At last the Marines came clumping up, red coats, white cross-belts, bright muskets and all, fit for any parade-ground. They lined the rail, all the rails, and Captain Aubrey called up to Stephen ‘Pray tell him to port his helm.’
A series of barking falsetto orders in Chinese and the junk began a smooth curve that displayed her overwhelming armament, which included the two carronades. The pirates, having contemplated this for a while, turned and went racing away to the northwards in search of an easier prey.
‘Mr Welby,’ said Jack, ‘it might save many valuable lives, was you to dismiss your jollies at once, and let them take off their stocks.’ With Li Po he exchanged smiles and bows, and to Stephen and Edwards he said ‘I am so sorry to have kept you in fear and trembling all this while, but the construction of the junk is so very unlike anything we are used to that the poor fellows could not come at their things – boots in one hold, accoutrements in another, bayonets far from cross-belts, and pipe-clay in the after-magazine with the gunpowder.
Would you believe me, gentlemen, if I were to tell you that this vessel has no less than six separate holds? And when I say separate I mean divided from one another by a watertight bulkhead.’ His officers came swarming up a ladder to a curious little deck or platform without a name in the Royal Navy vocabulary, looking about them with the lost amazement usual in landsmen aboard a man-of-war. ‘Ain’t I right, Mr Fielding,’ he called,
‘when I tell the Doctor here there are no less than six separate holds?’
‘It is an understatement, sir,’ replied Fielding. ‘Richardson and I make seven and the master reckons eight: we are going to make another tour. The midshipmen say they have reached double figures.’
‘Mai-mai, sweetheart,’ said Stephen down through a grating beneath which the little girls could be seen playing an elaborate form of hopscotch, ‘would you be a kind child and show these gentlemen each several compartment of the junk in turn? I am sure they will give you a whole ship’s biscuit for yourself.’ Ship’s biscuit: they were passionately attached to it, old though it might be, and could not be brought to believe that in ordinary times the seamen were given a pound every single ordinary working day.
‘It is a strange way of building a ship,’ said Jack, ‘but Lord, it has its advantages! If the Diane had had those bulkheads she would be swimming yet.’ And he went on about the wonderful economy of knees, the flexible strength far surpassing even what Seppings could provide, until the vacant expressions before him quenched his flow.
‘I must dress that boy’s leg,’ said Stephen. ‘On the right there is still another pelican.’
He had not only the splints to attend to under the anxious parent’s eye and the startling purple balm to renew, but also his serious rounds in company with Macmillan who, he found to his surprise, was drunk. Some degree of drunkenness was a common state aboard a man-of-war after dinner and here the degree was more pronounced than usual, the grog having been mixed with Li Po’s arrack, a spirit almost twice as strong as that saved from the Diane after the purser had stretched it with pure rain water and a little vitriol; and Macmillan had of course dined in the midshipmen’s berth at noon. For all that Stephen was surprised, Macmillan being ordinarily a most exact, abstemious man. Even now he was perfectly steady and his dressings were perfectly neat, but his more or less neutral English was invaded by his native Scotch, with its curious glottal stops, strong aspirates and rolling r’s, and his general attitude was more assured and loquacious than usual. ‘I lay awake the nicht,’ he observed, ‘and on a sudden it came to me why you had crackit yon wee bairn’s leg. Heuch, heuch, you must have thocht me a puir slow-witted gowk.’
‘Not at all, at all,’ said Stephen. ‘There is a naevus on his shank that we might do well to cauterize against future trouble. Did you remark it?’
‘Aye, that I did. My wife had the very same, but abune the knee.’
They were in the relative privacy of the space that served both as captain’s store-room and as dispensary, and Stephen, who had a real esteem and even affection for his assistant, felt required to say ‘I was not aware you were a married man, Mr Macmillan.’
For some while Macmillan did not reply, being occupied with putting their pills, plaster, draughts and bandages away with his usual obsessive neatness, but when he did speak it was as though he had already made a comprehensive answer, his present words being a continuation. ‘I had thocht a wife was a pairson a mon could tell his dreams to; but then one day she flung the collops in my face straight from the skillet, cried “The Hell with your faukit dreamings,” whipped out of the door and locked it fast behind her.’ He closed the medicine
chest, making the same movement with the key, and said ‘I never saw her more.’ They lived at the very top of a lofty house in Canongate, he added in parenthesis before going on in a different voice ‘But I never was a good husband to a canty young woman like her.
Even as a boy I had dreams of tall candles bending over in the sun, right down to touch the shelf; and when I was a man it was much the same – I would be there pointing a pistol with a certain triumph, you understand; and the barrel would droop, droop.’
Some decks away, some holds away, Stephen heard the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England for the officers’ dinner. ‘You must forgive me, Mr Macmillan,’ he said. ‘The Captain is so particular about punctuality.’
The Roast Beef that day consisted of the remains of the babirussa, some cooked in the English, some in the Chinese way, a variety of little Javanese dishes and then the best bird’s-nest soup that any man much under the rank of emperor was ever likely to see before him.
‘I think, gentlemen,’ said the Captain, two minutes after they had drunk the King’s health,
‘that we are coming up into the wind. Doctor, would you let your Ahmed jump up on deck and see what is afoot?’
Ahmed came back in a moment, and bowing he said in a conciliatory, deprecating tone
‘that they were stopping, loosening the sails to let a pirate come up, a pirate twice the size of the junk: Li Po had told him that flight was neither possible nor desirable – nothing more fatal.’
‘This is out of the frying-pan into the fire,’ said Edwards to Stephen as they stood on coils of rope immediately behind Jack and his officers, gazing at the uncommonly large war-proa immediately to windward and the canoe that was paddling towards them.
‘If you please, sir,’ said Reade in a low voice, ‘may I share your coil?’
‘Of course you may, Mr Reade,’ said Stephen. ‘Take my hand; and for God’s sake take care of your stump against the wooden thing here. To see so perfect a union damaged would break my heart.’ And returning to the secretary he went on,
‘A very striking figure, Mr Edwards; but not, if you will forgive me, quite accurate: gridiron would be nearer the mark, since Malays always grill their Christian prisoners. Those, that is to say, whom they do not crucify. You may read of this at length in the Père du Halde.’
‘I should not feel nearly so strong an inclination to apostasize if it were not for this treaty,’
said Edwards.
The canoe came alongside: its chief and two lieutenants were handed in at the junk’s version of an entering-port, where Li Po and his mates received them with deep, reverential bows. At Li Po’s first words the chief stared about with astonishment at the English seamen, the Marines (now in old shirts and trousers), the officers, and finally Stephen. At this his face changed to candid delight and he hurried over, his hand held out in the European fashion. ‘Wan Da, my dear, how do you do?’ asked Stephen. ‘You
recognize Captain Aubrey, I am sure, and his valuable officers? And Mr Edwards, who bears the precious treaty?’
Certainly he did, and would be delighted to drink coffee in his own vessel with Dr Maturin and the Captain as soon as his lieutenants had done their business. This consisted of taking a hundred and twenty-five silver dollars and three baskets of bird’s-nests by way of toll; and since Li Po had been telling out the coins with a morose deliberation ever since that well-known proa had been seen, picking the lightest and most dubious in his store, the transaction did not take long. Yet even in that short time Stephen had heard enough of Wan Da’s description of the French frigate Cornélie, now ready for sea in Pulo Prabang, and her frantic attempts at obtaining a minimum of stores for the voyage, to refuse the invitation on Jack’s behalf