The Road to Samarcand

by Patrick O'Brian

  THE WORKS OF PATRICK O’BRIAN

  BIOGRAPHY

  Picasso

  Joseph Banks

  AUBREY/MATURIN NOVELS IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION

  Master and Commander

  Post Captain

  H.M.S. Surprise

  The Mauritius Command

  Desolation Island

  The Fortune of War

  The Surgeon’s Mate

  The Ionian Mission

  Treason’s Harbour

  The Far Side of the World

  The Reverse of the Medal

  The Letter of Marque

  The Thirteen-Gun Salute

  The Nutmeg of Consolation

  The Truelove

  The Wine-Dark Sea

  The Commodore

  The Yellow Admiral

  The Hundred Days

  Blue at the Mizzen

  21

  NOVELS

  Testimonies

  The Golden Ocean

  The Unknown Shore

  Richard Temple

  COLLECTIONS

  The Rendezvous and Other Stories

  PATRICK O’BRIAN

  The Road to Samarcand

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WANDERER ran faster with the freshening of the breeze; her bows cut into the choppy sea, throwing white hissing spray into the sunlight. The schooner was carrying every stitch of canvas that she could spread, and she was so close into the wind that the boy at the wheel kept glancing up at the sails, watching for them to shiver and spill the breeze; but they remained taut and full, and presently his attention wandered. His gaze went up past the dazzling white triangles of the sails to the great albatross above them.

  “How does it manage to keep up without moving its wings?” he wondered, craning over to the left to see it more clearly. “It has never——”

  “Keep her on her course, you young idiot,” roared an unseen voice, and at the same moment the Wanderer yawed a little. The lee scuppers vanished under a cloud of foam, and Derrick gripped the wheel; it bucked under his hands, but he held it firm; the compass steadied, and the Wanderer’s bowsprit pointed to Tchao-King again. Derrick stood there, square to the wheel, his eyes fixed on the binnacle, the picture of a model helmsman; but he was red in the face, and he felt acutely conscious of the head that had appeared on deck. The rest of his uncle’s tall, lean body followed the head and stood there easily on the sloping deck, swaying to the send of the waves as the captain looked up at the sky, the wind-vane and the rigging.

  “If you do that again,” he said, coming aft, “I’ll drown you with my own hands, and then you’ll be put on half-rations for the rest of the voyage. Now listen, Derrick, you hand over to Olaf at six bells and come down to the saloon. We want to have a talk with you.”

  “Okay—I mean, aye, aye, sir,” replied Derrick, grinning. But when his uncle had gone below, he frowned. “I wonder what they want to talk to me about,” he muttered, changing his grip on the spokes. He turned it over in his mind for some time, but he could think of nothing: soon he gave it up, and concentrated his whole attention on steering the Wanderer as she ran through the China Seas.

  He heard the ting-ting of the ship’s bell, three times repeated, and a moment later Olaf Svenssen came out of the fo’c’sle. He was a big, fair Swede with a face as broad and as red as a side of beef, and like Captain Sullivan he stood for a moment gazing up at the weather and the sails.

  “How’s she steering?” he asked, coming to the wheel.

  “Due north-west by north,” replied Derrick, handing over.

  “Nort’-vest by nort’ it is,” said Olaf, taking the wheel.

  “Do you think the wind will get up any more, Olaf?”

  “Not till after sundown. The sun’ll swallow it up, Ay reckon. Maybe in the night we’ll have a blow, Ay dunno. But the Wanderer can take it, eh?”

  Derrick went below. His uncle and Mr. Ross, a tall, rawboned Scot, were in the saloon, working out the Wanderer’s position on the chart.

  “Is the sun over the yard-arm, lad?” asked Ross.

  “Yes, sir, just over,” answered Derrick. The schooner had no yards at all, but he knew what the question meant.

  “Good. Li Han! Coffee and rum.”

  “Coffee and rum on the spot one time,” cried the Chinese cook, bringing in a tray.

  “Now then, Derrick,” said Sullivan, finishing his coffee, “we want to talk to you.”

