Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [127]
‘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