Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [203]
‘Ask Godscalc,’ he said. ‘Then do what you want. I shan’t stop you. Your death will be on your head, not mine. You may have crumpled it somewhat, but I have a clean sheet.’
Godscalc, of course, was obdurate, for many reasons, in insisting that she should go. When argument failed, he enlisted Bel, and was astonished to find her less positive.
‘Oh, you have the right of it: she’s a lassie, and virtuous, and virtuous people in hatrent are to be pitied. Forbye, they’ll be leaving her alone in strange company. But if she goes back, will it heal, this great skaith she has suffered, or will it fester with her all her life? Her feeling for him is changing.’
‘I wondered,’ he said. ‘She learned more, for sure, than he wanted, the night of his fever. Maybe it has been for the good. Bel, will you stay with her?’
‘No,’ said Bel. ‘It is not easy to leave. You’ll never know, friend of mine, how it slays my soul to have to leave, but anything I could do has been done. Now she has her own way to make. I will answer for it to the few folk she has left.’
Godscalc had held the small woman by the shoulder. ‘Bel? Are you kin to Gelis?’
The formless, boneless, powdery face had lifted to his, and then smiled. ‘You don’t need to share a blood-tie to love someone, or admire them, or pity them. I’d have taken that one into my house even though she hated the whole of mankind, as she does.’
To Diniz, the defection of Gelis was, first a surprise, and then a rebuff. At some cost to himself, with a small party and only Saloum to guide him, he had been prepared to convey and protect two weak women all the way back to the Gambia.
Now Gelis was staying, and it made him uneasy. Four months of proximity had not drawn Gelis and Nicholas close. He didn’t see why she should want to protract it. He wouldn’t admit that he was hurt because she would be with Nicholas, and not himself. Diniz, going home with their gold, was consumed with both joy and anxiety, but the joy was not what it had been, when he had believed Nicholas was coming home too.
They left in the first week of March, with Saloum to guide them and Vito to give them his stout, unlettered energy. Already Vito was talking of the men they were going to rejoin on the Niccolò: of Melchiorre, if he had recovered – and of course, being a Florentine, surely he would. Of Fernão and the other five seamen, and even Ahmad, if he was still with them. But most of all, he talked about Venice, and the mist, and the cool nights, and the water. Of them all, Vito was happiest to be going home.
They left from Kabara, and Nicholas stood in the shimmering heat with the rest, watching fifty feet of canopied canoe being poled into a river which, brimming when they arrived, was now shallow, rock-strewn and foaming. On board was eighty tons’ weight of arms, provisions and cargo, including locked chests containing five hundred pounds of gold worth sixty thousand ducats. And a valiant, rough-tongued small woman; and Diniz his cousin.
Gelis was dry-eyed, but Godscalc was not. He said, ‘When shall we see them again?’
‘Tonight,’ said Nicholas. ‘If they don’t row any better than that. Come on. We have to go back and wait for the gold.’
From six they had become three – or four, if you counted Umar who, as if to compensate for their loss, unloosed now the constraints on his friendship. At first, visiting now and then, he put forward with diffidence his proposal for this feast, or that visit. By the end of the first week, the scope of his suggestions had widened.
They began to see feats of riding and spear-throwing and wrestling, and Nicholas, for a wager, once or twice even took part in them. They attended a marriage-banquet (not Umar’s) in a great amphitheatre hollowed out of the grit with terraced gardens tumbling down to a pool.
Gelis was found a teacher of classical Arabic who laid before her a field of beauty and wisdom through which she breathlessly wandered. Wisdom, too, was what great teachers purveyed, outside whose houses the slippers of Nicholas would lie unregarded sometimes from first