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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The plump woman looked up at him. ‘You evil-inclined man, what are you doing?’

  ‘Welcoming my confessor,’ said Nicholas; and went to the side.

  Diniz followed. Now the sun sank low behind them, and its Oriental light lay on the water and the drowsing fowl and the wicker cabins that dotted the shore, and tinged the reedy islands with the colour of Persian brick. The San Niccolò’s boats, drawing behind them the rose-tinged arrows of their wake, made their way slowly towards the mother ship, bringing with them Godscalc and Loppe, the sailing-master and his mate, and the oarsmen who had set out with them that morning. What else the boats contained could not be seen.

  Diniz said, ‘Nicholas? A boat from the Fortado.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nicholas said; and waited.

  Their own two boats arrived first, and disgorged their men, and were made secure while Nicholas stood at the head of the companionway and watched, hardly greeting his priest or his master or Loppe, except with a nod. Then, fast on their heels, came the pinnace from the Fortado, with Raffaelo Doria standing in it.

  ‘Ser Niccolò vander Poele?’ the commander called, and the rosy light beamed on his enamels, and his teeth, and the firm, jowelled, inimical face. ‘A word with you, pray?’

  The face of Nicholas, looking down, had no amusement left in it, but he laid his arms on the rail and clasped his hands gently. ‘Monseigneur? It is late.’

  ‘Late enough,’ said Doria. ‘No one can hear us. The factor has gone to the fort, and the King and his wives have gone home. It seems a good time to resume the little talk we had earlier. You will see that the men with me are armed. You will perhaps even notice that the cannon on the Fortado are prepared and pointing this way. I should not like to disturb the fort. But I must insist that you let me tow your boats to my ship with their purchases. It is for your own good. You are over your load-line.’

  ‘I am? Then you are right,’ Nicholas said. ‘I had better sail. Unfortunately, I have need of the boats, even empty.’

  ‘Why not? You may keep them,’ said Doria. ‘When I have emptied them.’ He turned.

  Behind, their painters loose, their crew paddling idly beside them, floated the San Niccolò’s two handsome boats, upside down. ‘I thought I might as well empty them first,’ Nicholas said. ‘Then we can be on our way. Unless you still want them?’

  Diniz said, ‘Oh, my God.’ Beside him, Gelis looked pale and even Bel had gone scarlet.

  Doria said, ‘You would do even this, to spite my owners?’

  ‘I should do more than that,’ Nicholas said. ‘Perhaps the Vatachino know it better than you do. Let me wish you good night.’

  ‘My lord!’ came the cry over the water.

  Nicholas, half withdrawn, stayed to watch, and the others stood on deck, listening.

  ‘My lord!’ It was not addressed to them, but to Doria, and it came from one of the Fortado’s own boats, speeding in from the ocean. ‘My lord, the roundship has sailed!’

  Raffaelo Doria looked up, and then across the water to the speaker. ‘In what direction?’

  ‘North!’ came the bellow. ‘North to north-west, and fully loaded!’

  The San Niccolò rocked. The Fortado’s pinnace dipped in silence below. In the sea to the rear, a practised team was righting the Niccolò’s boats. The incoming vessel slackened its dash and, on a wave from Doria, turned and made doubtfully for the Fortado.

  Raffaelo Doria looked up. He said, ‘You had already loaded the gold? You had it carried overland to the roundship?’

  ‘While you were entertaining the King and ourselves so very hospitably. As you recommended yourself,’ Nicholas said, ‘we elected to keep all our capacity for the Gambia. I’m afraid you left King Zughalin dissatisfied and less inclined to trust the Vatachino in the future – but at least you were not all hanged for arms running. And now I suppose you will leave. Do you have any particular plans?’

  ‘Only one,’ said Doria, ‘for you personally. As for the rest – am I going north after the Ghost? It is tempting, but no. I think that, like you, I shall make my way south. It seems I have all this cloth, and there is no Portuguese factor, as yet, in that kingdom. We may even meet there.’

  He bowed, leaving, and Nicholas turned from the rail. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Three mule-loads of gold?’ Diniz said. ‘Loaded on to the Ghost?’

