Casull nodded, leaning forward on his cushions. “The map,” he snapped.
“My lord.” The admiral in turn snapped his fingers, and a young aide who looked like his son, and probably was, brought it forward. “Speaker Jeschonyk has built an artificial harbor here, about a mile up the coast—out of trebuchet range. He sank two rows of merchantmen laden with rocks out into the sea, built wooden forts at the outer edges, and is basing his ships there. A hundred and thirty fighting keels, about the same number as ours.”
“Hmmm,” the King said. His finger traced down the map. “This town, Speyer, it’s got a good harbor, I think—why not there?”
Thicelt bowed his head; he had an aigrette of diamonds and feathers at the clasp of his turban now.
“O lord King, the currents and waves are unfavorable—it’s a bad row for a warship, the crews would be exhausted by the time they reached here.”
“While ours would be rested.” Casull nodded; that was the sort of calculation that any sea commander had to make. You couldn’t keep the masts up on a ship that expected to see action anytime soon. “Besides which . . . wasn’t Speyer ruled from here?”
“Yes, O King,” Sharbonow said. His turban clasp was even more ornate than Thicelt’s, and his cloth-of-gold jacket and red silk cummerbund were sewn with small black and steel-gray pearls. “And many families here have kin there. Marcomann’s troops stormed Speyer, and they were not gentle. I have many spies active there, men zealous in your interest and full of hatred for the Confeds.”
“So.” Casull’s finger returned to the improvised Confed harbor. “As many ships as ours, but many more quinqueremes—we’re better sailors, but they can overmatch us in a boarding action. If they can drive off my Royal fleet, then they can isolate Preble and, in the end, retake it. If we can eliminate their fleet as a consideration, then Preble is ours and we can drive them to distraction by raiding along the coast, and cost them heavily by interdicting their commerce.”
The shrewd dark eyes raked the brothers. “You, sons of Gellert. I am staking a great deal on your innovations.” He used the Emerald word, with its connotations of the unnatural and perverse.
“Lord King,” Adrian said softly. “We have advantages they do not suspect. A great victory here will surely render the Kingdom of the Isles safe from Confed aggression for many years.”
“And a great defeat here could see the Confeds in Chalice within this year,” Casull said, and then forced himself to relax. “We must trust to our seamanship, and to your weapons.”
* * *
“I said, it’s working well!” the new-minted engineer bawled in Adrian Gellert’s ear.
The steam galley Wodep’s Fist—the crew called it Wodep’s Prick, from the shape of the ram at the bows—lay quivering with life in the great harbor of Preble. Adrian was quivering with shock at the heat, experienced before but forgotten; he understood why the crew mostly worked stripped to their loincloths, despite the risk of being pitched against rough timber or red-hot metal. Decorum required him to wear at least a linen tunic, and it was already a sopping rag plastered to his skin. The great arched interior of the revolutionary craft was dim, red-lit by reflected flames from the boilers, full of sweat-gleaming near-naked figures, like something from the fate of wicked shades. Most of the interior was taken up by the riveted iron tube of the boiler, hissing and leaking steam now from half a dozen places.
That floated in muggy clouds around the rest of the machinery. At either side stood a cylinder of cast bronze, as thick through as a small woman’s waist, fixed at the bottom to thick timbers and joined to the boiler by pipes wrapped in crude linen lagging. From the top of each cylinder protruded an iron rod, joined to one end of a beam; the beam pivoted on an axle fixed to the hull, and the other end had still another rod that worked a crank running out through the hull. Like melancholy monsters run mad, the grasshopper beams worked up and down, up and down, with a smooth mechanical regularity like nothing Adrian had ever seen before.