Grantville Gazette Volume 27

by edited by Paula Goodlett

  Kneeling to stay low, Dermot slacked off three of the lace lines, opening a slight gap between the sail and the boom where the block had been. He grabbed one of the shot-off pieces of line, threw a rolling hitch around the boom, then passed the free end three times around loosely, and tied it off. Finally, he threaded what was left of the mainsheet back and forth through the traveler block and the bridle he'd just made. It wouldn't run freely, but . . .

  Both jibs were free now. Haro could get the bow up into the wind. "Now. Have him take up the slack in the mainsheet and belay it." It took an eternal ten seconds. Haro fell off until the fore and main filled. "Sheet home all." Edelstein took the wheel, prone on the deck and steering by the luff of the sails.

  A couple of shoulder rifles and the elephant gun went off practically together. Haro looked back at the pirate vessel again. One of the gun crew was down. Not dead; he was moving, and somebody was going to help him. No, to take his place. Haro sat and took aim again. Instead of one of the gunners, he hit a man stowing an oar. A fat lot of good that would do. They looked ready again. The galley was swinging to point the cannon at them.

  "Fall off the wind a couple points for half a minute. Then come back to course." The schooner dodged, but this time luck went against them. There was a crash somewhere below. "Dattler, report!"

  The medic shouted up the hatch, "It came through a plank someplace in the stern and went into the groceries. There's smashed potatoes all over the place."

  Smashed? Scheist! Most of the food supplies were stowed low. He took a fast look over the side. There was a splintered hole the size of his fist barely above the waterline, and the wavetops were lapping at it. He weighed alternatives—the gun was still the immediate threat. Couldn't afford many more hits like that one. He finished loading again, braced, and sighted. What's going on over there? The gun crew wasn't doing anything. One of them moved aside, and he got a look. The cannon was lying askew. A couple of their shots must have torn into the mounting and weakened it, so it broke when the gun fired. They won't get that fixed today. Okay, what's next? The leak? He was about to start giving orders, when a few of the corsairs who'd just left the deck came running back with muskets in their hands. "Sergeant . . ."

  "I see them." Ó Carroll fired and exchanged his rifle again.

  Something whined by, right over the rail. "Damn, skipper, I think that was a minié ball."

  "What else could possibly go wrong today? Shoot at whoever you think has a rifle. Lothar, keep weaving, try to spoil their aim."

  Ó Houlihan fired and reached toward the hatch. Conor started to hand him a loaded rifle. Something hit the hatch coaming, just where he was holding on. His head dropped out of sight, and there was a crash and a shout below. "What happened?"

  Dattler answered. "Conor fell on the mess table and broke his arm. Looks like a finger is shot off. I gave him a compress to hold against it. I'll get to him as soon as I finish stitching up the chief."

  "Understood." Get out of range, fast. Then the leak. "Sergeant, you and Ó Houlihan and Dermot give Goosens a hand for a minute, hoisting that boat clear of the water." He sighted again, trying to see which of the pirates was the real threat now. Zum Teufel! Is that an SRG over there? Whatever the thing was, the man wasn't pounding away with a ramrod to get the bullet seated. Minié ball, all right. He took a breath and held it, sighted, squeezed the trigger. The rifleman flinched, but that was all. The crack of the .30-30 sounded again. One of the pirates clutched his arm and dropped his weapon. No more of his men had been hit, thankfully, and the range was opening.

  Everybody who could shoot was firing now, the cook included. But at this distance, if they were getting any hits at all, it was probably just the sails.

  There'd been quite a few rounds fired on both sides, with most hitting only timber or canvas, if that. Well, Haro's adversaries probably didn't do a lot of marksmanship training, but his men had had all the regulation range time and more, and the best iron sights you could get. But the realization came to him that the one thing they hadn't practiced was marksmanship from a moving deck. That, I will remedy. And whenever they finally get that inch-and-a-quarter shell's miserable impact fuze to work right, it won't be a minute too soon for the couriers.

  "Cease fire. Stand by to come about. Dattler, what's the situation down there? How much water are we taking on?"

