How Firm a Foundation: Chapter Two

.II.
HMS Destiny, 54,
Gulf of Mathys

    “Well, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk?” Lieutenant Rhobair Lathyk called through his leather speaking trumpet from the deck far below. “You do plan on making your report sometime today, don’t you?”

    Ensign Hektor Applyn-Ahrmahk, known on social occasions as His Grace, the Duke of Darcos, grimaced. Lieutenant Lathyk thought he was a wit, and in Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s considered opinion, he was half right. That wasn’t something he was prepared to offer up as an unsolicited opinion, however. And, to be fair, whatever the lieutenant’s failings as a wellspring of humor, he was one of the best seamen Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever met. One might not think a young man not yet sixteen would be the best possible judge of seamanship, but Aplyn-Ahrmahk had been at sea since his tenth birthday. He’d seen a lot of sea officers since then, some capable and some not. Lathyk definitely fell into the former category, and the fact that he’d had an opportunity to polish his skills under Sir Dunkyn Yairley — undoubtedly the finest seaman under whom Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever served — hadn’t hurt.

    Nonetheless, and despite all of Lieutenant Lathyk’s sterling qualities, Aplyn-Ahrmahk thought several rather uncomplimentary thoughts about him while he struggled with the heavy spyglass. He’d heard rumors about the twin-barreled spyglasses which had been proposed by the Royal College, and he hoped half the tales about their advantages were true. Even if they were, however, it was going to be quite some time before they actually reached the fleet. In the meantime youthful ensigns still got to go scampering up to the main topmast crosstrees with long clumsy spyglasses and do their best to see through haze, mist, and Langhorne only knew what to straighten out a midshipman’s confused report while impatient seniors shouted putatively jocular comments from the comfort of the quarterdeck.

    The young man peered through the spyglass, long practice helping him hold it reasonably steady despite HMS Destiny‘s increasingly lively motion. A hundred and fifty feet long between perpendiculars, over forty-two feet in the beam, and displacing twelve hundred tons, the big, fifty-four-gun galleon was usually an excellent sea boat, but there seemed to be something about the current weather she didn’t care for.

    Neither did Aplyn-Ahrmahk, when he thought about it. There was a strange quality to the air, a sultry feeling that seemed to lie heavily against his skin, and the persistent, steamy haze over Staiphan Reach made it extraordinarily difficult to pick out details. Which was rather the point of Lieutenant Lathyk’s inquiry, he supposed. Speaking of which . . . .

    “I can’t make it out, either, Sir!” He hated admitting that, but there was no point pretending. “I can barely make out Howard Island for the haze!” He looked down at Lathyk. “There’s a couple of sail moving about beyond Howard, but all I can see are topsails! Can’t say whether they’re men-of-war or merchantmen from here!”

    Lathyk craned his neck, gazing up at him for several moments, then shrugged.

    “In that case, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk, might I suggest you could be better employed on deck?”

    “Aye, aye, Sir!”

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk slung the spyglass over his back and adjusted the carry strap across his chest with care. Letting the expensive glass plummet to the deck and shatter probably wouldn’t make Lathyk any happier with him . . . and that was assuming he managed to avoid braining one of Destiny‘s crewmen with it. The way his luck had been going this morning, he doubted he’d be that fortunate. Once he was sure the spyglass was secure, he headed down the shrouds towards the deck so far below.

    “You say the haze is building?” Lathyk asked him almost before his feet had touched the quarterdeck, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk nodded.

    “It is, Sir,” he replied, trying very hard not to sound as if he were making excuses for an unsatisfactory report. “I’d estimate we’ve lost at least four or five miles’ visibility since the turn of the glass.”

    “Um.” Lathyk gave the almost toneless, noncommittal sound which served to inform the world that he was thinking. After a moment, he looked back up at the sky, gazing south-southwest down the length of Terrence Bay, into the eye of the wind. There was a hint of darkness on the horizon, despite the relatively early hour, and anvil-headed clouds with an odd striated appearance and black, ominous bases were welling up above that dark line. Back on a planet called Earth which neither Lathyk nor Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever heard of, those clouds might have been called cumulonimbus.

