The ships were no more than seventy paces away from each other and it was clear that the Mongoose would pass to the north of the first Celestial cruiser. Far below, he heard muted shouting and the ominous rumble of wheels on wood, and the portholes on the starboard side of the Mongoose flipped open all at once and the barrels of the six big brass cannon nosed out. Farhan looked forward and saw that the cruiser was doing the same with her four guns on this side: it would be broadside to broadside when they passed each other. The big guns smashing into each other at a range of a short stone’s throw.
Farhan caught a flashing vision of hell as he imagined being belowdecks—in either ship—when the cannon roared and the iron balls were blasted into the bowels of the other, smashing through timbers and crushing frail bodies to red pulp. But the Mongoose had more guns—fourteen to the cruiser’s ten—and consequently threw a greater weight of metal which must surely do more damage at this short range. In a straight-out slogging match, ship to ship, with equal skill on both sides, the Mongoose must win the day.
Yet there was the second cruiser to consider. She had come up fast and now lay about five hundred paces behind the first cruiser and a little to the south. It was clear, even to Farhan, who made no claim at all to be a seaman, that she meant to form a two-ship line with her consort and continue the battering of the Mongoose after the first cruiser had passed. His ship would be pounded first by one and then by the other enemy vessel—and he wondered whether she could take it. She must certainly be crippled if not sunk by the attentions of two Celestial warships. The cruisers could circle, turning back on themselves, and pass by once more, again in line but heading east this time, easily overhauling the stricken Mongoose and smashing balls into her until she was sucked down into the sea.
All this was perfectly clear to Farhan and, at the same time, he knew that he could do precisely nothing about it. Yet in this knowledge of almost-certain death he found a calmness he’d never known before: he would fight his own private battle up here with his rifle, finding targets on the enemy deck and destroying them, if he possibly could. Whatever happened to the ship, he would fight to the last.
Farhan had managed to get the second ball into the rifle’s muzzle and was just ramming it home, when he heard the first brass cannon roar beneath him. He looked to his right and saw that the cruiser was beneath the arm that gripped his rifle barrel. It was only a stone’s throw away and moving fast. The enemy ship was about two-thirds the size of the Mongoose and gave an immediate impression of order and calm. Groups of men in neat blue uniforms stood to attention along the rail. The wood of the deck had been scrubbed to a brilliant white. The brass fittings gleamed like gold. Then everything was blotted out by the roaring of the enemy guns and a vast cloud of gray smoke that billowed up from below.
Farhan felt the strike of the enemy balls hitting the hull of the ship below him. He could see tongues of orange flame ripping through the smoke from time to time, as the Mongoose’s guns returned fire, but he could make out little else. Something caught his eye and he looked across at the passing masts of the cruiser. A man was sitting in the fighting top across and a little below from him, a Han in a blue uniform with a square black hat atop of which gleamed a yellow-glass ball. The man smiled shyly at him—they were no more than thirty paces away from each other—but made no hostile move. Below them the cannon fired again, and the balls smashed into each of their ships. His crow’s nest shook and shuddered with the impacts. The noise was hellish. The smoke was dense as a gray blanket six feet below his boots. Yet Farhan could see the passing Han officer in the other top as clearly as if they were in the same room. He felt the weight of the loaded rifle in his arms and knew that he should lift it and fire. But the smiling Han lieutenant raised a hand to his hat and lifted it an inch or two in salute as he glided away—and after that courteous gesture Farhan could no more shoot him than he could shoot his own mother.
The moment passed. The Han lieutenant was drawn away. There seemed to be a break in the firing and the clouds of smoke parted and Farhan looked down and caught a glimpse of the passing stern of the cruiser, the quarterdeck, where a huge man was grappling with the wheel. He looked like a very fierce fellow, bareheaded, with his black hair drawn in a queue at the back, his muscular frame almost bursting out of the blue jacket he wore.
