The Wine-Dark Sea (24 page)

Yet how Dutourd had managed to get away was scarcely worth pondering about for any length of time: all that signified was that he had got away and that Stephen had said he should be kept aboard. 'From my point of view it might be impolitic' for him to be set ashore in Peru.

Stephen's point of view had of course to do with intelligence, as Jack knew very well: during an earlier voyage he had seen him drop a box which, bursting, revealed a sum so vast that it could only have been intended for the subversion of a government; and he strongly suspected him of having dished two English traitors, Ledward and Wray, attached to a French mission to the Sultan of Prabang.

In a parenthesis he heard Stephen's voice: 'Tell me, Jack, my dear, is dish a nautical term?'

'We often use it in the Navy,' Jack replied. 'It means to ruin or frustrate or even destroy. Sometimes we say scupper; and there are coarser words, but I shall not embarrass you by repeating them.'

On the windward bow Canopus was just clearing the horizon. 'Stand by to go about,' he called, and his companions ran to their stations. He eased off half a point, cried, 'Helm's a-lee,' and ducking under the boom he brought the launch round in a true smooth curve, filling with barely a check on the starboard tack.

The moon was lowering now, and dimmed by a high veil she gave so little light that he scarcely saw Johnson come aft. 'Shall I spell you now, sir?' he asked, and his teeth showed in the darkness.

'Why, no thank you, Johnson,' said Jack. 'I shall sit here for a while.'

The launch sailed on and on, almost steering herself as the breeze grew lighter: and as the seas declined - no breaking crests at all - so the water became alive with phosphorescence, a pale fire streaming away and away in her wake but also gleaming in vast amorphous bodies at depths of perhaps ten or even twenty fathoms, and at various levels the movement of fishes could be seen, interweaving lanes or sudden flashes.

Jack returned to his reflexions: Stephen's point of view had of course to do with intelligence. This had almost certainly been the case for many, many years, and on occasion Jack had been officially required to seek his advice on political matters. But he had no notion of Stephen's present task: he did not wish to know, either, ignorance being the surest guarantee of discretion. Nor could he imagine how such a man as Dutourd could be any hindrance to whatever task it was. Surely no government, however besotted, could ever think of using such a prating, silly fellow as an intelligence agent or any sort of envoy.

He turned the matter over this way and that. It was an exercise as useful as trying to solve an equation with innumerable terms of which only two could be read. To windward there was a vast expiring sigh as a sperm whale surfaced, black in a corruscation of green light, an enormous solitary bull. His spout drifted across the launch itself, and he could be heard drawing in the air, breathing for quite some time; then easily, smoothly, he shouldered over and dived, showing his flukes in a final blaze.

Jack continued with his pointless exercise, with one pause when Johnson spelled him, until the end of the watch, ending with no more valuable observation than that with which he had begun: if Dutourd was in any way a threat to Stephen on shore it was his clear self-evident duty to get the man aboard again if it could be done, and if it could not, then at least to take Stephen off.

From the end of the watch at four he slept until six, blessing himself for this eye, but uneasy about the failing breeze, still right in their teeth, but barely carrying the launch close-hauled at more than five knots, and they measured by a hopeful mind.

It did not surprise him to wake to a calm, but for a moment he was surprised by the strong smell of frying fish: there was still an hour to go before breakfast.

'Good morning, sir,' said Killick, creeping in with his dressings. 'Flat calm and an oily swell.' But this he said without his usual satisfaction in bringing unwelcome news, and he went on, 'Which Joe Plaice asks pardon, but could not help having a cast; and breakfast will be ready in ten minutes. It would be a shame to let it grow cold.'

'Then bring me the hot water, and as soon as I am shaved I shall come on deck. You can do my eye afterwards: it is much better.'

'I knew as how Gregory would do it,' cried Killick, a look of triumphant happiness on his face. 'I shall double the dose. I knew I was right. It rectifies the humours, you understand.'