    “What’s the glass, Chief Waigan?” Lathyk asked after a moment.

    “Still falling, Sir.” Chief Petty Officer Fhranklyn Waigan’s voice was unhappy. “Better’n seven points in the last hour, and the rate’s increasing.”

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk felt his nerves tighten. Before the introduction of the new Arabic numerals it had been impossible to label the intervals on a barometer’s face as accurately as they could now be divided. What had mattered for weather prediction purposes, however, was less the actual pressure at any given moment than the observed rate of change in that pressure. A fall of more than .07 inches of mercury in no more than an hour was a pretty high rate, and he found himself turning to look the same direction Lathyk was looking.

    “Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk, be kind enough to present my compliments to the Captain,” Lathyk said. “Inform him that the glass is dropping quickly and that I don’t like the looks of the weather.”

    “Aye, Sir. Your compliments to the Captain, the glass is dropping quickly, and you don’t like the looks of the weather.”

    Lathyk nodded satisfaction, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk headed for the quarterdeck hatch just a bit more swiftly even than usual.

 

---

 

    Lieutenant Lathyk’s sense of humor might leave a little something to be desired; his weather sense, unfortunately, did not.

    The wind had increased dramatically, rising from a topgallant breeze, little more than eight or nine miles per hour, to something much stronger in a scant twenty minutes. The waves, which had been barely two feet tall, with a light scattering of glassy-looking foam, were three times that tall now, with white, foamy crests everywhere, and spray was beginning to fly. A seaman would have called it a topsail breeze and been happy to see it under normal conditions. With a wind speed of just under twenty-five miles an hour, a ship like Destiny would turn out perhaps seven knots with the wind on her quarter and all sail set to the topgallants. But that sort of increase in so short a period was most unwelcome, especially with the barometer continuing to fall at an ever steeper rate. Indeed, one might almost have said the glass was beginning to plummet.

    “Don’t like it, Captain,” Lathyk said as he and Captain Yairley stood beside the ship’s double wheel, gazing down at the binnacle. The lieutenant shook his head and raised his eyes to the set of the canvas. “Don’t usually see heavy weather out of the southwest this time of year, not in these waters.”

    Yairley nodded, hands clasped behind him while he considered the compass card.

 

---

 

    As the acting commodore of the squadron keeping watch over the Imperial Desnairian Navy’s exit from the Gulf of Jahras, he had quite a few things to be worried over. Just for starters, his “squadron” was down to only his own ship at the moment, since Destiny‘s sister ship Mountain Root had encountered one of the Gulf of Mathyas’ uncharted rocks three days before. She’d stripped off half her copper and suffered significant hull damage, and while her pumps had contained the flooding and she’d been in no immediate danger of sinking, she’d obviously needed to withdraw for repairs. To make bad worse, HMS Valiant, the third galleon of his truncated squadron (every squadron had been “truncated” in the wake of the Markovian Sea action), had reported a serious fresh water shortage two days before that, thanks to leaks in no less than three of her iron water tanks, and Yairley had already been considering detaching her for repairs. Under the circumstances, little though any commander in his place could have cared for the decision, he’d chosen to send both damaged galleons back to Thol Bay in Tarot, the closest friendly naval base, for repairs, with Valiant escorting Mountain Root just in case her hull leaks should suddenly worsen in the course of the three thousand-mile voyage.

    Of course, a single galleon could scarcely hope to enforce a “blockade” of the Gulf of Jahras — Staiphan Reach was over a hundred and twenty miles across, although the shipping channel was considerably narrower — but he was due to be reinforced by an additional six galleons in another five-day or so, and that wasn’t really his true task, anyway. It wasn’t as if the Desnairian Navy had ever shown anything like a spirit of enterprise, after all. In point of fact, the Imperial Charisian Navy would have welcomed a Desnairian sortie, although it was highly unlikely the Desnairians would be foolish enough to give the ICN the opportunity to get at them in open water, especially after what had happened to the Navy of God in the Markovian Sea. If, for some inexplicable reason, the Duke of Jahras did suddenly decide to venture forth, it wasn’t Yairley’s job to stop him, but rather to report that fact and then shadow him. The messenger wyverns in the special below-decks coop would get word of any Desnairian movements to Admiral Payter Shain at Thol Bay in little more than three days, despite the distance, and Shain would know exactly what to do with that information.

