He was still scrubbing at them when the incoming round shot struck him just below mid-chest.
* * * *
"Sir, their Marines are ashore in at least three places."
Lakyr turned towards Lieutenant Cheryng. The youngster's face was white and strained, his eyes huge.
"Only one of the batteries is still in action," the lieutenant continued, "and casualties are reported to be extremely heavy."
"I see," Lakyr said calmly. "And the enemy's losses?"
"One of their galleons has lost two masts. They've towed her out of action, and another was apparently on fire, at least briefly Aside from that—"
Cheryng shrugged, his expression profoundly unhappy, and Lakyr nodded. The Charisians had worked their way methodically along the waterfront, concentrating their fire on one defensive battery or small group of batteries at a time. Traditional wisdom had held that no ship could engage a well-sited, properly protected battery, but that tradition had depended upon equal rates of fire. He had no doubt that the Charisians had suffered damage and casualties well beyond those Cheryng had just reported, although they obviously hadn't suffered enough to decide to break off the attack. Which was scarcely astonishing. He'd hoped to do better than that, but he'd never had any illusions about successfully standing off the attack.
And I'm not going to get any more men killed than I have to trying to do the impossible, he thought grimly, and looked at the clock on his office wall. Three hours is long enough—especially if they've already got Marines ashore, anyway. It's not like the King gave me more infantry along with the gunners, after all.
"Very well, Lieutenant," he said, speaking more formally than he normally did when addressing Cheryng. "Instruct the signal party to raise the white flag."
November, Year of God 892
.I.
HMS Empress of Charis,
City of Tellesberg,
Kingdom of Charis
I suppose it's time."
Empress Sharleyan Ahrmahk turned from the huge stern windows' panoramic vista of Tellesberg Harbor's incredibly crowded waters at the sound of her husband's voice.
It was the first day of November, a date she had been dreading for five-days, and now it was here.
Cayleb stood beside the dining cabin table which had been one of her gifts to him. She'd managed to commission it without his finding out she had, and the obvious pleasure he'd taken from the surprise had pleased her immensely. Now the hand-rubbed, exquisitely finished wood's exotic grain and patterns gleamed in the single brilliant shaft of morning sunlight falling through the opened skylight, and the thick rugs which cushioned the deck's planking glowed like pools of crimson light in the cabin's shadowed dimness. The bullion embroidery of his tunic flashed and flickered, the sunlight through the skylight struck green and golden fire from the chain of office about his neck, and something was trying to close her throat as she gazed at him.
"I know it's time," she said, then paused and cleared her throat. "I. . .just don't want it to be."
"Me either," he said with a flash of white teeth in a fleeting smile.
"I know you have to go. I've known you'd be going ever since I arrived in Tellesberg. But"—Sharleyan heard the slight quaver in her own voice—"I didn't expect it to be this hard."
"For both of us, My Lady."
Cayleb's voice was quiet, and he crossed to her in two long strides. He caught both her slender hands in his powerful, sword-callused ones, raised them to his lips, and kissed their backs.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," she told him, freeing one hand and laying it gently against his cheek.
"I know." Again, that flashing smile she'd discovered could melt her heart. "It was supposed to be a marriage of state, with you secretly hardly able to wait to see my back despite all of the proper public platitudes." He shook his head, his eyes glinting in the dimness. "How in the world can I expect to kick Hektor's arse the way he deserves to have it kicked when I couldn't even get that right?"
"Oh," she said as lightly as she could, "I'm sure you'll fumble through to victory somehow, Your Majesty."
"Why, thank you, Your Majesty."
He kissed the hand he still held for a second time, then drew her close and tucked an arm about her.
She savored that arm's strength even as she marveled at the depth of the truth hidden in his lighthearted description of what their marriage could have been. What she'd more than half expected it to be.
It didn't seem possible. They'd been married for little more than one month. She'd known him for less than three. And yet this parting was like cutting off her own hand.
"I don't want you to go," she admitted softly.
"And I don't want to leave you behind," he replied. "Which makes us just like thousands of other husbands and wives, doesn't it?" He looked down into her eyes, and his own were grave. "If we have to ask this of them, I suppose it's only fair that we have to pay in the same coin."
"But we've had so little time!" she protested.
"If God's good, we'll have the years yet to make up for that." He turned to face her fully, and she laid her cheek against his chest. "And I assure you that I'm looking forward to every one of those years," he added in a wicked whisper into her ear as his right hand slid down her back to caress her posterior.
That was one good thing about Charisian fashion, she thought. Chisholmian gowns tended to be well buttressed with petticoats against her northern kingdom's cooler climate. Charis' lighter and thinner gowns were far less armored.
"It's a good thing there are no witnesses to discover what a crude and vulgar fellow you really are, Your Majesty," she told him, raising her head and turning her face up towards his.
"Maybe it is. But it's a very bad thing that I don't have enough time to prove what a crude and vulgar fellow I am," he told her, and bent to kiss her.
She savored the moment, pressing against him, and then—as if on cue— each of them inhaled deeply and they stepped back slightly from one another.
