There Will Be War Volume VII

by Jerry Pournelle

  Prince Jeng fell silent, and slowly ate two bites of sherbet. Derec said nothing. From the moment he had entered into conspiracy with Marcoyn and the two of them had raised the crew, he had expected nothing but death.

  Jeng looked at him curiously. “You do not fear death, northern man? I can make the death unpleasant if I wish.”

  “My life is in your hands,” Derec said. “I have always known this.”

  “Then you understand the essential character of our relationship.” Prince Jeng smiled. He finished his sherbet and put the bowl down, then put his arm around Derec’s shoulders and began to walk with him back into the palace. “I have in mind to give you a squadron, Captain,” he said. “It will be under the nominal orders of a Zhir, but it will be yours to command, and my admiral will understand this. Bring me back lots of the Levar’s ships, and I will favor you. You will be able to replace those old brass earrings with rings of gold, and diamonds and emeralds will gleam like reflective water on your fingers. Fail me, and… well, why be morbid on such a lovely day?”

  Derec’s mind whirled. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he stammered.

  “I will send some slaves aboard to replace your casualties.”

  Derec hesitated. “I thank you, Your Highness. Could I not have freemen? They–”

  Jeng’s tones were icy. “Slaves can pull ropes as well as anyone.”

  Derec sighed inwardly. Jeng would send his slaves aboard and collect their share of the pay and prize money. The slaves would not work hard and would prove cowardly, because they hadn’t anything to fight for. It was a persistent evil here, one Derec had hoped to avoid—but now he must concede.

  “I thank you, Your Highness. Strong men, if you please.”

  “No women? Not one?”

  “Women are not as strong. On a galleon, the sailors must move heavy cannon, and fight the yards when the sails are filled with wind.”

  “Really? But surely there are less physical tasks. Scrubbing the planks, or cooking, or serving the officers.”

  “Then there are discipline problems, Your Excellency. If you will look at the complaints in your navy, I’m sure you’ll find more than half having to do with officers playing favorites among their prettier crewmates.”

  “But how do your sailors keep warm at night?”

  Derec smiled. “Abstinence makes them… fiercer fighters, Your Highness.”

  Prince Jeng looked shocked. “I would never deprive my men and women of their pleasures, Captain. They’re prone enough to disobedience as it is. But if you insist on your barbaric customs–” He shrugged. “The least I can do is rescue you from this cold regime—one of my commanders must learn to enjoy life, yes? Until your ship is ready, you will stay in the palace and accept my hospitality. I will send a woman to your room tonight.” He hesitated. “You do like women, yes?”

  “Ah, yes, Your Highness.”

  “You did make me wonder, Captain. Perhaps you would prefer more than one?”

  Derec was surprised. “One is generally sufficient.”

  Jeng laughed. “I’m unused to such modesty. Very well. One it is.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness. For everything.”

  The prince had steered Derec back to the audience chamber, and he dropped his arm and stepped back. “The majordomo will show you to an apartment.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness.” Derec knelt again, raising his hands to his forehead.

  “One more thing, SuPashto.”

  “Your Highness?”

  Prince Jeng was smiling his catlike smile. “No more mutinies, Captain.”

  A day later, coming aboard Birdwing, Derec was surprised to meet the Liavekan wizard, Tevvik, at the entry port. The pleasant-looking young man smiled and bowed, his expression cheerful. Derec nodded curtly and stepped below to his own wizard’s hot, airless cabin. He rapped on the flimsy partition.

  “Enter.” Derec stepped in to find Levett sitting in his bunk, reading a Zhir grammar by the light of a tallow candle. Derec stood over him.

  “I’ve come for my lesson, wizard,” he said.

  Levett was a short, thin man. Though he was young, his hair and beard were white. Diamond chips glittered in his hoop earrings. His green eyes studied Derec.

  “As you like, Captain. I was just chatting with a colleague. Tevvik’s an interesting man. Shall we go to your cabin?”

  Derec turned and moved down the passageway to his cabin. The stern windows were open, providing relief from the heat. Flitting reflections danced on the deckhead above.

  “I have been comparing notes with Tevvik,” Levett offered.

