Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  The helmsman barked one harsh word, and the dhow shied away as if stung, of a sudden, heeling hard-over as she swung up towards the winds on a close reach, and accelerating like a greyhound as her crew leapt to haul the fore-ends of her lateen yards inboard and low to the deck. The helmsman did turn, once she was well in hand, wave, flash a brief, white-toothed smile in his bearded, sea-tanned face and shout a message.

  “Arschloch!” Leutnant Kolodczy yelped. “Affesohn!”

  Lewrie heard a snicker from the base of the larboard quarterdeck ladder and turned to see Yeoman of the Powder Room Rahl, turning beet-red and quivering, silently laughing fit to bust.

  “De fildy peasant,” Kolodzcy carped. “He call me! . . . Vell, id ist not matter vaht, nein. I am askink de hüresohn for Serpski, unt he play de liddle game. Firsd, in Durkish, dehn Serbo-Croat. Say dhat he ist loyal Durkish subwect, unt gute Muslim . . . unt gannot risk pollutink himself by contact vit infidels.”

  “Ah, I see,” Captain Rodgers sighed, visibly deflating. The wind was dying, and it appeared they’d be stuck in their miserable anchorage for the rest of the day, perhaps ’til the next dawn, if it didn’t return. And with nothing to show for their efforts. “Damn! And double-damn!”

  “He ist liar, herr Kapitan,” Kolodzcy added, though, with a clever snicker. “I am thinkink he vas Serpska, in sbite of vaht he say.”

  “Oh, I see!” Rodgers brightened. “We’ve just been scouted out, then. For others. Do we lay here at anchor, sooner or later, someone will work up enough nerve to contact us, d’ye mean, Leutnant Kolodzcy?”

  “I am zertain of dhis, herr Kapitan,” Kolodzcy said with a short formal bow and a self-satisfied click of his heels. “By de dime ve gomplete dinink, I am thinkink.”

  “What was that the fellow said, Mister Rahl?” Lewrie enquired of his Prussian ex-army artillerist, once Rodgers and Leutnant Kolodzcy had taken themselves below to his great-cabins for drinks in celebration.

  “Herr Kapitan” —Rahl blushed—“de herr leutnant calls him de ‘bastard’ . . . de whore-son, unt son of an ape. De fisherman, he calls herr Leutnant Kolodzcy de ‘Ostereicher Schwule.’ In Cherman, he says dis, herr Kapitan. De zierlich Ostereicher Schwule.”

  “And that means . . . ?” Lewrie prompted.

  “Ach, Gott, herr Kapitan,” Rahl whinnied. “It means de petite Austrian queer.”

  “Genau, Mister Rahl.” Lewrie chuckled. “Exactly. Zierlich Ostereicher . . . Schwule? Damme, I must remember that.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Leutnant Kolodzcy’s certainty didn’t look so good by dusk. The dhow had sailed itself out of sight down the coast from whence it had come, and as sundown came and went, and the lanthorns were lit on deck, and the wind died away, their anchorage became an oily-smooth and undisturbed millpond. They sent launches ashore to barter for fresh bread. But that was the only contact they had with the locals.

  They were up and out on deck at the beginning of the Morning Watch, hands sluicing and sanding after stowing their hammocks, with the ship enveloped in a windless mist that denied them the sight of anything past the first fringe of trees ashore. By half-past four, they stood-to at the guns for Dawn Quarters, as they did every morning at sea, outside of a friendly harbour, should anything threatening loom up with the sunrise.

  A faint lifting scend of offshore waves, the back-waves from the slight rale of surf on the shoreline, made Jester creak and complain as she was lifted and gently rocked, the anchorage still as glassy as some mirror’s face and the waves too weak to break or foam, like lake-water.

  Far off in the fog, on a rocky point far beyond the village, came the trout-splashing and grumbly yelps of seals at their morning feedings, now that it was safe to venture from their gravelly beaches after a dark and moonless evening. Monk seals, Buchanon had told him when they’d seen their first at Corfu, another variation of Lir’s Children, written about by Pliny, Plutarch, Homer and Aristotle. Wary as seals were of humans, he’d thought it odd that they were there at all, so near the rude settlement; perhaps it was a temporary fishing camp and not a permanent one.

  By five, Lewrie sent the people below for their breakfasts after securing the guns. Aspinall came up from Copper Alley with coffee for them all, as the mists thinned slightly, expanding their circle of sight to about two cables. Toulon was especially playful and active after an eye-opening snack from the cooks, scampering about the quarterdeck and footballing a champagne cork from the previous night’s gloomy supper in the great-cabins—pouncing and “killing” over and over.

