How Firm a Foundation (4 page)

“We’ll alter course, Master Lathyk,” he said crisply. “Put her before the wind, if you please. I want more water under our lee if this wind decides to back on us.”

“Aye, Sir.”

“And after you’ve got her on her new heading, I want the topgallant masts sent down.”

Someone who knew Lathyk well and was watching him closely might have seen a small flicker of surprise
in his eyes, but it was very brief and there was no sign of it in his voice as he touched his chest in salute.

“Aye, Sir.” The first lieutenant looked at the boatswain’s mate of the watch. “Hands to the braces, Master Kwayle!”

“Aye, aye, Sir!”

*   *   *

The glass continued to fall, the wind continued to rise, and lightning began to flicker under the clouds advancing inexorably from the south.

Destiny
looked oddly truncated with her upper masts struck. Her courses had been furled, her inner and middle jibs struck, storm staysails had been carefully checked and prepared, and single reefs had been taken in her topsails. Despite the enormous reduction in canvas, she continued to forge steadily northeast from her original position at a very respectable rate of speed. The wind velocity was
easily up to thirty miles per hour, and considerably more powerful gusts were beginning to make themselves felt, as well. Large waves came driving towards the ship from astern, ten feet high and more and crowned in white as they rolled up under her quarter to impart a sharp corkscrew motion, and lifelines had been rigged on deck and oilskins had been broken out. The foul weather gear was hot and
sweltering, despite the rising wind, although no one was optimistic enough to believe that was going to remain true very much longer. Their current position was less than three hundred miles above the equator, but those oncoming clouds were high and the rain they were about to release was going to be cold.

Very
cold.

Aplyn-Ahrmahk would have been hard put to analyze the atmospheric mechanics
of what was about to happen, but what he saw when he looked south from his station on Destiny’s quarterdeck was the collision between two weather fronts. A high pressure area’s heavier, colder air out of the west was driving under the warmer, water-saturated air behind a warm front which had moved into the Gulf of Mathyas from the east three days earlier and then stalled. Due to the planet’s rotation,
winds tended to blow parallel to the isobars delineating weather fronts, which meant two powerful, moving wind masses were coming steadily into collision in what a Terran weatherman would have called a tropical cyclone.

Fortunately, it was the wrong time of year for the most violent form of tropical cyclone … which was more commonly called “hurricane.”

Ensign Aplyn-Ahrmahk didn’t need to understand
all the mechanics involved in the process to read the weather signs, however. He understood the consequences of what was about to happen quite well, and he wasn’t looking forward to them. The good news was that Captain Yairley’s preparations had been made in ample time and there’d been time to double-check and triple-check all of them. The bad news was that the weather didn’t seem to have
heard that this wasn’t hurricane season.

Don’t be silly,
he told himself firmly.
This isn’t going to be a
hurricane,
Hektor! Things would be getting worse even faster than they are if that were the case. I think
.

“Take a party and double-check the lashings on the quarter boats, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk,” Captain Yairley said.

“Aye, Sir!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk saluted and turned away. “Master Selkyr!”

“Aye, Sir?” Ahntahn Selkyr, another of
Destiny
’s boatswain’s mates, replied.

“Let’s check the lashings on the boats,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said, and headed purposefully aft while Selkyr mustered half a dozen hands to join him.

“Giving the lad something to think about, Sir?” Lieutenant Lathyk asked quietly, watching the youthful ensign with a smile.

“Oh, perhaps a little,” Yairley acknowledged with
a faint smile of his own. “At the same time, it won’t hurt anything, and Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s a good officer. He’ll see that it’s done right.”

“Yes, he will, Sir,” Lathyk agreed, then turned to look back at the looming mass of clouds rising higher and higher in the south. The air seemed thicker and heavier somehow, despite the freshening wind, and there was an odd tint to the light.

“I thought
you were overreacting, to be honest, Sir, when you had the topgallant masts sent down. Now”—he shrugged, his expression unhappy—“I’m not so sure you were.”

