Forged in Fire (Destiny's Crucible Book 4)

by Olan Thorensen

  “Those thousands will go back home and spread the word, along with efforts by all of you boyermen. Talk with the prominent people in your districts, and it’ll be your responsibility to select those from your districts to attend the Gathering. Make every effort to have a member of each family make the trip. The news will be better believed and understood if the clan members not attending hear directly from their boyerman, local leaders, and a member of their own families.

  “Every boyerman should also think about how to get all their non-fighting people to redoubts. Here in Caernford, we’ll focus on how to push production of food stores, weapons, and training as hard as possible.”

  None of the eleven boyermen had questions. They had all been briefed separately or in groups by Culich, Vortig Luwis, or Pedr Kennrick during the last two sixdays. Ten of the boyermen were experienced, having filled their positions for a minimum of five years, one man for thirty-seven years. The eleventh boyerman was Hurnmor Kulvin, who had been a boyerman for ten days. Culich had decided the existing boyerman, Belman Kulvin, had too weak a personality to lead his district in what was coming and had replaced him with a cousin. Although he hated to make a change at this time, two prominent Arwin leaders assured their hetman that most of the Arwin district welcomed the change.

  Culich looked at Yozef and raised an eyebrow. Yozef took the gesture as a question whether he had anything to say before the meeting broke up. He glanced at Maera, who gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Yozef shook his head at Culich.

  That afternoon, Yozef met with the map-makers and the surveyors, along with Maera, Denes, Mulron Luwis, and Balwis—the latter having become more engaged in plans and learning as his responsibilities rose.

  Yozef went over the same example of a potential battle site that he had described earlier with the clan leaders. Gartherid Kennrick asked for and received leadership in the first stages of searching for battle sites. Pedr’s son was missing his left leg below the knee and used a special saddle made the last month. Gartherid felt confident he could ride however much was necessary. Yozef left them with instructions to begin by combing the maps, the surveys, and the reports on Keelan Province as their first attempts to find battle sites that fit Yozef’s criteria. After Keelan, they would move on to the rest of Caedellium. He gave them two sixdays to make an initial list of potential sites. Yozef would listen to their report, and they would pare down to the most likely candidates. Then, Gartherid, several of the surveyors, and Yozef would visit those sites.

  CHAPTER 10: CARRONADES AND SNIPERS

  At sixteen bells—four in the afternoon, as Yozef mentally translated—the same group who had met the map-makers and the surveyors met with men involved in artillery production: Yawnfol and Brellen Nyfork, the Abersford cannon foundry cousins who had moved to Caernford to help establish the much larger foundry; Razil Gurbuz, a captured Narthani artilleryman who knew about cannon casting and who had switched allegiance to ensure better treatment by his captors: two of the Fuomi naval gunners who were lent to the clans because of their experience in cannon casting and deployment; and three men from a factory producing canister and grapeshot containers.

  Yozef moved straight to the point of the meeting, addressing the foundry staff first. “I want you to assign a casting crew to a new type of cannon.” He handed out sheets with drawings and instructions. “This new cannon is called a carronade. As you see from the drawings, the barrel is shorter and the bore larger than other cannon you’ve made. While the shorter barrel will make it less accurate than the 6- and 12-pounders, it means less powder is needed, because we won’t care about the shorter range. Carronades are used in close-engagement sea battles and as antipersonnel weapons. Obviously, we aren’t concerned with the naval uses. We’ll use them against Narthani infantry and cavalry attacks. Carronades are also faster to reload. I’ve estimated the shot size will be equivalent to a 30-pounder cannon, so we’ll call them ‘30-pounder carronades.’ The advantages to carronades over regular cannon is that the gunpowder charge only needs to be one-third that of a cannon of the same shot size, and the gun’s weight is also about one-third that of the same pounder cannon. Although we previously considered attempting to cast 30-pounder cannon, the same amount of metal will go into three 30-pounder carronades.”