  * * *

  Ian finished shoving sacks and crates aside, and got his first clear look at the damage. He went back up the ladder scowling. That cannon ball had done more than just punch through the hull, the shock had cracked the caulking between two of the planks. There was a line of dribbles coming in the port quarter, just above the floorboards. It was obvious enough what the skipper was going to do about it—lay the hull over on a beach someplace so they could get at the spot, and re-caulk it. And check the planks, too. It wouldn't be any surprise if one or two were split or loose on the frames. Dermot assured them they could do it at Trá Ciaran, St. Kieran's Strand, the gently sloping west shore of North Harbor. They were going there anyway. If they didn't sink first. As it was, Edelstein and Ó Houlihan were taking their turn on the pump, puffing like a steam engine, and just about keeping up. At least the hole was above the waves, heeled over on the port tack the way they were, but they weren't going to make their landfall on this course. And once they tacked again, that hole was going to be under water. The skipper was hanging over the rail by a hand and a knee with a life line around his waist, looking at it.

  "How bad is it, sir?"

  "We have a problem, Ian. The way it's splintered, a plug wouldn't hold without a lot of trimming. Meanwhile we're getting further and further east."

  "Well, we could try fothering. That's supposed to be quick."

  "What's that, some kind of magic up-time caulk?"

  "No, it's an old-time British trick I read about. They'd stretch a sail over a bad leak, and run lines around the hull to hold it in place. We've only got the one hole and a busted seam. Heck, a hammock would probably be big enough to cover everything."

  The lieutenant shook his head. "Look where it is. The hull curves inward under the stern. The lines would pull it away."

  "Mmm. Yeah. Okay, could we nail it on?"

  * * *

  Me and my big mouth. There was no way to do this single-handed. Ian and Liam were crouched shoulder-to-shoulder in the stern of the currach, with Dermot playing a couple of lines running over their heads to the schooner's rail, trying to hold them in place. Liam was struggling to hold onto the square of canvas they'd smeared with grease from the galley to waterproof it and help it seal, and the strip of salvaged barrel hoop to use for a batten, while Ian tried again to get the first couple of nails in. A wave bounced them around, and knocked the hammer out of his hand for the second time. For the second time he hauled it up by the lanyard the skipper had made him tie around his wrist. Once more. This time he got a nail started, and tacked down an upper corner. Then the other. That was the easy part.

  "Dermot wants to know what all the splashing is."

  "You try driving a row of nails under water some time! Crap, I banged myself!"

  He kept pounding away. Finally it was as good as it was going to get. He straightened up and nodded at Dermot. Two minutes later they were back on board and running around to get under way on the starboard tack.

  "Berry! Your hand is bleeding!"

  "Just a nick from a miss with the hammer, Skipper. I'll be all right."

  "Never mind all right. Who needs more blood on the deck? Go see Dattler."

  * * *

  Ó Carroll hauled the piece of rope taut and tied it off on the davits. "Ian, what are we doing, exactly?"

  "We're cannibalizing the boat tackle to use for a temporary mainboom block. We'll need it to maneuver, when we get close to shore."

  "Ah. Does Himself know what we're doing, here?"

  "Nope. He told me to make the best repairs I could up here, and went below to try to do something with that cracked seam. I'm not
going to bother him unless I have to. He's got enough to think about."

  "It seems so. He looked like he lost his best friend."

  "He damn near did. The chief could have bled to death right in front of us, if Eugen hadn't moved so fast."

  "They're that close?"

  "Oh, yeah. Blaser and Gellert go back a long way. Once in a while they talk about it. Blaser first went to sea in his uncle's fluyt, must be fifteen years ago. Gellert was the boatswain then, and Blaser learned his seamanship from the two of them."

  "What brought them here, then?"

  "Well, Blaser inherited the ship. It just about made a living, but there wasn't much left over. Finally there wasn't any way to keep it afloat any longer, and there wasn't enough money to replace it. So Blaser sold it to a ship breaker, and then they worked their passage up to Magdeburg on a river barge, and walked into the navy yard. But I'm pretty sure that's not the only thing bothering him."

