by David Weber
“Stream the starboard buoy!”
The anchor buoy—a sealed float attached to the starboard anchor by a hundred-and-fifty-foot line—was released. It plunged into the water, following the anchor. If the cable parted, the buoy would still mark the anchor’s location, and its line was heavy enough that the anchor could be recovered by it.
“Stand clear of the larboard cable! Cock-bill the anchor!”
Yairley watched men with buckets of seawater douse the smoking starboard cable. Another moment or two and—
Destiny staggered. The galleon lurched, the men at the wheel were hurled violently to the deck, and Yairley’s head came up as a dull, crunching shock ran through the deck underfoot. For a moment, she seemed to hang in place, then there was a second crunch and she staggered onward, across whatever she’d struck.
“Away carpenter’s party!” Lieutenant Lathyk shouted, and the carpenter and his mates bolted for the main hatchway, racing below to check for hull damage, but Yairley had other things on his mind. Whatever else had happened, it was obvious he’d just lost his rudder. He hoped it was only temporary, but in the meantime …
“Down jib! Haul out the spanker!”
The jib disappeared, settling down to be gathered in by the hands on the bowsprit. Without the thrust of the rudder, Yairley couldn’t maintain the heading he’d originally intended. He’d planned to sail parallel to the shore while he dropped both anchors for the widest purchase possible on the treacherous bottom, but the drag of the cable still thundering out of her starboard hawsehole was already forcing Destiny’s head up to the wind. The pounding seas continued to thrust her bodily sideways to larboard, though, and he wanted to get as far away from whatever they’d struck—probably one of those Shan-wei-damned uncharted rocks—as possible before he released the second anchor.
Fifty fathoms of cable had run out to the first anchor, and the ship was slowing, turning all the way back through the wind under the braking effect of the cable’s drag. She wasn’t going to carry much farther, he decided.
“Let go the larboard anchor!”
The second anchor plunged, and the pounding vibration of heavy hemp hawsers hammered through the ship’s fabric as both cables ran out.
“Stream the larboard buoy!”
The larboard anchor buoy went over the side, and then the starboard cable came up against the riding bitt and the cable stoppers—a series of lines “nipped” to the anchor cable and then made fast to purchases on deck—came taut, preventing any more it from veering. The ship twitched, but enough slack had veered that she didn’t stop moving immediately, and the larboard cable continued running out for several more seconds. Then it, too, came up against its bitt and stoppers and Destiny came fully head to the wind and began drifting slowly to leeward until the tautening cables’ counter-balanced tension could stop her. It looked as if she’d come-to at least two hundred yards from shore, and they could use the capstans to equalize the amount of cable veered to each anchor once they were sure both were holding. In the meantime.…
Yairley had already turned to the wheel. Frahnklyn Waigan was back on his feet, although one of his assistants was still on the deck with an unnaturally bent arm which was obviously broken. As Yairley looked, the petty officer turned the wheel easily with a single hand and grimaced.
“Nothin’, Sir.” He’d somehow retained a wad of chewleaf, and he spat a disgusted stream of brown juice into the spittoon fixed to the base of the binnacle. “Nothin’ at all.”
“I see.” Yairley nodded. He’d been afraid of that, and he wondered just how bad the damage actually was. If he’d simply lost the tiller or fractured the rudderhead, repair would be relatively straightforward … probably. That was the reason Destiny carried an entire spare tiller, after all. Even if the rudderhead had been entirely wrung off, leaving nothing to attach the tiller to, they could still rig chains to the rudder itself just above the waterline and steer with tackles. But he doubted they’d been that fortunate, and if the rudder was entirely gone.…
He turned as Lathyk arrived on the quarterdeck.
“Both anchors seem to be holding, Sir,” the first lieutenant said, touching his chest in salute. “For now, at least.”
“Thank you, Master Lathyk,” Yairley said sincerely, although he really wished the lieutenant had been able to leave off his last four words. “I suppose the next order of business is—”
“Beg your pardon, Sir.” Yairley turned his head the other way to face Maikel Symmyns, Destiny’s boatswain.
“Yes, Bosun?”
