A Mighty Fortress by David Weber
Kholman managed not to swear again, although it wasn’t easy. On the other hand, one of the good things about Jahras (aside from the fact that he was family) was that he was willing to speak his mind plainly, at least to Kholman. And he had a point. To be honest, the duke had never been overly impressed with his cousin- in- law’s military prowess, but Jahras had one of the Desnairian Empire’s better brains when it came to managing anything which had to do with trade, shipping, or manufactories. Well, one of the better aristocratic brains when it came to dealing with such matters, but that was pretty much the same thing. It was, after all, unthinkable that anyone who wasn’t an aristocrat should be given the sort of authority the Admiral General of the Navy required.
It was a testimonial to Kholman’s inherent mental flexibility that he was even vaguely aware that there might have been a non- aristocrat somewhere in Desnair with more expertise in those matters than he or Jahras possessed. The very notion would never have occurred to the vast majority of his fellow nobles, and it never occurred even to Kholman that anyone except a nobleman should hold his or Jahras’ current offices. The sheer absurdity of such an idea would have been sufficient to keep it from crossing his brain in the first place. And if someone else had suggested it, he would have rejected it immediately, since it would have been impossible for that theoretical common- born officer to exercise any effective authority over “subordinates” so much better born than he was.
But the fact that Jahras had what was probably the best brain available when it came to the problems involved in building a navy from scratch didn’t necessarily mean he was really up to the task. For that matter, in Kholman’s estimation, the Archangel Langhorne might not have been up to this task!
“I don’t disagree with anything you’ve just said, Urwyn,” the duke said after a moment. “Langhorne knows we’ve discussed it often enough, at any rate. And it’s not anything we haven’t warned His Majesty and the Bishop Executor about, either. But that’s still not going to solve our problem when the Emperor and Bishop Executor Mhartyn hear about this.”
Jahras nodded. The good news was that Emperor Mahrys and the bishop executor were in Geyra, thirteen hundred miles from Kholman’s Iythria office. There were times when that physical distance between Kholman’s headquarters and the imperial court worked against them, especially given the nasty infighting which so often marked Desnairian politics. Rivals had much easier and quicker access to the imperial ear, after all. On the other hand, most of those rivals had quickly realized that despite the enormous opportunities for graft inherent in building a navy from scratch, it was likely to prove a thankless task. However optimistically belligerent Emperor Mahrys and—especially—Bishop Executor Mhartyn might be, Jahras doubted that any Desnairian aristocrat ever born could possibly look forward to the notion of fighting the Charisian Navy at sea. No one who’d ever done that had enjoyed the experience . . . a point which had been rather emphatically underscored by what the Charisians had recently done to the combined fighting strength of five other navies.
Under the circumstances, while Kholman’s enemies would undoubtedly seize upon any opportunity to damage his credibility with the Crown with un-holy glee, they’d be careful not to do it in a way which might end up with them being chosen to take his place. For that matter, Jahras’ position, despite his far less lofty birth, was even more secure. In fact, if he’d been able to think of any way to avoid it himself in the first place, he would have done so in a heartbeat. But at least the sheer distance between them and Geyra gave them a pronounced degree of autonomy, without rivals or court flunkies constantly peering over their shoulders. So the two of them were far enough away from the imperial capital, and well enough insulated against removal, to be reasonably confident of not simply surviving their monarch’s anger but retaining their current positions.
Oh, joy,he thought ironically.
“Let’s be honest, Daivyn,” he said out loud. “Nothing is going to make the Emperor or the Bishop Executor any less angry about what’s happened to Wailahr. That’s a given. In fact, I think we should use this to underscore the fact that we’ve always warned everyone we’re bound to get hurt, at least initially, going after Charisians in their own element. We’re not the only ones who know Wailahr, or who understand his reputation as a good commander’s well deserved. All right. Let’s make that point to His Majesty—that one of our better commanders, with two of our best vessels under his command, was defeated by a single Charisian galleon in less than forty- five minutes of close action. Don’t blame him for it, either. In fact, let’s emphasize the fact that he fought with great gallantry and determination. For that matter, as far as I can tell from this Captain Yairley’s message, that’s exactly what Wailahr did! Tell the Emperor we’re making great progress in building the Navy, but that it’s going to take a lot longer to train it.”
Kholman frowned thoughtfully. There was a great deal to what Jahras had just said. In fact, the economies of the Gulf of Jahras and Mahrosa Bay had attained an almost Charisian bustle since the Church of God Awaiting had begun pouring money into the creation of shipyards there. Skilled carpenters, smiths, ropemakers and sailmakers, lumberjacks, seamstresses, gunpowder makers, foundry workers, and farmers and fishermen to provide the food to feed all of them, had swarmed into the area. The locals might not think much of the Harchong “advisers” who’d been sent in to (theoretically) help them, but they’d buckled down with a will to the task itself, propelled by an enthusiasm built almost equally out of religious zeal and the opportunity for profit.