  “The Liaveker.”

  “He’s Tichenese, actually. That’s why he’s so dark. It was a matter of chance that he was in the Liavekan navy—it might as easily have been Ka Zhir, or the Two Kingdoms. He’s seeking adventure and foreign lands, he doesn’t care whom he serves. He’s on parole; now he’ll set up on his own, here in town. Of course,” he said rather deliberately, “he has no family. No one depending on him. He can afford to wander.”

  Derec sat at his table and held the wizard’s eyes for a long moment. The wizard looked away.

  “I have promised you your liberty, Wizard. As soon as I know your weather spells.”

  “I have never doubted your word, Captain.”

  “Just my ability to keep it.”

  Levett said nothing.

  “This situation was not of my making, Levett,” Derec said. “I’m sorry you are without your wife and family; I know you love them dearly. As soon as I can spare you, you will be free to take the first ship north. With money in your pocket.”

  Levett licked his lips. “They will call me a mutineer.”

  “The mutiny was mine, Wizard.”

  “I understand. You were left no choice. I had no choice myself—when the fighting broke out, I wrapped myself in illusion and hid.”

  “You had no part in the mutiny, true enough.”

  “Those in authority at home… may not understand.”

  “There would have been a mutiny in any case. My choice was to try to control it, lest everyone die.”

  The finest ship in the Two Kingdoms’ fleet, Derec thought bitterly, and the man who had conceived it, fought for its building, sweated through its construction—Captain-General Collerne—had been denied command. Instead, Birdwing received a courtier from the capital, Captain Lord Fors, and his venemous lieutenant, Grinn… and within two months, with their policy of vicious punishments mixed with capricious favoritism, they had destroyed the morale of the crew and driven them to the brink of violence. Derec—who as a commoner had risen to the highest rank available to the lowborn, that of sailing master—had tried to stand between the captain and his crew, had tried to mitigate the punishments and hold the crew in check, but had only been mocked for his pains, and threatened by Grinn with a beating. A sailing master, the senior warrant officer on the ship, flogged… the threat was unheard of, even in a service accustomed to violence.

  After that, Derec knew that mutiny was only a matter of time. Derec approached Marcoyn first—the man was constantly in trouble, but he was a fighter. Derec then chose his moment, and as an officer had the keys to the arms chests: Fors and Grinn both died screaming, begging for their lives as maddened crewmen hacked at them with swords and pikes. Lieutenant Varga, a good officer who had been appalled by his captain’s conduct, had nonetheless tried to rescue Fors, and was stabbed and flung bodily into the sea for his pains.

  Derec had tried to hold the killings to three; but the mutineers got into the liquor store and things soon ran out of control. The ship’s corporal died, bludgeoned to death in the hold; another dozen, known captain’s favorites or those suspected of being informers, were killed. Marcoyn had led the blood-maddened crewmen on their hunt for enemies, had hung the remaining lieutenants and a fourteen-year-old midshipman, Sempter, from the mizzen shrouds, and there garroted them one by one. Derec had stood by underneath, watching the starting eyes and kicking heels, hel
pless to prevent it—he was the ship’s sailing master, another officer, and if he’d objected he would have danced in the shrouds with the others.

  After the crew had sobered, Derec had been able to reassert his authority. Levett, who had hidden during the mutiny, had lent supernatural influence to Derec’s command. Now Derec was captain, and had chosen his officers from among the bosun’s and master’s mates. Marcoyn, who was illiterate and could not navigate, had been given the marines, whose morale and efficiency he was in the process of ruining with a brutality and capriciousness as hardened as that of Captain Lord Fors.

  “You have done as well as you could, Captain,” Levett said. “But now that you possess the royal favor, can you not do without me?”

  Derec looked up at him. “Not yet, Wizard. You are the best windspeller I know.”

  Levett was silent for a time, then shrugged. “Very well. Let us go about our lessons, then.”

  Derec reached inside his shirt for his amulet of Thurn Bel. The wizard seated himself. “Clear your mind, Captain,” he said, “and summon your power. We shall try again.”