“’Fraid the entire rudder’s gone, Sir.” Symmyns grimaced. “Can’t be certain yet, but it looks to me as if the gudgeons’ve been stripped clean away, as well.”
“Better and better, Bosun.” Yairley sighed, and the weathered, salt-and-pepper-haired Symmyns smiled grimly. The boatswain was the ship’s senior noncommissioned officer, and he’d first gone to sea as a ship’s boy when he was only six years old. There was very little he hadn’t seen in the ensuing fifty years.
“Beg pardon, Captain.” Yet another voice spoke, and Yairley found one of the ship’s carpenter’s mates at his elbow.
“Yes?”
“Master Mahgail’s compliments, Sir, and we’re making water aft. Master Mahgail says as how it looks like we’ve started at least a couple of planks, but nothing the pumps can’t handle. Most likely stripped a lot of the copper, though, and the rudder post’s cracked clean through. And he asks if he can have a few more hands to help inspect the rest of the hull.”
“I see.” Yairley gazed at him for a moment, then nodded. “My compliments to Master Mahgail. Tell him I appreciate the report, and that I look forward to more complete information as it comes to him. Master Lathyk,” he looked at the first lieutenant, “see to it that Master Mahgail has all the hands he needs.”
“Aye, Sir.”
“Very well, then.” Yairley drew a deep breath, clasped his hands behind him once more, and squared his shoulders. “Let’s be about it,” he said.
.IV.
HMS Destiny, 54, Off Scrabble Shoal, Grand Duchy of Silkiah
“Pull, you lazy bastards!” Stywyrt Mahlyk, Sir Dunkyn Yairley’s personal coxswain, shouted as the thirty-foot longboat porpoised its way through the confused waves and spray like a seasick kraken. Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk, crouching in the bow and hanging on for dear life while Destiny’s starboard sheet anchor weighted down the longboat’s stern and accentuated the boat’s … lively movement, thought Mahlyk sounded appallingly cheerful under the circumstances.
“Think this is a blow?!” the coxswain demanded of the laboring oarsmen in scoffing tones as the boat’s forward third went briefly airborne across a wave crest, then slammed back down again. “Why, you sorry Delferahkan excuses for sailor men! I’ve farted worse weather than this!”
Despite their exertion and the spray soaking them to the skin, one or two of the oarsmen actually managed a laugh. Mahlyk was amazingly popular with Destiny’s crew, despite his slavedriver mentality where Captain Yairley’s cutter was concerned. At the moment, he’d traded in the cutter for the larger and more seaworthy longboat, but he’d brought along the cutter’s crew, and there was no insult to which he could lay his tongue that didn’t make them smile. In point of fact, his crew took simple pride in his ability to outswear any other member of the ship’s company when the mood took him.
Which, alas, it did far more often than not, if the truth be known, especially when the captain wasn’t about.
He and Aplyn-Ahrmahk were old friends, and the ensign remembered an incendiary raid on an Emeraldian port in which he and Mahlyk had torched a half-dozen warehouses and at least two taverns. They’d tossed incendiaries into three galleons, as well, as he recalled, but they hadn’t been the only ones firing the ships, so they couldn’t claim solo credit for them. Their current expedition was somewhat less entertaining than that one had been, but it was certainly no less exciting.
The longboat swooped up another steep wave
, leaving Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s stomach briefly behind, and the ensign turned to look back at the galleon. Destiny pitched and rolled to her bower anchors with all the elegance of a drunken pig, masts and yards spiraling crazily against the clouds. She looked truncated and incomplete with her upper masts struck, but she was still one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. More importantly at the moment, Lieutenant Lathyk stood on the forecastle, a semaphore flag tucked under his arm, watching the boat from under a shading palm while Lieutenant Symkee used one of the new sextants the Royal College had recently introduced as a successor to the old back staff to measure the angle between the longboat and the buoys marking the positions of the bower anchors. As Aplyn-Ahrmahk watched, Lathyk took the flag from under his arm and raised it slowly over his head.
“Ready, Mahlyk!” the ensign called.
