APRIL, YEAR OF GOD 891
I
Off the Trhumahn Bank,
South Howell Bay
"Signal from the flagship, Sir!"
The Earl of Gray Harbor turned from his place at the quarterdeck rail as the shout floated down from the senior of the two midshipmen perched in the mizzentop. He folded his hands behind him, adjusting to the easy movement of the deck with the remembered reflexes of twenty-plus years at sea, and watched HMS Typhoon's captain look up at the teenaged midshipman who'd announced the signal.
That young man had his eyes glued to the flagship. The noises of a ship at sea-wind humming through the rigging, the rhythmic surge of water past the hull, the creak of timbers and masts, the high-pitched cries and whistles of seabirds and wyverns following in Typhoon's wake-flowed around Gray Harbor while he watched the senior middy straining to read off the signal flags streaming from HMS Gale's mizzen yard. The other youngster sat with his back against the mast, holding the outsized book in his lap firmly against the insistent wind while he waited to turn its pages.
"Well, Master Mahgentee?" Captain Stywyrt prompted, glowering up at the mizzentop as the seconds trickled past.
"I can't quite make out the hoist, Sir, and-" Midshipman Mahgentee began, then broke off. "I've got it now, Sir! Numbers Nine and Thirty-Seven-form line of battle on the port tack, Sir!"
"Very good, Master Mahgentee," Captain Dahryl Stywyrt said, and looked at yet another midshipman, this one standing expectantly on the quarterdeck with him.
"Hoist the acknowledgment, Master Aymez," the captain said. "Lively, now!"
"Aye, aye, Sir!" Midshipman Aymez responded, and began barking orders to the seamen of his detail.
Gray Harbor watched without any temptation to smile, despite the fact that Aymez's thirteen-year-old voice had yet to break and that the youngest of the seamen under his command had to be twice his own age. The earl had once stood in Aymez's shoes, and the youngster clearly knew what he was about.
Balls of brightly colored bunting spilled out of the flag bags, and four of them were bent on to the signal halyards in the proper sequence. Aymez watched carefully, making certain of that, then gave a final order, and the flags rose swiftly. The topmost flag reached the yardarm, and a quick jerk broke them to the wind. They streamed out, duplicating the signal at Gale's yardarm, simultaneously indicating receipt of the flagship's signal and repeating it to show it had been properly read.
Mahgentee had never taken his eyes off the flagship. A few more moments passed, and then, as Gale's signal officer hauled down the original hoist, he shouted down to the quarterdeck once again.
"Execute, Sir!"
"Very well, Master Ahlbair," the captain said to his first officer. "Lay the ship on the port tack, if you please."
"Aye, aye, Sir!" Lieutenant Ahlbair replied, and lifted his leather speaking trumpet to his lips. "Hands to sheets and braces!" he barked.
Gray Harbor watched Stywyrt's well-drilled crew as petty officers bellowed and seamen scampered to their stations. The evolution was more complicated than it had been aboard Gray Harbor's own final command, but Typhoon was a galleon, not a galley. At a hundred and twenty feet, she was thirty feet shorter than a typical galley, and she was also both beamier and taller, which made her look undeniably stubby. And she had three masts, compared to a typical galley's single one, of course, but some additional changes had been made, as well.
The most immediately apparent change-and the one which, Gray Harbor had discovered, had actually most offended his view of the way ships were supposed to look-was the disappearance of the towering forecastle and aftercastle. Those castles had provided the advantage of height both for defense against boarders and for pouring fire from matchlocks, crossbows, and light cannon down onto the decks of an opponent. Their disappearance seemed . . . wrong, somehow. Which, he knew, was a foolish attitude. They were no longer needed, and he'd already noticed how much more weatherly Typhoon had become without their wind resistance helping to push her to leeward. Besides, their removal had been an important part of Merlin's and Olyvyr's efforts to reduce top weight and displacement. But however he might feel about the way the castles had been cut down to the upper deck level, the alterations in her sail plan were actually a far more profound change.
Her square-rigged spritsail had been replaced with three of Sir Dustyn Olyvyr's new "jibs"-triangular staysails set "fore-and-aft" on the forward-leading stays supporting the foremast, and the mizzenmast's lateen sail had been replaced by a "spanker," a gaff-rigged fore-and-aft sail, with its foot spread by a heavy boom. They looked decidedly . . . odd to Gray Harbor's eye, but he had no intention of complaining. Nothing was likely to change the fact that square-rigged vessels always had been (and would remain) clumsy and awkward to maneuver. The improvement the new headsails and spanker made possible, however, had to be seen to be believed.