  “Aye, we want to talk to you,” repeated Ross, solemnly. “Have a wee tot of rum.”

  “It’s like this,” went on Derrick’s uncle. “When you joined us in Wang Pu after . . .” He paused. He didn’t like to say “after your mother and father died,” and while he was seeking for a better phrase he thought of that sudden death far away in Chang-An, and of those two kind, gentle missionaries who had been Derrick’s parents. He coughed and went on, “ . . . after the funeral, we had no time to make any arrangements, so we took you along on the Wanderer while we considered what ought to be done with you. That is quite a time ago now, and so far we’ve done precious little about it. But we have come to the conclusion that you ought to go to school. The only question is where, the States or England.”

  “Or Scotland,” put in Ross.

  “Or Scotland. But wherever it is (and I had thought of Ireland too) a school it must be.”

  “Just so,” said Ross. “A school first, and then the university, to be bred up to one of the learned professions.”

  “Exactly,” said Sullivan. “Knocking about the China Seas with a lot of rough-neck sailors is not the thing for a boy who ought to be hard at his books, not at all, at all.”

  “But, Uncle,” cried Derrick, “I’ve had all the education I want, and I want to be a sailor. Can’t I just stay on the Wanderer with you and Mr. Ross? It’s much better than school for a sailor. I’m learning to navigate, and I can splice a rope as well as Olaf.”

  “No, my boy,” said his uncle, firmly. “It won’t do at all. I don’t say that you aren’t very useful—you’ve got all the makings of a sailor—but it won’t do. There are hundreds of reasons. To begin with, you’ll have to train in steam to get anywhere nowadays: I doubt whether you would ever get a mate’s ticket with this kind of training. And, besides, you have got to be properly educated. Your English cousin on your father’s side thinks just the same.”

  “Just so,” said Ross. “Get a good grounding in the classics, mathematics and geography, and then you’ll be ready for sea training.”

  “But, sir, didn’t you say that you ran away to sea when you were younger than I am? And everyone knows that you are the best master mariner in the Yellow Sea.”

  “Weel, lad, that’s as may be. Humph. But that’s another case altogether. Days were different then. And let me tell you this, when I was a wee laddie I was a great headstrong fule: I did not know the wisdom of my elders. But when I had been first mate of the Indus just three years, I saved my pay and I went to Saint Andrew’s. I realised that my elders were not so stupid as I had thought when I could walk under a table without bending my head, and so I took my degree.”

  “Couldn’t I do the same, sir? Look, Uncle Terry, just let me stay aboard the Wanderer until I’m old enough to go to college, and I promise you I’ll——”

  “No, no, my poor boy. School it must be, so pipe down and make up you
r mind to it. You must go and learn how to parse, and the Kings of Israel, and how many beans make five. Besides, the matter is not entirely in my hands—there’s your English cousin, and he has a big say in the affair.”

  “That would be Professor Ayrton, I suppose,” said Derrick, gloomily. “My father often talked about him. He was coming out to see us this year.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. He’s a great authority on oriental archaeology, a very learned man, and I don’t suppose that you will be able to escape the advantages of a liberal education with him on your track. We shall be seeing him a few days after we reach Tchao-King, and we’ll have another talk about it then. Now cut along and give Li Han a hand at checking over the stores.”

  Derrick left the saloon with a heavy heart and made his way to the galley. The idea of being a schoolboy again after the freedom of the schooner was not a pleasant one.

  In the saloon Sullivan leaned back and lit his pipe. “I sympathise with the boy,” he said. “I’d feel just the same myself in his place. And there’s a lot in early training: nothing like it for a deep-sea sailor. Still, I suppose he must be educated.”

  “Aye,” said Ross, “though I don’t know anything to beat an apprenticeship under sail to make a sailorman. But this Professor Ayrton probably will not see eye to eye with us there.”

  Derrick found Li Han counting piles of bags and tins, trying to make them tally with the total in the store-book.

  “They want to send me to school, Li Han,” said Derrick, sitting on a tea-chest.

