by David Weber
He could have wished he had the weather gauge, instead of being forced to engage from leeward, but at least he was to windward of the convoy. He’d been tempted to detach HMS Prince of Dohlar, his rearmost galleon, to assist the galleys assigned to the coasters’ close escort. Unfortunately, Prince of Dohlar couldn’t have gotten there before the infernally fast, Shan- wei- damned Charisian schooners. By the same token, however, all five of Raisahndo’s ships were between the Charisian galleons and the convoy, and he was satisfied none of them were going to break past him to assist in the merchant ships’ massacre. Not without fighting their way through, at any rate.
And the truth is, even if I am never going to admit it to a single soul, that pounding two or three Charisian galleons into driftwood would be worth the loss of the entire convoy.
As a converted merchantman, Rakurai lacked the poop deck of the Dohlaran Navy’s purpose- built galleons. As a result, her wheel, quarterdeck guns, and officers were completely exposed to overhead fire. On the other hand, it meant Raisahndo had (at least in theory) a clear view as he stood by the starboard rail, gazing towards the enemy. Unfortunately, he was also staring directly into the choking bank of evil- smelling powder smoke rolling back across Rakurai’s decks on the wind. That was another problem with being to leeward. Not only did his gunners have to cope with their own smoke, blowing straight back into their faces, but the Charisian artillery’s smoke came driving down across them, as well. The wind was brisk enough to clear their own smoke quickly, actually, but there were always fresh clouds of Charisian smoke to replace it. All they could really make out were their target’s masts above the seething, stinking fog bank, and that couldn’t contribute to their accuracy.
Another Charisian broadside came smashing back. They seemed to be firing a bit more slowly, but they were scoring an unpleasant number of hits. And each of those hits did substantially more damage than Raisahndo estimated his own, lighter pieces were accomplishing. He’d expected thirty- pounders, even thirty- five- pounders, from Earl Thirsk’s reports of Crag Reach, and he hadn’t looked forward to the disparity in weight of metal. Unfortunately, at least some of his present opponent’s guns were even heavier than that, and he winced as one of his own quarterdeck twelve- pounders took a direct hit.
The round shot came screaming in through the bulwark gunport at just enough of an angle to chew a perfectly rounded half- moon out of the forward edge of the open port’s frame. It slammed into the gun carriage, apparently at a slightly rising angle, and struck the underside of the twelve- pounder’s barrel. The ton- and- a-half bronze gun tube erupted upward, leaping out of the explosion of splintered carriage timbers and shattered ringbolts like a sounding doomwhale. Half the eight- man crew was killed as the enormous round shot slashed directly through them; two of the four survivors were crushed and broken as the barrel of their own weapon crashed back down on top of them.
Something—probably a splinter; possibly a broken iron bolt—hissed by Raisahndo’s right ear, close enough to make his head ring as if someone had just slapped him . . . hard.
Another inch or two, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything ever again, he thought, then brushed the thought aside as he contemplated the carnage that single hit had left in its wake.
Probably one of those damned “carronades,”he reflected grimly. At least they knew what the Charisians called the shorter, stubbier guns, but that didn’t help a lot when the Temple had decreed that all of Mother Church’s galleons would be equipped solely with long guns.
In some ways, Raisahndo actually agreed with Vicar Allayn’s logic. The “carronades” clearly had a shorter maximum range than a long gun of the same bore, and the ability to pound the enemy (and kill his crews) before he got into range to return the compliment had a great deal to recommend it. There were, unfortunately, a few flaws in that logic.
For one thing, Earl Thirsk was right about the two sides’ relative seaman-ship. Much though Raisahndo hated to admit it, a Corisandian admiral was far more likely to achieve the engagement range he wanted than a Dohlaran admiral was to prevent him from doing so. Even ignoring that, however, Vicar Allayn seemed to be still thinking in terms of conventional boarding actions, despite the logical disconnect between them and the greater range he wanted from his longer guns. He seemed more interested in larger numbers of lighter guns, suitable for sweeping an opponent’s decks just before closing to board, than in smaller numbers of heavier guns, capable of smashing their way through an enemy ship’s timbers at longer ranges. Killing the other fellow’s crewmen was all well and good, in Raisahndo’s opinion, but boarding actions had clearly become secondary (at best) to artillery duels. And, in an artillery duel, if the other fellow’s gunners were protected by heavy bulwarks your artillery couldn’t penetrate, he was going to be far better placed to kill your personnel than you were to kill his.