Farhan lifted the rifle, cocked the right-hand hammer, aimed, breathed and fired down at the man. The bullet caught the wheelsman in the center of his broad back, knocking him away from the tiller-wheel and flat on his belly on the deck. The wheel began to spin wildly. Farhan was aware of a bellowing from his own quarterdeck, and the familiar running stamp of bare feet. He felt the Mongoose go about, coming round to head south. The sails creaked and shifted and he was aware, disconcertingly, of grinning brown faces all around him, hauling in sheets and hoisting fresh sails.
The green coast of Yawa was now dead ahead and on his right the first cruiser was drifting away, the wheel still unmanned, the craft turning before the wind. The once-pristine deck was now a scraped and bloodied mess, bodies here and there, jumbles of fallen blocks and rigging and—just then—a full broadside roared out from the starboard side of the Mongoose, raking the cruiser from stern to bow. Farhan actually saw a pair of balls shoot out from the cloud of smoke and sweep down the length of the deck at chest height, one plowing into a knot of sailors in blue and disintegrating them, the other biting through the mainmast like an ax chopping down a sapling and causing it to topple slowly, sails, sheets, yardarms, all collapsing onto the deck. The stern of the cruiser was smashed wide open by the rest of the broadside and Farhan caught a glimpse of a bloody cave, a hellish space of dismounted guns and tumbled bodies, a thick stream of gore pouring out from the scuppers. The Dokra troops were massed on the starboard rail, pouring volley after volley of musket fire into the carnage of the cruiser’s opened end, their balls punching holes in the smoke and whistling into the darkness of the enemy ship.
Farhan had to look away. He turned his head left and saw the second cruiser fast approaching, no more than a hundred paces away now, coming on perpendicular to the Mongoose’s path and as yet untouched by her might. The cruiser’s bow cannon roared, the ball scorching through the fan-shaped mainsail, leaving a neat round hole. The Mongoose replied in kind. The port broadside lashed out: a vast roaring convulsion of gray smoke and stabbing flame. The forepeak completely disappeared. The foremast was torn down by a screaming ball. All along the second cruiser’s length were bloodied, blackened men, dangling ropes, broken lengths of timber.
The Mongoose’s starboard-side guns had not completed their bloody business either. They were firing individually now, at the will of their crews, balls arcing out and smashing through the hull of the first cruiser, which was now leaning dangerously to port; indeed the port rail was almost underwater. Men were jumping into the sea. Farhan looked right and saw a ball crash into the interior of the hull through a gap under the stern rail and burst out the other side. It was clear the ship was sinking. Most of the stern was now lapped by water.
To his left, the port broadside crashed out once more, the balls smashing through the hull of the second cruiser at the prow and tearing down the length of the ship, causing Gods knew what carnage in the dark belly of the vessel. And now the Mongoose was going about again. Farhan could hear Lodi shouting orders from the quarterdeck. The Buginese were once more all around him. Sheets were tightened. More orders shouted. The ship swung around, the north wind now coming onto her beam, her nose pointing east again. As she came around, the second cruiser’s bow chaser fired again, missing altogether as the Mongoose swung through ninety degrees. The second cruiser was now passing on Farhan’s left, almost close enough to touch, or so it seemed. He lifted the rifle, aiming at a man who was directing the fire of a squad of enemy musketeers. The man somehow sensed Farhan in the fighting top and pointed up at him but before the Han musketeers could change their aim, Farhan aimed quickly, fired and blew
his right leg clean off above the knee.
The Mongoose’s port broadside smashed into the second cruiser at a range of twenty paces, tearing long holes in the side, knocking two of the enemy gunports into one black space. The cruiser returned fire, a faltering volley that nevertheless crashed into the ship at very short range and made her timbers scream. Farhan felt the jolt of it as he tried to reload his long piece, once more spilling precious powder, and the whole ship seemed to lurch downward at an angle. But the second cruiser was mortally wounded, too. The deck was awash with blood and large chunks of the rail and hull were completely missing.
