The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  CHAPTER IX

  The horse stalls in the Sea Mare's 'tween-decks were cramped and dark, lit only by a single swaying lantern. Each horse was in a narrow slot with no room to turn around. Karah and Eowlie moved down the row, securing each bridle to two chains running to beams on either side and blindfolding the more skittish horses. Several times she was glad of the leather-and-metal armor she wore—nervous horses bit—and there would be a huge bruise on one thigh where a hoof caught her.

  "That's all," Eowlie said. The neighs and whickers were full of heart-rending, uncomprehending fear. She hitched at the carbine slung over her back and fiddled with the chin strap of her helmet—the regimental armorer had had to make substantial alterations to make it fit her long skull and unorthodox chin. "Time to go fight the battle."

  "Godsall," Karah muttered to herself, as she blew out the lantern. No sense in risking burning oil splattering all over the straw. Battle. And on the sea, too.

  She licked sweat off her upper lip. They clattered up the companionway, past the raw smell of new planking; they'd torn up part of the decking forward of the mainmast to get the horses below, and hadn't it been fun getting them to back down the steep slippery thing? Light stabbed into their eyes; Karah noticed Eowlie shade hers for a second. She sees well in the dark, the Tykissian thought. But brightness hurts her.

  So far all Karah could see was water with Imperial ships on it. Dawn was just over, still red and sullen on the clouds to the west. It wasn't the season for rain—rain fell in the winter everywhere around the Imperial Sea—but those certainly looked like rainclouds to her.

  More cannon boomed, further out to sea, like rumbling thunder over the prairies of home. Sailors shouted in the rigging above, calling down the news as they close-hauled the sails, cutting back to the minimum needed to keep steerage way on the Sea Mare. The wind was freshening, off the land to their west; they were close enough to see the forested mountains of Meltroon and the yellow-and-green checkerboard of wheat and sugarcane along the coastal plain. A city that looked like a pile of whitewashed dice sprawled along the coast directly opposite the fleet.

  "Vat did they say?" Eowlie asked, uncertain of the lingua franca.

  She fiddled a little at the catches of her corselet Karah thought she knew the reason; if you went over the side in this you'd sink like lead shot She hunched her own shoulders, checked the arrows in the quiver over her back, and plucked the string of her short, thick horn-backed bow.

  "Smoke southeast More of our galleys heading towards it" Karah paused to listen. "Some coming towards us… oh, godsall, Three protect Your children, they're Tseldenes and they're coming towards us." The Sea Mare was with the rearmost of the Imperial fleet, only a squadron of six galleys further north. Karah didn't know why the enemy were lunging at the stragglers, but she didn't claim to be an admiral.

  The center of the deck was bulwarked with piled crates of hardtack and barreled meat. The rest of the Scout Troop had finally turned up…

  "What happened to you?" Karah blurted, looking at the bruise on Korgi's face.

  "Zeemos," she said; beside her, Doe growled deep in her throat.

  "Ve'll attend to him after this," Eowlie said.

  "If we can," Amourgin said.

  Karah swallowed again, resisting the impulse to go over to the water barrel for a dipper; she'd already used the head. Getting your pants down while you were strapped into a leather-and-metal corselet was too much of a production, and drinking more water made it inevitable.

  She wiped her hands on her pant legs again: "Remember, we're supposed to hold back and shoot up anyone who gets aboard," she said. Damn. I actually sounded confident.

  Up on the quarterdeck, Bren Morkaarin was talking to the ships captain and some of the officers; below him the bosuns were handing out cutlasses and axes from the arms chest to the sailors. Soldiers crowded up out of the hold, as many as could fit They pitched the deck cargo down and then squatted, concealed by the bulwarks from any smaller ship.

  Bren looked confident, doing lunge stretches as he spoke to get limbered up. That reminded her.

  "Stretch, everybody. Come on, you pop a tendon now and you're dogmeat."

