by Rob Preece
Rissel sailors battled grimly, hopelessly, or simply abandoned ship, jumping into the chilly waters of Dinan's bay.
She steeled her heart. They couldn't stay and rescue those sailors. They couldn't even rescue their own men. Not until her little boat had completed its job. And one captured merchant ship might not be enough. They had to keep working until they couldn't do anything else.
"Over there to our right,” Ellie said. A raft had gotten through to another of the merchant ships. This was a bigger boat, though, with a larger crew. It looked as if they were getting the fire under control.
"Guess that one is going to get away,” the helmsman told her.
"Not if I get there first. Come on, bring me to them."
He shook his head. “One ship should be enough. Don't you be throwing your life away."
"Just do it."
"They'll blow us out of the water when we get near."
"Nobody is going to be loading gunpowder when they've got a fire on board. Not on a merchantman.” She hoped not, anyway.
The helmsman didn't look happy but he nodded and adjusted his tiller slightly, allowing the fishing boat to swing away toward the much larger merchantman. “Never thought Dafed should let a woman fight. They always want to do crazy things."
Ellie had to force down her pique. She was busting her tail for this army, trying to make a difference in a country that might be hers by birth but certainly wasn't yet anything she could consider home. She didn't expect gratitude from Sergius and the nobles. Despite her supposedly royal birth, they meant nothing to her. But surely the ordinary people could understand that she was working to make things better for them.
Except how could they? Sergius hadn't announced anything yet. And if he ever did get around to announcing a parliament, something he never would do if they didn't win this night battle, he would take all of the credit for himself. Ellie was destined to be a forgotten figure in this world's history.
She shoved her stones into place as they approached the merchant ship, building the wards, adding an extra layer to the focus because she was already tired. The merchantman was under weigh now, and the fire was only smoldering in a few hotspots on deck but not threatening the sales and rigging. Minus a mast, though, she suspected they'd be in trouble.
When she tried to force the last element of the pattern—the sharp-bladed knife—into place, she met a resistance she'd never experienced before. It wasn't just physical, it was mental, almost as if she were pushing the sharp steel directly into her brain.
She pushed harder, willing away the pain, but the blade wasn't just resisting, it twisted in her hand, scoring a deep cut.
"Need some help with that, princess?"
She shook her head. “Dinan's mages must have seen what we did to that last ship. They're interfering."
Lawgrave's lessons had concentrated on establishing patterns to do things but he'd mentioned something about magical interference. She'd have to get him to show her how to stop enemy mages, and how to defend herself from their interference. Until she did, though, she was essentially out of the magic business.
"Even one ship is a victory,” the helmsman reminded her. “Might have enough food on it to feed the army for weeks."
"Two would be better. Bring me alongside."
"You're going to get us killed."
"Once you drop me off, sail away. Keep yourself alive. See if you can pick up any of the raftsmen."
He muttered his response but he followed orders. Gradually their fishing boat closed the distance with the heavy merchant.
She checked her katana, timed the waves, and waited for the opportunity.
As the merchant ship added sail and gathered steerageway, the gap between the two vessels closed more and more slowly until, when they were about five feet distant, the merchant started to inch away.
Ellie waited for a wave to lift the bow of the fishing boat and leapt. “Geronimo."
Chapter 9
Ellie's feet hit the water but her madly clutching hands clung to the carved wood of the merchantman's stern. Behind her, the fishing boat helmsman cursed, but already his voice was growing more distant.
Water ripped at her legs with malignant force as she yanked herself upward. Her hands were slick with sweat and fear but she willed them to hold on.
A voice from the ship said something and Ellie realized that the speaker used a foreign language—they must be Rissel. She wouldn't be surprising them with her arrival. Which was unfortunate because she would be outnumbered and she was in a horribly exposed position.
She willed her muscles to cooperate, dragged her feet out of the water and found a toehold.
Instinct warned her and she let go with her right hand, swinging her body to the left as she drew her katana.
A boat axe smashed into the deck railing where her hand had been only fractional seconds before.
She cut back, but her blade clanged off the heavy oversized axe.
The Rissel sailor was shouting, probably calling for reinforcements.
She pulled herself upward, ducked under the axe's broad sweep, and thrust with the katana, using the point rather than the cutting blade.
As the slightly curved sword slid into her attacker's belly, he screamed, dropped his axe, and grasped the guts that threatened to spill out.
She took advantage of the few seconds of distraction to scramble up to the ship's deck and went to work.
The sailors weren't using gunpowder weapons—never dependable on shipboard anyway. But there were a lot of them—more than she had expected, and they came at her in waves.
They were good, and they were a lot more used to having the floor move under them that Ellie was.
Instead of killing, she tried to stay away from them, cutting at anyone who came to near, but saving most of her energy for slashing at the rigging, the sails.
She cut through any cordage she could reach, ducked when lines twanged and flew past her with the force of a whip, and danced when groups of sailors gathered and rushed her.
They would win eventually, she knew. They worked well together, circled around her so she couldn't keep them in a line. But before they won, she intended to do her damage, disable the ship beyond immediate repair.
