A Jester’s Fortune

ought to stir up the shit-pot. Dash off something and show it to me before Saliceti arrives. I will be with these sheep-faced cowards 'til then. Sweetening their cup of gall we just forced them to drink, hein? And Junot?'

'Oui, mon general?'

'More coffee. A lot more coffee!' Bonaparte demanded, laughing out loud, for a rare change. 'Ah, signoresl A momentary delay, sirs. Now I may have some coffee with you, if you will permit? Sorry about the spoons and poor cups, but a soldiers portmanteau … I now get along with less than when I was in the Royal artillery…'

And he whirled away, instantly affable, as if he'd just had seven hours sleep, alert and filled with energy.

To placate the vanquished.

Book III

Fuga sub terras, fuga nulla per aurus.

Nec lacrime (neferte preces) superive vocati

pectora nostra movent; aliis rex Iuppiter oris.

Faxo Bebrycium nequeat transcendere puppis

Ulla freturn et ponto volitet Symplegas inani.

No escape is there beneath the earth, none through the air

My heart is proof against tears (no groveling prayers!)

and appeals to heaven;

'tis elsewhere Jupiter counts for king.

I shall see that no vessel sails Bebrycian waters

and that the Clashers dance to and fro on an empty sea.

Argonautica, Book IV, 217-221

Gaius Valerius Flaccus

CHAPTER 1

It was Captain Charlton s thinking that they'd barely gotten on-station to perform the duties they'd been assigned, and it would be the act of timid poltroons to 'leg' it back to the shelter of the Fleet at the first setback. He left a letter with the British consul, to go by the next departing merchantman, for Admiral Jervis. But he sent them out to sea. Fillebrowne's Myrmidon would accompany his Lionheart, to hunt off die Italian coast, near Brindisi, whilst Pylades and Jester would sail over to the Balkan side of the narrows and scout the seas nearer to Corfu and the other Ionian Isles, the coasts of Turk-ruled Greece-the Morea- and Venetian-held Albania, to scour the Straits of Otranto.

As soon as they fetched the Balkan coasts, off the Istrian Peninsula and the port of Pola, Lewrie was enchanted. It was so unlike any shore he'd ever beheld, like sailing into some fantasy world. The coasts and isles were steep-to, with hardly any beaches to be seen at the foot, but a thin bearding of gravel. Rough, craggy coasts soared upward, rising dramatically from the brilliant blue waters, which now mirrored azure late-spring skies. And they were timbered… so lushly wooded in pines or gnarled oaks, right down to the sea, except where they were too steep for trees' roots to cling, so steep that the hills were streaked here and there with vertical slashes of bare stone and skree-rock, as stark against the dark green forests as the striations of colour in a Venetian lady's hair.

There were coastal hillocks, folding and rolling like frozen waves, always upwards, always more impressive, until they merged in the misty distance with the true mountains, lightly shaded blue-grey and capped with snow and ice on the furthest, above grey granite and the immense forests.

And that archipelago of isles and islets, that transplanted Bahamas, resembled the erect, dolmenlike islets of the Chinese shore, round the mouth of the Pearl River that led to Canton, as if someone had jammed gargantuan pilings, or whole mountains, into the sea quite recently. Though they were inhabited, for the most part, the woods and crags of the coastal cliffs hid their peoples from view, so that Lewrie could imagine, at times, that they were the first explorers, the very first humans at all, to lay eyes on them.

And when they did stand close enough inshore to eye the coastal villages or towns that clung to the shoreline, they were mostly blank to the sea, walled right down to the water's edge, with windows three floors or more above, crammed so tight together they formed fortified enclaves against invasion.

Like his first sight of Naples a few years earlier, Lewrie s impression of those towns was of dusty, mildewy antiquity, like a Greco-Roman history come to life. There were true walled fortifications he suspected must have been built when the Romans, the Byzantines, ruled this Illyrian province of their respective empires. Grecian, exotic and alien, as otherworldly as an ancient painted frieze atop temples now tumbled in ruin, or the red-black pottery of the Classic periods, with their paintings of awkward, stylised warriors, gods and nymphs.

Some seemed very much like Venice-were Venice unwelcoming and unfriendly-as if a portion of the Grand Canal palaces had been transported, with church steeples and campanile soaring above an unbroken wall of balconies and windows and private boat-landings along the ocean; though poorer, shabbier, and so very much older.

The further they sailed south, though, the belltowers, the watchtowers, and the steeples of churches and cathedrals turned to slimmer, taller minarets, and the gilded onion domes of Eastern Orthodox churches, or Moslem mosques, dominated the towns' toppings, like illuminations from a Byzantine or Arabic atlas.

And the inhabitants of that coast…! They were alien to English eyes, the way they dressed themselves; some in turbans or fezzes, and loose-flowing robes over scruffy pull-over tunics, some in Hindooish, baggy pyjammy trousers, belted jerkins and skullcaps, in sandals or in poor, plebeian bare feet, like the poorest of the poor crofters of Ireland or the wild moors. What few women they could see with the aid of their telescopes at long-distance were hooded, veiled, head-covered or over-smocked like Venetians or Moslems, or cowled or kerchiefed in rusty black or goat-brown, like so many old Italian crones or widows. It was the rare merchant or visitor they espied in anything near to Western apparel. Hungarian, Austrian, Greek or Ottoman, it didn't signify-it was as if Europeans had flown by hot-air balloon to a distant planet to colonise it, but no matter how long or how hard they tried, a European hegemony would never take, not in a thousand more years! Even the cooking smells, the normal airborne effluents a tight-packed village or town produced, seemed otherworldly!

'Sorta reminds me o' Norway, sir,' Mr. Buchanon said. 'All th' fjords an' such. Wood-timber huts an' houses, where a body can see up the valleys 'at run inland. Poor as church-mice. Handsome, though.'

'Aye, Mister Buchanon, it is handsome scenery. And impressive,' Lewrie was forced to agree. 'Though I still can't quite get the notion out of my head that we've been picked up and dropped on a new planet's seas. And all alone.'

He left out the brooding notion he'd also formed; that once put there like Doctor Gulliver by a power unknown, they had no way back! And they would be doomed to Lilliput, Brobdingnag or Yahoo climes forever. Would there be a giant child to pluck them from the sea for playthings, would they tame flocks of Lilliputians to hunt their bread- room rats? Or would they converse with those damned talking horses, eventually?

'Sail ho!'

Just after dawn, the decks were still damp from the daily sluicing and holystoning, and everyone was shivering to a brisk little wind off the Balkan mountains, a Bora that put a touch of ice to a spring day.

Lewrie left off his pewter mug of tea to stand near the middle of the quarterdeck and gaze aloft expectantly, shading his eyes against the sunrise.

'Deck, there!' The lookout expanded on his first report. 'Sail ho! One point orf t'star-h'd bows… due South! Full… rigged!'

'Hmm… not a local, then,' Lewrie surmised. He turned to gaze at Pylades, a mile or