  When she got up, puffing, she hopped up onto the barricade around the mast and used the little spyglass Amourgin had owned—it was her day for it. A line of black dots had appeared to the southeast, stretching neatly across the horizon. They grew larger, into model boats with their oars rising and falling beside them like the legs of insects. Lower and a little broader than the Tykissian warships, she'd heard that they used a single bank of oars, but four or five rowers on each. Black-painted hulls trimmed with scarlet and silver; big black-purple lateen sails still up, each with a godmask on it, each different and all insane. The One of A Thousand Faces, demon-god of Tarin Tseld and the Old Empire. That was frightening, but not nearly so bad as the beast-mask castings at the muzzles of the cannon protruding from the bows, or water creaming back from the rams, or the light breaking in silvery glints off the edged weapons of the marines on their decks.

  "They're striking sail," Karah said hopefully. The long angled booms of the galleys' sails came down to their decks and were lashed fore and aft.

  "Rigging for battle," Amourgin said quietly; his eyes were hard to read behind the reflecting surface of his glasses. Something reached up under Karah's breastbone and squeezed. She could hear a pounding of drums, the hortator in each war galley slamming out the beat for the rowers, none of them quite in time with the other vessels. Tump-tump-tump-tump… it speeded up as the sails went down.

  The Imperial galleys moved past the Sea Mare, backing until they were in line and then lunging southeast. Their formation grew ragged as each picked an opponent from the warships of Tarin Tseld and went to ramming speed. The Tseldene line was double-ranked and much wider; two of the southron galleys curved in toward each of the Tykissians.

  Screams brought Karah's head up. Men and women all over the deck of the Sea Mare were pointing and crying out.

  A figure taller than mountains was striding over the southern horizon, black against the pale blue of the sky. It was clad head to toe in armor of black steel plates that flickered with fire along the edges. At first Karah thought the helmet was fronted by a mask, but then she saw that it changed from instant to instant. An angel's face of luminous chalk-pale beauty; a staring thing with lolling tongue and a boar's tusks; the laughing face of a child whose eyes vomited nests of worms; a woman with the teeth of a dog and the faceted eyes of a wasp…

  Someone was retching, and the screams turned mindless. One soldier began hacking at her own hands with a dagger. Another plunged fingers into his eyes. A band of steel was pressing around Karah's head, tighter and tighter until she could feel her own eyes pressing out like bursting-ripe grapes…

  A taut string went snap behind her eyes and she staggered, moaning with relief, shaking and sweating. Magic was common enough, but miracles and theophany…

  "Illusion!" Amourgin was shouting, a little shrill. Bren's voice joined him:

  "It's just a sending. Ignore it The Three are with us!"

  She had her doubts about that being an illusion; clouds breasted about the chest of the image like water about a man wading through a river, streaming backward. Waterspouts a hundred feet high gouted upward from each step. It pounded Its steel-shod fists on Its chest, and the sound rang like all the anvils in the universe.

  "Fey certainly are the Three, and with us," Eowlie said, her accent thicker. She pointed back the way the fleet had come; the clawed finger shook a little. "If those are them." Karah twisted to look over her shoulder.

  The figures striding down from the north were as large as the one to the south; a lion-centaur with the head of a falcon, a woman with a wolfs dugs, a wolf-headed child.

  The horizon-high thing to the south threw back Its head and screamed, and the world trembled around Karah. Then It faded, turning ghost-transparent, vanishing. She could feel her mind trying to reject what she h
ad seen, like a dream fading with daylight The Three vanished also, more sharply. The light seemed to change around them, back to normal, although they hadn't noticed it was different.

  Amourgin's lips were moving, as if in prayer. "Just a sending," he repeated, as if reassuring himself. "Manufactured illusion. Our war priests dispelled it. Nothing to worry about."

  Karah's eyes dropped from the sky. One of the Tykissian galleys was burning from stem to stern, sending pale flame and black smoke up into the bright morning sky. Another had two Tseldene galleys locked to either side. The remaining four Imperial craft were in a circle with their sterns together while half a dozen Tseldene ships prowled around them like wolves around a buffel herd. As she watched, an Imperial vessel fired its cannon, and the cast-iron shot went skipping over the waves. One plowed into the bow of an enemy ship in a shower of spray and splinters, and the Tseldene fell away to starboard with a list Three other enemy galleys were sinking, rammed or hulled by cannon shot, but that left dozens boiling by the Imperial warships toward the sailing transports. "I'm worrying," she said hoarsely.

