The Prison Hulks, and HMS Chihiro, 50, Gorath Bay, Kingdom of Dholar
“How is he this morning, Naiklos?” Sir Gwylym Manthyr asked, turning his back on the vista of Gorath Bay.
“Not as well as he pretends, Sir,” Naiklos Vahlain replied.
The slight, dapper valet joined the admiral at the forecastle rail and stroked his mustache gently as he, too, looked out across the bay. The sky was a blue bowl overhead, dotted with white cloud puffs, and a brisk breeze-cool, but without the bitter bite of the winter just past-blew across the deck. Wyverns and seabirds rode the breeze, their cries and whistles faint, and three-foot waves gave the deck underfoot a slight pitch as the ship’s anchor held her head to the wind.
Not that the roofed-over obsolete coastal galley was much of a ship, anymore, Manthyr reflected, gazing once more across the bay at the hateful sight of the city of Gorath’s tall stone walls. He’d had altogether too much opportunity to examine those walls over the last seven months. He’d spent endless hours picturing how vulnerable they would be to modern artillery… and regretting the fact that he’d never have the chance to see that vulnerability demonstrated.
He turned away from the familiar lava-flow anger of that thought, not that the contemplation of his remaining “command” was any more appealing. Lywys Gardynyr, the Earl of Thirsk, had done his best for his prisoners-better, to be honest, than Manthyr had anticipated, after the unyielding terms then-Crown Prince Cayleb had inflicted upon him after the Battle of Crag Reach-but he’d faced certain limitations. The greatest of which was that he appeared to be the only Dohlaran aristocrat with anything remotely resembling a sense of honor. The others were too busy hating all Charisians for the crushing humiliation of the Battles of Rock Point and Crag Reach. Either that, or they were Temple Loyalists too busy sucking up to the Inquisition-or both-to worry about little things like the proper treatment of honorably surrendered prisoners of war.
Manthyr knew his own sense of failure and helplessness when he contemplated the probable future of the men and officers he’d commanded only made his bitterness worse. But when he looked around the moldering old galleys which had been converted into prison hulks to house his personnel, when he considered how grudgingly their needs were met, how meager their rations were, how little concern even the Order of Pasquale had demonstrated for his wounded and sick, it was hard to feel anything except bitterness.
Especially when you know the only thing standing between your people and the Inquisition is Thirsk and-who would have believed it?-a Schuelerite auxiliary bishop, he thought.
He wasn’t the only Charisian that bitterness was poisoning, he reminded himself. He and his surviving officers did all they could to maintain morale, but it was hard. Charisian seamen by and large were far from stupid, and even the youngest surviving ship’s boy could figure out what was going on. Penned up in the drab, damp, barren sameness of their floating prisons day after day; denied the right to so much as send letters home to tell their families they were still alive (so far, at least); poorly fed; without exercise; with no warm clothing against a winter which would have been bitterly cold for anyone, far less men from their semi-tropical homeland, it was scarcely surprising when even Charisians found it difficult to pretend to one another that they couldn’t see what was coming.
Which is one reason we’ve got so much sickness in the hulks, Manthyr told himself bitterly. Not that there aren’t plenty of other reasons. Aside from Thirsk and Maik none of these people give a good goddamn about whether or not heretic Charisians are covered by Pasquale’s Law. Hell, most of them probably figure “heretics” don’t have any right to worry about Pasquale’s commands! They’re sure as hell not bothering themselves to provide the proper diet his law decrees, anyway. No wonder we’re actually seeing scurvy among the men! And when you crank that kind of so-called food into the living conditions-such as they are-and the despair, it’s a wonder everyone isn’t down sick!
His jaw muscles ached, and he forced himself to deliberately unclench them. None of their chaplains had survived the final battle, which was probably just as well, since the Inquisition would most certainly have demanded (and received) possession of any heretical priests who fell into their hands. Manthyr liked to think that at least some of the Dohlaran clergy would have been interested in meeting the spiritual needs of his men, but they’d been forbidden to by Wylsynn Lainyr, the Bishop Executor of Gorath, and Ahbsahlahn Kharmych, his intendant. If the rumor mill was to be believed, Bishop Staiphan Maik, the Dohlaran Navy’s special intendant, had attempted to get that ruling overturned, but if he’d tried, he hadn’t succeeded. Bishop Executor Wylsynn was willing to grant access to clergy for Charisians who were prepared to renounce-and admit- their heresy and the blasphemous rites in which they had participated in the worship of Shan-wei, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.
Which, since we haven’t had any “blasphemous rites” or “worshipped” Shan-wei, would be just a bit difficult for any of them to do honestly. And all of us know from what happened to those poor bastards the Inquisition got hold of after the Ferayd Massacre how Clyntahn would use any “confessions” against Charis. Not to mention the fact that “admitting” any such thing would make whoever “confessed” automatically subject to the Punishment of Schueler. And only a drooling idiot would believe someone like Clyntahn wouldn’t get around to applying it sooner or later, no matter what Lainyr might promise first.
Despite that, some of his men-a few; no more than a couple of dozen-had “recanted” their heresy and been “received back into the bosom of Mother Church”… for now, at least. Or so their fellows had been told, at any rate. Manthyr had his doubts about how long that was going to last, and the constancy of the rest of his people in the face of what they all knew awaited them eventually had been one of his few sources of consolation over the past months.
Yet even that consolation had been flawed with bitterness, and the despair was always there for everyone. It combined with all those other factors to drive down the men’s ability-and willingness-to resist disease, and by his latest estimate, at least a third of his remaining personnel were currently ill. It had been worse over the winter months, in some ways, but malnutrition and privation hadn’t yet reduced their resistance then. Now that spring’s milder temperatures had arrived, the sick list should have been shrinking; instead, it was climbing, and they were losing three or four men every five-day.
Men who were forbidden burial in consecrated ground as the “spawn of Shan-wei” they were. Instead, their bodies were to be taken ashore on Archbishop Trumahn’s personal order and cast into pits in the fields where the Dohlaran capital buried its garbage. Its other garbage, as the holy archbishop had put it. Which was why Manthyr and his officers had taken to dropping their dead quietly and reverently over the side under cover of night, weighted with whatever they could find for the job and accompanied by the murmured words of the burial service any captain remembered only too well.
The numbers were going to get worse. He was almost certain of that, and he was desperately worried about young Lainsair Svairsmahn, HMS Dancer ’s only surviving midshipman. Svairsmahn had lost his left leg just below the hip during the final, desperate hour of the action which had hammered four of Manthyr’s ships into wrecks before they finally struck. The boy had been barely twelve and a half when they took off his leg, yet his courage had almost broken Manthyr’s heart. He and Vahlain had cared personally for Svairsmahn over the bitter winter just past, nursing him through his recovery, slipping him extra food from their own meager rations (and denying they were doing anything of the sort whenever he asked). There’d been times, especially right after the amputation, when Manthyr had been afraid they were going to lose the boy anyway, as he’d lost so many other officers and men. But Svairsmahn had always pulled through.