At the Sign of Triumph (Safehold)

.IV.

HMS Fleet Wing, 18,

HMS Hurricane, 30,

Bennett Channel,

and

HMS Destiny, 54,

Off Shipworm Shoal,

Saram Gulf.

“Must be nice to be able to read minds, Sir,” Zosh Hahlbyrstaht remarked as he stood beside Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk gazing northwest into the wind at the low-lying cloud of weather-stained canvas plowing steadily down Basset Channel. “Is that something just any admiral can do, or do you have to be a baron?” He shook his head. “Either way, I do admire a man who can predict what the other fellow’s going to do so far in advance! How is he at picking baseball teams?”

“Well,” Hektor said dryly, gazing through the double-glass braced on Stywyrt Mahlyk’s shoulder; he had trouble supporting even a double-glass, much less a regular spyglass, for very long with only one hand, “I don’t know whether or not he can read just anybody’s mind, and he’s never picked a winning team that I know of. But I will say that as a midshipman in Destiny I had ample evidence he could read the mind of anyone under his command!” He straightened, lowering the double-glass with a nod of thanks to Mahlyk. “Never saw a single seaman sneak something past him—and they tried, believe me; it was almost like a game they played with him! Didn’t matter what I had on my conscience, either. He always knew about it. Usually before I did!”

“Works that way for cox’ins, too, if you don’t mind m’ saying so, Sir,” Mahlyk observed, and gave his youthful commander a rather sharp glance. “Seems to be the sort of gift a Pasqualate’d call ‘contagious,’ now I think on it.”

“Well, since no one ever accused me of mind-reading, I’m sure I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about,” Hektor returned, but his expression was absent as he resettled the double-glass strap around his neck without ever taking his eyes from the loom of those oncoming sails, etched against the late-afternoon sunlight. Neither of his companions understood just how well he could actually see them, of course.

He stood that way for the better part of another minute, then shook himself and looked back at Hahlbyrstaht.

“Send Lawrync up to the crosstrees for another count. We’re damned well not seeing all of them from here, but I want the numbers we can see confirmed as definitely as we possibly can. Then I think we’d best send Sir Dunkyn another note while there’s still light for Sojourner to relay our signals.”

* * *

“Lad’s got a talent for this, doesn’t he, My Lord?” Captain Lathyk observed, looking down at the written signal. “To the point, tells you what he knows, and tells you what he knows he doesn’t know, too.” He looked up, shaking his head. “I know captains three times his age who don’t bother with that last bit!”

“Well, I suppose he got a fairly competent grounding in his profession’s responsibilities in his previous ship,” Admiral Sarmouth acknowledged with a wry smile. He stood gazing down at the chart on the desktop between them while the lamps swung gently on their overhead chains. “Always nice when the other fellow seems to be doing what you want, too.”

“I guess you could call it that,” Lathyk said a bit sourly, then waved the signal. “Doesn’t seem to be showing a lot of imagination, though. Just sail straight down the channel to us?” He shook his head. “Best way I can think of to get a lot of his own fellows killed.”

“Fair’s fair, Rhobair,” Sarmouth chided, tapping the chart with a pair of brass dividers. “It’s not like he’s got a huge number of options. Unless you’d like to be the galleon skipper who finds himself dancing with Sir Hainz?”

Lathyk’s expression made his opinion of any such goings-on abundantly clear, and the baron snorted.

“That’s what I thought. And don’t forget that all he’s seen so far are schooners keeping an eye on him.” Sarmouth shrugged. “He’s got to assume the rest of us are out here somewhere, but he doesn’t have any proof of that, he can’t know exactly what our numbers are, and he doesn’t know where ‘out here’ we might be. For all he knows, he could smack into us in the next quarter hour … or we could be running a bluff and those schooners are just pretending to be talking to a squadron of galleons which are really somewhere else doing something entirely different. Wouldn’t be so different from what you and I did to the Desnairians before the Markovian Sea, now would it? I’ll guarantee there were some red faces when that got out! You don’t suppose Thirsk and Raisahndo haven’t bothered to study their opposite numbers’ records, do you?”

The admiral smiled, and the flag captain chuckled and shook his head.

“Not bloody likely, My Lord. If they were that stupid, the kraken’d already be flying over Gorath!”