For that matter, Kholman and Jahras had increased their own families’ fortunes enormously in the process. Of course, that was one of the standard, accepted perquisites of their birth and position, and their own share of the graft had been factored into the Navy’s original cost estimates. With that in mind, they were actually ahead of schedule and marginally under bud get where the actual building programs were involved, and the local metalworking industry was booming. It wasn’t precisely mere happenstance that almost all of the expanded foundries—and every single one of the new foundries—supplying ar-tillery to the ships building in Iythria, Mahrosa, and Khairman Keep were located in the Duchy of Kholman, but there were actually some valid logistical arguments to support the far more important money making arguments in favor of that. And production was rising rapidly. The guns coming out of those foundries might cost more than twice as much as the same guns would have cost from Charisian foundries, and they might have been two or three times as likely to burst on firing, but they were still being cast and bored far more quickly than Desnairian artillery had ever before been produced, and they were arriving in numbers almost adequate to arm the new construction as it came out of the yards.
“We can tell them that,” the duke said. “And, for that matter, whether His Majesty wants to admit it or not, he’ll almost certainly realize that it is going to take time to crew and train this many ships. But he’s still going to want some kind of an estimate as to how long it’s going to take, and I don’t think he’s going to settle for generalities much longer. Even if he’d like to, Bishop Executor Mhartyn isn’t going to stand for it.”
“Probably not,” Jahras agreed.
The baron sat gazing at one of the paintings on Kholman’s office wall for several seconds, stroking his beard while he thought. Then he shrugged and returned his attention to the other man.
“I think we need to tell the Bishop Executor that whether it’s going to be convenient or not, we’re going to have to send the tithe overland to Zion this year. I’ll give you an official report and recommendation to that effect. And then, I think, we need to point out that we’re actually managing to build and arm the ships faster than the people responsible for providing crews can get the men to us. When I write up my recommendation to send the tithe overland, I’ll also point out how what’s happened to Wailahr underscores the obvious need for longer and more intensive training even after we get the crews assembled. And as the men
Kholman’s eyes narrowed, and he felt himself beginning to nod slowly. If they announced that they had even a limited number of new galleons fully manned, they would almost inevitably come under pressure to repeat the same disastrous sort of experiment which had just recoiled so emphatically on Wailahr. As long as they could report—honestly—that the ships’ crews remained seriously understrength, there’d be no pressure (or none that couldn’t be resisted, at any rate) to send them to sea in ones and twos where the Charisians could snip them off like frost- killed buds.
And if we spread the men between as many ships as possible, we can do that while still sending in manpower returns that show we’re making use of every man they send us. That it’s notour fault the supply won’t stretch to cover all our requirements, however hard we try....
“All right,” he agreed. “That makes sense. And if they press us for a definite schedule, anyway?”
“Our first response should be to say we’ll have to see how successful they are in sending us the men we require,” Jahras replied promptly. “That’s only the truth, by the way. Tell them we’re going to need some time—probably at least a month or two—to form some kind of realistic estimate of how long it will take to fully man the ships we need at the rate they can provide the crews.
“After that, we’ll need time to train them. I imagine that will take at least several more months, and it’s already February.” The baron shrugged again. “Under the circumstances, I’d say August or September would be the soonest we could possibly expect to really be prepared, and even then—and I’ll mention this, tactfully, of course, in my report to you, as well—we’re going to be inexperienced enough that it would be unrealistic to expect us to win without a significant numerical advantage. Obviously,” his lips twitched in a faint smile, “it would be wisest to avoid operations which would permit the Charisians to whittle away at our own strength until we can be reinforced with enough of the ships building elsewhere to provide us with that necessary numerical advantage.”
“Of course,” Kholman agreed.
August or September, eh?he thought, restraining a smile of his own. Heading into October, really, with the inevitable—and explainable—schedule slippage, aren’t you, Urwyn? Slippage we can blame, with complete justification, on the people who aren’t getting us the manpower we need. More probably even next November . . . which will just happen to be about the time Hsing- wu’s Passage freezes solid. At which point none of those ships “building elsewhere” will be able to reinforce us until spring.
It hadn’t escaped the duke’s thoughts, as he considered what Jahras had just said, that stretching out the schedule would also present the opportunity to funnel still more of the Church’s bounty into his own and the baron’s purses. In truth, however, that calculation was little more than a spinal reflex, inevitable in any Desnairian noble. What was more important, at least in so far as Kholman’s conscious analysis was concerned, was that acting too precipitously—being the first swimmer to plunge into a sea full of Charisian- manned krakens—would be an unmitigated disaster for the navy he and Jahras were supposed to be building. Far better to be sure there were at least other targets for those krakens to spread their efforts between.
“Go ahead and write your report,” the Duke of Kholman told his admiral general. “In fact, I think it would be a good idea to backdate at least some of it. We really have been thinking about this for a while, so let’s make that clear to His Majesty.” The duke smiled thinly. “It wouldn’t do to have him decide we’re just trying to cover our arses after what happened to Wailahr, after all.”
.II.
Ice Ship Hornet ,
Lake Pei,
The Temple Lands
The Earl of Coris had never been colder in his entire life. Which, after the last few months of winter travel, was saying quite a lot. At the moment, however, he didn’t really care. In fact, at the moment, he wasn’t even worrying about the imminence of his arrival in the city of Zion or what was going to happen after he finally got there. He was too busy trying not to whoop in sheer exuberance as the iceboat Hornet went slicing across Lake Pei’s endless plain of ice like Langhorne’s own razor in a scatter of rainbow- struck ice chips.
