Off Armageddon Reef (41 page)

“Bishop Maikel also strongly supports,” the crown prince continued, “Father's belief that the degree to which
Seijin
Merlin is involved in all of this should be minimized. Not just for the reasons we've already discussed, although Bishop Maikel agrees all of them are valid, but also because the involvement of a
seijin
would automatically trigger a much more thorough—and time-consuming—preliminary inquisition if Father Paityr were forced to take formal cognizance of it. Bishop Maikel would prefer to avoid that, and he believes Father Paityr would, as well. After all, the critical point, as the
Writ
itself makes clear, is the substance of that which is tested, not its origin.”

He paused until heads nodded solemnly, and Merlin resisted the temptation to smile cynically. All of those nodding men were perfectly well aware that Bishop Maikel was effectively advising Haarahld on how best to “game the system.” But that was all right with them, because “gaming the system,” whether it was called that or not, had been an everyday fact of the Church's life for as long as anyone could remember. As long as Mother Church formally approved a new concept or technique, its originators were covered, and at least in Father Paityr's case, approval wouldn't depend on the size of the bribe offered.

And every one of the men in this chamber also understood that one major unstated reason for them to take credit for the things Merlin was about to begin teaching them was to spread out the responsibility for those innovations. To avoid having so many simultaneous new ideas come at Father Paityr from a single, possibly suspect, source that he was driven to focus on where they came from, rather than upon their content.

“There's one more initial point Father wanted me to stress,” Cayleb continued after a moment. “Nothing that
Seijin
Merlin is about to share with us can be kept indefinitely as our exclusive property. Once others have seen the advantages, it won't take them long to start trying to duplicate those same advantages for themselves. Some of what we're going to be talking about today, like what
Seijin
Merlin calls ‘Arabic numerals' and an ‘abacus,' are going to have to spread widely to be of any use to us. As such, their advantages are bound to be recognized, and they're bound to be adopted by others very quickly. Others will have exclusively, or at least primarily, military implications, involving ways to make the Navy and Marines more effective. The results of those changes are going to be quickly apparent to our adversaries if and when they encounter them in battle, but Father would be much happier if people like Nahrmahn and Hektor had no idea what we're doing
until
they encounter those changes in battle.”

Heads nodded again, much more emphatically, and Cayleb nodded back soberly.

“In that case,
Seijin
Merlin,” he said, “why don't you go ahead and begin.”

“Is it really that simple?” Baron Seamount asked several hours later, staring at the coarse black grains on Merlin's palm and shaking his head slowly. His expression was a curious mixture of awe and chagrin.

“It's really that simple,” Merlin confirmed. “Of course, producing ‘corned' powder like this has its own set of problems. It's easy to strike a spark, or even set it off from simple friction heat, especially during the grinding process. But overall, it's a lot safer, and more powerful, too.”

He and the navy officer stood in Seamount's office in a squat stone structure beside the King's Harbor citadel. The office was a wide, low-ceilinged chamber, newer than much of the rest of the fortifications, since it sat squarely atop the fortress's main powder magazine.

Location is everything
, Merlin thought dryly.
Although, now that I think about it, maybe it does make sense to put the officer in charge of the magazine's safety directly on top of it. If nothing else, it should make sure he pays attention to his duties!

“I doubt any of those problems can begin to compare to the ones we've always had,” Seamount said now. He held out his own hand—the mangled one—and Merlin turned his wrist to tip the black powder into the captain's palm.

Seamount raised it to his nose and sniffed, then stuck out his tongue and tasted the powder delicately.

“I can see why this…‘corned' powder of yours is going to be a lot safer to handle,
Seijin
Merlin,” he said. “But why is it going to be more powerful?”

Merlin frowned thoughtfully and stroked his mustachios while he considered how best to answer the question.

As Seamount said, the safety advantages were obvious. Safeholdian gunpowder hadn't been around that long, and it was still a very crude proposition. The exact proportions of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal remained a matter of hot debate among the practitioners of the artillerist's art, such as it was and what there was of it. Worse, and much more dangerously, it was still “meal powder”—made by simply mixing the finely crushed ingredients into a powder with a consistency very close to that of flour. It worked, more or less, but the ingredients didn't
stay
mixed. They separated out, especially if the mixture was jostled or agitated. Which, given the state of most of Safehold's roads, meant a powder cart often found itself moving in a fine fog of highly flammable, highly explosive dust.

No one on Safehold had yet thought of the expedient of moistening the powder, pressing it into solid cakes, and then grinding it to a uniform consistency. The process bound the component ingredients together, preventing them from separating back out, which explained both Seamount's awe and his chagrin. The implications for the safe, efficient use of artillery and small arms were profound, yet the solution was so absurdly simple that it was difficult for him to forgive himself for not having already thought of it.

Which still left the the problem of how to explain the increase in propellant force.

“It's more powerful for several reasons, as I understand it, Sir Ahlfryd,” Merlin said, after moment. “First, I've adjusted the…recipe just a bit. The one you were using had too much charcoal in it. But the main reason, as it was explained to me, is that basically what gunpowder does is simply to burn very, very quickly in a confined space. When the powder is made into grains this way, there's more space between each grain, which means the fire can burn even more quickly and completely. I'm sure you've seen the same sort of process when you've ‘poked up' a fire on your hearth.”

It was Seamount's turn to frown. He stood gazing down into his palm, gently stirring the powder grains with the index finger of his other hand, then nodded.