Joe Plaice, a steady forecastle-hand, was good at all the countless skills required of an able seaman, but he was an absolute artist in the use of a casting-net: poised on the bowsprit, with his left hand on the stay, he swung the net with his right, throwing it with an exactly-calculated twist that spread its weighted edge so that the whole fell flat as a disk on the surface just over one of the countless bands of anchovies that surrounded the launch for miles in every direction. The little fishes stared in amazement or even tried to leap upwards. The weights quickly carried the edge of the net down and inwards; a string drew them together; and the imprisoned fish were drawn aboard. Half the first cast had been eaten by the helmsman, who was always fed first; the second half and two more were eaten fresh and fresh by all hands, sitting on the deck round a large pan, itself poised over charcoal on a raised iron plate.

'By God, this is good,' said Jack, sweeping up the juice with his biscuit. 'There is nothing better than your really fresh anchovy.' 'It must die in the pan,' observed Plaice. 'It is deadly poison else.' There was a general murmur of assent. 'Very true,' said Jack. 'But I tell you what, shipmates,' he went on, nodding towards the east-south-east, 'you had better blow your kites out, you had better eat all you can, because God knows when you will have another hot meal. Or a cold one, for that matter. Ben, do you know what a wind-gall is?'

The very young man blushed, choked on his fish, and in a strained voice, looking nervously at his companions, said, 'Well, sir, I seen the ordinary kind.'

'Look out to leeward, a little afore the beam, and you will see one a long way out of the ordinary.'

'It was not there when we set to breakfast,' said Joe Plaice.

'And to leeward too, oh dear, oh dear," said Johnson. 'God bless us.'

'Amen,' said the others.

Far over, in the ill-defined region between sea and sky, there was an iridiscent patch, roughly oval, of the size that an outstretched hand might cover; and its colours, sometimes faint, sometimes surprisingly vivid, shifted right through the spectrum.

'A wind-gall to windward means rain, as you know very well,' said Jack. 'But a wind-gall to leeward means very dirty weather indeed. So Joe, you had better make another cast: let us eat while we can.'

The other sea-creatures were of the same opinion. The launch was now in the middle of the northward-flowing Peruvian current and for some reason the animalculae that lived there had begun one of those immense increases in population that can colour the whole sea red or make it as turbid as pea-soup. The anchovies, blind with greed, devoured huge quantities; medium-sized fishes and squids ate the anchovies with reckless abandon, scarcely aware that they themselves were being preyed upon by fishes much larger than themselves, the bonitoes and their kind, by sea-lions, by great flights of pelicans, boobies, cormorants, gulls and a singularly beautiful tern, while agile penguins raced along just beneath the surface.

The launch's crew spent most of the forenoon making all fast, sending up preventer stays and shrouds and preparing what number one canvas they possessed. A little before dinner-time, when a tall white rock, a sea-lions' island much haunted by birds, the sea-mark for Callao Head, showed plain on the starboard bow, nicking the horizon ten miles away, with the remote almost cloud-like snow-topped Andes far beyond, the wind began blowing out of a clear high pale-blue sky. It could be seen coming, a dun-coloured haze from the east, right off shore; it did not come with any sudden violence, but it increased steadily to a shrieking blast that flattened the sea, bringing with it great quantities of very fine sand and dust that gritted between their teeth and blurred their sight.

In the interval between the first pleasant hum in the rigging that woke the launch to life and the scream that overcame everything but a shout they came abreast of the tall white rock, Jack at the tiller, all hands leaning far out to windward to balance the boat and the launch tearing through the water at a pace somewhere between nightmare and ecstasy. As they passed under the lee of the island they heard the sea-lions barking and young Ben laughed aloud. 'You would laugh the other side of your face, young fellow, if you could feel how this God-damned tiller works with the strain,' said Jack to himself, and he noticed that Plaice was looking very grave indeed. Joe Plaice, he reflected, must be close on sixty: much battered in the wars.

And now at last the wind was working up an ugly sea: the waves had no great fetch and they were short and steep, growing rapidly steeper, with their crests streaming off before them. As soon as the boat was past the rock it was clear that she could not go on under this press of sail. The seamen looked aft: Jack nodded. No word passed but all moving together they carried out the perilous manoeuvre of wearing, carrying the launch back into the lee, there close-reefing the main and foresail, sending up a storm fore-staysail and creeping out to sea again.

For the rest of daylight - and brilliant daylight it was, with never a cloud to be seen - this answered well enough and they supped by watches on biscuit and oatmeal beaten up with sugar and water: grog, of course, served out by Captain Aubrey. There was even enough of a pause for Killick to dress Jack's eye and to tell him he would certainly lose it if he did not put back to the barky, where it could be kept dry.

