There Will Be War Volume VII

by Jerry Pournelle

  “Very good.”

  The boatmen tossed oars and Derec jumped for the entry port. He stepped onto the maindeck and sensed rather than saw his crew massed beneath the stars. He mounted the poop, then turned to face them. “We’re running for Liavek, men,” he said. “I have reason to believe they will welcome us.”

  There was a stirring ended swiftly by petty officers’ voices calling for silence.

  “Those of you who were slaves,” Derec said, “are now free.”

  Now there was an excited chattering that took the officers some time to quiet. Derec held up a hand.

  “You may have to fight to keep that freedom, and that within the hour. Now—quietly—go to your stations. No drums, no noise. Facer, fetch me the pilot.”

  Derec leaned against the poop rail, pulled the big horse pistols from his waistband, and carefully wound the spring-driven locks. He was aware of the Tichenese wizard standing by, watching him. “Do you know weather magic, wizard?”

  “Some. It is not my specialty.”

  “What is?”

  “Fireworks. Explosions. Illusion.”

  “Can you make Birdwing look like something else?”

  “Your ship is a little large for that. Perhaps I could cloak it in darkness. The darkness will not be absolute, but it may make its outlines less clear.”

  “Very well. Do so.”

  Facer and SuKrone pushed the pilot up the poop ladder. She was a small, dark woman, her head wrapped in a kind of turban. She was dressed in the house robe she’d been wearing when SuKrone’s men had kidnapped her. Derec pointed one of his pistols at her, and he heard her intake of breath.

  “Take us out by the back channel,” he said coldly. “If you fail me, I will shoot you twice in the belly. Follow my instructions, and I’ll put you over the side in a small boat once we’re clear.”

  The pilot bowed, raising her palms to her forehead. “I understand, Your Excellency. But we must await the tide.”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Thereabouts, yes.”

  “Do not fail me.” He gestured with the pistol. “Stand over there.”

  “Your obedient servant, Excellency.”

  “Wizard, Facer, come with me.” Derec stepped forward off the poop, along the gangway, climbed the fo’c’sle. The land breeze brought the sound of music and laughter from the town. Derec looked to starboard, where the twisting back channel between Great Kraken Island and the mainland was invisible in the darkness. Glowing softly in the night, masthead riding lights stood out against the black.

  “There’s our problem,” he said. “Double Crowns is moored right near the entrance to the passage. We’ll have to pass within half a cable.”

  Facer pursed his lips, blew air hesitantly. “They’ve lookouts set for us, I’m sure. They know we want to run. And if they give the alarm, Shzafakh’s bastions will blow us to bits.”

  “My darkness won’t cover us that well, Captain,” the wizard said. He was speaking easily in Derec’s own language, and with a native accent: apparently he’d spent time in the Two Kingdoms.

  “We can’t fire on them without raising an alarm,” Derec mused. “We can’t run aboard them without calling attention to ourselves.” He shook his head. “We’ll just have to run past and hope for a miracle.”

  “Captain…” Tevvik’s tone was meditative. “If we can’t pass without being noticed, perhaps we can make people notice something other than ourselves.”

  “What d’ye mean, Wizard?”

  “Perhaps I can cause an explosion aboard Double Crowns. Then maybe the gunners in Shzafakh will think we’re running from a fire, not for freedom.”

  Derec scowled. “The magazine is protected against spells.”

  “I’m sure. But powder in the open is not.”

  “They would not have cartridges in the open—it’s all held in the magazine till needed.” Scornfully. “Don’t waste my time with these notions, Wizard.”

  “I was suggesting a boat full of powder nestled under that ship’s stern. I can make that go off well enough.”

  Astonishment tingled in Derec’s nerves. He tried not to show it; instead, he stroked his chin and frowned. “With a little sorcerous wind to push it where it’s needed, aye,” he said. He pretended to consider. “Very well, Wizard,” he said. “We’ll do it. Facer, fetch the gunner.”

  Tevvik smiled. “I wish you wouldn’t use the word wizard that way, Captain. The word’s not a curse.”

  Derec looked at him. “That’s a matter of opinion, Mr. Tevvik.”

