Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  Black Knight’s rage was tempered only by the throbbing in his arm. His thoughts were not focused. His grasp on events seemed to be slipping.

  In the back of his mind was a seed of pride for a daughter he had never met who might truly measure up to the standard required of a great monarch, but this was clouded by anger that she was likely acting against him. She was not under his control.

  Why did these girls not have his vision? Under his guidance and protection both Blancapaw and Memwin could have more power and wealth than they could possibly dream of. They need only accept their true destiny, with him, belonging to him. His sister had never respected him, always treating him like something between a pet and a servant, at least until he started to command the military by himself and finally managed to stay away from her. His other children, even those who rose to high rank like Borckren, had never been good enough for his plan. He had hoped to sire a great dynasty with Blancapaw, but now the shadow had clouded that vision and it seemed fraught with uncertainty. He had almost forgotten about Memwin. Her mother, Fenfenwin, was the only other person who might have been the Destined Princess. Why did Fenfenwin have to resist him? How dare she leave him! With all these confused thoughts, the great leader sat and waited, rubbing his arm, while his underlings weighed anchor and set sail.

  71

  Utukin’s Headquarters, Lake Quolow – 10th November

  Pelembras had reached the headquarters of General Utukin three days ago, on the night of the full moon. After a brief discussion with the general, he had spent the next two days consulting with the engineers in charge of repairing the ship canal and its locks. These would have to be repaired before any sizable warship could be brought to the lake. Small boats could not be used to attack Quolow. The city had retained all the warships that it could fit in its inner port without hampering their manoeuvrability, not enough to attack Utukin’s camp but enough to destroy any flotilla of longboats that might try to approach the city.

  Having heard no news of Arnapa and the others since he had waved them off, he was confident that they had managed to continue their search for Blan without further interference. However, he was now becoming more concerned about escaping before a real Kraran shipwright arrived. As Pelembras searched the camp on the pretext of speaking to all and sundry about his plans for building the river fleet, just standard methods, not his own original ideas, it had become abundantly clear that Utukin had already made preparations for the arrival of the Shipwright General of Krar. Pelembras had come just in time to fill that role, but he could be exposed as an impostor at any moment.

  Some of the river fleet would be built right in front of the camp, on the banks of the lake where Utukin had a large army to protect the works. Pelembras had given that advice because it was obvious and the real Shipwright General would say as much. The river banks below Quolow Falls and along most of Southport River were beset by marshes and it would be difficult to build a shipyard there or to defend it from commando raids. The obvious places for shipyards were right here, where the shore was firm and the water deep, or way upriver at Belspire where shipyards had existed before the city had been ruined.

  Pelembras now peered through a small, borrowed telescope to view Quolow eleven or twelve miles away across the lake. He saw the masts of seven warships rising above the wall of the inner harbour. The city was well defended landward to north and south and, he assumed, east, but it would not withstand a major attack by a fleet of quimals coming across the lake. He consoled himself that it would take many months for such a fleet to be built. The enemy’s preferred plan would be to build a fleet of smaller vessels to help break Fandabbin’s blockade of the lower reaches of Southport River and then bring quimals up river from the sea to attack Quolow.

  He turned the telescope to the left and saw a longboat approaching from about a league away. Longboats did sometimes take engineers and equipment down to the ship canal, yet Pelembras had an uneasy feeling about this boat. He hurried back to the cluster of large tents and prefabricated buildings that constituted General Utukin’s headquarters. A beacon tower had been built there. When he climbed to the covered platform where the beacon was installed he discovered that a message had recently been received. The Signals Officer who had noted down the sequence was about to sit at a desk to decode it.

  “That’s for me… urgent!” Pelembras snapped as he snatched the message from the officer’s hand. The officer was clearly taken aback so, to allay his suspicions, Pelembras smiled at him and added, “Stress of war, you know. I’m under a lot of pressure from the Great One.” The signals officer recovered his composure, shrugged his shoulders and returned to the beacon.

  Unlike the young Signals officer, Pelembras was an old hand at codes and ciphers. Akrinan shipbuilding designs and techniques were national secrets and always encoded. Furthermore, when the Akrinans had been called up to join Black Knight’s invasion, several crew from each of Telko’s ships had committed to memory the codes most commonly used by Black Knight’s forces. Pelembras certainly found it useful now.

  The message decoded to, “SG ETA10NV 1200,” and then to, “Shipwright General expects to arrive at noon on tenth November.”

  It was now two hours before noon but Pelembras had a feeling that the longboat he had seen minutes earlier carried the Shipwright General. Although it pushed against a strong current, it would arrive well within an hour. Pelembras had no boat and no horse. He was at least eleven miles by water from Quolow and about eight miles from the waterfall. The enemy controlled all the land around. How could he escape?

  “Thank you, officer. This is indeed an important message for me.” He sat authoritatively at the officer’s desk. There was a block of cotton papers there and a quill pen. He noted that the signals officer had used a slip of this paper to note down the coded message from the sending beacon further down the shore.