    In the extraordinarily unlikely eventuality that the Desnairians decided to move north, they’d have to fight their way through the Tarot Channel, directly past Shain’s squadron. That wasn’t going to happen, especially since Yairley’s warning would ensure Shain had been heavily reinforced from Charis by the time Jahras got there. In the more likely case of his moving south, down the eastern coast of Howard to swing around its southern end and join the Earl of Thirsk, there’d be ample time for the ICN’s far swifter, copper-sheathed schooners — once again, dispatched as soon as admiral Shain received Yairley’s warning — to carry word to Corisande and Chisholm long before the Desnairians could reach their destination.

    In effect, his “squadron” was essentially an advanced listening post . . . and better than three thousand miles from the nearest friendly base. All sorts of unpleasant things could happen to a small, isolated force operating that far from any support — as, indeed, what had happened to Mountain Root and Valiant demonstrated. Under the circumstances, the ICN had scarcely selected that squadron’s commander at random, particularly in light of the delicate situation with the Grand Duchy of Silkiah. Silkiah Bay opened off the Gulf of Mathyas just to the north of Staiphan Reach, and dozens of “Silkiahan” and “Siddarmarkian” merchantmen with Charisian crews and captains plied in and out of Silkiah Bay every five-day in barely sub rosa violation of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s trade embargo. Anything so blatant as the intrusion of a regular Charisian warship into Silkiah Bay could all too easily inspire Clyntahn to the sort of rage which would bring a screeching end to that highly lucrative, mutually profitable arrangement, and Yairley had to be extraordinarily careful about avoiding any appearance of open collusion between his command and the Silkiahans.

    In theory his single galleon was sufficient to discharge his responsibilities in the event of a Desnairian sortie, but in the real world, he was all alone, totally unsupported, and had no friendly harbor in which he could take refuge in the face of heavy weather, all of which had to be weighing on his mind as the implacable masses of angry-looking cloud swept closer. If he was particularly perturbed, he gave no sign of it, however, although his lips were pursed and his eyes were thoughtful. Then he drew a deep breath and turned to Lathyk.

    “We’ll alter course, Master Lathyk,” he said crisply. “Put her before the wind, if you please. I want more water under our lee if this wind decides to back on us.”

    “Aye, Sir.”

    “And after you’ve got her on her new heading, I want the topgallant masts sent down.”

    Someone who knew Lathyk well and was watching him closely might have seen a small flicker of surprise in his eyes, but it was very brief and there was no sign of it in his voice as he touched his chest in salute.

    “Aye, Sir.” The first lieutenant looked at the boatswain’s mate of the watch. “Hands to the braces, Master Kwayle!”

    “Aye, aye, Sir!”

 

---

 

    The glass continued to fall, the wind continued to rise, and lightning began to flicker under the clouds advancing inexorably from the south.

    Destiny looked oddly truncated with her upper masts struck. Her courses had been furled, her inner and middle jibs struck, storm staysails had been carefully checked and prepared, and single reefs had been taken in her topsails. Despite the enormous reduction in canvas, she continued to forge steadily northeast from her original position at a very respectable rate of speed. The wind velocity was easily up to thirty miles per hour, and considerably more powerful gusts were beginning to make themselves felt, as well. Large waves came driving towards the ship from astern, ten feet high and more and crowned in white as they rolled up under her quarter to impart a sharp corkscrew motion, and lifelines had been rigged on deck and oilskins had been broken out. The foul weather gear was hot and sweltering, despite the rising wind, although no one was optimistic enough to believe that was going to remain true very much longer. Their current position was less than three hundred miles above the equator, but those oncoming clouds were high and the rain they were about to release was going to be cold.

