The Tyrant by Eric Flint and David Drake

The first was the increasing turmoil and lack of discipline among the Vanbert nobility, whose energies became more and more devoted to endless scheming and maneuvering for internal power. No one had been willing to allow any Speaker to gain enough power to amass the resources necessary to subjugate the archipelago—resources which, technically speaking, were quite easily within the reach of the Confederation. As Demansk had just proved, in a few short months.

The second was that when a leader did emerge who had the power to do so—Marcomann—he had been preoccupied with maintaining his own power. For all his undoubted ability, Marcomann had been guided by no vision whatsoever beyond his own aggrandizement. So he had turned the resources of the Confederacy toward a conquest of the western coast, the last area of the northern continent which still held enough territory to provide the land grants needed to win and keep the allegiance of his huge army.

Which, however shrewd a maneuver that might have been from the standpoint of keeping power, did the Confederacy no real good at all. It simply stoked the flames of internal feuding—Demansk’s own father had spent most of his life preoccupied with gaining new lands in the west for his family—and just gave the pirates a fertile new area for plundering. Helga, in fact, had been seized in one of the raids on the western coast which had become so easy for the pirates in the last two decades.

The third and final factor was weather. Even for superb sailors like the Islanders and the Emeralds, bad weather could prove disastrous. For the lubberly Vanberts, one of the obstacles to devoting the resources needed to create the kind of giant fleet that Demansk had done was that a single storm could destroy it in a day. More than one Vanbert fleet, though none anywhere near as large as Demansk’s, had met that fate.

Demansk had maneuvered successfully past the first two obstacles. The problem of weather he had solved in the simple and straightforward manner he had built the fleet itself. He’d simply timed his attack to coincide with the one time of year, late spring and early summer, when the weather in the northern reaches of the Western Ocean was almost invariably mild.

Still, it had been a gamble, even if one with good odds. But now that the gamble had paid off, Casull had no choice but to come out and fight a sea battle—against a fleet that was at least five times larger than anything he could assemble himself.

He couldn’t simply keep the fleet in the harbor at Chalice, much as he might have wanted to. Granted, that harbor—and the city itself which rose up along the inner slopes of the caldera—was about as impregnable a fortress as any in the world. The ancient volcanic crater in which Chalice nestled still had three quarters of its circumference left. Casull could have easily blocked the narrow entrance to the harbor and bled the Vanberts for weeks, if they tried to break through.

Nor would he have had to use many men to guard the crater rim. Chalice had no walls for the simple reason that it didn’t need any. The knife-edge ridges of the caldera itself were superior to any curtain wall and battlements ever constructed.

But that was also Chalice’s weakness. The city was the best harbor in the world, true, but it was only a harbor. There was nothing—not a single path, much less a road, across the stark terrain which circled it—which connected Chalice by land with the rest of the island. The city depended on seaborne trade and fishing for everything, beginning with the food it consumed every day. Ironically, it was the worst city in the world to withstand a siege, for all that it could withstand it the best in narrow military terms.

“Right there,” said Thicelt, pointing to a place farther south along the island’s coast. “That’s where we’ll build it.”

The admiral was pointing to a long and wide beach about ten miles south of the city, which curved easily and gently for another five miles or so. More than enough space, even for Demansk’s gigantic fleet, to beach most of the ships. All of them, really, except the quinquiremes and the special woodclads—and what relatively few ships were needed to maintain a blockade of the harbor.

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