  In spite of his best intentions not to, Lewrie had been forced to treat Rodgers and Kolodzcy, to dine them in, which had meant breaking out a half dozen bottles of bubbly for them. Then he’d watch it positively flood down their maws with little hope of enjoying much himself!

  “Breakfast be ready for ya, an’ t’other gentlemen, in a quarter hour, sir,” Aspinall prophecied.

  “Good,” Rodgers said with a bleak expression, between restoring sips. He and Kolodzcy had come aboard, just about the time the gunners had begun to secure the artillery. And, Lewrie thought, both of them looked so “headed” by their night’s intake that a hot kiss and a cold breakfast might have killed them.

  “Fine.” Lewrie yawned, hunched into his boat-cloak against the raw nippiness of the mists and a rare predawn chill. “Thankee.”

  “Fresh bread, lashin’s o’ butter an’ jam, sirs,” Aspinall said with good cheer. “An’ mutton chops, sirs. Do ya wish me t’break out yer last crock o’ mint jelly, Captain, sir?”

  Lewrie nodded sleepily. “Aye, Aspinall, that’d be right fine.”

  Rodgers looked a tad queasy at the mention of mutton chops, and Leutnant Kolodzcy just looked . . . half dead, and upset by it.

  “Gottverdammte Nebel,” he groused at the fog, stalking about in a white silk-lined cape. “Unt, gottverdamme die Serpski,” he added with a petulant wheeze. He produced a mauve silk handkerchief.

  Lewrie felt a warmth along his left calf, the brush of a tail as it idly flagged his booted leg. Toulon had left off “killing” his cork to come to his side and look up with his yellow eyes half slit. Lewrie bent down to rub his chops and head, with Toulon half on his hind legs to receive his rubs.

  “Achoo!” Leutnant Kolodzcy let go with a rather kittenish sneeze.

  Toulon, startled, leaped atop the taut-rolled and tightly packed canvas hammocks stowed on the quarterdeck rails over the waist.

  “Scare you, puss?” Lewrie teased.

  But the cat stiffened, facing outward, his whiskers well forrud and his neck straining. His tail-tip began to quiver and fret as he let out with a quizzical “Murr-row!”

  But he wasn’t pointed towards the sounds of the seals, nor towards shore at all, where the village lay. Something about two points off the larboard bows had gotten his attention. A bit to seaward, deep in the mists.

  “Company coming,” Lewrie intuited. The year before, just one of the many odd, fey occurrences in this commission, Toulon had sensed the smuggler’s tartane they’d been chasing along the Genoese Riviera, on a cool and windless dawn such as this one. Eerie, inexplicable—unless a body actually believed Mr. Buchanon’s ancient blather, o’ course!—but he had sniffed her out long before they’d spotted her.

  “Oh . . . pshaw!” Rodgers groaned.

  Too hungover t’say much else, Lewrie thought, grinning. After he saw them off, they’d surely had a brace more bottles of champagne in Pylades before retiring.

  “Smell something, puss?” Lewrie asked. Toulon lifted his head to sample the air. Of course, he lowered his head to sniff hammocks, too. There could be a seaman going to sleep tonight in a blotch of ram-cat pee, Alan thought sourly, if this turns out to be a dead-bust!

  “Murrff!” Toulon said, though, tail now thrashing vigourously, his forepaws clawing on the hammock canvas. He didn’t sound anything near to happy. The cat let out a low, menacing trill, a “Wwhuurr!” of warning, and began to hunker down and bottle up.

>   “Company, sir,” Lewrie reiterated, completely sure of his facts this time. He shared a wary glance with Knolles and Buchanon, who were more familiar with the eerie by then. It would be impossible to explain it all to Rodgers, anyway. It just was, no matter how improbable.

  “Mister Knolles, pipe the starboard watch on deck. My respects to Mr. Crewe, and he is to reman the guns to lar-board. Marines to get up and turn-to, double-quick,” Lewrie intoned.

  Toulon was peering outboard most intently by then, turning about to present himself sideways, as if to loom larger to a so far undiscovered challenger.

  Then, from out of those mists where Toulon was intently staring . . .

  “Boat!” Lewrie cried, the same time as the larboard bow lookout.

  Ghostly, a dull grey phantasm that suddenly stood out stark upon that pearlescent fog . . . suddenly, there was a boat. A small, dhow like two-master. And, most ominously, a hint of others astern of her!

  “Mmmuurrr!” Toulon moaned, rather murderous, capping it off with a vicious hiss—and finally, a spit.