"I truly do hate leaving you behind, for a lot of reasons," he told her. "And I'm genuinely sorry to be dropping full responsibility on you when you've had so little time to settle in here in Tellesberg."
"I can't pretend I didn't know a moment like this would be coming, though, can I?" she countered. "And at least I'll have Earl Gray Harbor and the Archbishop to advise me."
"There's just never enough time." He grimaced in frustration. "You should have had more time. There are so many things I still need to tell you, explain to you." He shook his head. "I shouldn't have to be dashing off like this with so much still only half-done."
She started to reply, then settled for shaking her own head with a slight smile. In theory, he didn't actually have to "dash off." His naval and land commanders were perfectly capable of fighting any battles which had to be fought. But there might well be—indeed, almost certainly would be—political decisions which needed to be made at the battlefront, promptly and decisively, without the five-days and five-days of delay involved in sending dispatches back and forth across the thousands of miles between Corisande and Charis. Besides, the fighting men of Charis had an almost idolatrous faith in Cayleb Ahrmahk. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the Battles of Rock Point, Crag Reach, and Darcos Sound. His presence with them, she knew, would be worth a squadron of galleons.
And, just as importantly, it gives us the opportunity to show that this newfangled "Empire" of ours truly is a marriage of equals. The King of Charis may be going off to war, but that war is the Empire's, not just Charis' alone. And the Queen of Chisholm is staying home to govern not just Chisholm, hut the entire Empire in his absence. . . and in her own name, as well as his.
"You do realize, don't you," she said after a moment, "that this little military excursion of yours is probably going to put a serious crimp into our plans to move the capital back and forth between Tellesberg and Cherayth?"
"I hope it won't be too bad," he replied seriously. "If we have to, w
e could probably leave Rayjhis home to serve as our joint regent here in Charis while we officially move the capital—and you—back to Cherayth, I suppose."
"I think that would be the wrong decision." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I won't pretend I'm not anxious about how well Mahrak and Mother are managing in my absence. But they're very capable people, and the fact that you're going to stage through Chisholm for the invasion is going to give them a chance to meet you, the same way your Charisians have met me. And unless I'm seriously mistaken, the fact that you—and your Charisians—trust me enough to leave me here in Tellesberg in your absence to govern the entire Empire is going to more than offset any concern in Chisholm about whether or not the seat of government is going to move back and forth exactly as scheduled."
"Of course I trust you!" He sounded surprised that there could be any question of that, and she tapped his chest with a slender index finger and a smile.
"I know that," she told him half scoldingly. "Getting everybody else to believe it may not be quite that simple, though. And this, I think, is one of the best ways we could have come up with to accomplish that."
"Even if it is a pain in the arse for us," he agreed.
"And there's another side to it, as well," she said.
"Such as?"
"One of the advantages of having co-rulers is that we can leave one of us here, managing things in Tellesberg, while the other one goes off to deal with other problems. I know we both have first councilors we trust implicitly, Cayleb, but that's not really the same thing, and you know it. If this works out the way I think it's going to, we'll have a degree of flexibility I don't think anyone else has ever had before. And, to be honest, we're going to need that kind of flexibility just to keep something the size of the Empire semi-organized and moving in the same direction."
He nodded soberly, and in an odd sort of way which he doubted he'd ever be able to explain to anyone else, her serious, pragmatic analysis only increased the tenderness—and regret—he felt as the moment of departure swept down upon them. In some ways, he'd been almost guiltily grateful for the Ferayd Massacre. Putting together Rock Point's fleet, and finding the transports for his Marines, had disrupted Lock Island's carefully choreographed schedule for the invasion of Corisande. That had given them time to produce several thousand more desperately needed rifles . . . and delayed Cayleb's own departure for another blessed pair of five-days. Ten more days he'd had with Sharleyan.
Which only made this moment even harder.
"Be careful." His hands slid around to rest upon her shoulders as he looked deep into her eyes. "Be very careful, Sharleyan. Rayjhis and Maikel and Bynzhamyn and all the rest will guard you, but never forget the Temple Loyalists are out there somewhere, and they've already shown they're not shy about resorting to bloodshed. Most of 'my' Charisians are already prepared to love you as one of our own, but three of them tried to murder Maikel, and someone else burned down the Royal College, and we still don't know who it was or how much organization there may have been behind it. So don't forget there are still daggers out there. And that not all of them are going to be made out of steel."
"I won't." The corners of her expressive eyes crinkled with an odd sort of amusement, and she snorted. "Don't you forget that you're talking to someone who grew up in Queen Ysbell's shadow! I know all about political machinations and court intrigues. Yes, and about assassins, too. And if I were likely to forget, Edwyrd will see to it that I don't!"
"I know. I know!" He held her close again, shaking his head. "I just can't stand the thought of something . . . happening to you."
"Nothing is going to happen to me," she assured him. "You just see that nothing happens to you, either, Your Majesty!"
"With Bryahn, General Chermyn, and Merlin all looking out for me?" It was his turn to snort, and he did it rather magnificently, she thought. "I won't say that nothing could happen—after all, there's always lightning, forest fires, and earthquakes—but somehow I don't see anything less than one of those getting through to me."
