Mudbound
He had gathered many lamps about his mirror, like an altar. They burned high. Carefully, Thaler poured boiling water into the basin beneath, decanting some into a mug with a puck of soap at the bottom. Undoing his collar and splaying his shirt open so as to keep the collar dry, he wetted his brush and razor and began to soap his face. His habit of shaving this late greatly disturbed the stewards, but he would keep it. He was no good to himself before elevenses, no good to anyone, perhaps, but he hoped otherwise on account of his station. He could hear reports and speak pleasantly in the early morning, but he could not shave with any efficiency or care.
The door of the little washroom stood open. Beyond it Thaler’s cabin was lit by a single lamp - he had harvested the others for his task. It rested on a sideboard near a gramophone that picked out some tune in three-quarter time. Opposite it, a girl from the diplomatic quarter dozed in a bergère. Thaler regarded her briefly. She looked rosy wrapped in local silks, still clutching a slim book in her right hand which draped over the gilt armrest. The book was opened to its middle, revealing between her fingers little phalanxes of verse. He envied her the privilege of reading anything that was not at least fifty-percent charts and tables.
His first command enveloped them both. The battleship Skvoreshniki rested proud on a mudflat in the lee of changeable, sandy cliffs, her port side facing the approaches to the harbor of the city and county of Loun. It was as near to a posting on shore as one could come and still wear a pistol. Skvoreshniki could, in theory, be moved through a great effort in dredging and with the aid of a flock of tugs but she was meant to stand sentry here forever, some 12,000 versts from where she had been laid down and where almost every man within her now had been born.
The watchstander tolled the end of the middle watch. Beneath him Thaler heard a handful of stokers break step in their passage, bound for bed. There were very few of them for a ship of this size. Her main engines had been cold for some time now and they fired only two boilers to provide hot water and power the systems to lay, load, and traverse her guns. Certainly, the hot water in his basin had come from the ship’s supply, he knew it by the flecks of rust.
A knock resounded from his cabin door.
“Good morning, Captain-Lieutenant, sir,” followed it.
“Enter, please,” Thaler muttered, nearly nicking himself.
“Beg pardon, sir, but the door is locked.”
Thaler let his razor clatter to the bottom of the basin and padded to the door.
A very junior rating stood before him, evidently part of the present watch, as he was uniformed.
“Sir, sighting beyond the old Loun light, sir. They would like you to make a determination for the log, sir,” he gabbled. Thaler indicated the sleeping girl and held a finger to his lips. The rating flushed. Leaving the doorway, Thaler crossed the room to his desk and extracted a pair of binoculars from the top drawer. He sighted through a large porthole and finding he could only see its filthy glass paused to wrench it open. Sea air dribbled through it, stirring the lamps. Thaler found the old Loun light and watched its beam sweep across the approaches. He saw nothing save the rocks it guarded against until, at the edge of its range a few white-tipped traces of wake could be seen, bearing on Skvoreshniki.
“Pilot cutters?” He opined.
“I could not say, sir,” the rating whispered.
“No,” he concluded, picking up a cigar from the ashtray on his desk and chewing its narrow end.
“No, why dispatch more than one?” He elaborated.
The lighthouse’s beam came around again and settled for an instant on a formation of black, low boats, moving swiftly. It then winked out.
Thaler lowered the binoculars. He turned to the rating.
“Assemble Misters Fingal, Nestor, and Whitley at once.”
“Yes, sir,” the rating responded, looking ready to sprint away.
Before he could, Thaler added: “and beat to quarters.”
Thaler toweled off his partly shaven face and began to return the lamps to their places in his cabin. The growing light nearly roused the girl and, momentarily, Thaler finished the job, starting her awake.
“I am sorry, you must go.”
“Oh no, have you a wife?” She murmured.
“Worse, I fear I am about to have a battle. Go on deck and cross the planking to the cliff. Can you recall the way we came? Take any of the bicycles and ride for town.”
“Ride? Dressed as I am?” She huffed.
“You may walk but I would advise against it,” Thaler intoned, buttoning his collar. “If you see any other ladies, including our native maids and fancy girls and what have you, take them with you, away from here.”
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The girl rose and squared up to Thaler, preparing a protest when he turned to his wardrobe, buckling on his gunbelt and sword.
“Is it so dangerous? Whatever is happening?” She asked, somewhat cowed.
“I cannot yet know. Even if it is minor it will warrant a report to the Admiralty and I would sooner show 10 dead bluejackets on my account than one lady of any stripe. If this is all folly you may slander me about the Services Club to your heart’s content.”
An insistent drumroll resounded from the passage outside, the beating of feet behind it as men rushed to their posts. Thaler showed the girl the door, crying “make way!” before letting her slip into the stream of men.
-
As Thaler made his way topside only the laggards among Skvoreshniki’s complement were still heading for their stations. The rest waited in gossiping rosettes of three and four about their guns, valves, plots, and aid posts. He burst on deck and cried up to Mr. Fingal on the bridge wing “Swing the main battery in the direction of the sighting and load bursting shells.” Fingal hesitated then bounded for a speaking tube to give the order. Thaler soon joined him on the bridge. Nestor and Whitley waited there as well. He addressed Fingal again, “Is that the fastest we can traverse our main battery?”
