Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [140]
And Bel said, ‘If he wasn’t, you’d get no hearing at all, and Senhor Jorge would feed you to the big lizards. I wish I was coming with you.’
He was glad that she wasn’t. The two women stayed on board, and the two or three crewmen that were sick, and sixteen able men, including the boy Filipe and Melchiorre and Manoli, two of the three expert seamen from the Ciaretti. Bel and Gelis would be safe.
For himself, Godscalc was not afraid; only anxious in case of failure. The silent rowers who took them ashore did not speak; they landed among thick, stubborn mangroves and followed a path rich in mud to a grassy clearing as wide as a park, beyond which, on rising ground, he saw the straw roofs and smoke of a village. Diniz said, ‘There was a snake; they say they can swallow a goat. Did you see the snake on the path? Did you see the red and green birds? Look at that tree!’
The tree was immense: the kind he now knew was called a Baobab; perhaps twenty feet in circumference, and set in the centre of the broad meadow, with its shadow, a great pool of darkness, lying beneath it. Then he saw that the shadow was tenanted.
Some three hundred warriors, their arms glittering, stood in a crescent beneath it, and in the centre, upon a carpet, sat a single black figure of Oriental obesity encased – thick arms, rounded shoulders, immense thighs – in some twenty yards of flowered Florentine silk of the kind exported by the Medici in Bruges at five to six ducats a yard. On the King’s head was a crown of white ostrich feathers, and his ears, arms, neck and ankles were hooped and studded and bangled with gold. Behind him stood a group of chieftains in coloured gowns of a less expensive style, and to one side, manacled to a stake, lay a leopard.
Nicholas said, ‘My lord,’ and stepped forward. He bowed, without kneeling. Loppe, behind him, repeated the phrase, and a greeting in Mandingua. The King, ignoring Loppe and the two black men at his back, gazed in silence first at Nicholas, and then at Godscalc and Diniz; and then set himself to scrutinise the six seamen, beginning with Jorge da Silves, who bowed also. The King’s eyes returned to Nicholas. He spoke.
The words sounded angry: made more so by the jet of saliva that shot from a vacant socket between the King’s purple lips. His eyes, compressed by fat, seemed to glare, and as he spoke he scrabbled within the fringe of grey beard at his jaw as if his fingers were stinging or palsied. Loppe, listening, turned back to Nicholas.
‘My lord King says he thinks the white men must believe him rich, that they appear begging at his door so frequently. He says he has nothing to sell, but will offer them a gourd of wine, since he is a great lord. First, he wishes to ask if it is true that they travel with a sorcerer.’
‘I am no sorcerer,’ said Father Godscalc in anger, striding forward. From under the tree, light as wind, there came a muted rustle, and assagais and arrow-tips twinkled. Nicholas looked at Loppe. Father Godscalc thumped his box on the ground, unlatched its sides, and standing to his full monolithic height repeated, ‘I am no sorcerer. I am a man of God, from the same Church as the abbot of Soto de Cassa who came here two years ago to instruct you in the Christian faith, and who baptised you under its laws. Why do you use the name Gnumi Mansa when all the world knows you swore to worship none but God the Father, in token of which you bear the great name of the dead Infante Henry, whom you called brother?’
He had promised Nicholas he would not become angry, but it was impossible. Jorge at least knew that it was impossible. He saw Nicholas and Loppe glance at each other again; then Loppe began to translate.
It was extremely brief – so brief that he