Irona 700

by Dave Duncan

  “Oh, yes!” Regrettably, that comment did come out as an excited squeak.

  “We have agreed to appoint you vice admiral for this venture. Rasny 650 will be in charge. Go and sharpen your cutlass, Vice Admiral, and may the goddess bless your venture.”

  Triumph! Scorning a properly sedate withdrawal, Irona almost skipped from the Council Chamber. Fatigue forgotten, she was going to rush Vly straight home to bed, rip off his tunic, and ravish him.

  Benesh warriors were marines. A war fleet was always led by a Chosen, called an admiral, with a professional sailor as his deputy, holding the rank of commodore. Each galley was commanded by a captain and a subordinate called a bosun. As soon as these men stepped ashore, they became, respectively, marshal, general, captain, and sergeant. The same hands that released the oars took up swords or spears.

  By morning the army’s efficient bureaucracy had been kicked awake from its winter sleep and told to have fifteen hundred marines with five days’ supplies ready to embark at the naval docks in two days. Irona was barely to see her bed for the next two weeks.

  Ten of the younger officers, men judged open to new ideas, were teamed up with officials from Treasury and agents of the Geographical Section and dispatched to various outports scattered around the Island. Irona 700 and Rasny 650 accompanied the team that was rowed across the bay to Brackish.

  It was a breezy but sunny morning. Navy galleys had closed off the mouth of the bay already, allowing ships in but not out, although there was little traffic in winter. Even if a spy guessed what was brewing, the wind was from the north, so it would be very difficult for any sailboat to reach Udice to warn Shark. If the wind stayed like that, Irona’s mad expedition would never leave port.

  She watched without guilt while her expert companions ground Beigas Broskev down to much less than she expected to be paid, but the Brackish boats were standing by for inspection.

  The vice admiral had already decided to choose Pelican to be her flagship, if she were available. She was the largest hunter boat in Brackish, commanded by Captain Aporchal, who had been a friend of her father’s, insofar as that disagreeable old tyrant had ever had friends. Pelican also boasted a second mast, an innovation that the old-timers scorned, while conceding that she was faster than anything else in the Brackish fleet. Who cared about speed when you were going after seals or dugong or stuff? Even with whales it was skill and experience that mattered.

  Pelican was indeed in port, tied up at a jetty with her crew busily making her shipshape for the mysterious charter the Broskev woman promised. Captain Aporchal himself was sitting on the leeward side of the cabin, splicing a rope and keeping a weather eye on everyone else. He looked up in anger when a pretty-boy stranger with a sword came strutting up his gangplank. And behind him a woman? Girl? That one? Oh, Goddess!

  Aporchal’s knees hit the deck with a painful crack.

  Irona laughed happily. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”

  “My lady!” He didn’t dare look at her.

  She told him to rise. He was a hulking bear of a man, much taller than she.

  “You haven’t changed a bit! How’s your family?”

  He mumbled that they were fine. Yes, grandchildren now. … Tragic about her father. … It took several questions and answers before he accepted that he was speaking to a person, and a person he had known all her life, not the goddess herself. Then he began to make more sense, but his hands never stopped fumbling with his hat, while the wind played with his white hair.

  “We didn’t believe it at first,” he said. “But three days later men arrived to start working on the breakwater. …”

  Her smile came easily. “It’s nice to have important friends. Is there anything else Brackish needs?”

  He raved about the honor of serving the goddess, and she made a mental note to find out more about Brackish later. They would have many days together. Admiral Rasny had let her go on ahead but now had tired of waiting and was coming aboard with his cloak open to show his collar.

  Aporchal dropped to his knees again. Irona suggested he take the two Chosen into the cabin so they could benefit from his advice. There they swore him to secrecy and explained that the real objective was not Vyada Kun but Captain Shark in Udice. Aporchal barked like a harbor seal at that news. “Anything to clean up those … beg pardon, ma’am … pirates!”

