The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  His mind skipped through the things that might be available on a dock, and he smiled grimly as he turned back to his own task.

  “I think that’s a good sign, Mr. Mate.”

  The frigate looked bigger and bigger as you got closer, its masts towering to the sky. But a ship under sail was a thing in dynamic tension, huge forces barely contained. As he watched a bolt clipped the spar of the maincourse just where it crossed the mast, braced around as the ship ran with the wind abeam. Feldman winced in involuntary sympathy. The great length of wood—seventy-five feet of prime Sitka spruce thick as his waist in the center—was already bent like a longbow as it took the strain of the vast mainsail’s draw. Now it flew asunder with a sudden snapping violence as it parted at the point of maximum bend. Splinters would be flying like arrows, and some of them would be as long as catapult bolts, too.

  The Stormrider slewed and heeled as the tension came off her standing rigging. Lines broken and cut swung like curling whips in the hands of invisible demons. Hands ran upward on the ratlines to make emergency repairs, with catapult bolts whirring through the spaces aloft and cutting more line; the pirates and the Korean were probably using sickle-heads designed for that purpose . . . though they’d just as easily chop a human form in two along the way. The Stormrider’s headlong rush slowed, and she heeled slightly westward into the wind under the unbalanced stress on her remaining sails. A broadside of round shot lashed the water just short of the orcas as the malignantly bad timing of the injury to her sails threw off the frigate’s aim. The orcas had taken Feldman’s bait; they were used to merchantmen trying to run away from them and were ignoring him for now.

  Normally I would run myself, Feldman thought. It’s not my job to fight pirates unless they can catch me and it is the Navy’s.

  Occasionally . . . well, honest sailors hated and despised sea-rovers.

  Both orcas turned and heeled with beautiful smoothness, cutting straight in towards the Stormrider and letting their sails out gullwing-fashion as they ran downwind, sacrificing their own firepower to close as quickly as possible while they hoped not to be battered to pieces or set aflame. Feldman put the spyglass to his eye to check their exact courses, and got an unpleasant view of the crews of their bow-chasers and broadsides pumping frantically.

  I was right, he thought. Heading for the frigate’s bow and stern, they want to put in a broadside of case-shot and board right on its heels.

  The Korean was to leeward and couldn’t do more than slant a bit more closely, but it should still be alongside in five minutes or less.

  “Prepare to port your helm,” he said to the crewmen at the wheel. “Mr. Mate, ready with the port broadside. Tell the crews they’ll be switching after the first.”

  • • •

  “Sir, Medical Officer Suarez reports that Lieutenant-Commander Dirkson won’t be up anytime soon. She had to cut for the splinter in his stomach and he’s under sedation.”

  Captain Russ suppressed an impulse to swear as the medical orderly saluted and gave his message. Dirkson had been in charge of the gundeck. The impact and rending crack overhead as the round shot struck the spar only made him snarl silently, though the sound was like his own legbone snapping, and he staggered slightly as the—now—badly mistimed broadside added to the unnatural movement of his ship. A volley of orders set the deck-crews hauling to adjust the set of the other sails to compensate, but nothing was going to change the fact that they’d lost a fifth of their sail surface and it had taken their edge in speed with it.

  We’re not going to make that anchorage in time to receive the enemy, he thought. Not now. All right, let’s see if we can encourage the enemy to make an unforced error.

  “Number Two,” he snapped to his executive officer. “Go below and take command of the gundeck, keep up the fire on the Korean. Leave the orcas to me, just keep all catapult crews to starboard, and hammer the foreigner hard and fast until further orders or you hear the receive boarders. But have the starboard side loaded with beehive and case-shot, alternating. Be ready to switch the crews back and give one broadside at close range.”

  She left at the run. It was good to have subordinates who didn’t need the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted. The loss of the spar was like a wound to one of his children. But unlike children naval vessels didn’t exist for themselves, and Stormrider wasn’t his yacht either. This was a warship, and it was here to win victories for Montival, even if it meant wrecking her and killing the crew.