  “Thirty-nine piculs of rice: exactitude only approximate,” said the Chinese cook. “Do they? Very proper too. Thereby you will have inestimable privilege of becoming first-chop scholar.”

  “I don’t want to be a first-chop scholar. A master mariner is good enough for me.”

  “You are talking jestily. Who wishes to be a meagre sailorman if he can be a learned and enter the government service? Why, in time you might be an official and never do anything for remainder of earthly existence. You could grow long fingernails, and become obese and dignified.”

  “I don’t want to be obese and dignified. I’d rather be a meagre sailorman.”

  “Ah, but think of the excessive perils and discomforts of seafaring life. Very often sea is unnecessarily agitated by heavenly blasts, and seafaring persons are plunged beneath surface. It is much better to be the meanest official with firm chair under seat. And maritime persons enjoy no prestige, no face, while government officials are very dignified. You should go to school with rejoicement, labour with unremitting zeal, and become pensionable civil servant. Please excuse.” He stowed away the chest on which Derrick had been sitting, and went on, “Observe the classics: in the Shih King it says, ‘It is the business of scribes and scholars to correct the government of the people.’ You pursue ancient advisement, and correct the government. What face! What daily bribes! What squeeze!”

  “Yes, there’s glory for you,” said Derrick. “But as for me, I’d rather be master of a schooner like the Wanderer.”

  “You like some lichees now?” asked Li Han. “Just one or two?”

  “As many as you like, Li Han. There won’t be any at school, I dare say.”

  Li Han piled the fruit on a plate. “Exceedingly peculiar thing,” he said, “I run after learning all the time, chasing it in adverse circumstance, and you run away from it when it comes on a tray.” He lit a cigarette. “This morning I reach the letter S in my dictionary.”

  “Gee, Li Han,” said Derrick, finishing the lichees, “you thought it would take you another week to work through R, didn’t you? At this rate you’ll come to Z and the abbreviations before the end of the year. That’s swell. Is there anything I can do to help, apart from eating the lichees? Because if not, I think I’ll vamose.”

  “Vamose?”

  “I shall move my person with distinguished agility from this place to another,” explained Derrick, slipping into the Chinese that he had learned before ever he spoke English.

  “Vamose—to skip away. Thank you. Will make instantaneous note—colloquial knowledge of English most valuable.”

  Derrick came on deck and stood watching the Wanderer’s wake for some time. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in the calmer sea he could see the schooner’s trail stretching far behind her. He looked down, and there, sure enough, was the great dark, torpedo-shaped form of the tiger-shark that had been following since the ship left port. Li Han came up with a bucket of rubbish: he threw it over the side, and at once Derrick saw the little pilot-fish dart forward and follow a lump of spoiled salt pork as it sank. The shark shot out from the shadow of the schooner, and Derrick saw the white gleam of its belly as it turned; there was a swirl in the water, and it was gone. The pilot-fish snapped up the scrap that remained and joined the shark under the stern. Derrick shuddered: sharks were the only things in the sea that he hated. There was something appallingly sinister about the great fish’s silent voracious rush.

  He looked away and searched the sky and the horizon for the albatross that was nearly always there, a particularly fine one, with such a vast wing-span that it seemed impossible that it should ever be able to fold them and walk on the ground. But it was not there: nor were the gulls which usually appeared to swoop on the scraps that Li Han threw overboard.

  Presently he went along to have a word with Olaf. “I say, Olaf,” he began, “if you wanted to be a sailor, would you go to school?”

  “Well, I am a sailor, ain’t I?” said Olaf. “What do you think Ay look like? A film-star, maybe, or a guy that dances on a tight-rope?”

  “No, I mean do you think school is a good thing?”

  “A good thing?” said the Swede, watching the compass and considering. “Well, Ay reckon they wouldn’t teach me much out of a book, eh? Ay can’t read only big print, see? And Ay don’t want to be squinting down my nose at a lot of words Ay can’t understand.”

  “I mean if you were young and wanted to be a ship’s captain.”

  “Hum. That’s another thing. You got to know how to navigate, of course: but Ay don’t know that anything else ban much use to a sailor, except the nautical almanac.”

