Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  He had no answer for that question, even now, and he put it aside yet again and looked down at the assembled rifle once more.

  “The reports from Sir Rainos and General Rychtyr all emphasized the advantages breech-loading gives the heretics, Dynnys. I hate to say it, but perhaps we have no choice but to accept that we can produce far fewer rifles in order to give the troops we do field the weapons they need to survive in battle. And if iron serves well enough for the barrels of our current muzzle-loading rifles, then it will just have to serve for the breech-loading ones we need, as well.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too, My Lord,” Zhwaigair told him, “and I’m not sure this is the only or even the best way to close a rifle’s breech.”

  “You’re not?” Thirsk’s question came out sounding more like a statement, and Zhwaigair shook his head.

  “I’m not sure my idea’s practical. I think it is, and I’d like your permission to discuss it with my uncle and some of his artisans, but it occurs to me that it might be possible to simply drill a vertical hole through the barrel and thread it. If the pitch of the threads was properly planned and cut, we could screw a plug through the holes that would seal the breech even better than the heretics’ design does, and without that felt pad they use. The metal-to-metal seal should be gas tight if we get the design right.”

  Thirsk blinked, then looked quickly back at Maik.

  “That sounds like a very interesting idea, my son,” the bishop said, and Thirsk heard the additional message buried in Maik’s tone. Not only was the idea “interesting,” but Thirsk couldn’t see a single aspect of it that could possibly rouse the Inquisition’s ire against Zhwaigair.

  Don’t get too optimistic about that, Lywys, he told himself after a moment. God only knows what could “rouse the Inquisition’s ire” these days! As the situation gets worse, the worst of the inquisitors only get more fanatical.

  “This would be faster than simply duplicating the heretics’ design?”

  “It would certainly be faster unless we could duplicate whatever powered machinery they’re using, as well, My Lord.” Zhwaigair shrugged. “We could get it into production more quickly because we’d have to change very little about the existing rifles, although I doubt it would be as simple as converting the ones we’ve already built. And I’d guess that once we do have it into production, we could build a rifle to this design at a rate of, say, one for every four of the existing rifles. It would still represent a huge drop in production rate, but nowhere near as much of a drop as duplicating this design would.”

  He tapped the barrel of the assembled rifle again, and Thirsk nodded.

  “And what about these ‘primer caps’ of theirs?”

  “My Lord, my experience is with iron, steel, and brass, not the mysteries of Bédard and Pasquale, but I’m reasonably certain that what they’ve done is to take a tiny drop of fulminated mercury and seal it inside the cap, probably with a drop of varnish. When the hammer falls, the fulminated mercury detonates and flashes over to ignite the cartridge.”

  “I see.”

  Thirsk’s eyes met Maik’s once again. From what Zhwaigair was saying, duplicating the heretics’ “primer caps” wouldn’t be insuperably difficult from a manufactory perspective. From every other perspective it would mean a direct confrontation with the teachings of Schueler and Pasquale, however, and it was anyone’s guess whether or not Zhaspahr Clyntahn would grant yet another dispensation of such magnitude.

  “The advantage these give the heretics is pronounced, My Lord,” he said quietly to the bishop. “We have more misfires than they do even in clear weather; in the rain, they fire just as reliably as they do in sunshine … and our men can’t.”

  “I understand that, Lywys.” Maik’s expression was troubled, even worried. “And I agree. But, my son, this is one suggestion you must let come from someone else. I know you’re already going to be making quite a few based on the Lieutenant’s work. Pick the ones you make carefully. Don’t waste your influence on less important ones or ones that someone else can make just as well.”

  “Influence,” indeed, Thirsk thought dryly. You mean don’t use up any more of the limited patience my superiors and Mother Church have where my nagging is concerned!

  “You’re probably right about that.” His tone acknowledged what the bishop had truly said, and he turned back to Zhwaigair.

  “You’ve done just as well with this task as I’ve come to expect of you, Lieutenant,” he said, the words formal but the tone warm. “Be good enough to write it up for me in a proper report, and I’ll see what I can do about getting it into the hands of the people who need to see it.”

  And we’ll just have to hope they read it after I do, he added silently.

  “Of course, My Lord.”

  “Good!” Thirsk patted him on the shoulder, then gathered up Khapahr with his eyes. “Ahlvyn, you and I—and the Bishop—are already late for my meeting with Admiral Tyrnyr. I think we’d better be going.”

  .X.

  HMS Destiny, 56, and Royal Palace, City of Manchyr, Princedom of Corisande

  The Charisian galleon made her way majestically from the broad waters of White Horse Reach into Manchyr Bay. Despite the lengthy voyage from Chisholm, her black hull with the single white strake of her maindeck gunports was immaculate, and while an admiral’s streamer flew at her foremast, another flag flew from her mainmast’s lofty head. Its blue field showed a silver crown, and it bore a black canton embroidered with crossed swords in orange. It was not a Charisian flag, for all that it flew in the place of greatest honor, and on this day, flying that banner in this place, the name picked out in gold leaf across that galleon’s stern—HMS Destiny—seemed somehow more appropriate than ever before.

