The Nutmeg of Consolation (5 page)

Captain Aubrey, his officers and David Edwards, the envoy's secretary, ate their dinner on trestled planks laid this side of the breastwork, which had sandbags on its top to protect their heads from the not infrequent swivel-gun, whose layer made remarkably good practice, hitting the embankment or skimming just over it almost every time - such good practice that the moment they saw the flash all hands dropped to their knees, out of direct range. Their genuflexion did not always save them, however, and twice during the meal Dr Maturin was called away to deal with the more sluggish.

Dinner today was informal, so much so that Richardson might without impropriety peer between the sandbags with his telescope and say 'It is my belief, sir, that the enemy are entirely out of water. I see three parties trying to make holes in what they take to be the watercourse; and Green Headcloth is blackguarding them like a fishfag.'

'They expected to be drinking out of our well by now,' said Welby, smiling. 'Though mark you, they may do so yet,' he added as a sop to Fate.

'The odds are more even now,' observed the purser. 'And if it goes on at this rate we shall soon have the advantage.'

'If that should come about they will surely sail away and come back three times as strong,' said the master. 'Sir, would it be foolish to suggest destroying their proa out of hand? It is frail past belief - no metal in its whole construction and a ball in either hull or better still at the junction between 'em would knock it to pieces.'

'I dare say it would, Mr Warren,' said Jack. 'But that would leave us with better than two hundred thirsty villains eating us out of house and home. The Doctor says there are barely a score of pigs left, and only a few days' ration of ring-tailed apes. No. There is nothing I should like better than seeing them weigh and set off for reinforcements. Almost all our long-sawing is done, and very fortunately poor dear Mr Hadley had left several of his most important tools up here for sharpening and resetting; working double-tides I believe we can launch the schooner and be on our way to Batavia before they come back. Their home port is certainly in Borneo.'

'Oh,' cried the purser, as though he had been struck by a new idea: but he said no more. The swivel-gun and the gingall both hit the sandbag immediately opposite, ripping it and covering both him and the table with its contents. When they picked him up he was dead. Stephen opened his shirt, put his ear to his chest and said 'Heart, I am afraid: God be with him.'

During the hot still hours that followed Jack, Fielding and the gunner overhauled the powder, all that had been found, scraped from barrels, withdrawn from flasks and bandoliers, signal cartridges and even rockets. 'We have a charge for each of the carronades and the nine-pounder, with just enough over to leave the Doctor half a flask for his rifle,' said Jack. 'Master gunner, it might be well to load them now, while the metal hardly bears touching: the heat will make the powder brisk. And let the nine-pounder ball be very carefully chipped -indeed, oiled and polished.'

'Aye aye, sir. Grape for the carronades, I do suppose?'

'Case is your real slaughter-house charge at close quarters, but I am afraid we have none?'

The gunner shook his head with a melancholy air. 'All on that fucking reef, sir, pardon me.'

'Then grape, Mr White.'

'Sir, sir,' cried Bennett, 'Captain Welby says they are sending men up through the forest.'

'Perhaps, sir,' said Welby when Jack, joined him at his look-out point, 'it would be prudent not to direct your glass: they might think we had smoked them. But if you watch the open ground to the left of that great crimson-flowering tree at eleven o'clock from the flagstaff, you will see them slip across, their spearheads held low and wrapped in leaves or grass.'

'What do you think they are at?'

'I believe they are a forlorn hope, a storming-party sent to attack the camp from behind, where the silver is. They are to catch up a chest or two and run off into the broken country behind while their friends amuse us with a false attack in front.'

'They cannot know what the back of the camp is like. We can hold it with half a dozen men: there is a shocking great drop where the landslide swept the earth away.'

'No, sir. And as the young person came in by the west gate and left by the south, she would not have seen the drop either. No doubt it is all their general's theory; but still I am sure he thought he could rely on surprise.'

'How many men did you reckon?'

'I counted twenty-nine, sir, but I may well have missed a few.'

'Well, I think we can deal with that - Mr Reade, stop that goddam fool pointing at the trees. Stop it at once, d'ye hear me there? You and Harper can pick up the biggest stones you can carry and take them to the north wall steps at the double. Mr Welby, I think we can afford a round apiece to your eight best marksmen. A quarter of your people down before you start your attack is discouraging. It will be uncommon brave men that go on, with such a rise in front of them.'

