On the Oceans of Eternity (31 page)

I have no intention of joggling your elbow,
she thought but did not say. The OOD probably felt just as nervous having the godlike authority of a captain and commander on the same quarterdeck on her usually lonely vigil; it was just after two bells on the midwatch, one in the morning to civilians.

“I think it’s coming on to a really stiff blow,” she said thoughtfully, instead.

The sky was pitch-black and the sea reflected it, with the wind making out of the west and a nasty cross-chop, a chaotic surface of waves crashing into each other in bursts of off-white foam. Sheets of cold rain blew in with the wind mingled with spindrift whipped off the surface of the waves, making her want to hunch her right shoulder; she did nothing of the kind, of course, standing erect with her hands clasped behind her, letting the wind slap the oilskins and sou’wester against her. The only light was from the big stern-lanterns and what leaked from the portholes of the deckhouse behind her, and the riding lights at the mastheads; she could see others spaced out across the heaving waters to her west, the rest of the Republic’s south-bound fleet. There were four hands on the benchlike platforms on either side of the frigate’s double wheels, wrestling with the tension that flowed up through the rudder cables and drum to the wooden spokes. Plenty of it, with this cross-sea and the heavy pitch it imposed.

They’re probably thinking about their reliefs and a hammock,
Alston mused. Although the crew’s hammocks on the gun deck would be swaying like branches in a gale, and it would get worse—they’d have to fasten the restraining straps across themselves.
I should go below, get some rest. If only we’d been able to get the politics finished and get away earlier in the season!

If there hadn’t been so much riding on this fleet—if she’d been commanding a single ship, say—she might well have been enjoying herself. This was
real
sailing. The burden of worry made that impossible.

“There are times I badly miss satellite weather pictures,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

Jenkins nodded for politeness’ sake; he was barely thirty, and they were a fading memory of the CNN National Forecast to him. They’d been an essential tool of the sailor’s life to her, for better than a decade. You developed a sixth sense about weather, if you studied it carefully all your life, but it just wasn’t the same as that godlike eye in the sky.

The Bay of Biscay was always risky, and the winter storms were coming on, raging down out of the North Atlantic and funneled into this giant cul-de-sac. She could feel it in her gut, the terrible ironbound coast of northwest Iberia lying off her lee, waiting there to port. Reefs growling in the surf like hidden tiger-fangs, sheer cliffs and giant waves breaking on them like the hammer of Ogun until mountains trembled, a graveyard of ships for millennia. And the Lord Jesus pity any fisherman out tonight in a Bronze Age coracle, or a boat of planks sewn together with willow withes.

The spray on her lips wasn’t quite icy, but it was rawly cold, with the mealy smell of snow in it somehow. Anyone who went overside in this would be dead in half an hour, even if they didn’t drown first. Looking up she could see the masts nearly bare, furled sails with doubled gaskets, the remaining sheets of canvas drum-taut and braced sharp as the
Chamberlain
heeled to the wind coming in on the starboard beam. Everything else was as secure as it could be, too; deadlights on the stern gallery, guns bowsed up tight, extra lashing on the boats. Glancing at Jenkins she could see his gray eyes slitted and peering upward, then reaching out to touch a stayline—feeling the forces acting on his ship, the messages in the heave and jolt as she cut into every wave and rose, paused, swooped downward.

Much heavier and we’ll have to come about into the wind and heave to. Can’t run before it, or even scud. Christ, no, she
thought, as a wave came across the forward third of the ship’s starboard side, swirled across the waist deck and poured out of the scuppers. Not nearly as much sea room as she’d like.

Another glance to starboard. Thirty ships, counting every transport. As many as Nantucket could spare, with a minimum to keep essential trade running and patrol the oceans near home—trying another invasion would be suicidal for the Tartessians, but you never knew what a desperate man would do. It was far more than the Republic could afford to lose, that was for certain.

