Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [237]
In Timbuktu itself, whose name was currently on the lips of every banker in Europe, all time seemed to have stopped. None spoke of the day, or the month, or the season now slipping away, in case all else were to slip away with it. Death remained an everyday guest, not quite present, but not out of sight, or out of mind.
In the quarter of the imams, the scholars, the ancient mosque of Sankore, the Timbuktu-Koy had made free a house where men of medicine could watch over the ill-advised Europeans whose arrival had promised so much – which still might mean so much – to the future of the city. Brought there so close to death that it seemed impossible that either should live, the holy man and the Venetian Fleming seized the vigorous fancy of the city.
Gelis, leaving to visit them, would find gathering about her on the way a flock of concerned and affectionate people, bronzed and black, Negroid and aquiline, naked or veiled, tattooed, painted, hung with bucket-earrings of gold, or with lips turned down to their bosoms, their hair lush or crimped or shaved or piled on top of their heads. ‘Do they live? Poor lords, everyone knows what pagans will do when they think they are threatened.’
Always, she went to Godscalc first for, broken, desolate, he kept some thread between himself and the living, and sometimes he talked. None of them understood how he, the elder, the unworldly, had struggled to surmount what had happened while Nicholas lay, day after day, unresponding.
Unless it was deliberate. Umar thought so. Umar never left the chamber in which they both lay. As she did, he pieced together what had happened: the agony of the journey, where land, beast and man had been against them. Godscalc spoke again and again of the valour of Nicholas, early beaten down in Godscalc’s defence and refusing to stop. Until, in the end, Godscalc himself had begged to abandon what he had come for, and had led the way back, to be waylaid by frenzied, terrified men who thought them devils, monsters, leprous magicians who would conjure their wells to be dry, their wives barren, and who had beaten them, and left them for dead.
They had had no means of defence. The night before, suspecting danger, their bearers had fled, taking all the little they had. Afterwards, Godscalc had waked to find himself sunk in the forest floor, his broken hand enfolded in that of Nicholas in a gesture of comfort and – he felt – friendship, but not in expectation of meeting again in this world. Then, he had thought Nicholas dead.
Dry-eyed, Gelis listened. Godscalc began to recover. But not Nicholas.
In October, Umar said, ‘Demoiselle. Gelis …’
And she had stopped him. ‘I am in no mind to leave them.’
He had looked at her gravely: this black, gentle, serious man whose attachment to Nicholas she had seen, at last, for the tremendous and terrible thing that it was. He said, ‘It is for you to decide. The gold is needed. Nicholas founded a bank, and thereby took upon himself the welfare of many people. If it does not reach the San Niccolò now, it will be too late. Whether he lives or not, this was part of his plan.’
‘He would want the gold to go,’ Gelis said.
‘He would want you and Father Godscalc to go with it,’ Umar said. ‘The padre could travel. He must go. If what has happened means anything, he must tell the world of it.’
Gelis said, ‘You want me to leave.’
‘No,’ said Umar. ‘If Nicholas lives, and if you choose, from pity or friendship, to stay with him, no one would dissuade you except, perhaps, Nicholas himself, if he knew. In your own world, it might be different.’
He paused. He said, ‘I have ascribed to you friendship and pity, but I do not know your heart. Forgive me, I am of a different race. I must also say therefore that if you wished him punished he has atoned, as few men have ever atoned, to the point of death and maybe beyond. If that was your sole aim, then I beg you to leave him.’
‘In our own world, it might be different?’ she repeated.
‘There is your dead sister,’ he said.