Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [214]
His mind was determined on calm. It was his blood which sent the pulse through his fingers to hers. He could not stop it, and he saw her recognise it for what it was. The Byzantine eyes smiled. She said, ‘Take me, then. Take me the way you took Katelina.’
He dragged his hand away, and stood up; then, more slowly, picked up and threw over one shoulder his wet, crumpled mantle.
‘I took her under a waterfall, as I remember,’ he said. ‘But we’ve done that part, and I’d rather not get wet again. I thought I’d go now. Will you ask Umar to bring you home?’
‘The Timbuktu-Koy will be angry,’ she said. When he opened the door, noise and light streamed into the room.
‘He will be ashamed,’ Nicholas said. ‘His son behaved badly. But in time, when the old man has gone, there will be no one else to protect Timbuktu against Akil.’ He stopped and said, ‘I am sorry. I hate this. You should have filled me with drink, and it would be over with.’
‘It is over,’ she said. He could not see her face. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Then you are lucky.’
He didn’t look for Umar before he left, or for Godscalc, or for Zuhra, or any of the gentle, austere, witty friends he had made in the last weeks. Friends of the mind, whose attentions made it unnecessary to pamper the body. Until tonight.
He walked to his quiet house through crowded African lanes, and ensconced himself behind veils in his chamber, his drying clothes cast aside, his flesh oiled with sweat in the heat. He lay open-eyed, listening to the lions grumbling in the ether, and watching the light from the summer storm flicker over his walls. Much later, he heard the sudden rush of rain falling. He imagined the palace, with its flowers drenched and its lamps all put out, and the carnival rising to its glorious, animal pitch, with young bodies weaving and dancing in the tepid, bountiful rain. His door opened.
He thought it was Godscalc. Then he thought it must be Akil’s girl, although he had dismissed her because she had revived the old, the constant, the inconvenient hunger. When rain-splashed flesh slid against his, he flung out an arm.
It met warm, unbound hair: European hair. He drew a breath, and a palm was laid on his mouth. ‘I am not here,’ said Gelis; and touched him with a thumb and four fingers without possessing, without surely possessing an inkling of what she had unleashed.
Chapter 31
IT WAS April rain which visited Timbuktu in the course of that night: warm and irregular, evaporating almost as soon as it touched the hot earth, the drifting sand, the baked clay carapaces of airless, intimate chambers.
The April rain fell, too, on Madeira, but in token of a moist and sluggish retreat: the mild, wet season was ending, and flowers were springing again from the bottomless tilth: orchids and lilies, brooms and buttercups, the carpets of white and gold immortals and rose-coloured groundsel; the new green of cane plants and vines. Gregorio sometimes thought, if you thrust a toe into the soil here, a foot would grow, and a calf and a knee. Only he, lying hearing the rain, was solitary and sterile.
Towards the end of the month, he rode, as he often did, to the sea cliff at Câmara de Lobos and gazed south. Four months ago he had looked and seen the great ragged sails of the roundship Ghost, beating her laborious way into home waters, and had ridden to Funchal to meet her, with the results he had tried to send to Nicholas.
The roundship had arrived empty, because – so they said – her master had been entitled to deliver, but not to buy merchandise. Gregorio didn’t believe it. No one, familiar with the way Nicholas worked, would take that for anything but a stratagem. But if it was, where was the money they were desperately waiting for?
No word came, from the Ghost’s master Ochoa, or Nicholas. The ship, positively identified as the Doria by a dozen experts sent by de Ribérac, had been first impounded, and then dispatched with its whole crew to Lisbon. Ochoa