Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [196]
She had a new robe because she and Bel had been visited by a man with bales of cloth made in Florence. The man said his employer had some from Syria, too. The regular Barbary galleys left Pisa in April and unloaded at Tunis, Algiers and Oran before going to Almería and Málaga in July or later. The goods they brought came south over the al-Sahra with the next camel-train. They would know when it came.
Gelis and Bel bought what he had, and even found someone to sew it. Directed to a wide portico covered with straw, they had discovered a group of white-shirted men seated cross-legged beneath it, their black heads stooped over their needles. To one side, an old man read aloud, a great book in his hands.
He was robed, and had a pair of Murano spectacles clipped on his nose. Gelis said, ‘So how did that come about? Maybe the price of the girl?’
‘Do ye want to take her place?’ Bel of Cuthilgurdy enquired. ‘If ye don’t, dinna mention it. The folie love of lichory is doing well enough in this city without you. There have been, I understand, some advance negotiations in the matter of gold: a case of making wee, tempting pre-emptions while the prices are high. If ye look over the wall at the Sankore, ye’ll see the scholars all walking about bumping into each other.’
‘In return for what?’ Gelis had said.
Oh, the same,’ Bel had answered. ‘Gold or such-like. The doctors and imams here are all merchants. Ye remember what Father Godscalc was saying. It’s like Bishop Kennedy of St Andrews. If you can read the Good Book and count the holy angels of paradise, you might as well get into business.’
Gelis remembered. She remembered Godscalc’s expression on returning from his first excursion into that part of the city they had so far heard of and discredited, because the pursuit of learning for its own sake, the ability to set up schools and attract great men of letters, the purchase of writing materials, the hiring of scribes and the formation of great collections of books were the privilege of a few princes in Europe whose courts scholars were proud to attend. Centres of high education did not occur on the edge of the Sahara.
Of course, Muslim teaching had come early to Africa with the traders – even before Timbuktu itself had been founded. Under the Mali empire there had grown a tradition of learning. In Timbuktu, the first teachers, they said, had been black; and from Umar’s own family in Kabura, by the Joliba flood-plain. Tuareg settlers grew rich, and joined the ranks of traders and scholars, to whom in turn the ruler gave lavish concessions. Pilgrims came to dead scholars’ tombs, and students arrived from the south. The city became endowed with Baraka, divine grace. The word was written – they had seen it – in the palace. It was also thus, they had heard, in Granada.
They had been told there was a university within the arcades of the mosque of Sankore, the disciple of Cairo and Damascus. They had been told of pupils sponsored by merchants who, becoming distinguished pedants themselves, set up their classes in the courts of their houses and taught logic and rhetoric, grammar and history, prosody and astronomy so long as there was light.
Moving astonished through the city they had heard the calls to prayer, but also the rhythms of chanting, the drone of the solitary voice interspersed with responses, to the accompaniment of drumbeats and piping. Some of the choruses were formed of the shrill voices of children reciting the Koran as they exchanged their native Mandingua for stumbling Arabic. Others had not been young at all.
Godscalc had come back from his first visit