"See that it stays that way." She reached up and caught the lobes of both ears, holding his head motionless. "I've already told Captain Athrawes that he'd better not come home to Charis without you."
"I'll bet that put the fear of God into him," Cayleb said, smiling appreciatively.
"I don't know about God," she told him. "But I did my best to put the fear of someone a bit less powerful but more . . . immediate, shall we say, into him." Cayleb laughed out loud. Then he sobered once again. "It really is time, love," he said softly.
"I know. 'Time and the tide wait for no man,' " she quoted.
"Not without every general, admiral, and ship's master in the entire invasion fleet seriously considering regicide, at any rate. Charisian seamen hate missing the tide."
"Then I suppose we'd better get this over with."
Despite her cheerful tone, she felt her lower lip trying to quiver. She suppressed the reflex sternly and tucked her hand into the elbow of his proffered arm as he escorted her out of the cabin where they'd actually managed to find genuine privacy even onboard a crowded warship.
The deck outside that cabin made the ship's crowding abundantly clear. Cayleb's flagship was the newest and most powerful unit of what had just become the Imperial Charisian Navy. She was an improvement on the Dreadnought which had served as Cayleb's flagship for the Armageddon Reef campaign. That ship had gone down after the Battle of Darcos Sound, and originally, this ship had been intended to carry the same name. But Cayleb had decreed a change. Charisian tradition prohibited naming warships for people who were still alive, so instead of the name he really would have preferred, his new flagship had been christened "Empress of Charis"
As Sharleyan stepped onto the main deck of the ship which wasn't quite officially her namesake, she was once more struck by how enormously the standards of naval design and naval combat had changed in the course of only three years. Charisian galleys had been the biggest and most seaworthy in the world. That had meant they were also the slowest in the world under oars alone, but even the largest of them had been no more than two-thirds the size of Empress of Charis. Cayleb's new flagship measured over a hundred and fifty feet between perpendiculars and, with her far deeper draft, displaced almost fourteen hundred tons. She mounted thirty long krakens on her gundeck and thirty-two carronades on her spar decks. Combined with the new, long fourteen-pounders mounted as chase guns, fore and aft, that brought her total armament up to sixty-eight guns, and no other warship in the world could hope to stand up to her. Except, of course, for the sisters anchored all about her.
She seemed downright huge to Sharleyan. And she was. The largest ship in the Chisholmian Navy had shown little more than half her displacement and had mounted only eighteen guns. Yet the empress knew from conversations with her husband, Lock Island, and Sir Dustyn Olyvyr that Sir Dustyn was already applying the lessons he'd learned designing Empress of Charis to the next even larger and still more powerful class.
She no longer even looked like a galleon. Dreadnought and her sisters had already dispensed with the towering fore and aftercastles, but Empress of Charis showed even less freeboard than they had, proportionately, and she was effectively flushdecked, with no raised forecastle or aftercastle at all. Or, rather, the narrow spardecks which had been incorporated into Dreadnought had been broadened so that they formed virtually a complete, upper gundeck, and her gently curved sheer ran unbroken all the way from prow to transom. Because of her greater size, she actually carried the sills of her gundeck gun ports higher than the older ship had, and just looking up at her soaring, powerful sail plan could make Sharleyan dizzy. But her cutwater was sharply raked, and despite their vast size, she and her sister ships looked low-slung, lean, and dangerous. Her every line carried a sleek, predatory gracefulness, and the new Imperial Navy was continuing another Charisian tradition. Other navies might paint their ships in gaudy colors; Charisian warships' hulls were black. The galleons ca
rried white stripes along their sides, marking the line of their gun ports, and the port lids were painted red. Aside from their figureheads, that was virtually the only color their hulls showed, in stark contrast to the ornamental carving, gilding, and paint of other navies.
It was, Sharleyan had discovered, a deliberate statement. Charisian warships needed no decoration, no proud carving or glittering gold leaf, to overawe an opponent. Their reputation took care of that quite handily, and the very lack of those things gave them a severe sort of beauty, the grace of function unhampered by a single unnecessary element.
"You named a beautiful ship for me, Cayleb," she said in his ear, speaking loudly as the seamen manning Empress of Charis' yards began cheering the instant they stepped onto the deck.
"Nonsense. I named her for the office, not for the person holding it!" he replied with a wicked grin, then twitched as she pinched his ribs fiercely. He looked down at her, and she smiled sweetly
"There's worse than that waiting when you get home, Your Majesty," she promised him.
"Good."
His grin grew even broader, then faded as they reached the entry port and the bosun's chair waiting to lower her to the deck of the fifty-foot cutter moored alongside the flagship. The cutter flew the new imperial flag, and the golden kraken of the House of Ahrmahk swam sinuously across it, rippling in the brisk breeze. The same flag, except for one detail, flew from the mizzen peak of every warship in the anchorage, but Sharleyan's cutter showed the silver crown of the Empress above the kraken, while the flag flying above Empress of Charis showed the golden crown of the Emperor.
The two of them stood gazing down at the cutter for a moment, and then Cayleb inhaled deeply and turned to face Sharleyan.