Mamelukes

by Jerry Pournelle

  Rowers surged up from their benches, boiling up through the hatches with weapons in hand, piling in behind their marines, and it was all close-range, hand-to-hand butchery. Rick had seen it on far too many battlefields since arriving on Tran, but not like this. Not compressed into such a small area. Not on a heaving, rolling wooden perch in the middle of a spray-lashed sea. And the fact that it was so far away, so distant even through the binoculars, only made it worse somehow.

  There was nothing wrong with the Duchy crews’ courage, but the three-to-one odds on the outer wings quickly worked in Nikeis’ favor. The opposing great galleys locked together in the center, but the Nikeisian galee sottili had been loaded with extra drafts of militia to support their marines. They added their weight to the onslaught sweeping inward from the wings, and though the Riccigionan marines fought frantically to hold the bulwarks, their lines cracked in too many places. Nikeisian marines swarmed through the gaps, engaging the rowers trying to reinforce them, and Nikeisian rowers followed, spreading out, taking the Riccigionan defenders from the rear.

  The defense crumpled quickly, the outermost Duchy ships fell, and the victorious Nikeisian marines prepared to sweep down the rest of the line while the angry wind drove the entire, rafted mass back onto the channel mouth.

  * * *

  Captain Gulian Foscari tried to hide his nervousness as his ship, Corona, threaded its way towards the heart of Nikeis. He stood beside Terenzio Rambaldo, Corona’s first lieutenant, on the quarterdeck, his gaze flicking back and forth between the leadsman on the bow and the windows and balconies of the buildings flanking the channel. That gaze was spending more time on the buildings, actually. The leadsman would tell him if there was a chain or other obstruction in the channel, but crossbow bolts or arrows could fall from any opening in the buildings above them with no warning. There was not a Nikeisian in sight—no doubt they had pulled as many of their women and children as they could up the hills and out of harm’s way—but he was sure the defenders would show themselves soon enough, and when they did . . .

  The sounds of battle receded as his crew maneuvered expertly through another twist in the channel. Now, safely in the lee of the taller islands, the water was far calmer and it seemed almost silent compared to the blowing wind and tumultuous waves through which they’d sailed throughout the night. It wasn’t silent, of course; not with that same wind still muscling its way through the buildings about them, but it was close enough he could actually hear the creak of the hull.

  “Our spies were right,” Rambaldo said quietly. “Nikeis has neglected its defenses. Perhaps we’ve already seen the best they have to offer.”

  “Perhaps,” Foscari replied. “I don’t intend to rely on that, but our cousins’ tightfisted nature may have been their undoing. I do know they were making offers to hire experienced crews very recently.”

  “It’s too late to hire us,” Rambaldo said with a grin.

  “Very true.”

  Foscari had been there when the Captain General of the Riccigionan fleet discussed the offer from the High Chancellor of the Five Kingdoms. He’d never seen so much gold and silver before, and over and above that, the High Chancellor had promised that the Five Kingdoms would waive all tribute for the next two years if the Grand Duke joined the armada to take Nikeis. That would have been tempting enough, but the promise of loot from the star lord boxes had been even more tempting. That kind of prize could bring a lifetime of luxuries!

  Still, a small suspicion had been planted in Foscari’s mind that day, and it had grown far stronger now that they were actually here in Nikeis. The gold, the offer, and the details about the boxes and their destination had all arrived in the Grand Duchy well before any rumors of the sky lights had arrived by way of ships coming from Nikeis. Or from anywhere else in the Inland Sea, for that matter. So how had the Five Kingdoms known about them so much sooner than anyone else?

  I fear the hands of the sky demons are behind this message from Issardos, he thought now, and too many legends warned of the price which always accompanied the sky demons’ aid.

  They rounded another bend and Corona emerged from the channel’s shadows into the relative brightness of the inner lagoon. The first outriders of the storm clouds which had pursued the fleet throughout the night stretched overhead, but the visibility was far greater than it had been.

  “There!” Rambaldo cried. “There they are—just like he said it would be!”

