simon married Katelina in the belief that the coming child was his own. The trouble was … The trouble is …’
‘That Simon is your own father,’ said Gelis. ‘And Katelina found out. So that, in biblical terms, you led her to have carnal relations unknowing with a man and his son, and to bear a child to the younger, which she passed off as the son of the elder. And because she found that she loved you, it killed her.’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, again eventually. ‘Now you know why it’s appealing to stay in Africa.’
Gelis looked at him. It was, perhaps, one of the reasons why he was staying in Africa. It was not the only one. She said, ‘But suppose the imposition of the child wasn’t planned, although at first Katelina thought it was. Suppose you didn’t mean it as an act of private retribution against Simon because he refused to acknowledge you. If in fact you are wrong and Simon is right, you have committed no sin, except one of stupidity. Unless, that is, you really want Diniz to kill Simon for you. That would be monstrous.’
‘He won’t kill Simon,’ said Nicholas. ‘Simon might try to kill him. I’ve warned Gregorio. As a family, we leave something to be desired.’
‘What do you desire?’ Gelis said. She moved the lamp slowly to illumine his face. His eyes were heavy, and his skin moist in the heat. Her hair, still unloosed, fell forward a little.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Was that what you wanted to hear?’
‘It was polite, certainly,’ she said. ‘Then why not come to Lagos?’
His lids had closed. He smiled. He said, ‘There is no privacy on a caravel.’
‘Then,’ Gelis said, ‘I shall have to stay, shall I not, in Timbuktu?’
His eyes opened then, but their expression was one of guarded amusement. He said, ‘I want to be there when you break the good news to Bel.’ Then he said, ‘You can’t mean it?’ He had lifted his head from the wall.
‘I always meant to,’ she said. ‘Diniz and Bel owe a duty to Lucia, but I don’t. I want to stay. I’ve begun learning Arabic’
His gaze searched her face. He hardly listened to what she was saying. He said, ‘You do mean it. Why?’
‘You said you desired me,’ she said. ‘You half meant it.’
‘Men often do,’ he said. He had all his wits about him now, she saw. He said, ‘You would like to tease me? It isn’t much your style. You were ready enough to go home an hour ago.’
‘Then I thought you were going as well. Would you like a drink?’ Gelis said. She rose from the bed. ‘I should like to tease you.’
‘All the way to Ethiopia? Without Bel?’
‘I should stay behind while you did that. Umar would see to my household. I’ve found some milk. I’ve found something else. Oh!’ She turned round. ‘Fermented spirits? Nicholas!’
‘Bring it,’ he said. ‘Take some yourself, if you want it. It was invented for moments like these.’ His hand was steady, taking it from her, although she made sure that her fingers touched his. When he only sipped, she knew she had lost him.
She said, ‘So you are too old to be teased. When you find Prester John, perhaps you should bathe in the Fountain of Youth. I shall wait for you.’
‘Do. You might have to suckle me,’ Nicholas said. ‘So what is it? You want to be the first to know if we die?’
‘More or less,’ Gelis said. ‘That is, when you die, someone has to take home the gold.’
‘And that is why you let your hair loose,’ Nicholas said. He set his cup down. Gelis smiled, and moved up to collect it. He stretched one arm to prevent her, and then, lifting the other, imprisoned her suddenly. She gasped and stumbled, half to sit on the bed and half over him. He took her by the arms and sat her primly upright confronting him. She felt his hand touch the back of her hair, and for a moment thought he was going to draw her to him. Then she saw his face, which was thoughtful.
Her own, she hoped, was impassive. She hadn’t resisted. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘I think you may have left it too late, but whatever you have in mind, I still propose to remain.’
His hands steadied her and then lowered, leaving her sitting there. He said, ‘I wondered. But thank God …’ He stopped.
‘What?’ she said. Without her knowing it, her breathing had halted.
He said, ‘You don’t know how to seduce. Never do it. Never, never do it, do you hear?’
She could have done many things, including striking him. She was stopped by the look on his face. She said, ‘If you let me stay, I shall be as Umar to you. Nothing more.’
‘Let you stay?’ he said. ‘How could I prevent you? By force?’
She rose slowly, thinking of the stricken joy in Godscalc’s face, seen in the courtyard. Of Umar’s anguish, and the painful relief in the face of Diniz, given his congé. She said, ‘Force? Nicholas, a man seldom needs to apply force who is himself a master of the art of seduction. If you want me to go, you’ll get rid of me. If you don’t, I shall stay. Which?’
‘Ask Godscalc,’ he said. ‘Then do what you want. I shan’t stop you. Your death will be on your head, not mine. You may have crumpled it somewhat, but I have a clean sheet.’
Godscalc, of course, was obdurate, for many reasons, in insisting that she should go. When argument failed, he enlisted Bel, and was astonished to find her less positive.