    Very cold.

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk would have been hard put to analyze the atmospheric mechanics of what was about to happen, but what he saw when he looked south from his station on Destiny’s quarterdeck was the collision between two weather fronts. A high pressure area’s heavier, colder air out of the west was driving under the warmer, water-saturated air behind a warm front which had moved into the Gulf of Mathyas from the east three days earlier and then stalled. Due to the planet’s rotation, winds tended to blow parallel to the isobars delineating weather fronts, which meant two powerful, moving wind masses were coming steadily into collision in what a terrestrial weatherman would have called a tropical cyclone.

 

---

 

    Fortunately, it was the wrong time of year for the most violent form of tropical cyclone . . . which was more commonly called “hurricane.”

    Ensign Applyn-Ahrmahk didn’t need to understand all the mechanics involved in the process to read the weather signs, however. He understood the consequences of what was about to happen quite well, and he wasn’t looking forward to them. The good news was that Captain Yairley’s preparations had been made in ample time and there’d been time to double check and triple check all of them. The bad news was that the weather didn’t seem to have heard that this wasn’t hurricane season.

    Don’t be silly, he told himself firmly. This isn’t going to be a hurricane, Hektor! Things would be getting worse even faster than they are if that were the case. I think.

    “Take a party and double check the lashings on the quarter boats, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk,” Captain Yairley said.

    “Aye, Sir!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk saluted and turned away. “Master Selkyr!”

    “Aye, Sir?” Ahntahn Selkyr, another of Destiny‘s boatswain’s mate’s, replied.

    “Let’s check the lashings on the boats,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said, and headed purposefully aft while Selkyr mustered half a dozen hands to join him.

    “Giving the lad something to think about, Sir?” Lieutenant Lathyk asked quietly, watching the youthful ensign with a smile.

    “Oh, perhaps a little,” Yairley acknowledged with a faint smile of his own. “At the same time, it won’t hurt anything, and Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s a good officer. He’ll see that it’s done right.”

    “Yes, he will, Sir,” Lathyk agreed, then turned to look back at the looming mass of clouds rising higher and higher in the south. The air seemed thicker and heavier somehow, despite the freshening wind, and there was an odd tint to the light.

    “I thought you were overreacting, to be honest, Sir, when you had the topgallant masts sent down. Now” — he shrugged, his expression unhappy — “I’m not so sure you were.”

    “It’s always such a comfort to me when your judgment agrees with my own, Rhobair,” Yairley said dryly, and Lathyk chuckled. Then the captain sobered. “All the same, I don’t like the feel of this at all. And I don’t like the way the clouds are spreading to the east, as well. Mark my words, Rhobair, this thing is going to back around on us before it’s done.”

    Lathyk nodded somberly. The predominant winds tended to be from the northeast in the Gulf of Mathyas during the winter months, which would normally have lead one to expect any wind changes to veer further to the west, not to the east. Despite which, he had an unhappy suspicion that the captain was right.

    “Do you think we’ll be able to make enough easting to clear Silkiah Bay if it does back on us, Sir?”

    “Now that’s the interesting question, isn’t it?” Yairley smiled again, then turned his back on the dark horizon and watched Aplyn-Ahrmahk and his seamen inspecting the lashings which secured the boats on the quarterdeck’s davits.

    “I think we’ll probably clear the mouth of the bay,” he said after a moment. “What I’m not so sure about is that we’ll be able to get into the approaches to Tabard Reach. I suppose” — he showed his teeth — “we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

 

---

 

    Lightning streaked across the purple-black heavens like Langhorne’s own Rakurai. Thunder exploded like the reply of Shan-wei’s artillery, audible even through the wind-shriek and the pounding, battering fury of waves approaching thirty feet in height, and ice-cold rain hammered a man’s oilskins like a thousand tiny mallets. HMS Destiny staggered through those heavy seas, running before the wind now under no more than a single storm jib, a close-reefed main topsail, and a reefed forecourse, and Sir Dunkyn Yairley stood braced, secured to a quarterdeck lifeline by a turn around his chest, and watched the four men on the wheel fight to control his ship.

