The Golden Princess, page 41
Nobody moved, though faces sobered. Karl nodded and put his fist out above the table. One by one the others tapped theirs on it and murmured:
“So sworn. And so witness Badb, Nemain and Macha, who love a warrior’s faithfulness; and by Lug of the Oaths.”
“Well, we’ll be off and on our way, then. We’re to meet feartaic Diarmuid of the McClintocks in five days. Let’s show the wild southern hillfolk who think they’re so tough what Mackenzies can do, eh?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Newport
Territory of the Free City of Corvallis
(Formerly western Oregon)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
July/Fumizuki 6th, Change Year 46/2044 AD/Shohei 1
“This way,” Moishe Feldman said to Captain Ishikawa, on a bright brisk afternoon.
The Imperial Navy officer walked up the gangplank behind the merchant, dodging a string of stevedores running up it with bundles on their heads. The ship moved slightly at her moorings with all the coming and going, though the netful of cargo swinging by and down through an open deck-hatch probably had more to do with it, as the team on the rope chanted: “She was makin’ for the trades on the outside, And the downhill run to Papeete . . .”
As he did the hull ground against the new hemp-rope bumpers of the dock, or the last tattered salvage tires doing that duty as well. He saw that the outside surface of the ship’s side from the gunwales to at least the waterline had been covered in thin sheet metal secured to the planking with bronze nails. It wasn’t armor, except possibly against shipworms; enough steel to stop a roundshot or bolt from a heavy naval catapult would make the vessel impossibly sluggish. But this would make it much harder to set the ship aflame with incendiary shot. Japanese shipwrights used the same trick, for vessels that expected to go in harm’s way.
Ishikawa came up the narrow gangway with familiar ease, just lightly touching the manrope along the side. He didn’t feel too conspicuous as he followed, even on this cloudless summer’s day. Not in local dress for this Newport place, and with a knit cap pulled over his distinctive haircut with its topknot and shaved strip up the pate. The strange clothes didn’t bother him very much; loose pants and hakama did roughly the same thing, as did a jacket and haori. He didn’t feel more than half-naked without his swords either, as most samurai would, since you couldn’t wear a katana all the time on shipboard anyway. Or just leave it thrust through a sash if you didn’t want it lost overside. The tanto on his belt wasn’t all that much different from the utility knife any seaman might wear, at least while it was in its sheath and you couldn’t see the shape or the quality of the steel.
It’s good to hear gulls and smell saltwater again, too, he thought. And to feel the wind on my face and a deck beneath my feet.
His mind skipped a little as he remembered the ice blowing into his eyes in the seas north of Hokkaido, the curling foam on the tops of the mountain-high waves ripped free and freezing as it came at him like catapult bolts until there was thick ice all over his oilskins.
Well, on a pleasant day like this, it is very good. Clear sky, a few clouds, a fresh offshore breeze . . . what more could a seaman ask of the kami of wind and tide?
His looks weren’t impossibly unusual either. Most of the people native to this town were big, hairy, round-eyed and fair, but by no means all. He’d seen a couple who could have been Nihonjin in local clothes themselves . . . if they kept their mouths shut and didn’t move, so that you couldn’t see how their very stance and stride were different. Though if you looked closely . . . perhaps the language shaped the face as much as the blood did, or the genes to use the old-fashioned term.
And there were others from all over the world. Which I envy.
He loved the sea and ships, that feeling that anything might lie over the horizon, but all his sailing before the last voyage of the Red Dragon had been around home waters, keeping the scattered islands and new outposts together and intercepting jinnikukaburi raiders. Or once or twice striking back at their homeland, landing troops and burning coastal forts and shipyards. It was vital, necessary duty and ships simply could not be spared for anything else. . . .
But I have had my dreams. That is why I was so eager to volunteer for the Tenno’s plan.
“I’ll show you around,” Feldman said slowly and distinctly.