Oh, stop complaining, Caitahno!he scolded himself. You’ve still got more guns than they do, and more ships than they do, and it’s time you concentrated on what you’re going to do to them instead of what they’re going to do to you!
“Let her fall off a quarter point!” he shouted to the helmsmen.
Captain Zhon Pawal watched the leading Dohlaran galleon’s masts as the other ship altered course slightly. He was turning a bit further away, and Pawal would have liked to think that meant he’d had enough. Unfortunately ....He’s just giving himself a little more range until his friends get here, Pawal thought harshly. Not exactly what I expected. They were supposed to either run the hell away or come in as a mob, like they did at Rock Point and Darcos Sound.
Pawal began to pace slowly up and down, well clear of the recoiling carronades. The range had fallen to a bit over two hundred yards, well within the fifty- seven- pounders’ effective range, and he bared his teeth as he contemplated what those massive shots must be doing to their targets.
But the fierce grin faded slightly as the enemy’s fire continued slamming back. They weren’t especially accurate, those gunners over there, but they were damnably per sis tent. It was the first time Pawal had faced an actual broadside, and he was frankly astonished by how steadily the Dohlarans were standing up. The sheer weight of Charisian fire had broken the morale of ship after ship at Rock Point and Darcos Sound, but it wasn’t doing that this time.
Or not from thisrange , at least, he told himself, and looked astern, where Harys Aiwain’s Shield was coming up fast. With all the smoke, he could no longer see Squall’s sails, but she had to be somewhere behind Shield. He hoped she was, at any rate! The two leading Dohlarans continued to pound away at Dart, but the third and fourth enemy galleons were beginning to fire on Shield. Aiwain wasn’t firing back yet, though. He was clearly reserving his own first broadside until he reached the range he wanted . . . assuming he got there.
“Bring her a point to larboard!” Captain Pawal snapped.
Captain Stywyrt watched the mast tops poking up out of the boil of smoke as Dart’s head came a bit farther north, moving the wind around to almost dead astern as Pawal moved to prevent the enemy from holding the range open. Stywyrt approved, although he wished the other captain had waited a bit longer and let Squall get closer before he’d done it.
Shieldfoamed steadily along in her consorts’ wake, and he still had a clear view of Captain Aiwain’s ship through his spyglass. As a result, he could see the white feathers leaping from the wave slopes like sudden fountains as the Dohlarans began to fire at Shield. From the scattered appearance of those feathers, the enemy’s gunners weren’t overly blessed with accuracy, but there were obviously a lot of them.
Even as that thought crossed his mind, a hole punched itself abruptly through Shield’s main topsail. The range from Shield to the closest Dohlaran galleon was down to two hundred yards, at the most, Stywyrt thought, and wondered how much longer Aiwain was going to wait.
Harys Aiwain looked up as the round shot punched through Shield’s main top-sail with the sound of a giant, slapping fist. She’d ta
ken at least three more hits on her way in, but so far, there was no report of casualties. Shield was a shorter, stubbier ship than Dart, a sister of HMS Dreadnought, the very first galleon designed as a warship from the keel up. She carried the same number of guns as Dart, although her battery was more cramped than the later, larger ship’s and her carronades were only thirty- pounders, and she was a bit slower under most conditions. Her frames and timbers, though, were heavier than those of any converted merchantman, and they’d stood up well to the handful of hits the Dohlarans had so far achieved.
Looks like Commodore Seamount was right about their powder being weaker than ours, Aiwain thought. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that their guns are lighter, to boot!
He knew at least some of the Dohlaran artillery was lighter, at any rate; all he had to do was peek over the hammock nettings and look down at the twelve- pound shot standing half- buried in his ship’s side just forward of her number twenty- seven gunport. He doubted any of his own thirty- pound shot would fail to penetrate when the time came.
Of course, as we get closer,they’ll start punching through, too, he reflected. That will be unpleasant.
