“Ready, Mahlyk!” the ensign called.
“Aye, Sir!” the coxswain acknowledged, and reached for the lanyard with his left hand while his right fist gripped the tiller bar. Another minute passed. Then another. Then The flag in Lathyk’s hand waved.
“Let go!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk shouted, and the longboat surged suddenly as Mahlyk jerked the lanyard which toggled the trigger and released the three-ton sheet anchor from the heavy davit rigged in the longboat’s stern. It plunged into the water, well up to windward of the more weatherly of the two anchors Destiny had already dropped, and the longboat seemed to shake itself in delight at having shed the irksome load.
“Stream the buoy!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk ordered, and the anchor buoy was heaved over the side behind the sheet anchor.
Although the longboat moved much more easily without the anchor’s hanging weight and the drag of the cable trailing astern, there were still a few tricky moments as Mahlyk brought it about. But the coxswain chose his moment carefully, using wind and wave action to help drive the boat around, and then they were pulling strongly back towards Destiny.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk sat on the bow thwart, looking aft past Mahlyk at the brightly painted anchor buoy, which got progressively smaller with distance, disappearing in the troughs of the waves, then bobbing back into sight. Boat work was always risky in blowing weather like this, but on a lee shore, with the entire rudder carried away and a bottom where anchors were known to drag, the notion of getting a third anchor laid out made plenty of sense to him. Of course, he did wonder how he’d ended up selected for the delightful task. Personally, he would cheerfully have declined the honor in favor of Tohmys Tymkyn, Destiny ’s fourth lieutenant. But Tymkyn was busy with the galleon’s pinnace, locating and buoying the spire of rock which had claimed the ship’s rudder. He was having at least as exciting a time of it as Aplyn-Ahrmahk, and the ensign wondered if the two of them had been chosen because they were so junior they’d be less badly missed if one or both of them didn’t make it home again.
I’m sure I’m doing the Captain a disservice, he told himself firmly, wiping spray from his face, and then smiled as he wondered how Sir Dunkyn was going to react to his upcoming little show of initiative. I can always blame it on Stywyrt, he thought hopefully. Sir Dunkyn’s known him long enough to realize what a corrupting influence he can be on a young and innocent officer such as myself.
“ Pull! Langhorne-I thought you were seamen!” Mahlyk bawled, as if on cue. “I’ve seen dockside doxies with stronger backs! Aye, and legs, too!”
Aplyn-Ahrmahk shook his head in resignation.
Sir Dunkyn Yairley watched with carefully concealed relief as the longboat was swayed back aboard. The pinnace followed, nesting inside the longboat on the gallows of spare spars above the main hatch. The cutters on the quarter and stern davits would have been much easier to get out and in again, especially with the deck so cluttered with the yards and sails which had been sent down from above to reduce topweight, and they probably would have sufficed. But they might not have, either, in these sea conditions, and he was disinclined to take chances with men’s lives, whether the rules of the game allowed him to show his concern or not.
And they definitely wouldn’t have sufficed for what that young idiot pulled after dropping the sheet anchor! he thought sourly.
He considered reprimanding Aplyn-Ahrmahk. The ensign and that scapegrace ne’er-do-well Mahlyk had taken it upon themselves to sweep the seabed north of Destiny with a grappling iron-weighted trailing line which should (in theory, at least) have snagged on any rocks rising high enough to be a threat to the galleon even at low tide. As a result, Yairley now knew he had over a mile of rock-free clear water for maneuvering room to the north of his current position. They hadn’t happened to ask permission for that little escapade, and they’d almost capsized twice before they’d finished, and the captain was severely torn between a warm sense of pride in a youngster who’d become one of his special proteges and anger at both of them for risking their lives and their entire boat’s crew without authorization.
Well, time enough to make my mind up about that later, he decided. And in the meantime, I’ll just concentrate on putting the fear of Shan-wei into the young jackanapes.
He paused long enough to give Aplyn-Ahrmahk a steely-eyed glare as a down payment, then turned back to the task of creating a jury-rigged rudder.
Maikel Symmyns had gotten a spare main topgallant yard laid across the quarterdeck so that its arms jutted out through the aftermost gunports on either side, supported with “lifts” to the mizzenmast and guys running forward to the main chains. Hanging blocks had been secured to either end of the spar, and the falls run forward from them through the fairleads under the wheel. Several turns had been taken around the barrel of the wheel, and then the free ends of the falls had been seized to the staple at the midpoint of the drum to anchor everything firmly.
“Here ‘tis, Sir,” Garam Mahgail said, and Yairley turned to face the ship’s carpenter. The carpenter was a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer, and he was probably close to half-again Yairley’s age and bald as an egg, but still brawny and calloused. At the moment, his bushy eyebrows were raised as he exhibited his craftsmanship for the captain’s approval.
“Is this what you had in mind, Sir?” he asked, and Yairley nodded.
“That’s precisely what I had in mind, Master Mahgail!” he assured the warrant officer, and beckoned Symmyns over. The boatswain obeyed the gesture, and the captain pointed at Mahgail’s handiwork.
“Well, Bo’sun?”
“Aye, I think it’ll work right well, Sir,” Symmyns said with a slow smile of approval. “Mind you, it’s going to be Shan-wei’s own drag in a light air, Cap’n! Be like towing a couple of sea anchors astern, it will.”
“Oh, not quite that bad, Bo’sun,” Yairley disagreed with a smile of his own. “More like one sea anchor and a half.”
“Whatever you say, Sir.” Symmyns’ smile turned into a grin for a moment, and then he turned back to his working party and started barking additional orders.
At Yairley’s instructions, Mahgail had fitted a pair of gundeck water tubs with bridles on their open ends, and inhauls had been made fast to the bottoms. Now the captain watched as one of the tubs was secured to either end of the spar by a line run to the inhaul. Then the bitter end from the hanging block was secured to the bridle. With the wheel in the “midships” position, the inhauls would tow the tubs through the water a good fifty feet behind the ship with their bottoms up, but when the wheel was turned to larboard, the bridle rope from the tub on that side to the barrel of the wheel would be shortened, pulling the tub around to tow open-end first. The resultant heavy drag on that side of the ship would force the galleon to turn to larboard until the wheel was reversed and the tub went gradually back to its bottom-up position, where it would exert far less drag. And as the wheel continued turning to starboard, the starboard tub would go from the bottom-up to the open-end-forward position, causing the ship to turn to starboard.
There were drawbacks to the arrangement, of course. As Symmyns had pointed out, the drag penalty would be significant. Water was far denser than air, which explained how something as relatively tiny as a ship’s rudder could steer something a galleon’s size to begin with, and the resistance even with both tubs floating bottom-up would knock back Destiny ’s speed far more than a landsman might expect. And whereas a rudder could be used even when backing a ship, the tubs were all too likely to foul their control lines-or actually be drawn under the ship-in that sort of situation. But Symmyns’ initial diagnosis had been correct. The gudgeons, the hinge-like sockets into which the pintle pins of the rudder mounted, had been completely torn out, and the rudder post itself was badly damaged and leaking. They had a pattern from which to build a complete replacement rudder, but there was nothing left to attach a replacement to, and his improvised arrangement should work once he got the ship underway once more.