A Mighty Fortress (127 page)

Trynair and Duchairn were both looking at him in surprise now. As a general rule, Clyntahn didn’t much concern himself with military movements. Partly, Duchairn thought cynically, because it had been his breezy confidence where military affairs he’d known nothing about were concerned which had launched this entire disaster in the first place.

“I don’t know, Zhaspahr,” Maigwair said slowly. “The new construction’s scattered up and down the length of the Passage. We’d have to get it all into one place, first. And a good quarter of the ships we’ve managed to launch and rig still don’t have their artillery.” He grimaced. “I’m afraid our foundries have been slower to really hit their stride than we’d anticipated, and, frankly,
Harchong’s
foundries are nowhere near as efficient as they could be, either. They’ve got a lot of them, but their output’s lower even than ours. For that matter, their best ones are in South Harchong—in Shwei and Kyznetsov. And before Thirsk ran the Charisians out of Claw Island, they put a major hole in the delivery of the guns South Harchong had managed to produce.”

“Well, Desnair’s foundries are doing pretty well, aren’t they?” Clyntahn ri-posted, and cocked an eyebrow at Duchairn.

“Production numbers are rising,” Duchairn acknowledged. “It’s not that their individual foundries are particularly big or especially efficient, but they do have a higher output per furnace than Harchong, and they’ve been establishing a lot of little cannon foundries. They’re still having problems with
iron
guns, though. Everybody is”—
except for Charis
, he carefully did not say out loud—“but even more of Desnair’s iron pieces seem to be failing when they’re proofed.”

“That’s just a matter of experience,” Clyntahn said dismissively. “Of course they’re not going to get it right the first few times they try! But if they’ve got the foundries, sooner or later they’ll be able to produce the guns we need.”

“Why not send them to Dohlar, instead?” Duchairn suggested. Maigwair and Trynair looked thoughtful, but Clyntahn’s face turned expressionless as the shutters went up behind his eyes. “Thirsk seems to’ve straightened out the Dohlaran foundries—at least, he’s been able to compensate for the Harchong guns the Charisians took. By now, according to the invoices I’m getting, he’s actually far enough ahead of his own demand that he’s in a position to export guns to
Harchong,
instead of the other way around.”

“Dohlar’s too far from Tarot and Charis,” Clyntahn said flatly, and Duchairn felt one eyebrow arch.

He glanced at Trynair and saw the same speculation on the Chancellor’s face.

Just as Clyntahn had never truly been prepared to give Gorjah of Tarot a clean bill of health over the betrayal of the Group of Four’s original plan of attack, he’d never forgiven Thirsk for first losing the battle of Crag Reach and then surrendering his surviving ships to Cayleb Ahrmahk. The Dohlaran ought to have fought until every one of his galleys went to the bottom, in Clyntahn’s opinion. The fact that he hadn’t—that he’d put the lives of his men above his service to Mother Church—made him automatically and permanently suspect to the Grand Inquisitor. Clyntahn had acquiesced only grudgingly in Thirsk’s appointment to his present post, and only when all three other members of the Group of Four had voted against him. And he’d bitterly resented Thirsk’s “demands” that Mother Church pay the wages of his sailors. As far as Clyntahn was concerned, those sailors should be eager to volunteer in God’s Own cause! Besides, the Church had dozens of other things it could have used that money for. And that didn’t even consider Thirsk’s ridiculous insistence that the Church ought to pay
pensions
to the survivors of men who were killed in her ser vice.

The Grand Inquisitor hadn’t been happy when Duchairn supported Thirsk’s policies. Having the Church’s Treasurer agree that the outrageous demands were “reasonable” and “manageable” had cut the ground out from under his own arguments. Maigwair’s unusually stubborn insistence that Thirsk had the best grasp of the new naval tactics hadn’t made him any more cheerful. And rather than agreeing with Duchairn and Maigwair that Thirsk’s performance in the Harchong Narrows demonstrated that the earl had been right all along, Clyntahn sided with the opinion (coming, Duchairn suspected, from Duke Thorast) that Thirsk had simply been lucky. Lucky in the weather, lucky in outnumbering the Charisians by such a huge margin, and—probably—lucky the Charisians had withdrawn from Claw Island before he was
finally
ready to attack it, since they would undoubtedly have defeated him—
again
—if he’d actually had to fight to evict them.