Farhan saw a man with a red-glass button in his hat ordering the green-and-blue Celestial flag to be hauled down. But before the ship could surrender, a massed volley from the forty Dokra lined up on the rail blew him and his fellow officers into a scatter of red chunks. A final port broadside from the Mongoose ripped into the second cruiser—it was her death blow, and the whole vessel seemed to shiver under the impact and settle a little lower in the water. She was holed beneath the waterline, that much Farhan understood, maybe in more than one place and the sea was now rushing in through the shattered timbers to fill her holds with salt water and drag her down. But by then the Mongoose was past her, sailing free and clear, with nothing ahead of her but wide, blue ocean.
TWO
CHAPTER 15
Extract from Ethnographic Travels by Professor Tolmund K. Parehki of the University of Dhilika
Istana Kush, the greatest fortress of the Laut Besar, is at the entrance of the Sumbu Straits—a corridor of water between the jungle-garbed, mountainous Island of Sumbu, which runs northwest to southeast, and the impenetrable mangrove swamps of Manchatka. For a trading ship, the only way to enter the Laut Besar from the west is through the Straits. Smaller craft may enter through the narrower waterway four hundred miles south between the bottom tip of Sumbu and the Island of Yawa, but there the currents are ferocious, riptides abound and the coastline is rocky. Many a ship, even with an experienced pilot, has had its bottom torn out attempting to make that dangerous passage.
Jinwa the Valiant, the first King of Singarasam, the original Lord of the Islands, realized the strategic importance of the Sumbu Straits and sent his artificers to build a fortress on the north coast of Sumbu. The stronghold, called Istana Kush, was built well with high walls, defensive ditches and many towers and platforms that allowed defenders to shower lethal missiles on any ship venturing through the Straits. For a decade, Jinwa collected tribute from any vessels passing in or out of the Laut Besar and made himself immoderately rich.
However, Jinwa was bloodily toppled from the Obat Bale and his successor had enough trouble in controlling the merchant princes of Singararsam and the plunder-loving sea-peoples of the islands without maintaining an expensive outpost on Sumbu. A generation later, the crumbling fortress at Istana Kush and the lands around had been granted in perpetuity to the Indujah Federation by a venal and, it must be admitted, desperate Lord of the Islands for the staggering price of one million silver ringgu.
Since then, the Federation has expanded the fortifications and made a handsome return on its investment—indeed it took only seven years before it was turning a vast profit. Now it is the Federation that truly controls the Laut Besar. The Lord of the Islands may lounge on the Obat Bale in Singarasam, fifty leagues to the east, but the Federation Governor in Istana Kush controls which ships come in and out of the Laut Besar—from the west—and how much profit they make. Gold and slaves, gum and spices, timber and obat all flow out of the Laut Besar by this route, and silver and guns and goods from the Federation factories flood in. And the man who holds the Gates of Stone oversees them all.
The Royal Watchtower of Ostraka stood on a wide, blunt promontory of land that thrust out like a fist into the vast Indujah Ocean. It was the southernmost point of the whole Khevan Empire, fourteen hundred miles south of the Imperial city of Khev, three hundred down from Ashjavat. The Watchtower lay directly below the curved harbor and a little to the east of the town of Ostraka. Katerina stood on the Watchtower’s flat, round roof, crenellated like a castle, and looked out at the vast sea before her. In days gone by, a great beacon had stood here to guide ships into Ostraka harbor; and the rulers of Ashjavat had posted lookouts to warn of the coming of sea raiders from the wilder, northern parts of the Indujah Peninsula. The beacon had not been lit in a generation; and the Indujah Federation, these days, was far more likely to send a trade deputation than a boatful of heavily armed bandits.
Katerina gazed out over the limitless ocean, today a rich greenish blue, with narrow lines of whitecaps rolling endlessly toward the cliffs below her feet. Somewhere across that empty expanse, three thousand miles or more to the southeast, lay the Sumbu Straits, the gateway to the Laut Besar, and the Federation fortresses of Istana Kush.