  There are times you have to be ready to destroy the thing you love, he thought grimly. Not to mention yourself.

  “Steady, helm,” he said.

  “Aye aye, stea—” the petty officer at the wheel began.

  There was a whistling, and then on its heels a soft massive sound, a thuckk with a crunch underneath it. A bolt had come arching down, a long-range shot from the Korean warship but still too fast to see except as a blurring flicker in the corner of the eye. It took the petty officer under the one armpit and slanted down and the chisel-shaped head exited in a shower of blood and scraps of meat and organ and bone just below the floating rib on her other side. The whole four-foot length of metal and hardwood wasn’t perceptibly slowed either by the woman’s body or by the light brigandine she’d been wearing—some of that came out as bits of metal and leather. The instantly-limp body pitched past him.

  The bolt went by close enough that he could feel the wind of its passage, then sank two feet deep into the double deck planking and the oak carlins beneath. Russ was moving before he was fully conscious of the spattering gout of hot blood across his face. He spat to clear his mouth as he jumped to the bench and gripped the spokes of the forward wheel. The seaman on the rear wheel hadn’t moved, but the cords of muscle on his bare arms stood out as he took a strain meant for at least two.

  “Sir Boleslav!” Russ shouted.

  The reliefs took the wheel. Captain Russ walked to the quarterdeck rail and called down to where a massive scrap of the mainsail had landed and covered most of the Protector’s Guard men. He pitched his voice to carry; it was a skill you learned at sea with the constant burr of ships working and the wind in the rigging.

  “Keep your men hidden, Sir Knight! Stay under the sail!”

  Right now none of the enemy could see the Stormrider’s deck, since she rode so much higher than they did. That wouldn’t last long, since the lookouts on their mastheads would have an angle of sight quite soon . . . but human beings were prone to seeing what they expected, and especially so in the heat of action.

  “They’ll grapple at the stern and bow!” he shouted, pointing forward and astern. “Be ready to move on my signal!”

  The Chehalis nobleman gave him a fist-to-breast salute to show he’d heard; he barked his own orders, and eighty pairs of hands gripped the sail from beneath and spread it farther.

  A glance to starboard showed the Korean ship still closing as fast as they could . . . despite a snapped spar of their own, on the gaffsail of their mizzen, and bulwarks beaten into splinters with several catapults lying dismounted. She was on fire in several places, but none of them had gotten out of hand yet and it looked as if their damage control parties were still operating. Blood was trickling out of her scuppers, and bodies were pitched overside to make room.

  Plenty of guts and seamanship there, Russ thought. But then, the same’s true of the Haida.

  Stormrider had hammered them with round shot for several broadsides now, and their lighter structure wasn’t taking it well. Five of their shot came aboard at that moment; two cracked off the bulwarks, two a little lower down into the hull at gun-deck level, and one took a seaman’s head off cleanly as an axe as it blurred across the deck and out over the starboard side. The body fell, all the blood in it pouring out in seconds.

  Their aim was excellent, but the more massive scantlings of the frigate would take it better. The range was closing, and a doze
n of the eighteen-pound globes of cast steel smashed into the foreign warship, tearing gaps in the thin sheet-metal antifire sheathing, battering at timbers and sending lethal sprays of splinters pinwheeling across the deck.

  “Mr. Smith!” he called.

  A midshipman looked up from where he was overseeing a squad putting together boat pikes, fitting the rear shafts into the collars that turned the weapons into sixteen-foot poles that could be jabbed across the gap between two ships lashed together in a boarding action.

  I am running short of lieutenants, he thought before continuing briskly, ignoring the young man’s blink of horror at the way he looked before he realized it wasn’t the Captain’s blood.

  “When the pirates attempt to board, their grapnels will be allowed to hold.”

  “Hold, sir?”