Only the fact that the Duke of Fern and Bishop Staiphan Maik, Clyntahn’s own intendant for the fleet, strongly supported Thirsk had held the Grand Inquisitor’s ire in check. Well, that and the fact that Thirsk’s victory was the
only
victory any of the Church’s squadrons had so far achieved.

And as far as I can tell, the fact that Thirsk allowed the Charisians to surrender has only pissed him off even more
. Duchairn very carefully did not grimace.
As far as Zhaspahr’s concerned, the only good Charisian is a dead one. He sees absolutely no reason Thirsk should have let them surrender. Even Allayn understands that if
our
admirals don’t allow
them
to surrender, then
their
admirals won’t allow
our
crews to surrender. I don’t think Zhaspahr really cares about that, though. In fact, I wonder if he wouldn’t actually prefer a situation in which the other side flatly refused to give quarter. He probably sees it as the best way to motivate our people to fight to the bitter end . . . exactly the way Thirsk didn’t do at Crag Reach
.

“I admit Dohlar’s a long way from Charis and Tarot,” the Treasurer said out loud. “On the other hand, as Allayn says, our ships are scattered all over the Passage . . . and nothing the Charisians have is close enough to
threaten
the Passage. We could send them all the way to Gorath Bay without having to worry about their being intercepted. And Dohlar’s much closer to Chisholm—and Corisande, for that matter—going west.”

“Of course it is.” Clyntahn waved an impatient hand dismissively. “And the Charisians who evacuated Claw Island went straight to Chisholm to reinforce the ships they already had there. In fact, that’s another reason to send
our
ships to Desnair.”

Duchairn looked at him quizzically, and he snorted.

“They’ve had to disperse strength to cover Chisholm and Corisande, Rhobair.” Clyntahn was back to that adult- lecturing- a-particularly- slow- child tone of his, but Duchairn was too accustomed to it to rise to the baiting. For that matter, he wasn’t even certain Clyntahn was still doing it on purpose. “Our best estimate is that Rock Point has about twenty or twenty- five galleons based on Thol Bay, and Lock Island has another thirty- five or forty operating out of Rock Shoal Bay. That’s sixty- five total. The rest of their galleons are dispersed protecting Chisholm and Corisande. What I’m proposing is that we take advantage of that dispersal to punch our ships through to Desnair. By the time they can redeploy the ships they have on distant stations, we’ll be concentrated in the Gulf of Mathyas and there won’t be anything they can do about it.”

Trynair was looking thoughtful, and even Duchairn had to admit there was a certain logic to Clyntahn’s argument. Still, the thing which had most impressed Duchairn about the failure of their initial attack on Charis was that sending fleets on lengthy voyages with coordinated timetables which didn’t consider little things like, oh, weather, seemed to be significantly more problematical than sending armies on lengthy
marches
.

“You’re talking about sending a hundred to two hundred and twenty of our galleons past Tarot to Desnair,” he said now. “According to Allayn, a quarter of them would be completely unarmed. So, say we have your higher number available for the trip—a hundred and twenty. That means only
ninety
of them would actually be armed, and none of our ships are as well trained as Earl Thirsk’s were. If the sixty or seventy Charisians manage to intercept them, I don’t know how well our ninety would make out, Zhaspahr. I don’t like saying that any more than you like hearing it,” he added as Clyntahn’s face tightened, “but we have to be realistic. And it’s not their fault, either. They simply haven’t had the time to train.”

“Rhobair has a point,” Trynair said in a reasonable tone.

“Yesssss,” Maigwair said slowly. The others all looked at him, and he held up his right hand, index finger extended. “Yes,” he repeated, “but we’ve got the semaphore.”

“And?” Duchairn prompted when the Captain General paused again.

“First,” Maigwair said, “we ought to have the advantage of surprise when we actually start moving the ships. Distance alone ought to see to that, but let’s assume the Charisians’ spies here in the Temple Lands have access to the commercial messages we allow the semaphore to pass. Or, for that matter, just that they have a network of homing wyverns to carry messages. What ever. It’s obvious they do have spies somewhere in the system, right?”