  “Why are they called carronades and not something else, like short 30-pounders?” asked a young worker.

  “It’s the name I prefer,” answered Yozef, not able to tell the men the name came from a company in Scotland that make the first officially recognized carronades—the Carron company. He thought he remembered that the British used them against the Americans in about 1780, and both sides used them in the U.S. Civil War.

  Yozef faced the men from the canister factory. “While we may eventually cast solid shot for the carronades, I want a crew to work on making wooden kegs to serve as canister rounds. Keep in communication with the foundry. By the time the first carronade is ready for test-firing, I want wooden canister rounds holding musket balls ready for testing. From my numbers, look for a canister length that will hold three hundred balls. That’s only an estimate. Once test-firing begins, you’ll experiment with lengths of the canisters, number of musket balls, and the gunpowder charges to be useful against an enemy at different ranges. Carronade canister may be maximally useful at no more than two hundred yards. You’ll have to find out by experimenting.

  “Once you have the canisters worked out, move on to grapeshot.”

  Questions from the working staff went on for half an hour before they quit asking Yozef and huddled among themselves. He watched, satisfied that they need little more input from him—very different from his first innovations, when he had to husband the projects along at every step for months. Most of Yozef’s project teams had become accustomed to taking an idea and running with it themselves, instead of depending on Yozef. The thinking was spreading to other clans, though slower than Yozef wished.

  A month later, the assigned foundry crew demonstrated the first carronade. After experimentation, the foundry crew made adjustments to the bore diameter and length, and the final version was designated a 25-pounder carronade. Without checking with Yozef, the foundry felt so confident of success, they proceeded to cast more barrels before testing the first one.

  Yozef shared his reaction to this revelation that night with Maera. “Before I realized I was being foolish, I started to be mad at them for moving ahead when they didn’t know whether the first barrel worked. I want people to use more initiative with both production and military matters, and here I was about to castigate the foundry staff for doing just that. If anything, it shows confidence and enthusiasm. And, of course, even if the first barrel fails testing, all the one crew lost is time, because the barrels can be melted down and recast as other artillery.”

  The foundry’s confidence proved well founded when Yozef witnessed the first test-firing. The first 25-pounder carronade passed the ten-firing test without detectable damage to the barrel. They next tested six different canister models and settled on the model holding 312 to 318 musket balls—the small variation due to differences in how the balls packed together in each separate canister round. Yozef gave the order for a second casting crew to join the first crew in switching to the carronades.

  As predicted, loading was faster than with cannon, with the crews able to get off three shots for every two for a 12-pounder. Yozef judged effectiveness by the number of musket ball hits on ten straw men lined in a row facing the gun. As expected, the targets shredded at fifty yards by so many hits. At three hundred yards, only half of the targets had single hits—the cone of balls had spread too widely. Yozef ruled that an arbitrary maximum efficiency was where ninety percent or more of the targets had at least one hit. After he plotted out multiple tests, the peak effectiveness was around 160 yards.

  I thought I remembered the range was farther out, thought Yozef. Oh, well, these are our results, so we live with it until we have a chance to figure out how to increase the range
. Even at three hundred yards, we’d hit half of a Narthani infantry charge and more if they were cavalry—horses are bigger targets. Hell, I wish we had the fusing problems worked out, so we could use case shot where a container of balls could explode above an enemy and shower them with balls.

  He also worried about giving crews and battery commanders too much leeway in deciding when to fire, subject to specific instructions in a specific situation, so he “ruled” that given sufficient ammunition, firing canister on attacking infantry would begin at three hundred yards and on cavalry at four hundred yards.

  After viewing the test-firings, Yozef turned to Vortig Luwis’s son. “Mulron, please talk to your father and tell him the carronades are successful. Ask him to speak with the hetmen about convincing other clans to switch a fraction of their cannon production to 25-pounder carronades. I’ll work with the foundry crew to prepare detailed written instructions for both the guns and canister. Once grapeshot is worked out, those instructions will follow. I want to know how quickly the other foundries around Caedellium can begin producing carronades and estimates of production each month after that. Similarly with ammunition production.”