  "That mad bitch of a squadron commander had to go haring in, like a curltusker in musth," the captain of the Sea Mare said bitterly. "Now we're for it."

  Bren tapped the point of his sword thoughtfully on the deck between his wide-planted feet "Where are Willek and the frigates?" he said thoughtfully.

  "I didn't ask the Grand Admiral about that part of her strategy, last time we took tea together," the ship's captain said dryly.

  "What can we do?" Bren continued, his voice flat. This was not the time for jokes.

  "Try to avoid getting rammed," the seaman said. "This hull will pop in like a maidenhead before a marlinspike."

  Bren winced—it was an unpleasant image—and looked at the approaching galleys. "Can we avoid it?"

  "We may. Harder to manage a straight-on ramming run than you'd think, if we've steerage way." The captain looked up at the sky, then checked the pennants flying from mastheads and rigging. "Breeze is freshening and coming round from the northwest. Pray Three send us a storm; we can stand it, those Tseldene rowboats can't; they'd have to run before it or put in and beach."

  Bren shook one wrist loose, then the other. "So all we have to do is worry about boarding."

  "Or they may throw fire into us—naphtha and sticklime."

  The XIXth's officer nodded "Captain Tagog! Sharpshooters to the mastheads, if you please; keep their lookouts busy. Sergeant Ddrad; troops to keep their heads below the bulwarks, on pain of flogging." It wouldn't do to look too formidable. If a Tseldene ship got close enough to throw fire into the Sea Mare, he wanted it to look easy enough to board instead.

  Forget the rest of the fleet; that wasn't his responsibility. He raised his voice.

  "All right, Nineteenth," he said. "We were going south to fight them, and they saved us the trouble by coming to meet us. It'd be poor hospitality to give such eager guests a disappointing reception, wouldn't it?"

  A crashing bark mingled with shrill howls—the old Tykissian war shout A little thready from the newcomers. He wished there'd been more time to train, but if wishes were horses, no field would go without manure.

  "Brace for it!"

  Karah grabbed again at the rope beside her—sailors had some sort of name for it, but right now she was more concerned with the Tseldene war galleys coming up on either side of the Sea Mare. They were longer than the Imperial ship, but lower to the water; half a dozen attempts to ram had failed, and now they were coming in. The quick boom-boom of their pacing drums echoed across the narrowing gap of water, along with the massed cannonade and musket fire, flame crackle and shout of the fleets engaged to the south.

  "Keep down," she reminded the scouts; Amourgin came in on the heels of her order.

  They were all using the piled crates as a breastwork. The deck was covered with crouching musketeers; pikemen were massed at the bulwarks along the sides, their long weapons poised. Forecastle and sterncastle held clumps of halberdiers.

  One of the Tseldene galleys fell behind and swerved. The high sterncastle of the Sea Mare hid it from Karah, but did nothing to quiet the massive whump as its two alligator-mouthed cannon cut loose, firing over the ram.

  The ship pitched beneath her feet, and there was a deafening crash of rending timbers. Then the screams began, bone-chilling screams from the 'tween-decks: the sounds of wounded humans, and of horses bugling their terror.

  "Rudder!" Amourgin shouted. "They shot away our rudder!"

  The other galley came in alongside, disappearing beneath the bulwarks. Oars shot up and the rowers pitched them up and snatched them back into the body of the galley; the sailing ship lurched and checked as the hulls came into contact Long planks tipped with spikes were slung from the Tseldene's rigging; they swung down and slammed into the Sea Mare's railings.

  "Fire!" the master gunner shouted.

  Along the rail the four little welded-iron guns barked, shooting backward on their four-wheeled carriages until the thick breeching ropes caught them. Karah knew what was flying out the muzzle ends: bags of musket balls, a whirring blast into the enemy ranks. Gunners leaped forward in a ballet of trained motion; a wet sponge to swab out the cannon, a dusty-dry paper sack of gunpowder rammed down with the other end of the pole, then a wad of rope, then another bag of caseshot, then another wad The primer rammed a wire spike through the touch-hole at the breech to open the powder bag and then poured fine-grained powder into the hole.

  "Fire!" The slowmatches in the gunners' linstocks came down again.

  "Head up," Eowlie said.