    The seas were trying to push her stern around to the east, and he was forced to carry more canvas and more weather helm than he would have preferred to hold her up. It was officially a storm now, with wind speeds hitting better than fifty-five miles per hour, and not a mere gale or even a strong gale, and he suspected it was going to get even nastier before it was over. He didn’t like showing that much of the forecourse, but he needed that lift forward. Despite which he’d have to take in both the topsail and the course and go to storm staysails alone, if the wind got much worse. He needed to get as far east as he could, though, and reducing sail would reduce his speed, as well. Deciding when to make that change — and making it before he endangered his ship — was going to be as much a matter of instinct as anything else, and he wondered why the possibility of being driven under and drowned caused him so much less concern than the possibility of losing legs or arms to enemy round shot.

    The thought made him chuckle, and while none of the helmsmen could have heard him through the shrieking tumult and the waterfall beating of icy rain, they saw his fleeting smile and looked at one another with smiles of their own.

    He didn’t notice as he turned and peered into the murk to the northwest. By his best estimate, they’d made roughly twenty-five miles, possibly thirty, since the visibility closed in. If so, Destiny was now about two hundred miles southeast of Ahna’s Point and four hundred and sixty miles southeast of Silk Town. It also put him only about a hundred and twenty miles south of Garfish Bank, however, and his smile disappeared as he pictured distances and bearings from the chart in his mind. He’d made enough easting to avoid being driven into Silkiah Bay — probably — if the wind did back, but he needed at least another two hundred and fifty miles, preferably more like three hundred — before he’d have Tabard Reach under his lee, and he didn’t like to think about how many ships had come to grief on Garfish Bank or in Scrabble Sound behind it.

    But that’s not going to happen to my ship, he told himself, and tried to ignore the prayerful note in his own thought.

 

---

 

    “Hands aloft to reduce sail!”

    The order was barely audible through the howl of wind and the continuous drum roll of thunder, but the grim-faced topmen didn’t have to hear the command. They knew exactly what they faced . . . and exactly what it was going to be like up there on the yards, and they looked at one another with forced smiles.

    “Up you go, lads!”

 

---

 

    In the teeth of such a wind, the lee shrouds would have been a deathtrap, and the topmen swarmed up even the weather shrouds with more than usual care. They gathered in the tops, keeping well inside the topmast rigging, while men on deck tailed onto the braces.

    A seventeen mile-per-hour wind put one pound of pressure per square inch on a sail. At thirty-two miles per hour, the pressure didn’t simply double; it quadrupled, and the wind was blowing far harder than that now. At the moment, Destiny‘s forecourse was double-reefed, shortening its normal hoist of thirty-six feet to only twenty-four. Unlike a trapezoidal topsail, the course was truly square, equally wide at both head and foot, which meant its sixty-two-foot width was unaffected by the decrease in height. Its effective sail area had thus been reduced from over twenty-two hundred square feet to just under fifteen hundred, but the fifty-five-plus mile-per-hour wind was still exerting over seventeen hundred tons of pressure on that straining piece of canvas. The slightest accident could turn all that energy loose to wreak havoc on the ship’s rigging, with potentially deadly consequences under the current weather conditions.

    “Brace up the forecourse!”

    “Weather brace, haul! Tend the lee braces!”

    The ship’s course had been adjusted to bring the wind on to her larboard quarter. Now the foreyard swung as the larboard brace, leading aft to its sheave on the maintop and from there to deck level, hauled that end — the weather end — of the yard aft. The force of the wind itself helped the maneuver, pushing the starboard end of the yard around to leeward, and as the yard swung, the sail shifted from perpendicular to the wind’s direction to almost parallel. The shrouds supporting the mast got in the way and prevented the yard from being trimmed as close to fore-and-aft as Destiny might have wished — that was the main reason no squarerigger could come as close to the wind as a schooner could — but it still eased the pressure on the forecourse immensely.

