How Firm a Foundation: Chapter Four

.IV.
Destiny, 54,
Off Scrabble Shoal,
Grand Duchy of Silkiah

    “Pull, you lazy bastards!” Stywyrt Mahlyk, Sir Dunkyn Yairley’s personal coxswain, shouted as the thirty-foot longboat porpoised its way through the confused waves and spray like a seasick kraken. Hector Aplyn-Ahrmahk, crouching in the bow and hanging on for dear life while Destiny‘s starboard sheet anchor weighted down the longboat’s stern and accentuated the boat’s . . . lively movement, thought Mahlyk sounded appallingly cheerful under the circumstances.

    “Think this is a blow?!” the coxswain demanded of the laboring oarsmen in scoffing tones as the boat’s forward third went briefly airborne across a wave crest, then slammed back down again. “Why, you sorry Delferahkan excuses for sailor men! I’ve farted worse weather than this!”

    Despite their exertion and the spray soaking them to the skin, one or two of the oarsmen actually managed a laugh. Mahlyk was amazingly popular with Destiny‘s crew, despite his slavedriver mentality where Captain Yairley’s cutter was concerned. At the moment, he’d traded in the cutter for the larger and more seaworthy longboat, but he’d brought along the cutter’s crew, and there was no insult to which he could lay his tongue that didn’t make them smile. In point of fact, his crew took simple pride in his ability to out-swear any other member of the ship’s company when the mood took him.

    Which, alas, it did far more often than not, if the truth be known, especially when the captain wasn’t about.

    He and Aplyn-Ahrmahk were old friends, and the ensign remembered an incendiary raid on an Emeraldian port in which he and Mahlyk had torched a half-dozen warehouses and at least two taverns. They’d tossed incendiaries into three galleons, as well, as he recalled, but they hadn’t been the only ones firing the ships, so they couldn’t claim solo credit for them. Their current expedition was somewhat less entertaining than that one had been, but it was certainly no less exciting.

    The longboat swooped up another steep wave, leaving Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s stomach briefly behind, and the ensign turned to look back at the galleon. Destiny pitched and rolled to her bower anchors with all the elegance of a drunken pig, masts and yards spiraling crazily against the clouds. She looked truncated and incomplete with her upper masts struck, but she was still one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. More importantly at the moment, Lieutenant Lathyk stood on the forecastle, a semaphore flag tucked under his arm, watching the boat from under a shading palm while Lieutenant Symkee used one of the new sextants the Royal College had recently introduced as a successor to the old back staff to measure the angle between the longboat and the buoys marking the positions of the bower anchors. As Aplyn-Ahrmahk watched, Lathyk took the flag from under his arm and raised it slowly over his head.

    “Ready, Mahlyk!” the ensign called.

    “Aye, Sir!” the coxswain acknowledged, and reached for the lanyard with his left hand while his right fist gripped the tiller bar. Another minute passed. Then another. Then –

    The flag in Lathyk’s hand waved.

    “Let go!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk shouted, and the longboat surged suddenly as Mahlyk jerked the lanyard which toggled the trigger and released the three-ton sheet anchor from the heavy davit rigged in the longboat’s stern. It plunged into the water, well up to windward of the more weatherly of the two anchors Destiny had already dropped, and the longboat seemed to shake itself in delight at having shed the irksome load.

    “Stream the buoy!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk ordered, and the anchor buoy was heaved over the side behind the sheet anchor.

    Although the longboat moved much more easily without the anchor’s hanging weight and the drag of the cable trailing astern, there were still a few tricky moments as Mahlyk brought it about. But the coxswain chose his moment carefully, using wind and wave action to help drive the boat around, and then they were pulling strongly back towards Destiny.