It wasn't enough to match the nimbleness and weatherliness of the "schooners" Olyvyr was producing, of course, but Typhoon's jibs and spanker still gave her a huge maneuver advantage over more conventionally rigged ships. They were located well forward and aft of Typhoon's natural pivot point, which gave them far more leverage than their sail area alone might suggest, and they helped her sail far closer to the wind than any square-rigger had ever before managed. That meant she had a shorter distance to go across the eye of the wind when it came time to tack, and the headsails' and spanker's leverage imparted a powerful turning moment as she began her turn, as well. The combination brought the vessel through the maneuver much more quickly and reliably. It was still easy for an unwary skipper to be caught aback and end up in irons, head-on to the wind and drifting to leeward, but it had become less easy, and the new sail plan helped a vessel regain way much more quickly if it did happen.
Personally, Gray Harbor knew, he would always be a galley captain at heart, but he was far too experienced not to grasp the enormous changes Lock Island, Seamount, and Merlin had wrought.
Typhoon completed her maneuver, settling onto her new heading, and Gray Harbor stepped back to his position at the rail, admiring the precision with which Commodore Staynair maneuvered his squadron's vessels.
In addition to all his other innovations, Merlin had radically overhauled the Navy's signal procedures, as well. The Royal Charisian Navy had evolved its own set of signals over the years, but they'd been restricted to fairly simple, straightforward messages. Hoisting a single red flag to the masthead, for example, as an order to engage the enemy. Adding the golden kraken on black of the Charisian ensign above it to order an attack on the enemy's van, or below it, to order an attack on his rear. Hoisting a black and yellow striped flag below the national flag as an order to "form line astern of me," or above it, as an order to form line abreast. There simply hadn't been a way to transmit more complicated orders . . . until Merlin stepped in, that was.
Baron Seamount had been too deeply involved in producing the new, modified artillery to deal with the signals issue himself, so he'd delegated that particular responsibility to Sir Domynyk Staynair. Staynair, the younger brother of Bishop Maikel Staynair, had been handpicked by High Admiral Lock Island to command Seamount's "Experimental Squadron."
He'd been chosen in part because his superiors' faith in his loyalty-and ability to protect the Navy's secrets-was absolute. But he'd also been chosen because of his raw ability. At thirty-seven, with over twenty-five years of seagoing experience, Staynair was young enough to remain flexible, yet more than experienced enough to help the seijin construct a comprehensive vocabulary of just under eight hundred standard commands. Those commands were listed in the signal book clasped so firmly by Midshipman Mahgentee's assistant in the top, and each of them had been assigned a numerical value.
Using the new signal flags, based on Merlin's "arabic numerals," each of those commands, which dealt with the overwhelming majority of possible evolutions, could be transmitted using a simple hoist of no more than three flags. The simple inclusion of a plain black flag-already called the "stopper" by the signals parties-between numerical flags served as punctuation. By inserting it to indicate breaks between individual values, multiple commands-such as Staynair's order to form line, followed by the order to do so on the port tack-could be hoisted simultaneously.
Staynair's vocabulary also contained a thousand of the words most commonly needed by seamen, each also represented by a single numerical hoist, to permit more complicated signals to be exchanged. And, if it should happen that a required word wasn't in the vocabulary, the letters of the alphabet had also been assigned flag values. Any word could be spelled out, although that was a laborious, time-consuming process.
The result was a vast increase in tactical flexibility . . . before battle was joined, at least. The amount of gunsmoke even old-style naval battles produced was quite sufficient to reduce the utility of any visual signaling system to virtually nothing once the actual shooting began. But any professional sea officer knew the ability to send quick, positive orders to the units of a squadron during the approach to battle was still a priceless advantage.
"Excuse me, My Lord."
Gray Harbor looked up, shaking himself out of his reverie, as a diffident young officer appeared beside him.
"Yes, Lieutenant?"
"Captain Stywyrt's respects, My Lord, but we're coming up on the target."