    “Clew up! Spilling lines, haul!”

    The clewlines ran from the lower corners of the course to the ends of the yards, then through blocks near the yard’s center and down to deck level, while the buntlines ran from the yard to the foot of the sail. As the men on deck hauled away, the clewlines and buntlines raised the sail, aided by the spilling lines — special lines which had been rigged for precisely this heavy-weather necessity. They were simply ropes which had been run down from the yard then looped up around the sail, almost like another set of buntlines, and their function was exactly what their name implied: when they were hauled up, the lower edge of the sail was gathered in a bight, spilling wind out of the canvas so it could be drawn up to the yard without quite so much of a struggle.

    “Ease halliards!”

    The topmen in the foretop waited until the canvas had been fully gathered in and the yard had been trimmed back to its original squared position before they were allowed out onto it. Squaring the yard once more made it far easier — and safer — for them to transfer from the top to the spar. Under calmer conditions, many of those men would have scampered cheerfully out along the yard itself with blithe confidence in their sense of balance. Under these conditions, use of the foot rope rigged under the yard was mandatory.

    They spread themselves along the seventy-five-foot long spar, seventy feet above the reeling, plunging deck — almost ninety feet above the white, seething fury of the water in those fleeting moments when the deck was actually level — and began fisting the canvas into final submission while wind and rain shrieked around them.

    One by one the gaskets went around the gathered sail and its yard, securing it firmly, and then it was the main topsail’s turn.

 

---

 

    “Keep her as close to northeast-by-east as you can, Waigan!” Sir Dunkyn Yairley shouted in his senior helmsman’s ear.

    Waigan, a grizzled veteran if ever there was one, looked up at the storm staysails — the triangular, triple-thickness staysails set between the mizzen and the main and between the main and the fore — which, along with her storm forestaysail, were all the canvas Destiny could show now.

    “Nor’east-by-east, aye, Sir!” he shouted back while rainwater and spray ran from his iron-gray beard. “Close as we can, Sir!” he promised, and Yairley nodded and slapped him on the shoulder in satisfaction.

    No sailing ship could possibly maintain a set course, especially under these conditions. Indeed, it took all four of the men on the wheel to hold any course. The best they could do was keep the ship on roughly the designated heading, and the senior helmsman wasn’t even going to be looking at the compass card. His attention was going to be locked like iron to those staysails, being certain they were drawing properly, lending the ship the power and the stability she needed to survive the maelstrom. The senior of his assistants would watch the compass and alert him if they started to stray too far from the desired heading.

    Yairley gave the canvas one more look, then swiped water from his own eyes and beckoned to Garaith Symkee, Destiny‘s second lieutenant.

    “Aye, Sir?” Lieutenant Symkee shouted, leaning close enough to Yairley to be heard through the tumult.

    “I think she’ll do well enough for now, Master Symkee!” Yairley shouted back. “Keep her as close to an easterly heading as you can! Don’t forget Garfish Bank’s waiting for us up yonder!” He pointed north, over the larboard bulwark. “I’d just as soon it go on waiting, if you take my meaning!”

    Symkee grinned hugely, nodding his head in enthusiastic agreement, and Yairley grinned back.

    “I’m going below to see if Raigly can’t find me something to eat! If the cooks can manage it, I’ll see to it there’s at least hot tea — and hopefully something a bit better, as well — for the watch on deck!”

    “Thank you, Sir!”

    Yairley nodded and started working his way hand-over-hand along the lifeline towards the hatch. It was going to be an extraordinarily long night, he expected, and he was going to need his rest. And hot food, come to that. Every man aboard the ship was going to need all the energy he could lay hands on, but Destiny‘s captain was responsible for the decisions by which they might all live or die.

    Well, he thought wryly as he reached the hatch and started down the steep ladder towards his cabin and Sylvyst Raigly, his valet and steward, I suppose it sounds better put that way than to think of it as the captain being spoiled and pampered. Not that I have any objection to being spoiled or pampered, now that I think of it.

    And not that it was any less true, however he put it.