  Maera noticed again how Yozef seemed comfortable with assuming authority, even if only by implication. She wondered if her husband were conscious of the changes in his behavior.

  When finished with the test-firings, the group walked a short distance to an adjacent building. The sounds of metal striking metal and the roar of furnaces were evident well before they reached the open front of the building. They could see heat waves drifting out and up from the opening. Inside, two dozen men worked at making muskets, and the sound was deafening.

  I need to tell the foreman about earplugs and muffs, thought Yozef, before noticing small wads of material protruding from several ears. He didn’t understand the details of musket production, but he recognized an assortment of bellows, muscular men pounding away at white- and red-hot pieces of metal and what had to be several sizes of trip-hammers.

  “Ser Kolsko!” shouted a large man loudly enough and close enough that Yozef’s eardrums recoiled. The man saw Yozef flinch and grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip, pulling him back outside. They stood away from the opening in the factory, where the others in the group from previous meetings had waited.

  The man unplugged his ears. “Sorry, Ser Kolsko. Shouting’s necessary to be heard above all the noise. Even then, much of the work is done with men using hand signals.”

  “No problem, Vallyn. I got your message. Is the rifle complete?”

  “Finished and test-fired. I have to say that getting that telescope mounted so it could be moved up and down, back and forth, about drove the man doing most of the work crazy. Ilnor is his name. And that was after getting a barrel with the rifling characteristics you wanted. Yet when it was finished, and we all saw the result, he was eager to move on to the next one. He says he’s got several ideas to make the work go faster and give a better final product.”

  “Okay, Vallyn, let’s see what you’ve got. Oh, and before I forget, let’s stop calling this a gun factory. From now on, it’s called the Caernford Musket Armory.”

  The man shrugged, having no idea why the name should be changed or what “armory” meant. However, if Yozef Kolsko said the name was changed . . .

  Vallyn went to the armory opening and shouted loud enough that Yozef reflexively flinched again. A minute later, a man ran out of the armory carrying a long leather case and gave it to Vallyn. He untied leather fastenings and pulled out a five-and-a-half-foot-long gun with a sixteen-inch mounted telescope. The front mount included screw mechanisms for fine adjustments.

  It was Balwis who first appreciated what they saw. “That’s got to be a rifle, not just a musket. The telescope brings the target closer, and the only thing that makes sense is that the barrel is rifled. It wouldn’t do any good with a musket. No matter how close a target seems, the accuracy wouldn’t change.”

  “Correct,” said Vallyn, “and the rifling using cold hammer forging around the rifling mandrel required that we construct a bigger trip hammer. There’s still things to work out with it.”

  “Have you tested it yet?” asked Yozef.

  Vallyn’s grin stretched ear to ear. “The people in the cannon foundry said they thought you might like to see the first tests, but Ilnor wouldn’t shut up until we let him try it. He claimed he’d never fired a rifle before, and within an hour he was putting balls in a one-foot circle at two hundred and fifty yards, using targets we set up behind the armory.”

  “Two hundred fifty yards!?” exclaimed Balwis. “I had an uncle purported to be the best rifle shot in all Preddi Province, and he told me he didn’t trust himself to hit anything over two hundred yards! And this Ilnor had never fired a rifle before?”

  “That’s the truth,” said a rangy man who spit to one side. “Never before. Once I finished this beauty, I had to try it. Didn’t hardly believe it myself how it shoots. Hell, I found myself imagining shooting Narthani when they were too far away to see where I was hiding.”

  Yozef had pretended he thought the clans had more chance against the Narthani than he feared was the case, but his dour mood momentarily lifted. Every little bit helps. We need to see just how accurate this sniper rifle is to know how useful it will be. I can imagine picking off officers and senior NCOs in Narthani units far beyond their own engagement range. And two hundred fifty yards? That sounds great for a novice, but we need to see someone more experienced using the rifle. All those TV shows and movies showing Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone hitting targets four hundred yards or more away was just Hollywood. I’d read that three hundred yards was the outer range of even the best marksmen without a telescopic sight.