'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'It is much better. I can see perfectly well: it is only the bright light I cannot stand.'

'Then at least let me cut a patch out of the flap of your hat, sir, so you can wear the two together, like Lord Nelson, tied over your head with a scarf, if it blows.'

It blew. The patch was barely on before the making of it would have been impossible: the voice of the wind in the rigging rose half an octave in half an hour and the boat was flung about with shocking violence. Most of that night they were obliged to lie to under a storm trysail and a scrap of the jib - a night of brilliant moon, beaming over a sea white from horizon to horizon.

Tomorrow it must blow out, they said; but it did not. The days followed one another and the nights, everything on the point of carrying away, a perpetual series of crises; sometimes they advanced until they were in sight of the island guarding Callao and the cliffs: sometimes they were beaten back; and presently, though this was approaching the austral midsummer, the wind, blowing off the high Cordillera, grew perishing cold to those who were always dripping wet. Wet, and now hungry. The unhappy Ben contrived not only to scrape his shins to the bone but also to lose their precious keg of oatmeal overboard; and on Thursday their rations were cut by half.

When Jack announced this in a shout as they huddled together in the starboard cuddy he added the ritual 'Two upon four of us Thank God there are no more of us,' and he was pleased to see an answering smile upon those worn, cruelly tired faces.

But there was no smile on Sunday, when at dawn they heard the sea-lions quite close at hand and realized that they had been driven back for the seventh time by a wind that was stronger still and even growing, a wind that must have blown the Franklin and her prize far, far into the western ocean.

Chapter Eight

Long practice and a certain natural ability enabled Stephen Maturin to compose a semi-official report of some length in his head and to encode a condensed version from memory, leaving no potentially dangerous papers after the message itself had gone. This required an exceptional power of recollection, but he had an exceptional power of recollection and it had been trained from boyhood in rote-learning: he could repeat the entirety of the Aeneid, and he had the private code by heart - the code, that is to say, in which he and Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, wrote to one another.

'God between us and evil, my dear Joseph,' he began, 'but I believe I can report an uncommonly promising beginning, an uncommonly promising situation, with things moving at an extraordinary, dreamlike speed. To begin with I was introduced to General Hurtado, a former Knight of Malta, who, though a soldier, is very much in favour of independence, partly because Charles IV was rude to his father but even more because both the present Viceroy and his predecessor seemed to him trifling ill-bred upstarts; this is not an unusual pattern in Spain and here the animosity is very much increased by the fact that in a letter the present Viceroy omitted the Excelenzia to which Hurtado is by courtesy entitled; yet what is more unexpected by far is that he is strongly opposed to slavery and that although he holds a command from which most officers have hitherto retired with enough wealth to ballast the ship that took them back to Spain, he is quite poor. As for his hatred of slavery, he shares it with several of my friends who were also Knights of Malta and I believe it comes from his time in the galleys of the Order: and as for the king's rudeness, it consisted of addressing the general's father as 'my relative' rather than 'my cousin', which was due to his rank, an offence never to be forgotten, since Hurtado is immeasurably proud.

'It was indeed the Knights of Malta who brought us cordially well acquainted, for although I had an excellent introduction from a political point of view, it was our many common friends in the Order that gave our meetings quite a different aspect -our common friends and our common attachment to the Sierra Leone scheme for settling liberated slaves, to which we are both subscribers.

'The first occasion was a ride in the barren wastes that lie beyond the reach of irrigation all round Lima. These expeditions are called hunting, and on feast-days the more athletic citizens urge their horses about the stony deserts in search of a more or less fabulous creature said to resemble a hare and blaze away at the very few things that move, usually a dingy, inedible passerine which I take to be a dwarvish subspecies of Sturnus horridus. I collected three beetles for you, of which all I can say is that they belong to the pentamera and that I am astonished that even such meagre, attenuated creatures could scrape a living from the desolation we travelled over. The General was more fortunate. He brought down a singularly beautiful tern, the Sterna ynca of Suarez: I can only suppose that it was taking a direct path from a curve in the river to some better fishing-ground along the coast; but the event was so rare, so nearly unknown, that it gave the General the utmost satisfaction - he declared there could be no finer omen for our future conversations.