Dewey Lambdin - A Jester’s Fortune

Half an hour more, and the fishing boat was close enough to eye with their telescopes, though she seemed intent on passing by, sailing due North, slowly… a wary mile and a half off, out of gun-range from shore and the warships. She mounted two short masts and wore two fore-and-aft lateen sails-a typical Eastern Mediterranen, Ottoman craft, low to the water with scant freeboard, built with a high-pinked stern and long, tapering, squarish bow, like an ancient Egyptian dhow. Lewrie didn't think her much over fifty feet long. Would she be built in Arabee fashion? he speculated as he watched her. Planked together with pegs and rope, and fragile as a porcelain teacup to gunfire? Or, this close to Venice and Europe, would she be more clinker-built, over ribs and beams, and more solid? Local construction… stolen…?

And, most important, was she armed?

His telescope revealed perhaps no more than eight or nine hands aboard her, and he thought that too large a number for a simple fisherman returning to his village and fearful of entering. Most fishine boats they'd seen got by on two or three, at best. And, this dhowlike boat was a touch too large, compared to the majority of the netters they had come across. Much larger, of a certainty, than the poor gaggle of old single-masted boats that lay on the local shore, and too heavy to haul up in that fashion at night, too. As for artillery, there was none to be seen, yet swivels or 2-pounder boat-guns could be hidden…

"Haulin' 'er wind, sir," Buchanon grunted.

Abeam of Jester, the dhowlike boat fell off the light Easterly breeze and began to stand in towards them, though still warily angled, as if to pass between Jester and Pylades, her lateens now winged out.

"Fair turn o' speed, e'en off th' wind, you'll note, Cap'um."

"Aye, Mister Buchanon," Lewrie agreed.

Onward, she stood, halving the distance rapidly, coming within gun-range, until she was perhaps five hundred yards off Jester's larboard stern before putting her helm over. Her crew sprang to the masts, to swing the lateen yards end-for-end to gybe her to the opposing tack, in the blink of an eye.

"Oh, smartly done, I say!" Knolles allowed.

"Show-off," Lewrie muttered.

Now the dhow angled in towards Jester on larboard tack, closing the distance until she was no more than two hundred yards off, aimed for a collision with Jesters bows if she held her course.

"Smell like a fisherman to you, sir?" Rodgers enquired.

"Hard to tell, sir," Lewrie replied quickly. "Over the stink of her crew. Well-dressed pack o' scoundrels, hey?" he japed.

Several of the hands aboard her wore nothing but rough wool tunics or loose smocks over baggy, Hmdoo-pyjammy-type knee-length trousers, or no trousers at all. A couple, including the helmsman or master aft by the tiller, had added goat-hair or goatskin vests, which even at that longish range reeked like wet badgers.

"Well, then." Rodgers grimaced, drumming his fingers on the cap-rail of the bulwark. "They're here, so speak 'em, somebody."

Leutnant Kolodzcy stepped to the rails, cupped his hands about his lips and hallooed them in some local tongue. The helmsman cupped a hand at his ear and shook his head as if unable to hear or understand. Their liaison officer tried several other words, though clewing taut to one… which sounded like "Serpska. "

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…! Veil, id ist not matter vaht, nein. I am askink de hiiresohn 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 shite 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, Leutenant 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."

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 lakewater.

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, writ-| ten 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 nights 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!

"Murtff!" 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.