Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [136]
‘It is possible,’ said Jorge da Silves. ‘Father, it is for you to say.’
‘Happy?’ said Nicholas to Bel of Cuthilgurdy.
‘There were tortoises on the beach,’ Diniz said. ‘And I saw a silk-cotton tree with an ape in it.’
‘So you see,’ continued Nicholas to Bel of Cuthilgurdy, ‘the whole expedition has been worth while.’
The next afternoon (the island having proved deficient in grace), the caravel turned her back on the ocean and set her course upstream and into the interior, stopping only to deliver four of her slaves to the river-bank. The Mandinguas departed unbaptised, and with a frail enough prospect of ever reaching their homes. Godscalc took leave of them miserably and they embraced him; and wept on parting with Bel and with Loppe, watched without pleasure by Jorge da Silves.
Instead of more than a score of slaves he had two, but at least they were of high quality, and one of them, the bearded and articulate Saloum, even offered himself as a pilot, for he had used the waterway of the Gambia, he said, many times.
And indeed, as the river unfolded its steaming, tortuous course, full of currents and shallows and freakish suckings and surges of tide, Saloum proved their most precious possession. He it was who, repairs and careening over, guided them from point to point on the banks, enabling Father Godscalc to attempt to land at this village or that, so that he could see what religion, if any, the inhabitants followed, and talk to them with Loppe or Saloum as his interpreter. There was no immediate hurry, Nicholas said.
For Diniz there was no hurry: it was a time of rapture. The shining, slow-moving river, three miles wide, moved beneath him, obeying its own motion and that of the moon, while the seamen deployed all their skills to harness the uneven wind and turn back and forth among the sandbanks and islands and streams, between one low, leafy green bank and the other.
Strange birds soared over their mastheads and disappeared in blurs of scarlet and green, dun and rose-colour into the dense margins of bushes and trees, from which came a wicked chorus of noise, a screaming and twittering, mixed with the hoots and cries of unknown animals; while by night the frogs and cicadas performed a different chorus.
Impelled by the special enthusiasm of Diniz as well as the padre, the San Niccolò on the second day turned off to sail between the towering mangrove bushes of some ample creek which led forty miles or more, Saloum said, to the south; and, anchoring finally, sent her boats to penetrate even further.
From that expedition Father Godscalc returned with a manner which hourly became weightier and more silent, while Diniz ran up on deck, wet and bitten and glowing, to talk until he was exhausted of the wonders of the swamps – he had seen the man-eating lizards, monster upon monster, asleep in the shallows. He had seen apes, great baboons, carrying their children lovingly on their backs. He had been put to sit with a lot of people under a tree while Godscalc talked to them, helped by Loppe, and had been given beans and millet in bowls and offered two black girls to sleep with. The black women had hair like braided wool, and wore cotton shifts woven in strips by their menfolk, and three of them had circles of gold on their arms, but Loppe wouldn’t translate any questions about them. He had tasted a gourd of palm wine.
‘So I see,’ Nicholas said. To Loppe, apart, he said, ‘What happened?’
‘The people are uneasy,’ Loppe said. ‘In some villages they ran away. In others they allowed the padre to speak because we gave them presents, but were glad when we left. It is not the leper-white skin or the caravels: they have seen traders before. Their holy men have told them that Father Godscalc is a sorcerer who will cast a spell on their millet, and cut the hair of young girls for his mattress, and who has incurred the hatred of trees.’
‘The hatred of …?’
‘It is a belief.’
Nicholas could be stolid as well. He said, ‘But they are subjects of Gnumi Mansa?’
‘I fear,’ Loppe said, ‘that Gnumi Mansa’s Portuguese