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk sat on the bow thwart, looking aft past Mahlyk at the brightly painted anchor buoy, which got progressively smaller with distance, disappearing in the troughs of the waves, then bobbing back into sight. Boat work was always risky in blowing weather like this, but on a lee shore, with the entire rudder carried away and a bottom where anchors were known to drag, the notion of getting a third anchor laid out made plenty of sense to him. Of course, he did wonder how he’d ended up selected for the delightful task. Personally, he would cheerfully have declined the honor in favor of Tohmys Tymkyn, Destiny‘s fourth lieutenant. But Tymkyn was busy with the galleon’s pinnace, locating and buoying the spire of rock which had claimed the ship’s rudder. He was having at least as exciting a time of it as Aplyn-Ahrmahk, and the ensign wondered if the two of them had been chosen because they were so junior they’d be less badly missed if one or both of them didn’t make it home again.

    I’m sure I’m doing the Captain a disservice, he told himself firmly, wiping spray from his face, and then smiled as he wondered how Sir Dunkyn was going to react to his upcoming little show of initiative. I can always blame it on Stywyrt, he thought hopefully. Sir Dunkyn’s known him long enough to realize what a corrupting influence he can be on a young and innocent officer such as myself.

    “Pull! Langhorne — I thought you were seamen!” Mahlyk bawled, as if on cue. “I’ve seen dockside doxies with stronger backs! Aye, and legs, too!”

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk shook his head in resignation.

 

---

 

    Sir Dunkyn Yairley watched with carefully concealed relief as the longboat was swayed back aboard. The pinnace followed, nesting inside the longboat on the gallows of spare spars above the main hatch. The cutters on the quarter and stern davits would have been much easier to get out and in again, especially with the deck so cluttered with the yards and sails which had been sent down from above to reduce topweight, and they probably would have sufficed. But they might not have, either, in these sea conditions, and he was disinclined to take chances with men’s lives, whether the rules of the game allowed him to show his concern or not.

    And they definitely wouldn’t have sufficed for what that young idiot pulled after dropping the sheet anchor! he thought sourly.

    He considered reprimanding Aplyn-Ahrmahk. The ensign and that scapegrace ne’er-do-well Mahlyk had taken it upon themselves to sweep the seabed north of Destiny with a grappling iron-weighted trailing line which should (in theory, at least) have snagged on any rocks rising high enough to be a threat to the galleon even at low tide. As a result, Yairley now knew he had over a mile of rock-free clear water for maneuvering room to the north of his current position.

    They hadn’t happened to ask permission for that little escapade, and they’d almost capsized twice before they’d finished, and the captain was severely torn between a warm sense of pride in a youngster who’d become one of his special protégés and anger at both of them for risking their lives and their entire boat’s crew without authorization.

    Well, time enough to make my mind up about that later, he decided. And in the meantime, I’ll just concentrate on putting the fear of Shan-wei into the young jackanapes.

    He paused long enough to give Aplyn-Ahrmahk a steely-eyed glare as a down payment, then turned back to the task of creating a jury-rigged rudder.

    Maikel Symmyns had gotten a spare main topgallant yard laid across the quarterdeck so that its arms jutted out through the aftermost gunports on either side, supported with “lifts” to the mizzen mast and guys running forward to the main chains. Hanging blocks had been secured to either end of the spar, and the falls run forward from them through the fairleads under the wheel. Several turns had been taken around the barrel of the wheel, and then the free ends of the falls had been seized to the staple at the midpoint of the drum to anchor everything firmly.

 

---

 

    “Here ’tis, Sir,” Garam Mahgail said, and Yairley turned to face the ship’s carpenter. The carpenter was a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer, and he was probably close to half-again Yairley’s age and bald as an egg, but still brawny and callused. At the moment, his bushy eyebrows were raised as he exhibited his craftsmanship for the captain’s approval.

    “Is this what you had in mind, Sir?” he asked, and Yairley nodded.

    “That’s precisely what I had in mind, Master Mahgail!” he assured the warrant officer, and beckoned Symmyns over. The boatswain obeyed the gesture, and the captain pointed at Mahgail’s handiwork.

    “Well, Bo’sun?”

    “Aye, I think it’ll work right well, Sir,” Symmyns said with a slow smile of approval. “Mind you, it’s going to be Shan-wei’s own drag in a light air, Cap’n! Be like towing a couple of sea anchors astern, it will.”