“It’s always such a comfort to me when your judgment agrees with my own, Rhobair,” Yairley said dryly, and Lathyk chuckled. Then the captain sobered. “All the same, I don’t like the feel of this at all. And I don’t like the way the clouds
are spreading to the east, as well. Mark my words, Rhobair, this thing is going to back around on us before it’s done.”

Lathyk nodded somberly. The predominant winds tended to be from the northeast in the Gulf of Mathyas during the winter months, which would normally have led one to expect any wind changes to veer further to the west, not to the east. Despite which, he had an unhappy suspicion
that the captain was right.

“Do you think we’ll be able to make enough easting to clear Silkiah Bay if it does back on us, Sir?”

“Now that’s the interesting question, isn’t it?” Yairley smiled again, then turned his back on the dark horizon and watched Aplyn-Ahrmahk and his seamen inspecting the lashings which secured the boats on the quarterdeck’s davits.

“I think we’ll probably clear the
mouth of the bay,” he said after a moment. “What I’m not so sure about is that we’ll be able to get into the approaches to Tabard Reach. I suppose”—he showed his teeth—“we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

*   *   *

Lightning streaked across the purple-black heavens like Langhorne’s own Rakurai. Thunder exploded like the reply of Shan-wei’s artillery, audible even through the wind-shriek
and the pounding, battering fury of waves approaching thirty feet in height, and ice-cold rain hammered a man’s oilskins like a thousand tiny mallets. HMS
Destiny
staggered through those heavy seas, running before the wind now under no more than a single storm jib, a close-reefed main topsail, and a reefed forecourse, and Sir Dunkyn Yairley stood braced, secured to a quarterdeck lifeline by a
turn around his chest, and watched the four men on the wheel fight to control his ship.

The seas were trying to push her stern around to the east, and he was forced to carry more canvas and more weather helm than he would have preferred to hold her up. It was officially a storm now, with wind speeds hitting better than fifty-five miles per hour, and not a mere gale or even a
strong
gale, and
he suspected it was going to get even nastier before it was over. He didn’t like showing that much of the forecourse, but he needed that lift forward. Despite which he’d have to take in both the topsail and the course and go to storm staysails alone, if the wind got much worse. He needed to get as far east as he could, though, and reducing sail would reduce his speed, as well. Deciding when to make
that change—and making it before he endangered his ship—was going to be as much a matter of instinct as anything else, and he wondered why the possibility of being driven under and drowned caused him so much less concern than the possibility of losing legs or arms to enemy round shot.

The thought made him chuckle, and while none of the helmsmen could have heard him through the shrieking tumult
and the waterfall beating of icy rain, they saw his fleeting smile and looked at one another with smiles of their own.

He didn’t notice as he turned and peered into the murk to the northwest. By his best estimate, they’d made roughly twenty-five miles, possibly thirty, since the visibility closed in. If so,
Destiny
was now about two hundred miles southeast of Ahna’s Point and four hundred and
sixty miles southeast of Silk Town. It also put him only about a hundred and twenty miles south of Garfish Bank, however, and his smile disappeared as he pictured distances and bearings from the chart in his mind. He’d made enough easting to avoid being driven into Silkiah Bay—probably—if the wind did back, but he needed at least another two hundred and fifty miles—preferably more like three hundred—before
he’d have Tabard Reach under his lee, and he didn’t like to think about how many ships had come to grief on Garfish Bank or in Scrabble Sound behind it.

But that’s not going to happen to
my
ship
, he told himself, and tried to ignore the prayerful note in his own thought.

*   *   *

“Hands aloft to reduce sail!”

The order was barely audible through the howl of wind and the continuous drumroll
of thunder, but the grim-faced topmen didn’t have to hear the command. They knew exactly what they faced … and exactly what it was going to be like up there on the yards, and they looked at one another with forced smiles.

“Up you go, lads!”

In the teeth of such a wind, the lee shrouds would have been a death trap, and the topmen swarmed up even the weather shrouds with more than usual care.
They gathered in the tops, keeping well inside the topmast rigging, while men on deck tailed onto the braces.