  ‘On its way to Madeira, and without the Fortado to dog it. It should get there,’ Nicholas said. ‘And Gregorio will know how to take care of it. And the Bank, I hope, will redeem itself all the more quickly, and Mistress Lucia’s business. While, as it happens, we have done no more to messieurs Vatachino and Lomellini and St Pol than will deprive them of trade, and prevent them from replacing poison arrows with gunpowder, for what that is worth. Father? Do you feel less despairing?’

  Godscalc stood, his face lined. He said, ‘I have taken God’s word today where it has not often been heard. That is all I can say.’

  ‘Jorge?’

  ‘It depends whom you trust,’ said the shipmaster. ‘But you could have done little else. And we are free to go to the Gambia.’

  ‘Loppe?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘We are not all children,’ said Loppe. ‘Even those who came on board today. Do not be deceived.’

  ‘You weren’t there,’ said Mistress Bel. ‘They laughed at us, and had cause to. The demoiselle knows.’

  ‘What?’ said Loppe.

  No one spoke. Diniz thought of the pearls, and the light silken hair, and the wager. Doria had believed Nicholas concealed on the Ghost, and had been shown to be wrong. Gelis had won her stupid wager, and the child Tati was her reward. Except that the child Tati, freed of her bondage, had clung screaming to Doria her owner; had kissed Doria’s feet weeping; and when finally wrested away, had tried to kill herself with his knife.

  The white man was her lord. She was superior now to the Jalofos, who had sold her. She would not survive the shame of returning. And, perhaps, she had been taught to adore Raffaelo Doria as, rumour said, his kinsman Pagano Doria had made himself the first lover of another young girl. So they had left Tati with him.

  Gelis van Borselen said to Loppe, ‘You will hear the story from someone, no doubt. I apologised to you once before. This time, you will know that I mean it.’

  Chapter 19

  THROUGH THE HOT DAYS and cool nights of early December, the caravel San Niccolò sailed to her ultimate landfall in the great river belt of the Sahel, and all but the six slaves aboard her lay at night and dreamed of what might be still to come, for the way to the Fountain of Youth, to the River of Jewels, to the court of Sheba and Solomon was ahead, and open.

  The Fortado had left the estuary first, and Nicholas had made no effort this time to forestall her for, he said, the race was won, and he was content. And that at least seemed true, whatever doubts some of them might harbour about the malice of Raffaelo Doria. Nicholas was content, and his caravel carried the glow of it, however fleeting, on the two hundred miles of its journey.

  Of the twenty-five crew and six passengers, most could now expect to be wealthy, if they lived, and if the Ghost reached her destination in safety. Seventy kilos of gold three times over had been loaded into the Ghost, on top of what she carried already. She was a roundship, and hence would make no great speed sailing northwards, but Ochoa was a fine seaman, and a good fighter, and she carried a prime weight of ordnance.

  As for the Fortado, said Nicholas, she was welcome to proceed south and buy whatever the Gambia traders had hauled to the mouth of the river. Then with any luck she would turn and go home, leaving the upper stream and its secrets to others.

  What did he mean by its secrets? What else but finding out where it led? Did it join with the Senagana, as some said? Did it link with the east-flowing river men called the Joliba? And was the Joliba an arm of the Nile, flowing east to the heart of Ethiopia? Nicholas wished no harm to the Fortado going to Gambia, he said, but he would like to see the tip of her mast now and then, a
nd the direction in which her guns might be currently pointing. And once she had got to the Gambia, he would very much like to see the back of her.

  He was not altogether stupefied by good fortune.

  There was, none the less, something fey about Nicholas – and his caravel. Since the departure of the Ghost, she had changed. When, on the first day of their sailing, Godscalc said, ‘What has happened?’ Bel of Cuthilgurdy smiled and looked up from her sewing.

  ‘We’ve become mummers; barefaced maskers, my bodach. You and Lopez and Senhor Jorge did the serious work. The rest of us were thrown on our wits; made to jink our way into the Fortado; forced into cheatry; compelled to trust one another. I would tell you we gart Gelis laugh, if I thought you’d believe it. Hence what you might call a truce.’

  ‘Including Gelis?’ said the priest.