This was Katerina’s target: the Gates of Stone, the key to the Laut Besar and all its wealth. She had begun dreaming about it from the first moment her old governess in Khev had pointed it out to her on the unrolled leather-and-linen maps, and had read her relevant chapters from Golintski’s Ancient Histories, and later from her own perusal of the works of the renowned Federation traveler Tolmund K. Parehki. She had also read eagerly, late at night by illicit candlelight, about its supposed impregnability from the revered Khevan military textbook The Craft of Combat. But it was not impregnable, she had decided, after many hours of intense study. She could take it, she could possess it, of that she was quite certain. With the troops that she had been given by the Republic and with sufficient determination, the Gates of Stone could be hers. And once firmly in her hands . . .
“Highness,” said a familiar voice behind her. “Colonel Tsu Wang says that the 42nd is on parade and ready for your inspection.”
Katerina turned away from the sea and looked at her Minister, who was standing in the center of the Watchtower’s roof, breathing a little heavily after climbing the stairs from the rooms of state below. A few paces behind him stood a black armor-clad figure, hand on his sword. Minister Tung had aged a great deal in the three months since he had entered her service and put on a little weight in the belly. The white streak in Tung’s once-raven hair had expanded and spread until only a few black wisps remained above his ears. Tung’s face was now deeply lined, and blue bags hung like bruises below his red-rimmed eyes. He looked at least ten years older than his thirty-one years, which was a shame, Katerina thought, for he had been a fine-looking man. Now he looked badly in need of a hot bath, a hard, full-body massage and about a week’s sleep. Well, he had worked diligently for her, that could not be denied, and she was grateful. And this constant struggle would soon be over for him—very soon.
“Thank you, Minister Tung,” she said, smiling prettily. “That is most gratifying to hear. Let us go down there and inspect them then.”
She paused at the head of the steps and looked out west over the harbor of Ostraka: at the pair of stone moles that jutted out like stiff arms and guarded its entrance; at the bays where boats of all sizes were moored, some hauled up on jetties and heeled right over so that the shipwrights could get at and replace the worm-eaten timbers; at the little whore-town of Pirrus on the far side of the water, where the cheapest marak was diluted with turpentine and a man who fell asleep in his cups was unlikely to wake with anything in his pockets—indeed, he should count himself lucky if his throat was uncut. She looked down at the three deep-water bays, cut into the quay beside the road heading north, beside the square wooden blockhouses, where the timber was cut and where the ropery spun its miles of cordage, and smiled to see the three tall ships moored in the slips, newly built, fully rigged and provisioned for a two-month journey. And before that, on the wide, flat parade ground, lined up in ranks and rows like toy soldiers, motionless, their blue jackets and blue-green banners making them a single block of sea-themed color in the center of the ground—there was the army that was hers to command. Her personal arm
y. A thousand well-disciplined, well-armed, fearless Han fighting men. A whole Celestial Legion, no less.
Katerina looked at Tung An Shan. He was a bone-tired man, a frightened man, a man who had performed wonders for her in a very short time: but was he a loyal man?
“We shall walk through the town, Minister. I would like to stretch my legs before we meet Colonel Wang’s magnificent Legionnaires. You hear that, Yoritomo—I’ll be walking through the back streets of the town with my loyal chief minister.”
The tall figure in the black-lacquered mask standing just behind Tung An Shan made the briefest of nods in acknowledgment.
Minister Tung and Princess Katerina walked side by side with a pair of Niho knights a pace behind her and one knight ranging ahead, looking for potential trouble in the winding thoroughfares of Ostraka town. This small, dingy, fish-stinking port was a far cry from the gilded grandeur of Ashjavat but, in the week since she had moved her court here, Katerina had come to like it. The streets were narrow and cobbled and twisted into unexpected places: closed-off courtyards where chickens pecked at piles of rubbish or into narrow alleys where the upper stories of the houses on either side almost met above the street to create dark, mysterious tunnels. Sometimes the streets headed down to green-slimed wharves and a glimpse of the gray water where a gnarled fisherman might be sitting on a barrel mending his nets.
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