Ishikawa followed that; he’d studied English for the professional literature in engineering and shipbuilding written in it, and since they got here he’d been trying hard to master the spoken form.
At least this man doesn’t speak some eccentric dialect!
It hadn’t occurred to him that English would have dialects like Japanese. He supposed it should have—the three written forms of his own language were much more uniform than what actually came out of people’s mouths on different islands, and he’d visited every single one of those that still had more than a family or two. By now he could follow some of what he heard here, though he wasn’t nearly as fluent as the Heika yet; he admired the way she’d mastered the spoken language by sheer applied willpower. Understanding was easier than speaking, and he could follow speech, if it was slow. Mostly.
She could even talk poetry with the locals by now.
What a woman the Majesty is, even so young! he thought. What a ruler she will make! Fearless but not reckless, tireless, both intelligent and clever, and so good at getting people moving as one. With a will like the steel of a Masamune sword, supple and strong and hard at the same time. And now to work. General Egawa was most particular about my thoroughly surveying any foreign ship which will carry the jotei. Not to mention the rest of us.
He found himself fascinated by both the similarities and the differences between this Tarshish Queen and his lost, beloved Red Dragon. The size was roughly similar, he thought twenty-five or perhaps fifty tons more than the four hundred he’d commanded, depending on the depth to keel.
He wrote displacement? four hundred ton, more a bit? on his slate and held it up.
“Four hundred and sixty tons displacement,” Feldman said, confirming his estimate.
Dimension? he wrote.
“Two hundred twenty feet from bowsprit to rudder, thirty-five-foot beam, twelve-foot depth of hold.”
The Japanese sailor easily converted feet to metric measurements, or to the more natural shaku, which were replacing them again in general use. A shaku was almost exactly the same as a foot anyway, smaller by well under a single percentage point.
“She’s shallow draught, for inshore work, and for dog-hole ports,” Feldman went on.
“Dog-hole?” Ishikawa asked.
“Places so narrow a dog couldn’t turn around in them.”
“Hai, understand,” Ishikawa said, suppressing a chuckle; he’d gotten ships in and out of places like that often enough. “Back, forward, around, anchor and rine . . . line . . . and pull, much swear and yell.”
“I’ve been there,” Feldman said, and this time Ishikawa grinned at the idiom once he’d examined it in his head.
They had dedicated warships here, he knew from his dips into the library at Montinore, built for nothing but fighting other ships, though not many. A publication called the Illustrated Naval Gazette had been fascinating. Japan couldn’t afford anything like that right now; her navy was of vessels designed for roughly the same purposes as this fast armed merchantman, carting cargo and people quickly into dangerous places, dealing with reefs and sandbanks and shoals, and fighting at sea or carrying troops onto hostile shores when necessary. The hull was moderately shallow, and he wondered how much leeway she’d make tacking. A deeper hull lost less distance that way, but of course it needed more water under the keel. . . .
There were three masts, each of them a single varnished trunk up to the topmast—he regarded them with soul-deep envy as he traced the standing rigging with his eyes. There would be trees like that somewhere in Japan’s mountainous interior, but nowhere close enough in practice to today’s shipyards, and his people used composite masts bound with shrunk-on steel hoops. These were better; and more beautiful.
They went below, dodging the net-loads of provisions and supplies swung down through the hatches and into the hold by the dockside cranes, and the laborers stowing it under the supervision of deck officers loudly concerned with the ship’s trim. From the smell, only faintly stale, the bilges had been deliberately flooded with clean seawater and thoroughly pumped out recently or the ship was fairly new, or both. He approved; it was most literally a pain in the back, but worth it.
“Ballast?” he said, then spelled it out on his slate when the other man looked baffled at barrus.
“Bundles of copper pipe right now,” Feldman replied. “Sometimes ingots or bars of various metals. Usually I sell it at the other end of the voyage and replace it with worked rock or salvage brick for the run home. Metal stock is cheaper in Montival than anywhere my firm trades, and you can always sell brick or ashlar here for a little something. The metal kills some things that try to grow in the bilgewater, too.”