A seventeen-mile-per-hour wind put one pound of pressure per square inch on a sail. At thirty-two miles per hour, the pressure didn’t simply double; it
quadrupled,
and the wind was blowing far harder than that now. At the moment,
Destiny
’s forecourse was double-reefed, shortening its
normal hoist of thirty-six feet to only twenty-four. Unlike a trapezoidal topsail, the course was truly
square,
equally wide at both head and foot, which meant its sixty-two-foot width was unaffected by the decrease in height. Its effective sail area had thus been reduced from over twenty-two hundred square feet to just under fifteen hundred, but the fifty-five-plus-mile-per-hour wind was still
exerting over seventeen hundred
tons
of pressure on that straining piece of canvas. The slightest accident could turn all that energy loose to wreak havoc on the ship’s rigging, with potentially deadly consequences under the current weather conditions.

“Brace up the forecourse!”

“Weather brace, haul! Tend the lee braces!”

The ship’s course had been adjusted to bring the wind on to her larboard
quarter. Now the foreyard swung as the larboard brace, leading aft to its sheave on the maintop and from there to deck level, hauled that end—the weather end—of the yard aft. The force of the wind itself helped the maneuver, pushing the starboard end of the yard around to leeward, and as the yard swung, the sail shifted from perpendicular to the wind’s direction to almost parallel. The shrouds
supporting the mast got in the way and prevented the yard from being trimmed as close to fore-and-aft as
Destiny
might have wished—that was the main reason no squarerigger could come as close to the wind as a schooner could—but it still eased the pressure on the forecourse immensely.

“Clew up! Spilling lines, haul!”

The clewlines ran from the lower corners of the course to the ends of the yards,
then through blocks near the yard’s center and down to deck level, while the buntlines ran from the yard to the foot of the sail. As the men on deck hauled away, the clewlines and buntlines raised the sail, aided by the spilling lines—special lines which had been rigged for precisely this heavy-weather necessity. They were simply ropes which had been run down from the yard then looped up around
the sail, almost like another set of buntlines, and their function was exactly what their name implied: when they were hauled up, the lower edge of the sail was gathered in a bight, spilling wind out of the canvas so it could be drawn up to the yard without quite so much of a struggle.

“Ease halliards!”

The topmen in the foretop waited until the canvas had been fully gathered in and the yard
had been trimmed back to its original squared position before they were allowed out onto it. Squaring the yard once more made it far easier—and safer—for them to transfer from the top to the spar. Under calmer conditions, many of those men would have scampered cheerfully out along the yard itself with blithe confidence in their sense of balance. Under
these
conditions, use of the foot rope rigged
under the yard was mandatory.

They spread themselves along the seventy-five-foot-long spar, seventy feet above the reeling, plunging deck—almost ninety feet above the white, seething fury of the water in those fleeting moments when the deck was actually level—and began fisting the canvas into final submission while wind and rain shrieked around them.

One by one the gaskets went around the gathered
sail and its yard, securing it firmly, and then it was the main topsail’s turn.

*   *   *

“Keep her as close to northeast-by-east as you can, Waigan!” Sir Dunkyn Yairley shouted in his senior helmsman’s ear.

Waigan, a grizzled veteran if ever there was one, looked up at the storm staysails—the triangular, triple-thickness staysails set between the mizzen and the main and between the main and
the fore—which, along with her storm forestaysail, were all the canvas
Destiny
could show now.

“Nor’east-by-east, aye, Sir!” he shouted back while rainwater and spray ran from his iron-gray beard. “Close as we can, Sir!” he promised, and Yairley nodded and slapped him on the shoulder in satisfaction.

No sailing ship could possibly maintain a set course, especially under these conditions. Indeed,
it took all four of the men on the wheel to hold
any
course. The best they could do was keep the ship on roughly the designated heading, and the
senior
helmsman wasn’t even going to be looking at the compass card.
His
attention was going to be locked like iron to those staysails, being certain they were drawing properly, lending the ship the power and the stability she needed to survive the maelstrom.
The senior of his assistants would watch the compass and alert him if they started to stray too far from the desired heading.