"Five sail—no, at least seven sail—-bearing nor'-nor'west!"
"Seven?" The captain shook his head. "Seven?"
"Something must have gone wrong, Sir." Mahkneel hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud until Lieutenant Gahrmyn responded to him. He turned and looked at the other man, and Gahrmyn shrugged. "I don't know what it might have been, Sir, but obviously something did. If I had to guess, I'd wager something tipped Sir Vyk's hand early and these are the ones who managed to make sail and avoid the boat parties."
Mahkneel grunted. Gahrmyn's explanation was almost certainly the right one, but that didn't help him very much. Seven ships would be almost a quarter of the total number of Charisian galleons in Ferayd when Arrowhead departed for her part in this operation, and he had exactly one galley with which to stop them.
And if any of them get away, someone's going to want my arse fried on a spit, and never mind the fact that I can only intercept one of them at a time!
"Clear for action, Master Gahrmyn," he said crisply.
"Aye, aye, Sir."
Gahrmyn touched his shoulder in salute, turned away, and began shouting orders of his own. Bosuns' whistles blew, the deep-voiced drums began to roll, and feet pattered wildly as Arrowhead's crew responded to the summons to battle.
"Deck, there! I can see at least nine of 'em now!" the lookout shouted, and Mahkneel grimaced.
The numbers weren't getting any better, but at least these were merchant ships, not war galleons. Arrowhead's broadside armament might be little more than a joke compared to what King Cayleb's galleons were reported to mount, but eight falcons, each throwing an eight-pound shot, ought to be sufficient to deal with any mere merchantman. And if it wasn't, the forecastle's chase armament—one fifty-pound doomwhale and a flanking pair of thirty-pounder krakens, mounted to fire straight ahead—certainly would. The problem wasn't whether or not he could stop any galleon with which he managed to come to grips, but the fact that he didn't see any way a single galley could "come to grips" with nine of them before most of them, at least, sailed right past him.
Well, the Writ says Langhorne knows when a man's done the best he can. I'm just going to have to hope Mother Church and the King are equally understanding.
"Do you want to use the chase guns or the falcons, Sir?" Lieutenant Gahrmyn asked.
"A single shot from the doomwhale would turn one of these people inside out," Mahkneel said.
"Yes, Sir. I know."
"On the other hand . . ."
Mahkneel rubbed his chin thoughtfully. What he'd just said to Gahrmyn was undoubtedly true. The chasers were far more gun than would be needed to stop any merchantman ever built . . . but they would certainly be more impressive than his falcons. And he could use the chase armament to plug away at them from astern if they decided to keep running, as well. Under these sea conditions, his gunners' accuracy wouldn't be anything to brag about. In fact, they'd be lucky to hit their target at all at any range much above sixty or seventy yards. But they might get lucky, and even if they didn't, merchant seamen faced with the prospect of fifty-pound shot pitching into their hulls might just decide against tempting fate.
"Have the Gunner go ahead and load the chasers," he said after a moment. "And tell him I'll want the warning shot fired from the doomwhale." Gahrmyn's eyebrows rose, and Mahkneel chuckled sourly. "I don't much like heretics, Rahnyld, but I'd just as soon not kill anyone I don't have to. And if you were a merchant seaman, how would you feel about having a doomwhale fired across your bow?"
"Actually, Sir," the first lieutenant said with the first genuine smile Mahkneel had seen out of him since they'd received their orders, "I think that after I got done pissing myself, I'd probably strike my colors as quickly as humanly possible!"
* * * *
"What do you think he's going to do, Sir?" Kevyn Edwyrds asked quietly as the Delferahkan galley came plowing through the strengthening whitecaps towards them.
The low-slung galley was making heavier going of it than the galleons, but there was an undeniable rakish gracefulness to her, compared to the high-sided, round-bowed galleons. She was a coastal design, far smaller and with a much shallower draft than any Charisian galley. She couldn't have displaced lids, carefully painted to match the rest of the galleon's hull, opened abruptly They rose as if they'd been snatched up by a single hand, and the short-snouted carronades thrust out of the sudden openings.