  "Oh, and isn't that enough for one man?"

  "I guess it is, so you could say he's got more than enough. He's probably thinking about what he's going to say to the admiral when we get back, and what Simpson's likely to say to him. We screwed up this morning. Neither of us really thought through what the risks were when we charged in to pick up Dermot and Conor, or looked hard at the payoff against what we stood to lose. We sure didn't consider Murphy's Law. We risked the ship, the mission, and all of us."

  "So, but you had to follow the captain's orders."

  "Sure, but it was my watch. I was just as responsible as him. It was my job to make the captain's orders work. If I'd really been thinking about everything that could go wrong, I could have said, 'I'll go check out the engine and warm it up. Just in case.' That old carburetor's always finicky when it's cold. With a hot start, it would have fired up on the first pull, and those guys never would have gotten a shot at us. And it probably would have gotten the skipper thinking over the whole situation, too."

  "That might be so. But suppose Conor and Dermot just disappeared, and then we turned up? What do you think his folk would have thought? And you did get the boat going, and kept us away from them."

  "Fine, Sean. So maybe it was the right decision after all, in cold-blooded military terms. We still didn't think it over at the time. And using the tender wasn't a plan. We were improvising, and we ended up with two wounded men. I don't care how many pirates we shot, that wasn't the mission."

  * * *

  Denis Ó Driscoll had never seen such a sight in his life. There was Dermot Cadogan, just rowing in past the point, with some oddly dressed foreigner in his bow sounding the bottom with a lead line as they went. A hundred yards behind, an outlandish-looking gray ship of some kind was following in his wake, with only a few men on deck and all its sails down. The low-lying deck swept unbroken from end to end, with no stern castle at all. No yards crossed the two masts—had some terrible storm torn them away, or had the crew stripped them for some reason? Two of the men were rhythmically bending up and down, and there was water running over the side near where they were standing. They must be bailing. As strange as the ship was, it was trailed by a boat with no sails or oars showing, a few puffs of thin black smoke coming from it. There was a man in the boat—what was he doing? Putting out a fire? Cooking? That seemed to be where the rumbling noise was coming from.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. "Dermot! Will you tell me what this is you're bringing us?"

  Dermot shouted back, "I will, when I can. Quick, gather all the help you can get. They need to drag that schooner there up on the beach before they sink."

  But word had already spread. The commotion was drawing folk from half a mile around. Most of the men were coming armed—that was only sensible.

  Meanwhile Dermot stopped rowing and pointed toward the strand, covered with fist-size rounded rocks. One of the strangers responded with a wave. The boat came around under the bow, and the crew gingerly lowered a big iron anchor into it. Denis didn't need anyone to tell him what they intended. Sure enough, the boat headed toward the shore.

  Denis shouted to one of the boys peering from the clifftop on the east side of the little harbor, "Rory! Run tell your da we need shovels. Four or five, if he can find them."

  * * *

  It took a dozen men to drag that anchor up above the high water mark, but now it was dug into the ground, with big rocks piled over it for good measure. The boatman had gone back and forth twice more, bringing first the anchor chain and then a tackle from halfway up the mainmast. Now he stood up from where he'd been joining lines together and waved his arm in a circle over his head. The chain rose off the ground and the ship crept further onto the shore, grounded, and slowly tilted over. Two of the men on deck went back to their bailing.

  Dermot pointed at the man just climbing down over the rail. "That's the captain, Denis. Here he comes. Ó Carroll, will you do the introduction? I'm not sure I have his name altogether right."

  * * *

  "My thanks to you all. This would have been much harder to do without your help."

  "There was no time for talk, and I saw Dermot treating you as a friend. Now will you tell us how Dermot knows you and what brought you here this way?"

  "We came here to talk about some commercial arrangements, but what brought us here in this condition was a sailing galley full of Moorish pirates that we had to fight off today. It's a good thing you have your weapons. I'm worried they might be coming here."

  Denis's face froze. "A raid coming? Are you sure of that?"