  “Sir!” Buchanon whispered from his left, pointing down over the larboard side, yet off to the larboard beam. “Lookit!”

  Lewrie tore his gaze from the dhow, perhaps the very same one that had come near enough to “smoak” them the previous afternoon. He saw nothing.

  “Lookit, sir!” Buchanon said with a shuddery hitch to his voice. “Closer aboard, Cap’um.”

  Wull, stap me! Alan frowned as he spotted something.

  The sea was grey-dark, oil-slicked with dawn-light, and still so millpond-smooth and flat, with barely a wind-fleck, hardly a hint of a roller to disturb its faint glittering . . . yet disturbed by a tiny vee of a wake which spread back from the head of a seal. He saw the short bewhiskered muzzle, the sleek brown pate, a limpid eye . . . fleeing.

  And far off, on the rocks unseen off the starboard bows, south of the village, there came faint splashing sounds, a fogmuffled dog-pack of frantic cacophany.

  The bark of seals!

  “Thought it a fair omen, havin’ seals here, sir, after so many months,” Mister Buchanon uneasily muttered. “Now, though . . . way ’ey’re actin’, Cap’um Lewrie . . .”

  Andrews was on the quarterdeck, Cony by the larboard gangway bulwarks along with many of the crew, those from the West Country who had always believed, those newlies who’d seen and heard strange things and come to believe; especially after their ship’s first eerie, eldritch encounter in the Bay of Biscay as she’d begun this commission, with the unspoken messages which came from the seals.

  “Don’t start, Mister Buchanon, ’tis tense enough already,” Alan said, feeling a shiver go up his spine, yet trying to maintain outward calm for his superstitious hands, who were turning to stare at their “lucky” captain.

  The seals came to him, to Jester. Lir’s Children. Cursed or blessed they were, the Selkies of the ancient pagan myths, and harbingers of that forgotten god of the sea, Lir, who seemed to hold the ship, crew and captain in the cusp of his hand, his favourites of fortune . . . or his unwitting weapons. Lir’s Children, the seals. And they were fleeing, splashing into the sea for safety, though greater, toothier terrors awaited them there, who made meals of them; all their playful curiosity abandoned in the face of perhaps an even greater danger.

  “Oh, ’tis a bad sign, sir,” Buchanon all but whimpered; him, a man grown to the fullness of his strength and courage. “A bad cess.”

  “A bad business for certain, Mister Buchanon,” Lewrie agreed, clenching his jaws stonily expressionless. “No matter it is our commanding captain’s wish. Cess, though? Don’t think so. Hope not.”

  “’Ere’s no good goin’ta come from ’is, Cap’um.” “Perhaps not, sir,” Lewrie allowed, with a tilt of his head to one side. He reached down to stroke his cat down the back, trying to gentle and cosset him, but Toulon was having none of it, came within a hair of lashing out blind with one claw-sprung paw as he gave out one more heartfelt, menacing growl. Yet, instead of springing down to take himself below to the safety of the orlop, as he did during gun-drill or battle, he stayed—hunkered up and sheltering against Lewrie’s cloak, and licking his chops in fear, but he stayed.

  “If God is just, sir,” Lewrie sighed, “and Lir means to watch over us, too, o’ course . . . I think he’s warnin’ us. Not dooming, hmm?”

  “Watch our backs, do we deal with ’ese . . . wotchyacallems . . .”

  “Serbs, Mister Buchanon.” Lewrie nodded. “Aye, we’re warned.”

  There were five boats, Lewrie could take note by then. Small, mostly, no more than thirty-five to forty feet overall, the bulk of them. All rigged with two masts in Eastern, lateen, fashion. Following last of all, a three-masted spectre slowly emerged from the fog. She was long, lean and low, a galliot or xebec —a war galley—of about seventy-five to eighty-five feet in length. The sun had at last arisen, lancing over the Balkan mountaintops from the east, setting light to the mists so that half the dawn’s horizon was set afire with a most foreboding crimson and saffron umbra that backlit the galliot and made her stand out starkly black, every bit of rigging, every sail, every peering crewman cut from black paper and plastered to the sunrise . . . a silhouetted apparition.

  Their pirates, it seemed, had at last arrived—pirates they’d been sent to seek, to discover and enlist. But, Lewrie felt deeply in the pit of his stomach, pirates their seeming patron Lir wished to have no truck with.

  Red sky at morning, sailor take warning—

  And the frightened seals.

  Warned, aye, Lewrie thought grimly; aye, and thankee.