He opened his mouth, but Gahrmyn had seen it as well. The first lieutenant needed no orders, and Arrowhead's flank chasers bellowed almost as one. In fact, they fired too soon, while the bow was rising, and both of them went high. One of them missed entirely, and even though the other smashed into the Charisian's hull, it hit too far up her side to be effective. It tore a round, splinter-fringed hole through the bulwark, but then it continued onward on an upward trajectory to plunge into the sea far beyond the galleon without inflicting any further damage.
Arrowhead was less fortunate.
* * * *
Kraken's deck bucked as twelve tons of carronades recoiled in a single, brutal bellow Smoke billowed, momentarily blinding, despite the brisk wind. Then it was snatched away, rolling downwind like a shredding bank of fog, and Fyshyr bared his teeth as he saw the galley once again.
* * * *
"Hard a port! Hard a port!" Mahkneel shouted, fighting to get Arrowhead round so her own broadside armament would bear while the forward gunners reloaded. Unfortunately, the galley had scarcely begun to answer the helm before the Charisian fired.
Despite their relatively narrow target, despite the fact that both their target and the deck beneath them were moving, and despite the shot which had already hammered into their own ship, the Charisian gunners made no mistake. At least eight round shot, each of them as heavy as either of Arrowhead's flank chasers could have fired, crashed into the galley's bow.
Men shrieked as the heavy shot plowed aft, killing and maiming anyone in their paths. One struck the starboard rowing frame, ripping lengthwise along it and cutting off sweeps like a scythe reaping wheat. Two more screamed down the oardeck itself, accompanied by lethal showers of splinters, and Arrowhead staggered as the intricately coordinated choreography of her rowers was brutally interrupted.
More iron swept aft at the upper deck level, punching completely through the forecastle, exploding out its open back like demons, and carving their own paths of carnage through the deckhands and the Marines waiting for orders to board the fat, helpless galleon after its surrender. One shot crashed directly into the timber bed carriage of the starboard chase flanker, dismounting the weapon and killing almost its entire crew, and yet another slammed into the capstan and sprayed a fan of splinters and bits of iron across the deck.
"Get her around!" Mahkneel bellowed at his helmsman, and the helm went hard over. Despite the wild, flailing confusion of her starboard oars, Arrowhead retained enough momentum to respond, and the galley swept around, fighting to bring her port falcons to bear.
That was when Hauwyrd Mahkneel discovered that the preposterous reports about how quickly Charisian artillery could fire weren't preposterous, after all.
* * * *
"Yes!" Hairys Fyshyr shouted as his second broadside crashed into the Delferahkan. His gun crews knew how urgent speed was, but they were taking time to aim, as well, firing on the downroll so that every shot hammered into their target's hull, and another storm of iron smashed into the galley.
Arrowhead was more heavily built than Kraken, but not nearly so heavily as a Charisian galley, and her turn had exposed her side instead of her narrow beam, giving Kraken's gunners a longer, bigger target. The heavy round shot smashed into her timbers, shattering and splintering, killing and maiming, and he could hear the screams of wounded and dying men as the galley's momentum carried her still closer.
The Delferahkan managed to get the rest of the way around, and her broadside of light falcons barked. At least three of the eight-pound shot slammed into Kraken, and someone cri
ed out in pain. But the galleon's smoke-streaming carronades had already recoiled, their crews were already reloading, and the galley had scarcely fired before Kraken's broadside bellowed for a third time.
* * * *
Mahkneel staggered, clinging to the rail for balance, as the Charisian's fire crashed into his ship again and again while she wallowed. Arrowhead's rowers were in hopeless disarray, she'd lost all forward way, dead and wounded lay heaped about the decks as she fell helplessly off to leeward, Lieutenant Gahrmyn was down—dead or wounded, Mahkneel didn't know which— and as he watched, the "merchantman" which had already so mangled his command altered course. She turned downwind, angling to cross his broken, bleeding ship's stern at a range of mere yards, and he knew there was nothing at all he could do to stop her.