  “I think you’re right, Olaf. They want to send me to school.”

  “What for, eh? You can read and write and figure, can’t you? Ay never was a one for falals and doodads. My old man, he was the master of a whaler, see? And he never knew any more than navigation by rule of thumb.” He turned the wheel two spokes, and went on. “Now Ay knew a man in Baltimore, could read out of books in Greek and what you say? Uh, Latin, ain’t it? Yes. Well, it worn’t any manner of use to him. He fell in the sea and drownded just the same.”

  “But that might happen to anyone, however much they knew.”

  “Ay don’t know. My old grandma, she was a Finn. Half Lapp, they say; and she was a wise woman. She could read the runes. You know what Ay mean? The old heathen writings, eh? And she could put good luck on a ship with what she knew, and she could sell you a nice little wind if you asked polite. If you went and tipped your hat to her and said, ‘Good morning, marm, I’ve come for a nice little wind like you can make, marm, if you please,’ ”—Olaf imitated himself being polite, with a horrible smirk and a bob of his head—“Why, then you’d maybe get it. But if you was to say, ‘Hey, old girl, give us a wind yust one point off of east and make it snappy,’ why, then you would get something more then you bargained for, eh? What she knew, my old grandma! Ay don’t reckon she would have drowned in any sea. Ay t’ink she must have been ninety when Ay remember her. Old, she was, with a beard like a man, and she was a little creature you could of broken like that . . .” he snapped his fingers. “But they was all afraid of her, even the old pastor, though he hated her worser’n poison. She used to be able to tell the day when a man was going to die, and she could charm the whales out of the sea. But Ay reckon you can’t get that sort of learning in no school. If you could, maybe it’d be some use, eh?”

  “Could she really tell when y
ou were going to die, Olaf?”

  “Well, maybe. There was only two or three ever asked her, and they died all right. After that, nobody wanted to know. But Ay seen her call an ice-bear over the sea. She was a wise woman all right.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “Ay don’t rightly know. We was up in the north of Norway, visiting a sick relation, see? And this relation, he went on keeping sick, in spite of my grandma. So she went out into the tundra and called in the reindeer—a good many Lapps can do that—and she made some kind of a spell then; but still this man, he could not get any better no way. So then she bawled him out and swore so that we all got frightened and asked her to stop, very polite. ‘Stow it, Grandma,’ we said. ‘Stow it, marm, if you please.’ And she stopped. She sat by the fire and smoked her pipe for a long while. It was very cold, Ay remember: up there the winters go on seven, eight months, and there ain’t no sun. The fjords were frozen deep, too, and the wolves, they came so close you could hear them breathe. After a long while she got up and looked out: there was a double ring of the Northern Lights flashing up all colours in the sky, and she went out. Soon there was a wolf howling close by outside and another answered in the tundra. My father, he said, ‘That’s your grandma, son, talking to the wolves.’

  “Well, nothing happened for a long while, and they all ban gone to sleep when Ay took a look outside, because Ay wanted to see. And Ay saw my grandma going down across to the fjord. So Ay slipped out and followed her in the moonlight, see? She went right on to the ice and squatted down. She took out a knife, an old stone knife like some of the Lapps have, and she cut runes on the ice. Then she called out across the sea, and far away there was an answer. Ay can’t make the proper noise, but it was something like this—Haoo, haoo. She called six, seven times with her hand like that, see, up to her mouth, and each time the answer came nearer. She held her knife by the blade and beckoned with it. And over the ice I see a great white bear coming slow, with his head turning from side to side on his long neck. Eh! He was a big one. Sometimes Ay could not see him against the snow on the ice, because he was white too, see? But there was his shadow there all the time. And Ay was so frightened Ay could not move my little finger, and Ay was cold: cold to the heart. Soon he come right up to her, and he sit down on the ice, and they talk, grunting and nodding. Suddenly something seems to crack in me, and Ay up and run like mad for the house, hollering all the way. I hear the white bear roar as I slam the door, and they all wake up and ask what’s biting me? Have I had a bad dream, maybe?