  He led the Tichenese back to the quarterdeck and gave the orders for men to file to the magazine and bring up ten casks of powder. “Barefoot only, mind,” he said. “No hobnails to strike a spark. Belts and weapons are to be laid aside. Scarves tied over their ears so their earrings won’t strike a spark.” He drew his pistols and pointed them at Tevvik.

  “Don’t set them off when they’re alongside,” he said, “or I’ll serve you as I’d serve the pilot.”

  The wizard raised his hands and grinned. “I have no intention of blowing myself up, Captain.”

  “Maintain those intentions,” Derec said, “and we’ll have no trouble.”

  The barge was loaded with powder, and canvas thrown over the barrels to avoid getting them wet. The boat’s small mast was raised, its lateen set, its tiller lashed. The boat was warped astern and Derec concentrated, summoning his power, keeping it ready. A small wind to blow his thirty-foot barge was fully within his capabilities.

  “Tide’s turning, Captain.”

  “Very well. Prepare to slip the cable and sheet home.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  There was a murmur of bare feet as men took their stations. Derec took a careful breath. “Sheet home the main tops’l. Set the spritsail and bonaventure.”

  The heavy canvas topsail fell with a rumble, then rumbled again as it filled with wind. Birdwing tilted, surged, came alive. Water chuckled under the counter.

  “Slip the cable.”

  The cable murmured from the hawsehole, then there was a splash as its bitter end fell into the sea. A pity, Derec thought, to lose the best bower anchor.

  “Helm answers, sir,” said the steersmen.

  “Larboard two points. There. Amidships.”

  Derec glanced over the stern, saw phosphorescence glinting from the bone in the teeth of the powder boat.

  Birdwing was barely moving. The back channel was dangerous and twisting; he needed maneuverability there, not speed.

  “Pilot,” he said. The woman stepped forward.

  “Sir.”

  “Take command. No shouting, now. Pass your orders quietly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The pistols were growing heavy in Derec’s hands. He ignored the tension in his arms and stepped to the weather rail, peering for sight of Double Crowns. The masthead lights were growing nearer. Five cables. Four. Three. He summoned his power.

  “Cast off the boat.”

  Derec’s heart leaped to his throat as the boat lurched wildly to the first puff of wind and threatened to capsize, but the barge steadied onto its course, passing to weather of Birdwing. He guided the boat with little tugs of his mind, aimed it toward Double Crowns.

  Two cables. Now one, and from across the water a shout. More shouts. The barge thudded against the razee galleon’s tumblehome near the stern. A drum began beating. Alarm pulsed in Derec: on this still night, that drum would be heard all over town. Derec steeled his mind to the necessity of what was to come.

  “Give us fire, Wizard,” he said.

  “Your obedient servant.” Tevvik pursed his lips in concentration and made an elegant gesture with his hand. Derec remembered at the last second to close his eyes and preserve his night vision.

  Even through closed lids he saw the yellow flash. A burst of hot wind gusted through his hair. He could hear shouts, screams, and, from his own ship, gasps of awe. He opened his eyes.

  Double Crowns seemed unchanged, but he
could hear the sound of water pouring like a river into her hold. The drum was silenced; in its place were cries of alarm. As Derec watched, the razee began to list. Crewmen poured from the hatches in a storm of pounding feet. The galleon’s list grew more pronounced; Derec could hear things rolling across the deck, fetching up against the bulwarks. Then came a sound that was a seaman’s nightmare, a noise that half-paralyzed Derec with fear— the rumble of a gun broken loose, roaring across the tilting deck like a blind, maddened bull before it punched clean through the ship’s side, making another hole through which the sea could enter.

  He couldn’t stand to watch any more. He moved to the other side of the poop, but the sounds still pursued him, more guns breaking free, timbers rending, men screaming, the desperate splashing of drowning crewmen. Then, mercifully, Birdwing was past, heeled to the wind, and entering the channel.

  The pilot negotiated two turns before the first challenge came from one of Fort Shzafakh’s bastions. The island rose steeply here, and Birdwing ghosted with its sails luffing for lack of wind. The fort was perched right overhead—from its walls the garrison could as easily drop cannonballs on Birdwing as fire them from cannon.

  “Hoy, there! What ship is that!”

