Against the Tide of Years (30 page)

“Lieutenant Jenkins is in sick bay—broken arm, dislocated hip,” Swindapa said. “We have nine missing and presumed dead, seventeen seriously injured, and contusions and sprains for nearly everyone.” She moved her right shoulder. “Dislocated, but it works.”

Alston nodded.
God damn,
she though sadly. It could have been worse, but she always hated losing any of her people. Words ran through her:

Seafaring was dangerous, that was all there was to it; doubly so in these small sailing ships.
I should visit sick bay as soon as I can.
She’d have to visit the families of the dead when she got back—she hated that too, but it was duty. They’d earned it.

“Ship status?” she said.

“We lost the foremast, of course. The main’s cracked just below the lower top—we woolded it with capstan bars, but it’s not going to take much strain. What’s really worrying is the hole forward where the mast kept hitting us before we cut it clear. We just finished fothering it with a sail”—that meant sliding a sail over the hole as a canvas patch—“but a lot of the seams are sprung, and we’re still taking on water. And with this cargo . . .”

Alston winced again, this time for her ship. Two hundred tons of dried barley in the bottom of the hold, with dates, wool, and sesame oil in big jugs on top of that. The rest didn’t matter, but the dried grain did; as it soaked up water it would swell, and if they were unlucky the soggy, swelling mass could push planks right off the frames, the way expanding ice did when a barrel froze.

“What time is it?”

“Fourteen hundred hours, Commodore.”

“What news of the flotilla?”

“Radio’s out—the deckhouse hatch caved in when the second wave came over the quarterdeck. Everything smashed up, and the operator’s one of the dead. The rest of the radio shack crew are in sick bay too.”

“Damn!” Alston took a deep breath. “Let’s go take a look.”

The feel of the ship under her feet was more alarming, down by the head and sluggish, with a counter jerk after each roll; that was water or loose cargo surging in the hold. Teams were working the pumps, sending solid jets of water overside.

“What’s the depth?” she said, when the junior lieutenant and the chief warrant officers had gathered, together with a CPO or two.

“Four feet in the hold, and we’re keeping just ahead of it, ma’am,” a warrant officer said—he was ship’s carpenter. “But God help us if the grain blocks the pumps; it’s chaos and Old Night down there, oil two inches thick on the water and bales and jars floating around.”

“Carry on, Chips,” Alston said, looking aloft and narrowing her eyes.

The ship looked naked, ugly and lopsided without the foremast, of course. The mess on deck had been policed up, loose line secured and a jury-rigged forestay had been erected from the mainmast to the bowsprit. Her eyes traced the mainmast; a deep crack up at the fifty-foot mark, with a ring of twelve-foot capstan bars lashed around it. Even with the tight woolding of line around it she could see the crack flex.
Plus we lost most of the boats,
she realized.

“We put the cords on wet when we woolded the mainmast and it’s getting a little tighter as they dry,” Swindapa said. “But it still looks ugly to me.”

“Damn right,” Alston said, concealing a rush of pride.
Couldn’t have done better myself,
she thought.

The mizzenmast looked all right, and the mizzen topsail was up as well, but with all the sail aft like that the ship would be a stone bitch to steer. “We have to get some sail for’ard,” she said.

A couple of the faces grimaced. “Ma’am, if we put too much stress on that mast, it’s going overboard.”

“And if we don’ make shore, we may founder,” Alston said. “If we get another blow before we’ve had a chance to repair her, we
will
founder.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “We’ll try rigging a jury staysail up near the bowsprit.”

Nods all around.“Are we going to try and make Mauritius Base?” the junior lieutenant—Sherman was her name—asked. “It’s only six or seven hundred miles.”

Alston shook her head. “Not with the wind out of the north, and at this time of year chances are it’ll stay that way. We’ll try for the mainland, and as far north as we can reach,” she said.
Hopefully not too far south.
An iron-bound shore, given to sudden storms and waves even more monstrous than the ones that had hit the flotilla yesterday. Back—or ahead—in the 1940s, one had gone right over a British heavy cruiser, putting the turrets all six feet under before the ship resurfaced. Plenty of other vessels before and after had just vanished there.

“We’re all going to be very busy, ladies, gentleman,” she continued. “Ms. Alston-Kurlelo, please draw up a new watch schedule, spelling everyone on the pumps—and I do mean everyone without broken bones. Next, we’re going to have to get some of that cargo overside.” It was that or jettison the guns, and she wasn’t going to get rid of the weapons if she could help it. “We’ll rig a boom on the mainmast just below the crack; Chips, find out what suitable spars we have for that. Next . . .”

She finished with: “And I want a careful lookout kept.”

That was all she could do for the rest of the flotilla. With an effort of will that got no easier with practice, she forced herself not to think about the other ships. Either the sea had eaten them, or not.

Melanterol son of Suaberon stopped to buy a skewer from a street vendor down New Whale Street; it was chunks of lobster meat with onions, savory and hot, filling his mouth with the water of hunger. The woman took his copper and laid the food in a split roll, deftly stripping out the thin wooden sliver and adding some of the biting hot peppers the Amurrukan imported from the Olmec country. Those were becoming popular in Tartessos as well; they were called
chilly
, which he thought a stroke of wit.