  ‘That would be rash,’ said Mistress Bel. ‘But there’s a reasonable understanding between her and Diniz. And she’s less cocksure than she was with young Nicholas. Not that the waste of life we’ve seen could be forgotten, but he’s managed to sweeten it.’

  ‘Not for me; not for Loppe,’ Godscalc said.

  ‘Then he’ll work on you both,’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy calmly. ‘And despite your misdoubts, he has gone on to sail south. Can he be intent on more gold? Or is he a crusading son of the kirk after all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Godscalc said. ‘Perhaps gold makes men dizzy, like wine. The very ship seems to sing.’

  ‘Do you say?’ said Mistress Bel. ‘Nothing vulgar, I hope.’

  Through a day and a night, the San Niccolò danced her way south, and her light heart was not wholly due, Godscalc perceived, to the treasure. The ship had become a community: one already half formed before the disruptive advent of the slaves, and now welded close by their fortunes. Moving among the faces he and Bel and Loppe now knew so well Godscalc guessed that, laden with gold, they would have shown themselves readier to turn and go home than to go on. But they had regard for their master, and seemed to think that there might be other chances, now their lucky young patron was back. The slaves would have been kept to sell for good money if Niccolino’d been there, the word went. The name Ochoa had used in the Bay of Tanit had stuck.

  Nicholas worked to make them his, too. He had the name and history of every man, and not only Melchiorre and Vito and Manoli who had sailed with him on his galley to Lagos. He cultivated the first mate, Jorge’s lieutenant Vicente, and he took trouble with the boys: the active, insolent, well-beaten Lázaro, who was enough of a thug to be a natural seaman, and the causelessly insolent Filipe, who was not.

  He had asked Bel, in Godscalc’s hearing, not to protect Filipe when he was punished, but to let him deal with it himself, and Bel had agreed without arguing. Godscalc wondered if Nicholas had found out about the two boys and the blacks; he was bitterly unsure if it was right to conceal it. He dreamed of the baby rising to the rim of each wave like a butterfly.

  Jorge, he supposed, had not really forgiven them for failing to keep their human merchandise. There were still six Negroes on board: all white-capped and shirted Mandinguas, and all free to rove the ship as they pleased, since they could understand what Loppe told them. Slighter in build and less talkative than the Jalofos, they were both quick and observant, as Godscalc found when he, too, tried to communicate with them. The natural leader, a tranquil man of about thirty-five with a fringe of a beard, knew Arabic and somewhere had picked up a few phrases of Portuguese, to which he was adding daily. In the absence of Loppe, it was Saloum who now helped to interpret. Their fellows who had leaped overboard had probably been as able and amiable as these, Godscalc thought, before they were captured. Only there had been no words to deal with their fear.

  They had put the others ashore at the Senagana, but had said nothing of them to King Zughalin, for he would have set out to trap them again, and sell them cheerfully to the next comer. Godscalc had learned that tribes at war saw nothing wrong in seizing their rivals. Kings did little, either, to prevent parents within their own lands from selling the odd child, like Tati, although the loss of young, active boys would, he suspected, be frowned on. It was one of the hidden flaws in Loppe’s programme. These people could not afford to lose the flower of their kindred; not unless they came back.

  It had become the custom since Funchal for those who were not of the crew to gather just before noon at the bitácula on the poop deck, to see the pin set in the compass-card and to wait until the cry came that meant the shadow had moved to the fleur-de-lys point of the north. Then the binnacle’s Venetian hour-glass would be lifted by Filipe or Lázaro and turned, as it was every half-hour, day and night, and the comparison made which would show how far east or west the ship might be sailing. At every stop they had made, the balestilha had been taken on shore – the cross-staff that ships carried in place of the heavy astrolabe used on land – and Godscalc had seen the creased charts and the worn tables written at Lagos with their lists of daily solar altitudes.

  It did not surprise him that Nicholas was always present and active in matters of navigation. Numbers were his tools. It did surprise him to notice how much Gelis had mastered during a journey which had, after all, been made largely on the extraordinary roundship of Ochoa de Marchena. He had assumed, he saw wrongly, that a young woman of birth would have spent such a voyage modestly in her cabin below. It had already struck him to wonder what she had done during the engagement between the Ghost and the Fortado, but she had said nothing of it herself and Bel, consulted, had told him to mind his own business. That, at least, was what he thought that she said, and he always took Bel’s advice concerning Gelis.

