The weather-witch needed to rest for a considerable length of time, and due to the compounded indirect effects of her considerable efforts at navigating the strait at high speed by wind alone, the weather was quite irregular for a while afterwards. I have seen clouds; and I have seen fog; but we found ourselves with clouds not quite low enough for ordinary fog, not quite meeting the ground yet engulfing half our mainsail. The tops and the crow’s nest were out of sight.
As my sailors had greater confidence in my eyesight than their own, I was stationed in the forecastle to watch for reefs and rocks, or the sudden appearance of land; then I saw something that was neither of those things. It was bobbing up and down, clearly adrift rather than being a piece of fixed land. Its sides seemed perfectly straight, though, and most of it was low enough in the water that it was hard to see over the choppy waves.
After a moment, I realized it was round. A round floating platform, nothing like I had seen, wider than any ship, slowly rotating in place as it drifted closer to us among the waves of the Axine Sea. As I stood in the forecastle staring at it, I suddenly realized that the flower-like burnt protrusions around the edge were the remains of paddlewheels. There were six of them; then I realized what I was looking at.
“It’s a battleship of the Golden Empire,” I said in Greek, turning to the sailor next to me.
The sailor stared at me in disbelief, then looked back into the dim space of open air beneath the deep foggy clouds. “You see a ship?”
“Well, it was a ship,” I said. “It was built as a steamer from the hull up, no sails or oars at all.”
“Oh… it’s so big,” the sailor said, as he caught sight of it, his jaw hanging open in surprise. “And round. Which way is the prow?”
“I think it’s actually smaller than a French cruiser, but I’m not sure. The width of the thing makes for a stable firing platform, theoretically.” I frowned. Judging the size and distance of it was difficult, particularly with the unusual shape, but it did seem a lot larger than it had a minute ago. My eyes widened, and I turned, shouting back. “Brake! Brake! Reverse oars to brake, now!”
The oars strained with a splashing noise; then there was a loud crunch and I stumbled forward. For the second time in my career as a ship’s captain, we had rammed a ship with me standing in the forecastle; this time, with the oars deployed to slow the ship rather than to speed its passage, I was not launched into the air in an uncontrolled tumble. I found I greatly preferred keeping my feet during the process.
“Stow the oars. I’m going to inspect the damage.” Having avoided being involuntarily thrown out of my ship, I jumped out of the ship of my own accord, dropping heavily into a crouch as I did so. The impact was still hard enough that I instantly regretted my impulsive decision, pain shooting up my legs.
The damage to our ship was minimal. It had been designed for ramming, and the thick timbers that were meant to protect the sides of the battleship were, while thick and robust, not very firmly attached in place to one another. I may theorize that perhaps they had been fixed into place with iron or steel nails; or, alternately, that the fastening materials and supporting structure, whatever they had been, had been weakened by the fires that had gutted the ship.
For the ship was gutted; there was no question of that. The central battery was missing almost all of its guns, with the elevated castle that served as the central battery’s rotating fire platform having been smashed apart. It looked for all the world as if it had been struck over and over again by a great mech wielding three giant mech-scale axes strapped together, their heads lined up so as to leave parallel lines whenever they struck. I was not sure whether this damage happened before or after the ship was raked with fire.
The ship’s log spoke simply of having been sent to Aegyssus, there to help secure the mouth of the Istros against an increasingly energetic rebellion led by the presumptively alive Prince Vladimir, serving double duty as both a floating battery and transport. (The latter because the railroad had been sabotaged in some particularly severe fashion.) The only survivors left aboard were a pair of soldiers who had been thrown into the brig for one or another mischief; after two days adrift with little water or food, they were barely coherent.
The ship had clearly been attacked with fire and battered by boarding mechs with heavy blades, but they claimed they had been in open sea with no alarm of any ship having been sighted when, out of nowhere, the ship was set ablaze. One said he was an expert gunner and would surely have been brought out of the brig and back on deck if any enemy ship had been sighted, and the other insisted he’d seen a monster through a porthole. While sea monsters are real, neither leviathans nor krakens nor sea serpents are known to have much tolerance of fire; the notion of a sea monster using fire to attack a ship may be therefore dismissed as absurdity and the fevered imaginings of a man who was drunk enough even by the standards of the navy of the Golden Empire to merit being tossed in the brig to put him out of the way until he sobered up.
No; a fired ship is usually set alight by courtesy of an enemy ship, the result of the application of heated shot, a war mage, or the notorious fire-projectors manufactured in Constantinople. This last possibility focused my suspicions southwards. Perhaps a squadron of the sultan’s navy happened upon one of the Golden Empire’s most valuable naval assets in the middle of the Axine Sea in the night. In spite of the nominal cooperation that the two powers were engaged in with respect to the rebellion that had spread from Wallachia into northern Rumelia, the officer in charge had been unable to resist the strategically compelling temptation to eliminate a significant portion of a rival naval force.
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The only difficulty with this theory was the lack of any sign of impacts of cannon-fire from the heavy bombards that were the staple armament of the sultan’s ships, whether galley or sidewheeler.
