A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  “I’m glad to hear it, Sir,” Baikyr said with a smile.

  “Good. In that case, I’m sure you won’t mind clearing the ship for action, Captain.”

  “At once, Sir!” Baikyr replied, and saluted sharply.

  Normally, the urgent tattoo of drums would have sent Ahrmahk’s crew scurrying to action stations. Not to night, however.

  Artificial sounds had an astonishing ability to carry preposterous distances across water. Wind and rain, the sound of waves, the hum of rigging, could be depended upon to deaden much of that sound, but no one was much inclined to take unnecessary chances this night. And so, aboard every one of the twenty- five Charisian galleons forging through the Stygian darkness, no drum sounded as men were sent to their stations by quiet orders.

  Feet pattered across decks. Muffled thumps and bangs came from below as internal partitions were dismantled and sent down into the hold—along with furniture, paintings, officers’ wine cabinets, flag officers’ armchairs, cabin rugs. Gun trucks squeaked and rumbled as breech ropes were cast off and the massive carriages were trundled back from where they normally stood, nestled firmly against the side of the hull and lashed there. Lead aprons were removed from touchholes. Gun locks were fitted. Tompions were removed from muzzles. Rammers and worms came down from overhead racks, tubs of water were arranged between each pair of guns, buckets of sand were scattered over the decking to provide traction... and absorb blood.

  Forward, the gunner issued cutlasses and boarding pikes. The newfangled pistols which had been invented for the Imperial Guard had become much more common, and now simpler, smoothbore versions were issued to senior petty officers and seamen. Wolves—the light, swivel- mounted anti- personnel weapons of choice—were issued and hauled up to the fighting tops. Carronade gunners swarmed along the upper deck, preparing their own weapons while rain bounced from the stubby barrels like freshwater spray. Until the upper- deck guns heated up, the flintlocks’ reliability would be suspect, so lengths of old-fashioned slow- match were wrapped around linstocks and placed in canvas-screened tubs where the betraying glow would be sheltered from hostile eyes and extinguishing rain, alike.

  Above the decks, more hands spread protective nets to catch falling blocks and severed cordage. Other seamen rigged chain slings to support the yards. Boats which were normally stowed amidships were hoisted out, put over the side to tow astern, where they could generate no lethal splinters if they were struck by enemy shot. Below decks, surgeons laid out knives and saws, healers laid out fleming moss and ban dages, and sick-berth attendants scrubbed down the mess tables where wounded men would all too soon lie sobbing in agony.

  The Charisian standard was to clear for action from a standing start, without warning, in no more than fifteen minutes. To night, it took twice that long, because there was time. Time to do it right. Time to make preparations without risking accident and injury. Time to double- check every single aspect of the process.

  There was not a man aboard the flagship, or aboard any of the ships following in Ahrmahk’s wake, who didn’t understand exactly what they faced. Who hadn’t been told the odds, who couldn’t compute the chances of their own survival . . . or grasp what would happen if the ships invisible to them through darkness and rain were allowed to unite with the Desnairian fleet in the Gulf of Jahras.

  They were experienced, most of those men. They knew the Charisian tradition. They didn’t think, didn’t merely believe, that they were the finest sea fighters in the history of the world—they knew they were, just as they knew what the Church of God Awaiting and the Inquisition would do to their homes and their families if they lost this war.

  Bryahn Lock Island stood on his quarterdeck, feeling rain beat on his own oilskins, watching the projected map only he could see, and felt that in his men. Felt their knowledge, their fear... their determination.

  “Be sure your mind is fresh enough to make the decisions worthy of the men under your command,” Domynyk Staynair had said to Cayleb Ahrmahk on another rainy night, before the Battle of Rock Point. Cayleb had told his cousin about it, and now Lock Island repeated that same sentence to himself.

  “Sir, the ship is cleared for action,” Sylmahn Baikyr told him, touching the chest of his streaming oilskins in salute.

  “Very well, Captain,” the high admiral said. “Be good enough to make the signal.”