    “Oh, not quite that bad, Bo’sun,” Yairley disagreed with a smile of his own. “More like one sea anchor and a half.”

    “Whatever you say, Sir.” Symmyns’ smile turned into a grin for a moment, and then he turned back to his working party and started barking additional orders.

    At Yairley’s instructions, Mahgail had fitted a pair of gundeck water tubs with bridles on their open ends, and inhauls had been made fast to the bottoms. Now the captain watched as one of the tubs was secured to either end of the spar by a line run to the inhaul. Then the bitter end from the hanging block was secured to the bridle. With the wheel in the “midships” position, the inhauls would tow the tubs through the water a good fifty feet behind the ship with their bottoms up, but when the wheel was turned to larboard, the bridle rope from the tub on that side to the barrel of the wheel would be shortened, pulling the tub around to tow open-end first. The resultant heavy drag on that side of the ship would force the galleon to turn to larboard until the wheel was reversed and the tub went gradually back to its bottom-up position, where it would exert far less drag. And as the wheel continued turning to starboard, the starboard tub would go from the bottom-up to the open-end-forward position, causing the ship to turn to starboard.

    There were drawbacks to the arrangement, of course. As Symmyns had pointed out, the drag penalty would be significant. Water was far denser than air, which explained how something as relatively tiny as a ship’s rudder could steer something a galleon’s size to begin with, and the resistance even with both tubs floating bottom-up would knock back Destiny‘s speed far more than a landsman might expect. And whereas a rudder could be used even when backing a ship, the tubs were all too likely to foul their control lines — or actually be drawn under the ship — in that sort of situation. But Symmyns’ initial diagnosis had been correct. The gudgeons, the hinge-like sockets into which the pintle pins of the rudder mounted, had been completely torn out, and the rudder post itself was badly damaged and leaking. They had a pattern from which to build a complete replacement rudder, but there was nothing left to attach a replacement to, and his improvised arrangement should work once he got the ship underway once more.

    Which isn’t going to happen, of course, until the wind veers, he reflected sourly.

    But at least he had three anchors out, so far they all seemed to be holding, and there was no sign anyone ashore had even noticed their presence. Under the circumstances, he was more than prepared to settle for that for the moment.

 

---

 

    “Oh, Pasquale, take me now!” Trahvys Saylkyrk groaned.

    He was the oldest of Destiny‘s midshipmen — in fact, he was two years older than Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk — and he didn’t usually have any particular problem with seasickness. The last couple of days had pushed even his stomach over the edge, however, and he looked down at the stew in his bowl with a distinctly queasy expression. The ship’s motion was actually more violent than it had been before she anchored, in some ways, as heavy, confused seas continued to roll in from the southeast. She lay with her head to the wind now, which meant she climbed each steep roller as it came in, then buried her nose and kicked her heels at the sky as it ran aft. And just to complete Saylkyrk’s misery, the galleon threw in her own special little corkscrew with every third or fourth plunge.

    “Please take me now!” he added as one of those corkscrews ran through the ship’s timbers and his stomach heaved, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk laughed.

    “I doubt he’d have you,” he said. As an ensign, he was neither fish nor wyvern in a lot of ways. Although he was senior to any of the ship’s midshipmen, he still wasn’t a commissioned officer, and wouldn’t be until his sixteenth birthday. As such, he continued to live in the midshipmen’s berth and served as the senior member of the midshipmen’ mess. Now he looked across the swaying mess table at Saylkyrk and grinned. “Archangels have standards, you know. He’d probably take one look at that pasty green complexion and pass.”

    “Fine for you to say,” Saylkyrk with a grimace. “There are times I don’t think you have a stomach, Hektor!”

    “Nonsense! You’re just jealous, Trahvys,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk shot back with a still broader grin. Some midshipmen might have resented being required to take the orders of someone so much younger than he was, but Saylkyrk and Aplyn-Ahrmahk had been friends for years. Now the ensign elevated his nose, turned his head to display his profile, and sniffed dramatically. “Not that I don’t find your petty envy easy enough to understand. It must be difficult living in the shadow of such superhuman beauty as my own.”

