“Yes, Sir?”
“To all galleons, ‘Make all sail to topgallants. Course northeast-by-east.’ To Admiral Hahlynd, ‘Screw-galleys conform to previous orders.’ And to all ships, ‘Prepare for battle.’”
* * *
“He’s made up his mind, My Lord,” Lathyk said, standing beside his admiral on Destiny’s quarterdeck as they watched the Western Squadron’s distant canvas swing to the northeast, turning to sail close-hauled on the larboard tack. Destiny and her consorts, on the other hand, had the wind broad on their starboard beams, which was very nearly a galleon’s best point of sailing.
At the moment, anyway.
“Unless I miss my guess, he’d ‘made his mind up’ about what he’d do in a situation like this before he ever left Rhaigair,” Sarmouth replied. “I won’t pretend I haven’t done everything I could to encourage him to do just this, but he knew what his options were when he set out.” He shook his head. “Reminds me of Thirsk a lot, really. Good men, both of them.” Then his expression hardened. “Too bad they couldn’t find an equally good cause to serve.”
He gazed around the quarterdeck. The wide, holystoned expanse of planking looked pristine and pure in the bright, chill sunlight, he thought. By evening it might look very different.
He shook that thought aside and looked up at the rigging, instead. The masthead pendant stood out boldly, not yet starched stiff by the wind but partly extended and flapping over its entire length. Between twenty-five and thirty miles per hour, his experienced eye estimated, but even with his additional sail, Raisahndo’s speed wasn’t going to be much above four or five knots, now that he’d brought his squadron so close to the wind. He was obviously bidding to keep Sarmouth from getting up to windward of him before they engaged. It was unlikely he thought he could evade Sarmouth that way, since Shipworm Shoal lay squarely across his path on his present course. But taking the wind gauge—if he could—was the right gambit for the Dohlaran.
Whether it would work or not was another thing entirely, but it looked like being a close run race, and if he somehow managed to win it.…
If Sarmouth pointed high enough to contest the wind gauge, he’d have to come starboard, moving the wind forward of the beam for his own ships as he put them close-hauled on the starboard tack, sailing the longer leg of an isosceles triangle towards the point where their courses crossed. If he didn’t contest it, though, and Raisahndo managed to get to windward of him and avoid Shipworm Shoal, the Dohlaran might actually be able to avoid action—immediately, at least—after all. With the advantage of their copper and their loftier rigs, Sarmouth’s ships could manage a good knot—at least—better than the Dohlarans under the same press of canvas … but he also had farther to go if he wanted the wind gauge, and he nodded crisply to himself.
“All right, Rhobair. If he’s in such a hurry to make our acquaintance, it’s only courteous to meet him halfway. Let’s get the topgallants on her and come to west-northwest.”
* * *
“Why do I feel so small and insignificant, Sir?”
Zosh Hahlbyrstaht and Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk stood shoulder to shoulder at Fleet Wing’s taffrail. The pumps worked steadily, although fairly slowly, and hammers, saws, and adzes sounded behind them as the schooner’s carpenter and his mates dealt with her damages. Hektor had just come from visiting his wounded. He was going to lose two of them, and that thought tightened his mouth with a pain worse than any physical injury, yet he knew Fleet Wing had been unreasonably fortunate. Much more fortunate than Sword of Justice, at any rate. Fleet Wing had plucked the Dohlaran brig’s survivors—all seventeen of them—from the icy water, and three of them had already succumbed to their savage burns.
He shook that thought aside … for now. He already knew it would come back to visit him in his dreams. But he found it easier to evade at the moment as he and Hahlbyrstaht gazed out at a spectacle fit to strike awe into any seaman.
Eighty galleons forged towards one another, like two huge, floating islands or distant, snow-capped mountain ranges. Canvas gleamed under the chill midday sun: pewter, or weathered tan or gray, or—here and there—the pristine white of newly replaced sails. Banners floated in brilliant splashes of color against the blue sky and the steadily thickening banks of dark-bottomed white cloud rolling down upon the wind. That same wind sang in the rigging and plucked at uniform tunics and hats, and gulls and wyverns wheeled and plunged, crying to wind and wave as they followed the warships moving through the water with a deliberate, terrible majesty both young men knew was doomed to disappear into history.
That was preposterous in, oh, so many ways, Hektor thought, yet it was also inevitable. Barely seven years ago, those would have been fleets of galleys, closing on oars to ram and board and settle the business with cold steel. Now they were stately castles, driving through the freshening swell under towers of canvas, spray bursting white from their cutwaters, while row upon row of hungry cannon snouted from their gunports.
The difference in raw destruction and carnage those seven years had made was astonishing, even to an officer—or possibly especially to an officer—Hahlbyrstaht or Hektor’s age, who’d lived through the breakneck fury of that change. And yet even as those two massive fleets, without a single unit more than six years old between them, manned by thousands of men and carrying thousands of guns, sailed slowly into the crushing embrace of destruction, Sir Hainz Zhaztro’s steam-powered ironclads must be completing the devastation of Rhaigair two hundred and ninety miles to the north. And the only reason the Dohlarans had accepted battle here rather than staying put at Rhaigair to defend their fortified anchorage was because their galleons—anyone’s galleons, however big, however powerful—couldn’t have lived ten minutes in combat with one of the City-class ships.
And whether the Temple Boys know it or not, something one hell of a lot worse than the Cities is coming on behind, he thought now, grimly.
“You probably feel small and insignificant because Fleet Wing’s only a schooner and she is pretty damned small and insignificant against this,” he said out loud, waving at the panorama of sails with his good arm. Then he lowered his hand and shook his head.
“We won’t see something like this ever again,” he said softly. “Oh, there may be a little cleaning up around the edges, but aside from Thirsk’s Home Squadron, this is the last fleet the Group of Four’s got, Zosh, and Thirsk won’t be coming out to meet us when we finally move on Gorath. Not after what Admiral Zhaztro’s probably finished doing to Rhaigair.” He shook his head with an edge of sadness. “Galleons are about to become as obsolete as crossbows. Nobody’s going to be building another fleet of them after the war’s over.”
“I know.” Hahlbyrstaht sighed. “And I guess it’s pretty damned stupid for anyone who’s ever served aboard a galleon in heavy weather to get all nostalgic over them. Hard to think of any experience more miserable than that! And it’s not like they’ve got some sort of centuries of naval tradition behind them, but … Damn it, Sir! I’m going to miss them.”
“A seaman’s life is a stone-cold bitch as often as not,” Hektor agreed, “but a galleon’s a hell of a lot prettier than any steamer ever designed—yet, at least. Of course, given his choice between going aloft in a hurricane and down to shovel coal in a nice, dry stokehold, I know which any sane seaman’s going to choose!”