She managed a cut at one of the heavy lines that stretched from the ship's wheel and felt the merchantman lurch as the rudder swayed.
Someone dressed in what looked like pajamas with a uniform coat pulled on top screamed something at her and attacked.
She parried, riposted, then parried again when he anticipated her riposte and swung back in a clever stop-thrust.
She backpedaled away from him and hacked at another line. She didn't have time to fence. She needed to keep moving, keep disabling the ship, keep alive.
She'd boarded from the stern, but the sailors, supplemented by more and more of their fellows who abandoned their fire-fighting and grabbed weapons, gradually pushed her forward.
The ropes and rigging tempted her. If she went up, she could strike down at the sailors and reach ever-more sensitive areas of sail and line. Still, although she didn't know much about sailing vessels, she knew enough to recognize a trap. She might be fit and acrobatic, but these were professional sailors. On their familiar turf, they'd hunt her down like spiders after a particularly annoying fly.
So she stayed low, hit hard when she had to, and kept moving toward the bow.
Time stretched until it seemed she'd been fighting forever. A club smashed her right arm and she almost dropped her katana, barely managing to shift it to her left hand. Her strokes were slower and weaker now and the officer backed her all the way to the bow of the ship. One more step and she'd be out on the bowsprit. And then she really would be dead.
"Ellie, get down."
She barely made out the words and they certainly didn't make much sense since she was under attack by three large sailors, but it was Mark.
She trusted Mark, trusted her life to him then as she dropped backward onto the rounded length of the b
owsprit. If she'd misheard Mark or he'd given her bad advice, she would never know it because one of those sailors was already raising a large axe.
The low roar of large-gage musketshot ripped through the night.
The man with the axe stopped like he'd walked into a wall, then slowly tumbled away.
His axe, though, descended toward her with a slow but beautiful glitter.
She tried to catch it, but her body wasn't moving right and she misjudged.
The ship slowed abruptly and the axehead, pushed by its momentum, barely cleared her, imbedding itself into the tip of the bowsprit close enough to hack off a hunk of her still-short hair while its wooden handle smacked into her face.
"Huh?"
But sailors were dropping away from her like bowling pins. Badly wounded and bleeding bowling pins.
The ship slowed in the soft muck of the spit of land but continued to climb for several yards, almost clearing the entire spit before it finally stopped.
Soldiers, Sergius's soldiers, swarmed over the deck of the ship and the sailors who had survived Mark's musket volley threw down their cutlasses and boarding axes and surrendered.
Ellie looked around, halfway dazed and completely surprised to be alive.
The first pink of dawn split the horizon in the distant east. Stars, more stars than she had ever seen on her native earth, slowly blinked out as the sun's light gradually penetrated.
She tried to sit up, found her way blocked by the axe handle, and had to wiggle to get around it. Her muscles screamed at her to stay down, to rest, to never move again. She forced them to move through the bone-weary pain. She had to see what they'd accomplished, and whether she was the sole survivor of that late-night raid.
A few flames still flickered from the hulk of the merchant ship Arnold's raft had rammed. The ship had burned nearly to the water line and, as she watched, a wave swept over it and it settled more deeply into the water. Neither they nor Sullivan were going to get any salvage from that ship.
Another ship burned in the harbor but its crew was still in control, bringing it closer to the wharfs where another merchant ship had been pushed away. In the dawn light, it looked like the wharf was crawling with ants. Ellie suspected Dinan would salvage that cargo although she thought it would be some time before they sailed that ship anywhere. The second ship they'd hit had never even cut anchor and now wallowed in the waves. Two of the merchantmen seemed to have escaped relatively unscathed and huddled closer to the protective cannon of the city.
But two ships, the one she'd damaged by magic and the one she'd boarded herself, were firmly wedged on the marshy spit, well out of range of the city's cannon and completely engulfed with Sergius's soldiers who were already carrying out sacks of provisions and supplies and leading out captured sailors.
As she watched, the fishing boat she'd traveled on dropped its sails and anchored nearby.
She hadn't counted the costs yet, but she knew they would be high. Some of the raft crews might have survived. Maybe. If they'd been lucky. But not most. The city's cannon had destroyed too many rafts and she'd diverted their rescue boat to other uses. Still, this was a victory, of sorts. Unless they were completely unlucky, their two merchant ships would provide enough food to let them continue the battle.
"This one has some cannons. That'll help.” Mark yanked the axe out of the bowsprit, glanced at it, then threw it down on the ground. “You okay?"
Ellie shook her head. She didn't feel pain, but she didn't have the energy to move.
"She's covered with blood. Our princess needs a nursemaid is what it is.” The helmsman from the fishing boat clambered onto the beached merchantman and lifted Ellie like she was a cargo he intended to carry home.
"I can walk."
"Not until we see whether that blood is your own or belongs to someone else,” Mark told her.
"Probably theirs,” she murmured. “Your musket volley caught them by surprise."
"We'll see."
She drifted into unconsciousness wondering if maybe she'd been wrong. Because she certainly couldn't get her body to move.
* * * *
Sergius assembled another war council two days after the fire-raft raid.