  “Yes. Notify the other anti-boarding parties immediately, report to me when you’ve done it. And direct the grapnel launchers to be ready to put one each into them if they try to disengage, but only on command.”

  The midshipman was a youngster from somewhere far inland—the Navy tried to recruit from all over Montival, not just the parts near the coast—and looking desperately earnest under the scraggly blond nothing-much he fondly thought was the beginning of a cropped nautical beard. For a moment his face went slack with astonishment. Then he proved he was intelligent as well as disciplined and brave and glanced at the sail hiding the Protector’s Guard contingent. He saluted and dashed away, hop-stepping over a body . . . or part of a body, at least.

  Normally two large orcas would have some chance in a boarding action . . . but with the Guardsmen on board things were not normal.

  “Not long,” Russ muttered to himself, turning his eyes back to the orcas.

  The reaver vessels were nearly bow-on to him now. The forward catapult of one cut loose—they were close enough now for it to sound quite loud even over the general din—and something flashed half-visibly through the air above. A cable and set of heavy wooden blocks fell into the netting over his head, and the gaffsail on the mizzen began to wobble. He could feel that through the soles of his feet and hear it as a rapid drumfire cracking sound; it dampened down as a rush of riggers went by overhead with their clasp-knives in their teeth, throwing themselves at the damage and tying down and splicing.

  Driving in to board while the Korean distracted us would be a very good strategy if all I had was the sailing crew and the usual marine contingent.

  He nodded, silent behind the blood-spattered mask of his face.

  Of course, then I wouldn’t have kept this course or given those orders.

  He spared a single glance for the merchantman he’d chased all this way, and was mildly surprised to see him coming up quickly on the port bow, and not nearly as far away to the westward as he’d expected if they were trying to make the run through the ruins of the Richmond bridge while the warship occupied the pirates.

  I wonder what he’s up to?

  • • •

  “Port your helm, fifteen degrees left rudder,” Moishe Feldman barked.

  The wheels spun and the Tarshish Queen’s bowsprit pivoted from west of south to due south and then east of south. Now they were to windward of the frigate and both the Haida craft attacking it, and that meant they could close quickly if they chose. As they did the First Mate’s voice boomed out through the speaking-trumpet to the deck crews, and they paid out the sails as the wind came more abaft the beam.

  The merchant schooner’s head began to plunge a little, and more spray came over the bow. Some of the spindrift reached the quarterdeck, and he blinked the spray out of his eyes. The two orcas swayed just enough to bring their broadsides to bear on the frigate and loosed, hammering scraps and splinters out of the bulwarks, then turned back and crashed alongside the Royal Montivallan Navy ship.

  There was a deep bunng sound as their grapnel throwers released. The anchor-shaped grapnels flew up and were winched tight, and boarding ramps normally set into the deck rose and toppled forward, the spikes under their forefronts crashing down to nail the vessels together. Haida crowded forward onto the ramps, a hail of arrows from their archers arching over their heads to clear the way as they brandished spears and war-clubs and cutlass-like swords. A roaring chorus from hundreds of throats:

  “Huk! Huk! Huk!”

  It was the battle-cry they used when they drove home an attack regardless of cost, aiming to swarm the frigate under in the first rush. The joined ships were close to him now, the bow of the Stormrider barely a hundred yards away. He could hear the roar of voices—and then the deep shout of:

  “Haro! Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!”

  —as the black-armored forms of the Protector’s Guard rose from behind the frigate’s bulwarks at bow and stern, their shields blazoned with the Lidless Eye raised high and blades poised to strike. He estimated that there must be nearly a hundred of them, half men-at-arms and glaivesmen sheathed cap-a-pie in plate. The longswords and war-hammers smashed down, and the pirate boarding-parties bunched up, crowding into a solid mass on their foredecks and the ramps. Crossbowmen shot from the frigate’s waist, taking the massed pirates in defilade, backed by crewmen and marines with long boarding-pikes.

  “Aha, I didn’t expect that,” Feldman murmured to himself. “He was luring them in.”