“At this pressure, yes, sir.” The engineer replied.
“Stoke us right up, we must have better than that. Wire down the safety valves if needed, I will bear any consequences. Go down and see it done.”
“Sir, what did you see?” Nestor half-demanded.
“We can all see it. The light has been put out.”
Nestor approached the rail and looked out to sea. “So it has.”
“With respect, sir, a hazard to navigation does not bear this response,” Whitley, his senior in age, though not rank, put in.
“It is precisely because it is a hazard to navigation that they would have immediately set a fire on the beach or put up flares if the light failed. It has been extinguished. I have seen also small craft moving with all too much military countenance toward the harbor. This smacks of enemy action.”
“Torpilleurs?” Whitley frowned.
“God willing it will be only that, they can do nothing against a mudbound ship,” Nestor noted.
“But they can turn our merchantmen and liners in the harbor into scrap hulks at a stroke,” Thaler countered, adding “the Distant Squadron is absent, they will be disappointed if that was their prize, but I suspect they mean to avoid them.”
“With what has been going on inland, to make open war on us now, they would defy all the world,” Whitley stated.
“They have very nearly done so before,” Nestor sighed.
-
Black smoke rose from Skvoreshniki’s funnels as her furnaces roared with newfound life, burning off years of old carbon deposits and grime.
“Maximum working pressure obtained on gun laying and fire control systems,” Nestor reported, his ear cupped to a speaking tube.
“Make ready to touch off our searchlights but hold for my word,” Thaler indicated, rubbing the pommel of his sheathed sword.
“Yes sir, would you…” Nestor began then raised his hand to call for silence.
“Ranging reports torpilleurs at eight versts, closing with us at 30 knots or more. Disposition unknown.”
“This is not our birthday, our friends have no reason to approach by stealth. Lights!” Thaler barked.
The ship’s searchlights, arrayed along her port side, ignited with a whoosh, their massive paraffin burners scrambling for breath. Their beams played out across the sea, fracturing on the wavetops until they revealed, in fits, the flotilla of torpilleurs. Thaler looked about Skvoreshniki’s bridge. It was cold and nearly dead, a layer of soot and rust tarnishing every surface. Her wheel and engine order telegraphs had gone untouched these many years, the charts still bore the course she had taken into this purgatory on the mudflat. In their brass frames, however, the fire control repeaters were alive again. They ticked back and forth, giving the range and bearings by clockwork from Skvoreshniki’s plotting room. Beneath them were ten little windows, all showed a green flag marked with “RDY” - each chamber of the old lady’s main battery was loaded, each breech screwed shut.
Thaler turned to Nestor. His second officer twisted an unlit cigarette about between his fingers with such force that the tobacco was falling to the deck.
“Put every gun to them sir.” He commanded.
Greatly relieved, Nestor approached a different speaking tube and bellowed: “Fire on the torpilleurs, fire as they bear!”
Thaler felt as if someone had hit the back of his head with a rifle butt. His ears rang. Vast columns of smoke and flame sprang from Skvoreshniki’s main guns, their shells surging forward with a howl. He tried to follow the arc of the shells, certain he could see at least one glowing against the dark sky. With a thunderclap the first exploded among the little flotilla, another dove into the water, exploding beneath it, still another passing harmlessly - a dud - to the harbor floor. The night burned, stretches of sea appearing sunlit by fire, bursting shells, and Skvoreshniki’s lights. The surviving torpilleurs did not let this go unanswered, they bore down on their foe. When in range, a few torpedoes plopped from their mounts and streaked across the water toward the ship. Most dashed themselves against the shallows near the mudflat but one skipped off and flew across the flat like a bullet before embedding itself in the mud a few arshins away from the battleship.
“Down!” A sailor screamed.
Thaler repeated the order but was not even to his knees when the torpedo’s payload detonated. Mud and stones rained down on the ship and her hull groaned with the shock, but she stood undaunted. Thaler rose. Whitely moved toward him at a run from his lookout position nearer the rail.
“The torpilleurs are bearing off, making for the inner harbor,” he reported.
“Are there any scribes among us?”
“We should be so lucky.”
“Send a messenger, wake the…”
The horizon flashed yellow-orange. By the light of their shellfire, the battle line of the Bexarian Grand Fleet revealed itself.
Their first volley missed high, slamming into the cliffs and sending a rockslide into Skvoreshniki’s landward hull. Thaler had scrambled into the pilot house just in time for its windows to burst and scourge him with bits of glass. He took a step forward, supporting himself with Skvoreshniki’s wheel and blinking away blood groped in the haze of sand, ash, and gun smoke for an officer. Finding none, he shouted down the nearest speaking tube: “Answer them! Send armor piercing!”
Whitley found him, “Sir, we haven’t the range.”
Another volley scythed across the water from the Bexarian line.
“Is the messenger away?”
“Yes.”
“Start putting men over the side, everyone but the gun crews, you may go yourself, I intend to stand.”
At a high angle a Bexarian shell bore down, slamming into Skvoreshniki amidships. Thaler felt the deck plating begin to rise beneath him, bowing upward with the force of a massive, internal explosion.