    “Beauty!” Saylkyrk snorted and dug a spoon glumly into the stew. “It’s not your ‘beauty’ I envy. Or that I would envy, if you had any! It’s the fact that I’ve never seen you puking into the bilges.”

    “You would’ve if you’d been in my first ship with me,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk told him with a shudder. “Of course, that was a galley — only about two-thirds Destiny‘s size.” He shook his head feelingly. “I was as sick as a . . . as a . . . as sick as Ahrlee over there,” he said, twitching his head at the still-miserable Zhones.

    “Oh, no, you weren’t,” Zhones replied feebly. “You couldn’t've been; you’re still alive.”

    The other midshipmen chuckled with the cheerful callousness of their youth, but one of them patted Zhones comfortingly on the back.

    “Don’t worry, Ahrlee. They say once your tonsils come up it gets easier.”

    “Bastard!” Zhones shot back with a somewhat strained grin.

    “Don’t pay any attention to him, Ahrlee!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk commanded. “Besides, it’s not your tonsils; it’s your toenails. After you bring your toenails up it gets easier.”

    Even Zhones laughed at that one, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk smiled as he pushed his own chocolate cup across the table to the younger midshipman.

    Hot chocolate was even harder to come by aboard ship than it was ashore, and it was expensive. With his allowance from his adoptive father, Aplyn-Ahrmahk could have afforded to bring along his own private store and enjoy it with every meal. Fortunately, he also had enough common sense to do nothing of the sort. He’d been born to humble enough beginnings to realize how throwing his newfound wealth into his fellows’ faces would have been received, so instead he’d invested in a supply for the entire mess. By this point, they’d been away from port long enough it was running decidedly low, however, and the cook’s mate assigned as the midshipmen’ mess steward was rationing it out in miserly doses. But the Charisian naval tradition was that the ship’s company was kept well fed, with hot food whenever possible, especially after a day and a night like Destiny had just passed. Despite Saylkyrk’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for the stew in his bowl it was actually quite tasty (albeit a bit greasy), and their steward had made enough chocolate for everyone. For that matter, he’d even managed to come up with fresh bread. He’d expended the last of their flour in the process, but the result had been well worth it.

 

---

 

    Unfortunately, poor Zhones clearly wasn’t going to be able to keep the stew down. He’d contented himself by devouring his share of the precious bread one slow, savoring mouthful at a time, washing it down with the sweet, strong chocolate. Now he looked up as Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s mug slid in front of him.

    “I –” he began, but Aplyn-Ahrmahk shook his head.

    “Consider it a trade,” he said cheerfully, snagging Zhones’ untouched stew bowl and pulling it closer. “Like Trahvys says, I’ve got an iron stomach. You don’t. Besides, the sugar’ll do you good.”

    Zhones looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

    “Thanks,” he said a bit softly.

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk waved the gratitude away and scooped up another spoonful of the stew. It really was tasty, and –

    “All hands!” The shout echoed down from the deck above. “All hands!”

    By the time Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s spoon settled into the stew once more, he was already halfway up the ladder to the upper deck.

 

---

 

    It took all the self-discipline Sir Dunkyn Yairley had learned in thirty-five years at sea to not swear out loud as his earlier thoughts about his improvised rudder ran back through his mind.

    I suppose the good news is that we’re still two hundred yards offshore, he told himself. That gives us a little more room to play with . . . and if the spar’s just long enough to keep the tubs out from under her, they may still work, anyway. Of course, they may not, too . . . .

    He watched Destiny‘s company completing his highly unusual preparations with frenzied, disciplined speed, and he hoped there’d be time.

    Of course there’ll be time, Dunkyn. You’ve got a remarkable talent for finding things to worry about, don’t you? He shook his head mentally, keeping himself physically motionless with his hands clasped behind him. Just keep your tunic on!

    “Another six or seven minutes, Sir!” Rhobair Lathyk promised, and Yairley nodded, turning to watch the longboat fighting its way back towards the ship.