  Pelembras took another slip of paper and wrote out a sequence of his own. He wrote its decoded translation on yet another slip. In his peripheral vision, he saw the officer turn away to polish one of the mirrors behind the set of beacon lanterns. With the man looking the other way, Pelembras reached for the seal that had been left on the officer’s desk and quickly impressed it on both of his message slips. He then hurried down from the beacon platform and along the shore in the direction of the longboat. The boat was close to shore, which suited him. By the time it came level they were already more than a mile north of the general’s headquarters and out of sight of any senior officers.

  A lean, elderly man was standing in the boat with a centurion and they were surrounded by twenty oarsmen. Pelembras waved vigorously, holding the message slips in one hand and beckoning with the other. The centurion saw Pelembras and ordered the oarsmen to take the boat closer to shore. Pelembras was relieved to see that the centurion was not the same one who had brought him to the camp. The crew also looked unfamiliar.

  “I am Master Shipwright Pelembras and I have urgent messages from the Great One to the Shipwright General,” called Pelembras.

  The elderly man in the longboat called back, “I am Karldros, Shipwright General of the Kingdom of Krar. What messages have you for me? Why not wait for me at the camp headquarters?”

  Pelembras waved his papers in one hand and pointed to them with the other as he called, “I came to meet you to save time, as you will see from the messages.”

  At a nod from Karldros the centurion gave orders for the boat to be brought to shore. As the lake was too deep to stand in, even at the water’s edge, two oarsmen leapt across to shore and thrust stakes into the ground so the boat could be tied up.

  “Come aboard, Pelembras, and show me the messages,” Karldros ordered.

  With no option but to follow his plan through, Pelembras struggled into the boat and handed his papers to Karldros. While he waited he directed his mind to dream about a great wedding party between Telko and Blan, a party at which he was proud to be invited. The thought of it brought his shoulders back and his chin up an
d it brought a smile to his face. He hoped that Karldros would see this as pride and pleasure at being asked to assist the great Shipwright General. At least it helped cover his extreme nervousness of the situation in which he found himself.

  “This message is very cryptic,” Karldros remarked, “but I understand from this that you have had the opportunity to study the secret methods of the Akrinans. That will indeed be useful, and I can see the wisdom of the Great One in sending you to be my assistant. But why should I divert this boat so urgently to make a closer inspection of the locks in the ship canal? I have just come from there.”

  Now Pelembras felt sorely at risk. He knew that there was unlikely to be anything wrong with the locks in the canal, but he had to convince this shipwright, possibly as knowledgeable as himself and certainly more experienced, that there was a problem worth investigating.

  “The Akrinans have a secret ship design which enables them to open a large underwater door in the hull of their ship and send out divers with a wagon of waterproof bombs,” said Pelembras. “They can do this where the ship is near an enemy port and the water is not too deep. In the case of Quolow, the divers would take the bombs to the portcullis protecting the inner harbour. At night the portcullis would be destroyed and the inner harbour taken by commandos in longboats and more divers released through the ship’s underwater door.”

  “How do they open a door underwater without sinking the ship?” Karldros asked, but without sarcasm.

  “There are two stages,” said Pelembras. “The divers and wagons enter a special hold which is then closed and sealed from the rest of the ship. That hold is slowly filled with water and, when it is full, the outer door is opened.”

  “How does this affect the locks in the ship canal?” asked Karldros.

  “The ships must have a greater draft than normal. If we are to build such ships which can be used both here and at Port Fandabbin, we must ensure that the locks are the right size,” Pelembras explained.

  It was true that Pelembras had spent much of his spare time back in Akrin designing and testing just such a system. He had not yet been able to apply the system to quimals, although there had been some mixed success with the small ship that Telko had given him for his experiments. He raised the idea now out of desperation. He needed an excuse to delay Karldros and to get away from the camp.

  Karldros thought for a while and then said to the centurion, “We are an hour early anyway. Send one of your men ashore to tell the general that I will be delayed. I will be with him before nightfall.”

  Pelembras felt short of breath and that he needed to fill his lungs all at once, but he restrained himself. Instead he managed to breathe in slowly and adopt the businesslike manner he hoped would suggest that he had always expected this decision from Karldros.

  When General Utukin received the message from the Shipwright General he was bemused. As far as he knew the Shipwright General was Pelembras and he had not expected to meet him tonight anyway.

  72

  It took all the might of twenty strong oarsmen, including the centurion who had taken the place of the messenger sent to the general, to bring the boat to shore at the northern end of the lake. Although they were a mile from the falls, the current was fierce and the risk of being propelled over the waterfall was great.

  The first thought Pelembras had was why the canal had not been extended for another mile or two down the western side of the lake so ships coming to or from the lake need not be taken so close to the falls. He guessed that the Quolowans liked it the way it was. They and their trading partners were trained to deal with the situation, but foreign invaders would be hampered by it and might suffer losses when their less canny navigators made mistakes.

