The Thirteen Gun Salute (25 page)

Lin Liang bowed: Wu Han was necessarily associated with him, and at half shares, the transaction being too important for either separately; but Wu Han was the soul of discretion, as silent as the legendary Mo.

'Is he not the banker for the French mission?'

'Scarcely. They have sent to change a little money into Java guilders for daily marketing, hut the only real connection is between Wu Han's Pondicherry clerk and a man belonging to the mission, also from French India.'

'Then please let it be known to Wu Han and his Pondicherry clerk that I should like any information about the French that can properly be given - lists of names and so on - and that I am ready to pay for it. But, Lin Liang, you understand as well as I do that in these things discretion is everything.'

Lin Liang was wholly persuaded of it; many of his own affairs too were of the most private nature; and perhaps for the future Dr Maturin might like to come by the door actually named Discretion, behind the hovel in which he and his miserable family had their unworthy being. He led Stephen through another court, surrounded by verandas, some with truly astonishing orchids hanging from the beams and slim young women with bound feet tottering rapidly away. Still another, bounded by a high wall with a rounded projection whose spy-hole commanded the low iron door; and on the other side a lane, or rather a path, wandered along a neglected canal.

Stephen wandered with it; he had some time to spare before his appointment with van Buren and he looked with more than ordinary attention at the orchids in the trees along the water or on the ground between them, an extraordinary variety of flowers and vegetation. He took specimens of those he could not recall having seen in Raffles' garden or dried collection, and he gathered up some beetles for Sir Joseph - beetles that in some cases he could not even assign to a family, so far were they removed from his experience. By the time he reached van Buren's door he was somewhat encumbered, but in that house burdens of this kind were taken for granted. Mevrouw van Buren relieved him of the flowers and her husband brought insect-jars. 'Shall we carry on directly with our viscera?' he asked. 'I have reserved the spleen especially for you.'

'How very kind,' said Stephen. 'I should like it of all things.' They walked slowly across the compound - van Buren had a club-foot - to the dissecting house, where they were anatomizing a portly tapir. The garden gate happened to be open and as they passed it van Buren said, 'If you were to use this when you do me the pleasure of paying me a visit, it might save time, particularly at night, when the house is locked up and the watchman thinks all visitors are thieves; and time we must save, because in this climate specimens will not keep. Tapirs in particular go off as quick as mackerel, though one would hardly suppose it.'

His words were so true that they worked fast and silently, hardly breathing, sometimes shifting the mirrors that reflected strong light into the cavity, but communicating mostly by nods and smiles though once, pointing to the tapir's anatomically singular forefoot, van Buren murmured, 'Cuvier'; and when they had thoroughly examined the spleen in all its aspects, taking the samples and sections necessary for van Buren's forthcoming book, they sat outside to breathe the open air. Van Buren spoke luminously not only of this spleen but of many spleens he had known, the comparative anatomy of the spleen, and the erroneous notion of force hypenn�nique.

'Have you ever dissected an orang-utang?' asked Stephen.

'Only one,' said Van Buren. 'His spleen is on the shelf with the human examples, a pitifully meagre collection. It is very difficult to get a really prime cadaver in this country: nothing but the occasional adulterer.'

'But surely criminal conversation, illicit venery, even grossly over-indulged, will hardly affect a man's spleen?'

'It will in Pulo Prabang, my dear sir. The incontinent person is peppered: that is to say a small sack or rather bag partially filled with pepper is tied over his head, his hands are bound, and he is delivered over to the aggrieved family and their friends; they form a ring, beating the sack with sticks so that the pepper flies. Presently it kills him and I have the corpse; hut the prolonged and repeated convulsions that precede death distort the spleen most surprisingly and so change its juices that they are useless for comparison; they do not support my theory at all.'

'Does the ape's spleen differ widely from ours?' asked Stephen after a pause.

'Remarkably little. The renal impression above the posterior border - but I will show you both without naming either, and you will decide for yourself.'

'I should love to see an orang-utang,' observed Stephen.

'Alas, there are very few down here,' said van Buren. 'It was a great disappointment to me. They eat the precious durians, and they are killed for doing so.'

'Absurd as it may seem, I have never seen a durian either.'