Ishikawa grunted thoughtfully and bent to look at the scantlings as they came back up into the main cargo hold, prodding occasionally with his tanto to check the soundness of the wood. The framing was again a mixture of the familiar and the strange; and they used a thick and apparently waterproof plywood extensively, which intrigued him—it gave much larger sections than ordinary planks and presumably was stronger, though he would worry slightly about the laminations in conditions at sea, depending on what they were using for glue.
Still, it looked as if it was holding up well, and the structural planking that strengthened the decks was magnificent—straight dense-grained baulks eighty feet long and eight inches through with scarcely a knot, beveled together at the edges and bolted securely to the beams and stringers. That turned the decks into elements in a hollow box girder of enormous natural strength. The construction and fastenings were to a very high standard too, as good as the Imperial Navy’s shipyard on Sado-ga-shima. Much better than the wrecked or captured jinnikukaburi vessels he’d examined, which were fragile when they weren’t over-heavy. The storage lockers held abundant spare sailcloth and rope, along with pitch and other naval stores.
He worked his way methodically back to the main deck, which was flush for about two-thirds of its length from the bowsprit, a lovely clean curve like a sword. Then it rose to a low poop-deck that held the binnacle and wheels.
The captain’s cabin—which would be for the Heika and the other women of rank—was at the stern, with officer’s cubicles on either side of a corridor running beneath the poop. He checked what would be the Heika’s quarters—quite adequate and already being modified for more bunks—and the navigation gear, which was good and almost exactly the same as the equipment he’d trained on. There weren’t many different ways to make a sextant and chronometer and binnacle-mounted compass, and as far as he could tell the charts were good, based on pre-Change surveys but updated recently. This Feldman probably had a lot more experience with deep-sea navigation by sun and stars than he did, though he was sure his inshore skills were at least equal given that his experience was mostly of that sort.
“You design ship?” he said, as they climbed back to the deck; he thought so, from some of the other man’s replies to his questions. “You build?”
“I designed some of the details and oversaw construction in the yard we have a share in, but this is similar to most of our . . . my family’s . . . ships. My grandfather got the wreck of a big schooner that came here right after the Change, from San Francisco—bunch of refugees brought her in, an old vessel built about a century before the Change and used as a museum ship, called the Thayer. The town council let them settle because they figured anyone who could do that was worth their keep. My grandfather got the hulk for next to nothing because nobody thought she was good for anything but burning for the nails.”
“Wooden ship still froat so rong, one hundred year?” Ishikawa asked skeptically.
“She’d been heavily restored about halfway through that, but even so . . . not seaworthy anymore, not really, not even at the beginning of the trip; it was a miracle she made it this far. She’d hogged badly, and there was dry-rot above the waterline, right in the ribs and hanging knees. It would have come apart like wet paper if they’d hit really bad weather. Sweet hull lines, though, a design originally meant for this very coast. We took her draught inch by inch, recorded everything as we dismantled her for the metal and fittings, and we’ve never found anything better for our line of work. There are ships three times as large and much deeper in the keel on regular runs now, but we go where the risk and the profit are.”
Ishikawa nodded. Risk meant battle, among other things. “Catapults?” he said.
One merit of speaking the language badly was that nobody would expect him to know how to be really polite in it, which he’d realized was another language all on its own when he grasped that people weren’t trying to be rude to him. In a way it was like being drunk; everyone automatically made allowances for things that wouldn’t normally be tolerated.
“Right, here’s the armament.”
Eight complex machines crouched on the deck on either side, their snouts pointing at flaps that could be opened in the bulwark.
“We mount ’em topside because they’d take too much cargo space if a clear fighting-deck was left below.”
“Why sixteen?”
“That’s as much weight as we dare put so high above the keel, you see.”
