Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [71]
‘Gelis has decided,’ said Diniz; but his eyes, shifting away, had fallen on Loppe. He walked over and held out his hand. ‘This is better than Cyprus.’
‘It is different,’ Loppe said. And their host, walking over, held out his hand also to Loppe and said, ‘I have heard of you. Senhor vander Poele is fortunate to have such a guide. Come in, all of you, and let us talk about this hell-hole you are determined to visit.’
The words were light enough. They covered the same trace of defensiveness Nicholas had observed among all this brotherhood of solitary voyagers; even among those with crooked limbs and warped yellow skin and heads that nodded and trembled, who would never travel again.
They spoke of marvels, of course: of the monstrous horse-fishes and lizards; of the tattooed women with gold-burdened ears, or stretched lips, or pendulous breasts, or of the kings with thirty wives each. That had to be listened to. But the advice Nicholas wanted was harder to come by, even from Diogo Gomes.
Africa? Jorge there knew all that he did. The Moors lived in the north – Diniz knew that, he’d fought them at Ceuta, good lad. But walk out of the back door of Ceuta, and there was the Sahara desert before you, stretching south for fifty-two days to the Sahel. And what was the Sahel? A belt of scrubland with rivers and grazing and trees, that divided the sands of the north from your tropical Land of the Blacks, a place of heat and rain and forest not even a madman could penetrate.
‘So that’s your interior,’ said Diogo Gomes, drinking up his cup of sweet wine. ’That’s the way the caravans go, north to south, taking silk and silver and salt down through the desert to these damned tricky marts of the Sahel and then plodding back north, your camels bow-legged with gold.
‘That is, not your camels. Christians are barred from that route. But being brighter than most, we found we could sail round the edge of the desert and, landing from time to time, entice some of the gold to the coast. All right so far as it goes. But why not go further, you ask, and cut into the north-to-south traffic?’
‘Ca’ da Mosto tried it,’ said Nicholas. ‘He said it couldn’t be done.’
‘And you didn’t believe him,’ said Gomes. ‘Well, I’ll show you. Where’s the map?’ And he put his cup down and, leaning over, stabbed a scarred finger.
‘There. There is Ceuta. There’s your north African shore in the Middle Sea. Follow me west through the Straits to the Ocean. Watch the African coast, how it bends to the south and the west – still green, still full of unchristian peasants, the devils. These are fishing villages. And now, see?’
He shifted his cup, and Diniz caught the map as it began to roll up. The commander flattened it with a broad hand, drinking absently. ‘Now look at the coast. Flat and pale, the sign of a damned, waterless land fit for no one but nomads, for you’re sailing down the edge of the Sahara with a steady north-easterly pushing you, and the sea with more sand than water in it, as your lead-line’ll tell you. There’s Cape Bojador, which men thought couldn’t be passed. A hundred miles south of the Grand Canary, that’s all it is, but nasty with rocks, keep well clear. Keep off the whole God-damned coast, watch out for rips, and don’t flatter yourself there’s a place safe to anchor.’
‘The current is south-west,’ said Jorge da Silves.
‘You want me to show you where it isn’t? You wait,’ said Diogo Gomes. He was red, but only partly from wine. ‘But now, you want to keep going south, and there’s the Rio de Ouro which you ought to know is a gulf, not a river, and leading straight into the desert, where the only gold is already on camel backs. Correct? And so go on until you’ve made three hundred miles since Bojador, and you’re coming to the good white stone of Cape Blanco and within it, the gulf we are speaking of; the first place for a thousand miles that will give you quiet nights and fresh water, for all