  Her escorting squadron accompanied her watchfully, keeping a wary eye on the blizzard of small craft which had put out to meet her. Manchyr Bay was over a hundred and thirty miles deep, north to south, and almost as wide, and some of those craft were small enough to be perilously far from land. Fortunately, the morning’s weather was magnificent, with a tropical sky like a burnished blue dome, a scatter of blinding white clouds, and a stiff topgallant breeze—what would’ve been called a Force Four wind on the ancient Beaufort Scale—following her into the bay from the southeast. The wind raised waves about four feet tall and pushed her along at a steady seven knots. White water creamed about her bows and her wake trailed behind her, a fading carpet of smoothed green water over which raucous clouds of greedy gulls and wyverns swept and darted. The sun was hot even this early, as it usually was less than seven hundred miles below the equator, for all that it was winter in Safehold’s southern hemisphere, and the northeast shore of Manchyr Bay was a dark green blur from the galleon’s deck.

  Princess Irys Daykyn stood on that deck as she had since shortly after dawn, hazel eyes bright as she gazed at that green blur—the blur of the Duchy of Manchyr, the blur of her homeland, of the coastal hills’ coarse, blowing grass and the circling bird wings of the land where she’d been born—for the first time in nearly three years. She was almost three months short of twenty, and that was more than young enough for three years to have seemed an eternity under any circumstances. Under the circumstances which obtained, they had been an eternity. There’d been times, more than she could count, when she’d known she would never be allowed to see Corisande again. And there’d been even darker times when she’d known she and her baby brother would not be permitted to live even in exile. Yet here she was, the wind blowing her dark hair in a silken cloud and the heart hunger rising in her throat like an exquisite pain.

  A twenty-foot cutter dared the watchful cordon of Destiny’s escorts, darting towards the galleon in a flurry of white water and heeling canvas, her lee rails buried as she slid exuberantly across the waves in rainbow clouds of flying spray, a long orange and white streamer blowing starched-stiff at her masthead.

  “Princess Irys! Princess Irys!” She heard the shout through the sounds of sea and wave
, saw someone standing beside the mast. The other woman clung to it for balance, waving the orange and white scarf in her free hand wildly above her head as she recognized the slim, straight figure on the foreign warship’s deck. “God bless you, Princess Irys! Welcome home! Oh, welcome home!”

  Irys’ throat closed, and she waved back to the cutter, wondering who that woman was, why she’d come so far out to sea to greet them in so small a craft. HMS Seahorse, one of the escorts, altered course slightly, bearing down on the cutter. It was obvious her captain had no intention of actually running down the far smaller boat, but her message was clear, and the cutter bore obediently away. Irys heard her name floating back from it one more time, and then Seahorse resumed her original course, and she heard someone chuckle softly beside her.

  She turned her head, expecting to see her chaperone, the Countess of Hanth. Lady Mairah really should have been with her, given all the commonly born seamen jammed into Destiny’s hull and the countless ways in which they might have offended against Irys’ birth and lineage. That was the way the no-doubt scandalized nobles of her father’s court would have seen it, at any rate. After so long aboard this galleon, though, Irys Daykyn knew there wasn’t a man aboard it who would not have died to protect her, and she’d been contaminated enough by her contact with Charis and Charisians to recognize—and treasure—their cheery greetings and nods of welcome.

  Lady Mairah might have been born Chisholmian, but she, too, had come to understand Charisian ways, and that was why she’d only nodded and gone right on listening to her stepson Trumyn’s reading lesson when Irys announced she was going on deck “for some fresh air.” She’d known the real reason Irys wanted to be on that deck, watching that land come closer and closer, of course. Lady Mairah always seemed to know by instinct when what Irys really needed was privacy and time to think, and she’d always tried to let the princess in her charge have that privacy. It wasn’t easy on a ship, even one as large as Destiny, but she tried.

  Irys opened her mouth to thank the countess for her consideration, then paused as she found herself looking into Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s brown eyes, instead. He stood at her shoulder, and she wondered how long he’d been there. In a way, she’d been surprised when he hadn’t joined her on deck immediately after breakfast, but then she’d realized he, too, was deliberately giving her space and time. It was like him to realize she’d needed that privacy, but now she was glad he was here, and she reached out to take his hand.

  “I understand why the Admiral wants to make sure no one gets too close alongside before we’ve got you and Daivyn safely ashore,” Hektor said. “We’ve seen what wagonloads of gunpowder can do in city streets; God only knows what a ton or two blowing up close aboard a galleon would do! But I have to say, looking at how many sails are bobbing around out there, that you must be a pretty popular lady.” He screwed his face up in a thoughtful expression and nodded wisely. “Of course, I think I’d heard something to that effect before. You don’t want to believe everything you hear, though.”

  “Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” She punched him on the shoulder with her free hand.

  “Well, rumors can be deceptive, you know.”