Almost at once the diversion began. The swivel-gun and the gingall fired as fast as they could; large bodies of men raced diagonally across and across the broad open slope between the camp and the building-slip, hallooing as they ran or howling like gibbons, and presently there was a furious discharge of crackers along the inner border of the forest. Jack had to shout to make himself heard. 'Mr Seymour, there is a forlorn hope about to make a dash for the silver by way of the north wall. Take Killick and Bonden and the eight Marines Mr Welby has told off together with whatever other men you need to line the wall and deal with the situation while we watch their attempt at amusing us and make sure it don't turn ugly.'

The feint, the diversion, did not turn ugly: the real attack did. The storming-party had been picked for strength and courage and in spite of a heavy loss the moment they left cover they ran straight on to the steps and the foot of the wall, where Killick, beside himself with pale hatred and fury flung great stones down upon them, helped on either hand by the Marines, all the Captain's bargemen and his coxswain. Again and again a Dyak would make a back for another and up he would come, spear poised, only to be flung back at pike-point, pierced through with a cutlass or smashed with a fifty-pound stone. And presently there were no more to come. Seymour, nominally in command, had to beat on the men's backs to prevent them stoning the few dreadfully shattered cripples who were crawling off among the rocks. Even then Killick stood for a great while, livid and glaring, a boarding-axe in one hand and a jagged lump of basalt in the other.

The diversion soon lost all conviction. The diagonal running to and fro grew languid, the crackers spluttered away to one last pop. The sun too was tiring of the day - it had been extraordinarily hot - and sloped westward through a deeper blue.

'Yet even so, sir,' said Welby, 'I do not believe this is the end. Their general has lost a power of men and he has nothing to show for it. They have no water - see how they dig! - and they won't find any there. So they cannot wait. The general cannot wait. As soon as they have rested a little he will launch the whole lot at us, straight at us: he is a death or glory cove, I am sure. See how he harangues them, jumping up and down. Oh my God they have fired the schooner.'

As the black smoke billowed up and away on the shifting breeze the whole camp burst out in a yell of desperate anger, frustration, plain grief. Jack raised his voice and hailed the gunner. 'Mr White, Mr White, there. Draw those carronades and reload with the very best round-shot we possess. Your mates have perhaps five minutes to chip them as smooth as ever they can: certainly not more. And Mr White, let there be slow-match at hand.'

This time there were no manoeuvres, no diversions. They came steadily up the hill, at first at a trot and lastly at a furious run. They came straight at the guns, with no sign of fear, but in no kind of formation either, so that they reached the earthwork in dispersed order, the fleetest first, in tens rather than fifties, and they never beat their way through the massed pikes and bayonets. Their chief arrived in the second wave, still running but scarcely able to see or fetch his breath: he leapt on to a body, slashing blindly at the seaman opposite him and fell back, his head split down the middle with an axe.

It was cruel fighting, kill or be killed, all in a great roar of sound and the clash of swords and spears, grunting and dust, sometimes a shriek. For what seemed a great while the enemy never fell back except for another spring forward; but the Dyaks and Malays were fighting uphill, against an enemy in close contact with strong-voiced competent naval and military commanders and sheltered by a moderate breastwork; besides, however great their courage, they were smaller, lighter men than the English, and at a given point, when there was a general withdrawal on the right and the centre, a regrouping for a fresh assault, Jack Aubrey felt the turn of the tide. He called out 'Mr Welby, charge. Dianes follow me.'

The whole camp leapt on to the wall with a cheer. The drum beat and they hurled themselves forward. After the first frightful clash the Marines' weight and their exact order bore all before them. It was a rout, a total, disastrous rout: the Dyaks ran for their lives.

They ran faster than the English and on reaching the sea they leapt straight in and swam fast to the proa, as nimble as otters, perhaps a hundred men left.

Jack stood gasping on the shore, his sword dangling from his wrist. He wiped the blood from his eyes - blood from some unfelt blow - looked at the blazing schooner, its ribs outlined in fire, and at the Dyaks, already hauling on their cable. 'Mr Fielding,' he said in a strong, hoarse voice, 'see what can be done to put out the fire. Mr White, gun-crews, gun-crews I say, come along with me.'