“Aye, Sir!” the coxswain acknowledged, and reached for the lanyard with his left hand while his right fist gripped the tiller bar. Another minute passed. Then another. Then—
The flag in Lathyk’s hand waved.
“Let go!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk shouted, and the longboat surged suddenly as Mahlyk jerked the lanyard which toggled the trigger and released the three-ton sheet anchor from the heavy davit rigged in the longboat’s stern. It plunged into the water, well up to windward of the more weatherly of the two anchors Destiny had already dropped, and the longboat seemed to shake itself in delight at having shed the irksome load.
“Stream the buoy!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk ordered, and the anchor buoy was heaved over the side behind the sheet anchor.
Although the longboat moved much more easily without the anchor’s hanging weight and the drag of the cable trailing astern, there were still a few tricky moments as Mahlyk brought it about. But the coxswain chose his moment carefully, using wind and wave action to help drive the boat around, and then they were pulling strongly back towards Destiny.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk sat on the bow thwart, looking aft past Mahlyk at the brightly painted anchor buoy, which got progressively smaller with distance, disappearing in the troughs of the waves, then bobbing back into sight. Boat work was always risky in blowing weather like this, but on a lee shore, with the entire rudder carried away and a bottom where anchors were known to drag, the notion of getting a third anchor laid out made plenty of sense to him. Of course, he did wonder how he’d ended up selected for the delightful task. Personally, he would cheerfully have declined the honor in favor of Tohmys Tymkyn, Destiny’s fourth lieutenant. But Tymkyn was busy with the galleon’s pinnace, locating and buoying the spire of rock which had claimed the ship’s rudder. He was having at least as exciting a time of it as Aplyn-Ahrmahk, and the ensign wondered if the two of them had been chosen because they were so junior they’d be less badly missed if one or both of them didn’t make it home again.
I’m sure I’m doing the Captain a disservice, he told himself firmly, wiping spray from his face, and then smiled as he wondered how Sir Dunkyn was going to react to his upcoming little show of initiative. I can always blame it on Stywyrt, he thought hopefully. Sir Dunkyn’s known him long enough to realize what a corrupting influence he can be on a young and innocent officer such as myself.
“Pull! Langhorne—I thought you were seamen!” Mahlyk bawled, as if on cue. “I’ve seen dockside doxies with stronger backs! Aye, and legs, too!”
Aplyn-Ahrmahk shook his head in resignation.
* * *
Sir Dunkyn Yairley watched with carefully concealed relief as the longboat was swayed back aboard. The pinnace followed, nesting inside the longboat on the gallows of spare spars above the main hatch. The cutters on the quarter and stern davits would have been much easier to get out and in again, especially with the deck so cluttered with the yards and sails which had been sent down from above to reduce topweight, and they probably would have sufficed. But they might not have, either, in these sea conditions, and he was disinclined to take chances with men’s lives, whether the rules of the game allowed him to show his concern or not.
And they definitely wouldn’t have sufficed for what that young idiot pulled after dropping the sheet anchor! he thought sourly.
He considered reprimanding Aplyn-Ahrmahk. The ensign and that scapegrace ne’er-do-well Mahlyk had taken it upon themselves to sweep the seabed north of Destiny with a grappling iron-weighted trailing line which should (in theory, at least) have snagged on any rocks rising high enough to be a threat to the galleon even at low tide. As a result, Yairley now knew he had over a mile of rock-free clear water for maneuvering room to the north of his current position. They hadn’t happened to ask permission for that little escapade, and they’d almost capsized twice before they’d finished, and the captain was severely torn between a warm sense of pride in a youngster who’d become one of his special protégés and anger at both of them for risking their lives and their entire boat’s crew without authorization.
Well, time enough to make my mind up about that later, he decided. And in the meantime, I’ll just concentrate on putting the fear of Shan-wei into the young jackanapes.
He paused long enough to give Aplyn-Ahrmahk a steely-eyed glare as a down payment, then turned back to the task of creating a jury-rigged rudder.
