Cayleb looked at him for several seconds, then nodded unhappily.
“Point taken, My Lord,” he said heavily.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Stohnar bowed slightly, then straightened and turned back to the map.
“And now,” he said with very little humor, “let’s see what—if anything—besides you we can scare up to put in Rahnyld’s way.”
.IX.
Merlin Athrawes’ Chamber, Charisian Embassy, Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
Merlin frowned as he sat in his darkened chamber and worried.
If Cayleb realized he was “awake” in what was supposed to be one of his down periods, there’d be hell to pay, but at the moment, Merlin didn’t really care. He was looking at the glowing schematic of a map only he could see, provided courtesy of Owl, and watching the projected movement of the scarlet troop icons moving out of Dohlar.
Stohnar and Parkair aren’t the only ones who need to shake themselves loose from a few preconceptions where those bastards are concerned, he rebuked himself sourly. You knew better—or you damned well should have—and you still underestimated how fast they could move once they got started. Which leads to the interesting question of how fast the Army of God’s going to be able to move once it finally gets started. I think you’re going to find out your “worst-case” estimate wasn’t “worst” enough, Merlin. He shook his head, expression grim. That bastard Clyntahn may actually’ve known what the hell he was doing this time.
He reminded himself that two-thirds of the advancing Dohlarans were mounted, but even so, twenty-plus miles per day would have been an astonishing sustained rate of advance for any pre-mechanized army out of Old Earth’s history … especially one that was thirty percent infantry, taking the time to link up with the local Temple Loyalists as it came, and moving through an area which had been devastated during the autumn and winter fighting. There was precious little forage for man or beast in the South March, and that wasn’t going to change before the end of the summer, which was probably why Rahnyld’s advisors—or the Church—had been smart enough to split his initial invasion force into two separate waves. The real reason for the speed of his advance, though, was the combination of the canal and road network and the existence of draft dragons.
The mainland continents were home to the oldest, largest human populations on the planet, and those humans had been busy building things for the better part of a thousand years. They’d lacked the sort of construction aids—like dynamite, for example—an industrialized civilization took for granted, unfortunately, so they’d often had to detour around obstacles those more advanced civilizations would have bulled right through. But they’d had plenty of manpower and precise directions from the archangels about the value of transportation systems, which meant the roads connecting major mainland towns and cities were built to a standard laid down by the Writ itself, with a permanence to make an engineer of the Roman Empire green with envy, and that their maintenance was a Writ-mandated religious duty.
And along with those high roads—and much more important than them, in many ways—was the canal system. As Ehdwyrd Howsmyn had mentioned when he and Merlin first discussed the River-class ironclads, some of those canals were ancient. In fact, the very first of them—including the longest one of all, the Holy Langhorne Canal—had been dug by Pei Shan-wei’s terraforming crews even before”the Day of Creation.” The others had been built over the centuries since by dint of backbreaking toil and persistence, and they were the only reason the mainland realms had been able to transport the tonnages of materials they’d needed for Mother Church’s military buildup after Charis closed the seas to her.
Even with Safeholdian high roads and draft dragons, the costs of land transport were extremely high, but a draft animal could pull roughly thirty times the same load in a canal boat as over a road. That was the reason canals had been so popular on Old Earth before the invention of railroads, although Old Earth’s preindustrial canals had been far less ambitious than those the “archangels” had prescribed for Safehold, many of whose tow roads were designed to allow three- or even four-dragon draft teams. Given the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng’s stranglehold on anything like railroads, canals connecting navigable stretches of river had made an enormous amount of sense.
The northern Harchong Empire, in West Haven, was unfortunate in that its shallower, largely unnavigable rivers and less conveniently placed mountains had precluded the construction of canals on anything like the same scale as in East Haven. Merlin suspected that had had a great deal to do with why the Empire’s primitive economy had reverted to a level well below that which the “archangels” had installed for the original colonists. No doubt the tendency of human beings to seek power and use it for their own benefit also had a great deal to do with it, but the lack of any adequate means to move large quantities of goods had to have factored into the equation as well.
