Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
The news staggered in. First, from downriver. The two mad white men had been attacked by idol-worshipping black men, who had killed their guide and threatened their encampment with spears, but the party had driven them off, and had been seen making for Gao.
Then news from the Gambia. The white boy who escaped from the Joliba had returned to the blue ship on the Gambia, and that ship had set sail. The time, from the account, must have been mid-February. So the Fortado had gone off, with Filipe.
In May, three months after Bel and Diniz had gone, Gelis heard that the other white party of madmen from Timbuktu – with one mad white woman – had arrived on the Gambia, boarded the black ship with King Gnumi, and left. The San Niccolò was on her way home.
On hearing the news, she hurried over to Umar’s house, where she could share her delight with him and his wife of five weeks. Zuhra slipped out, halfway through the excitement, to vomit briefly outside. She came back smiling, and all her aunts and cousins laughed and patted her. She was fifteen, and pregnant by Umar her husband. Gelis went home, and settled down at last to her studies.
There was only one further report from the east, from a caravan coming through from Takedda with copper. They had come across cowrie shells which had originally been bartered by two white men for food, and skins for their feet and a night’s shelter from the rains. The rains, as everyone knew, were unhealthy in that region, which was why wise men kept to the north. But then, wise men went to Cairo or Mecca, not south through the swamps and the forests that led to the mountains.
Saloum, who returned in June from the Gambia, came to see her, and talked about it as he sat on her cushions. ‘You will forgive me. He is your holy man. But I thought him a man of doubts, your Father Godscalc. I would not have thought him so brave for his faith.’
‘You were brave for yours,’ Gelis said.
‘But I am sure of Paradise,’ Saloum said. ‘That is, is it not, why Muslims are supposed to be strong? But I have seen a man do more than his best, just from fear of fear.’
‘Or from love,’ Gelis said.
‘Or from fear of not being loved. Man’s heart is a thing made of sand. You know there is unrest on the river?’
‘Unrest?’ Gelis said.
‘Your friends chose the right time to go home, and the right ally. King Gnumi had looked after your ship. He told me there will be trouble.’
‘Between the two Kings?’ Gelis said. ‘Because of what happened to us?’
‘That! No,’ Saloum said. ‘That was no more, forgive me, than a crossing of spears during an elephant hunt. This is war.’
‘In the east too?’ Gelis asked.
‘Everywhere.’
‘But not Timbuktu.’
‘Timbuktu? One can plunder it, but one must possess it to make use of its commerce, and this requires more than a sudden raid by hot-tempered neighbours, or by the drunken youths from this village or that, shaking their assagais. It requires a ruler,’ said Saloum. ‘A man of power, with an army behind him.’
‘There can be few of these,’ Gelis said, ‘stronger than Akil or Muhammed ben Idir.’
‘Few. Luckily few,’ Saloum said; and went on to praise the white woman, and Diniz.
By then, the great heat had begun, and the regular rainstorms, of which the first had been so freakish and so memorable. The drifted sand steamed in the streets, but there were days when the sky was bright blue, instead of the dust-coloured grey of harmattan-time, and when it produced no rain at all. Nor, when it did, was it the kind of torrent that fell further south, and turned obscure tracks into sinks of waist-gripping mud, and formed pools of thick teeming water, they said, which could cause a man to die through one drop on his skin.
Gelis roved the city during these weeks, and on one of these walks, met the Italian.
She assumed, that is, that he was a native Italian because she heard his voice first. She was kneeling on a piece of open ground at the time, poking with a stick at a bank of sand,