He looked across at the nearest Dohlaran. The range was coming down on a hundred yards, and he heard a sudden scream from below decks as at least one Dohlaran shot finally got through. He didn’t know whether it had penetrated Shield’s timbers or come through an open gunport, but whichever it had done, he didn’t doubt he was going to start taking more casualties very soon.
“Stand to, the larboard battery!” he shouted to Mohtohkai Daikhar, his first lieutenant.
Sir Dahrand Rohsail glowered into the blinding smoke as it cascaded back across HMS Grand Vicar Mahrys. He stood on the starboard poop deck ladder, three feet above the level of his quarterdeck, trying to see across the netted hammocks which formed a (hopefully) musket- proof barrier along the rail. At the moment, the stinking tide of smoke that spewed out with each broadside rendered his efforts to see anything more or less useless.
Rohsail’s fifty-gun ship was one of the first of the Royal Dohlaran Navy’s new- construction galleons, and he’d been more than a little surprised when he received command of her. He’d never made any secret of his personal allegiance to Duke Thorast, and he shared the duke’s dislike for the Earl of Thirsk to the full, if not for all the same reasons. Although Rohsail was never going to forget all he owed to Thorast’s patronage, he couldn’t deny—in the privacy of his own thoughts—that Thirsk had clearly been right and Duke Malikai had obviously been wrong before Rock Point. Anyone with the least awareness of how court politics worked knew it would have been foolish to expect Thorast to commit the disastrous folly of admitting his brother- in- law’s stupidity had pissed away almost the entire peacetime navy, yet even the duke must know it was true. Rohsail did, at any rate!
For that matter, the captain was willing to admit the advantages of the signal flags Thirsk had copied from the damned Charisians. The degree of control—of the ability to communicate between ships—they provided was priceless, and he shuddered to think of how things might have worked out if it had remained a Charisian monopoly. In fact, he’d been forced to concede Thirsk had a clearer, more realistic view than Thorast, in almost every respect, of the kinds of ships and tactics needed to knock those arrogant Charisian bastards back on their heels.
All that was true, and Rohsail knew it. But he also knew the earl was systematically gutting the Navy in the process. He was promoting commoners over nobles, insisting gentlemen had to accept “schooling” from uncouth, low- born merchant seamen, like Ahndair Krahl, of the Bedard. He was undermining discipline with his foolish restrictions on how it could be enforced. And this madness of his, requiring a seaman’s wage be paid directly to his family, if that was his choice, when he was at sea. And that it had to be paid in full and on time!
Rohsail had no objection to paying the men their wages . . . eventually. But money was always tight. Sometimes decisions had to be made about where to spend limited funds, and seamen aboard a warship didn’t have anything to spend money on, which made not paying them until the end of the commission a reasonable way to husband scanty funds. Of course, sometimes they couldn’t be paid immediately after a ship paid off, anyway, but there were al-ways brokers willing to buy up their delayed wages for a twenty percent commission or so. And if a man got himself killed at sea—which was bound to happen fairly frequently—the Navy didn’t have to pay anyone, now did it? But not according to Thirsk!
Even without the insanity of lifetime pensions for widows and orphans, insisting wages be paid immediately to a man’s family was going to play hell with the Navy’s finances in the fullness of time. Mother Church might be able to afford it, but there was no way the Kingdom of Dohlar could continue the practice once the heretics were crushed. And who was going to end up being blamed and hated by the common lower- deck scum when it had to be abandoned? Not Earl Thirsk, that was for certain! No, it would be left to Duke Thorast to clean up the mess, and they’d be lucky if they avoided mutinies in the process.
And when that happens, the way Thirsk’s cut the balls off navy discipline isn’t going to help one bit, either, Rohsail thought grimly. “The lash can’t make a bad seaman good, but it can make a good seaman bad,” indeed! The lash is all most of them really understand ! The way Thirsk’s sucking up to them is going to leave all of us even deeper in the shit when it comes time to clean up behind him.
But this wasn’t the time to pick fights with the man Vicar Allayn and Vicar Zhaspahr had selected to command the Dohlaran Navy. That time would come once the disastrous consequences of Thirsk’s more outlandish policies became apparent, and Rohsail was rather looking forward to that day of comeuppance. In the meantime, though, there was a war to fight, and as insane as Earl Thirsk might be in altogether too many ways, at least he understood what had to be done if that war was going to be won.
