Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
They all heard him halt. Gelis looked at Godscalc, then trotted after. She had anticipated some blockage, a barrier, but as it descended the path became suddenly broader; became a ledge; became a plateau stark in the sun, which blazed from the south-east ahead of her.
Nicholas sat in the opening, the reins on his knee, looking outwards. He had seldom ridden in Bruges. If he had, Gelis thought, he would have looked like this, stolidly equestrian on the ridge of the wall, except that the sky would have been paler, and there would have been a windmill beside him. There was wind, now, where he had stopped. It fluttered the cloth at his shoulder, which was otherwise still. Gelis dismounted, and walked her mount down beside him. He said, ‘There it is.’
She saw, again, what had been given her from the deck of a caravel, which was a vision of space. The manuscript of the sky, stained with blue, franked by the seal of the African sun. Below it, a horizon so far that the haze of distance made it uncertain, a haze which lay not over the Ocean of Darkness but an ocean of light, of a fertile land of golden grain and green grass and the terracotta of alluvial soil, sprinkled with the deeper green of great trees and freckled with cattle. And through the plain ran a broad silver highway, rimmed on its far side by hills and edged by miniature townships, neat as constellations of straw.
She wished to ask what the highway was, but could not. Saloum’s footstep, careful, courteous, sounded behind them. He said, ‘It is the Joliba, senhorinha. The great river you know of. It flows east, no man knows where. The caravanserai you seek is fourteen days from here, close to its banks.’
‘And the silent market?’ Nicholas said.
Saloum came to his side. The donkey shifted. ‘It is there,’ Saloum said. ‘On the stretch of river you see, over the plain.’
No one spoke. Then Nicholas said, ‘I see no fires.’
And Saloum said, ‘No, my lord. The trade will be done.’
It was done. They descended the slopes. When next day they moved over the shining, flowery grass it was evident that there was no one there on the banks of the Joliba, although on their journey they saw that the soil of the meadow had been roughly churned here and there, and pitted by uneven footmarks, and the agitated small prints of donkeys. Of the five men who had probably died, there were no bodies visible, and in the rich soil, no trace of spilled blood.
The river-bank consisted of fine, ruddy shingle smoothed by the water, so that they could see where cattle had stood, and the slots of a leopard, and the scuff of hurrying rats. Further up, the grit was dry and tumbled and littered with what had been left when the water shrank. Further up still, it was mixed with grass, and on one spot they found a great heap of wood ash, half blown about and quite cold, with some chicken bones lying, and the kind of detritus a group of men left when eating and waiting together.
When they walked down the shingle again, at a different place, they could see where several canoes had been hauled to the bank, and some mooring posts sunk, with bits of Baobab rope still wound about them. Then, much further up, Vito found the trading-station itself.
It had been set up on a stretch of hard ground, reinforced in some places by boulders. As on the Gambia, the booths had been placed in a line, and the sockets and mat-prints still showed although the thatched roofs and uprights had gone. One of the mats was still in place, with the oblong imprint of the salt slabs plainly visible. Two of the places were blackened and