A Mighty Fortress (137 page)

The red lanterns at
Ahrmahk
’s mizzen yard dipped, and Captain Baikyr put his helm up to windward.

Sodden canvas flapped as the ship fell off to leeward and the wind moved from broad on the the larboard beam to fine on the larboard quarter. Hissed commands trimmed sheets and braces, and Bryahn Lock Island stood gazing aft, where someone with unusually sharp eyes might have just made out the loom of
Darcos Sound
’s headsails. But he wasn’t relying on anything as fallible as eyes, and he drew a deep, unobtrusive breath of relief as Zakrai Wayst’s ship followed
Ahrmahk
around.

One by one, the ships of the Imperial Charisian Navy reached the point at which
Ahrmahk
had altered course, and one by one—each guided by the barely visible poop lanterns of her next ahead—they altered course, in turn.

Lock Island turned back forward. He stepped up close beside the helmsmen, looking down at the illuminated compass card, then raised his head once again and gazed forward while rainwater sluiced down his face.

There was nothing he could do now but project the posture and appearance of a man confident in his plan and its workings. He understood that, just as he understood that every sailor and Marine, every officer and petty officer, aboard
Ahrmahk
knew he couldn’t actually see what was happening any better than they could. In point of fact, they were wrong about that, but there still wasn’t anything else he could do. They
knew
he was playing a role, projecting the confidence they needed to see out of him, and it didn’t matter. That, too, was part of the compact, part of the intricate, complicated network of responsibilities, commitments, duties, and trust between him and the men under his command.

They can’t see a damned thing,
he thought, almost wonderingly.
It’s blacker than the inside of Clyntahn’s heart, and they have no idea whether or not I’m really going to find Harpahr’s fleet for them. Just as they have no idea what’s going to happen when—
if—
we smash into one another in the dark, in the middle of a rainstorm. They’re obeying my orders, following my plan, on the basis of nothing but duty . . . and faith. My God. What could anyone possibly do to
deserve
that kind of loyalty and obedience?

He had no answer, but he knew he would do what ever it took, pay any price, to honor that trust. To be
worthy
of it, even if he couldn’t deserve it.

He glanced at the nearer helmsman, a grizzled petty officer with a long pigtail, streaming with rain while his jaw worked on a chew of tobacco. The petty officer’s attention was on the dimly visible sails, watching them, steering to keep them filled with the delicate touch of a man who’d spent twenty years at sea. He seemed to sense the high admiral’s eyes, however, and turned his head to meet Lock Island’s gaze.

“Just you be worryin’ ’bout findin’ the bastards, M’Lord,” he said with a grin, raising his voice through the roar of rain on wet canvas, water sluicing across decks and runneling through the scuppers. “You find ’em, an’ we’ll kick their sorry arses proper fer ’em! You can lay to that, Sir.”

He grinned again, then spat a stream of tobacco juice expertly into the spittoon lashed to the base of the binnacle housing.

“Your move,” Kornylys Harpahr observed, leaning back on his side of the chessboard. He knocked the ash out of his pipe and began methodically refilling it, never taking his eyes from the board while Taibahld considered it.

“That was nasty of you, My Lord,” the flag captain said.

“Well, as the Archangel Chihiro said, we do our officers and men no favors by going easy on them,” Harpahr replied comfortably. “The enemy isn’t going to! Besides, you had it coming after what you did to
me
last night.”

Taibahld chuckled. His thrice- a-five- day chess games with the admiral general had become a firm tradition, and he knew they both enjoyed them. They were well matched, and the companionable relaxation as they slaughtered one another’s chessmen had helped build their close personal and professional relationship. They’d talked out more than one logistical problem, discussed more than one possible tactical scenario, across this chessboard, and Taibahld had been more than a little surprised by how fond he’d become of Harpahr in the process.

Now he rubbed his nose, considering the trap he’d been lured into. He could save his queen, but only by sacrificing his king’s castle, which would open the right side of the board wide for Harpahr’s attack. But if he let the admiral general
have
the queen, and used the move to slide his own queen’s bishop between—

He was reaching for the bishop when he paused. His head came up, his eyes narrowing, just as Harpahr finished relighting his pipe. The admiral general looked at him curiously through a cloud of smoke.

“Ahrnahld?”

“I’m sorry, My Lord.” The flag captain’s tone was oddly taut. “I thought I heard someth—”

Then he heard it again.

