Scales of Gold (43 page)

Before the dancing began, when the tent had been removed and the carpets spread again in the low, golden light under the tree, he made his excuse and, getting up, wandered from place to place until he had spoken to all the five crewmen from the
San Niccolò
. They had to know what to expect; they too had to make their
choice; they had to be warned what would be acceptable. He came last to Vicente and Lázaro.

Vicente heard him in silence, but his gaze travelled to where his Portuguese master Jorge was sitting, his shoulder supported, his eyes already half closed. Nicholas said, ‘You are right, it won’t please him. But it may be that he never realises that it has happened – unless, of course, he is told. On the other hand, you can abstain. It would make a better example for Lázaro.’ And he smiled at the boy.

Lázaro said, ‘I am thirteen.’ He was looking at Vicente.

It was true. He was the same age as Filipe, although with something of a man’s build already, and a deftness and strength that already justified the seaman’s post he’d been given. Beneath the powerful harness of Vicente, there had been no more gratuitous horseplay on board.

On land, one would have expected the same. Vicente said casually, ‘You are too young,’ and then frowned as the boy reddened from his brow to the edge of his doublet.

The boy said, ‘I can. If you do, then I do.’ Then, as the
comito
hesitated, at a loss, he cried in his strange, husky voice, ‘Do you want me to prove it?’

Of the three possible resolutions, Nicholas picked the least injurious. He said, ‘Are you going, Vicente? Then here’s a stout fellow who, I’m sure, ought to be allowed to make one of these ladies happy as well. Only remember. Wait until you are asked, and behave with courtesy. The lives of your mates may depend on it.’

Nicholas made his way back to the close-packed, sweet, sweating humanity at the King’s side, and was pulled down. He had walked straight past Diniz, who was more than thirteen, and a gentleman, and glacial with Scottish-Portuguese dignity. Nicholas had passed, and Diniz had melted as he passed, and then dissolved as Nicholas dropped an eyelid. The drumming, already loud, began to roll faster.

Many times, reliving that night, he pondered the vividness of it, and wondered what drugs might have induced it. The burning colours (from what impossible dyes?) worn by the dancers as, winding down the slope from the village, they stamped and swayed round the grassy arena before Gnumi Mansa. The hunkered knot of musicians on the King’s right, their unseeing eyes on the performers, their hands and sticks resonating on curious hides with a rhythm that stirred forgotten memories: water striking on armour in battle; a storm of rain driving its tattoo across a great army encampment; the distant beat and roar of a fire consuming a house and a business.

The impact of sound, and the awesome impact of sight. The vast roseate bowl of the African sky as the sun sank in the Ocean of Darkness and, behind the frieze of darkening bush, a strip of satiny water barred by the slender topmast of the
San Niccolò
, bright as a needle, her pennant stirred by the light river airs. And here beside him, under the tree, the circles burning red as two lamps on either side of the King’s spreading black nose.

The men fought, and the women danced, their feet rising and falling, their hands flailing, their heads low, their rumps in the air. The men retired and in the firelight under the indigo sky the women danced in circles, in rows, their hands twisting and clapping, their cries flying up to the brilliant stars, while the drums beat and beat. And from the watching, clapping crowds, first one woman and then another would slip out and join them, and then a man, and another man, the red light glistening on their eyes and their teeth and on the gold on their arms. Someone tugged Nicholas.

Already a group of the King’s wives had joined the performers, one or two alone, one or two with a white man drawn by the hand. The girl who fetched him to his feet was the one who had pressed behind him in the tent, whose tongue had touched his ear and his neck and whose arching foot had played by his thigh. She was small, with lustrous eyes and a proud neck and inquisitive fingers pliant as candlewick. There was another girl, a little taller, who rose and came with her. He let them lead him into the dancing, heavy with the effort of present restraint; dizzy with the cavernous ache of a well-made, well-practised body long denied its habitual deliverance.

