Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [187]
In isolation. A man from Bruges or Venice or Lisbon, each with its flourishing hinterland, could only wonder that such a thing could be possible: that a crossroads occupied by a dozen races on the edge of the desert could become a centre of wealth; and although never a city-state, could contrive to rule its own destiny.
Nominally, Timbuktu had had several overlords, and once had belonged to the kingdom of Mali. Few princes troubled to visit it often. When Mali weakened, the Tuaregs had seized control once again, but for thirty years had been content to rove the Sahel and the Sahara, leaving the day-to-day labour of ruling to the present excellent Timbuktu-Koy, who paid himself a third of the tax levied from rich traders. The other two-thirds were the privilege of the garrison lord and his army.
They had met this man, the Tuareg Lord Akil. The Timbuktu-Koy, said Umar, was an old man, Muhammed ben Idir, who had been clever enough over many years to keep control of the city, and prevent Akil from interfering on his sudden descents. The Koy’s son and natural successor was a young man with a young man’s impatience who, it could only be hoped, would prove as cunning. They would be offered food and drink after the audience, and might partake, even the ladies. In Timbuktu, Umar said, the segregation of women (except for business) was not insisted on.
The Ma’ Dughu was the palace seen once by Nicholas in his fever. Now, mounting the steps between the palms and the acacias, he knew it was not a dream of his, but of the great King of Mali who, proceeding to Mecca with a fortune of gold sufficient to destabilise the entire Egyptian market, had brought back with him from Cairo the architect Al-Tuwaihnin who had caused a new mosque and a new Alhambra to rise in the desert, its materials brought stone by stone on camelback from the north.
Over the hundred years that had passed, the sun and the climate had distorted the dream. The marble steps of the Ma’ Dughu were broken and warm to the foot, and while the snowy air from the Sierra Nevada was blowing cool through the halls of Granada, the dust of the harmattan blasted the fine onyx pillars in Timbuktu, and scoured the carvings and stucco-work in its corridors, so that the bands of Koranic writing were half-erased by dust and by light. Light pounced like a lion through the vaults and arcades of the Ma’ Dughu and hung shimmering over courtyards sprawling with flowers where the pools were half full of sand, and creepers drooped from the tiles.
Only the hall of ceremony was cool, for trees shaded its walls, and deeply carved doors admitted the emissaries of Venice and Portugal from the leafy dusk of a garden.
Inside was another dusk, made of gold. Gelis drew in her breath, and even Nicholas stopped for a moment, so that Umar, leading them, checked and looked back. Then they moved between silent men into the chamber, sixty feet long, that the architect Al-Tuwaihnin had built a hundred years before for the King of Mali, and which his master’s successors had been pleased to adorn with the wealth of their city.
The carved ceiling might once have been painted, but it was the soiled gold of its leaf-work that glimmered down on them now, matched by the darkened gold of the plates on the wall, within which candles burned, revealing the hung skins and cracked tiles behind them. Gold touched the running bands of calligraphy – austere Cufic, and sensuous cursive – which, blemished and stuttering, proclaimed Allah alone is Conqueror along every wall.
But the massy blaze which drew the eye to the end of the room came from the dais, draped in silks, upon which stood a gold chair occupied by a bearded man, half Negro, half Berber, wearing a great golden headdress and jewelled robe and surrounded by gold-accoutred soldiers, and by younger, unarmed men who might have been his sons. Behind the chair stood two children, black and naked, each stirring the air with a great, long-stemmed plume of