  Rasny began asking questions. If the old sea dog said that what they were planning was suicide, the expedition would die stillborn. But Aporchal had already guessed whose idea this had been.

  “Nothing to it!” he said. “S’ long as Caprice sends us good winds, it’ll be easy as clubbing seals.”

  Irona had never appreciated before that excessive loyalty could kill you.

  The ordeal of organizing had barely begun, though. In the next two days and nights, life was a blur of conferences and briefings. Irona’s only relief came from the joy of seeing the expressions on the faces of bull-shouldered­ marine officers reporting to the vice admiral for the first time. That, and occasional encouraging pats on certain parts of her anatomy from the bodyguard behind her when no one was looking.

  The only cloud in her sky was the thought that she would have to be parted from Vly. The men could not take wives or mistresses on a war mission, so how could she take her lover—or gigolo, as the sailors would see him? Surprising herself, she found a moment to seek out her old tutor, Trodelat 680, and put the question to her, woman to woman.

  Easy, Trodelat said. A woman could not engage in martial arts and Chosen were not expected to. They were entitled to bodyguards. “Tie a sword on him and keep him close, even if you have to share a bunk with the sword.”

  Problem solved. Vly was in fact a skilled swordsman by then and was sure to be accepted once that information got around.

  On the day planned for departure, Irona had an honored place close to the First at a very brief service in the temple, when the leaders asked for Caprice’s blessing on their venture. Outside, the north wind had given way to fitful breezes that could resolve into anything, but Irona had faith in the goddess’s favor. By then the whole city knew that something strange was happening, and when the worshippers returned to the docks, the bay was speckled with sails and hulls, with more still arriving from the outer ports.

  Contingents of horrified and outraged marines were being embarked in what they saw as stinking little death traps. Few of them would ever have been to sea in anything other than a galley. They were rowers, many having arms that would have outbulged even Sklom Uroveg’s. The company assigned to Irona’s flagship, Pelican, was led by a squint-nosed, one-eared gorilla, Bosun Uvillas, perhaps the ugliest man she had ever seen. He and Captain Aporchal were already close to daggers drawn.

  The wind veered into the west, a very good sign. As the last boats were loading, it strengthened. Admiral Rasny raised his flag on Orca and led the fleet out of the bay. The vice admiral’s Pelican was to bring up the rear, but of course that instruction could not be followed too literally, or Irona would never arrive anywhere. Some stragglers would have to be left behind, although captain and crew would not then receive their promised bonuses. The marines they carried would miss out on battle pay, so disagreements would be inevitable.

  After an hour or so, the wind turned into a strong sou’wester, as the goddess urged them onward, but this soon led to trouble. The sea grew rough and the tiny vessels began to roll excessively, in many cases being top-heavy because the living cargo refused to stay belowdecks like fish or whale flesh, which was what these boats were designed to carry.

  The men’s reluctance was understandable. Galleys never ventured out in winter, and marines were unaccustomed to small boat motion anyway. The owners could foresee their uncontrollable cargo bringing on disaster, but whether the sailors or the marines were to blame would not matter, for fear was contagious. Soon Irona, bringing up the rear, saw craft turning back.
First one, then two … four. The great fleet was in danger of falling apart, and it would take her vocation as a Chosen with it.

  “Captain, make all the sail you dare.”

  Aporchal looked at her as if she was out of her mind; perhaps she was, but a desperate situation required a desperate remedy.

  “Take us forward to the van,” she insisted. Then she borrowed Vly’s dolphin-handled dagger to shorten her smock to the absolute limit of decency. As the gallant Pelican leaned into the wind, Irona scrambled up the foremast, to the accompaniment of lewd cheers and whistles from all aboard.

  Fortunately the vice admiral’s flagship had been provided with a bugler. With him continuously sounding the charge and the vice admiral herself waving a sword in full view aloft, the boat went surging forward through the fleet. The cheering and laughter spread.