"Ah, of course! Thank you, Lieutenant. And please thank the Captain for me, as well."
"Of course, My Lord."
The lieutenant touched his left shoulder with his right fist in salute, then returned to his duties while Gray Harbor carefully inserted the cotton Seamount had provided into his ears.
"Beat to quarters, Master Ahlbair!" Stywyrt's voice sounded muffled through the cotton, but the order was clear enough, and the traditional deep-voiced drums began to boom.
Once again, bare feet pattered over wooden decks as the crew scurried to their stations. It wasn't necessary actually to clear for action-Stywyrt had seen to that long since-but the galleon's decks offered a seething flood of humanity in what seemed like utter chaos.
Gray Harbor's experienced eye saw through the apparent chaos to the intense, disciplined order underneath it. Where a landsman would have seen only confusion, he saw the precise choreography of a formal ball, and the fact that so much of what Typhoon's crew was doing was completely new only made that precision even more impressive.
"Load starboard, Master Ahlbair," Stywyrt said.
"Starboard batteries, run in and load!" Lieutenant Ahlbair shouted, and Gray Harbor stepped closer to the quarterdeck rail to gaze down and watch the gundeck gun crews casting off the breeching ropes which secured the newfangled gun carriages to the ship's side. Men tailed onto the side tackles, grunting with effort as they heaved, and their massive charges moved backward in a thunderous squeal of wooden gun trucks across deck planks which had been sanded to improve the gun crews' traction. The guns on Typhoon's main deck were krakens which had been rebored by Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. They weighed two and a half tons each, and they moved heavily, reluctantly, despite their carriages' wheels.
"Avast heaving!" gun captains shouted, announcing their satisfaction as their ponderous charges moved far enough inboard. The Number Three from each gun crew removed the wooden tampion which normally sealed the bore against spray, and the Number Two removed the sheet-lead "apron" which protected the secured gun's vent so Number One could attach the gunlock.
Powder monkeys-boys, some of them as young as seven or eight-dashed up to each gun with their wooden cartridge buckets. Each bucket contained a single flannel bag, filled with gunpowder and then stitched shut, and each monkey dumped his cartridge on deck at his assigned gun, then went racing back for another.
The gun's Number Five picked up the cartridge and passed it to Number Three, who slid it down the muzzle of the gun. Number Six had already selected a round shot from the garland along the bulwark. He passed it to Number Three while Number Four rammed the powder charge home. The gleaming round shot-just under six and a half inches in diameter and weighing over thirty-eight pounds-went down the bore next, followed by a fat, round wad of rope yarn to keep it from rolling around inside the gun as the ship moved, and Number Four tamped everything down with another stroke of his rammer.
Gun trucks squealed again as the cannon were run back into firing position. They snouted out of their gunports all down the galleon's starboard side as Typhoon bared her claws, and the Number Eight and Number Nine of each crew slid stout wooden handspikes under the gun tube. The gun carriage had been designed with "steps" cut out of the brackets-the heavy side timbers which supported the main weight of the gun-and the crewmen used those steps as purchase points, grunting with effort as they levered the breech of the gun upward.
The trunnions were placed so that the gun was slightly breech-heavy, and as the handspikes heaved the breech to the desired elevation, the gun captain inserted the elevation wedge-a simple wooden shim, designed to fit under the breech and hold it there. More work with handspikes levered the guns around, training them as far forward as possible, and then the gun captains drove priming irons-small iron skewers-down the guns' touchholes, piercing the cartridges, and reached for the primer boxes each wore at his belt.
That, too, was a new innovation. Before Merlin's intervention, each gun had been primed with loose powder from the gun captain's powderhorn and, when the moment came, it had been touched off with a red-hot iron rod or a length of slow match. But burning matches and glowing irons had never been the safest things to have around loose gunpowder, especially on a narrow, pitching deck filled with moving men, so still more changes had been made.
Now the gun captains took goose quills packed with fine-grained gunpowder from the cases at their waists, and inserted them into the vents. They stripped away the wax-covered paper seals to expose the powder filling, and metal clicked as their Number Twos cocked the gunlocks. The firing mechanism was an adaptation of Merlin's "flintlock," which was essentially identical to the lock used on the new muskets, but without a priming pan. Instead, when the striker came forward, the flint struck a milled steel surface and showered sparks over the powder-charged quill.