And that same problem had probably a great deal to do with the introduction of gunpowder as well, because it was pressure from traditionally backwards, anti-innovation Harchong which had led the Church to decide in its favor. Merlin had been baffled at first as to why a society like Harchong, so thoroughly dedicated to—and dependent upon—a serf- and slave-based economy, had pressed for such a status quo disturbing decision, but the answer had dawned on him. Someone among the Harchong powerbrokers had realized what the Empire’s lack of canals had done to it and wanted gunpowder’s blasting ability to build his own canals. Unfortunately for Harchong and its people, that project—like many in the Empire—had come to naught in the end. That tended to happen in Harchong when whoever had made it his business to push a particular project (and pay the bureaucrats the necessary graft) died, and in this case, there might well have been active opposition as well, from members of the aristocracy who’d recognized an adequate canal system’s potential to destabilize the stagnant and monolithic economy which granted them such absolute power.
The absence of any navigable rivers in Sodar certainly contributed to that kingdom’s relative poverty, especially hemmed in between mountains to the south, South Harchong to the north, and the Desnairian Mountains and Empire to the west.
The best canal in the world was still inferior to oceanic transport in terms of cost and efficiency. With the delays imposed by passing through locks and the need to coordinate traffic and rest draft animals, loads normally moved no more than forty or so miles a day, as opposed to two hundred or even as much as two hundred and fifty-plus a day by sea, but they still gave Safehold a transportation system Old Earth had never dreamed of before its twentieth century. Indeed, it was almost like having an amazingly capital-intensive, glacially slow railroad system … of sorts, anyway. And “glacially slow” was probably an unfair way to describe it, actually, when the maximum sustained speed for land transportation was only about five miles per hour, even on Safeholdian roads.
Of course, then there were the dragons.
A fully adult male hill dragon weighed in at just under fifteen thousand pounds, about ten percent more than an African bull elephant, and its digestive processes were far more efficient than any elephant’s had ever been. Of course, most of Old Earth’s other ruminants’ digestion had been fifty percent more efficient than an elephant’s, as well, but the hill dragon’s was over seventy percent more efficient. And the damned thing could eat just about any form of vegetable matter, which helped to explain how such massive creatures sustained themselves in the wild in large numbers without destroying their environment. (The carnivorous great dragon was another reason; unlike elephants, there was a Safeholdian predator which could—and did—pull down even adult hill dragons all by itself.) With their six limbs, as opposed to the elephant’s four, they were also capable of higher sustained speeds in poor terrain and of carrying proportionately heavier loads. With a properly designed pack frame, a hill dragon could carry up to thirty percent of its body weight, which compared favorably to a horse’s twenty percent, far less an elephant’s capacity of
barely ten percent.
Even more to the point, dragons were almost as efficient as oxen when it came to drawing weights. With a “burst” draft capacity of better than five times its own weight, a hill dragon’s sustained load-pulling capacity was about eighty percent of that, which as a practical matter, meant a single fifteen-thousand-pound hill dragon could pull a thirty-ton load, and Safeholdian wagon design, like many aspects of the planet’s technology, was considerably more advanced than one might have anticipated. With high wheels, broad wheel rims to distribute weight, leaf springs, and low-friction wheel bearings, a draft dragon could move a two-and-a-half-ton articulated wagon with a cargo load of twenty-seven tons at sustained speeds of four miles an hour along a decent surface (and Safeholdian high roads had very decent surfaces, indeed). Theoretically, even allowing for rest and feeding time, a dragon could have moved that load almost forty miles a day through relatively level terrain, although twenty-five to thirty would have been a more realistic estimate, at a “fuel cost” of under six hundred pounds per day. And even that cost could be reduced if it was possible to feed the creature wholly or in large part on grain, rather than relying on hay, grazing, and other roughage.