  The first lieutenant was pointing at three preposterously large, oddly shaped boxes lined up before the Doge’s Palace on the far side of a half-flooded square. They were painted blue, with dark and strange letterings of different sizes and in different colors scattered across them. Between them and the edge of the square was a head-high barricade, built roughly and in obvious haste out of paving stones, timbers, and what looked like stone taken from demolished buildings. The one thing Foscari couldn’t see were any defenders.

  “Take us in closer,” he said. “But slowly! Let’s not get deep enough for any nasty surprises while we’re all alone.”

  Rambaldo looked mulish for a moment, but then his own common sense reasserted itself and he nodded before he turned back to the helmsman.

  Corona sidled cautiously towards the square in the eerie quiet, broken only by the sound of the wind buffeting the buildings all about them, and still there was no one to be seen. Crewmen and officers grinned at each other with greedy delight, but there was an edge of disquiet in those grins.

  “Maybe they all ran away,” Rambaldo said nervously.

  “Maybe, but—”

  A sharp slapping sound, like a fist against a jaw, interrupted Foscari’s response. The steersman went up on his toes, hands flying to his chest, and a spray of blood erupted between his shoulder blades. A single explosive crack of thunder sounded an instant later, and the steersman fell to the deck.

  Then Rambaldo’s jaw disintegrated in a pink cloud, followed by the same thunderclap. The ship veered off course. The sound of a whistle rang out from behind the waiting barricade, and dark-faced men with strange hats appeared along it.

  Someone barked orders in an unknown language, in a voice louder than any Foscari had ever heard. Then the thunder crackled again, far closer and twenty times as loud. Something struck him. He fell to the deck, clutching his own chest, and saw the blood erupting between his fingers. He realized the quarterdeck was covered in bodies. And the forecastle. Bodies like his. Someone was screaming. No, a lot of men were screaming.

  It was hard to breathe, and he closed his eyes to rest.

  * * *

  The fustas swarmed the drifting galley and Rick watched Roman legionnaires and Nikeisian halberdiers storm across its bulwarks. The stunned rowers were overwhelmed before they could even rise from their benches.

  “That was excellent, Mac,” Rick said. “Pass the word to everyone on the net—well done!”

  He returned his gaze to the fight outside the northern channel as Mason keyed the microphone, and his smile faded. The Nikeisian marines had closed in on the last two Riccigionan ships in the center of the line, coming at the defenders from three directions at once. The Riccigionans were clearly doomed, but they stubbornly refused to yield.

  “Ah, hell!” Rick snarled as he raised his binoculars to the turbulent seas beyond the outer lagoon and saw the reason they were being so stubborn.

  At least a score of additional galleys, the standard of the Five Kingdoms starched stiff as steel at their mastheads by the ever-stronger wind, came storming towards the churning water of the outer barrier. They heeled dangerously as they rode the gale, but they weren’t slowing, and even more ships followed astern of them. The Nikeisian squadron was out of time. Even if the city’s marines managed to end the fight before the Five Kingdoms galleys arrived, the defending ships couldn’t possibly cut themselves free of the rafted mass and redeploy in time to meet them.

  Admiral Stigliano must have reached the same conclusion. The interlocked Nikeisian and Riccigionan gall
eys had been driven back on the mouth of the channel, and as Rick watched, the Nikeisian crews not actively fighting scrambled to drop anchors and grapnels into the water from as many ships as possible while others lashed them as tightly together as they could. They stretched across the channel, almost directly between the twin fortresses on Lido and San Lazzaro, like a huge, wooden boom. But it was a boom made of ships and men.

  Cork in a bottle, he thought, and his heart sank. It wasn’t a surprise, really. It had always been a possibility—indeed, a probability—that something just like this would happen. That’s why you put Walbrook where you did. He watched the Nikeisians turning their ships into their city’s outer bulwark, knowing it meant most of them would die, and something inside him quailed from the order he knew he would almost certainly have to give.

  “Publius says he’s going to commandeer the galley they just captured as his new command ship,” Mason reported.

  “You’re kidding me!” Rick lowered his binoculars to look at the major in disbelief.