The spring wind from the north really was chilly—Nantucket was usually cool compared to his native Tartessos, and the winters were enough to rot the testicles off an ape. He was in Amurrukan dress—trousers, boots, jacket, and knitted wool cap—and that kept him warm. Besides that, it meant no one would take him for a foreigner at first glance; there were enough Amurrukan with his sharp olive-skinned looks that a casual glance would slide over him. It was obvious when he opened his mouth, though; his English was good, but not that good. Yet.

“. . . Still no word from the commodore . . .” he heard, unobtrusively circling near a party of dignitaries who stood around, waiting for the ceremony to begin.

Ah,
he thought. The Islanders’ black she-devil war-leader was still lost, then, after that storm on the other side of the world. The king will be interested to hear that. If it came to war, the Republic would be weakened considerably without her and those ships.

He swallowed the last of the roll and clapped with the others as the Islander ruler walked up and cut the ribbon. This too was information; the king wished to know every little detail, for it might bear on the Island’s strength. The great building behind him had formerly been the
A&P
, whatever that was, a merchant’s dwelling, from the way they spoke of it. Since the Event the Islanders had used it as a whale rendery—he could still smell that—but a new channel had been dredged east up the harbor for the whale-catchers and their prey. The A&P and its wooden extension running down to Old South Wharf were now to be a huge covered market for farm produce and fish; many of those watching were excited at the prospect of renting stalls. All of them were relieved at getting the stink and greasy smoke of this trade out of the center of their city. He could understand that, since tanneries and smithies were banished outside the walls of Tartessos by law.

Melanterol strolled through the crowd, listening. Some were alarmed over the fate of the flotilla; others still believed that Alston would bring it through. Still others chattered of the fishing and the crops and exchanged gossip that wouldn’t have been out of place in his native city. He looked northward; the harbor was crowded too, a leafless forest of mast and spar, and many of the ships were vary large; he could see barge-loads of beam and plank being towed eastward to the shipyards, where new
clipper-frigates
were abuilding. The sound of hammering, of power-driven saws, the chuffing of steam engines came over the murmur of the crowd. He shivered a little. That was the noise of weapons being forged, a spear that might well be pointed at the heart of his folk. Perhaps they should strike first . . .

There were a dozen steam tugs or whalers in sight as well, their paddles churning the cold blue waters; a flight of gulls took wing at the melancholy howl of a steam whistle.
I hope the king’s artificers are doing better with the engines of steam,
he thought. That was turning out to be endlessly frustrating, even now that they knew the principles.

A young woman in smoke-grimed overalls applauded next to him as the speech ended. “Lot of new stuff going up,” she said. “Extension to the casting plant, too. Double shifts.”

“Ah,” Melanterol said. “You work there? A great thing. Even in Alba, we’ve heard of it.”

“You Alban?” she said, turning to him. A snub nose with a smut of charcoal across it, blue eyes—and by her accent, not a native speaker of this tongue either. “I don’t hear where you’re from; I’m from the Glimmerfish country, myself.”

He touched head, breast, and groin in a gesture of Alban formality he’d learned. “I’m from the Summer Isle—Ireland, the Eagle People call it. I trade—cloaks, horses, gold dust. My tribe wished to see if it would profit us to send here directly, and not go through Pentagon Base in Alba.” He grinned at her. “And I wished to see its magic and marvels for myself.”

She smiled back a little wryly. “Wonders, yes. I wondered and marveled at how much they would pay for work, until I saw how fast the coins flow away from you here!”

“Then let me buy you some of the wonderful bitter ale they serve at the Brotherhood,” he said.

The woman gave him a considering look, up and down.
Fiernan Bohulugi,
he though; they were even bolder than Amurrukan women, in some ways.
And she works for Leaton. Works at the Bessemer casting plant.

The king was
very
interested in the place that made cast steel for cannon. There was a general description of the process in one of the books the palace had, but experiments had produced nothing but disaster and unusable spongy metal. Walker had been curiously unhelpful as well.

“Why not?” the woman said. “You get a thirst, pouring steel.”

Marian Alston-Kurlelo stepped back from the pump handle, working her fingers and then wiping a forearm across her forehead.
Hell, at least I don’t have to be afraid of sunburn.
Poor Heather had to watch that carefully in these latitudes, or she peeled like an onion.

“Reliefs on,” she said aloud.

A new shift of twelve stepped up to the bars and began working them, up and down like the action on an old-fashioned rail handcar.

“Chips?” she said, walking forward and looking over the side where crewfolk were fothering another sail over the hull.

“It’s gaining on us again, ma’am,” the warrant officer said.
He
looked lobster-red; he’d been in the water a good deal. “It’s not just the damaged planking. With that cross-chop during the storm, she spewed oakum from half the seams. We’re taking water in trickles over big sections of the hull and I can’t get at it with the state the hold’s in. Every time the pumps clog we lose ground.”

“Damn,” Alston said, squinting up at the sky.

No more bad weather, thank Ghu, as Ian would say. The
Chamberlain
was making four knots across the wind, heading west by south; all the mizzen sails set, the main course, main lower topsail, and a big improvised triangular staysail on the line that led down from the mast to the bowsprit, through the area where the foremast should be.
Hmmm . . . we could use the upper half of the mainmast as a jury foremast, cut it off right where it’s cracked.