Patrick O'Brian - The Thirteen Gun Salute

'How would your thinking that profit him?'

'l am not sure. It might be in the hope that the rumour would spread from our mission, eventually reaching the Sultan's ear from various sources and thus gaining in credibility. It might be in order to reduce Fox to despair, so that he should go away without any agreement. I do not know. But clearly it has floated into Ledward's mind and I am persuaded he has made Abdul believe it.'

The door opened and Mevrouw van Buren came in. She was little more than five feet tall, but she contrived to be elegant, slim, intelligent and above all cheerful, a quality Stephen valued highly - most Malays tended to be morose, and many, many married women to be glum. He was very fond of her: they bowed to one another, smiling, and she said to her husband, 'My dear, supper is on the table.'

'Supper?' cried van Buren, amazed.

'Yes, my dear, supper: we have it every evening at this time, you know. Come, it will be getting cold.'

'Oh,' said van Buren as they sat down, 'I was forgetting.

There was some post waiting for me when we came home. Nothing very interesting. The Proceedings are filled with mathematical papers, and in the Journal that charlatan Klopff vapours away about his vital principle. But I was sorry to hear that the City of London was in such a turmoil, and that there was a run on the banks: I do hope you are not likely to be injured?'

'Bless you, I have no money,'said Stephen. Then recollecting himself he went on, 'That is to say, for many years my life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and it would have been short if I had not continued to live; so poverty and solitude became quite habitual - the natural state. I think of myself as penniless. Yet now in fact the case is altered. I have been blessed with an inheritance, which is, I may add, looked after by a bankinghouse of unquestioned integrity; and what is much more to the point I am no longer solitary. I have a wife; and by the time I return I hope to have a daughter too.'

The van Burens were touchingly pleased. They drank to Mrs Maturin and her baby, and when the subject had been thoroughly handled Mevrouw van Buren said, 'This brings in my news very happily: I have been bursting to tell you. The Sultana Hafsa is certainly with child, two months with child, and the Sultan is making a pilgrimage to Biliong to ensure that it shall be a boy. He promises to gild the dome of the mosque if he has an heir.'

'How long will the pilgrimage take?' asked Stephen.

'With the journey and all the proper lustrations, eight days: perhaps nine, since half the council necessarily go with him, leaving only the Vizier and a few others to keep the peace and try current cases,' said van Buren. 'I am afraid your negotiations are at an end for at least a week.'

'I shall go to Kumai,' said Stephen with a shining face.

On the way back to his bawdy-house he decided that in decency he must alas ask Fox to join him in the expedition; by the time he entered the lower, coarser hail he had composed a civil but not unduly pressing message, and as he was walking through to reach the upper, quieter regions where he could write it he noticed Reade and Harper sitting with a group of middle-aged women. Their short legs were resting on other chairs; each had a cheroot in one hand and a glass, probably of arrack, in the other; Reade's pretty, smooth, round, choirboy face was bright scarlet, Harper's something between grey and green. The sight puzzled him for a moment, but then he remembered they had been sent ashore so that their morals should not be damaged when girls were allowed on board. They did not see him, their gaze being fixed on a lascivious dance in the middle of the room, and he passed through to the stairs. Having written his note he came to their table and when their eyes had at last focussed on him they started to their feet. Harper flushed red; little Reade turned deathly pale and pitched forward. Stephen caught him as he fell and said, 'Mr Harper, you are all right, are you not? Then be so good as to deliver this note into His Excellency's hands as soon as possible. Halim Shah'- to the man of the house - 'pray have the other young gentleman carried to Mr Fox's residence without delay.'

The answer to his note came with the morning sun, and it was as welcome: Fox was d�l�d�l�but the Sultan had invited him to join the company going to Biliong, by way of compensation for Ledward's presence during his visit to Kawang. and the envoy saw that it was his clear duty to accept, for the sake of the treaty. He would go with death in his heart; never was a pilgrimage more inopportune. Yet if Maturin would do him the great kindness of breakfasting with him, Fox could at least give a brilliantly intelligent eye some notion of the things to look for and measure in the Kumai temple: Aubrey would be breakfasting too, which might be an added inducement.