He watched the Charisian's guns running back out yet again, saw them flash fresh fire, felt the impact of their iron on his ship as if in his own flesh, and knew it was over.
"Strike the colors!" he heard someone else shouting "with his own voice "Strike the colors!"
* * * *
Fyshyr watched the green and orange Delferahkan colors come down like a wounded wyvern, and his lips drew back in a snarl. Behind his eyes, he saw again those bodies being thrown over the side of their own ship like so much harbor garbage. Heard again the survivors' reports of murder and massacre of dead women and slaughtered children, and the screaming encouragement to slaughter the "heretics" in God's name.
His guns thundered yet again, and fierce exultation blazed in his heart as their iron shot smashed into the galley's splintering hull. They'd chosen to start the slaughter, he thought savagely. Now they could deal with the consequences.
"They've struck, Sir!" Edwyrds cried in his ear, and Fyshyr nodded.
"I know," he said flatly, as yet another broadside thundered into the mangled, bleeding carcass of his enemy.
"Damn it, Sir—they've struck!" Edwyrds shouted.
"So what?" Fyshyr wheeled on his first officer, then shot out one arm, pointing back the way they'd come. "Did they give us any warning, like an 'officer and a gentleman' is supposed to do? Did the people we're not even at war with stop when they were murdering our people? Our women and children? Burning our ships? Killing our friends?"
Edwyrds looked at him for a moment, then shook his head and leaned closer.
"No, Sir, they didn't. But these people were clear out here when it happened. And even if they hadn't been, we're not them. Do you really want us to turn into exactly what Clyntahn's already accused us of being?"
Fyshyr's eyes went wide in astonishment as bluff, unimaginative Kevyn Edwyrds threw that question into his teeth. For a long, breathless moment, while the guns roared yet again, they stood there, eyes locked . . . and it was the captain's gaze which fell.
"No, Kevyn," he said, and his voice would have been all but inaudible even without the thunder of battle raging around them. "No. I won't be that."
He drew a deep breath, looked once more at the broken, bleeding galley, and then raised his voice.
"Ceasefire!" Hairys Fyshyr shouted. "Cease fire!"
.XV.
Charisian Embassy,
City of Siddar,
Republic of Siddar
Sir Rayjhis Dragoner tried hard to feel grateful for his posting as he gazed pensively out the window.
Usually, he didn't find that a particularly difficult task. Of all the embassies to which an ambitious diplomat might find himself assigned, the one in the city of Siddar was probably the plum. Any Charisian was still going to have to put up with the fundamental, almost unconscious arrogance mainlanders displayed to almost anyone from what even the best of them had a tendency to refer to as "the out islands," of course. The Siddarmarkians weren't quite as bad about that as most of their fellows, but they were still quite bad enough to go on with.
Yet all minor complaints aside, the Republic was the most comfortable fit any Charisian was going to find among the mainland realms. Siddarmark was firmly addicted to its ancient, republican form of government, and its society and social customs were far less rigidly stratified than most of Safehold's more powerful states could boast. That didn't prevent the Republic from sustaining its own great dynasties—in effect, if not in name, an hereditary nobility as powerful as anyone else's—and although there was considerably less prejudice here against those whose wealth came from "trade" than there was in the other mainland realms, there was still more than there was in Charis. Yet despite all that, Siddarmarkians were more comfortable than most with Charis' sometimes outrageous social notions, and their shared identity as Siddarmarkians included a powerful, self-aware strand of stubborn independence of mind which they embraced consciously and deliberately as a defining aspect of their national personality.
No doubt, Dragoner thought, that independence explained much of the traditional tension between the Republic and the Temple Lands. Despite the nightmares which obviously plagued the Knights of the Temple Lands from time to time, no Siddarmarkian lord protector had ever been likely to seriously contemplate launching a war of conquest against them, however tempting a target their wealth might make them. That hadn't kept generations of Church chancellors from worrying about the possibility that one day some lunatic lord protector would, however. And even worse, in some ways (mostly because it was a considerably more realistic possibility), was the Church's fear that the stubbornly intransigent Siddarmarkians might someday refuse to submit to some Church decree. If that ever happened, the well-trained, professional, well-equipped pikemen of the Republican Army would make a fearsome foe. And unlike Charis, it would be a foe which literally lived right next door to the Temple Lands themselves.
