He snorted again, then blew a smoke ring towards the overhead. He watched it drift upwards, then looked back at Skaht.
“Well, in that case, I suppose I should tell the High Admiral we’re ready to leave, shouldn’t I?”
* * *
My God, that’s a beautiful ship, Sharleyan Ahrmahk thought as she descended from the carriage into the golden flare of trumpets and the massed, deafening thunder of her waiting subjects. She started down the double line of saluting Imperial Guardsmen towards the waiting platform, Edwyrd Seahamper at her heels even here, but her eyes clung to the ship lying to a single anchor off the Tellesberg seafront, and she knew she’d never seen a more magnificent vessel.
It was true, although Gwylym Manthyr’s beauty was quite different from that of the galleys which had preceded her or the galleons dwarfed by her stupendous presence. It was an angular, severe beauty—rearing out of the water like a floating cliff. Or like an island crowned by fortress walls and towers. Her single mast thrust up with only one yard, intended solely to display signal flags, not to carry canvas. The fat pod of the lookout’s position was over a hundred feet above water level, and her funnels rose with the clean, arrogant severity of a great dragon’s spinal plates. Unlike the traditional stark black of the ICN’s galleons or the earlier ironclads, her hull and gunshields were painted a dark blue gray while her upperworks and funnels were painted in what Ahlfryd Hyndryk and Ehdwyrd Howsmyn called “haze gray,” although the funnel caps and her mast were an unrelieved black. Probably because that was the color her funnel smoke was going to leave them anyway, in the end.
The guns in her barbettes, thrusting from her casemates, or in their shielded deck mounts promised unyielding death and destruction, yet they, too, had their own beauty—the beauty of function, of purpose. And so did her long, graceful sheer, the sharply raked prow and flared bows, the way she sat in the water, a living creature in her own element.
The Tellesberg sky was a blue dome bounded by dramatic banks of cumulus cloud. They piled against the southern and eastern horizons, rolling slowly, almost imperceptibly to the northwest, brilliant white above and shadowed gray below. The harbor’s seabirds and wyverns rode the breeze, calling to one another, diving for particularly tempting bits of flotsam, and small craft bobbed around the waiting warship, keeping a respectful distance and yet somehow like the harbor’s winged citizens.
Twin columns of smoke rose from Gwylym Manthyr’s funnels, and steam plumed white against it as relief valves vented. She was ready—eager—to go, Sharleyan thought as she ascended the platform’s steps.
Makel Staynair, his brother, and Halcom Bahrns—the last two in dress uniform, dress swords at their sides—were already there. They bowed profoundly to her, and then it was her turn to kiss the archbishop’s ring.
She straightened, turning to face the crowd that packed the waterfront, and stillness radiated out from the platform as the spectators closer to it shouted for those farther from it to be still and listen.
She let that stillness settle, then held out one hand to Syaynair.
“If you would, Your Grace,” she said into the stillness, and the archbishop moved forward to stand beside her and raised his hands.
“Let us pray,” he said, and a stir rippled through the crowd as caps were remove and heads were bowed.
“Oh God,” he said then, his voice rising clear and clean against the sound of the wind, the pop of the platform’s banners, the distant cries of gulls and wyverns, “we come to You this day to ask Your blessing upon this ship, upon her crew, and upon her mission. We know how You must weep to see Your children shed the blood of any of Your other children, yet we also know You understand the test to which we have been called. You know the task before us, and we thank You for having been with us so far, walked at our side in our battle for survival, our struggle to serve Your will as You’ve given us to understand it and to defend those who the corrupt, vile men in Zion would torture and murder in Your name, just as they tortured and murdered the man for whom this ship is named. We ask You to walk with us for the rest of our journey, as well, and we beseech You to keep, guard, guide, and protect these, our protectors, in the five-days and months to come. Be with them in the furnace, give them victory, and grant that—in that victory—they do not forget that even their mortal foes are also Your children and our brothers. Let no unnecessary bloodshed, no cruelty, mar their actions, and preserve them from the hatred that can poison even the cleanest soul. We ask this as You have taught us to ask, trusting in Your goodness as we would trust in the love of any father. Amen.”
“Amen!” the response came back from the crowded quay and the streets behind it like a grumble of thunder, and Sharleyan took one more stride forward, resting her hands on the platform’s flag-draped railing, while hats and caps were replaced amid a brief, fresh susurration of conversation. But that conversation faded quickly as all eyes turned attentively, expectantly, towards her. She let the stillness settle once more, let the anticipation build—waited until the vast crowd was ready—and then squared her shoulders.
“Charisians!”
Her voice was far sweeter—and lighter—than Maikel Staynair’s. Yet it had been trained from childhood for moments just like this one and it rang out with astonishing clarity. Even so, those farthest from her couldn’t possibly hope to hear her. The crowd which had come to witness Gwylym Manthyr’s sailing stretched for hundreds of yards along the waterfront, thrust tendrils up the approach streets. No one’s voice could have carried to its fringes, but the highly trained priests and lay brothers the archbishop had seeded throughout it were prepared to relay her words to those distant ears. She would have to time her delivery, leave spaces for those repetitions, but that, too, was something in which she’d been trained since girlhood.
“Charisians!” she repeated. “Three and a half years ago, four ships of the Imperial Charisian Navy fought to the death against impossible odds. Crippled by storm damage, facing a squadron—a fleet—which outnumbered them many times over, they chose not to surrender unharmed, but to fight. To fight against those impossible odds to protect their undamaged consorts who might yet avoid destruction … but only if those four ships fought and died to buy them the time they needed. And so those ships fought—fought just as every ship in our Navy fights to protect every Charisian, every child of God who defies the savagery and the arrogance and the ambition of the men who have perverted all Mother Church means and is.”
She paused to let her words be repeated … and to let them sink in.
“We’ve remembered those ships in memorial masses every Wednesday in each month of September since that day … and we will remember them in every September to come. We will remember HMS Rock Point, HMS Damsel, HMS Avalanche, and—especially!—HMS Dancer for as long as there is a Charisian Navy, a Charisian Empire, and a Church of Charis, because the men aboard those ships—your brothers, your husbands, your fathers, your sons—fought for us, for every single one of us. And when they’d fought their ships into sinking wrecks, when three-quarters of them had fallen in combat against an entire fleet, the wounded, bleeding survivors surrendered honorably to their foes.”