Scales of Gold (75 page)

A large smile overcame Nicholas: he felt his beard creaking inside his dimples. He said, ‘You’re just trying to get us both killed. Let’s go and talk to the rest. Perhaps there are a few others who don’t fancy Akil.’

In the end, fifty camels separated from the rest and chose to carry on to the north without calling at the Arawan post of the
Maghsharen Tuareg. They left within half a day of its gates, carrying with them (for a price) all the surplus water the remaining travellers could spare and also the guide, who received, and counted, a hundred gold mithqals for his services. Then they set off, rather fast, for the nearest oasis.

Later, Nicholas realised that Umar had been afraid that Akil would damage the springs. In fact, the Maghsharen had not been so prescient. It was the winds of the previous week that had silted them up, so that when their camels raced towards the green of the palms, there was no broad sheet of water to see; only stretches of mud, with pools of sluggish water lying between them. There was enough, perhaps, for the camels. There was not enough for fifty camels and forty men with a waterless journey before them.

The chief merchant turned to Umar. ‘Katib. We must take what there is, and turn back to Arawan.’

‘You must turn back,’ Umar said. ‘We shall go on. But, from your kindness, allow our beasts to water first, and let us share out what drinking water there is. Your journey will be shorter than ours. Also, there is the guide.’

‘Take him. We know the way back,’ said the merchant. He looked relieved. He had agreed to come in the first place, Nicholas thought, only to show respect for the katib. The merchant said, ‘Will all your men wish to continue?’

Two of them didn’t. It left four, and himself and Umar to deal with six camels. He paid for some goats, and took what food could be spared. It was mostly millet, and kola nuts. He didn’t comment on that. He said. ‘Do we need all these camels?’

‘Yes,’ said Umar. They set off that night.

Now there was silence, for worried men did not talk for too long, especially as the night deepened and walking became automatic; the feet of men and camels travelling up and down the long, curving dunes, leaving them ploughed but unplanted behind them.

Above, the stars hung, enormous and glittering. Nicholas knew their names now: the names he’d learned on his first, ecstatic voyage; the names Diogo Gomes had used; the names in the books he had left behind, in the city where he had just spent part of a lifetime. The drovers had other names for them as well. Some were cheerfully obscene. Some were beautiful.

Beauty was what surrounded them now. It had been there from the beginning, but made indistinct by the host of people about them. Now they were but seven pepper-seeds upon an ocean which stretched, white as curds, to the rim of the universe; specks as remote as those he had watched from a sea-spattered cliff-top in Europe. And as the sun rose, disclosing the scalloped forms of the
dunes, and sank, a vast glory at night, Nicholas experienced the liberation he had not so far been vouchsafed in his life: an emotion of awe and of thankfulness that he had felt nowhere else.

He said little that day or the next, but walked, and sat alone swaying for hour after hour on his beast, the two sticks of his tent in his fists, his shadowed eyes blind, while his mind began to make sense of many things. Whatever it was he had found, it was not the Sea of Obscurity. It was light, and self-knowledge, and peace.

On the third day, Umar roused him. ‘I have taken a decision.’

The world returned. Nicholas said, ‘Never mind your decision. What is this place, your desert?’

Umar smiled, ‘A place to go, when one has feasted with wise men, as you have. Do you want to hear of the problems of the flesh, instead of the soul? We cannot reach the wells by Taodeni as we wanted. Our water is low, and the guide, the
takshif
, says he smells a storm coming. Therefore we are travelling towards the wells of Bir al Ksaib instead.’

‘We’ll reach water much quicker that way?’ Nicholas said. For two days, he hadn’t felt hungry. Now he did.

‘Three days sooner. Perhaps two and a half. It may make all the difference.’

‘But it’s out of our way. So it will take longer to reach Taghaza afterwards?’

‘It will add two days to the overall journey,’ Umar said. ‘But the storm may add many more. We shall need to be prepared, that is all, and in good heart. We are eating. Come and talk to the men.’

The sandstorm, when it came, was the first, but not the worst. During it, nothing could be done but sit cocooned in its path while it belaboured the back and tore and whipped and stung its way through to the flesh, so that every man’s body was heavy with sand, and the eyes, the mouth, the ears became choked with it. The camels stamped: ropes broke and burdens went swinging; the objects of most vital necessity – their water-skins, the carcasses of the goats they had had to kill – required constant and desperate protection.