    He’d hated sending Mahlyk and Aplyn-Ahrmahk back out, but they were clearly the best team for the job, as they’d just finished demonstrating. Two of the ensign’s seamen had gone over the side while they struggled to get the bitter end of the spring nipped onto the buoyed anchor cable. Unlike most Safeholdian sailors, Charisian seamen by and large swam quite well, but not even the best of swimmers was the equal of waters like these. Fortunately, Aplyn-Ahrmahk had insisted on lifelines for every member of the longboat’s crew, and the involuntary swimmers had been hauled back aboard by their fellows. From the looks of things, one of them had needed artificial respiration, but both of them were sitting up now, huddled in the half-foot of water sloshing around the floorboards as the thirty-foot boat clawed its way back towards the galleon.

    “Lines over the side, Master Lathyk,” Yairley said, looking back at the first lieutenant. “There’s not going to be time to recover the boat. Bring them up on lines and then cast it adrift.” He bared his teeth. “Assuming any of us get out of this alive, we can always find ourselves another longboat, can’t we?”

    “Assuming, Sir,” Lathyk agreed, but he also grinned hugely. It was the same way he grinned when the ship cleared for action, Yairley noted.

    “Cheerful bugger, aren’t you?” he observed mildly, and Lathyk laughed.

    “Can’t say I’m looking forward to it, Sir, but there’s no point fretting, now is there? And at least it ought to be damned interesting! Besides, with all due respect, you’ve never gotten us into a fix yet that you couldn’t get us back out of.”

    “I appreciate the vote of confidence. On the other hand, this is the sort of thing you usually only get one opportunity to do wrong,” Yairley pointed out in a dry tone.

    “True enough, Sir,” Lathyk agreed cheerfully. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go see about losing that longboat for you.”

    He touched his chest in salute and moved off across the pitching, rearing deck, and Yairley shook his head. Lathyk was one of those officers who grew increasingly informal and damnably cheerful as the situation grew more desperate. That wasn’t Sir Dunkyn Yairley’s style, yet, he had to admit Lathyk’s optimism (which might even be genuine) made him feel a little better.

    He turned back to the matter at hand, trying not to worry about the possibility that one or more of the longboat’s crew could still be crushed against Destiny‘s side or fall into the water to be sucked under the turn of the bilge and drowned. It helped that he had plenty of other things to worry about.

    The never-to-be-sufficiently-damned wind had decided to back still further, and it had done so with appalling speed after holding almost steady for over four hours. It was almost as if it had deliberately set out to lull him into a sense of confidence just to make the final ambush more disconcerting. For four hours, Destiny had lain to her anchors, bucking and rolling but holding her ground despite his sailing notes’ warnings about the nature of Scrabble Sound’s bottom. But then, in less than twenty minutes, the wind had backed another five full points — almost sixty degrees — from southeast-by-south to due east, and the galleon had weathervaned, turning to keep her bow pointed into it, which meant her stern was now pointed directly at Ahna’s Point. The speed with which the wind had shifted also meant that the seas continued to roll in from the southeast, not the east, pounding her starboard bow, which had radically shifted the forces and stresses affecting her . . . and her anchors. Now the wind was driving her towards Ahna’s Point; the seas were driving her towards Scrabble Shoal; and her larboard anchor cable had parted completely.

    Must be even rockier than I was afraid of over there, Yairley thought now, looking at the bobbing buoy marking the lost anchor’s position. That was an almost new cable, and it was wormed, parceled, and served, to boot!

    “Worming” was the practice of working oakum into the contlines, the surface depressions between the strands of the cable. “Parceling” wrapped the entire cable in multi-ply strips of canvas, and the boatswain had served the entire “shot” of cable by covering the parceling, in turn, in tightly wrapped coils of one-inch rope. All of that was designed to protect the cable against fraying and chafing . . . and the rough-edged bottom had obviously chewed its way through all precautions anyway.