He had no idea how to copy their dancing, nor did it matter. The drumbeat throbbed through his veins; before and behind, the limbs and bodies of men and women pressed against him; he found the smaller girl leaping at his flank, his hand caught round her waist. Round his own waist were the arms of the other girl. His doublet was open, and his shirt. The fires flared; their shadows streamed and leaped over the grass; the noise of the drums drowned all speech and deadened all thought. He saw Vito, flushed, dishevelled, freeing the black, fulsome breasts of a girl perhaps four months with child, who laughed up at him as he sucked and caressed her. He glimpsed Fernão in the flickering dark, already halfway up the slope with a girl at his hip and another, laughing, carried in his stout shirt-sleeved arms. He saw Vicente, and what Vicente was doing.

He realised that abstinence was not only impossible, but that without warning he had reached a state of overwhelming necessity.
He could not speak. Unthinking, without effort it seemed, he found himself standing in the darkness under the trees, a girl’s spread hands on his buttocks, his clothes swiftly wrested apart so that he could continue and conclude a function he did not remember beginning.

The relief – the shameful parallel could hardly be avoided – brought him to his knees. Then he realised that two girls had taken part, one promoting, one acting; and that both were close to him now, their arms wound about him, their fingers exploring his body while they giggled and chattered and laughed. And then a third joined them, wearing nothing now but her golden ornaments, although he recognised her face from the tent.

She laughed at him, and then, leaning over, opened his mouth and thrust her own tongue inside, while the other girls caressed them both, shrieking a little and sometimes slapping one another. The boneless creature with whom he had (definitively) coupled stroked his cheek and leaned back, her dark face enraptured; her body palpably keyed to the condition within which he also was suspended: pleased and soothed, alert and sharply receptive. He laughed at her softly and taking her fingers, kissed them. Upon which the others fell upon him, shrieking and biting and, pulling him up, ran him through the trees and up the slope to the great central guest-hut of the village.

It was not empty, but darkness concealed those who rolled on the straw with which it was strewn, and whose cries and creakings were audible. It seemed of little importance in the magnificent war in which he found himself; when a fourth girl joined him, hot as ginger, he laughed aloud and with a cheerful, a maniac zest charged into battle.

His life, oddly fashioned, had had little to do with bought love and none with orgiastic indulgence. Before the teaching years, the years of his training at the hands of aristocrat, princess, courtesan, he had discovered his own form of joy in the barns and attics and hedgerows of Bruges, with maids who had no expectations of marriage and who knew how to avoid trouble. He and they had made love, you might say, carelessly and freely as animals, except that animals were not moved by such exercise to affection, to compassion, to the benison of glorious laughter.

Since he was eighteen, he hadn’t bedded a woman with laughter. He realised it just before dawn, and the girl beneath him – the third, the fourth, for they had changed, he well knew, all through the night – caressed him with her toes and her fingers and dried his damp eyes with her lips. And then, agile and cruel, witty and eager and inexorable, had brought in her reinforcements, and challenged his vigour again.

Gelis van Borselen, wakeful through the long night, watched the long troughs approach at first light with their sated, silent men. Her arms spread on the rail, she let pale Vicente go by, and tipsy Luis and fiery, half-quenched Vito. She saw Fernão miss his step, sleepily, on the ladder. She observed the child Lázaro plod on board, with his hectic face and brilliant, glittering eyes. She saw Godscalc confused, Jorge dazed, Diniz conscientious, and finally Nicholas, stepping from canoe to ladder with confidence, and from ladder to deck with positive triumph. Then he saw her, and clutched unexpectedly at the rail.

She began to laugh. When Bel of Cuthilgurdy strode to her side Gelis seized her for support and laughed harder. She said, ‘Niccolino! What have they done to you?’

And Nicholas, rueful, happy, exhausted, broke into laughter as helpless as her own and said, ‘Broken me. Don’t laugh. My God, don’t laugh. I don’t think I can walk.’

‘Would you like me to carry you?’ said Gelis. ‘What do you have in your hand?’

He looked down at the object. It was frail and white and peculiar. It was a bone.

‘An aphrodisiac?’ suggested Bel with some sourness.

He made a sound like an underground spring, examining it. ‘It could be. I shan’t pretend I should have refused it. But no. It was a present.’

‘For services rendered?’ It was Gelis.

He said, ‘They thanked me in other ways.’ His eyes, dark round the rims, shone pale and childishly bright in the dawn. He said, ‘It was a present for you. A cat bone. It’s hollow.’

