The Sea Peoples(102)

“Orrey?” Heuradys said softly.

órlaith started and shook her head. Her liege knight’s eyes were a lionlike amber, but just for an instant there was a hint of gray, and a crested helm and a bitter spear and a shield marked with a Gorgon’s head. That was the Lady she worshipped as her second mother had before her, the wise and crafty Defender of the City whose emblems were the owl and the olive.

“Things are a bit raw right now, Herry,” she said, equally softly. “Normally I’m fine with leaving the Otherworld on the other side of its Veil, and dealing with the light of common day. But not this day, and that’s part of my work too.”

“Nice to know you’re not just a pretty face,” Heuradys said, and órlaith grinned thanks for the little jest.

Naysmith stiffened. “What the devil?” she said, looking at the latest message from the kite-observer and then through her own glass. “They’re not opening out into line! They’re all heading straight for us! That’s . . . suicide.”

She turned to the signaler. “Flanking ships advance. Captain Edwards, take in sail. If they’re willing to stick their heads into a sack, we’ll oblige them.”

? ? ?

CRACK!

Sea-Leopard heeled under the recoil of her broadside of twenty-four-pounder catapults. The roundshot slashed out, invisible except as blurred streaks, and the Korean warship coming in on the port quarter seemed to stagger in the water. órlaith could hear the crunching sound of the cast-steel globes racking into the timbers of the enemy ship. Splinters flew skyward amid screams. At least it wasn’t napalm shell or firebolt; two more of the enemy ships burned like torches not far behind them and sent the black slanting pillars of their funeral pyres into the sky, but this one was too close to risk setting it afire. Pumps were jetting water over the Sea-Leopard’s decks anyway, and down the thin sheet metal that guarded the wooden hull. Special squads waited with the foam-gear that could extinguish chemical fire.

More screams of pain and mortal terror came from the waist of the Korean craft, where several of the heavy metal balls smashed through the gunwales and went through ranks of men kneeling behind them. Men too tightly packed to dodge even if they’d had time.

What flew skyward from those impacts wasn’t splinters, except from a few of the polearms the soldiers carried. It was parts of men, and if you looked closely you could see that they splashed as much as breaking.

“For what we are about to receive . . .” some Christian with a sense of humor said.

The metallic twangs from the enemy ship were fewer in number; six, she thought. And subtly different, probably because the engineering tradition behind their design was. Natural law set the limits for what the students of the mechanic arts could do, but styles differed from nation to nation within those bounds. The massive fabric of the ship shuddered a bit, and something flashed by overhead too fast to see. Bits fell—severed ends of rope, and a block-and-tackle that caught in the netting overhead. Shouts sounded harsh as orders were barked and the topmen cleared the rigging above, with their clasp knives in their teeth.

Then the frigate’s broadside cut loose again; she could see in her mind the crews lunging up and down at the handles of the cocking mechanisms below, and the grunts as the shot were levered into the troughs. The enemy ship was only a few hundred yards away now, within long bowshot, and there was an explosion of spray and splinters as the heavy metal struck at the waterline. The bow jerked down as water flooded in, rammed home by the forward momentum of the ship. Then the thick stay-lines that held the foremast in place and transmitted the force of the wind to the hull snapped, writhing across the deck like thigh-thick whips with bone-cracking force.

The tall mast was a composite, smaller timbers fitted and bound together with shrunk-on hoops, not a single trunk like the Sea-Leopard’s Sitka spruce sparage. It was nearly as strong, but when it failed . . . as its writhing bend showed it was about to do . . .

“Duck!” órlaith shouted crisply; petty officers were echoing it all the way down the hundreds of feet of deck.

She suited action to words by knocking down her visor and going to one knee with her shield up.

The enemy ship’s mast shattered like one of the fabled bombs of the ancient world. The huge strain on the length of it turned into energy in motion as splinters and chunks scythed outward. Heuradys stepped in front of her, as several of Reiko’s samurai did with her; the Tennoˉ merely looked down for a moment and put an armored forearm in front of her face as she knelt.

The mast cracked like a whip as it disintegrated too; like an endless succession of whips, in fact. About a second later something went bang! into órlaith’s shield, hard enough to rock her backward. Whatever it had been went over the side spinning hard enough to look like a disk as it flew. There were screams and curses from spots where sharp wood hit flesh or blunt pieces struck with bone-cracking force, and more purposeful shouts as stretcher-bearers and surgeon’s assistants hurried to bandage and rush the wounded below to the lazaretto and the waiting doctors.

They all came back to their feet afterwards; Kalaˉkaua had a bleeding gash on his right forearm, but he worked the fingers to make sure nothing important had been damaged, and submitted impatiently as a Montivallan medic dusted it with antiseptic powder and bound it up tightly.

“My apologies, Your Highness,” Admiral Naysmith said. “I didn’t anticipate this.”