Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [232]
She said, ‘I know salt coming over the Sahara can increase its price by four times, and no doubt the profit is high, too, on other goods.’
‘The expenses are high,’ said ibn Said. ‘The double journey takes four or five months – six, if the camels are to be rested. You know, perhaps, the cost of a camel, yet they cannot survive this expedition more than a very few times. And men are hired and die, or are waylaid by parties of robbers. There are few waterholes, and the way hidden by sandstorms. One mistake in the desert, and whole caravans can and do perish. The sands are half made of bone.’
‘So, soon men will bring it by sea?’ Gelis said.
His eyes were large and dark as the pool of the harbour at Sluys. ‘Did you find it easy to do so?’ he said. ‘And as you have found, although men and camels like water, silk does not.’
‘I see that,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you knew what price such fabric sells for in Flanders. Especially fabric with the flaw which, as you see, runs through this cloth; or with the faults in the cropping you see there. The licence fee for selling such cloth should not be too demanding.’
‘Madonna. you interest me.’ said Abderrahman ibn Said, merchant and agent. ‘Let us sit down and talk.’
Gelis did not, in the normal exchanges with Umar’s household, find it absolutely necessary to discuss her visits to the households of merchants, although she found that Umar, too, had begun to offer some of his European experience, tactfully, to the city fathers. If he sought a public appointment, he failed to receive it. The Timbuktu-Koy, in poor health, seemed little interested and his son deaf to advice. She noticed, for ibn Said told her, how the Koy’s taxes had abruptly increased, and how much profit had been peeled from the latest caravan.
‘It is not wholly wise,’ had said ibn Said, in his meaningful way. ‘Merchants stay in Timbuktu because it is profitable. But there are other towns.’
‘Gao?’ she had said. They had formed a habit of meeting, always in the presence of his family. He found her advice of value and even of profit; she did not object when some not insubstantial gift came her way. You might almost say they had entered a partnership.
‘Gao? No,’ he had said. ‘The Songhai are rather too powerful. Although, of course, it is a place of importance, where the trade leaves for Egypt and Tripoli. Your lord Niccolò will pass through Gao and Kano.’
‘I believe he has passed through Kano,’ she said – she could not resist saying.
The Arab had kept silence. Then he said, ‘I salute, of course, the hardihood of your friends. Had they chosen to go to Egypt, it would not have been difficult. The desert routes, despite their dangers, are known. Through Air, he could have proceeded by the old pilgrim highway to Azawa, Ghat, Murzak, Aujila, Siwa to Cairo. There are salt caravans which pass from Air to Bilma and back and are so common that the peaks near Bilma – do you know? – sing to warn when the camels are coming. But south of Kano … There you leave the land fit for camels, the land of Muslims, and enter the rainforests which have few tracks, and are the province of pagans. I have known only one man who has ever tried to go to Ethiopia from Timbuktu, and he did not come back.’
He paused. ‘You wait, madonna. How long will you wait?’
‘Until October,’ Gelis had said. ‘I have to go from Timbuktu in October, or the caravel which expects us will leave.’
‘It is July,’ had said the Arab thoughtfully. ‘If your friends have not turned by now, they will never come back in time.’
By August, Gregorio was in Lagos for the second time. The first time, he had merely paused there, to deliver Diniz and Bel to the ecstatic Lucia de Vasquez before sailing with Melchiorre north to Lisbon. There he had made his accounting with the King of Portugal, and sold the San Niccolò’s cargo.
He would like to have taken the bullion to Flanders, but there was no time. The price he got in Lisbon was good enough – all Europe was screaming for gold – and by horse and by ship,