That conferred a degree of mobility on a Safeholdian army which preindustrial Old Earth commanders couldn’t even have imagined. Not only could they move much faster, but they could also operate farther from supply depots. A commander from the American Civil War back on Old Earth had been able to supply his troops, using animal-drawn transport, for distances of perhaps sixty miles from the closest railhead or riverboat landing. A Safeholdian commander who devoted a quarter of his tonnage to feeding his dragons could deliver the rest of that tonnage up to five hundred miles from the nearest canal. It would take those dragons sixteen of even Safehold’s long, twenty-six-hour-plus days to cover that distance even one way—thirty-two for the round trip—but they could do it.
Eventually, even with dragon-drawn transport, the Dohlarans would overreach their logistics if they moved away from the canal system, especially in light of how badly the Republic’s agricultural sector had been damaged. Spring was always the worst time for an animal-powered army to invade, because food stocks in the target area had been run down over the winter and its ability to subsist on the countryside was at its lowest. This spring in Siddarmark was far worse than usual, which meant the Dohlarans had to plan on transporting every pound of food their men and their animals needed, and food was a far greater logistical problem than ammunition for any field force. Forty thousand men and forty thousand horses would require four hundred and sixty tons of food a day—over eighty-five percent of it for the horses alone—which was a pretty convincing explanation of why water transport was so important when it came to keeping an army supplied. But all that food could be transported in a mere seventeen dragon-drawn wagons, and there were two hundred of them in the Dohlaran supply train moving out of Thorast with Rychtyr’s vanguard. Worse, the canal system in Dohlar hadn’t been damaged the way the Republic’s canals had been. The east-west canal route gave them waterborne communications all the way from Sairhalik in the Duchy of Windborne across the Siddarmark border to within a hundred and fifty miles or so of the Seridahn River. The locks had been temporarily crippled at that point, but Rychtyr was bringing along the engineers to repair them, and from there he could cover the remaining distance to Ervytyn, on the Seridahn, in about eight days. From there he could go upstream to the fortified Siddarmarkian town of Alyksberg or downstream to the far more lucrative objective of Thesmar, and there wouldn’t be much to dispute his passage.
And there’s actually an upside, from their perspective, to how devastated the countryside is, Merlin reflected harshly. Since they can’t live off the countryside, anyway, there’s no point sending out foraging parties, and that was the thing that really slowed preindustrial armies. When you have to go out and sweep up the food you need, you can only advance as fast as the people doing the sweeping can scour the farms in your path. But since there’s no point even trying to do that, they can get their troops on the move early and keep them there late every day. If they had a clue about dividing into corps and using parallel routes of march, they could move even faster!
He was beginning to realize why Stohnar and the other Siddarmarkian officers had been so much more pessimistic than the Charisian and Chisholmian commanders—and me, damn it to hell!— about the balance of troop strength in central Siddarmark. Cayleb’s Safeholdian advisors had expected it to take far longer for massive armies to move overland, because they didn’t have anything like as dense a road and canal net as the mainland did. Their expectations had been predicated on a lifetime of knowing no cargo—or army—could move as rapidly overland as they could move the same loads by sea. His estimate, on the other hand, had resulted from how damned much he “knew” from Old Earth’s history.
And they’d all been wrong.
You can’t afford to fuck up this way, he told himself bitterly. Damn it, you’ve taken advantage of the way Safehold doesn’t mirror-image preindustrial Earth over and over again. You should know better than to let preconceptions bite all of you on the ass!
He sat in the darkness, drumming his fingers on the table before him, trying to visualize how the unanticipated rate of advance by the Church’s armies was going to upset his own estimates. Only time would tell, he thought bleakly, but he already knew at least part of the answer.
The word he wanted, he thought, was badly. Very badly.
.X.