'There you are, Stephen,' cried Jack, as he came in. 'A very good morning to you - it is days since we met. I am just going to flog those little brutes, and shall be back very soon. Here is His Excellency.'

'For all its mortifying effects,' said Stephen as he and Fox sat down to their kedgeree, 'you must admit that this invitation to Biliong is a great diplomatic coup. None of the French mission goes, I believe?'

'No, not one. I must draw what comfort I can from that.'

They talked for some little while about the journey, which, though by no means the great pilgrimage to Mecca, had many of the same strict ritual observances and much of the same austerity and abstinence. Would the presence of concubines or even of Abdul be proper? 'Oh no,' said Fox. 'At the time of vows of this kind chastity is absolutely required. Abdul will certainly not go.'

'Enter the righteous Sadducee,' said Jack, walking in. 'The trouble with flogging boys is that you may maim them for life, which is unkind, or not really hurt them at all, which is ridiculous. Bosun's mates never seem to have any trouble; they lay on as though they were threshing out a bushel of beans and then put the cat away as calm as you please. Nor did old Pagan, my schoolmaster. Plagoso Orbilio, we used to call him. But I tell you what it is, Excellency: you are no doubt a most capital diplomat, but you are a damned indifferent nursemaid.'

'I never thought such things would enter their heads,' said Fox sulkily. 'Public women! Lewd girls! I am sure they never entered mine, at that age.'

Jack and Stephen looked down at their plates; and after a while Fox begged Aubrey's pardon - his appointment at the palace was coming very close, and before he left he had to tell Maturin about this temple he was going to see - the particular features to be observed and if possible drawn and measured.

They saw him off, wished him a happy pilgrimage, and went back to finish the coffee. 'I wish I could come with you,' said Jack, 'but I cannot leave the ship. Yet since van Buren says there is at least a bridle-path to the crater-wall, may I not ride with you that far? And then Seymour or Macmillan or both could be there whenever you appoint, leading a pony for you to come back on.'

The road inland wound along the Prabang river, right across the alluvial plain, and on either hand people were working their partly-flooded enclosures with buffaloes, or setting rice-plants. Weaver-birds flew in clouds, and down by the water various kinds of duck moved in surprising quantities: storks paced gravely in the paddies. 'I believe that was a real snipe,' cried Jack, putting his hand to his carbine. 'And another, by God!' But Stephen was deeply engaged in a discussion of the sagopalms that lined the road and filled the marshier parts with his guides, two sunny Dyaks belonging to that part of the Sultan's bodyguard detached to look after the British mission. They were armed with spears and their traditional blowpipes as well as krisses, and they were said to be quite fearless and deadly opponents; they were of course head-hunters; and they were full of information about sago and most of the creatures that passed. One of them, Sadong, was a remarkably good shot, and being an amiable, obliging soul he knocked down several of the more unusual birds for Stephen with his silent, accurate weapon, particularly after they had left the cultivated ground and had begun their long steady climb through the open forest, following the tracks made by the Chinese who brought down sandalwood, camphor and a number of the smaller trees used by cabinet-makers. Well before noon they sat under a spreading great camphor: Stephen skinned his birds and the Dyaks spitted them on twigs as an appetizer; then they ate a cold roast peacock, brewed a pot of coffee and set off in the hot, silent, shaded middle of the day. Nothing was moving; even the leeches were somnolent; but the Dyaks showed the recent tracks of two bears and the curious boar of those parts, and they pointed out a hollow tree in which the bears had obviously found honey, a tree with thirty-six kinds of orchid growing on it, some at a great height. The least spectacular was said to be useful in cases of female sterility.