Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [137]
Nicholas said, ‘You are saying that it would suit Gnumi to believe that Godscalc is an impostor? And that since he isn’t, we may all be … what? Prevented from seeing him? Or killed so that we don’t carry tales?’
‘Either is possible,’ Loppe said. ‘The Fortado perhaps will advise him.’
Carefully, they were allowing the Fortado to lead. It laid them open to traps but possessed, meanwhile, other advantages.
‘Doria and Crackbene, carrying out the orders of the Vatachino and Simon,’ said Nicholas. ‘I think I can guess what they will advise.’
‘Can you?’ said Loppe. ‘They haven’t turned. They’re still trading.’
‘All right,’ Nicholas said. ‘If all they want is a cargo, they’ll go to the two Kings and Cantor and turn, having primed Gnumi Mansa to slaughter us. Do you think that will happen?’
‘It may,’ said Loppe. ‘It may not. Saloum will count in our favour. On the other hand, your first theory is probably right. They’ll load and wait at the falls beyond Cantor. Then they’ll try to track where we go when we land. In which case we’ll survive until then.’
‘Some of us,’ Nicholas said. ‘They don’t need Father Godscalc. And whomever they do want to preserve, this King may have other notions. Where is Gnumi Mansa to be found? Do you know?
‘I can guess,’ Loppe said. ‘He came to meet Doria at the river-bank at Tendeba: we should reach it tomorrow. He moves about his domain with two hundred warriors and his wives; he won’t be far away. Those are his almadias, his canoes, along the river-bank.’
Nicholas had seen them. Gliding in and out of the shallows, never approaching the ship; a chain of swift, shallow troughs with their double line of upright, wing-capped, white-shirted Negroes with their short-shafted paddles; wholly unrelated to the eager mercantile canoes of the coast, heaped with meal bags and kola nuts. Nicholas said, ‘What will happen?’
‘You will be sent for,’ said Loppe. ‘And you go.’ He added no warnings. So far up the river, there was little to be done, they both knew, if the Kings took against them.
That night, the San Niccolò lay at anchor off the muddy banks of the river with their singing, croaking, rustling life, and the thirty-one men and two women on board passed the hours sometimes in sleep; sometimes listening to the cries of night birds and the sudden gurgle and swish of cloven water, or the low voice of Filipe, turning the hour-glass, and the mutter of Melchiorre, responding. Misted with wings, the great lanterns bloomed in the darkness, oiling the running waters with gold and touching the sleeping figures on deck, and blotted out, for fleeting seconds, by the leafy membranes of bats, silent as the watchers who waited unseen on either side, their shallow boats deep in the reeds. And just above the threshold of silence, there vibrated the throb of conversing drums.
Nicholas spent the night with the crew in the open, his pallet laid in the quiet of the after-deck. Twice Jorge crossed to kneel and talk in a murmur. The first time, it proved to be nothing of consequence. When next he paused by his bedside Nicholas made room for him to sit on the mattress while he pulled himself up in the half-dark, embracing the large sheeted hump of his knees.
None slept completely bare with women on board, but both of them were stripped to the waist, so that Nicholas could see the white seams of old wounds furrowing the other man’s sinewy torso, and guess from Jorge’s curious gaze how much of his own chequered past could be read from his naked shoulders and arms, his ribs and belly and breast. Jorge said surprisingly, ‘You should appear thus to the King. You are going, this time, ashore?’
‘I should rather appear thus to his wives,’ Nicholas said, utilising one dimple with caution. ‘Of course I shall go, as you will,