Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
Nicholas was well aware of the dangers. As the sun increased its heat and the ship, running free, fell into the routine of fair-weather sailing, he kept a light touch in his relations with the upper seamen of the poop, and showed no disposition to check the rough games, the bloody contests, the obscene entertainments the men chose to indulge in. He also kept an unobtrusive eye on his passengers.
The horses were Diniz’ salvation. Cooped up sweating below on a daily diet of hay and a hundred buckets of sorely grudged water, the Ghost’s twenty-five valuable Berbers were no longer the fire-eaters who had embarked at Sanlúcar. Their condition was closer to that of the pigs, the goats and the poultry which had also, in logic, become the groom’s charge until eaten. Forking hay and shovelling dung-laden straw, the man was first shocked and then pleased to find the young Portuguese happy to help him.
It suited Diniz, who had been reared on the land. His headache waned; he found the labour undemanding and restful; he began to think the smell of fresh air quite peculiar. Also the man took to him readily, and he was not entirely shunned by the crew, who knew he had been in Ceuta and who had assessed and approved of his shooting. He appeared in the cabin for food, although Gelis recoiled and Nicholas and Ochoa did all the talking. He also liked to stand by himself at the rail, watching the pallid crust of the coast sliding past, separated from him by the heaving blue ocean, so weighty, so endless, so deep.
Diniz was not afraid. He and his father had lived on Madeira. Madeira was on the same ponderous sea. Over there was Cape Bojador, caput finis Africae, the spume of whose reefs, seething and flashing with fish, had made mariners think that the sea boiled; that magnetic rocks would dismantle their vessels; that ahead was the brink: the terrible cataract at the end of the world. The man who ventured his life in these waters was clearly deranged, the wise men of the Koran had thought.
Men knew better now. Diniz had seen fishing-boats. There were porpoises in the water and birds he knew in the air. Certainly, as Ochoa set a course nearer land, he saw the sea flush, as if stained by pus or by blood, but this was merely sand, Ochoa explained, spilled and tumbled from the long, clinging, crumbling cliffs. And that very day a haze of light rosy sand brushed the roundship, sifting over the deck and sliding into the folds of men’s shirts, patching their glistening faces and bodies like fawnskins. It lay as dust on the sea, except where the ship smoothed it clean with her sides, and her wake trailed a gloss in the water. There was no mystery in it.
The best tales, at this time, came from Ochoa, and especially if Gelis were there. He wanted her to remember the great island peak he had steered by; twelve thousand feet high, and named after the fire on its summit. Had they landed there, instead of on Grand Canary, he would have shown her naked savages painted with goat fat and coloured red and yellow and green like a carpet. And merry they were on that island: dancing, laughing and singing all day; for there was fruit to be had for no labour, and every man could fill a field with his wives. ‘And you have never wanted to stay?’ Gelis said.
Diniz thought her unwise in some of the things she said and did now to amuse herself. She would even linger on deck while the men took their ease in the bows, and once, when they were laying coins on the flight of two birds, she joined in, and carried the prize. When she made gift of it back to the common purse they said no direct word to thank her, but made no objection, either, when she wanted to try the next wager.
That time she lost, and soon after left, though still smiling. The next day she did it again, over a match between two fighting crickets. She remained for half a turn of the glass, and took some tentative chaffing, and went. She had only one gown,