Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [247]
‘He will be disappointed,’ said another. ‘The Songhai, the Fulani have half the goods this time.’
Nicholas said, ‘Does the Koy know?’ and someone laid a soothing hand on his shoulder. ‘He has been told. Rest. Thanks to you, Timbuktu has never been stronger.’
Afterwards, he remembered hesitating, leaving the house of the Qadi. But it was late, and as quiet as it ever was, for a city filled with humans and animals. The wind thrashed in the palm trees; the air was hazy with sand. Behind some locked courtyard he could hear the wail of a single-string fiddle, and on the outer edge of his hearing, drums beat. He paused at the gates of the Ma’ Dughu and then walked on, because the Koy’s bodyguard had been warned, and he, the outsider, should not stand on one side or the other, but should balance them.
He had chosen to sleep on the roof of his house, and the smoke wakened him. At first, he took the conflagration above him to be that of dawn: against a fierce, crimson sky darkened by sand all below him seemed black – the pillars of Andalusia, the pilasters of Memphis, the blind Arab walls and square houses of this strangest of cities. Then he saw that houses were burning, and what beat in the sky was the glow from the flames. Then the great gongs began to sound, and the horns that he had got Muhammed ben Idir to command in every corner of the city, and Nicholas ran down to the street as he was, calling his servants.
The fires had begun near the northern gate and all those who lived in the quarter, but for the officials, were trying to escape. He could hardly get through the lanes for the throng running against him, their children in their arms, their goats, their cows following. Others, like himself, had seized brooms from their racks and were forcing their way to the danger; he called to them, making sure they remembered the scheme. Some to the fire; some to the pools, the canal, the wells, the fountains, the buckets. Brought up in Bruges, he had always known what to do in a fire. Unless it was destroying his own business and home. Unless his father had started it.
Umar said, ‘Where is it?’
Of course, Umar would be there. His house was not in danger. From the roof, as if Donatello had been there, outlining it for him, Nicholas had memorised the course of the fire. One main source; two subsidiary ones. Not the palace. Not the three mosques – or not so far. But the shops and houses nearest the north gate where a drunken army might descend for food and drink and girls and – being short of money and temper – might kick over a brazier, fling a brand in a disapproving householder’s face or even, less carelessly, decide to see just how efficient the young Koy and his army might be, and how easy it might be to frighten them.
Running, Nicholas gave Umar his orders, and saw Umar leave. Still running, he came up to the first of the great houses and saw their servants doing what they had been taught to do: to drench, to dowse, to dig. Then he came to the seat of the blaze, and a dozen men with him, flinching back from roaring, wind-smashed tatters of fire and gush upon gush of hot sand, flung frying upon beast and man.
The straw huts of the outskirts had caught the first sparks and stood burning like haystacks, with no one still living inside. The houses of pressed mud or mud-brick had fared better, but most were thatched, and full of matting and blankets and rugs, as well as people. It was still possible to drag children out: to gather up the frightened and hurt as they staggered into the streets and rush them to safety, sheltered from the tearing wind with its ash and sand, its sizzling sparks, its burning gobbets of straw and nooses of whirling Baobab rope.
Some of the people Nicholas carried that night were known to him; some tried to smile. One woman, when he touched her, had a smile which didn’t change, and the heat of her arms seared his hands. By then, the fire had reached the large houses.
If ever Nicholas had wondered what he would choose, he