  When Aporchal had brought Irona almost to the admiral’s boat in the van, he hove to and let the fleet go by, providing a second view of the exhibitionist hussy. Her bravado worked. The sight of a pretty girl brandishing a sword atop a wildly swaying mast shamed the men into remembering their duty. There were no more desertions, and the expedition was saved.

  As an exhausted Irona flopped into Vlyplatin’s arms later, she knew that she had created a legend. If the assault on Udice succeeded, she would be a national hero. If it didn’t, she had just committed political suicide, and the Seventy would never take her seriously again.

  Whatever their size, ships either anchored or beached at night, and in midwinter the days were short. The masters had been provided with a list of approved anchorages, most of them chosen because they were both virtually uninhabited and easily recognized, for maps were unreliable and place names could vary. Each boat carried at least one man who could read.

  This system worked amazingly well, and the way the winds cooperated astonished everyone except Irona herself. Of the original ninety-eight vessels, only eighteen failed to report in at the last rendezvous. Only three were known to have foundered, and most of those aboard had been rescued. She had hopes that the absentees would turn up in due course.

  The last rendezvous had to be at Vyada Kun, because there was no other adequate harbor near Udice. Vyada Kun was a sizable town controlling a large island of the same name, but it was a reluctant ally, only recently incorporated into the Empire and still nostalgic for the Good Old Days of being an independent republic. The pirates were bound to have agents and sympathizers there.

  The harbor was a lagoon behind a long barrier island, easily large enough to hold the Benesh fleet but also easily secured. Commodore Lewommi took charge the moment he jumped ashore, ordering pickets set on the local boats, all of which were conveniently beached nearby on the windswept sand. No word of the army’s arrival would be smuggled out of Vyada Kun that night, but that did not mean that the fleet had not been observed at sea and some other boat was not already carrying warnings to Udice.

  A hundred boats arrived more or less together and two dozen more within an hour, but Admiral Rasny’s was not among them. When a delegation came down from the city to find out who these newcomers were, Irona insisted that she would receive it, not Lewommi. After all, her vote had helped elect the governor, a Benesh appointee. She sent word back to him that he was to do all he could to keep news of the fleet’s approach from spreading beyond the town. She doubted very much that this situation could last another day, though. If the marines did not attack tomorrow, they would find the pirates flown.

  Before dawn she called the senior officers to a council of war aboard Pelican. Lewommi advised that they had sufficient manpower to risk an assault and the wind would probably serve. But it was Irona 700 who gave the order to proceed, and her flagship led the armada out. The wind was perfect, the sun rose into a cloudless sky: unbelievable weather for midwinter and a clear sign of the goddess’s favor. Some marines began to sing, as they did when rowing, and soon the song spread throughout the fleet. They were still singing when they swept into the Udice fiord a couple of hours later, and their voices echoed back from the stark cliffs on either hand, as if the mountains were calling out a welcome.

  But when Udice itself came in sight at the head of the fiord, the singing stopped and marines who owned armor began putting it on. The standard garment was an apron of sheep or goat leather clad with bronze plates. Irona thought its weight must put a serious strain on the men’s necks.

  Most of Shark’s vessels were drawn up on the shingle for careening, as were the local fishing vessels. Only two ships were afloat, at anchor. They were lashed together, one of them dismasted for repairs and the other fitted with a derrick. The marines waded ashore and rushed the village. Not presuming to join in the fighting, Irona stood on deck with Vlyplatin and watched, but there was very little to see. The pirates who offered resistance were killed, but most did not, and soon about three hundred men were sitting in circles along the beach, facing outward, hands tied behind their backs. At the center of each circle stood a man with a drawn sword and orders to use it if he saw a need.

  An estimated seventy pirates fled across the pasture behind the village and tried to escape up the cliffs that closed off the valley. Benesh archers used them for target practice.

  A rather disappointed General Lewommi saluted the Chosen and announced that Udice had been secured with only two wounded, whose injuries were not serious: Now what? Irona had given no thought at all to now what. Nobody had, so far as she knew. Perhaps they had all assumed that the pirates would fight to the last drop. It had been too easy.

