Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
Umar said, ‘Gelis. We make books and copy them. Is that not enough?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Books can walk. If Akil demands more than his third for the army, if a caravan fails to arrive, or the Joliba floods at the wrong season, then books can leave Timbuktu and make their home anywhere. Wealthy scholars find it easy to leave. But artisans who supply swords and slippers and good dyed cloth can survive on little, and will stay, and so will the heart of the city.’
‘I think perhaps,’ said Umar slowly, ‘you are becoming at home in this place. Do you want to go back?’
She looked at him. To be truthful, her eyes always made him uneasy by their paleness, and the unexpected lines of brown lashes, all of it framed by the pallid, wheat-coloured hair. She appeared as if coated with sugar; while within, something quite different was rooted.
She said, ‘Do I want to go back? I dream of nothing else.’
‘Very well,’ he said.
He had no need to say more. She looked up. ‘Ah. You have come to tell me there is no news, and that there are therefore decisions to be made. I am sorry, Umar. I should have guessed. Come in. Let us leave this, and talk.’
She was brave, of course, and had considered the possibility that she might have to set out for the Gambia on her own. She would have to leave Timbuktu in three weeks at the most, to make the long journey back along the course of the Joliba, and then down to the Gambia with the gold. ‘I shall come to Cantor,’ Umar said. ‘And the Timbuktu-Koy has promised a boat and many men, strongly armed, from his own bodyguard. The San Niccolò, which will be waiting, will have her own artillery and far more than her usual complement.’
‘I know,’ Gelis said.
Of course she, too, had read all those meticulous pages. Once before, in Trebizond, Umar had read such a list of directives, when sure that Nicholas was not going to return.
Umar said, ‘There is still time. They are late, but the Niccolò can wait for a little. Not for long, but a little. The unrest may even have helped. If Godscalc found the path doubly barred, he might have had to turn back the sooner. Then all that would hamper them would be the rains.’
Gelis said, ‘You never thought they could get there.’
‘No,’ Umar said. ‘Nor did they. Father Godscalc had determined to try it for the sake of his faith, and to save others. And Nicholas went to protect him.’
‘And not for the River of Gems?’ Gelis said. Her smile drew the sting, or appeared to.
‘He needed the gold for his Bank,’ Umar said. ‘And now he has it. Who knows what desires he has now? What drew him, or what will bring him back?’
Gelis said, ‘I think he is dead.’ And looking at those bleak, Baltic eyes, he saw that she had spoken, for once, her true mind.
On the lower Joliba, which men called the river of rivers, Gher Nigheren, the villagers paid some lip-service to Allah, and slightly more to the holy man who came and killed chickens and foretold the size of the maize crop next year. They had, however, learned that Allah, or his servants, liked to know when true Believers met their death, so that words might be said over them by men with their heads bound in cloth and a leather parcel hung round their necks and the necks of their horses. Therefore they sent word up the river when bearers arrived carrying the remains of two men who were certainly Tuareg in some part of their blood, going by their colour, and the shapes of their noses.
Not that either their colour or the original shapes of their noses could clearly be distinguished, as they had been found in the forest, where the hyenas had certainly had a look at them; and where, before that, they had been systematically attacked by both spear and axe, and perhaps by arrows, since the limbs of the older man were both discoloured and distended in places. But that might have been because the bones in both his upper and lower arms had been broken, and most of the bones of his fingers.
The younger man displayed, too, the gouges and hack-wounds of recent battle, but also the signs of older injuries, and with them an extremity of