  In any case, navigation mattered, whether they were out of sight of land, as they had been, or whether as now they were sailing down a treacherous coast invisible to them by night, and distorted through dust-clouds by day. The eighty feet of the San Niccolò pitched through the ocean, sailing wide, the set of her sails hardly altering, but the lead dipped and dipped from her side while the knots of the log told her speed.

  From the poop deck, there was little to see. The coast they were passing was featureless still: a ribbon of low dunes and hillocks and bushes which became greener as the second day progressed, with a line of trees visible above the distant beaches, and the white of surf on low reefs, and a glimpse of mangrove islands, now seeming near and now far in the haze.

  Early that morning they had passed the basalt cliff, fifty feet high, which marked, Jorge said, the western limit of Guinea, along with the green point called Cape Verde. After that, their course turned south-south-east, as did that of the Fortado, when she could be glimpsed. Having raised her, Jorge da Silves was quite content to keep his distance, hurrying when she hurried, but making no attempt to gain ground. Except in the matter of slaves, he seemed quite in accord with his patron’s intentions.

  Diniz, joining Godscalc under the pavilion of the poop, was happier trying to prove Nicholas wrong. ‘What would you do if you were the Fortado, and having to report back to David de Salmeton? I’ll tell you. You’d get to the Gambia quickly. You’d unload the arms as well as the legitimate cargo. You’d take on everything you can buy – including slaves, I shouldn’t wonder. And then you’d arrange a warm welcome for the Niccolò.’

  He sounded unaffectedly happy, visualising it. Also he smelt of horses again. Of the twenty-five they had brought, they had kept five for themselves. He added wisely, ‘No one would know. We’d simply appear to have sunk with all hands in some accident. If I were Nicholas, I’d have hurried and wrecked the Fortado instead.’

  ‘Did you mention this to Nicholas?’ Godscalc said. He moved away from the helm and the master, and leaned on the rail looking aft. Diniz followed him.

  ‘He says the Fortado won’t invite battle, because she wants to load and get her cargo home safely. He says she has nothing to gain since we’re practically empty. I say that Crackbene and Doria can’t afford to let him off. Think what he’s done to them!’ His dark, narrow face glowed.<
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  ‘I suppose,’ Godscalc said, ‘it depends on how successful they are in the Gambia. The smiting of Nicholas might seem less compelling than a quick exit with a mountain of gold.’

  ‘Except that they won’t find much gold, according to Jorge,’ Diniz said. ‘Gum and pepper and cotton, perhaps. But when the Senagana has gold to sell, the Gambia doesn’t.’

  ‘You mean it comes from the same mines?’ Godscalc said. ‘But perhaps Doria knows how to obtain it at source.’

  ‘No,’ Diniz said. ‘Even Diogo Gomes didn’t know that. They keep it secret.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The heathens who mine it. They dig holes, and send their women down them with feathers.’

  It sounded like a joke. Godscalc was in no mood for jokes. He said, ‘Where did this nonsense come from?’

  Diniz, as he usually did, kept his good manners. ‘The classical writers spoke of it. All the navigators were told about it at Sagres. The Carthaginians came here for their gold: Herodotus wrote about it fifteen hundred years ago. The silent trade, it was called. No one ever saw who the miners were. No one knows, even yet.’

  ‘Then how do they sell?’ Godscalc said.

  ‘You are telling him about the silent trade?’ said Jorge da Silves, joining them unexpectedly. ‘It has been done the same way for hundreds of years. The traders pile their goods on the banks of a river, each pile named for its owner, with a hollow of a certain size made beside it. Then they make a smoke signal, and go back to their boats. When they return, they find no people, but the hollows filled or part-filled with gold. If the gold is sufficient it is taken, and the salt – it is always salt – left for the miners. If not, they retreat again to their boats, upon which the amount of gold is increased. The trade depends on absolute honesty: this timid race, who are never seen, make no effort to make off with the salt until the gold has been removed.’

  Diniz said, ‘Of course, you know the story as well.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jorge da Silves. ‘And so, naturally, does Senhor Niccolò.’