“But this is a shell, lord King,” Adrian amplified.
“You mean it’s hollow?”
“My lord sees as clearly as the eye of the Sun God. It is filled with the gunpowder, and this”—he pointed to a wooden plug in the side of the metal ball, with a length of cord through it—”is the fuse. It is a length of cord soaked in saltpeter; when the cannon fires, the main charge lights it. Then in ten seconds, the cord burns through to the charge in the middle.”
While they spoke the crew had been fixing the cannon’s tackle to bollards sunk in the stone of the dock, and aiming it with handspikes and main force. The gunner glared down the barrel with its simple notch-and-blade sights, then stepped back and adusted the wedge under the breech of the cannon that controlled its elevation.
“If my lord wishes, he may fire the first shot,” Adrian said, bowing. “If it please my lord King, please stand well to one side—the cannon will move backward rapidly when it is fired. And,” he went on, raising his voice for the assembled dignitaries, “this time the noise will be much louder.”
Casull was grinning like a shark as he brought the length of slowmatch at the end of the long stick down on the little pile of fine powder. It caught with a long sssshshshshs, and an appreciable fraction of a second later . . .
BAMMMMM!
This time some of the Islander magnates took startled steps back, mouthing curses or prayers. The gun leapt back until the breeching ropes brought it up with a twang, belching a cloud of smoke shot through with a knife blade of red fire. The wind had picked up, and the smoke swept to one side in good time to see splinters and chunks of frame pinwheeling up from the target galley. Then three seconds later there was another crack, muffled by the wood the shell was embedded in. A quarter of the light galley’s side exploded outward; when the smoke cleared from that, it was already listing to one side . . . and burning.
Casull gave a whoop and hiked up his robe in one hand, snapping his fingers and hopping through the first steps of a bawdy kodax dance; one could see he’d been a sailor long before he was King. His son stood blinking, red spots on pale cheeks; the buccaneer admirals and mercenary commanders were swearing, spitting, thumping each other on the back.
The King stopped first, pausing to turn and shake a fist to the east. “Now see who goes to the bottom, you turnip-eating peasants!” he shouted.
Then he turned to Adrian, eyes snapping. “What else have you for me, O Worker of Wonders?”
Adrian smiled thinly; the problem with getting the reputation for being a magician was that he had to live up to it, and when they expected him to be infallible . . . Esmond was looking hungrily at the burning galley and a slow, deep smile was spreading over his face.
“There are two other types of shot the cannon can fire, lord King,” he said. “Solid stone balls, heavy basalt or granite. Those will pound down the walls of forts, as catapults might, but since they strike much harder from further away, they do it quicker. The other is case-shot. It’s a leather bag full of lead balls, like the arquebus fires, but a hundred of them. Imagine them flung out in a spray, into a dense formation of men—a Confed infantry battalion, or a section of marines about to board.”
Casull nodded hungrily. Esmond, from his expression, was imagining precisely that.
“Why didn’t you make these for the Confed nobles you were working for?” the monarch asked.
“First, lord, I didn’t have time. Second, they didn’t take me seriously enough to give me what I needed. These cannon take a lot of bronze, and bronze is expensive—this one twenty-four pounder takes more than two tons of bronze.”
Casull grunted as if belly-punched, losing a little of his joy. “That is something to think on,” he said. “Not just the money, but the bronze itself—there isn’t all that much around, we’ll have to import . . .” He clapped Adrian on the shoulder again. “Still and all, you’ve done all that you promised and more. And there is still another wonder to lay the world at my feet?”