  She seemed to have more consciousness of things above and below her than normal people. Karah and the other scouts looked up; men were firing from the standing rigging of the Tseldene galley, bullets wasp-whining down onto the crowded decks of the Sea Mare. Musketeers in the crows nests shot back at them. Other Tseldenes were swinging across on ropes braced to the masts, or scrambling into the Imperial ships rigging.

  Cant have that, Karah thought numbly; her feelings were very distant She felt cold and hollow—felt all the world had slowed down and grown quiet and slipped away from her. The noises of battle sounded very far away.

  She drew a shaft to the ear, estimating distance. Compared to firing from a galloping horse, this wasn't too hard.

  "Shoot!" she yelled, and loosed. Her bowstring slapped hard at the leather guard on her left forearm, a familiar and homey sound. This time she wasn't aiming at a target, or a buffel or wolf or leopard.

  The arrow seemed to fly slowly, swooping up like a swallow under the eaves of the barn back home on a summer's night, flying after a moth. There was the sense of inevitability that always followed a good shot Up on the mainsail spar was a man, a dark squat Tseldene, naked save for baggy white trousers and head cloth, his feet gripping the timber with a sailor's agility, two long knives in his hands. The broadhead arrow sank in under his short ribs; she knew from the angle it must be cutting up through his lungs, maybe the heart He pitched off the spar and fell soundless back onto the deck of the galley, nearly a hundred feet.

  The fall lasted forever. I just killed a man, Karah thought.

  Eowlie screamed something in her ear, loud enough to shock Karah out of her frozen pause. Whatever she'd said sounded like a cat whose tail had gotten caught under a moving wagon wheel. The fanged girl levelled her carbine and fired Karah looked around; a wave of spiked steel helmets and broad brown Tseldene faces was pouring up the boarding planks from the galley.

  "Gurah! Gurah!" they chanted; the first ranks carried spears with spiked and hooked heads, the rear long curved slashing swords and small shields. Their armor was of blackened steel and brass; the officers wore helms with bestial masks of fretted bronze and silver shaped in the manifold countenances of the One. "Gurah! Gurah!"

  Pikes darted and thrust. Tseldenes toppled, to die in the narrow grinding space where the hulls of the vessels met. Others clambered up the sides of the taller Imperial ship, to mee
t the long steel heads of the pikes. Karah drew and loosed, drew and loosed; a crossbow bolt sank into the crate beside her, throwing splinters at her face. She ignored the splinters and loosed another arrow, over the heads of the XIXth's pikes and into the press on the boarding planks. The other scouts were firing their carbines less rapidly; turn the breech screw, jab in a cartridge with the thumb, turn it closed, prime the pan with powder from a spring-flask worn on a cord around the shoulder, crank the steel spring with the winding spanner, aim and fire—four times a minute, bang click-crank-click-snap and then bang again. Stinking smoke blew back into her face.

  "NOW!" Bren Morkaarins voice, inhumanly calm but pitched to carry:

  All the pikemen squatted abruptly. The rank of musketeers behind them rose and fired over their heads, dropped down; the rank behind them rose and fired as well.

  Instantly the deck of the Sea Mare was hidden in the smoke, dense enough to choke; the strong breeze blew it away in patches, and they could seek the long pikes jabbing out again, knocking Tseldenes off the planks. In the silence that followed the crashing volley, they could even hear for an instant the scrinnggg of pikeheads on armor, or the dull wet thudding sounds as they punched into bellies and chests. A cheer rose from the musketeers, even as they fumbled with ramrods and bandoliers and priming flasks, answered defiantly from the galleys deck.

  "Watch it!" Amourgin screamed.

  Karah turned in time to see the boarding planks fall on the other side of the ship; the second enemy galley was alongside there. Men in the Tseldenes rigging were waiting. As the hulls touched they jumped free, swinging on ropes, the sudden check to the momentum of their vessel bringing them out over the Sea Mare's deck like pendulum bobs. Those low enough dropped into the midst of their enemies. The Tseldenes were sailors armed with knives and light tomahawks, down amid musketeers and pike-armed infantry crammed too tightly to draw their own close-quarterweapons. They laid about, spreading disorder far beyond their number.