Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [101]
It was not the case now. He wanted to put his father’s point of view, but Nicholas wouldn’t allow it; stopped him speaking, and asked Gelis to go to her cabin.
She didn’t refuse. He was a large man, standing beside her. He could quite well have marched her below. As it was, she rose, and balanced, and walked, pausing to turn as she passed him. ‘Religion and gold,’ Gelis said. ‘You were right, weren’t you, Claes? They have nothing in common with justice.’
The horses, heavy and drowsy below, were the best comfort Diniz could find. He would miss them. Tomorrow they, too, would step on unknown shores and labour for unknown masters. Tomorrow, men and women and children would occupy the same straw. Horses and slaves, to a merchant, were merchandise. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right, unless the end justified it.
He spent some time below. Then he spread his blanket in the great cabin and pretended, when the other men came, to be already asleep.
He wakened to daylight and shouting, and came on deck to find the ship floating like the spectre she was in a suspension of fine ruddy sand.
It was far more dense than before. However thinned by the draught of her passing, it hung in impassive red veils beyond, giving Diniz a shadowy glimpse of the jut of Cape Blanco, its long white plateau no more than two miles behind. Of the deep bay the ship was traversing, there was no sign at all. The Ghost occupying her circle of sea seemed like a dog on a treadmill, always sailing but never progressing; and every now and then, as the breeze brought it, sand would enter the ship in soft flurries, striking the canvas with a hoarse and echoing wheeze, while rendering noiseless all human activity. Ochoa de Marchena said, ‘It happens. It will wear off through the morning.’ And later: ‘We hailed a boat in the night. It’s good news. See how our young man is happy! The San Niccolò is anchored in Arguim, and has been there for two days.’
Two days. Diniz couldn’t see Nicholas, and wondered how anyone could refer to him as young. He wondered, too, at the speed Jorge da Silves had made with the caravel, even given his familiarity with the coast. Lastly, he wondered how the same Jorge would go about conducting his business in his patron’s name without his patron on board, and what excuse he was making to linger. He could hardly say that he had a stolen roundship to wait for.
Ochoa, who knew the coast almost as well as Jorge, came to cheer him from time to time, a piece of bread or a chicken leg in his hand. Ochoa pointed out the sudden glare in the water that screamed a warning of rocks, but was caused by the little sardine fish in its thousands. He described the great fighting tunny: on a clear day, Senhor Diniz would see the fishing-boats and the huts of their owners edging the sands and mudflats of this very bay, to which they brought back their catch to salt and sell later through Arguim. ‘For whose protection, of course,’ Ochoa said, ‘they pay a small toll. Indeed, a rather large toll. But it gives them sole rights, and that is always expensive.’
The fog of sand lingered all morning; the food Diniz found in the cabin was gritty. Gelis didn’t appear. He took time to pack, since he was certainly leaving – for the San Niccolò, he hoped, despite everything. He saw that Nicholas, too, had stowed and strapped all his belongings. He came in once, lowering a flask from his lips, and said, ‘You’re ready, good. Better still if the sand doesn’t clear: we can slip quietly across to the Niccolò.’ He smiled. There was no gold today on his shirt. He said, ‘Would you like some of this? There’s no mud in it.’