  “Balwis. You say your uncle was considered one of the best rifle shots? How about yourself? I imagine your uncle taught you something about rifles?”

  “Yeah, when he visited us or we him, which was two, three times a year. My father also wasn’t a bad shot and had his own rifle he let me use. Irked him to no end I was better with the rifle than he was.”

  “Okay, then, let’s see how you do with this one.”

  Vallyn handed Balwis the rifle, and he peered through the telescope. “Could be a wider view. A shooter should be able to locate his target, though it may take a few moments to scan around till he finds it.”

  The group and the armory workers walked to the test-firing range behind the building. Targets stood at several distances, starting at what Yozef estimated was fifty yards and out to the most distant he figured was the 250-yard mark.

  Balwis loaded the rifle. While Yozef watched, for the first time he fully understood the practical problem with rifles versus smoothbores for large-scale fighting. It took Balwis three times as long to load the rifle as he would a smoothbore. The rifle required an effort to push the ball down the spiraling rifling with the ramrod.

  Minie balls, thought Yozef, remembering the bullet introduced on Earth in the 1850s and pronounced “minnie” by Americans. I’d put the idea aside for now, thinking we didn’t have time. Now that I see the rifle, maybe even a few handcrafted minie balls would be worth the effort.

  Once Balwis had loaded the rifle, he hefted its weight and tested different positions before sitting on the ground and resting the barrel on a box.

  “I suggest you start at fifty yards to see where the balls end up, compared to where you aimed,” said Yozef.

  Balwis glanced back at Yozef with a look that conveyed how much he needed advice.

  Everyone quieted as Balwis took aim and fired at a sheet of paper with a one-foot circle tacked on it. Boom! A flash erupted from the end of the barrel, and Balwis jerked back from the recoil. Black smoke quickly dispersed in the moderate wind.

  “It hit the paper high and to the left,” called out an unidentified voice.

  Balwis cursed.

  “Use the screws, Balwis,” said Yozef. “The barrel and the telescope aren’t perfectly aligned at first. By adjusting the scre
ws, it moves the front end of the telescope up and down and back and forth.”

  He had seen an old black-and-white movie where adjustments were referred to as Kentucky Windage and Tennessee Elevation—not that he was tempted to explain those references. In the movie, the shooter adjusted his aiming point. If a shot was struck four inches to the right, the next time the shooter aimed four inches left. Maybe we should call it Preddi Windage and Keelan Elevation? Naw. Doesn’t have a ring to it.

  Balwis turned the screws too much, and the next shot again missed the circle. He cursed, then said, “Okay, I’ve got the idea. I should only need a few more shots to put them near the center.” It took eight more shots for him to begin putting successive balls within a two-inch circle. He moved on to the 250-yard target. There, hits were all within the one-foot circle.

  “Put targets farther out,” said Balwis. “Let’s try four hundred yards.”

  A worker ran out and tacked a target against a thick stand of trees backed by a rising slope. Of five shots, two hit within the circle, and the other three hit no more than three inches outside.

  Balwis turned to Yozef, his feral grin almost as wide as Vallyn’s cheerful one. “If I practice with this, I’m sure I’ll be able to hit man-sized targets out to five hundred yards. Possibly farther. Even at six hundred yards, it might be possible to get a fair percentage of hits. However, I have some suggestions. One is to have a support for the end of the barrel. Maybe two to four legs that the end is supported by. Could be attached to the barrel or probably better to be a separate piece, because the rifle might be used in other positions. Also, the screw part of it needs to be locked down. Every time I shot, I could see the next round was slightly off. I think the screws move slightly from the jolt of the shot. I changed my aiming point once I realized what was happening.”