“Exactly,” Sarmouth said. “I don’t think he believes for an instant that that’s what we’re actually doing, but he has to at least bear the possibility in mind, especially when the entire world knows we did it before … and he damned well does know where the ironclads were when he left port. And even though we have the advantage of all-coppered hulls and he still doesn’t, the difference between our speed and his has to be a lot less lopsided than the difference between sailing galleons and steamers. Unless he simply chooses to scuttle them without ever leaving harbor, he has to take his galleons somewhere, Rhobair. Without knowing where we’ve placed our major strength, about all he can do is pick an escape route and hope he’s guessed right. And the last thing he could afford to do was to vacillate until those ironclads rolled into range of his anchorage. Better to bash on—try to fight at least some of his squadron through to Gorath, even if it means taking on this entire squadron in confined waters—than try to avoid action and find himself caught between us and Sir Hainz.”

“Well, put that way, I suppose he isn’t being quite as … unimaginative as I might’ve thought,” Lathyk admitted. “I think I’d still’ve tried to time things to make it out to sea in darkness, though, Sir.”

“Now there you may have a point. On the other hand, he will clear the Cutfish Narrows before dawn, and that’s the narrowest part of his entire passage. He’ll still have to weather Broken Hawser Rock before he reaches the Gulf, and if I were in his boots, I might prefer to have darkness for the last eighty or ninety miles of that run on the theory that it would be easier to give our schooners the slip in the dark with that much more open water to work with. But it’s not an easy choice. Does he try to evade us in daylight on this side of the Narrows after he clears the channel, or does he worry about our jumping him here in the dark?”

Sarmouth tapped the chart again, the points of his dividers on the Cutfish Narrows, between Tybor Rock, at the southern tip of Shipworm Shoal, and the northeastern arc of Shyan Island Shoal.

“What he’d really prefer would be to get through the channel and out to sea—and home to Gorath—without ever sighting a single one of our galleons. There’s no way he could believe that’s going to happen, though, and if he has to fight his way past us, he’d probably prefer to fight at the shortest possible range. Which is a pretty fair description of any action in the Narrows, when you come down to it. They’re only about fifteen miles wide, even at high water, which I expect his screw-galleys would like. They’re designed to get to knife-range as quickly as possible, not fight ships like Lightning and Seamount—or Zhenyfyr Ahrmahk and Iceberg, for that matter—in open water when we’ve got a wind to work with. So, yes, it could work out for Hahlynd and his boys if we were foolish enough to take him on there, especially in the dark. But those same tight quarters mean he wouldn’t have a lot of room to evade us, and his ability to control his ships would be a lot poorer in the dark. Nobody would be seeing any signal flags, that’s for damn sure! And don’t forget how badly the Temple Boys and their friends have gotten hurt in night engagements in the past. Like, oh … the Markovian Sea, for example.”

The baron’s smile was much colder this time.

“Still, I think he’ll figure tight quarters—like the Narrows—and poor visibility would cramp our maneuverability as much as it would his, and that means it would give him the best chance if he actually has to fight us. That’s why he’s making his approach so late in the day and passing through them in the dark. I suspect one reason he’s timed his passage this way is to offer me the opportunity to sneak in under cover of darkness and ‘ambush him’ in the hope I’ll take it.

“Our options are different, of course. If we didn’t have entirely coppered bottoms—and if Hektor and the other scouts weren’t keeping such a close eye on him—I might well try to jump him there, daylight or not, to keep the cork in the bottle and keep him from breaking out into the Gulf and making us chase him. But he’s not getting away from us even if, by some miracle, he does make it to the Gulf. Given that, I’m not in all that big a hurry to finish the business—unlike him we’ve got all the time in the world to do this right—and frankly, there’s no way in hell I want to tangle with those screw-galleys in the dark. They’ve never managed to use one of Zhwaigair’s ‘spar torpedoes’ on us yet, and damned if I see any reason to give them the opportunity to use one now!”

“Fair enough, Sir.” Lathyk nodded. “So what do we do next?”

“A reasonable question.”

Sarmouth dropped the dividers and stood back, folding his arms and frowning. In fact, he was looking at a rather different chart, projected onto his contact lenses and showing the precise current positions—with movement vectors—of every ship in a hundred-and-fifty-mile circle centered on Destiny.

At the moment, Raisahndo and his forty-three galleons, twelve screw-galleys, and eleven brigs and schooners, were the better part of ninety miles from Sarmouth’s chart table. The Dohlaran’s speed had dropped a bit as the wind moderated, but he hadn’t cracked on additional sail, which confirmed that he held to his determination to pass the Narrows in darkness. As Sarmouth had just pointed out to Lathyk, however, not all of Raisahndo’s hulls were coppered.