She took it. He reeked of bed and women and happiness. It was a bone, and both ends were sealed. She opened one, and dust ran out into her palm. Yellow dust. She stopped it quickly and looked at him.

‘For you,’ Nicholas said. ‘Unless you would like anything else.’

‘How did you guess?’ Gelis said. ‘Come to my cabin.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Nicholas said; and, pushing himself off the rail, patted her on the shoulder as he passed and ruffled her hair with unforced, unthinking bonhomie. She heard him hit the wall as he wandered into his chamber. She was still standing looking after him when Bel moved her out of the way.

Chapter 22

I
T WAS
Godscalc who, to universal stupefaction, declared that they must next call on the King Bati Mansa, four days’ sail further on up the river.

He knew, of course, what had happened. So much was obvious during the interminable Mass held in the clearing before their departure and attended by all the ship’s complement able to walk, as well as by eight hundred Mandinguas and Henry Mansa, wearing his spectacles.

The King smiled all through the service and so did his pretty young wives, who also wriggled and whispered. Saloum and the robed elders were absent but the leopard attended, and Jorge da Silves whose hooded glare showed much the same ferocity. The seven culprits stood with the rest, smelling remarkably of brackish water and weed, while Father Godscalc spoke, but not too loudly, and held his missal to protect his eyes from the excruciating white to which his vestments had been bleached. Nicholas hung his head.

His punishment occurred later, on board, when the decks had been cleared of apes, parakeets and three warthogs, assorted cages of poultry and a goat, together with a generous cargo of legless provender and some merchandise. Then, when Tendeba had vanished, and the ship was negotiating the first of the several difficult bends in the next thirty-mile stage of her voyage, Father Godscalc summoned Nicholas to his chamber.

The bulkhead muffled the words of the ensuing tirade more than the crew would have liked, but it was apparent that Nicholas had little to say, and that the little was soon swept aside. When he emerged after twenty minutes, looking serious, those on deck had had sufficient warning to scatter and busy themselves, and took care not to look round when he climbed aft and strolled to talk to the helmsman. Bel of Cuthilgurdy banged on the door he had left and opening it, pushed it shut with her shoulder. Then she crossed
to Godscalc’s table and dumped down a basket. In it was a flask, a cup which she filled, and a dish containing a comb of wild honey.

He was seated, his knees apart, his crucifix in his hands. ‘To sweeten my temper,’ he said. His large-boned face with its wiry black hair was sallow.

‘The only thing wrong with your temper,’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy, ‘is that ye should have lost it with that one long ago. Ye let him play with you. Ye let him play with you because you’re convinced he’s a prodigy. He’s twenty years younger than you are.’

‘I am aware of it,’ Godscalc said. ‘And has taken no vows.’ He paused. He said, ‘He knows I envy him.’ He stopped again, and said, ‘My only hope is that I think – sometimes I know – that he envies me.’

There was a silence. Bel said, ‘None the less, ye had the right of it, surely. There were youngsters to think of. And fornication is not a general rule of the Church, even though it seemed natural enough to the King, and he may take more kindly to the Trinity for finding us so heartily equipped with good taste. Forbye, ye couldna have stopped it, even if ye’d had a heid for their drink.’

He groaned, and she pushed the cup of herbs towards him until he lifted it and drank and then set it down and covered his face. She wondered if he had seen Diniz that morning, and assessed his state of sparkling, expansive delight. She wondered if he had noted Lázaro’s manner greeting Filipe: not conceited or scathing but comradely, like that of the other seamen; like a man with nothing to prove. She wondered if he had heard the obscenity with which Filipe had rebuffed his former idol. She understood, as well as Godscalc, the terrible dilemma inseparable from any man’s dealings with Nicholas. She said, ‘How did he take it?’

‘He was respectful,’ Godscalc said. ‘And made no excuses. So now I find myself making them for him. It was a travesty of a mission: his part, if you like, was at least honest.’

‘But ye hope for more from Bati Mansa the pagan? Father,’ said Bel, ‘ye can’t need me to remind you. This particular man may loathe Christians. The
Fortado
will have put him against us. And if ye mean to take another party on land, you’ll have to peg down the crew who missed the rut at Tendeba, or they’ll storm ashore and surprise the King’s wives whether they’re tendered or not. Is it worth it?’