And then there was the
Farragut.
She thought again about the design of the steam ram’s bows, a nagging concern. They’d had to mount the heavy steel plates before they left, with action in the offing on arrival at Tartessos. The steam ram was a bad enough seakeeper without them. With the added weight forward she sailed the way a whale swam—always rolling about and inclined to dive unexpectedly. Bad luck, to run into a storm with that bastard designer’s compromise along....

At least she can claw off to windward under power, if need be,
she thought.

In a sailing ship the only thing you could do with a lee shore was go aground on it, when you started to lose more in leeway than you made in headway won on each tack. And when a storm mounted past a certain force, even the most weatherly ship sagged more and more to leeward with each extra knot of wind speed. Her mind drew the parallelogram of forces for each ship in the fleet, varying with their depth of keel and their ability to point to windward, correlated it with their positions relative to the coast to the southeast and what she knew of the set of the oceans around here.

“Mr. Jenkins, I’m goin’ below,” she said. “Please have me woken if there’s a substantial change in the wind, or any important messages from the fleet.” At least every ship had a well-maintained pre-Event radio this time, and Guard or Marine techs to maintain it.

“Aye, aye, ma’am!”

She turned and rounded the low deckhouse, one hand lightly on the safety line strung beside it, water swirling calf high around her sea boots as the ship took a black wave edged in white froth. She waited until it had run free through the scuppers and then opened the hatch and went down the companionway. The
Chamberlain
had forty-six feet of raised quarterdeck and this space beneath; the companionway ended in a bulkhead, with corridors to either side lined with the little cubicles of officers’ quarters, the galley, and officers’ mess. Right ahead was a tub made from a large barrel split lengthwise. It had a couple of inches of water sloshing around in it, and wet-weather gear hanging from pegs above. She added her own. In a gale, it mainly served to break the force of the wind; her uniform was sopping, and her skin crinkled beneath it.

Her own quarters were to the rear, the stern cabin of the ship—what would have been Jenkins’s, if his frigate weren’t also the flagship. She returned the salute of the Marine sentry, who looked sleepily alert, and went through into the darkness. The heavy plank deadlights were secured over the broad stretch of inward-sloping windows to the rear, and it was pitch-black. A heavy fluffy towel lay over the back of a chair whose legs were bolted to the deck at the central table; she smiled gratitude as she stripped and dried herself off. Her teeth were still nearly chattering in the raw chill of the cabin. Wooden ships and central heating didn’t go together, nor could they ever be completely dry in heavy weather—oak beam and plank just weren’t steel girders and welded plate.

The
Chamberlain
was a dry ship by those standards; there weren’t any drips or spurts of water, just a pervasive dampness.

And I’m a tropical bird,
she thought.
Say what you like about South Carolina, it isn’t usually like this.

That made the bed’s dry warmth doubly delicious as she slipped under the covers. She carefully stayed on her side of it, though. Normally Swindapa didn’t wake if Alston came to bed late, just rolled over and grappled in her sleep like a semi-conscious octopus, but contact from an expanse of sea-chilled flesh ...

Might as well drop ice cubes down her spine.
Instead Alston pulled the covers to her chin and lay on her left side, with her knees braced against the padded six-inch board that rimmed the cabinward side of the bunk in rough weather.

The
Farragut
should be all right,
ran obsessively through her mind.
So, she doesn’t have as much reserve buoyancy as I’d like, particularly with the armor and ram reinforcement fitted. She’s still tight, and she can still maneuver under power. She will be all right. Go to sleep, Goddammit!

It wasn’t only that there were a hundred-odd crewfolk aboard her, or that Trudeau was an officer she’d shaped and a friend besides. That all mattered, but Alston also had to fight when she got where she was going.
Farragut
was a boar-hog beside the deadly gracefulness of the clipper-frigates, and barely seaworthy in the deep oceans, but she was a good third of the fleet’s fighting power.
I need that ship, dammil For Tartessos, and afterward.
Of course, the Coast Guard fleet had superior guns, not to mention gunnery—the Tartessian vessels in the attack last spring had been carrying fairly crude stuff; cast-iron or bronze eighteen-pounders at most, the sort of thing Nantucket had been turning out in the Year 3, and it had cost them heavily against the poured-steel eight-inch Dahlgrens of the Islanders. Far heavier shot and greater range and accuracy, for about the same weight on the gun deck.

