ABSTRACT
{[f. 420v]} While I was with the emperor, with a mind to overwinter there, I was sent a message from a land that they call Naninâ, two days’ journey away, where <[f. 375/364]> many Portuguese lived, asking me to hurry there to confess some of them who were very sick and in peril and had not confessed for a long time. I therefore asked the emperor for leave to go, but he would not give it to me, saying that it was already raining heavily and the Nile, which I would have to cross, was very swollen. However, when I insisted in order to attend to those sick people, he gave me two months’ leave. The following afternoon I went to take my leave but he kept me until midnight conversing about various things, saying that since I wanted to go so soon I would have to be patient that night, because he had a lot to talk about. When he finished, I asked him for permission to leave early the next day, but he said that I should first talk to him again. In the morning, they said that he was not giving audience to anyone, and they had not allowed any of the great men to enter. And so I did not depart, and at midday he sent for me. He was with his wife (whom they did not call empress, since the old empress was still alive), and he said to me, ‘I have called Your Reverence to this house for you to know that I am very much your friend, because only people who are very close may enter here.’ I kissed his hand, saying that from the favours he had done me I was well aware of the great obligation that I had always to serve His Majesty, but that I had nothing to say regarding that favour, since anything that might be said would be too little to show the esteem in which it should be held. He kept me there conversing until the afternoon and, when I took my leave, he said to me, ‘Go, Your Reverence, with the blessing of Our Lord, but remember that you only have leave for two months.’ I replied that if the rivers could be crossed I would be back before then, if God gave me health. Afterwards, he told Lâca Mariâm to send word to the captain of Naninâ to give me a certain quantity of wheat, which would be 100 Castilian {hanegas} <fanegas>2 or more, and early the next day he should summon a Portuguese who was travelling with me and give him 300 cruzados in gold for my expenses for those two months, and to warn him not to tell me anything until we were on the journey; and that is what he did.
