Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [173]
No, he didn’t refrain from going ashore because he was afraid, or because the need for haste wouldn’t allow it. There was no need for haste now. He abstained from the exercise of his mission because he had seen confirmed what he did not wish to believe: that he, a white man and a stranger, could not deliver his message to a simple people so alien. They heard him with fright. And even if they had received him with love and peace and full understanding, they were bound not to follow him, unless their King followed him too. His was not a mission to his fellow men, who must be heedless as those screaming baboons. It was a message only for Zughalin and Gnumi Mansa and Bati Mansa and those other great lords such as Prester John, to whom he was an envoy, a person to pamper or kill.
But perhaps, most of all, he sat here with his faith locked within him because the people of these shores, he had been told, were practising Muslims, and that was Saloum’s creed. Once, he had despised Saloum for leading a priest to Gnumi Mansa. Now, he understood that he had saved all their lives.
He had asked Saloum what Timbuktu was like, but had learned only what he already guessed: that it was a place of trans-shipment; a terminus where the camels, ten thousand perhaps in a train, could rest and feed and take water while the goods they had brought from the desert were moved to the yards of the dealers, and from there to the boats by which they would be dispersed when the floods would allow. A place of seasonal haggling, and gold. What your heart and your soul both have need of, Lopez had incomprehensibly said.
He supposed Nicholas still needed gold, although he hadn’t said so: the journey had to be paid for, and the Ghost might not have arrived. Diniz, his shoulder still bound but dry and without inflammation, sometimes talked about that, and the surprise his mother would get when she found he had made her so rich, and how good Gregorio was, and what a fine job he and Jaime would make of the estate in Madeira now they could buy in more land. And how furious Simon would be, wherever he was, and the man David from the Vatachino. Diniz wished that everyone knew what had happened to Raffaelo Doria. He wished the same could happen to all the men still on the Fortado, including Michael Crackbene.
‘I don’t think you mean that,’ said Godscalc, but knew well, of course, that he did.
Vito also spoke with satisfaction about the fate of Doria, who had wanted to kill them all under that hut. He was less comfortable with what had happened to Jorge da Silves, who had been the ship’s master until he had decided to make his own way to the gold. It sometimes worried Vito to think that the traders who killed the signor’s men might be in this place Timbuktu, and angry with Signor Niccolò for being white, and of the same party that frightened the Wangara men into burning their goods.
Godscalc, who had had the same thoughts, said that he hoped that Saloum, whom they had freed, might protect them; and that the traders liked spectacles. If the place seemed too rough, they would simply pass it and proceed on their way.
‘To Ethiopia,’ Vito said, with a pleased, freckled smile. Although in awe of Nicholas, he had sailed with him all the way from Ancona and possessed for him an uncomplicated admiration, as well as a belief in all his works. Only now and then, when he saw a black lion motionless on the strand or a group of monsters with long marbled necks in