  Derec was ready. He cupped his hands and shouted upwards in his accented Zhir. “Two Kingdoms ship Sea Troll!” he roared. “A warship blew up in harbor and started fires on other ships! We’re trying to run clear!”

  “Holy Thung! So that’s what we heard.” There was an awed pause. “Good luck, there.”

  “Much obliged.”

  Birdwing ghosted on. Derec could see grins on the faces of his officers, on the wizard. In his mind he could only hear the sounds of Double Crowns filling with water, men dying and timbers rending. He barely noticed when the channel opened up and ahead lay the dark and empty sea.

  An hour after dawn the land breeze died. The pilot had been put ashore long since, and even the old cone of Great Kraken Island was below the horizon: Birdwing was running northwest along the coast in the clear, broad, shallow channel between the mainland and Ka Zhir’s stretch of low boundary islands. Winds were often uncertain in the morning, particularly near the coast and especially during the transition between the nightly land breeze and the daytime sea breeze: there was nothing unusual about it. Derec dropped the second bower anchor and let the galleon swing to and fro in the little puffs that remained. The crew drowsed at their stations. Fretfully Derec looked southward. Sea Troll, he thought, was damaged: it could not pursue without raising a new maintopmast. But Monarch and the new race-built ship were fully seaworthy. Were they becalmed as well? He suspected not. Derec looked at the Tichenese.

  “Master Tevvik, do you think we can whistle up a wind between the two of us?”

  The wizard spread his hands. “I am willing to try, Captain. I am not an expert.”

  Derec called for a pot of kaf, ordered breakfast for the crew, and the two went to his day cabin. The partitions separating the cabin from the maindeck had been broken down when Birdwing was cleared for action, providing a long, unbroken row of guns from the stern windows to the bow, and Derec’s table was hastily brought up from the orlop, and blankets to screen him from the curious eyes of the crew.

  “You’re planning on privateering for Liavek now, I take it?” the wizard asked. “There will be a Two Kingdoms fleet in harbor, you know.”

  “I’ll find a small harbor somewhere along the coast. Come in under a flag of truce, negotiate with the Levar’s government.”

  “I can speak for you.” Derec looked up in surprise. The wizard smiled again. “I know a man named Pitullio—he works for His Scarlet Eminence.”

  “I thank you,” Derec said. “I’ll consider that.”

  For two and a half hours he and the wizard tried to raise a wind, preferably a strong westerly that Birdwing could tack into, and that Monarch, the old-fashioned high-charged galleon, could not. The puffs continued, the ship dancing at the end of its cable, sails slatting.

  “Captain.” Facer’s voice. “The lookouts see a squall coming up from the south.”

  Derec sighed. He could feel sweat dotting his brow: he had been concentrating hard. The wizard looked at him with amused eyes, grin white in his dark face.

  “It’s not our wind,” Tevvik said, “but I hope it will do.”

  Derec rose wordlessly and pushed aside the curtain. His body was a mass of knots. “Ready a party at the capstan,” he ordered. “I don’t want to lose another anchor.” He climbed to the poop.

  It was a black squall, right enough, coming up from the south with deliberate speed. Ten minutes of stiff wind, at least, and with luck the squall might carry Birdwing with it for hours, right into the stronger ocean breezes. Derec had the second bower broken out. The galleon drifted, waiting for the squall.

  Derec looked into the darkness, hoping to gauge its strength, and his heart sank.

  Right in the center of the squall, he saw, were two ships. He didn’t need his glass to know they were Monarch and Torn II, driving after him on a sorcerous breeze. Perhaps their wizards had even been responsible for his being becalmed.

  “Quarters, gentlemen,” he said. “We are being pursued. Have my steward fetch my armor, and send the wizard to the orlop.”

  He stopped himself, just in time, from glancing up into the mizzen shrouds. The ghosts of his slaughtered countrymen, he knew, had been an illusion.

  But now, more than ever, he felt their gaze on the back of his head.

  They were coming down together, Derec saw, straight down the eight-mile slot between the mainland and the sandy barrier isles. Monarch was to starboard of the race-built ship, three or four cables apart. There was a black line drawn in the azure sea a mile before them where the squall was pushing up a wave.

