accurate, if loosely phrased, Center said.
Hmmm, Adrian thought. This time he felt the wonderful tension-before-release mental sensation of almost grasping a concept; it was like sex just before orgasm, only better. But they have a lot of . . . what was that phrase? Social mobility?
correct, Center said. if anything, an excessive amount.
Sure, you can get ahead, here, Raj said. But you can’t stay ahead. Everything here turns on the fall of the dice; the ruler’s favor, a lucky pirate raid. This place is as unstable as water, while the mainland’s set in granite. You can carve granite into a new shape, though; water will just run through your fingers.
Adrian shook himself back to the world of phenomena; the mental conversation had only taken a few seconds, but he was attracting looks. Most of them were tolerantly amused; the Scholars of the Grove had a solid reputation for otherworldly abstraction.
If only they knew, he thought to himself. Aloud: “Fire!”
The gunner carefully squeezed the trigger. There was a chick-shsss as the hammer came down and the priming caught in a little sideways puff of fire and dirty-white smoke. Then: Bdannggg as the arquebus fired; the cloud of smoke from the main charge was enough to hide the target from Adrian’s eyes for a second. Esmond gave a silent whistle of relief beside him; the bullet hadn’t missed. Casull’s eyebrows went up as well, and the Islander grandees were laughing and slapping Adrian on the back; eight ounces of high-velocity lead had smashed a hole the size of a fist through the Confed shield, through metal facing and plywood and tough leather, and then removed the entire top of the target’s head in a spatter of pink-gray froth and whitish bone fragments.
Adrian swallowed. “So, you see, my lord King,” he said. “Many such arquebusiers could sweep the decks of an enemy ship, beyond the effective range of archers.”
“But not beyond the range of catapults and ballistae,” Casull said. “Still, a dreadful weapon, yes. These . . . arquebuses? Arquebuses, yes—they can fire faster than catapults, and we can put more of them on a ship. The Confed marines have always been our problem, the Sun God roast their balls; we’re better seamen, but as often as not they swarm aboard and take the ship that rams them.”
“Lord King, I’m just getting started,” Adrian said with a grin. “Next is a much larger version of the arquebus, for use against ships and fortresses.”
The King’s dark eyebrows looked as if they were trying to crawl into his widow’s peak. “Show me!” he commanded.
“This is the weapon,” Adrian said, signalling. A half-dozen of his men dragged it over; a bronze tube seven feet long, mounted on a low four-wheeled carriage of glossy hardwood. “I call it a cannon.”
The barge teams in the military harbor were busy again; this time they towed out a small and extremely elderly galley. It was listing, and the dockyard workers had stripped it of most of its fittings; they anchored it to a buoy two hundred yards out in the harbor.
Meanwhile Adrian’s men were busy around the gun. Adrian gave Casull a running commentary: “First, as you see, lord King, a linen bag full of the gunpowder is pushed down the hollow—the barrel. A wad of felt goes in next, to hold it in place.”
The crew shoved the bag home with a long pole, grunting in unison as they slammed it down. “Now the gunner runs a long steel needle through the touch-hole, to pierce the bag, and fills the touch-hole and this little pan on top of the gun with priming powder—finely ground.”
“And here is what the cannon will hurl,” he said. The team paused for a second to let the King see what they were doing.
“A bronze ball?” Casull said. “Wouldn’t stone do just as well, and be much cheaper?”
“We will use stone balls to strike fortress walls,” Adrian said. Cast iron would have been better still, but the only furnaces capable of making it were in Vanbert, and not many of them. All the ironworks in the Islands were what Center called Catalan forges, turning out wrought iron.