  “Sir! The Flag’s hoisted the signal!”

  Captain Zakrai Wayst turned from a quiet conversation with the ship’s chaplain at the signal midshipman of the watch’s excited announcement.

  “Has it, indeed, Master Hahlmyn?” His tone was calculated to steady the lad, and the midshipman drew a deep breath.

  “Yes, Sir,” he said in a much calmer voice, and Wayst nodded.

  The captain’s eyes were no longer young, but he doubted that would have made a great deal of difference. The downpour was so heavy he could barely see as far forward as the mainmast. He might have been able to pick out a faint glow, diffused across the plunging raindrops, from Ahrmahk’s big stern lanterns, shaded to be invisible from anywhere but astern, yet he wouldn’t have bet money on it. And he for damned sure couldn’t see the three red lanterns hoisted to the flagship’s mizzen yard.

  But young Hahlmyn was a reliable lad, and Wayst was prepared to take his word for it.

  “Have you acknowledged, Master Hahlmyn?”

  “Aye, Sir! One red lantern at the fore topsail yard.”

  “Very well, then. Repeat the signal to our next astern, if you please.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir!”

  One by one, down the entire length of that rain- lashed line of galleons, the red lanterns rose. Their gleam was all but lost in the darkness and rain, but sharp-eyed lookouts had been awaiting them for hours. Ship by ship, they were sighted and acknowledged. It took time—a seeming eternity as Bryahn Lock Island waited on his quarterdeck at the head of that long column—but eventually Baikyr’s signal lieutenant saluted.

  “Darcos Sound has hauled down her lantern, High Admiral.”

  “Good,” Lock Island said calmly.

  Zakrai Wayst could be something of a fussbud get, and there was no denying he had a pompous streak at least two feet wide, but he was as steady and reliable as a rock, and the man who could frighten him had yet to be born. That was why he commanded Darcos Sound, the second ship in Lock Island’s line. The lowering of the lantern from Darcos Sound’s fore topsail yardarm was the signal that Wayst’s own next astern—HMS Daffodil—had just lowered her forward lantern. There’d been simpler and faster ways to pass that information—indeed, both Ahrmahk and Rock Point’s flagship, Destroyer, were equipped to use those other ways, when the time came—but not yet. They were too... energetic. Too indiscreet. Still, Darcos Sound’s lowered lantern showed everyone astern of her had done the same thing, indicating receipt of Ahrmahk’s signal to prepare for battle.

  As it happened, Lock Island knew that. He’d watched through the remotes Owl had deployed to smother the area.

  This must’ve been driving Merlin crazy ever since he got here,the high admiral thought now. He’s been able to see so much—know so much—almost instantly, and he’s still had to rely on signal flags and lanterns and the speed of mounted couriers because no one else could see it. And, of course, because he couldn’t afford for his abilities to be labeled “demonic.”

  “In that case, Captain Baikyr,” he said out loud, turning once more to face his flag captain in the pounding rain, “I believe it’s time we were about it.”

  The red lanterns at Ahrmahk’s mizzen yard dipped, and Captain Baikyr put his helm up to windward.

  Sodden canvas flapped as the ship fell off to leeward and the wind moved from broad on the the larboard beam to fine on the larboard quarter. Hissed commands trimmed sheets and braces, and Bryahn Lock Island stood gazing aft, where someone with unusually sharp eyes might have just made out the loom of Darcos Sound’s headsails. But he wasn’t relying on anything as fallible as eyes, and he drew a deep
, unobtrusive breath of relief as Zakrai Wayst’s ship followed Ahrmahk around.

  One by one, the ships of the Imperial Charisian Navy reached the point at which Ahrmahk had altered course, and one by one—each guided by the barely visible poop lanterns of her next ahead—they altered course, in turn.

  Lock Island turned back forward. He stepped up close beside the helmsmen, looking down at the illuminated compass card, then raised his head once again and gazed forward while rainwater sluiced down his face.

