Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [143]
He was pointing, Godscalc thought, to the black girl who had returned, all shining eyes and teeth and heavy gold bangles, and was now kneeling before them. Then he saw that she was offering coloured comfits, heaped in a willow basket made in Madeira.
‘The Fortado has been here,’ Nicholas said. ‘They informed the King that you and Diniz your companion were secret enemies of the white men’s Church who, if allowed to survive, would send thunderbolts to destroy his crops and burn his cities and dry up his rivers. They told him to leave the rest of your party untouched, but that the white lords would reward him if he destroyed you. Saloum saved you twice over. He told them you were a true priest, and persuaded them not to kill you for it. Now will you upset all he has done?’
Godscalc couldn’t answer at first. He felt very tired. Now the shadow of the vast tree was dimming the roof of the tent, and outside the Mandingua voices seemed to have grown louder and shriller, half drowning the cries of the first of the night-flying birds. He could hear music: the wailing of some sort of horn; the sound of plucked and sawn strings; the drubbing, in increasing volume, of many different drums. There was a hollow tingle of bells. The skirts of the tent were folded back and Gnumi Mansa … Henry … returning bespectacled and staggering from the well-beaten place of common withdrawal was settling himself afresh and calling for Nicholas. Nicholas, who had avoided using his name.
Godscalc said, ‘Did you choose to punish me because I believe in something? Or because of what I know?’
Nicholas viewed him. His face, gleaming fawn under his hat, was fretted, Godscalc saw, by the loops and rings of brown hair stuck to fresh, dimpled cheeks whose innocence seemed as always in harmony with the large open eyes, their whites and irises so distinct that they seemed to reflect heaven and earth in their soft, rounded expanse. Innocence echoed by the full, relaxed lips and profound voice. Innocence belied only a little by the curious, fastidious nose, and the set, perhaps merely stoical, of the chin and the jaw. Innocence wholly belied by long acquaintance, which taught that the features so assembled were the outer manifestation and cloak of a man few people knew – perhaps none.
Nicholas said, ‘I brought you here because I needed a ship. It’s nothing to do with me if you can’t do your job.’
When the priest went to sleep, the King showed, despite himself, a certain relief. The box of decaying wafers, still prominently displayed on the carpet, was discreetly scuffed to one side and a number of elderly men robed in white could be observed making themselves at home at the back of the tent where the horse had also been tethered. Against its throat and below its fine gilded headstall hung a minute purse of red leather which had not been there before.
Nicholas sat between the King and Jorge da Silves in what appeared to be a great pressure of flesh, some of it belonging to the official party and some occasioned by the unexpected accommodation in their midst of the magnificent young women who had feasted them and who, now the platters had gone, still jumped up from time to time to refill the gourds. Jumped up and reinserted themselves in their places in a manner that turned Diniz crimson, Nicholas saw, and was already creating an awareness among the older men: the cheerful, hard-drinking Luis; the handsome helmsman Fernão; the lively red-headed Vito and even the austere Vicente himself.
The King, he saw, was aware of it and so were his chieftains. They seemed to be laughing. The palm wine appeared yet again, and he took two gourds and gave them both to Jorge. The drumming surged. Loppe, on the King’s other side, paused in his translation and looked at him.
Smiling, Nicholas spoke in Flemish, not Portuguese. ‘What is happening?’
It was a game they had played before. Loppe spoke to the King