After an unconscionably shaky beginning, the Church of God Awaiting had actually gotten most of it right when it came to building its navy. Not
all
of it—that would have been expecting far too much out of a land animal. But once Allayn Maigwair had actually stopped to
think,
once Zhaspahr Clyntahn had pointed out that the galleys he was building were exactly the wrong ships, the Church’s Captain General had put a great deal of effort into recovering from his initial errors. He’d shown a surprising degree of insight in the process, and he’d found quite a few capable men—like Kornylys Harpahr—to help him do it.

There were still blind spots. His insistence on eschewing the shorter- ranged carronade, for example. He hadn’t picked up on the huge advantage the Charisian ships’ coppered bottoms gave them, either, and his galleons still boasted the forecastles and after castles of pre- Merlin Safehold, although they
had
been reduced in height. Taken all together, though, he’d actually done almost as well as the Earl of Thirsk when it came to visualizing the threat and how to build a ship that could meet it.

And while the Temple Guard had no real naval tradition, it did understand discipline and the value of rigorous training. Unlike certain secular powers, the Guard had no institutional objection to finding experts who could teach it what it didn’t know, either. Bad weather, ice, inefficient foundries, Charisian raids on essential shipping... all of them had helped to delay the Church’s great project, but they hadn’t been able to
stop
it, and men like Ahrnahld Taibahld and Kornylys Harpahr knew what to do with those ships once they were built.

Yet for all that, there were still weaknesses. For all their own courage, all the effort they’d spent on forethought and planning, it would never have occurred to Harpahr or Taibahld to attack a numerically superior enemy under the cover of a tropical front’s waterfalls of rain. And for all the millions upon millions of marks the Church had invested in its fleet, it hadn’t realized the importance of
light
units. It saw the fleet, graceful Charisian schooners as corsairs, as commerce raiders, without really appreciating their value as scouts. As swift bloodhounds to scent out an enemy fleet . . . or as the exquisitely sensitive whis kers of a cat- lizard to sense an approaching enemy before he could reach striking range.

And because of that, Admiral General Harpahr had snugged his columns of galleons down for the night without pickets to guard his flanks, reducing canvas to minimize the risk of collisions and avoid the possibility of damage if it turned out there were squalls hidden within the rain, after all. To keep his fleet from scattering and to be sure it would be the efficient, compact, concentrated force he and Taibahld had made of it when the sun rose and the rain ceased.

Which was why not a single lookout in a single ship of the Navy of God had seen a thing as twenty- five Charisian galleons came ghosting out of the dark.

Bryahn Lock Island stood quietly, hands clasped behind him. The rain was easing, although it still came down in sheets. That was fine with him, and so was the fact that there was actually going to be quite a lengthy break between this band of rain and the next one coming up from astern.

Just last long enough for us to get in amongst them before you clear,
he thought at the weather.
Just last long enough
.

He’d made only a single minor course change since they’d turned in to attack. He could feel Captain Baikyr’s tension, although the captain hid it well, but Lock Island himself was surprised to discover he was almost as calm as he looked. Unlike his flag captain, he knew they were on precisely the correct heading. On the other side of the rain lashing the surface of the sea to a white froth ahead of them, there was an enemy fleet, and HMS
Ahrmahk
and her sisters were stealing up upon the outermost column of that fleet like assassins.

He felt muscles and sinews tightening—not with fear, but with anticipation—and had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting for his gunners to stand to.

Not yet. Not yet, Bryahn. Wouldn’t do for the lookouts to be wondering how you saw the other side clear from the quarterdeck before they did. All sorts of unwelcome little questions could come out of that!

And then—

“Sail two points abaft the larboard bow, Sir!”

The forward lookout had kept his wits about himself and passed the word aft, relayed from man to man, rather than raising a shout.

“Good,” Lock Island said as an electric shock ran through the men on the quarterdeck about him. He sensed them stirring, backs straightening, eyes narrowing as they realized he had, indeed, found the enemy for them.

He felt himself leaning forward, squinting as if he could somehow physically see through the rain and the darkness, and then his eyes widened. The rain was beginning to taper off, and he discovered he
could
see. See a long, slowly moving column—fourteen high- sided galleons, poop lanterns gleaming, light showing through skylights or, here and there, through gunports opened for ventilation. Those lights picked them out of the night, illuminated his targets, while his own lean, black- painted ships came slinking out of the shadows.

“We’ll cross their sterns, Captain Baikyr,” High Admiral Lock Island said formally. “Then we’ll come to larboard, take the wind on the beam, and pound them from leeward while we overhaul. Keep an eye out for their second column, though. We don’t want some bright bastard over there to get any ideas about working up to windward.”

“Yes, Sir!”