Scales of Gold (50 page)

‘A crossbow bolt in the shoulder, and a lot of good blood leaked away. A falling-out among thieves.’

‘Thieves!’ croaked Diniz. ‘They’re madmen! They’ve gone crazy for gold!’

‘They talked,’ said Nicholas, ‘Of going back and torturing Saloum, it appears. They thought he’d misled them, and they believed he really did know the way to the mines.’

‘I did mislead them,’ said Saloum. ‘The silent market is not where I told them.’

Diniz wriggled in Godscalc’s arms. He was breathless. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they know where it is now. They caught a man and began to force him to tell them. That’s when I told them to stop, and the little bastard – and Filipe shot me.’

‘You’ll get your reward,’ Godscalc said. ‘Although it may not feel like it at the moment. Nicholas, will Jorge be in danger?’

Nicholas was looking at Saloum. ‘You misled me, too,’ he said. ‘You knew …’

‘I knew you were not only concerned for the boy. But I chose to give you the boy,’ said Saloum. ‘Had I not, you would have missed him.’

‘And now?’ Nicholas said.

‘Oh, now, if you wish,’ said Saloum, ‘I shall take you to the
silent market. I have kept my promise. You are too late for Doria and Lopez. If you wish to rescue these Portuguese murderers, I leave the matter to Allah.’

The silent trade known to the Carthaginians had many places of concourse, but all of them depended, as did this one, on rivers. The salt came by boat, grey-white slabs scribbled over with charms, and still corded in packs as when it crossed the Sahara. The gold came from Wangara, brought on foot over many days’ travelling. The salt was left, and the signal fires lit, and in time the gold would be found placed beside it. Then the invisible bartering would begin.

Jorge da Silves never reached it. The hunched, naked clusters of vultures caused Saloum to stop, a glance of warning at Nicholas, and the trudging procession came to a halt, the porters dropping their loads, the camel resting, that carried Bel and Diniz. The object, when they found it, might have been some half-eaten kill of the wild, but was not. The death had been merciful. Jorge, the acolyte of the Order of Christ, had been killed by the soft leaden ball of a hackbut.

‘His own men,’ Diniz remarked, having forced the information from Godscalc, returning.

‘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 several 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.