‘Oh, you have the right of it: she’s a lassie, and virtuous, and virtuous people in hatrent are to be pitied. Forbye, they’ll be leaving her alone in strange company. But if she goes back, will it heal, this great skaith she has suffered, or will it fester with her all her life? Her feeling for him is changing.’
‘I wondered,’ he said. ‘She learned more, for sure, than he wanted, the night of h
is fever. Maybe it has been for the good. Bel, will you stay with her?’
‘No,’ said Bel. ‘It is not easy to leave. You’ll never know, friend of mine, how it slays my soul to have to leave, but anything I could do has been done. Now she has her own way to make. I will answer for it to the few folk she has left.’
Godscalc had held the small woman by the shoulder. ‘Bel? Are you kin to Gelis?’
The formless, boneless, powdery face had lifted to his, and then smiled. ‘You don’t need to share a blood-tie to love someone, or admire them, or pity them. I’d have taken that one into my house even though she hated the whole of mankind, as she does.’
To Diniz, the defection of Gelis was, first a surprise, and then a rebuff. At some cost to himself, with a small party and only Saloum to guide him, he had been prepared to convey and protect two weak women all the way back to the Gambia.
Now Gelis was staying, and it made him uneasy. Four months of proximity had not drawn Gelis and Nicholas close. He didn’t see why she should want to protract it. He wouldn’t admit that he was hurt because she would be with Nicholas, and not himself. Diniz, going home with their gold, was consumed with both joy and anxiety, but the joy was not what it had been, when he had believed Nicholas was coming home too.
They left in the first week of March, with Saloum to guide them and Vito to give them his stout, unlettered energy. Already Vito was talking of the men they were going to rejoin on the Niccolò: of Melchiorre, if he had recovered – and of course, being a Florentine, surely he would. Of Fernão and the other five seamen, and even Ahmad, if he was still with them. But most of all, he talked about Venice, and the mist, and the cool nights, and the water. Of them all, Vito was happiest to be going home.
They left from Kabara, and Nicholas stood in the shimmering heat with the rest, watching fifty feet of canopied canoe being poled into a river which, brimming when they arrived, was now shallow, rock-strewn and foaming. On board was eighty tons’ weight of arms, provisions and cargo, including locked chests containing five hundred pounds of gold worth sixty thousand ducats. And a valiant, rough-tongued small woman; and Diniz his cousin.
Gelis was dry-eyed, but Godscalc was not. He said, ‘When shall we see them again?’
‘Tonight,’ said Nicholas. ‘If they don’t row any better than that. Come on. We have to go back and wait for the gold.’
From six they had become three – or four, if you counted Umar who, as if to compensate for their loss, unloosed now the constraints on his friendship. At first, visiting now and then, he put forward with diffidence his proposal for this feast, or that visit. By the end of the first week, the scope of his suggestions had widened.
They began to see feats of riding and spear-throwing and wrestling, and Nicholas, for a wager, once or twice even took part in them. They attended a marriage-banquet (not Umar’s) in a great amphitheatre hollowed out of the grit with terraced gardens tumbling down to a pool.
Gelis was found a teacher of classical Arabic who laid before her a field of beauty and wisdom through which she breathlessly wandered. Wisdom, too, was what great teachers purveyed, outside whose houses the slippers of Nicholas would lie unregarded sometimes from first light to last.
Godscalc, accompanying him, saw that Umar was unsurprised, and berated himself for his lack of insight. He had seen the treasures Nicholas had brought with him from Trezibond: the manuscripts he had bought, such as the one Umar had later possessed. Nicholas always knew what was valuable. Having a busy, inquisitive mind, he had taught himself Greek to that end, and some Arabic, and learned something, obviously, of ancient scholarship. Until now Godscalc had had no idea of the extent of his learning.
He realised that Nicholas had been privy, as he had not, to the talk of the Emperor’s philosophers; that in Venice he had listened to Bessarion, and to the priesthood in Cyprus; that on his travels alone he had used his connections to join, for a night or two, the company in more than one private studio school. He had never heard Nicholas dispute any subject in his own field and now grew cold, wondering what he really felt – had all along felt about this broken-backed mission; this illusion that, single-handed, Godscalc would bring Christ to the end of the world, and embrace the Church that lay over the mountains. At nights he lay awake, anxious.
His conscience began to trouble him, too, on his own behalf. His fingers itched to touch the vellum he saw in the hands of the Timbuktu-Koy’s scribes; to pick up a brush and indulge in the luxury he had forbidden himself, because it brought him too much delight. He groaned when taken first to a place where books were copied and lent – a bookseller’s as thronged, as invigorating, as that of Vespasiano da Bisticci in Florence, although situated under heavy arcades of clay, with the beat of drums perpetually throbbing.
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.’