HMS Destroyer, 54, Tellesberg Harbor, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis and Charisian Embassy, Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
“Well, that’s impressive,” High Admiral Rock Point said, bracing his hands on the stern walk railing as he watched the galleons get underway.
“Less impressive than some of the food convoys,” Merlin replied over the plug in his ear.
“I was talking about the Mule,” Rock Point said, jutting his chin in the direction of the small, smoke-streaming vessel pushing a galleon clear of a fouled mooring buoy. Its bluff bows were liberally furnished with fenders, and water foamed white under its counter as it put those bows against the galleon’s flank and thrust it around until it took the wind on its quarter.
“Oh.” Merlin sounded a bit abashed, the high admiral thought. “How are people dealing with her?” he asked after a moment.
“So far, so good.” Rock Point rapped his knuckles on the railing for luck. “A few people screamed and had conniptions when they saw her, but we’d warned everyone she was coming, and Paityr issued all the proper attestations.” He chuckled. “I think half the people who saw her expected her to burst into flames any moment, and I’m sure at least a hundred people suffered a very embarrassing accident the first time she sounded her whistle! But they actually started adjusting to her faster than I’d expected. And God knows she does the work of four or five galley tugs, and does it one hell of a lot faster!”
“I can’t say that surprises me.”
“Nor me, even if I did have to take it all on faith until I actually saw it. And Dustyn and his shipwrights spent an entire day doing nothing but crawling around her gizzards. Then they took her into the Bay and played with her for twelve solid hours! I think some of them hadn’t quite been able to convince themselves Ehdwyrd’s riverboats—or the King Haarahlds—were really going to work until they actually saw her.”
“Hard to blame them. But I still say the convoy’s not as impressive as the food shipments. Not to me, anyway. Terrible as the situation was, there was still something … good about knowing we were loading ships with something that would save lives instead of taking them.”
“I don’t disagree,” Rock Point said more grimly, straightening his back, “and I’m not trying to downplay how important that food was, Merlin. But this load’s going to let us do something about the people responsible for Siddarmark’s needing that food, and I’ve discovered I’m very much in favor of being more … proactive where those basta
rds are concerned.”
“There is that, I suppose,” Merlin conceded, watching with Rock Point through Owl’s SNARCs as the convoy began shaking down into formation.
That precaution was scarcely necessary in the protected waters of Howell Bay, which—as it had been for centuries—was a Charisian lake. But he approved of their getting into the habit from the beginning, because the privateers leaking past Commodore Tyrnyr and beginning to sail from ports as far south as Desnair the City were becoming more than a mere nuisance. And any privateer or regular navy commerce raider who got his hands on one of these galleons would become a very wealthy man if he could only manage to get its cargo home.
Eighty-five thousand Mahndrayns; a hundred and fifty twelve-pounder smoothbores; forty four-inch muzzle-loading rifled cannon; a hundred and fifty infantry mortars; forty-two million rounds of rifle ammunition, fifty thousand twelve-inch shells—shrapnel and high explosive—and thirty-five thousand charges of grapeshot; fifty-six thousand four-inch shells; a hundred and twelve thousand rounds of mortar ammunition; disassembled caissons and limbers for all the guns; and over twenty-five hundred draft horses and dragons for the artillery alone.
The contents of that convoy effectively cleaned out the arsenals and warehouses of Old Charis. The Delthak Works and the other foundries were laboring around the clock to produce still more weapons, and the coal and iron miners struggling to feed those foundries’ voracious appetite were taking too many chances as they wrestled the sinews of war from the earth. Fifty miners had been killed in a gallery collapse just three five-days ago … and the shaft was already being reopened. Howsmyn had twelve of the steam-powered river barges in service now—well, eight, after subtracting the almost completed gunboat conversions—with thirty more under construction. But the new steam engines were only just beginning to come into operation at the Delthak Works, and although most of the other foundries had engines of their own on order, none had been delivered yet. The mines and ore boats had a higher priority, and output was climbing quickly, but it remained far short of actual needs.