Patrick O'Brian - The Ionian mission

The remark was not well received. 'If he is so sure he need scarcely say it once, let alone keep up a perpetual harping on the subject,' reflected Jack, and Stephen said 'This is a clumsy form of blackmail' to himself, while the whole tone of Graham's translation conveyed disapproval. Andros however was far too agitated to notice: he took them into the battery, and once the, small group of gunners who manned it had stood clear Jack saw the cause of his emotion: all the guns but three were made of painted wood and of the others two had had their trunnions beaten off, so that they could not be pointed with any sort of accuracy, while the third, an archaic brass piece, had once been spiked, and the person who bored out its touch-hole had made a sad botch of it. Mustapha could bring in his gunboats at high noon if he chose and batter away at the lower walls to his heart's content: there was nothing in Kutali to stop him.

'These two we use for firing salutes,' said Andros, 'to deceive the world in general. The third we dare not touch.'

'Has the Bey no field-pieces?" asked Jack.

'Only one, and it throws no more than a three-pound ball. He keeps it in his camp. If it were brought up here people might suspect the real state of affairs.'

Jack nodded, and leaning out over the parapet he considered the possibility of splicing four cables an-end and winching up cannon made fast to well-greased travellers, directly from the shore. After all, an eighteen-pounder , ' weighed no more than his bower anchors, and half a dozen would make this place perfectly impregnable: but getting even one or two up those impossible, narrow, twisting, ladder-like streets would be a labour of weeks.

The hold-fast this end and of course the prodigious tension would be the main difficulties ... but they would deal with that problem when they came to it: Tom Pullings could always be relied upon to do wonders in the line of seamanship.

'A romantic prospect, is it not?' said Father Andros. His anxiety seemed to have diminished, as though he had read Jack's mind, and he spoke quite easily, smiling for perhaps the first time since they came ashore.

'Eh?' said Jack. 'Why, I suppose it is.' He straightened and took his bearings: Cape Stavro ran out to the southwest, the long promontory with Marga at its southern base and Kutali at its northern, the two separated by thirty miles of sea but only three of land. Yet those three were so mountainous that it was not easy to see how the journey could be made. 'Where is the aqueduct that goes to Marga?' he asked.

'You cannot see it from here,' said Andros. 'But I can easily show it to you. It is no distance at all, and there is a wild romantic view from the crag above it. I am aware that English travellers are partial to wild romantic views.'

'Pray ask him what he means by no distance at all,' said Jack.

'Not an hour by the goats' path,' said Graham after the translation. 'But he says that we could take horse and go by the smooth way, if you do not mind missing the wild romantic view.'

'I am afraid that we are not here to indulge ourselves in wild romantic views,' said Jack. 'Duty requires that we should take horse.'

The smooth way led them between the mountains over a firm springy sward, up and down and down again to a grassy saddle, where the priest dismounted and said 'Here.'

'Where?' cried Jack, gazing about for a noble series of arches marching across the landscape.

'Here,' said the priest again, thumping a limestone slab half-buried in the turf. 'Listen.' And bending their heads in the silence they could hear water running underground. The spring was on Mount Shkrel and a gently-sloping covered channel carried it all the way to the heights behind Marga: 'You can sec it, like a green road following the curves of the hillside, where it plunges straight down, and I will show you many places where it can easily be cut.'

Looking down on Marga Jack felt inclined to say that he would not be in that commanding officer's shoes with his water cut off and a battery opening upon him from such a height: for he had no doubt that although guns and even carronades were notoriously awkward things to carry across country, above all mountainous country, he could move a competent number over this firm dry turf, keeping to the channel as it followed, or very nearly followed, the contour-line, if once he could get them up to the citadel. But he never liked to tempt fate either by land or sea, and he only observed 'that perhaps they should be getting back now; he for one was so hellish peckish that he could eat an ox and then call for more.'

They rode back therefore, and at a fine pace, the horses eager for their stables, the men for their mangers; and on the way they met a Turkish officer. He and Father Andros exchanged a few private words - the language incomprehensible but not the tone of satisfaction - and the priest announced with what little spontaneity he could summon that the Bey, having recovered from his indisposition, would be happy to invite Captain Aubrey to a... 'It is an unusual term, Albanian in origin,. I believe,' said Graham. 'Perhaps it should be translated as a snap, a slight or hasty meal.'

A more accurate version would have been fat-tailed sheep stewed with saffron, preceded by three made dishes and followed by three more. During part of the feast, so that Graham should have leisure to eat, Sciahan spoke through a Moldavian dragoman, telling Jack about the Syrian campaign in 1799, when he and Sir Sidney Smith repelled Buonaparte from Acre, and then about his manoeuvres with the Naval Brigade in the days that led up to the battle of Aboukir. Sir Sidney was somewhat too showy to qualify as Jack's favourite public character, but sincere and reasoned praise of the Navy, above all from a fighting man as scarred and battered as the Bey, was quite another matter, and Jack looked upon him with great complacency. Though indeed he would have liked his host in any case, a small, compact, grey-bearded man with great natural dignity, direct, and apart from his diplomatic illness and his sending of Father Andros so that the position should be put to Aubrey by a fellow-Christian, devoid of artifice. He was much more what Jack had expected of a Turk: a plain man, and one that he could trust. Towards the end of the meal Sciahan said, 'I am happy to learn from Father Andros that you have seen the state of Kutali. I understand that your Admiral wishes to be able to use the port for his ships and that he wishes us to help him expel the French from Marga. If he will give me the cannon I and the Kutaliotes will do our part.'

'Very well,' said Jack. 'I shall send my consort to Cephalonia for the guns as soon as the wind turns into the north.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Matins and lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers and compline: at each of the canonical hours and often between them, prayers for a north wind rose from the churches of Kutali, prayers far more fervent than Jack or his advisers had imagined at first. The Kutaliotes loathed and dreaded Ismail Bey, but they loathed and dreaded Mustapha even more; they knew him directly or by reputation as an exceedingly violent cruel man, subject to huge, ungovernable rages; and few of the Greeks had not lost relatives in the burning villages or devastated countryside of the Morea. And it was Mustapha whom they all looked upon as the most likely attacker, he being sea-borne and immensely active. One measure of their dread was their kindness to the sailors ashore and their eager cooperation when it was understood that the officers wished to settle the true line for an enormous rope running from the mole to the citadel, a rope that must necessarily sag but that must nevertheless have a clear path between its supports. The officer chiefly concerned, Mr Pullings, or the Maiden as the Kutaliotes called him because of his mild face and gentle manners, had but to hint that a wall, outhouse, chimney, dovecote might be in the way for it to vanish, plucked down if not by its owners then by his neighbours and the rest of the community.