‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Loppe would know,’ Nicholas said, ‘if you think it worth asking him. I’d prefer Jorge, I must tell you, to keep his illusions. Whatever the truth, you can’t do anything about it except agonise, and you might as well agonise over what can be helped. Look at this.’
He was pointing, Godscalc thought, to the black girl who had returned, all shining eyes and teeth and heavy gold bangles, and was now kneeling before them. Then he saw that she was offering coloured comfits, heaped in a willow basket made in Madeira.
‘The Fortado has been here,’ Nicholas said. ‘They informed the King that you and Diniz your companion were secret enemies of the white men’s Church who, if allowed to survive, would send thunderbolts to destroy his crops and burn his cities and dry up his rivers. They told him to leave the rest of your party untouched, but that the white lords would reward him if he destroyed you. Saloum saved you twice over. He told them you were a true priest, and persuaded them not to kill you for it. Now will you upset all he has done?’
Godscalc couldn’t answer at first. He felt very tired. Now the shadow of the vast tree was dimming the roof of the tent, and outside the Mandingua voices seemed to have grown louder and shriller, half drowning the cries of the first of the night-flying birds. He could hear music: the wailing of some sort of horn; the sound of plucked and sawn strings; the drubbing, in increasing volume, of many different drums. There was a hollow tingle of bells. The skirts of the tent were folded back and Gnumi Mansa … Henry … returning bespectacled and staggering from the well-beaten place of common withdrawal was settling himself afresh and calling for Nicholas. Nicholas, who had avoided using his name.
Godscalc said, ‘Did you choose to punish me because I believe in something? Or because of what I know?’
Nicholas viewed him. His face, gleaming fawn under his hat, was fretted, Godscalc saw, by the loops and rings of brown hair stuck to fresh, dimpled cheeks whose innocence seemed as always in harmony with the large open eyes, their whites and irises so distinct that they seemed to reflect heaven and earth in their soft, rounded expanse. Innocence echoed by the full, relaxed lips and profound voice. Innocence belied only a little by the curious, fastidious nose, and the set, perhaps merely stoical, of the chin and the jaw. Innocence wholly belied by long acquaintance, which taught that the features so assembled were the outer manifestation and cloak of a man few people knew – perhaps none.
Nicholas said, ‘I brought you here because I needed a ship. It’s nothing to do with me if you can’t do your job.’
When the priest went to sleep, the King showed, despite himself, a certain relief. The box of decaying wafers, still prominently displayed on the carpet, was discreetly scuffed to one side and a number of elderly men robed in white could be observed making themselves at home at the back of the tent where the horse had also been tethered. Against its throat and below its fine gilded headstall hung a minute purse of red leather which had not been there before.
Nicholas sat between the King and Jorge da Silves in what appeared to be a great pressure of flesh, some of it belonging to the official party and some occasioned by the unexpected accommodation in their midst of the magnificent young women who had feasted them and who, now the platters had gone, still jumped up from time to time to refill the gourds. Jumped up and reinserted themselves in their places in a manner that turned Diniz crimson, Nicholas saw, and was already creating an awareness among the older men: the cheerful, hard-drinking Luis; the handsome helmsman Fernão; the lively red-headed Vito and even the austere Vicente himself.
The King, he saw, was aware of it and so were his chieftains. They seemed to be laughing. The palm wine appeared yet again, and he took two gourds and gave them both to Jorge. The drumming surged. Loppe, on the King’s other side, paused in his translation and looked at him.
Smiling, Nicholas spoke in Flemish, not Portuguese. ‘What is happening?’
It was a game they had played before. Loppe spoke to the King and to Nicholas, the words in Flemish slipped in between. ‘The men and women outside are going to perform for you. The men will leap and fight, and when the fires are lit, the women will dance, clothed and half-clothed. They are graceful.’
‘And the women here in the tent?’ Nicholas said. Their shoulders were bare, and their arms, and their slender ankles and feet. He could feel their breath on his neck, and once, a tongue.
‘All the women here are the King’s wives. You are his guests until dawn, so he will offer experience of them as his feast-gift.’ Loppe was smiling too, with rare affection and mischief.
Nicholas said, ‘What do we do?’ He felt hollow. He brought his brain on guard with some suddenness, like a sentry caught napping.
Loppe said, ‘It is your choice. He will have made provision for all of you. He will be complimented if those of rank among you requisition the favours of his favourite wives. Not to do so might seem a slight, unless a man is clearly incapable. The padre is asleep.’
‘And our Knight of the Order, or as soon as I can arrange it,’ said Nicholas. A shocking pang ran through him and remained somewhere, throbbing.
‘Leave him to me,’ Loppe said.
‘I don’t know if I should,’ Nicholas answered. ‘Loppe, are you sure? It seems …’
‘He has many more,’ Loppe said. ‘More than he can satisfy. This will keep them contented. These young women are mostly with child, and hence barred to him and restless. The occasion can produce nothing but good: the King will appoint you his brothers.’
Nicholas smiled at the King and felt the smile spread idiotically. The subject under ostensible discussion was unicorn’s horn. He said in Flemish, ‘What did Doria do?’
‘He wasn’t asked,’ Loppe replied. ‘He put altogether too many questions about the source of the gold. What you see before you, Niccolino, is virgin territory.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Nicholas said. When the wine came round again, he refused it.
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 N
icholas 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
IT 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.
&nb
sp; 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.
Scales of Gold: The Fourth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 33