  Drained, his lesson over, Derec stepped onto the poop and nodded briskly to Randem, the officer of the watch. Moaning through the rigging and rattling the windsails was the fitful wind that he had, at great effort, succeeded in summoning. Not much to show for three hours’ effort.

  He stepped to the stern and gazed over the taffrail at the lights of Ka Zhir. His eyes moved to the cliffs above, where his apartment and his harlot waited in Jeng’s palace. She would be disappointed tonight, he thought; the wizardry had exhausted him.

  Time to call his barge and head ashore. The order poised on his lips, he turned to head back for the poop companion. He froze in his tracks, terror lurching in his heart.

  Dark forms dangled from the mizzen shrouds, their legs stirring in the wind. Tongues protruded from blackened lips. Pale eyes rolled toward Derec, glowing with silent accusation.

  Wrenching his eyes from the sight, Derec looked at Randem, at the other men on deck. They were carrying on as normal. The ghosts were invisible to them.

  Derec looked again at the dead and stared in horror at young Sempter, the boy swinging from the shrouds with the garrote still knotted about his neck.

  The dead had risen, risen to curse him.

  He was doomed.

  Drums and cymbals beat time as Derec’s rowing squadron backed gracefully onto the shelving pebble beach of Ka Zhir’s outer harbor. Birdwing, a damaged galleass in tow, dipped its ensign to its nominal Zhir admiral. The galleass had lost its rudder in an autumn storm, had broached-to and been pounded before the rowers got it under way again. Birdwing was continuing to the inner harbor, to deliver its crippled charge to the royal dockyard.

  “Keep the Speckled Tower right abeam till the octagonal tower comes in line,” the Zhir pilot said. “Then alter course three points to larboard to clear the New Mole.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the timoneer.

  The sound of anchors splashing echoed over the bay, followed by the roar of cable. The squadron’s three prizes, all round-bowed merchantmen, had just come to rest. Derec, looking out over the taffrail, saw the crippled galleass slew sideways in a gust, then come to a sharp check at the end of the hawser. Birdwing gave a brief lurch as the cripple’s weight came onto the line.

  The bonaventure flapped overhead as Birdwing turned gracefully to larboard. A ghastly stench passed over the quarterdeck, and Derec hawked and spat. Ka Zhir used slaves in some of their ships; and they were chained to the benches and lay in their own filth—the smell was incredible. Derec turned away from the galleass and faced forward, his eyes automatically giving a guilty glance to the mizzen shrouds. His mind eased as he saw them clear, tarred black hawser cutting through the bright blue tropical sky.

  Over his voyages of the last six months, the ghosts had returned many times, every few days, sometimes in broad daylight. Usually Derec saw them hanging in the mizzen rigging, but on occasion he’d see them elsewhere: Lieutenant Varga, his wounds pouring blood, his hair twined with seaweed as he watched Derec from amid the crew as the hands witnessed punishment; the ship’s corporal, his skull beaten in, sitting on the main cross-trees and laughing through broken teeth as the ship went through gun drill; and once, most horribly, Derec had entered his cabin at dinnertime only to find Midshipman Sempter sitting at his place, gazing at him over his meal, his mouth working silently as he tried to speak past the garrote. Derec’s steward had watched in amazement as the captain bolted the room, then returned later, sweating and trembling, to find the ghost gone.

  Nothing untoward had ever happened: Derec’s luck on his voyages had been good. Admiral Zhi-Feng, Derec’s nominal superior, was an intelligent man, and on Prince Jeng’s orders had diffidently followed Derec’s advice; he was learning quickly, and had recommended that Birdwing’s lines be taken by draftsmen so that an entire squadron of race-built galleons might rise on the royal dockyard’s stocks. Five galleons were a-building and would be ready by spring. Derec had fought three engagements with Liavekan squadrons and won them all, capturing two galleasses, four galleys, and a number of smaller craft; he had sent in over forty merchant ships as prizes. Corrupt and slow though Ka Zhir’s prize courts were, they had made Derec a wealthy man: the strongbox he kept beneath the planks in his sleeping cabin was crammed with gold and jewels. Prince Jeng’s War was proving successful, much to the discomfort of his Scarlet Eminence in Liavek. With an entire squadron of galleons, Derec had no doubt the Liavekan Navy would be swept from the seas.