The army had unloaded enough food to feed itself for a week or ten days, enough muskets to equip about half of the pikemen, and two swivel cannon.
There had been more supplies on the ships but Sullivan had loaded his remaining ships with cannon and soldiers. Anchoring outside of musket range, they'd bombarded the beached and defenseless ships until they left nothing but kindling and trash.
Eight sizable cannon, dozens of barrels of gunpowder, and who knew how many days worth of food had been lost in the muck before they could be unloaded.
Sergius had a couple of the sergeants pour wine and Ellie picked up on the somber expressions around the makeshift table.
"The situation is still grim.” Sergius didn't waste any time bringing the meeting to order. He took a sip of his wine and then set the heavy mug on the table. “Baronet Arnold, tell the captains and sergeants what your scouts have found."
Arnold stood. He still wore a heavy blanket and his nose hadn't stopped running since he'd washed up on the mud-spit, but he hadn't stopped going, either.
"The princess correctly anticipated the traitor-Duke of Sullivan's plans. My knights report that he has a large army approaching from the south. Mage Lawgrave has used his magic to ascertain their numbers."
Lawgrave didn't stand but he nodded. “That is essentially correct. They may be fifty miles to the south. Although their mages are providing heavy cover, I was able to get an approximate count. They have at least five thousand infantry, maybe more. I detected twenty light cannon, and maybe seven hundred horsemen. I couldn't tell if they were knights or light."
Sergius nodded. Ellie could tell he was trying to be kingly but it was hard. Sullivan had twice as many men as he in Dinan and three times as many a few days march south. Which meant that Sergius's army and his hopes for a future were about to be extinguished like a candle flame caught between two very large hands. “The situation appears desperate but we have been in desperate circumstances before and have found a way to prevail. I am open to suggestions."
Sergius had been using the royal ‘we’ less frequently lately and Ellie hoped that was a good sign. If it were, it would be about the only one.
"If we could capture the city, we'd be able to use its walls to protect ourselves from the field army,” Arnold pointed out. “Light cannon would take a while to breach the city walls. And supply would favor us rather than Sullivan."
"If capturing the city were within our power, we would definitely do so,” Sergius said. “But none of us has yet detected a way to overcome strong defenses and an army that outnumbers us better than two to one. Unless you have a new plan, Baronet?"
Arnold glared around table and, when no inspiration hit him, collapsed into his chair. “There must be a way."
"Can we return to Moray?” the King asked. “We've had two victories and captured enough loot to pay the soldiers. We could recoup and recruit additional forces."
Dafed shook his head. “The forest where we were ambushed is filled with Sullivan's bandits again. They'd cut trees across the road, ambush us, and pin us down for long enough to allow his main army to destroy us."
Sergius nodded, then looked around at the sergeants and captains. “It sounds like we must fight. If we move from here, the city's garrison would be able to assemble and come after us. If we stay here, we'll be in a defensible position and the garrison won't be able to fully deploy without coming in range of our muskets. It seems to me that we have no choice but to stay here and make our stand. Perhaps we should spend the days before my uncle's army arrives making our peace with God."
Ellie had no problem with anyone making peace with God and she knew Sergius was right about what would happen if they marched away from Dinan, but waiting for another army to arrive invited certain defeat. Giving all the initiative
to their enemy went against everything her father had taught her about the way of the warrior. “That can't be right,” she said.
Sergius shrugged. “We've been lucky so far. Our knights and dragoons defeated a larger number of soldiers in the woods. Our brilliant raftsmen defeated the Rissel fleet. Perhaps we'll be lucky again and defeat Sullivan's army when it arrives."
He didn't convince anyone. If they waited for Sullivan to arrive, it would take a Biblical-scale miracle to save the army and Sergius's kingdom.
"I have a plan,” Mark said.
Before his success with the bayonets, Ellie didn't think anyone would have listened to Mark. Now, though, they fell silent.
"I'm reminded a little of General Lee's Chancellorsville campaign,” Mark went on. “Lee divided his army in the face of superior numbers and defeated his enemy in detail by moving quickly and taking advantage of the lines of interior movement."
"Is interior movement a strange kind of magic?” Lawgrave demanded.
Ellie had to admit that it sounded a little disgusting.
Mark laughed. “Not that kind of movement. In military terms, interior movement refers to the ability to shift force concentrations between divided enemy units."
"As the King has pointed out, if we move away from the city, their garrison will march out and destroy us from behind,” Dafed said. “It doesn't sound to me like we have any movement capability at all."
"We are constrained, but Lee was constrained as well. He left a small detachment of his soldiers to guard his defensive position and marched his army to destroy the main enemy attack.
"But if we leave enough men to defend the camp,” Dafed said, “we won't have enough to attack the enemy. The garrison already outnumbers us. If we remove many, they'll overrun us. Besides, how could we attack an army of thousands?"
"So we need to convince them that they don't have the strength,” Mark said.
"I suspect it's easier to make yourself believe a lie than to make the enemy believe it,” Lawgrave argued. “They know we only have two thousand men. They'll see or scry how many men we send away. My magic might mislead them a bit but not enough to create the ten thousand men we need to defeat Sullivan."
