"Well," Gary Trudeau said. "At last I've seen something less seaworthy than my poor Farragut."
Alston snorted slightly. "Farragut was supposedly designed to handle anything on salt water. This one was not intended for deep-ocean work, Mr. Trudeau," she said.
Victor Ortiz chuckled. "At least we know she can carry the weight; it came out from Alba in her hold."
A deep breath. "All right, let's get on with it."
Bosuns' pipes twittered, the Marine band played, and Swindapa stepped up to hand her a point-bottomed, jug-eared amphora of requisitioned Tartessian wine.
"I christen thee Eades" she said, and threw the amphora.
It shattered on the reinforced ram that projected out just beyond the bows of the ironclad. Wine ran down armorplate and oak, red as blood. Everyone cheered; Marian smiled broadly, in a public display of emotion rather rare for her.
In fact, she was thinking of the original Merrimac, transformed into the ironclad Virginia by the Confederates for its meeting with the Monitor off Hampton Roads. How they'd have hated the thought of black-as-tar Marian Alston commanding something so like her; and how they'd have hated naming her after the engineer who'd designed the Federal gunboat fleets that stormed down the Mississippi and cut the Confederacy in half. Her father would have loved it.
I hope, somewhere, those bukra ghosts can see this. While they roast in hell.
Sledgehammers struck at the wedges and chocks. The timbers holding the Eades against the force of gravity gave way, and the steel rollers of the cradle rumbled and squealed as she began to move. The huge weight started slowly, then accelerated with terrifying speed. Waves of muddy water surged up in twin plumes on either side as the stern slid into the bay, then subsided as the ironclad shot out. A dozen thick cables secured to deep-driven tree trunks paid out and then came twanging-taut; the ship rocked and then settled.
Have to rearrange her ballast a bit, Marian thought, studying her trim with a critical eye.
"All right, let's get her boilers hot and see how she works," she said aloud.
"No," Isketerol of Tartessos said.
"Lord King-
"Yes, they are destroying us bit by bit," Isketerol said.
He looked around at the war-captains and wisemen, their faces shocked or blank or calculating, mottled by the light filtering through the canvas of his tent. They were mostly men who'd come to power under him… and hence men he'd rewarded with grants of land and mines. Men with lands and mines in the provinces now being stripped and sacked by the Amurrukan. The tent stank of acrid sweat loaded with anger and fear; his guards were more than ceremonial, and their tension told it.
He grabbed patience with both hands and ran his finger across the map. "By the time news of their raids comes to us, they are already done," he said. "We used our light-signalers to react faster than the highlanders could. Now the Amurrukan do the same to us."
"Then we must meet their raiding forces with our own- forces larger than theirs."
Isketerol nodded. "Tell me how, Lord Miskelefol," he said. "They see us move by night or day, from the air. From the air their scouts report to their commander. And their forces move more quickly than ours." His fist hit the table. "On our own roads! By the time we react to what they are doing, they have finished it and are doing something else in another place. They lead us by the nose, and we take our marching orders from them! If we send out a column, they can avoid it… or bring together enough of their troops to smash it…'
Everyone winced; that had happened twice. He pointed out through the flap of the tent, to the long ranks of brushwood-and-earth shelters within the earthwork fortifications.
"We are too many for them to attack us here, and by our presence we guard the lands around Tartessos City. They cannot pass by without fighting this army."
"Then we should march out and crush them in one great battle!"
"Arucuttag… give me strength!" he snarled, making himself stop short of asking the Hungry One to eat his supporter. "Their weapons are too much better than ours. If we attack them, they will slaughter us; that's why our invasion failed last year!"
He sighed. "We can only stand on the defensive; they cannot afford even a costly victory, much less a defeat, and if they attack us, we have the advantage. As long as the forts and cannon and rockets hold them away from this side of the Great River and Tartessos City, we are not defeated, because we have the core of the kingdom. From there, we can slip ships in and out. Time presses them in ways it does not do us. If we hold long enough, we may force them to accept our terms."
After so long on sailing ships, the little bridge of the Fades was a stifling closeness; stiflingly hot, too, with the boiler heat captured by thick oak timbers and steel-plate sheathing, and a throat-catching reek of sulfur from coal smoke. Engine throb shivered up through her feet with a slow heavy beat, tolling the movements of the big steam cylinders and the massive crankshaft driving the propeller-quieter than a diesel, beating like a great slow heart. The bridge sat like an octagonal lump at the forward edge of the casement; an eight-sided enclosure from her shoulders up, with vision slits at eye level, and an openwork basket where it protruded into the fighting compartment below. That stretched a hundred feet back, a single great slope-sided room, with only the armored sheath of the funnel in the middle and the crouching shapes of the guns to break it.
Hate to think what all this cost, she thought, peering out through the narrow horizontal opening ahead. The sea was a deep living blue, with an occasional whitecap impossibly pure against it. Sweat wasted, acres of land not cleared, plows and harrows not made, factories not built, kids who didn't get an extra pair of shoes. With any luck they wouldn't have to build anything like this again for a generation or two.
"Not exactly like old times, eh, Skipper?" Thomas Hiller said.
"Not exactly," she replied.
The Eagle's old sailing master had lost his frigate in the Battle of the Pillars, as they were calling it now; that had given him a leg up over the other contestants for the XO's position. And it's some compensation, I suppose, she thought. Hiller had loved the brand-new clipper-frigate, almost as much as Eagle. He'd missed seagoing command, too, enough to leave his family on Nantucket. Scratch crew all 'round… or picked, depending.
Even the Black Gang were mostly volunteers under the direction of petty officers from Farragut, and she'd had to talk Victor Ortiz out of volunteering for that, with his burns barely healed.
Men, she thought. Then from a little ironic devil who lurked at the back of her consciousness: Well, you're here, aren't you?
"You should have delegated this, ma'am," Miller said.
"You certainly should have," Swindapa said, looking up from the navigator's table.
"If I'm indispensable, I haven't been doing my job these ten years past," she said dryly. So much for the awestruck obedience due the high commander. "Helm-rudder amidships."
Swindapa gave an involuntary yawn. And I'd forgotten how much trouble midnight feedings can be, she thought. Her partner caught her eye and winked.