  She called another council of war and included two graybeards from the village. Everyone agreed that to carry so many prisoners back to Benign for trial was impossible. To release them here, even without their ships, was unthinkable; the village had suffered enough already. But half of the captives were loudly complaining that they were innocent, either because they had been kidnapped, or because they were natives of either Udice or Benign.

  Irona did not know what the law was, or even which law applied: naval, martial, or civil. But she was the ranking magistrate present, so she would have to make up her own law and hope that she would not later be impeached for exceeding her authority. Ledacos’s maxim, that doing the least evil was better than doing the greatest good, was very little help when a whole army of philosophers might need a century to apply it to her present situation.

  The only answer, and all those smirking bronze helmets were just waiting for her to admit it, was to kill the prisoners. But how to tell who was guilty and who wasn’t?

  “We’ll hold a trial,” she declared. “Commodore, collect a dozen or so women from the village. And don’t leer at them like that or you’ll scare them to death. At least we can be sure none of the women are pirates, and they’ll know who isn’t native and who’s been abusing the villagers. You, there, clean out that dismasted ship, strip it of valuables. Commodore, we’ll need a whole team of volunteers with good swords and strong right arms.”

  Lewommi snorted. “They all have two strong arms, and any man in the fleet will volunteer to kill pirates. Can’t we just give them one each to play with?” But he stalked off to do as she said.

  Irona was fighting a strong sense of unreality. This bloodthirsty tyrant was herself? She? The Irona she had known all her life? And she had barely started. Pirates, fine. Men from the Empire, probably fine. But if she beheaded a Benesh citizen, she would be impeached for certain.

  “Bosun Uvillas? Collect a dozen or so men from Benign. Your team will question any prisoner who claims to be a Benesh citizen. Ask him to name the Sources or the street along the docks, and so on. Listen to how he speaks. If he’s a citizen, tell him he can ask to be taken home for trial, but warn him that a guilty verdict there will mean the sea death. Here we’re just going to cut off their heads.”

  The hog was even uglier when he grinned.

  Irona had a vague memory that naval law was simpler than civil, so she
set up her courtroom on the deck of Stormdancer, which was the seaworthy pirate ship afloat at the jetty. The twelve Udice women sat in a row, some knitting or spinning, others clutching babies, and all of them almost drooling at the thought of vengeance on the ruffians who had terrorized them for months. Vlyplatin was set to work as court reporter.

  The first prisoner was marched up the plank. He was a fresh-faced, youngish man, who did not fit Irona’s image of a monster.

  Name? Plea?

  But that was the last time Irona asked for a plea, for the women began screaming, “Pirate!” “Rapist!” and even “Child molester!”

  “Guilty,” she said.

  His guards cut off his protests by forcing a horse’s bit in his mouth and tying it there, so that he could scream all he wanted but speak no name to Bane with his dying breath. Then he was marched across to the dismasted hulk alongside, hauled over the rails, thrown down on the deck with his head over the open hatch. One swish of a cutlass was enough to silence his howls. His corpse was thrown after his head and by that time the next accused was arriving in court.

  The fourth man claimed to be a citizen of Benign, and his accent sounded genuine.

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “Not guilty! I was being held for ransom.”

  The women all started yelling at once about rape and murder.

  Irona raised a hand, and they fell silent. “You will be taken back to Benign for trial, but if the Naval Court there finds you guilty of piracy, you will be sentenced to the sea death.”

  Throughout that exchange his immediate predecessor had been screaming on the deck of the hulk. The noise stopped abruptly, being followed by two muffled thumps.

  The accused smiled ruefully. “Bitch! All right, I change my plea. Guilty as the Dread Lands.” He opened his mouth for the rope.

  That one died without a scream.

  About three hours later, when she was almost out of victims, Irona looked up and saw that the admiral had arrived, very late but not looking very repentant. Had he truly been delayed, or had he deliberately held back, whether to avoid involvement in a potential disaster, or to let Irona have all the credit for her proposal? His smile seemed genuine enough.