Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [206]
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you took obedience for granted. I the ball, and you the master’s hand on the box.’
The eunuch had come with a basin and napkins. His head bent, Nicholas slowly wiped his hands clean. Then he laid his fist on the table. It had a knife upright in it. The eunuch looked at her, and then moved quietly away. Nicholas picked up her hand where it lay and put the knife into it. She let it stand in her grasp. He took his hand away.
He said, ‘I take you for granted as much as it is prudent for any person to do so. I trust you as far as is sensible. I enjoy your company as far as it is allowable. I will banter with you and expect you to banter with me just so far and no further. I have confided in you, by accident, more than was wise but probably not enough to make any difference. I shall not do it again.’
His eyes were grey, and pale, and perfectly steady. He said, ‘It is hot, and we are often alone. You have two weapons, one of which is that knife. I expect you, sometime, to use one, but I don’t want you to use the other.’
She said, ‘I remember. You don’t want me to cut off your hair. But you gave me the knife.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘That is what I am trying to tell you. I gave you the knife. I have no cause for complaint. I expect you to use it.’
‘I thought I had used it,’ she said. ‘I thought you had felt it for four months. I thought you knew it had blunted.’
There was a drop of blood on the table. He said, ‘It has bitten you,’ in a wry voice. Then, differently: ‘No. I am sorry, let me take it from you.’ He drew the knife from her fingers and, laying it down, looked at the small cut in her palm.
He said, ‘Too much rhetoric altogether. It’s time I left Timbuktu. You will take the gold to Gregorio?’
She said, ‘You have still to receive it. You have still to leave. You have still to come back.’
There was a silence. She said, ‘So you will come to the harem tomorrow? I might dance.’
‘So might I,’ he said, and got up, and smiled.
He went, next day, to the feast at the palace harem, held when the increasing heat of the day had yielded to the passive warmth of the night. He was a good guest, and a natural entertainer: the invitation brought many more. Gelis, among her own increasing numbers of friends, watched him carolling along with the singers, inventing stories when the marabouts required it, making music, making verse, talking. He told long jokes in Arabic which made people cry with laughter. Twice, he made her laugh, although she stopped quickly. Zuhra said, ‘I like your man.’
It was a good-humoured, easy society. Sometimes the feast lasted through the night and into the next day, and men and women slept in the shade, while the pastilles of incense were renewed, and the fountains refreshed, and the baskets prepared with fresh pastries and sweets, honey-cakes and wheaten biscuits, kous-kous and pigeons and mutton.
Nevertheless, it had nothing like the cruel, indolent lubricity of a Trebizond. When the banquet was over, men returned to their affairs, and the slippers of Nicholas lay again outside this school or that library, and Gelis found Godscalc again with the camel-drovers, or in some book-store, or sitting at home, drawing and drawing. Not manuscripts, as he might have wanted, but maps.
The last time she discovered him so, it was the end of March. She said, ‘The gold has not come yet.’
He had lifted his head. The heat did not suit him: his big face was blotched and his hair, tangled and thinned, had grown grizzled. He said, ‘Gelis, I will stay till it does.’
‘But you are preparing,’ she said. He was making a rutter, a map that contained all the information he could glean about the roads east. It seemed either overwritten or blank.
He smiled. ‘It is not what you would expect, is it? But guides die. One must have something. And of course, one must prepare. It is a long way, they tell me.’
She said, ‘Is Nicholas helping?’
And