“You’re
freezing,”
a voice said in her ear. Warmth pressed against her, along back and legs, as her partner curled near spoon fashion. Arms wrapped around her, slender and strong, and she smelled the clean familiar scent of healthy skin and Nantucket Briar shampoo.

“Didn’t want to wake you, sugar,” she murmured in the darkness.

“I can feel your spirit,” Swindapa said.
“And
the knots in your back. There’s nothing you can do about the weather that you haven’t done! Turn around so I can get at it, then let all the thoughts go, and
sleep.”

She obeyed, sighing slightly as slender fingers kneaded her neck and shoulders and down along her spine, then up to massage her scalp through the inch-long cap of tight wiry curls. When they had finished she felt as if her head was floating on the pillow, instead of being tied to her shoulders with heated iron rods.

“Sleep,
bin’HOtse-khwon,”
her partner’s voice murmured in the darkness. The lack of light was like black velvet pressing against her eyes now, and the other’s breath went warm across her cheek. “Sleep now.”

Damn, Alston thought, on the soft creamy edge of unconsciousness.
But it’s nice to be ... settled. Gives a center to your life. And you can feel really close snugglin’.

 

Princess Raupasha of Mitanni swayed backward slightly as the shotgun punched at her shoulder. The sharp
thudump
of the second barrel’s buckshot was nearly lost in the hammering of hooves, the crunching whir of the tires over sandy dirt, the creak of wood and leather and wicker.

“Aika-wartanna!”
she cried.
One turn.

Her driver pulled the horses into a turn so tight that the right wheel came off the ground. The whole crew leaned in that direction, to put their weight against the force trying to overturn the war-cart. The wheel thumped back down and she snatched out the next weapon from the leather bucket fastened to the chariot’s side and turned to keep the target in view. It was straw lashed to a pole amid a forest of others, each shaped roughly like a man and each with clay jugs of water inside. That leaked out where the lead balls had scourged the straw, making a dramatic stain on the dried grain-stalks.

“Tera-wartanna!”
Three turns.
Thudump.

Straw and pottery and water flew out. She handed the shotgun off to her loader with a show of nonchalance. Inwardly she exulted as the driver pulled the team aside, slowing them from the pounding gallop to a trot and then to a walk, soothing them as he reined in.

As
I dreamed,
Raupasha thought, looking behind her at the watching teams of her squadron.
As I dreamed, but never hoped
...

Her foster father Tushratta had hoped the child beneath the heart of King Shuttarna’s wife would be a son, to avenge his lord; that was why he’d smuggled her out, rather than dying by Shuttarna’s side in battle with the Assyrians. Instead the royal woman had borne a daughter and died herself. In the lonely desert manor to which he’d fled he had raised Raupasha much as he would have that longed-for son, and her bedtime stories had been of Mitanni’s ancient glories. How often in the chariot beside him, hunting gazelle or lion in the wastelands, had she dreamed herself as a great King like Shaushtar or Parsatatar in the epics! Bending the bow and scattering the enemies of her people like the lightning bolts of Indara Thunderer.

I do not have the strength of arm to bend the bow of a mari
yannu
warrior,
she thought.
But I can pull the trigger of this
gun
as well as any. True lightning, as I dreamed.

The other chariots gathered around at her gesture. She looked at them with pride. Such a little while ago her Mitannians had come to war in creaking chariots with warped wheels, relics hidden for a generation from the Assyrian overlords. The hand of Asshur had lain heavy on the Hurrian folk, and still heavier on their onetime lords. The artificers and silver of the Eagle People had given her two hundred sound chariots—with iron-rimmed wheels, and collar harnesses and iron shoes for the horses themselves. Each war-cart held three, Hittite-fashion; a driver, a warrior, and a loader for the firearms that replaced the horn-backed bows of old. The foot soldiers now had rifles, and drilled under the critical eye of Marine
noncoms.