When it was over they were exhausted, and had lost two days’ travel. And all about them, the slopes, the valleys, the outcrops of fine sculptured sand had radically altered. They were where they had been, but the desert had reformed about them. Then the
takshif
, silent throughout, stirred and rose to his feet. ‘Katib?’

‘Yes?’ said Umar.

‘I will guide you by the shift of the sun, and the wind. In a little, the sand will speak louder. But it is speaking already. Tell your men not to fear, and be strong.’

The men were strong, and also experienced. Nicholas thought that, given the choice, they preferred the natural perils of the desert to the black camps, the sudden attacks of the winter. Now, they were unlikely to be troubled by brigands, and were beyond Akil’s power.

Success depended on how long it would take to reach Bir al Ksaib, and on their strength, and that of the camels. All the desert was strewn with the bones of long-dead camels, and often those of the men who accompanied them. The sands round Timbuktu were threaded with ivory rib-cages, and it had been the same at the oasis and Arawan. Their owners had died within sight of water, as if joy itself had stopped their tired hearts.

They walked and rode for three days before the next storm, and after that, walked more than they rode, to save the camels, for whom there was little food left. They killed a camel the day after the storm, and cut up and dried its flesh in the sun, seething some of it in the liquid wrung from its own stomach and bladder. The rest they poured into their empty water-skins. One of the drovers fell sick and had to be carried. The desert contained, in tidy piles, the discarded loads from both camels.

Umar had counted the days, as well as Nicholas. The second night after the storm, Umar said, ‘If we had gone to Taodeni instead, we should be there.’

It was not really the case. The sandstorms would have held them up just the same. But it was true that their food was nearly finished and their water so reduced that they were perpetually parched. Umar said, ‘Do you wish me to bring out the
goro
?’

He was speaking of kola nuts. Nicholas had seen them. The size of a chestnut and expensive, the most efficacious were white. Chewed, they dispelled in time all sense of hunger and weariness. They were the means Nicholas had used to bring Godscalc back from Ethiopia. They took their own toll. Nicholas said, ‘Soon, perhaps. But not yet.’

Soon, Nicholas began to dream of the pools in the Ma’ Dughu, and of the river that ran past his gardens in Kouklia. When Umar shook him awake, he laughed creakily, and told him that he was thinking of the water-wheel at Bruges, and what he had done to it.

That was the day the sick man went crazy, and Nicholas thought perhaps he himself was affected as well, because there on the dancing, quivering sand was a lake, with palm trees about it, and animals drinking.

‘They tell you it is the sport of demons,’ Umar said. ‘But it is a trick of the light. There is such a place. But it is not there, on the sand.’ Umar had become thin and sunken of eye, as they all were,
but he had shown no emotion except when the thread broke. At home, Nicholas knew, Zuhra was already carrying their third child. It would be born before Umar returned. Nicholas didn’t need to be told what Umar was doing for him.

Then the blind man came again, as they rested at noon, and said, ‘Katib, I smell a storm. There is one camel I see you have favoured. Give it to me, and I will take it to Bir al Ksaib and bring you back water. I can outrun the wind.’

‘Tell it to everyone,’ Umar said. ‘We shall all decide.’

They let him go, for the trust they felt in him. Under clear skies, he explained, the strongest might just reach the well in two days. Travelling hampered by storms, none could do it. By waiting for him, man and beast would harbour their powers. They would have four camels left, for six people. When he came back, there would be five between seven. And if there were others for hiring, he would bring them. But the Bir al Ksaib was just a pool.

They watched him out of sight, and then prepared as well as they could for the day, and the night, and the storm. But first, the sick man died, and they gave him a mantle of sand.

The storm came, and they lived through it for two lightless days, and into the dawn of a third. Their food and drink, which was almost nothing, had been apportioned to last precisely four days.

They had the camels, slumped bickering and groaning beside them. These had little urine to yield, and could give no more blood and still walk. If the
takshif
didn’t come back, it would be necessary to ride them, or to kill and eat them and walk. It would be necessary, but not likely to be very successful.