  “Yes, I do,” she agreed in a softer voice, eyes darkening briefly as she recalled the “rumors” about who’d actually paid for her father’s murder. But that was an old pain now, one she’d learned to deal with, and she banished it quickly. “For example,” she continued, “I’ve heard rumors that you’re, ah, emotionally involved with someone.”

  “Odd.” He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “I’ve heard the same rumors about you.”

  “Oh, I’m certain you’re mistaken, Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk,” she said demurely. “That would scarcely be lady-like.”

  “No, it wouldn’t, would it?” he murmured, and Irys felt a gentle heat across the high cheekbones she’d inherited from her mother as she remembered the handful of moments alone and unsupervised the two of them had managed to seize in Cherayth. Opportunities had been fewer and much further between aboard Destiny, given the galleon’s crowded state, but they’d been more than enough to banish any fear that theirs would be a bloodless, passionless marriage of state.

  “In that case, there couldn’t possibly be any truth to the rumors,” she told him just a bit snippily. “For I, Lieutenant, am always a lady.”

  “That’s what my stepmother’s said upon occasion, too,” Hektor observed. “And she sticks her nose up in the air just like that when she does it. I never really believed her, though. About the ‘always’ bit I mean.”

  “I believe she and I did discuss something about sailors and reunions after long voyages. Not that I have any personal experience of the matter, of course.”

  “Oh, of course not.”

  They smiled at one another, then turned to look back over the galleon’s rail at the land slipping slowly past.

  “At this rate, we’ll make port sometime in the late afternoon,” he told her. “Nervous?”

  “Oh, no! Why should I possibly be nervous?”

  “I can’t imagine,” he said innocently, and moved his elbow as if by instinct to block the jab she aimed at his rib cage.

  “What about Daivyn?” he asked in a rather more serious tone, and she sighed.

  “Sometimes I think he still doesn’t really grasp what’s going on at all. Other times, I’m sure he does and he’s just pretending—maybe to himself, even more than me—that he doesn’t. And still other times, he discusses it with me with this incredibly serious expression. I see a little bit of Father in his eyes when that happens.”

  “Really?” He looked down at her, and she shook her head.

  “Not the ambition, Hektor. It’s the … understanding, I guess. The look Father got when his brain was fully engaged. He really was a very smart man, you know. Not in all ways. Or maybe what I mean is that he was smart without always being wise. But he really did care about the well-being of Corisande. Sometimes what he wanted—what he thought would be best for Corisande and what he went about giving it—wasn’t really what his people needed or what they wanted, but I think he genuinely convinced himself that his ambitions were truly their ambitions, as well. I don’t think he ever really realized they supported his efforts to expand his power because they supported him, not because they wanted anything of the sort themselves. And I’ve come to think any ruler has to be careful about assuming that the people he actually sees and talks to, the nobles on his council, his diplomats and generals and admirals, really understand—or care about—what’s best for his entire realm. It’s awfully easy to get trapped inside a bubble like that and ignore anyone outside it, Hektor. I’ve seen it, and now I recognize the danger, and smart as he was, I don’t think he ever did. He played the game by the rules he knew … and never bothered to learn another set.”

  Her tone was somber, her expression sad, and she gazed at that welcoming green blur for several seconds before she looked back up at Hektor again.

  “But flawed as he might’ve been, he truly did care. And if Daivyn does have some of that same concern inside, hiding under the prince learning to be a little boy again, then with a little direction and a little guidance, maybe.…”

  Her voice trailed off, and Hektor nodded.

  “I’ll take your word about your father.” Irys’ heart warmed as she heard the simple sincerity in his voice. How many men whose king had died in their arms could genuinely have believed the prince responsible for that death had sought to be the best ruler he knew how to be, however poorly he’d truly understood the job in the end? “But what I’ve seen of Daivyn so far is pretty hopeful. He’s a good kid, Irys, and one of these days—if we can just keep him from being poisoned by toadies and court politics—I think he’s going to be a pretty good man, too.”

  Irys suppressed a chill as she thought about all the ways “toadies and court politics” could poison the mind and the soul of so youthful a prince. Daivyn had celebrated his eleventh birthday only ten days earlier, ri
ght here on Destiny, and God knew he truly was a baby to be inheriting a throne. That would’ve been true at any time, far less in times as chaotic as these, and Irys knew enough about courts and the maneuvering which went on within them to feel that cold bite of fear. It was so easy for a child to be shaped for good or ill by the adults around him, and especially when that child was a prince. There would always be those who would be prepared to play the sycophant—or the betrayer—and the cataclysm of the war wracking Safehold would offer far too many openings for opportunistic scum.

  Well, we’ll just have to keep that from happening, won’t we? she asked herself tartly. And he could have worse influences than Hektor, come to that. But how do we stand guard against that kind of poison without making it obvious we’re doing it? Without making him think we don’t trust him to protect himself against it? And what happens when a teenage Daivyn starts to fret about all the people who won’t let him do what he wants? When other people tell him he can do what he wants—whatever he wants—start promising him the sun and the moon and stars?