“Yes,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “Yes, I can see how that might be. I never considered it before, but then again, I never had ‘corned' powder to experiment with.”

He frowned some more, then looked back up at Merlin.

“But if it's more powerful, will our existing guns be up to firing it?”

“That's an excellent question, and I don't have a good answer,” Merlin admitted. “From what I've seen of your artillery, it's well made, but it was all designed for meal powder, not corned powder. I think you're going to have to experiment to find out.”

“I can see that.” Seamount nodded. “We've always proofed our guns by firing them with double or triple charges and loads of shot. I suppose we should start by firing some of them with standard charges, by weight, of corned powder, then increase the loading until they fail.”

“That sounds reasonable to me,” Merlin agreed. “One thing, though. You may have to thicken the walls of the gun tubes to stand up to the power of the new powder, but you can probably reduce the barrel length.”

Seamount raised an eyebrow, and Merlin chuckled.

“The main reason you've needed as much length as you've got now is to give the powder time to burn before the ball leaves the bore,” he pointed out. “Since corned powder burns more quickly, you won't need the same barrel length to get the same effect.”

“You're right.” Seamount's eyes gleamed as he considered the implications. “So we could reinforce the thickness and might still end up saving weight, overall. And”—his eyes glowed even more brightly as his agile mind raced onward—“a shorter gun can be reloaded more quickly can't it?”

“Yes, it can.” Merlin nodded, then stroked his mustachios again. “In fact, I just had another thought. One that would probably increase your rate of fire even more.”

“What sort of thought?” Seamount's eyes narrowed into hawk-like intensity.

“Well,” Merlin said slowly, frowning as he obviously worked through the implications himself, “you've always loaded each round using ladles of loose powder, haven't you?”

Seamount nodded quickly with an “of-course-we-have” sort of expression, and Merlin shrugged.

“Well,” he said again, “suppose you were to pre-measure the charge for each shot? You could sew each charge into a cloth bag. Then you could just ram the bag home each time you load. And if the bag's weave was loose enough, the primer would burn a hole through the cloth and ignite the main charge.”

“Langhorne!” Seamount muttered. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking hard, then began to nod. Slowly, at first, then faster and harder.

“You're absolutely right!” he said, reopening his eyes, still nodding. “I'll bet we could at least double—probably triple—our rate of fire if we did that! And—” His nodding stopped abruptly. “—I don't see any reason we couldn't do the same thing for our field artillery. Or even—Langhorne! We could come up with a way for musketeers with this new ‘flintlock' of yours to do the same kind of thing instead of using powderhorns!”

Merlin blinked in apparent astonishment. And, truth be told, he
was
just a little astonished. He'd known Baron Seamount had a first-class brain, but he was delighted by how quickly the naval officer was grappling with the new possibilities. The “
seijin
” had hoped introducing the basic concepts would produce this sort of synergy, but he hadn't expected even Seamount to grab them and run this quickly.

On the other hand,
he reminded himself,
one reason the Charisians are so tough at sea is that they've invented the concept of a professional navy. Everybody else still insists on sticking army officers—preferably nobly born ones, whether they have any brains are not—aboard a ship to command it in battle. The professional sailors are only along to steer the thing where their landlubber “commanders” tell them to go; aside from that, they're supposed to keep their big mouths shut. But not in Charis. I wonder if Seamount really realizes just how big an advantage that gives his people?

The professional naval officer in question turned to look at the diagrams chalked on one wall of his office. That entire wall was paneled in slabs of slate, turning it into one huge blackboard, and when they'd first entered the office, it had been covered by half a dozen sketches and jotted reminders to himself. But Seamount had swept them impatiently away and begun creating new ones with sharp, crisp strokes of his chalk as they spoke. Now he considered those newly created sketches and notes and shook his head slowly.

“Some of our officers are going to resist all this, you know,
Seijin
,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“
Seijin
Merlin,” Seamount replied with something trapped halfway between a snort and a chuckle, “you've been very tactful this afternoon. I'm fairly confident, though, that most of my own brilliant notions had already occurred to you before we began.”

Merlin felt his face smooth into momentary, betraying non-expression, and the Charisian laughed.

“That wasn't a complaint,” he said. “And while I have my own suspicions about just why you might prefer for us to ‘figure it all out' for ourselves, I'm not going to worry about confirming them, either. But when you take all of this together—the new powder, these ‘trunnions' of yours, the new gun carriages, this idea of premeasured charges, the shorter barrel length—it's going to stand every established notion of how naval battles are fought on its head. I haven't had time to consider all of it yet, of course, but one thing is obvious; every war galley in the Navy just became useless.”

“I don't know if I'd go quite
that
far,” Merlin said cautiously, but Seamount shook his head again, this time crisply, decisively.

“It won't work with galleys,” he said, and his chalk rapped on slate with tack-hammer sharpness as he tapped the rough schematic of the new-style gun carriage with it. “We're going to have to come up with something else, and a whole new set of tactics and tactical formations. At the moment, the only real possibility I see is some development of the galleon, even though Langhorne knows we don't have many of them to play with! I suspect—” He gave Merlin another sharp-eyed glance. “—that you and Sir Dustyn are going to be discussing that shortly. But it's obvious a galley simply doesn't have anyplace to put enough guns, not if we can design and mount cannon that fire as quickly as I think we'll be able to fire now. They'll have to be mounted along the broadside of the ship, not just in the bowcastle and sterncastle, and you can't do that in a galley. The rowers would be in the way. And they don't have the loadbearing capability for that much weight of metal.”