“Hai, unbarance if more.”
Feldman peeled back the tarpaulin that covered the one he indicated, and Ishikawa bent over to peer at the mechanisms. A heady, familiar smell of well-lubricated steel and brass and a stranger one of something slightly like peanut oil greeted him.
The differences of detail were greater here—unlike wind and water or time and stars, there were more workable solutions to this class of problem—but the basics were similar. Springs of salvaged steel from railroad car suspensions were compressed when carefully curved throwing arms were drawn back, and snapped forward to pull the cross-cable that launched the projectile resting in a trough. The main frame was secured to a plate in turn bolted to the beams and carlins of the deck, with elevation and traversing screws moved by handwheels.
He rough-measured the components with outstretched thumb and little finger, since his were a convenient half-shaku long more or less, and decided they were near optimum in their proportions. Those had to be carefully calculated to transmit the maximum possible amount of the energy stored in the springs.
These weapons could be quickly rerigged to throw either eight-pound steel balls or four-foot javelin-arrows. Some of those had sickle heads to cut rigging or bisect anyone unlucky, and some of the roundshot were of glass filled with incendiary compounds and wrapped in cord that could be soaked in the stuff and set alight just before they were shot.
He traced tubing with his eyes, and grunted with delight—the recoil force was transmitted through cylinders of its own and used to partially recock the loading system, salvaging energy and speeding up the process.
Really very clever.
The Imperial Navy had something similar, but that was much easier with the purely mechanical cocking system his service used. In the bows and right aft at the curved stern of the poop deck were the chasers, single rather larger catapults running on steel tracks set into the decks, so that they could be rapidly traversed to cover a cone before or after the ship. Those had sloping steel shields built on either side of the throwing-trough to protect the crew while they reloaded and aimed.
“Cocking mechanism is . . . pump liquid . . . hydrauric?” he said.
“So desu,” Feldman said, surprising him a little. “Long-stroke hydraulic bottle jacks from Donaldson Foundry & Machine in Corvallis, twenty-five-ton rating on the broadside pieces and thirty-five for the chasers in bow and stern. Those rocking-pump levers unfold and are clamped behind the piece for action. Forty-five seconds to reload with two hands on the pump, twenty-eight with four. Range is about fifteen hundred yards at maximum elevation with bolt ammunition, a bit more if you shoot on the uproll. More effective and accurate the closer you get, of course.”
Ishikawa grunted again—that was a slightly better rate of fire than the ones he’d used; on the other hand, his threw heavier shot farther and he would bet that they took less maintenance and were more reliable than these.
Then he looked up. The long booms on the masts looked as if it was mainly a fore-and-aft gaff rig, but there were spars for square sails on the main and foremast.
“Sail plan?”
“There we did make changes. It’s a topsail schooner rig now; gaff mainsails on all three masts, square topsails on the main and fore, jib topsail on the mizzen. That’s a compromise, but everything’s tradeoffs, right?”
“Hai,” Ishikawa said, when they’d gone back and forth to make sure that tradeoff meant toredoofu. “Honto ni,” he added for emphasis. “Definitely truth. Anything better one way, not so good the other. Nothing ichiban all way.”
This rig would sacrifice a little speed with the wind abaft the beam for more when you were working into the wind plus ability to point closer, and a very little less on a reach for considerably more with a following wind. For a ship that might have to either chase or run in any conceivable wind conditions, not just get from Point A to Point B regularly at least cost and time, it was a very sensible compromise.
Hoses were rigged to the dock. Rumbles came from below as the liquid gushed through them, filling the coated steel tanks below with fresh water.
“Crew?” he said.
With the work of loading going on so fast it was impossible to tell exactly who were part of the ship’s complement and which were dockside workers helping out or shore-based carpenters making last-minute alterations. Neither type wore uniforms, just rough shapeless patched working clothes differing only in detail from their Japanese equivalents.