  The portlids of the frigate’s broadside suddenly snapped up in unison with a squeal and clack of mechanisms, revealing the throwing troughs of the catapults, the arms folded back to each side at maximum cock.

  Tung-Crack!

  Under that came a humming like malignant wasps; case-shot or beehive or both. The war-chant turned to screams as the hundreds of steel balls and darts slashed into them, though some beat the water between the two pirate vessels to froth or passed over the orcas’ sterns.

  It was time. Feldman raised the speaking-trumpet and called to the catapult crews who crouched along the deck—thinner than usual, but for one broadside where you didn’t need the pumps three to a catapult would do.

  “At the pirate’s stern, fire as you bear! Wait for your shot!”

  Each catapult-captain raised an arm for an instant in acknowledgment, not looking up from where they peered through the sights, left hand on the traversing wheel and the right on the elevation. The pirate’s stern-chaser and the Tarshish Queen’s bow pivot catapult cut loose at almost the same instant as their bowsprit crossed the Haida’s stern, and Feldman cursed to himself. Someone over there had been alert . . .

  And may he grow like an onion, with his head in the ground! he thought.

  Tung-CRACK.

  The pirate round shot snapped out in a blur, and there was a loud painful-sounding crunch from the waterline just at the bow, a quiver through the mass of the ship. Radavindraban cursed in his own musical tongue and leapt down the companionway at the head of a damage-control party; that had probably opened the hull at the waterline, and would have to be plugged immediately, even if it meant throwing stores aside.

  Feldman nodded grimly as he watched glass and wood fly from the orca’s sternquarter windows; his own bow-chaser’s shot going in. Then the broadside catapults cut loose, one after another at intervals of less than a second. The first four solid round shot all struck around the same spot—even at close range that meant his crews were good. Light flared from the throwing-troughs of the last four catapults on the port side as a crewmember stepped in with a lit towmatch on the end of a pole to light the fuel-soaked cord that wrapped the glass napalm shells.

  Tung-WHACK, four times repeated, and a shudder through the deck. Below him along the deck the twin throwing arms of the catapults slammed forward into the stops, here and then there without any visible trace in between as the lanyards were pulled. The cable between whipped the carrier down the trough and the shells went on their deadly way.

  There was always a bit of mental stress—something you felt in
your gut and groin and the back of your throat—when you fired napalm shell. It wasn’t entirely unknown for them to burst in the trough during firing . . . if you hesitated, and fear could make you do that.

  Irrational, but there you are, it’s people.

  This time nobody hesitated, and the shells struck with malignant precision. The preceding four solid round shot had smashed open the stern windows of the pirate schooner and carried on into the interior.

  And since orcas were flush-decked, beyond the captain’s cabin and a few canvas-and-wood partitions was the open hold running forward to the forecastle, for stores and cargo—loot and shackled slaves, for an orca. Four napalm shells slammed through the tangle of broken canvas and tarred wood. The glass shattered, igniting the clinging liquid within, sending gobbets of burning napalm and burning wood and cloth forward into what amounted to a dry wooden box scattered with piles of more dry canvas and tarred rope and highly flammable naval stores.

  Flame belched out of deck housings and portholes, and black smoke followed. Another gout of flame, and another, and then a bigger one, far bigger than the shells could account for and quicker than mere wood and cloth and rope could catch fire.

  The careless mamzrim must have left one of their own chests of fire-shell open.

  “Hard a’port! Port your helm, full port!” Feldman said sharply, suppressing an impulse to duck as someone on the stern of the ship he’d just destroyed managed one last arrow; it plunked quivering into the deck not far from him.

  Then: “Let go the sails, on the run!”

  The Tarshish Queen’s bow slewed eastward again, this time as fast as the rudder could push it, coming around in a half-circle as the ship did a majestic pinwheel. The sails came down with a rush and a whapping thump, the rigging giving a deep nerve-racking twang as it stopped the upper booms from falling into the folds of canvas.