  Now that their quest was ended, and their dealings with these strange creatures was about to begin . . . they’d been damned well warned.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Like treadin’ water ’mongst a pack o’ sharks,” Will Cony said, scowling hellish-black as the rakish craft approached within hailing distance, dividing and passing down the larboard side, between the village and Jester’s starboard side, or astern to flaunt their courage, almost under Pylades ’ guns, and within “close pistol shot.”

  “Like the Lanun Rovers at Spratly Island,” Lewrie whispered.

  “Well, sir . . . least there’s only th’ six. An’ not thirty of ’em, this time,” Cony replied with a mirthless snicker. “Manageable.”

  “Odd, how things turn out,” Captain Rodgers commented, flexing his fingers on the hilt of his small-sword. “Coincidence, hey? Think back. I could swear this is the same lot you drove off from that Dutch merchantman in th’ Hvar channel, Commander Lewrie.”

  “Then they have already had a taste of our iron, sir,” Lieutenant Knolles vowed. “Perhaps they’ll know to mind their manners ’cause of it.”

  “Perhaps, indeed,” Rodgers mused impatiently, waiting for their vaunting show of seamanship and braggadocio to end, and the negotiations to begin.

  “Deuced cocky buggers, sirs,” Midshipman Hyde decided to say for them all.

  “Anyone see artillery?” Rodgers snapped.

  “On the largest, sir,” Lewrie pointed out. “Looks to be a pair of six-pounders forrud. She’s gun-ports to either beam, but I can’t see much beyond some very old, long-barrel swivels, or boat-guns.”

  “Just the one six-pounder or so forrud on the next-largest, sir,” Midshipman Spendlove was quick to contribute. “And more swivels.”

  The seamen who crowded the rails of the pirate ships were armed, and were most happily brandishing their weapons, all but ululating like painted Red Indians. They were armed with curvy, scimitarlike swords and matching daggers, some very long and slim Arabee muskets with convoluted, curling butts, some inlaid with ivory or brass, like the Hindoo jezails Lewrie’d seen in the Far East, at Calcutta, or among the Mindanao pirates.

  “Damme if ’at’s a swivel-gun, sir,” Buchanon exclaimed, pointing at the nearest forty-footer. “I could swear ’at’s a falconet! A wrought-iron breech-loader! Barrel made o’ hammer-welded iron rod bundles, an’ hooped t’get
her. Beer mug sorta iron cartridge gets stuck in the rear o’ th’ barrel, an’ wedged in place. Lord, sir, ’at was old in the days o’ th’ Spanish Armada! Blow up, peel apart, an’ shoot backwards, if yer not careful with ’em, so ’twas said.”

  “Dhey are heffing grade need ohf you . . . unt your veapons, ja!” Leutnant Kolodzcy archly sniffed. “You see how I dell you? Ach, now we be beginnink.”

  The local vessels had at last left off their pirouettes to show off their prowess, and their lack of fear, and were handing their sails and coming to anchor in a loose gaggle off Jester’s bows, where they’d be safe from artillery fire. A boat was got down from the larger two-masted dhow and made its way to the galliot, even as a second boat was being hoisted over from her, and a boat-crew broke out her oars.

  “What sort of side-party does a pirate captain rate, I wonder?” Lewrie japed. “What sort of honours should we award him, Leutnant Kolodzcy?”

  “None, herr Kommandeur Lewrie,” Kolodzcy prinked with aspersion. “You show him nothink. No gondempt . . . but no honours, eidder.”

  “No side-party, Mister Knolles. No pipes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The larger rowing boat from the galliot, another Levant-looking craft like a felucca without her single mast, was stroking over to the sloop of war, with two men in her stern-sheets, who stood while others sat and rowed or steered.

  “De one from de dhow . . . de arschloch we speak, yesterday,” Kolodzcy said sharply. “De odder, de taller—he ist dheir leader ve are havink to deal vit.”

  The felucca reached Jester’s side, her larboard side, below the already opened and inviting entry-port. Not the side of honour, as the starboard was in worldwide naval usage. Whether their leader was aware of this insult or deigned to sneer at his welcome, they couldn’t tell, for he sprang from the gunn’l as soon as the boat bumped into the hull, and scampered up the boarding-battens to the gangway in a flash, eager and wolfishly smiling a dazzling white-toothed smile half hidden below a bristling, flowing set of moustachios. He looked about in appraisal, almost as if judging to the pence what the value of looting her might fetch him, before he was joined by his goat-skinned compatriot, a shorter, thicker-set fellow with a lush, unkempt beard.