    Fortunately, the cables to the starboard bower anchor and the sheet anchor Aplyn-Ahrmahk and Mahlyk had laid out hadn’t snapped — yet, at least — but both of them were finally beginning to drag the way he’d been more than half afraid they would from the outset. It was a slow process, but it was also one which was gathering speed. At the present rate, Destiny would go ashore within the next two hours at the outside.

    At least the tide’s nearly full, he reminded himself. It’d be better if we had the ebb to work with, but at least the current’s slowed and we’ve got as much water under the keel as we’re ever likely to have.

    He watched the longboat’s crew struggling one-by-one up and through the bulwark entry port. Aplyn-Ahrmahk, of course, came last, and Yairley felt at least one of his worries ease as the young ensign scrambled aboard.

    “Master Lathyk’s compliments, Sir,” Midshipman Zhones said, sliding to a stop in front of him and saluting, “and the boat crew’s been recovered. And all preparations for getting underway are completed.”

 

---

 

    “Thank you, Master Zhones,” Yairley said gravely. “In that case, I suppose we should make sail, don’t you?”

    “Uh, yes, Sir. I mean, aye, aye, Sir!”

    “Very good, Master Zhones.” Yairley smiled. “Go to your station, then.”

    “Aye, aye, Sir!”

    The midshipman saluted again and dashed away, and Yairley glanced one more time around his command, mentally double checking every detail.

    The topgallant masts and topmasts were housed, but the topsail yards had been gotten back up to work on the topmast caps, and the topsails and foresails’ gaskets had been stripped off and replaced with lengths of spun yarn so that they could be set instantly. The fore- and mainyards had been braced up for the larboard tack, and the spring Aplyn-Ahrmahk and Mahlyk had managed to make fast to the larboard anchor cable had been led in through an after gunport and made fast. Every eye was on the quarterdeck, and Yairley stepped slowly and calmly to his place by the wheel.

    He looked back at his watching men. They could all very easily die in the next few minutes. If the ship took the ground in something as rocky as Scrabble Sound in this kind of sea, she was almost certain to break up, and the chances of making it to shore would be poor, at best. Yet as he surveyed all of those watching faces, he saw no doubt. Anxiety, yes. Even fear, here and there, but not doubt. They trusted him, and he drew a deep breath.

    “Stand by the cables!”

    Tymythy Kwayle, with a gleaming, broad-headed ax in hand, stood by the riding bitts where the sheet anchor cable crossed them. Boatswain Symmyns himself stood by the larboard cable with an identical ax, both of them waiting for the order to cut the hawsers. If everything went according to plan, the moment the anchor cables were cut, the spring attached to the larboard cable would become her new anchor cable, pulling her stern, rather than her bow around into the wind. With her yards already braced, the instant the wind came two points forward of the beam she could cut the spring, as well, and make sail close-hauled on the larboard tack, which would put her roughly on a course of south-southeast. She ought to be able to hold that heading clean back out of Scrabble Sound the way she’d come, if only the wind held steady. Or, for that matter, if it chose to back still further east towards the north. Of course, if it decided to veer to the west, instead . . . .

    Stop that, he told himself absently. The wind isn’t really trying to kill you, Dunkyn, and you know it.

    “Stand by to make sail! Lay aloft, topmen!”

    The topmen hurried aloft, and he let them get settled into place. Then –

    “Man halliards and sheets! Man braces!”

    Everything was ready, and he squared his shoulders.

    “Cut the cables!”

    The axes flashed. It took more than one blow to sever a cable six inches in diameter, but Kwayle and Symmyns were both powerfully muscled and only too well aware of the stakes this day. They managed it in no more than two or three blows each, and the freed hawsers went whipping out of the hawseholes like angry serpents at virtually the same moment.

    Destiny fell off the wind almost instantly, leaning over to starboard as her stern came round to larboard. It was working, and –

    Then the spring parted.

    Yairley felt the twanging shock as the line snapped, simply overpowered by the force of the sea striking the ship. She hadn’t turned remotely far enough yet, and the sea took her, driving her towards the rocky beach waiting to devour her. For a moment, just an instant, Yairley’s brain froze. He felt his ship rolling madly, starting to drive stern-first towards destruction, and knew there was nothing he could do about it.