  Derec glanced up at the royal palace, the white walls on the tall brown cliffs, and frowned at the sight of the flag that flapped from its staff. Something was wrong there. He stepped to the rack, took a glass, and trained it on the flag. The Royal Standard leaped into view. Derec took a breath.

  So King Thelm was back, having presumably recovered from his illness. Jeng would no longer be regent; absolute power had now passed to his father. He wondered at the alteration’s implication for himself, for Birdwing, and decided there would be little change. Thelm might negotiate an end to the war, but still Birdwing and Derec had proven themselves over and over again: Thelm wouldn’t throw away such a strategic asset.

  “Bel’s sandals!” SuKrone’s curse brought Derec’s eyes forward. Amazement crackled in his mind.

  Birdwing had rounded the fortification at the end of the New Mole, and the entire inner harbor was opened to view. The harbor was full of the tall masts and dark rigging of a northern fleet, the huge round-bellied caravels that brought metals, pitch, and turpentine to Ka Zhir every autumn, returning with sugar, kaf, and spices; and riding to anchor were northern warships, three high-charged galleons and one leaner, lower shape, a race-built galleon like Birdwing, but longer, showing thirty gunports each side.

  Floating above each ship was a green ensign with two gold crowns, the flag of Derec’s homeland.

  They had come early this year, and caught Derec unprepared.

  The scent of death swept over the poop. It was just the smell of the galleass, Derec thought; but still his spine turned chill.

  “What do we do, Captain?” Marcoyn’s mad eyes were wild. Drunkenly, he shook his fist in Derec’s face. “What the piss do we do? They’re going to have us kicking in the rigging by nightfall!”

  Birdwing was still moving toward the inner harbor, a party of men standing in the forecastle ready to drop the best bower. Derec was looking thoughtfully over the rail. One of the big galleons—Derec recognized the Sea Troll—had storm damage: one topmast was gone. The Double Crowns was missing its castles: they had presumably been razored in an effort to make it as light and handy as Birdwing. Monarch, the other high-charged galleon, stood closest, towering over every ship in harbor and carrying eighty guns. But it was the other race-built ship that had an admiral’s red pennant flying from its maintruck, and it was to this ship that Derec’s eyes turned. Torn II, he thought: so they had built her, and sent her here to find her
precursor.

  “Captain! Answer, damn you!” Marcoyn staggered, not from the heave of the deck but from his liquor.

  Derec turned his eyes on the man and tried to control the raging hatred he felt. “We will wait, Mr. Marcoyn,” he said.

  “You’ve got to do something!” Marcoyn raged. “You know Prince Jeng! Talk to him!”

  Derec looked at Marcoyn for a long moment. Marcoyn dropped his unfocused eyes, then his fist.

  “We fight under the flag of Ka Zhir,” Derec said, indicating the ensign flying overhead. “We have Zhir protection. The trading fleet is here, aye, but it’s under the two hundred guns of Fort Shzafakh and another two hundred on the mainland. They daren’t attack us, Marcoyn. Not openly.”

  Marcoyn chewed his nether lip as he thought this over. “Very well, SuPashto,” he said.

  Derec stiffened. “Captain SuPashto, if you please, Mr. Marcoyn.”

  Marcoyn’s eyes blazed dull hatred. “Captain,’” he spat. He saluted and turned away.

  The other crewmen, the small, dark Zhir standing beside the tall, fair Farlanders, had watched the confrontation, trying hard to conceal their rising fear. Derec’s quiet tones had seemed to calm them. He stepped forward to the break in the poop.

  “They daren’t touch us, boys!” he shouted. “Not openly. But there will be Two Kingdoms men ashore on leave, and for now we’ll have no shore parties. When we must send parties ashore, we will go armed, and in large groups. Now”—he ventured a ragged grin—“let’s show them what we’ve learned. As soon as our anchor’s down, I want those sails harbor-furled, without a dead man in ’em; I want our old chafing-gear down; and I’ll have some parties detailed to renew our gilding. Mr. Facer, see to it.”