  There was nothing he could do now but project the posture and appearance of a man confident in his plan and its workings. He understood that, just as he understood that every sailor and Marine, every officer and petty officer, aboard Ahrmahk knew he couldn’t actually see what was happening any better than they could. In point of fact, they were wrong about that, but there still wasn’t anything else he could do. They knew he was playing a role, projecting the confidence they needed to see out of him, and it didn’t matter. That, too, was part of the compact, part of the intricate, complicated network of responsibilities, commitments, duties, and trust between him and the men under his command.

  They can’t see a damned thing,he thought, almost wonderingly. It’s blacker than the inside of Clyntahn’s heart, and they have no idea whether or not I’m really going to find Harpahr’s fleet for them. Just as they have no idea what’s going to happen when—if— we smash into one another in the dark, in the middle of a rainstorm. They’re obeying my orders, following my plan, on the basis of nothing but duty . . . and faith. My God. What could anyone possibly do to deserve that kind of loyalty and obedience?

  He had no answer, but he knew he would do what ever it took, pay any price, to honor that trust. To be worthy of it, even if he couldn’t deserve it.

  He glanced at the nearer helmsman, a grizzled petty officer with a long pigtail, streaming with rain while his jaw worked on a chew of tobacco. The petty officer’s attention was on the dimly visible sails, watching them, steering to keep them filled with the delicate touch of a man who’d spent twenty years at sea. He seemed to sense the high admiral’s eyes, however, and turned his head to meet Lock Island’s gaze.

  “Just you be worryin’ ’bout findin’ the bastards, M’Lord,” he said with a grin, raising his voice through the roar of rain on wet canvas, water sluicing across decks and runneling through the scuppers. “You find ’em, an’ we’ll kick their sorry arses proper fer ’em! You can lay to that, Sir.”

  He grinned again, then spat a stream of tobacco juice expertly into the spittoon lashed to the base of the binnacle housing.

  “Your move,” Kornylys Harpahr observed, leaning back on his side of the chessboard. He knocked the ash out of his pipe and began methodically refilling it, never taking his eyes from the board while Taibahld considered it.

  “That was nasty of you, My Lord,” the flag captain said.

  “Well, as the Archangel Chihiro said, we do our officers and men no favors by going easy on them,” Harpahr replied comfortably. “The enemy isn’t going to! Besides, you had it coming after what you did to me last night.”

  Taibahld chuckled. His thrice- a-five- day chess games with the admiral general had become a firm tradition, and he knew they both enjoyed them. They were well matched, and the companionable relaxation as they slaughtered one another’s chessmen had helped build their close personal and professional relationship. They’d talked out more than one logistical problem, discussed more than one possible tactical scenario, across this chessboard, and Taibahld had been more than a little surprised by how fond he’d become of Harpahr in the process.

  Now he rubbed his nose, considering the trap he’d been lured into. He could save his queen, but only by sacrificing his king’s castle, which would open the right side of the board wide for Harpahr’s attack. But if he let the admiral general have the queen, and used the move to slide his own queen’s bishop between—

  He was reaching for the bishop when he paused. His head came up, his eyes narrowing, just as Harpahr finished relighting his pipe. The admiral general looked at him curiously through a cloud of smoke.

  “Ahrnahld?”

  “I’m sorry, My Lord.” The flag captain’s tone was oddly taut. “I thought I heard someth—”

  Then he heard it again.

  After an unconscionably shaky beginning, the Church of God Awaiting had actually gotten most of it right when it came to building its navy. Not all of it—that would have been expecting far too much out of a land animal. But once Allayn Maigwair had actually stopped to think, once Zhaspahr Clyntahn had pointed out that the galleys he was building were exactly the wrong ships, the Church’s Captain General had put a great deal of effort into recovering from his initial errors. He’d shown a surprising degree of insight in the process, and he’d found quite a few capable men—like Kornylys Harpahr—to help him do it.