They toiled up again, those that were whole; and never before had Jack so felt the burden of his weight. The bodies lay thick half-way to the camp, thicker in front of the earthwork, but he hardly noticed as he picked his way through just by the brass nine-pounder. Bonden, the captain of the gun and a faster runner, gave him a hand over the parapet and said 'They are under way, sir.' He looked round, and there indeed was the proa luffing up, coming as close to the awkward breeze as ever she could sail; the tide had been on the ebb long enough to bare the reef and she had to get all possible offing on the unhandy starboard tack to weather the west point with its shocking tide-rip and northward-setting current.

The gunner, helped by his surviving mate, arrived a moment later. 'There is more match in my tent, sir,' he called in a voice that hardly carried over the breastwork.

'Never fret about that, Mr White,' said Jack, smiling. 'The first still has half a glass to go.' And there it was in fact, untouched, unkicked in the turmoil and confusion of battle, smouldering away in its tubs, its smoke drifting away across the empty camp.

'God love us,' whispered the gunner as they crouched there laying the forward carronade, 'I had thought the set-to was much longer. Four degrees, would you say, sir?'

'Pitch it well up, master gunner.'

'Well up it is, sir,' said the gunner, giving the screw half another turn.

For a perceptible instant the match hissed on the priming: the carronade spoke out loud and sharp, screeching back along its slide; all hands peered out and under the smoke and some caught the high curving flight of the ball. Jack watched it so intently that only his heart remembered to rejoice that the powder had proved sound, beating so hard it almost stopped his breath. The line was true: the ball short by twenty yards.

Jack ran to the nine-pounder, calling to the captain of the other carronade, 'Four and a half, Willett. Fire as she rises.'

The carronade fired an instant later: a noble crash once more. This time Jack did not see the ball, but there was its white plume in the sea, just ahead of the proa, the line as true as the last. He heaved on his handspike, shifting the lay of the gun a trifle to the right, called 'Stand by, there,' and clapped the match to the touch-hole. At the same moment the proa's helmsman put his tiller hard over to avoid the shot and sailed straight into the point of its fall. There was no splash. For an instant all hands looked blank: then the two hulls fell apart, the great sail collapsed, the entire vessel disintegrated, and the whole, already spread over twenty or thirty yards of sea, drifted fast towards the west point and its terrible overall.

'What is the cheering?' asked Stephen, coming bloody-handed from the hospital-tent and peering molelike through spectacles he now wore for the fine-work of surgery.

'We have sunk the proa,'said Jack. 'You can see the wreckage sweeping past the cape. They will be in the tide-rip directly -Lord, how it cuts up! - and no man living can swim through that. But at least we do not have to fear any reinforcements.'

'You take your pleasures rather sadly, brother, do you not?'

'They fired the schooner, do you see; and from what little I saw there is no hope of saving a single frame.'

Fielding heaved himself wearily over the corpses and the parapet, took off his battered hat, and said 'Well, sir, I give you joy of your glorious shot: never was there such a genuine smasher. But I am very sorry to have to report that although several hands got burnt in their zeal, there is nothing, nothing we could do to save the schooner. There is not a single frame left entire - left at all. Even the keelson is gone; and of course all the planking. As well as the cutter.'

'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr Fielding,' said Jack in a voice intended as a public communication - a score of men were within earshot. 'I am sure you and all hands did their best, but it was a hopeless blaze by the time we reached it: they had certainly spread tar fore and aft. However, here we are alive, and most of us fit for duty. We have many of poor Mr Hadley's tools; there is timber all around us; and I have no doubt we shall find a solution.'

He hoped the words sounded cheerful and that they carried conviction, but he could not be sure. As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrast between two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting there was no room for time, reflexion, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, arm lunging at the first hint of a lowered guard, a cry to warn a friend, a roar to put an enemy off his stroke; and all this in an extraordinarily vivid state of mind, a kind of fierce exaltation, an intense living in the most immediate present. Whereas now time came back with all its deadening weight -a living in relation to tomorrow, to next year, a flag promotion, children's future - so did responsibility, the innumerable responsibilities belonging to the captain of a man-of-war. And decision: in battle, eye and sword-arm made the decisions with inconceivable rapidity; there was no leisure to brood over them, no leisure at all.