Grand Vicar Mahrysheaved as she blasted yet another broadside into the smoke, and Rohsail smiled thinly as he pictured what that torrent of iron must be doing to its target.
I wish I couldsee the damned thing, he admitted to himself. Still, I can see the masts , and the rest of the frigging ship has to be somewhere under them!
He snorted in harsh amusement at the thought and climbed the rest of the way up the ladder to the poop deck. He’d be more exposed from there, but maybe he could actually see something up to windward.
A fresh Dohlaran broadside came howling in. This one was better aimed, and Harys Aiwain watched a round shot carve its way through the midships bulwark. Splinters of shattered planking, some of them three feet long or more, went hissing across the deck, and tatters of shredded canvas flapped wildly as the shot tore through the tightly rolled hammocks standing on end and netted between the stanchions atop the bulwark. Two men went down on the number five carronade. One of them hit the sanded deck limply in a splattered spiderweb of blood, but the other screamed, clutching at the jagged splinter standing out of his right shoulder. Someone dragged the wounded man clear, and two men from the starboard battery—one each from number six and number eight carronades—moved quickly to replace the casualties.
The captain absorbed all those details, as well as the fresh holes appearing in his fore topsail and a length of shrouds blowing sideways in the wind as it was clipped off by yet another round shot. But he absorbed them with only a corner of his brain; the rest of his attention was focused on the third ship in the Dohlaran line. She was almost directly opposite Shield now, and no more than fifty yards away. He waited a moment longer, and then his sword slashed downward.
“Fire!”
Shieldfired on the downroll.
In point of fact, Captain Aiwain’s range estimate had been slightly off; the actual distance to Grand Vicar Mahrys was only forty yards, and the avalanche of Shield’s fire crashed into Rohsail’s ship with devastating effectiveness. Despite the fact that Grand Vicar Mahrys had been designed and built as a warship, her frames and timbers weren�
��t as heavy as Shield’s, and the thirty- pound Charisian round shot sledgehammered through them with contemptuous ease, slamming across the Dohlaran’s gundeck in butchering fans of splinters.
Aiwain’s gunners were far more experienced than Rohsail’s. They could see their target more clearly, and they were better judges of their own ship’s motion, as well, and they timed Shield’s roll almost perfectly. Despite the short range, despite their experience, a great many of their shots managed to miss, anyway. Only someone who’d actually fired a smoothbore cannon in the midst of the smoke and thunder and howling chaos of a naval battle could truly realize just how difficult it actually was to hit something the size of an enemy warship under those circumstances, even at relatively short range. But far fewer of Shield’s gun crews missed their target, and none of their fire went high. Every hit smashed into their target’s hull, and they were close enough to hear the screams.
Captain Raisahndo grimaced as the second Charisian ship came into action. There was no mistaking the sound of that single, massive broadside—or, for that matter, the sudden eruption of fresh smoke. He peered aft, trying to decide which ship the Charisian had targeted. It was hard to make out details. In fact, he could barely see HMS Bedard’s headsails as she sailed along in Rakurai’s wake. It didn’t look as if Ahndair Krahl’s ship had been hit, though, and Raisahndo was unpleasantly confident that a Charisian broadside fired at such short range wasn’t going to completely miss its target.
Must’ve beenGrand Vicar Mahrys, he decided.
The thought evoked mixed emotions. Personally, Raisahndo hated Sir Dahrand Rohsail right down to his oh- so- nobly- born toenails. The man was an arrogant, aristocratic prig who’d never bothered to hide the fact that he was a member in good standing of the officers sucking up around the Duke of Thorast. Or, for that matter, to hide his disagreement with Earl Thirsk’s notions of shipboard discipline. On the other hand, he’d complied with Thirsk’s restrictions on the use of the lash, whether he agreed with them or not, and he had guts. He’d actually been willing to learn at least the rudiments of seaman-ship (however much he’d hated taking lessons from commoners), for that matter, and no man who lived could question his willingness to come to grips with the enemy.