Maikel Symmyns had gotten a spare main topgallant yard laid across the quarterdeck so that its arms jutted out through the aftermost gunports on either side, supported with “lifts” to the mizzenmast and guys running forward to the main chains. Hanging blocks had been secured to either end of the spar, and the falls run forward from them through the fairleads under the wheel. Several turns had been taken around the barrel of the wheel, and then the free ends of the falls had been seized to the staple at the midpoint of the drum to anchor everything firmly.
“Here ‘tis, Sir,” Garam Mahgail said, and Yairley turned to face the ship’s carpenter. The carpenter was a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer, and he was probably close to half-again Yairley’s age and bald as an egg, but still brawny and calloused. At the moment, his bushy eyebrows were raised as he exhibited his craftsmanship for the captain’s approval.
“Is this what you had in mind, Sir?” he asked, and Yairley nodded.
“That’s precisely what I had in mind, Master Mahgail!” he assured the warrant officer, and beckoned Symmyns over. The boatswain obeyed the gesture, and the captain pointed at Mahgail’s handiwork.
“Well, Bo’sun?”
“Aye, I think it’ll work right well, Sir,” Symmyns said with a slow smile of approval. “Mind you, it’s going to be Shan-wei’s own drag in a light air, Cap’n! Be like towing a couple of sea anchors astern, it will.”
“Oh, not quite that bad, Bo’sun,” Yairley disagreed with a smile of his own. “More like one sea anchor and a half.”
“Whatever you say, Sir.” Symmyns’ smile turned into a grin for a moment, and then he turned back to his working party and started barking additional orders.
At Yairley’s instructions, Mahgail had fitted a pair of gundeck water tubs with bridles on their open ends, and inhauls had been made fast to the bottoms. Now the captain watched as one of the tubs was secured to either end of the spar by a line run to the inhaul. Then the bitter end from the hanging block was secured to the bridle. With the wheel in the “midships” position, the inhauls would tow the tubs through the water a good fifty feet behind the ship with their bottoms up, but when the wheel was turned to larboard, the bridle rope from the tub on that side to the barrel of the wheel would be shortened, pulling the tub around to tow open-end first. The resultant heavy drag on that side of the ship would force the galleon to turn to larboard until the wheel was reversed and the tub went gradually back to its bottom-up position, where it would exert far less drag. And as the wheel continued turning to starboard, the starboard tub would go from the bottom-up to the open-end-forward position, causing the ship to turn to starboard.
There were drawbacks to the arrangement, of course. As Symmyns had pointed out, the drag penalty would be significant. Water was far denser than ai
r, which explained how something as relatively tiny as a ship’s rudder could steer something a galleon’s size to begin with, and the resistance even with both tubs floating bottom-up would knock back Destiny’s speed far more than a landsman might expect. And whereas a rudder could be used even when backing a ship, the tubs were all too likely to foul their control lines—or actually be drawn under the ship—in that sort of situation. But Symmyns’ initial diagnosis had been correct. The gudgeons, the hinge-like sockets into which the pintle pins of the rudder mounted, had been completely torn out, and the rudder post itself was badly damaged and leaking. They had a pattern from which to build a complete replacement rudder, but there was nothing left to attach a replacement to, and his improvised arrangement should work once he got the ship underway once more.
Which isn’t going to happen, of course, until the wind veers, he reflected sourly.
But at least he had three anchors out, so far they all seemed to be holding, and there was no sign anyone ashore had even noticed their presence. Under the circumstances, he was more than prepared to settle for that for the moment.
* * *
“Oh, Pasquale, take me now!” Trahvys Saylkyrk groaned.
He was the oldest of Destiny’s midshipmen—in fact, he was two years older than Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk—and he didn’t usually have any particular problem with seasickness. The last couple of days had pushed even his stomach over the edge, however, and he looked down at the stew in his bowl with a distinctly queasy expression. The ship’s motion was actually more violent than it had been before she anchored, in some ways, as heavy, confused seas continued to roll in from the southeast. She lay with her head to the wind now, which meant she climbed each steep roller as it came in, then buried her nose and kicked her heels at the sky as it ran aft. And just to complete Saylkyrk’s misery, the galleon threw in her own special little corkscrew with every third or fourth plunge.