  To cement his credentials with Karldros, Pelembras made a suggestion, “Perhaps pylons should be placed for at least one mile beyond the canal’s lakeside entrance to create a protective channel for our brave navigators.”

  Bent and aged as he was, Karldros still towered over Pelembras. He slapped Pelembras on the back and laughed. “I trust that you mean our incompetent navigators. I’m sure we both agree that, except for the Akrinans, the seamanship of our navy is embarrassingly poor compared with that of the Dabbinans. Black Knight knows this and it afflicts him like a bone in his throat. Our quimals are glorified troop carriers.”

  “Be that as it may, Lord Karldros, we technologists can still design systems which accommodate the needs of the less skilled operator,” Pelembras replied, trying to maintain his air of loyalty.

  “But to what end?” asked Karldros. “What kind of world do we invite if our inventions are wielded by idiots?”

  “But surely the Great One is leading us to a better world, even if some of his followers are unworthy of it,” Pelembras parried.

  “A better world…?” Karldros countered. “Of course, the slaves and bereaved will believe so, as will the young girls taken for the amusement of our troops, and the families slaughtered or thrown out of their homes to make way for the victors.”

  Pelembras was in a dilemma. He was talking to someone who was at the highest level of the enemy’s organisation and had clearly survived and prospered in the paranoid political environment surrounding Queen Rega and Black Knight. Yet the man would have Pelembras believe that he was an idealist and a cynic. Was he truly? Or, was he testing Pelembras?

  “We are in a war and time will tell,” Pelembras said. A trite statement, but the only neutral reply he could think of in the moment.

  After disembarking, Karldros and Pelembras walked for a mile along the shore toward the waterfall until they came to a place where they could look down over the cliff. There was a steep stairway there which descended to the pool at the bottom of the waterfall on their right. To their left, the canal swept away from the lake, first going northwest and then zigzagging repeatedly north and east to enter the river below. It was really a series of locks by which ships would be raised or lowered between the lake and the river. About two miles in front of them they could see the canal pass through a mile of marshes to meet the central stream of the river.

  As Pelembras was looking out at the broad vista in front of him and wondering where Blan and the others might be, he felt Karldros tap him on the shoulder. He turned and saw that Karldros was looking behind them at horsemen galloping up. Pelembras felt as though an icy hand had clenched around his heart as he recognised the leader as the centurion who had taken him to the enemy camp a few days earlier. The centurion had five others with him. They were military police. The game was up.

  “I have heard of you, Pelembras of Akrin,” Karldros said, just loud enough for Pelembras to hear him over the roar of the waterfall. “I know the messages you gave me were forged. You are an Akrinan patriot and are now an enemy of the Great One, as are all Akrinans. As one Master Shipwright to another, use these stairs. There are boats tied up below. Do not abuse my trust. If capture is inevitable, have the decency to kill yourself before you incriminate me. I will deal with the centurion.”

  Surprised, Pelembras clambered down the stairway. It was fortunate that he had thick gloves. He relied more on holding the rope that functioned as the handrail than on making contact on the steps with his feet. “May the Great Plan reward you,” Pelembras called out as he half rappelled and half ran down the narrow stair.

  Meanwhile, Karldros pretended to follow him at a much slower pace. The centurion dismounted and followed. When the centurion caught up, Karldros pretended to trip and sprawl across the width of the stair. The centurion had no choice but to stop and help the old man to his feet. That took longer than one might have expected as Karldros seemed to find it difficult to regain his footing.

  “That man is an impostor!” cried the centurion.

  “Which man?” Karldros cried with feigned surprise.

  “The one who calls himself Pelembras,” cried the centurion.

  “He had official papers,” said Karldros indignantly, but still staggering and baulking the centurion from passing h
im.

  “We must arrest him. Let one of my men help you up while the rest of us apprehend the impostor.”

  “Don’t worry, there can be no escape that way,” Karldros assured the centurion. “He will surely perish in the marshes or be taken by crocodiles in the river. You help me back up. I am now in charge of these works by order of the Great One. I will send out a full search party for the impostor as soon as you get me back to my headquarters at the top of the canal.”

  The centurion reluctantly helped Karldros back, but he also sent three of his men to follow Pelembras. They were too late. The stairs curved around a bastion of rock which obscured the view of the small jetty at the bottom. By the time they reached the jetty there was no sign of Pelembras. There were two boats tied up there but it was impossible to tell whether or not any other boats had been there recently.

  “Tried to swim and drowned, I should think!” one of the soldiers called to his comrades.

  “He was an old man, fifty if he was a day,” another shouted, “couldn’t last out there even if he took a boat.”

  “Don’t let the general hear you talk like that,” the third soldier shouted indignantly. The soldier was not so far from fifty years himself.

  73

  Near Polnet-Southport Confluence – 11th November

  For three nights Arnapa and her companions had paddled cautiously down the lower Polnet River to Southport River. They had moved ahead mostly at night because enemy craft were frequently to be seen in the main channel of the river. These were usually barges carrying materials for the repair of the ship canal, but even they had soldiers on board to guard the cargo and assist with sails.