'Why, my bat-tree is a durian. Let me show you.' They walked out to the far end of the garden, where a tall tree stood in a little enclosure of bamboos. 'There are my bats,' said van Buren, pointing to clusters of dark, almost black creatures about a foot bong hanging upside down, their wings wrapped about them. 'When the sun reaches the far trees they will begin to squeak and gibber, and then they will fly off to the Sultan's garden and strip his fruit-trees, if the guardians do not take great care.'

'Do they not eat your durians?'

'Oh dear me no. I will find one if I can.' Van Buren stepped over the low fence, took a long forked pole and peering up into the tree he poked among the leaves. The bats stirred and muttered angrily and one or two flew out in a circle, settling again higher up- a five-foot wingspan. 'Some people eat them,' remarked van Buren, and then he cried, 'Take care.' The durian fell with a heavy thump, an object the size and shape of a coconut but covered with strong thickset spikes. 'The skin is far too thick for any fruit-bat,' he said as he cut it open, 'quite apart from the spikes. Ugly spikes: I have had several patients with dangerous lacerated wounds from a durian falling on their heads. The orang-utang opens them, however, spikes, coriaceous skin and all. This one is quite ripe, I am happy to say. Pray try a piece.'

Stephen realized that the smell of decay came not from their dissection but from the fruit, and it was not without a certain effort that he overcame his reluctance. 'Oh,' said he a moment later, 'how extraordinarily good; and what an extraordinary contradiction between the senses of smell and taste. I had supposed them to be inseparably allied. How I applaud the orang-utang's discrimination.'

'They are charming animals, from what I have heard and what little I have seen: gentle, deliberate, with nothing whatsoever of the baboon, the mandril, or even the pongo, let alone the restless petulant wantonness of monkeys in the general sense. But as I say there are almost none down here. To see a miss, for I believe that is the true Malay, you must go to Kumai.'

'I long to do so. You have been there, I collect?'

'Never, never: with this leg I cannot climb, and at the end of all possible riding there are innumerable steps cut into the bare rock of the crater's outward side. The path is called the Thousand Steps, but I believe there are many more.'

'I have an almost equal disadvantage. I am tied to this place until the negotiations are brought to an issue, I hope a happy issue. Today I learnt of a connexion that may prove useful.'

Early in their acquaintance or indeed friendship Stephen had found that van Buren was utterly opposed to the French project, both because he hated Buonaparte and what he had done to Holland, and because he thought it would ruin Pulo Prabang, which he loved. They had many friends in common, particularly the more eminent French anatomists; each knew and appreciated the other's work; and for once in his career as an intelligence-agent Stephen had laid aside dissimulation. He now told van Buren of his conversation with Lin Liang and of his hopes; and after that, as they sat on a shaded bench outside the dissecting-room, van Buren returned to his accurate, well informed account of the members of the Sultan's council, their virtues, shortcomings, tastes, approachability.

'I am infinitely obliged to you, dear colleague,' said Stephen at last. 'The moon has risen and I can see my way back into the town, where I mean to walk about among the bawdy-houses and places where they dance.'

'May I hope to see you later? I usually start work again in the cool of the night, at about two; and if we do not finish some of the finer processes before tomorrow's sun, they may scarcely be distinguishable. But before you go let me tell you of a thought that occurs to me. Our Latif's half-brother is a servant in the house allotted to the French mission: he may be able to gather some small scraps of information about your man from Pondicherry.'

These days Stephen rarely saw either Fox or Jack Aubrey. He stayed ashore, usually sleeping in the favourite haunt of the small Javanese colony, a house where there were exquisite dancing-girls and a famous Javanese orchestra, a gamelan, whose rhythms, intervals and cadences, though entirely foreign to his ear, pleased him as he lay there through the night by his scented sleeping-partner, a young woman so accustomed to her clients' peculiarities - some very bizarre indeed - that his passivity neither surprised nor displeased her.

Here, in the main hail where the dancers performed, he sometimes met his shipmates, surprised, embarrassed, shocked by his presence. Mr Blyth the purser, a kindly man and older than Stephen, took him aside and said, 'I think I ought to warn you, Doctor, that this place is little better than a disorderly house; prostitution often occurs.'