In fact, the Imperial Charisian Navy remained the only navy in the world which coppered all of its vessels. Even ICN-owned transports and freight galleons were coppered, and the ironclads were wooden sheathed below the waterline so copper could be attached without galvanic action dissolving the iron fastenings. It was expensive as hell, but until the Royal College got around to inventing antifouling paints—which wouldn’t happen anytime soon—it was the only way to protect a submerged hull against borers and weed. And however resistant to borers an iron hull might be, it certainly wasn’t immune to the drag effect of weed and encrusted shellfish. Just over a quarter of Raisahndo’s galleons lacked that advantage, however, and if they’d been in the water any length of time, that would cost them at least a knot or two—maybe even more—compared to a Charisian galleon of the same size and sail power.

He can’t run—not with everyone—if things go badly for him … and they’re going to go very badly, unless I manage to screw up by the numbers. But just like I told Rhobair, he’s caught in one hell of a trap. The only way out’s through, and we’re the only people he has a prayer of fighting his way past.

Except that’s not going to happen.

For a moment, he felt a pang of pity, but he suppressed it sternly. Caitahno Rausahndo might be—indeed, he was—an honorable and a decent man. But so was Earl Thirsk … and that hadn’t prevented what had happened to Gwyllym Manthyr and his men. Nor did it change the fact that the Kingdom of Dohlar had been the Group of Four’s most effective proxy from the very beginning.

There’s a price for that sort of thing, he thought grimly. I may not like being the one sent to collect it, but I by God will collect it!

“I think we want to be right about here around breakfast time tomorrow,” he said finally, unfolding one arm to tap an index finger on a spot thirty miles north-northeast of their current position. “That’s far enough out to prevent anyone on Shipworm Island from reporting our position to him, and assuming Hektor and his friends are their usual efficient selves about maintaining contact overnight, we’ll be well placed to run down on him for a meeting engagement sometime around midafternoon.”

His flag captain craned his neck, looking down at Sarmouth’s fingertip, then nodded.

“Yes, My Lord,” he acknowledged. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

* * *

“I wish the bastards would go ahead and show themselves, Sir,” Captain Trahvys said quietly.

He and Caitahno Raisahndo stood on HMS Hurricane’s quarterdeck, faces dimly lit by the backwash of the binnacle light, as the flagship made her cautious way into the Cutfish Narrows. Now the flag captain grimaced, folding his hands behind him and rocking on his heels as he looked away from the compass into the moonless dark. Faint starlight glimmered on his ship’s canvas, but every other light had been doused, aside from the binnacle and the single blue lantern each galleon showed to her next astern for guidance and stationkeeping. Every gun was loaded and run out, with the crews sleeping—or trying to sleep, anyway—beside their pieces, despite the cold. It was about as quiet as things ever got aboard a sailing vessel underway, and Raisahndo wondered if Trahvys’ nerves were as tightly wound as his own.

“Assuming they intend to show up at all,” Trahvys added. “And somehow,” his grimace deepened, “I don’t see them being quite so obliging as to just wave as we sail past to Gorath.”

“Neither do I,” Raisahndo acknowledged. “Just between you and me, I’ll spend the odd hour or two on my knees thanking Langhorne if we do sneak by without Sarmouth’s ever getting a galleon in range of us.” He wouldn’t have admitted that to just anyone, but Trahvys only nodded. “Unfortunately,” the admiral continued, “that’s the one thing I’m sure isn’t going to happen.”

“Can’t disagree, Sir,” the flag captain said grimly, and Raisahndo shrugged.

“The best we can do is the best we can do, Lewk, and I’m sure that’s what the lads will give us. But you’re right, if we have to fight, this would be the perfect spot, especially for Admiral Hahlynd’s screw-galleys. They might even get a chance to use those damned torpedoes for something besides training!”

Trahvys nodded, Pawal Hahlynd’s screw-galleys had armed the percussion detonators on the spar-mounted three-hundred-pound charges of powder and then raised the spars into the vertical position. Assuming they got the chance, the spars would be lowered to project forty feet ahead of their stubby bowsprits, like an old-fashioned cavalry lance. If they could get close enough in the dark, ram one of those into a Charisian’s side, all the armor in the world wouldn’t save their victim!

