Hornblower took out his watch; it had no second hand—watches with second hands were far too expensive for him to afford—but he could measure the time roughly. He watched the tip of the minute hand creep from one mark to the next, from there to the next, and into the third minute. He was concentrating so deeply on the task that he did not hear Looney break water; his attention was called by a word from Leadbitter. Looney’s head was visible twenty yards astern, his long thick switch of black hair, tied with a string, beside his ear.
“Back water!” said Hornblower promptly. “Pay out that line, there!”
The second order was understood clearly enough by the Ceylonese, or at least they knew their business, for as a vigorous stroke or two sent the gig down to Looney one of them attended to the line over the bows. Looney put his hands up to the gunwale and the other two pulled him on board. They talked volubly, but Looney at first sat still on the thwart, his head down by his thighs. Then he lifted his head, the water streaming from his wet hair. Clearly he talked about the cold—that sharp breeze must have been icy upon his wet skin—for the others towelled him and assisted him to cover himself with his clothes.
Hornblower wondered how he would set them to work again, but there was no need for him to interfere. As soon as Looney had his white garments about his shoulders he stood up in the bows of the gig and looked about him, considering. Then he pointed to a spot in the water a few yards away, looking round at Hornblower.
“Give way!” said Hornblower.
One of the Ceylonese hauled in on the grapnel and let it go again when the boat reached the spot indicated. Now it was his turn to strip, to inflate and deflate his chest, and to take a cannonball into his hands and drop over the side. Cannonballs cost money, thought Hornblower, and a time might come when he would need them to fire at the enemy. It would be better in the future to play in a supply of small rocks gathered on the shore. The diver came up to the surface and scrambled on board, to be received by his companions just as Looney had been. There was some kind of discussion among the divers, which was ended by the third one going down in the same place, apparently to settle the point in dispute. What he discovered led on his return to Looney requesting by signs a further shifting of the gig, and then Looney took off his clothes again to go down.
The divers were working industriously and, as far as Hornblower could see, intelligently. Later on Looney and one of his mates made a simultaneous descent, and it was on this occasion that Hornblower noticed that Looney’s legs and feet, when he climbed in, were scratched and bleeding. For a moment Hornblower thought of sharks and similar underwater perils, but he revised his opinion at once. Looney must have been scrambling about on the wreck itself. There were decaying timbers down there, deep in the bright water, overgrown with barnacles and razoredged sea shells. Hornblower felt confirmed in his opinion when Looney desired to buoy this particular spot. They anchored a plank there by a grapnel, and then dived more than once again in the neighbourhood.
Now the divers were exhausted, lying doubled up and huddled together beside the bow thwart.
“Very well, Looney,” said Hornblower, and he pointed back to the ship.
Looney gave him a weary nod.
“Up anchor,” ordered Hornblower, and the gig pulled back towards Atropos.
A mile away were visible the lug sails of longboat and launch also on their return journey, coming down with the freshening wind abeam. It seemed to Hornblower as if things could never happen to him one at a time; he had hardly set foot on the deck of the Atropos before they were running alongside, and as the Ceylonese made their weary way forward to report to McCullum here were Carslake and Turner demanding his attention.
“The water casks are refilled, sir,” said Carslake. “I used the little stream that comes in half a mile from the town. I thought that would be better than those in the town.”
“Quite right, Mr. Carslake,” said Hornblower. On account of what he had seen in North Africa, Hornblower agreed with Carslake that a water supply that had not passed through a Turkish town would be preferable.
“What stores did you get?”
“Very little, sir, today, I’m afraid.”
“There was only the local market, sir,” supplemented Turner. “The Mudir has only sent out word today. The goods will be coming in for sale tomorrow.”
“The Mudir?” asked Hornblower. That was the word Turner had used before.
“The head man, sir, the local governor. The old man with the sword who came out to us in the boat yesterday.”
“And he is the Mudir?”
“Yes, sir. The Mudir is under the Kaimakam, and the Kaimakam is under the Vali, and the Vali is under the Grand Vizier, and he’s under the Sultan, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be—all of ‘em try to be independent when they get the chance.”
“I understand that,” said Hornblower.
No one who had given any study at all to the military and naval history of the last few years in the Eastern Mediterranean could be ignorant of the anarchy and disintegration prevailing in the Turkish Empire. What Hornblower wanted to hear about was the effect these were producing locally and today. He turned back to Carslake to listen patiently first to his account of what had been bought and what would be available later.
“I bought all the eggs there were, sir. Two and a half dozen,” said Carslake in the course of his report.
“Good,” said Hornblower, but without any fervour, and that was clear proof that his mind was not on what Carslake was saying. Normally the thought of eggs, boiled, scrambled, or poached, would have excited him. The untoward events at Malta had prevented his buying any there for himself. He had not even laid in a store of pickled eggs at Deptford.
Carslake droned himself to a stop.
“Thank you, Mr. Carslake,” said Hornblower. “Mr. Turner, come below end I’ll hear what you have to say.”
Turner had apparently kept his eyes and ears open, as Hornblower had ordered him to.
“The Mudir has no force here at all worth mentioning, sir,” said Turner, his wizened old face animated and lively. “I doubt if he could raise twentyfive armed men all told. He came down with two guards as old as himself.”
“Y’ou spoke with him?”
“Y’es, sir. I gave him—Mr. Carslake and I gave him—ten guineas to open the market for us. Another ten guineas tomorrow, is what we’ve promised him.”
No, harm in keeping local authority on his side as long as possible, thought Hornblower.
“And was he friendly?” he asked.
“Weell, sir. I wouldn’t say that, not exactly, sir. Maybe it was because he wanted our money. I wouldn’t call him friendly, sir.”
He would be reserved and cautious, Hornblower decided, not anxious to commit himself without instructions from superior authority, and yet not averse to pocketing twenty pieces of gold—pickings for an average year, Hornblower guessed—when the opportunity presented itself.
“The Vali’s carried off the local army, sir,” went on Turner. “That was plain enough from the way the Mudir talked. But I don’t know why, sir. Maybe there’s trouble with the Greeks again. There’s always trouble in the Archipelago.”
Rebellion was endemic among the Greek subjects of Turkey. Fire and Sword, massacre and desolation, piracy and revolt, swept islands and mainland periodically. And nowadays with French influence penetrating from the Seven Islands, and Russia taking a suspiciously humanitarian interest in the welfare of Turkey’s Orthodox subjects, there were fresh sources of trouble and unrest.
“One point’s clear, anyway,” said Hornblower, “and that is that the Vali’s not here at present.”
“That’s so, sir.”