Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [245]
‘I am sorry,’ said Umar. His expression had changed. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I have told you,’ said Nicholas, ‘but not so that you will take any action. They wish to preserve the trading metropolis that is the source of their wealth. It is worth preserving. So is your greater heritage. Katib Musa has not begged me to show him how to use a crossbow in defence of the ulama, but he does not need to. Of course I shall help, but there is not a great deal that can be done.’
‘Without you,’ Umar said, ‘nothing could be done at all. I shall complain to the Koy on your behalf.’
‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘It is the enmity between these two that will admit the Songhai. Let me stay uncommitted. Let me do what I can for them both. Umar, what am I learning for, if not for such as this?’
There was a silence. Then Umar said, ‘It has been my prayer that you would find something more at the end of your search. Oh yes, if the city is threatened, I am not too proud to ask you how it should be defended, so long as you think it of worth. If it should be better run, and it pleases you to devise how to enhance it, every man here is your slave. So long as, in the end, there is something for you that you would not otherwise have had.’
Nicholas said, ‘You know the school, and the teachers. You know what I have had. Do you want me to tell you what it means to me?’
‘I know what it means to you,’ said Umar slowly. ‘And so do your teachers. One has only to watch. But only you know what use you will make of the powers it gives you.’
‘That is true,’ Nicholas said. ‘And as a teacher, you will know that one does not offer a gift, and then require an accounting.’
‘I think perhaps,’ Umar said after a moment, ‘that is –’
‘Unfair?’ said Nicholas quickly. ‘It was. I am sorry. You hoped I would begin to discover what I wanted to do with my life. You hoped I would find a confidant, since you think I need one. But Umar, what confidant did you ever allow yourself before you came home? Until that moment, whom would you trust, whom would you burden with your hopes and your doubts and your fears, and still call yourself a grown man?’
There was a long silence. Then Umar said, ‘Nicholas, it is not always a mark of weakness to lay a burden on someone else, so long as they can bear it. I might have put my faith in you, but you were not yet a grown man.’
It was the cruellest thing he had ever said. Nicholas answered at once. ‘Do you think I should disagree with that? No, it is not a mark of weakness, having found the right person, to ask help of them. But it also depends on the nature of the burden.’
‘You are wrong,’ Umar said. ‘That is vanity speaking still. Nothing matters but what you are. You yourself.’
‘And you think I had better find out,’ Nicholas said. ‘Well, you are probably right. Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.’
After that, Nicholas was patient and did nothing to offend Umar, or his other friends, or those who ruled the city. As he had offered, he used the cooler months at the start of the year of 1467 to strengthen the defences of the city, and when Akil, restless once again, collected his garrison and, with well-oiled hackbuts, galloped off to cause trouble elsewhere, Nicholas took the Koy’s bodyguard under his wardship and initiated a month of hard, brutal, competitive sports. At the end of it, five men had been killed, twelve injured, and fifty had joined from the city, with more begging to come. And he was fit again.
Little news came over the Sahara but not, he thought, because of any action of Umar’s to prevent it. What did come was either painfully specific – ibn Said’s brother in Tlemcen had had another son – or painfully general – the English had forbidden all trade with Flanders, and so Bruges was suffering. The old Duke of Burgundy’s son, like the son of their Koy, was afraid of no one, and fighting every day in some cause or another, mostly in France.
It added point