Gambling often occurred too, very passionate gambling for very high stakes, sometimes going on till dawn. It was mostly monied people who came here, but he rarely saw any of the French and never Ledward or Wray, who had gone to join the Sultan in his hunting, Ledward having some acquaintance with the Raja of Kawang. Once however he played with four Spanish shipwrights in the French service who had brought their month's pay from the ship, anchored in a remote creek to keep her people out of harm's way. He took their money from them - he had always been lucky at cards - and a great deal of information; but on finding that they were most reluctant Frenchmen he let them win it back again. He also let them suppose that he was a Spaniard in the English service, which, as they confessed, was natural enough, Spain and England now being allies: for their part they had been impressed as long ago as 1807, when another face of things was seen, and they had never been able to get away since.

The rest of the time he walked about the countryside in a way that would be expected of a natural philosopher, the Captain's guest, sometimes with Richardson, sometimes with Macmillan, occasionally with Jack, but more often by himself, for his companions objected to the forest-leeches that fastened upon them by the score in the wilder parts and the tormenting flies and mosquitoes in the irrigated fields. They were most profitable walks however, in spite of these disadvantages and even in spite of a shockingly aggressive kind of bee that built its comb in the open, hanging from a stout branch, and that attacked on sight, pursuing the intruder for a quarter of a mile or to the nearest very thick bush, sometimes itself inhabited by still more ferocious red ants or in one instance by an irritable female python, coiled about her eggs. Quite early he chanced upon a broad track where woodcutters had dragged their timber down with teams of buffaloes, and this clear tract in the deep forest gave him wonderful views of the arboreal birds, particularly the hornbills, and sometimes of a mouse-deer, while gibbons were far from rare, It was in this glade that Jack found him on the evening of a day during which he had had an unusually interesting conversation with Wu Han's Pondicherry clerk.

'There you are, Stephen,' cried Jack. 'They told me you might be here; but if I had known you was gone so far up the mountain-side I should have taken a pony. Lord, ain't it hot! Where you get the energy from, after your nightly activities, I cannot tell, I am sure.' Like the rest of the ship's company Jack had heard of the Doctor's extraordinarily dissolute life, smoking and drinking until all hours, gambling; but he alone knew that Stephen could take the sacrament without confession.

'To be sure,' said Stephen, thinking of their work on the tapir, now a mere skeleton, 'I was very busy last night. But you too would walk far up the mountain-side without gasping if you did not eat so much. You were much better, physically, when you were poor and wretched. What do you weigh now?'

'Never mind.'

'At least another stone and a half, perhaps two stone, God be with us. You fellows of an obese and sanguine habit are always on the verge of an apoplexy, particularly in this climate. Will you not omit suppers, at least? Suppers have killed more than Avicenna ever cured.'

'The reason I came sweating up this infernal hill,' said Jack, 'was to tell you that Fox summons us both to a conference this evening. The Sultan returns tomorrow night, only a week after his appointed time, and we are to have our audience the day after.'

On the way down he told Stephen how the ship was faring, and how the stores laid in at Anjer, especially the great quantities of Manila cordage, were now being put to use, together with a detailed, perhaps a little too detailed, account of the restowing of the hold to bring her slightly by the stern. 'Just half a strake or so, you understand, nothing flash or outlandish or showing away. It pleased me very much indeed. But,' shaking his head and looking melancholy, 'there was something else that did not please me nearly so well. Having advised with Fox, I called all hands aft and told them that we were here to settle a treaty between the King and the Sultan, and that the French were here too for the same purpose: that the French foremast jacks had gone ashore in droves and had given great offence by getting drunk, fighting, offering to kiss honest young women, and touching their bare bosoms, and that they and their ship had been packed off to Malaria Creek. So, said I, the Dianes were not going to be given liberty except on promise of good behaviour, and even then only in small numbers at a time and with very little pay advanced. It was for their country's good, I said, only for their country's good. And I had thought of ending with God save the King or Three cheers for the King; but somehow by the time I had finished it did not seem quite suitable. A sullen, dogged set, upon my word: nothing but sour looks and wry faces. Even with Killick and Bonden it is nothing but Yes, sir or No, sir - never a smile. But then I am no orator. The Surprises might have worn it without oratory, because they know me; but not these swabs. They want to be ashore tumbling a wench and be damned to their country's good.'