Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [134]
The wick reeked. He could hear her breathing; she sneezed. He got up and pulled back the curtain to let in air, and some light from the deck, and also to show the way out. She accepted, he supposed, that it was not only a joke, but a form of dismissal. As she rose, he looked to see how much she minded.
He expected contempt. He wouldn’t have objected, this time, to contempt mixed with a tinge of amusement. He saw, as she went, only her habitual indifference beneath which lay something else that, as always, he could only guess at.
He went off to deal with Filipe.
Chapter 20
NEXT MORNING, obedient to whatever prompting, Father Godscalc held a special mass for the San Niccolò, entering perilous waters, as was in any case seemly for a ship of her name on that day.
In Venice, the first week in December would have brought cold high tides and raw air, and Margot would be opening the shutters of the Casa di Niccolò upon banks of grey mist through which boat would pass ghostly boat, as Julius travelled to the Rialto to balance ducat against groat and écu, and to count his reserves. This week in Murano, friends would warm their hands at the winter-long glowing furnaces of Marietta Barovier, who might tease her timid protégé the Florentine into raising a glass to a Venetian Pope.
In Bruges, ice might have filmed the canals, requiring Cristoffels to warm the pumps in the dyeyard, and Tilde and Catherine de Charetty to light the fire in their office as they paid out their wages and pored over their ledgers, and worried about the future of the Medici agents, now that the old man Cosimo, pater patriae, was dead.
And on two distant islands, the wheels of the sugarcane mills would be turning fast in the rain. On Madeira Gregorio, anxious, resentful, determined, would toil at his desk, and perpetually plod the muddy track between Ponta do Sol and Funchal; while on the other … The King of Cyprus would now be twenty-five years old and tired, no doubt, of his stolen mistress and petulant, perhaps, because David de Salmeton was no longer there; or even regretting, briefly, the banishment of his once-cherished Nikko. Zacco’s mother would want her son to marry. His queen might already be chosen. The King of Cyprus would not, this St Nicholas Day, need to think of Famagusta.
And on the Guinea coast, one man celebrated his twenty-fourth Feast in tropical heat, and high expectation, and enough foreboding to make the blood race, and obliterate all the abominations of the past. On the San Niccolò, the caulking-pitch spat and sizzled in the shimmering radiance while below, the horses drooped, listless. Dolphins shouldered aside the warm sea, and sometimes the vast back of a whale rose and dipped, while sea birds perpetually swirled and swooped and perched on the caravel’s rails and spars. And across the water the sounds of Africa reached the ship as well as the smells: an outburst of faint, rapid drumming would strike the ear from among the tall trees behind the green of the mangroves, although no huts could be seen, and there might be nothing on the beaches but the delicate white plumes of the egrets.
In time, the drumming became intermittent and faint, and as the final hours of the approach to the Gambia went by, there came to those on the San Niccolò another experience: the sensation of being watched; a conviction that the distant trees held more than wildlife; that the movements among the dunes were not always those of birds. And finally men became visible, gazing intently from the shore or paddling their canoes through the winding shallows until, as if by consensus, there came the moment when they came darting out to the ship and, rocking, encircled her.
Ten years before, poison arrows from these same canoes had greeted all foreigners. Now Loppe said, ‘I will go to them. It is safe,’ and slipping down the side stepped into the nearest, sitting hunkered in the deep wooden cavity.
Anything Loppe wished to do, Nicholas allowed. He couldn’t keep perfectly still, but paced idly back and forth until from the boat the