Perhaps the enemy ships had closed to boarding range without giving signs of their intentions by overtly loading their guns, but how? Some clever deception? Magical fog? Both survivors insisted there had been no dense fog the night of the attack, but they did claim to hear a sound like the flapping of great wings; in reality, obviously the flapping of sails, meaning that the Empire’s greatest steamship had been defeated by the galleys that formed the second tier of Sultan Allaedin’s great navy, galleys moving under wind power no less.
After establishing that the attack took place at night and was carried out by galleys moving under sail power, I concluded that the real cause of the ship’s defeat had been the negligent failure to ensure that night watchmen were assigned in sufficient number or even stayed awake, in spite of the giant samovars and the ample stores of tea that we found aboard. As someone who was or at least had briefly been an officer of the Golden Empire, I felt a sense of deep shame and embarrassment on behalf of my countrymen. They had taken a modern warship into battle against galleys that could have been built a thousand years ago, most likely galliots less than a tenth the size of their own vessel, and lost totally and completely.
I certainly found it more plausible that the sultan’s navy was still preying upon that of the Golden Empire than the notion that Prince Vladimir by himself somehow had wreaked such destruction while having only scattered mountain folk at his disposal and no warships. Perhaps the rebels had some river barges at their disposal, courtesy of captured traffic on the Istros, but those would hardly be seaworthy, much less able to ambush a steamship making a straight-line course that took it far away from land.
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After we had salvaged what we could from the wreck of the ill-fated Holmgard, which included a surprising amount of intact copper piping and an intact cast-iron boiler, I met with my officers for dinner and an extended discussion. For some combination of reasons related to upper class etiquette that I found confusing, or perhaps the size of the decorated dinner table we had salvaged from the small dining room attached to the Holmgard’s captains quarters, this dinner included not only my officers, but Zaneta and the four women who had been either rescued by Ragnar (according to the delighted blonde Circassian), stolen by Ragnar (according to the less-delighted brunette Circassian), or kidnapped by Ragnar (according to Gulben, the suddenly-meek auburn-haired younger sister of Sultan Allaedin).
Other than the fact that Katya was an officer herself and seated between myself and Felix, there was a woman seated between every two officers, meaning that seating alternated between men and women with the exception of a misplaced Georg at the foot of the table. Gulben was seated at my left hand, and reacted poorly to my theory that Sultan Allaedin was responsible for the destruction of the Holmgard.
“Our captains would never disobey orders to risk restarting the war!” Her dark eyes locked onto mine defiantly for one heartbeat. Then she clutched at her stomach and looked down, shaking her head. “Unless you say so, Master Corvus.”
“My saying it doesn’t make it so,” I replied drily, glancing over at Vitold, seated on her other side.
Vitold nodded. “He’s been wrong before. But everybody knows that the Sultanate lets all the pirates in the world roost in Taurida,” he said. “Most of his galley captains are little more than ravagers and freebooters. They eat babies and impale dogs on spikes! I remember seeing the illustrations on the news sheets. Some of them even had horns and tails, the devils! You can’t tell me the sultan’s devil-pirates are disciplined enough to keep the peace!”
Gulben glared at Vitold, then looked down. “I hear and obey, Lieutenant Szpak,” she spat out through gritted teeth in thickly-accented Slavonic of a Rumelian variety. “I shall not tell you that the sultan’s captains are devout and treat the slaves they take as lawful plunder of war humanely. I shall not tell you that the Golden Empire tolerates pirates and freebooters of its own. I shall not tell you that none of the ship’s captains of the Sultanate have horns and tails and that the only devil made flesh is the Undying Emperor squatting in Tanais. I shall not tell you that you are an idiot who will believe any lie printed on a page!”
“Enough,” I said.
Gulben’s teeth clicked as she shut her mouth, humming at me in annoyance.
“The important question is this: Should we be worried that what befell the Holmgard will befall us?” I looked around the table, then repeated myself in Gothic after remembering that not all of them understood Slavonic. “Whether that was a squadron of Sultan Allaedin’s navy, pirates, some absurd Wallachian fleet conjured out of nothing by the rebel prince, or whatever those two men thought…”
“A fire-breathing kraken with a giant axe in each tentacle, perhaps?” Johann grinned, and there was laughter all around the table.
“That sounds like something my cousin Ragnar would come up with,” Felix said, smiling briefly.
The blonde Circassian looked hopefully at Felix, not understanding Gothic; our surgeon, conversant in Gothic as well as Turkish, whispered a quick translation, and her face fell, disappointed.
Once the conversation had been steered back on track, we discussed the logs of the Holmgard and the survivors’ testimony, and decided that the ship must have drifted north and east from where it was attacked; as we ourselves intended to sail further north and east to pass through the Cimmerian Strait, we would be moving away from the attacking ships, who in any case would doubtless have come away from the engagement with looted money and captured slaves, the latter of which which would be more profitably disposed in the south in Rumelia, Trebizond, or Constantinople.
And once we crossed through the Cimmerian Strait, there would be no worry about pirates; true, the navy of the Golden Empire was no great force, but it could and did police the Cimmerian Sea.