Duchairn nodded, impressed despite himself. Thinking things through wasn’t something he normally associated with Allayn Maigwair.

“All right. In that case, we openly send orders to our squadrons all along Hsing- wu’s Passage. For that matter, let’s send them in one of the ciphers we’re pretty sure the Charisians may have compromised in Delferahk or Corisande. We order them to rendezvous at Angelberg, but we tell them that’s a ruse. They’re concentrating there to help any Charisian spies assume we’re going to send them to Desnair, but they’re to prepare to sail to
Dohlar
. Even if the message isn’t compromised along the semaphore chain, you
know
at least some of their crew will talk about their upcoming trip to Dohlar whenever they get a chance to go ashore in Angelberg. So any Charisian spies are going to hear about that destination, and as far as
preparing
for the voyage is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether they’re going to Dohlar or Desnair, really.”

His eyes were beginning to sparkle now as his enthusiasm mounted.

“So, our cover story is that their preparations are to take them west. Any spies who spot them in Chantry Bay will almost certainly find out about their orders to Dohlar, and we don’t tell even our
admirals
differently until they’re all ready to sail. At that point, we use the semaphore to send them their actual sailing orders. Surely that ought to insure that we have strategic surprise. In fact, if the Charisians do get wind of their original orders, they may shift their own deployments to protect Chisholm and Corisande!

“Then, once we have our ships in motion to the east, instead of the west, we use the semaphore to order the Desnairians to sortie to meet them. We’ll be able to tell Desnair to sail more quickly than the Charisians will be able to tell their squadrons to concentrate. So, ideally, Lock Island will still be lying to anchor in Rock Shoal Bay when Rock Point and his twenty- five ships find themselves caught between seventy- odd Desnairian galleons coming up from the south and a hundred to a hundred and twenty Harchongese and Temple Lands galleons coming down from the north.”

“That’s a very good thought, Allayn,” Clyntahn congratulated. “And there’s another aspect to it, as well. We can keep track of both forces as long as they stay in coastal waters, so if one of them hits a snag, or if it turns out the Charisians have somehow managed to concentrate against one of them, we can order the other one to turn around and avoid action.”

Maigwair beamed, clearly basking in the unaccustomed light of the Grand Inquisitor’s approval. Even Trynair was nodding, slowly at first, but then more firmly.

Duchairn, on the other hand, still had profound reservations. Maigwair’s and Clyntahn’s ideas about coordinating two separate fleets sounded good in theory, but he couldn’t quite convince himself it would work out that smoothly in practice. On the other hand, Maigwair did have a point about achieving surprise. If no one outside the Group of Four itself knew where the northern ships were really going to go, no one could possibly betray that information to Charis. And it really didn’t matter how quickly the information got to Charis once the ships actually began moving, because Charisian warships as far away as Chisholm or Corisande would be so badly out of position that they might as well have been on the bottom of the sea. They couldn’t possibly reach the Gulf of Tarot or the Sea of Justice before the Church’s fleets had either united with one another or turned around and returned separately to their original ports.

He watched the other three and realized that what ever qualms he might feel, all of them were in favor. That being the case, he wasn’t going to prevent it, what ever he did. So he wouldn’t try. He would content himself with voicing his own reservations—reservations mild enough he could brush them away later with a smile for his own timidity if they proved unfounded, but sufficiently pointed to position him, if things turned out badly after all, to remind them all that he’d warned them against overconfidence.

He sat back in his chair, waiting while Maigwair and Clyntahn worked out the details to their own satisfaction. There’d been a time when Rhobair Duchairn hadn’t worried all that much about political calculations. He’d risen to his post as Treasurer mostly because he’d been the consummate bureaucrat, content to leave politics—Mother Church’s and secular politics, alike—to Try-nair and Clyntahn.

And the fact that we’re having this discussion is proof of how well
that
worked out, isn’t it, Rhobair?
he asked himself acidly.
On the other hand, even
you
can learn if God hits you with a heavy enough club. The real trick’s going to be convincing them—and especially Zhaspahr—that you still don’t have a clue
.