Nicholas had stopped being hungry, and thought he would vomit if he had to eat camel again. Umar said Nicholas would be surprised what he could do, given a little discomfort.

They joked when they could. They sat together, five men, and talked sometimes, but talking was painful. Nicholas dreamed a great deal. In some of his dreams, he was with Godscalc, bleeding, retching, striving to climb down some impossible gully. In some he was in Famagusta, where others were starving and he was in a kind of pain that was worse. He was always in pain, waking or dreaming. They all were.

‘Well?’ Nicholas said on the fourth morning. ‘I wager you a piece of camel against a big layer-pasty that he’s missed the way and gone on to Marrakesh. A really big layer-pasty, the kind with duck and pigeon and goose and whole eggs in it. And a girl, all covered with sugar.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Umar. ‘You’re thinking of your stomach again. If you must think of something tasty, why not mutton? Or remember the Koy’s last feast, when he tried to serve lion?’

‘Lion suet,’ Nicholas said. ‘Lion suet is good for the ears. Bel was always trying to melt it. Do you hear anything?’

Sometimes, they forgot to listen. Sometimes, their eyes burning and swollen, they couldn’t see. One of the men said, ‘
My lord!
’ He lurched to his feet.

Nicholas sat with his back to the sun, and didn’t turn. He sat opposite Umar, and let Umar’s face tell him what was happening behind him.

Umar said, ‘Which camel are you going to eat? You’re not damned well going to cheat and eat the fresh ones. I want to see you eat something that stinks as much as you do.’

His face quivered, then steadied. Nicholas took both his hands and held them tightly. Then he got up, for the three others were standing embracing each other and calling, and when he went forward, they put their arms round his shoulders too, and then Umar’s.

‘Allah!’ said Nicholas crossly. ‘But you are a hard race to kill, you great bullocks from Guinea. What is a poor trader to do, who led you out here to die so that he could eat all the camels?’

They laughed as if they were drunk. They laughed, and croaked, and kissed one another and him, for the
takshif
was riding towards them, with three mounted men and five camels.

Chapter 37

T
HE WATER OF
Bir al Ksaib was brackish and warm, and better than wine. There was food there. They rested for three days, and took fresh camels, and completed their journey to Taghaza. It was not easy.

It was further than the way they had come, and the winds were still blowing. But they had strong mounts, and willing men to go with them, and a new guide. The blind
takshif
would have come, and their drovers, but Nicholas gave them great presents and turned them back. He tried to turn back Umar too, but failed. ‘You didn’t keep your wager,’ Umar said. ‘If you won’t eat the camel, then you have to supply me with the pie.’

There wasn’t much likelihood of finding a layer-pasty in Taghaza, but Nicholas was willing to try. Umar, with his bright intelligence and generous nature, was the golden thread which permeated the whole Olympian experience; Umar as a whole man of his own race at last, and able at last to make affirmation of what he felt and believed.

They had always communicated, Umar and he, in a practical sense. The planning of the future of Timbuktu was only an extension, in a way, of the planning of the plantations at Kouklia. But Umar was also a man widely read and well taught, who had used the years of isolation and exile to ponder in silence. In the schools of Timbuktu, he and Umar had both spoken, and been heard, and continued in private the entrancing deliberations in which they had taken part. Their relationship changed, but their discussions, except for once, had remained general.

On the long transit to Taghaza, walking under the Andalusian vaults of the stars, there was time to talk again now and then – and a need. The clarity of the desert demanded something as rare; demanded truth, vision, honesty of those who walked in it. But it was less possible, now, to divorce their thinking from what they
now knew of each other. And when Umar, with hesitation, began one day to speak of his forebears and family, and then, slowly, of his capture and the years that came after, Nicholas was aware that he had finally been given the gift that the other had always withheld.

‘Should I regret it?’ Umar said. ‘It humbled me. I had thought myself learned, of illustrious race, one of the chosen. Had I not been captured, I might have travelled as far, but in Muslim countries, and treated always with respect. As it was, I was made to learn many things, and came to understand more than one religion. We have talked of all this. You challenged Father Godscalc to defend his beliefs, and reinforce yours, but I should guess that you were careful not to disturb him. He needs what he has.’