  "No, but there's hardly a worse thing they could do, for you and us. So by the lesson of Captain Murphy's famous law, that's the thing to prepare for."

  "Captain Murphy? One of The Ó Neill's men?"

  "No, he was a test pilot in the world my second officer came from. It's a long story."

  "A long story, so? Would he tell the tale tonight, do you think? Never mind. Best we set a watch." He half-turned and pointed toward a low ridge to the south. "Rory, go on up there and look sharp for any strange sails. Somebody will come spell you in a while."

  There was a stir and the crowd parted. A broad-shouldered man of middle years came to stand next to Denis, and studied the scene for a few seconds. He looked at Dermot and cocked his head, as if to ask, "Will someone tell me who these strangers are, and what is that thing cluttering the beach where we land our fish?"

  Dermot looked down for a moment and shifted his feet. "It's complicated."

  "I have time to listen. I don't see anyone waving weapons in the air."

  "This is . . ." He gestured to Ó Carroll.

  "Our captain, Lieutenant Haro Blaser of the United States Navy. The United States of Europe, I mean. I am Sergeant Seán Ó Carroll, here to translate."

  Dermot put in, "And this is our king, Cornelius Ó Driscoll, I told you of."

  Haro caught the name, and inclined his head politely.

  "Here to translate, so. Then it's not by accident that you came to us."

  Dermot gave an amused snort. "They came to see you, Cornelius."

  Cornelius cocked his head again.

  "We were sent to arrange for a visit by a senior official of our government, if you're willing, to discuss commercial arrangements. Our ships will soon start to pass this way, and we would like to have a regular place to buy provisions and make repairs. I didn't expect we'd be making repairs ourselves, though."

  "A fine enough thing to talk about, but why didn't he just come himself?"

  "There have been some unfortunate experiences in other places. Some people who were greatly needed were kept waiting uselessly for months."

  Dermot grinned. "You're a diplomat, Captain. The way I heard it, they blew a hole in the Tower of London and sank an English warship getting one bunch back."

  Cornelius raised an eyebrow. "Oh, that must be a tale to hear. But what happened to you?"

  "Conor and I were off to the southwest fishing at dawn this morning. Some damned paynims caught sight of us and made a fine try at ca
rrying us off, like all those poor souls they snatched away from Baltimore the other year. If Captain Blaser and this schooner here hadn't changed course and come streaking in like the wind to pick us up, we'd be on our way to Barbary by now. It looked like we were sailing away from them clean, until the wind dropped and they came rowing up after us. That was when all the shooting started, and Conor got hit, and they blew a hole in the hull. One of their men got hurt bad, too."

  "Speaking of Conor, I don't see him here. Did he take your fish up the hill to the women?"

  "Their doctor wants to keep him for a couple of days, to make sure he heals all right."

  "Make sure? Did you say make sure he heals? He can do that?"

  "I did. He said, short of really terrible luck, Conor will row again in a couple of months. If he takes care of his arm the way he was told."

  Cornelius stood for a few moments, thinking.

  "I'd never have looked for such deeds from strangers. It's more than Christian charity, for certain. The clan is in your debt, so." He reached out his hand to clasp Haro by the forearm. Haro returned the gesture, and so they stood facing each other for a few seconds."Your repairs, then. What do you need from us?"

  "A new two-sheave block. That's the hardest thing. We have a few spare planks to repair the hole in the hull, and when that's done I would be happy to have any help you could give us caulking and painting, and patching the sails. The sooner she's afloat again, the better. And we'll probably need some help hauling her back off the shore."

  Cornelius cupped his chin in his hand. "A block. Mmph. Well, maybe we can manage that here and maybe we can't, but there's a man in Crookhaven who makes them. We'll get it, one way or another."

  Denis was looking off at the ridge top. "Cornelius? Rory's waving madly."

  * * *

  The drifting clouds threw another patch of moonlight on the sails, away off to the south. The galley had been lurking hull-down for hours out there, not coming any closer.

  Ó Carroll straightened up and stared for a minute. " Ó Driscoll? See that?"