That independence of mind was also one of the reasons Siddarmark, traditionally, had maintained close commercial ties with Charis. The Siddarmarkian merchant class was heavily represented in the Republic's elected Assembly of the People. In fact, coupled with the wealthy farming class, they dominated the Assembly, thanks in no small part to the rigorous property requirements of the franchise. The merchants' interest in supporting friendly relations with Charis was obvious, and despite a certain traditional prejudice against bankers and merchants in general, the farmers' interest was even stronger. No one in Siddarmark was able to supply manufactured goods at anything remotely like the price Charisians could offer, and Charis was Siddarmark's largest single market, by far, for raw cotton, silk, tea, tobacco, and wheat. It was a lucrative trading relationship which both nations had every reason to preserve.
All of which explained why the Charisian Ambassador to the Republic had an easier job than most diplomats could ever hope for. Under normal circumstances, at least.
Circumstances, however, were no longer "normal," and Sir Rayjhis rather doubted they ever would be again.
He grimaced while he continued gazing out his office window across the sunlit roofs of Siddar to the dark blue, sparkling waters of North Bédard Bay. North Bédard Bay—normally called simply "North Bay," to distinguish it from the even broader waters of Bédard Bay proper, to the south—was over two hundred miles wide, and the passage between the two bodies of water was little more than thirty miles across. The shipping channels were even narrower than that, and the Republic, at enormous expense, had built Castle Rock Island (and the powerfully gunned fortifications on it) in the shoal water between the two main channels where they approached one another most closely. In many ways, Castle Rock was the Republic's Lock Island, although neither lobe of Bédard Bay had ever been as critical to the Republic's development as Howell Bay had been to that of Charis.
It still made Siddar a remarkably secure harbor, however. Piracy had never been much of a problem here, and the waterfront and warehouse district were usually bustling hives of almost Charisian-like activity. And as one of the premier ports of West Haven, Siddar was also home to one of the largest communities of Charisians outside the kingdom itself.
All of which had made the city a prey to conflicting
, dangerous tides of public opinion ever since the conflict between Charis and her enemies had exploded into open warfare. Tension had run high enough when everyone had been busy trying to pretend the Knights of the Temple Lands and the Council of Vicars—or, at least, the Group of Four—were two separate entities. Since Archbishop Maikel's denunciatory letter had arrived in Zion (and, so far as Sir Rayjhis could tell, every port city on Safehold simultaneously), that pretense had been stripped away like the frail mask it was. And the level of tension in the Republic had soared accordingly.
Even people who don't like the Group of Four are worried as hell, Dragoner thought. And it's a lot worse than that where the hardline Temple Loyalists are concerned. The only good thing is that the more extreme Loyalists had already made themselves thoroughly unpopular with the Siddarmarkians before this whole mess ever blew up. Unfortunately, there's no way this is going to get any way but worse. What in God's name did Cayleb and Staynair think they were doing?!
His grimace deepened as he faced an unpalatable truth. Despite his own reservations about the Group of Four, his own certainty that whatever else they might represent, it wasn't God's will, Sir Rayjhis Dragoner was one of the Charisians who was horrified by the sudden open schism between Tellesberg and the Temple. Conflicting loyalties pulled him in two different directions, and he found himself hoping—and praying regularly—that somehow the inevitable confrontation between the kingdom he loved and the Church he revered might somehow be averted.
But it's not going to be, he thought sadly. Not with the lunatics on both sides pushing so hard. Still, he admitted almost grudgingly, I suppose it's hard to blame Cayleb, given what the Group of Four tried to do. And whatever else I may think of Staynair's letter, he's right about the abuses and corruption in the Church. But surely there has to be a better way to reform those abuses! Mother Church has ministered to men's souls ever since the Creation itself. Can't anyone see where splitting the Church is bound to lead?