Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [219]
‘Too long a night,’ he said, and touched her wet cheek with his fingers.
He dropped them immediately. Even so, the blood flooded her face, and ran beating again through her body. She saw him respond, and try not to respond, and succeed. She said, ‘No. Never too long.’
‘But not to be repeated,’ he said. ‘Now you have –’ He broke off.
‘Failed?’ she suggested.
He didn’t answer.
She said, ‘Nothing is as simple as that.’
‘No. You gave me solace,’ he said. ‘You meant to do that, too, I think. It doesn’t matter what else you gave me. Unless …’
‘What?’ They were sitting two yards apart, in her chamber.
‘Unless you know,’ he said. ‘Unless you received it as well. There is broken cullet, and crystal. You don’t throw away crystal.’
‘No,’ said Gelis. ‘It breaks easily enough, of its own accord.’ She kept her eyes on his face. ‘What are you trying to say? That we should continue as lovers?’
‘That would be … No,’ Nicholas said.
‘Then what?’ she asked. The ache had turned into something much worse. She said, ‘We want each other. We have a priest. Is that what you are hoping I’ll say?’
‘Oh, dear heaven,’ he said. ‘Over Katelina’s dead body?’
‘You didn’t say,’ she said, ‘if you thought of her last night.’
He made to move, and then didn’t, his eyes fixed on her face. He said, ‘Do you think if I had, I could have …’ He broke off again. He said, ‘I didn’t ask you that question.’
‘You asked me one about cullet and crystal. It was the same one,’ she said. ‘Do I want a lover? If I take one, it will be you and no other. Do I want marriage? Not to you. My sister gave birth to your son. And yes, I thought of Katelina when I came to your room. It began with cullet.’
‘And now?’ he said.
‘Now you are going to Ethiopia, and there is time to reflect.’ She shifted, easing her shoulders. ‘We have exchanged a gift, that is all, that neither of us quite intended. Put it down to the heat of the furnace.’
She remembered the words, standing on the wharf at Kabara to see him leave with Father Godscalc, in his trough-canoe crowded with bearers. She did not weep, and he did not touch her, although he was silent, for Nicholas.
She had given him a present, if of a curious kind. In place of self-hatred, self-doubt; in place of distrust, an abiding puzzlement, combined with an emotion which now could not be shown, far less released, for fear it might destroy his resolution to leave her.
She knew what it was, for it lived with her, too, every night. One could not call it love. The name for it was longing.
Because he had not sailed on the San Niccolò, Nicholas was a long way from arriving in Madeira that spring. At the time Jaime’s wife made her confident prediction, he and Godscalc were travelling eastwards along the great river which had changed its name from the Joliba to the Gher Nigheren. Rock-strewn and powerful, it sometimes allowed them to travel precariously on its waters, but more often required them to unload their belongings yet again, and place them on the heads of their porters, and follow them on camelback, if they were lucky, or more often on foot.
The porters were grudging and surly. All the fishing huts on the river were occupied by Songhai Muslims, who were unaccustomed to any other colour in mankind but red-brown and black, and who knew nothing of other beliefs except those of the medicine man. Father Godscalc had found no use, yet, for his portable altar except as a bulwark of his own faith.
A good-hearted, outgoing man who got on well with soldiers, and had fought in a few wars of his own, Godscalc found the journey an ordeal – not just because of the dangers and the discomfort, which soon became extreme – but because he knew it meant nothing to Nicholas.
Nicholas was here for Godscalc’s protection. He had not tried to pretend that he longed to see Prester John, or open the way for a Crusade of the Church. In order to reach Timbuktu, he had been willing to accept this as part of his duty. Perhaps, had there been no other profit, he would have felt some requirement, on his own