  “Says the fusta crews will run the deck. His security team will make sure the rowers stay put, and his legionnaires will be the marines.”

  “Oh, crap!” Rick shook his head. “Tell him to keep his ass—I mean, kindly ask him to at least stay in the inner lagoon.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  And what the hell do I do if he gets himself killed? Rick wondered, turning back to the fight in the channel.

  * * *

  The shoulder mic chirped.

  Warner could barely hear it through the crashing roar of sea and wind, and he was tempted to not answer it. He was too busy hugging the mainmast like a sodden bear while he waged a grim rearguard action against his nausea. Maybe if he just went ahead and threw up he’d feel better afterward?

  They’d been sailing for five hours, and he’d had enough rolling and pitching to last a lifetime. Especially after what he’d endured when they changed tack an hour earlier. He’d had to abandon his spot by the mast as the deck crew adjusted the sail, and he’d huddled with the other mercenaries as the steering oar was put hard over.

  Martins had explained—with what Warner personally considered appalling cheerfulness—that they’d have to wear ship rather than tack.

  “Why?” Warner had asked, and Martins had shrugged.

  “These galleys’ lateen sails are handier for coming about—turning upwind to change tack—than a square-rigger would be without a proper jib.” Warner nodded in impatient understanding, and Martins shrugged. “But handier or no, Captain Pilinius doesn’t want to risk it in this lot.” The Brit waved a hand at the tumult raging around them. “Turning downwind will take longer, because he’ll have farther to turn, but it lets him use the wind instead of fighting it. And we’re far less likely to get caught and thrown aback facing straight into it.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Warner had said fervently, wiping spray from his face.

  Of course, that had been before Pilinius actually did it.

  If working with the wind was supposed to be safer and easier, Larry Warner never wanted to be aboard a ship that did it the hard way. Ferox had rolled madly, heaving in protest, and unless Warner was badly mistaken, she’d damn near capsized in the process. Huge clouds of spray had burst up over the angular shape of her oar box and water had broken green and angry across her decks, washing as high as his knees as he’d clung to the forecastle ladder with white knuckles. It had flooded the upper deck completely until the ship came reluctantly back upright and it fountained from the scuppers. Even Pilinius had lost his air of studied calm as he volleyed orders and threw his own weight against the steering oar.

  Still, they’d made it. Somehow.

  And I am so never going to sea again, Warner thought.

  The rest of the squadron had made it around, as well, and changed formation in the process. Ferox led the port—babordo, he reminded himself—column of ten ships to leeward, while Fides, one of the triremes, led the windward column, followed by ten more galleys. The wind was even stronger than it had been, with spray flying everywhere and waves rolling up on the starboard quarter like moving, foam-topped mountains. Some of them were considerably higher than Ferox’s fourteen-foot freeboard, and the quartering sea added a nasty corkscrew effect to the galley’s motion. He didn’t like to think about what it must be like aboard the smaller triremes and liburnians.

  The shoulder mic chirped again, and this time the sound pulled him up out of his misery to press the button.

  “Hunter One, over.”

  “I was getting a little worried there,” Major Mason said. “Thought the radio had gone dead. Over.”

  “Radio’s fine. I’m not so great. Over.”

  “How bad? Over.”

  “Damned if I know,” Warner said frankly. “I’m more’n a little seasick, and I think Pilinius and Junius”—and that prick Martins—“are a lot more worried than they were when we set out. Wind’s really picking up. Over.”

  “Well, I have a little news to take your mind off of that. The bad guys are earlier and moving faster than we’d expected. They’re more scattered, too. Their main body’s still coming into sight from the bell tower, but it’s pretty damned ragged and we’re watching a squadron north-northeast of you, heading your way. It’s the farthest east of the lot—so far at least. Don’t see how they could actually have sighted you yet, though. Most probably just got separated from the rest and now they’re steering for Nikeis, but it looks like your courses are going to intersect short of the main body. Over.”

  “How many? Over.”