  There were still blind spots. His insistence on eschewing the shorter- ranged carronade, for example. He hadn’t picked up on the huge advantage the Charisian ships’ coppered bottoms gave them, either, and his galleons still boasted the forecastles and after castles of pre- Merlin Safehold, although they had been reduced in height. Taken all together, though, he’d actually done almost as well as the Earl of Thirsk when it came to visualizing the threat and how to build a ship that could meet it.

  And while the Temple Guard had no real naval tradition, it did understand discipline and the value of rigorous training. Unlike certain secular powers, the Guard had no institutional objection to finding experts who could teach it what it didn’t know, either. Bad weather, ice, inefficient foundries, Charisian raids on essential shipping... all of them had helped to delay the Church’s great project, but they hadn’t been able to stop it, and men like Ahrnahld Taibahld and Kornylys Harpahr knew what to do with those ships once they were built.

  Yet for all that, there were still weaknesses. For all their own courage, all the effort they’d spent on forethought and planning, it would never have occurred to Harpahr or Taibahld to attack a numerically superior enemy under the cover of a tropical front’s waterfalls of rain. And for all the millions upon millions of marks the Church had invested in its fleet, it hadn’t realized the importance of light units. It saw the fleet, graceful Charisian schooners as corsairs, as commerce raiders, without really appreciating their value as scouts. As swift bloodhounds to scent out an enemy fleet . . . or as the exquisitely sensitive whis kers of a cat- lizard to sense an approaching enemy before he could reach striking range.

  And because of that, Admiral General Harpahr had snugged his columns of galleons down for the night without pickets to guard his flanks, reducing canvas to minimize the risk of collisions and avoid the possibility of damage if it turned out there were squalls hidden within the rain, after all. To keep his fleet from scattering and to be sure it would be the efficient, compact, concentrated force he and Taibahld had made of it when the sun rose and the rain ceased.

  Which was why not a single lookout in a single ship of the Navy of God had seen a thing as twenty- five Charisian galleons came ghosting out of the dark.

  Bryahn Lock Island stood quietly, hands clasped behind him. The rain was easing, although it still came down in sheets. That was fine with him, and so was the fact that there was actually going to be quite a lengthy break between this band of rain and the next one coming up from astern.

  Just last long enough for us to get in amongst them before you clear,he thought at the weather. Just last long enough.

  He’d made only a single minor course change since they’d turned in to attack. He could feel Captain Baikyr’s tension, although the captain hid it well, but Lock Island himself was surprised to discover he was almost as calm as he looked. Unlike his flag captain, he knew they were on precisely the correct heading. On the other side of the rain lashing the surface of the sea to a white froth ahead of them, there was an enemy fleet, and HMS Ahrmahk and her sisters were stealing up upon the outermost column of that fleet like assassins.
>
  He felt muscles and sinews tightening—not with fear, but with anticipation—and had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting for his gunners to stand to.

  Not yet. Not yet, Bryahn. Wouldn’t do for the lookouts to be wondering how you saw the other side clear from the quarterdeck before they did. All sorts of unwelcome little questions could come out of that!

  And then—

  “Sail two points abaft the larboard bow, Sir!”

  The forward lookout had kept his wits about himself and passed the word aft, relayed from man to man, rather than raising a shout.

  “Good,” Lock Island said as an electric shock ran through the men on the quarterdeck about him. He sensed them stirring, backs straightening, eyes narrowing as they realized he had, indeed, found the enemy for them.

  He felt himself leaning forward, squinting as if he could somehow physically see through the rain and the darkness, and then his eyes widened. The rain was beginning to taper off, and he discovered he could see. See a long, slowly moving column—fourteen high- sided galleons, poop lanterns gleaming, light showing through skylights or, here and there, through gunports opened for ventilation. Those lights picked them out of the night, illuminated his targets, while his own lean, black- painted ships came slinking out of the shadows.

  “We’ll cross their sterns, Captain Baikyr,” High Admiral Lock Island said formally. “Then we’ll come to larboard, take the wind on the beam, and pound them from leeward while we overhaul. Keep an eye out for their second column, though. We don’t want some bright bastard over there to get any ideas about working up to windward.”