“Even without the screw-galleys, getting in close would be our galleons’ best chance to hurt them, too. Of course, it’d be frigging impossible to exert any sort of control over an unholy brawl like that, but confusion usually helps the fellow trying to run more than the fellow trying to stop him from running, and let’s be honest here. I know what I told the others, but the truth is we’re not looking for a battle under any circumstances, no matter how ‘good’ they might be. We’re looking for an escape, and for that, we need as much sea room as we can get before we run into them. If Sarmouth’s considerate enough to present his squadron in the next couple of hours and let us fight him here, on the best terms we can get, I sure as Shan-wei won’t complain! In fact, I’ve done my dead level best to convince him to do just that. But if I were him and he was me?” He shook his head. “I’d sit somewhere ahead of us, knowing we’d have to come to him, and I’d stay the hell out of any night battles while I waited for daylight.”

Trahvys made a wordless sound of agreement, and it was Raisahndo’s turn to grimace under cover of the darkness. He must be even more nervous than he’d thought he was. He hadn’t just told the flag captain all those things he already knew for Trahvys’ benefit; he was still trying to convince himself they had at least some chance to pull this off. But the truth was that any engagement—daylight or dark—was unlikely to be a happy experience for the Western Squadron, and there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about that. A competent admiral could usually find ways to defeat an adversary—or at least cope with it—if his fleet was more powerful than his opponent’s or if it was faster.

Unhappily for the Western Squadron, it was neither.

“Well, it’ll be dawn in about three hours,” he pointed out, breath-steam gleaming in the chill night as it caught the binnacle’s reflection. “Assuming the bastards persist in not showing up between then and now, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to feed the men early, just in case.”

* * *

“Still with us, I see. Nice of them to be so punctual!” Lieutenant Hahlbyrstaht observed as the sunrise slanted sharply across the waves to gild the distant topsails with gold. He shook his head. “And right where you said they’d be. Sort of reminds me of that business in the Fern Narrows last year.”

“We’re not supposed to talk about that, Zosh,” Hektor reminded him, and Hahlbyrstaht nodded.

“Point taken, Sir,” he said rather more formally, then grinned. “It’s still an impressive trick, though, Skipper, and I’m not the only man aboard who thinks that. Is this ability to smell the enemy something His Majesty taught you?”

“No, but I sometimes think it might be something Sir Dunkyn taught Cayleb back when Cayleb was a midshipman.” Hektor smiled as someone in far-off Siddar City snorted an imperial sort of chuckle over his com earplugs. Then he shrugged. “Actually, it wasn’t all that hard to figure out where they’d pretty much have to be under these conditions.”

“Maybe not, but staying close enough to see them at first light without blundering right the hell into those two fellows in the dark was just a tad more challenging,” Hahlbyrstaht countered, and pointed at the topsails of a pair of Dohlaran brigs less than four miles clear of Fleet Wing. The closest galleons were at least eight miles beyond them. “I found it a little worrisome, anyway. Of course, I realize two-to-one odds are a mere nothing for seasoned Charisian seadogs like us!” He snapped his fingers with fine disdain. “Still, it could’ve gotten lively.”

“Which is why I knew I could rely on our ‘seadog’ lookouts to do such a good job.” Hektor smiled again. This time, actually, it was more of a grin. “The Admiral always told me caution can be a great motivator and that a little honest fear does more to keep a man on his toes than any amount of confidence.” He shook his head, his grin fading. “I sometimes wonder if he really realizes how much … moral authority it takes to say something like that to a ten- or eleven-year-old midshipman.”

“‘Moral authority’?” Hahlbyrstaht snorted. “That’s something the Baron has in spades!”

“Oh, I think you could say that,” Hektor agreed. Then he turned to look to the northeast, shading his eyes with his good hand as he gazed into the sun. “I assume Sojourn’s up there where she’s supposed to be?”

“Yes, Sir. Last time we looked, anyway.” Hahlbyrstaht chuckled sourly. “Of course that was before we had the damned sun shining right into our eyes. I imagine she’ll be able to read our signals just fine, but seeing her confirmation hoists’ll be just a bit tougher.”

“Well, if she’s up there, I suppose we should update Commander Cupyr and ask him to pass it along to the Admiral.” Hektor grimaced. “We should be able to see his confirmation sometime in the next, oh, hour or so.”