He’d never imagined anything like it. Even the descriptions Hahlys Tannyr had shared with him over meals or an occasional tankard of beer on the wearisome overland trip from Fairstock to Lakeview had been inadequate. Not for lack of trying, or because Father Hahlys had lacked either the enthusiasm or the descriptive gift for the task, but simply because Coris’ imagination had never been given anything to use for comparison. If anyone had asked him, he would have simply discounted out of hand the possibility that anyone could ever travel faster than, say, fifteen miles an hour. To be honest, even that would have seemed the next best thing to starkly impossible, except possibly in a sprint by specially bred horses. Slash lizards were faster than that when they charged—he’d heard estimates that put their speed in a dash as high as forty miles an hour—but no human being had ever ridden a slash lizard . . . except very briefly in certain fables whose entire purpose was to demonstrate the unwisdom of making the attempt.
Now, as showers of ice flew like diamond dust from the iceboat’s screaming runners and the incredible vibration hammered into him through his feet and legs, Coris was finally experiencing what Tannyr had tried to explain to him, and a corner of the earl’s mind went back over the past, wearisome five-days of travel which had brought him to this moment.
The sheer, slow, slogging misery of their journey along the Rayworth Valley where it formed the open north- south “V” at the heart of the Wishbone Mountains had only served to make Tannyr’s descriptions of his iceboat’s speed even less believable. The only redeeming aspect of the trip, perversely enough, had been the snowy conditions with which they’d been forced to cope. The outsized sleighs Tannyr had procured had made surprisingly good time—indeed, better time than carriages or even mounted men might have made over those winter- struck roads—behind the successive teams of six- limbed snow lizards the under- priest had arranged via the Church’s semaphore system.
The snow lizards, unlike the sleighs’ passengers, hadn’t minded the icy temperatures and snow at all. Their multi- ply pelts provided near perfect insulation (not to mention, Coris had discovered at one of the posting houses in which they had overnighted, the most sinfully sensual rugs any man had ever walked barefoot across), and their huge feet, with the webs between their pads, carried them across even the deepest snow. They were considerably smaller than the mountain lizards used for draft purposes in more temperate climes, but they were close to twice the size of a good saddle horse. And while they would have found it difficult to match a horse in a sprint, they had all of lizard- kind’s endurance, which meant they could maintain almost indefinitely a pace which would have quickly exhausted, or even killed, any horse.
The snow lizards would have been perfectly happy padding along into the very teeth of a Wishbone Mountains blizzard. Assuming the wind had gotten too bad even for them, they would simply have curled up into enormous balls—two or three of them huddling together, whenever possible—and allowed the howling wind to cover them in a comfortable blanket of snow. Human beings, unfortunately, were somewhat more poorly insulated, and so, even with the snow lizards’ help, Coris and Tannyr had found themselves weatherbound on three separate occasions—once for almost three days. Mostly, they’d used Church posting houses, since most of the inns (which seemed to be considerably larger than those to which Coris was accustomed) appeared to have closed their doors for the winter. Not surprisingly, he’d supposed, given how the weather had undoubtedly inspired all but the hardiest—or most lunatic—of travelers to stay home until spring. Even the posting houses had been both larger and rather more luxurious than he would have anticipated, but given the number of high- ranking
The weather delays had been frustrating enough, despite the comfort of the posting houses, but the shortness of the winter days hadn’t helped, either, even though the snow lizards had been perfectly happy to keep going even in near total darkness. They’d stretched their travel time each day as far as they could, yet there’d been stretches—even in the sheltered and (relatively) lowlying valley—where the roads had been far too sinuous, steep, and icy for anyone but an idiot to traverse them in darkness. Considering all that, the earl hadn’t been particularly surprised to find Tannyr’s original estimate of how long the trip would take had actually been a bit optimistic.
Despite that, they’d finally reached Lakeview, once again (inevitably) in the middle of a dense snowfall. Night had already fallen by the time they arrived, and the ancient city’s buildings had seemed to huddle together, hunching shoulders and roofs against the weather. Many of the city’s windows had been shuttered against the cold, but the glow of lamplight streaming from others had turned the falling snowflakes into a dancing, swirling tapestry woven by invisible sprites. Their traveling sleighs had slowed dramatically once they reached Lakeview’s streets, yet the darkness and the weather had already urged most of the city’s inhabitants inside, and they’d quickly reached The Archangels’ Rest, the harborside inn where rooms had been reserved for them.
It was a huge establishment, a full six stories tall, with palatial sleeping chambers and a full- fledged ground- floor restaurant. In fact, The Archangels’ Rest dwarfed anything Coris had ever seen in Corisande or even the largest of the outsized inns they’d passed en route from Fairstock. For that matter, he was pretty sure it was larger than anything he’d ever seen anywhere, short of a cathedral in some capital city. It hardly seemed proper to describe it as a mere “inn,” and he supposed that was why someone had coined the word “hotel” to describe it, instead.