  “I make it a dozen. They’re too far away to see their pennants, but there’s at least one great galley in there and they’re maintaining a line formation, so they’re probably not pirates. Best guess, Five Kingdoms. Over.”

  “Roger. Out.”

  Warner released the talk button and detached himself from the mast, not without regrets, to make his cautious way aft to the quarterdeck.

  “Hail, Fleetmaster,” he half-shouted across the angry wind. It came out a little strangled sounding as he fought not to vomit.

  “Hail, Praefectus Warner,” Junius replied.

  “The tower tells me there’s an enemy squadron of a dozen galleys north-northeast of us, headed our way.”

  Martins consulted his compass, then scowled and pointed upwind.

  “Bad luck,” he said. “They’ll have the weather gauge on us.”

  “If we don’t see them yet, then they don’t see us,” Junius said. It was his turn to scowl.

  “Tower says they’re in a line formation with at least one great galley, probably not pirates.”

  “If they’re maintaining formation in this weather instead of scattering, they’re regular navy ships,” Junius agreed. He picked up a leather speaking trumpet from a bulwark rack and raised it in Fides’ direction.

  “Enemy squadron spotted upwind,” he bawled through it, somehow making himself heard despite the weather. Warner thought it must be some kind of trick professional seamen learned. “Stand by to detach your division and engage. We will continue as planned.”

  * * *

  The next wave of attacking galleys swept across the outer lagoon and charged down on the rafted Nikeisian squadron blocking the North Channel. The rising wind clearly left them little option but to make for the closest passage to the inner lagoon, and arrows flew from the moored Nikeisian galleys to greet them. One of the attacking galee sottili must have lost its steersman, because it swerved wildly and broached across the waves surging over the submerged breakwater. For a moment, Rick thought it was going fully over, but it managed not to capsize . . . just in time to be rammed squarely amidships by a following galley.

  The rammed galley rolled completely up on its side as the other ship slammed into it, and he saw men spill into the angry waves. Very few of them seemed to surface again.

  The ship which had hit it found itself in almost equally dire straits. There’d been no time to reduce sail before it struck, and t
he impact had snapped its masts. Both of them went over the side in a tangled, thrashing knot of wreckage. The galley itself ripped its ram out of its sister, completing the fatal gash, as the fallen top-hamper dragged it around. The fallen spars were a sea anchor, holding it broadside to the waves. It rolled madly, and axes flashed as its crew hewed desperately at the shrouds tethering it to the wreckage.

  But the rest of the oncoming galleys carried through. They surged down on the defenders, sails billowing madly as they let their sheets fly to spill the furious wind from their sails just before they struck. There were only two or three great galleys in this wave, but they were accompanied by far too many lighter ships. Some of them buried their rams in the anchored ships; most of them crashed home without actually ramming, and more grapnels flew as they made fast. More boarders boiled up, swarming across the bulwarks, coming to grips with the already depleted Nikeisian marines and rowers. The defenders had been given precious time to reorganize and station themselves as advantageously as possible, but they were going to be badly outnumbered, and still more enemy galleys were coming up fast. Weapons slashed and stabbed, and something far darker and redder than seawater splashed across the jammed galleys’ decks.

  One of the attacking galleys jammed itself into a gap at the extreme right end of the Nikeisian line, and more grapnels flew—this time from the shore. As Rick watched, an avalanche of Nikeisian militiamen swarmed over its decks, hacking and chopping, then raced down the line to reinforce the squadron’s depleted crews.

  His heart rose as he realized they’d be able to support Stigliano after all. Maybe if they could do the same thing at the other end of the line, Stigliano could hold his ground despite the odds!

  “Some of them are gonna find other channels, Sir,” Mason said, and Rick lowered his binoculars again as he turned to face the major and raised both eyebrows.

  “Most of ’em still seem to be headed for North Channel,” Mason said, answering the unvoiced question. “Probably because it’s the main way in from that part of the lagoon. But some of them are managing to avoid all that.” He jerked his head at the growing logjam of galleys. “Mostly because of how scattered they got on the way here, I think. They aren’t coming in together—not tightly, anyway—and some of them are taking advantage of that.”