  “We’ll try to outrun them,” Derec said. “We may prove their match in speed.” He tried to sound confident, but he knew his assurances were hollow: the conditions were ideal for Monarch, booming straight downwind with her baggy sails full of sorcery. “If we lose the race,” Derec went on, “I’ll try to get the weather gage. If we’re to windward, Monarch at least will be out of the fight.”

  A sigh of wind ruffled Birdwing’s sails. The ship stirred on the water. The sails filled, then died again. Derec strapped on his armor and watched as the darkness approached.

  And then the squall hit, and the sun went dark. The sails boomed like thunder as they flogged massively in the air; the ship tilted; rain spattered Derec’s breastplate. Then the sails were sheeted home, the yards braced—the helm answered, and Birdwing was racing straight downwind, a white bone in its teeth, sails as taut as the belly of a woman heavy with child. Magic crackled in Derec’s awareness, a seething chaos of storm and wind. Desperately he looked astern.

  Monarch seemed huge, castles towering over its leaner consort, its masts bending like a coachwhip in the force of the wind. Derec gauged its speed, and a cold welling of despair filled him. Birdwing seemed to be maintaining its lead over Torn II, but Monarch was surging ahead as studding sails blossomed on its yards. Birdwing’s own studding sails were useless in this wind; the stuns’l booms would snap like toothpicks.

  Derec stiffened at the sound of a gun: the big ship was trying its chasers. Monarch was pitching too much in this following sea, and Derec never saw the fall of shot.

  Yard by yard the great ship gained, its black hull perched atop a boil of white water. Derec hoped for a miracle, and none came. Hollow anguish filled him.

  “Take in the t’gallants,” he ordered. “We will await them.” Diligently he fought down despair. “Don’t send down the t’gallant yards,” he said. “We may yet be able to show them our heels.”

  Monarch’s stuns’ls began coming in as they perceived Derec’s shortening sail. The maneuver was not done well, and sheets began to fly, spilling wind from sails, a last-ditch method of slowing Monarch so that it would not overshoot its target.

  Derec watched nervously, gnawing his lip, trying to sum
mon his power and weave a defensive net around his ship. He could feel Tevvik’s energies joining his, strengthening his shields. Another gust of rain spattered the deck; gun captains shielded their matches with their bodies. Monarch looked as if it were coming up on Birdwing’s larboard side, but that might be a feint. Would the huge ship alter course at the last minute and try for a raking shot across Birdwing’s stern? If so, Derec had to be ready to turn with her. Plans flickered through Derec’s mind as he gauged possible enemy moves and his own responses.

  “Load the guns. Roundshot and grape. Run out the larboard battery.” Maybe the guns running out would prod Monarch’s captain into making his move.

  But no. The man seemed eager to get to grips, and disdained maneuver. He had almost thirty guns more than Derec; he could afford to let them do his thinking for him. The black ship came closer, its little scraplike sprit topsail drawing even with Birdwing‘s stern. Derec could hear officers’ bellowed commands as they struggled to reduce sail.

  Anxiety filled Derec as the ship rumbled to the sound of gun trucks running out. Monarch was pulling up within fifty yards. Torn II was eclipsed behind the big ship, but now that Birdwing had shortened sail he could expect her shortly. He glanced again at the men, seeing the gun captains crouched over the guns with their slow matches, the officers pacing the deck with rapiers drawn, ready to run through any crewman who left his station.

  “No firing till my order!” Derec bellowed. “There may be a few premature shots—ignore them!” And then inspiration struck. He turned to one of Marcoyn’s marines, a blond man sighting down the length of a swivel gun set aft of the mizzen shrouds. “Blow on your match, man,” Derec said. “I’m going to try a little trick.”

  The marine looked at him, uncertain, then grinned through his curling blond beard, leaned forward over his matchlock, and blew. The match brightened redly. “You other marines, stand ready,” Derec said. He looked at the black ship, and fear shivered down his spine as he saw himself looking straight into the muzzle of a demicannon. Each enemy gunport had been decorated with the snarling brass head of a leopard: now guns were running out the beasts’ mouths. Monarch’s foremast was even with Birdwing’s mizzen. Derec waited, his pulse beating in his ears, as Monarch crawled forward with glacial speed.