    Yet even as that realization hammered through him, he heard someone else snapping orders in a preposterously level voice which sounded remarkably like his own.

    “Let fall fore topsail and course! Up fore topmast staysail!”

    The crewmen who’d realized just as well as their captain that their ship was about to die didn’t even hesitate as the bone-deep discipline of the Imperial Charisian Navy’s ruthless drills and training took them by the throat, instead. They simply obeyed, and the fore topsail, course, and topmast staysail fell, flapping and thundering on the wind.

    “Sheet home! Weather braces haul! Back topsail and course!”

    That was the critical moment, Yairley realized later. His entire ship’s company had been anticipating the order to haul taut the lee braces, trimming the yards around to take the wind as the ship turned. That was what they’d been focused on, but now he was backing the sails; trimming them to take the wind from directly ahead, instead. Any hesitation, any confusion in the wake of the unexpected change in orders, would have been fatal, but Destiny‘s crew never faltered.

    The yards shifted, the sails pressed back against the mast, and Destiny began moving through the water — not forwards, but astern — while the sudden pressure drove her head still further round to starboard.

    Destiny backed around on her heel — slowly, clumsily canvas volleying and thundering, spray everywhere, the deck lurching underfoot. She wallowed drunkenly from side to side, but she was moving astern even as she drifted rapidly towards the beach. Sir Dunkyn Yairley had imposed his will upon his ship, and he stared up at the masthead weathervane, waiting, praying his improvised rudder hadn’t been fouled, judging his moment.

    And then –

    “Let fall the mizzen topsail!” he shouted the moment the wind came abaft the starboard beam at last. “Starboard your helm! Off forward braces! Off fore topmast staysail sheets! Lee braces haul! Brace up! Shift the fore topmast staysail! Let fall main topsail and main course! Sheet home! Main topsail and course braces haul!”

    The orders came with metronome precision, exactly as if he’d practiced this exact maneuver a hundred times before, drilled his crew in it daily. The mizzen topsail filled immediately, arresting the ship’s sternward movement, and the forward square sails and fore topmast staysail were trimmed round. Then the main topsail and main course blossomed, as well, and suddenly Destiny was moving steadily, confidently, surging through the confused seas on the larboard tack with torrents of spray bursting above her bow. As she gathered way, the floating tubs of her improvised rudder settled back into their designed positions, and she answered the helm with steadily increasing obedience.

    “Done it, lads!” someone shouted. “Three cheers for the Captain!”

    HMS Destiny was a warship of the Imperial Charisian Navy, and the ICN had standards of discipline and professionalism other navies could only envy. Discipline and professionalism which, for just an instant, vanished into wild, braying cheers and whistles as their ship forged towards safety.

    Sir Dunkyn Yairley rounded on his ship’s company, his expression thunderous, but he found himself face-to-face with a broadly grinning first lieutenant and an ensign who was capering on deck and snapping the fingers of both hands.

    “And what sort of an example is this, Master Lathyk?! Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk?!” the captain barked.

    “Not a very good one, I’m afraid, Sir,” Lathyk replied. “And I beg your pardon for it. I’ll sort the men out shortly, too, Sir, I promise. But for now, let them cheer, Sir! They deserve it. By God, they deserve it!”

    He met Yairley’s eyes steadily, and the captain felt his immediate ire ease just a bit as the realization of what they’d just accomplished began to sink into him, as well.

    “I had the quartermaster of the watch time it, Sir,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said, and Yairley looked at him. The ensign had stopped capering about like a demented monkey lizard, but he was still grinning like a lunatic.

    “Three minutes!” the young man said. “Three minutes – that’s how long it took you, Sir!”

    Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s eyes gleamed with admiration, and Yairley gazed back at him for a moment, then, almost against his will, he laughed.

    “Three minutes you say, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk?” He shook his head. “I fear you’re wrong about that. I assure you from my own personal experience that it took at least three hours.”