The Pen and the Sword (Destiny's Crucible Book 2) (33 page)

Oh,
Merciful God!
ARE
you merciful? How could you let something like this happen to someone like Ana?
To
me
!

Maera
rose and walked outside. Yozef held out a hand to her. She grasped it with one
hand firmly, then patted it gently and pushed it away as she left the house. He
took it to mean she wanted to be alone and granted her wish. She sat on the
veranda for two hours. Yozef checked on her several times. Finally, she came
inside and went straight to their bedroom. He waited a few minutes and then
followed. She was in bed, under the covers. He undressed and lay next to her,
not touching. After a few minutes, she turned to him, buried her face in his
chest, and sobbed . . ., never saying a word. She finally stopped and fell
asleep, still tight against him. He held her until he, too, fell asleep.

When
Maera woke the next morning, there was a moment of confusion. She was awake,
but there was something wrong. Then the news of the previous evening washed
over her again. Tears came to her eyes; however, she didn’t cry. Crying was
over. Anarynd was gone. The thought was a hole in her chest, and there was
nothing she could do. “Maera Kolsko-Keelan” was back in charge. She had
responsibilities—her husband, the child on the way, duties to the clan and her
new community. Life would be good, but it would never be the same.

Cannon
and Ammunition

Yozef
was sensitive to supporting Maera, as she dealt with the news about Anarynd.
Neither of them mentioned her name, though he never doubted what was constantly
on Maera’s mind, especially when he found her staring off into the distance or
clinging to him longer than before when they embraced. As sixdays passed, then
a month, Yozef saw her slowly returning to her former self, at least outwardly.

Anarynd’s
fate reinvigorated Yozef’s thinking about the Narthani, something that had
seemed less urgent as he became absorbed with Maera, their marriage, the
child-to-be, and all of the adjustments that followed. Now the worries for the
future came back with a vengeance, prompted by memories of the raid on St.
Sidryn’s, the Narthani, his talks with Culich, and the implications of the
Moreland raid.

What
if the Narthani attacked Keelan? Every intuition pointed to cataclysmic events
to come. If the worst came, what could he do to help protect Maera, the child,
himself, and all of the Caedelli? The question and the search for answers felt
overwhelming, and when he tried to focus on what was doable, his first thoughts
returned to their failure with cannon. After months of effort, the foundry
still hadn’t succeeded casting a functional 6-pounder barrel.

Christ,
I wished I’d read more about early weapons technology so I could dredge up out
of my new memory how to make a damn cannon barrel.

Yozef
and the foundry workers stared in disgust at the 6-pounder barrel that peeled
back from the opening, the jagged bronze splayed like petals of an opening bud.

“Sorry,
Yozef,” said the foreman. “I thought this one would work. The barrel was as
straight as we can make them, and the first five shots were successful.
Obviously, we’re missing something important in scaling up from the swivel guns
to longer and thicker barrels.”

“I
know,” said Yozef, “and we weren’t even up to a full powder charge yet. I’m
afraid I’m out of ideas. I’d hoped you and your men could figure out the
problem by trial and error. I think we have to admit we’re stymied for the
moment and give up on the bigger cannon and stick to producing more of the
swivels.”

Their
failure was both discouraging and ominous. An escaped Preddi slave described
what to Yozef sounded like a Narthani field cannon in the 9- to 12-pounder
size. He’d hoped they’d be smaller, since 12-pounder cannon had been the
mainstay of armies on Earth from the Napoleonic era to the U.S. Civil War, a
hundred years later than the approximately early 1700s he associated with Anyar
technology.

He
wondered whether the mainland wars here had gone on so long and been so
intensive, it had accelerated military science. He remembered how the U.S.
Civil War led to innovations that revolutionized warfare: ironclad warships,
repeating rifles, the use of railways to move armies, military telegraph lines,
ambulance corps, balloons for reconnaissance, and Gatling guns.

He
stared longer at the ruined barrel.
Even if we make 6-pounders, the
islanders will still be outgunned.

The
carriages with two or three swivel barrels would be useless against real
cannon, but were better than nothing and would provide gun crew training if
they ever solved the casting problem.

“All
right, men. Let’s put the bigger barrels aside for now and concentrate on
producing another twenty swivel barrels. This time, only mount them two at a
time, instead of three as with the first carriages. That’ll give us three with
three swivels and ten with two. Also, go ahead and mount a 6-pounder barrel.”

“Why,
Yozef? What’s the point having a carriage with a barrel we don’t dare fire?”
asked the foreman.

“What
if we figure it out? Even a non-functional 6-pounder will let the gun crews
drill with a cannon, instead of the swivels. They won’t fire it, but they’ll
have the motions memorized. Then, if we figure out the barrel problem, we’ll
have gun crews accustomed to the size of real cannon.”

One
positive outcome of developing the swivel carriages was working out canister
rounds and powder sacks in predetermined weights. Yozef had hoped to extend the
idea to muskets. The Caedelli method of loading muskets was still in the powder
horn stage. To load, one had to remove the stopper at the end of a powder horn,
pour into the barrel an estimated of amount of powder, ram a musket ball all
the way down with a ramrod, rotate the musket ninety degrees and give a rap to
let some of the powder into the firing vent, cock the hammer, and pull the
trigger to let the hammer point strike a flint that ignited the powder in the
vent into the barrel—then do it all again.

The
problems included variations in the amount of powder affecting accuracy, firing
downhill being plagued by the ball rolling down the barrel if it wasn’t firmly
seated, and having to manipulate both the powder horn and the bag of musket
balls.

The
same escaped Preddi who’d described Narthani cannon also witnessed Narthani
ranks of muskets firing more rapidly than any Caedelli, and he had stolen a
Narthani cartridge. It was a paper compartment containing a musket ball and a
pre-measured amount of powder. The musket man pulled a cartridge out of a bag,
held the ball with his fingers, and shook the paper so the powder fell to the
bottom of the compartment. The he bit off the end with the ball, poured powder
into the barrel, took the ball and the paper out of his mouth, put the ball
into the barrel, followed by the paper as a wad, and rammed both home.

The
Caedelli had no history in which rapid mass musket firing was a critical
advantage; that luxury was now gone. Convincing Denes and Maera of the problem
came quickly after he described the Narthani cartridges.

“Imagine
two groups of a hundred men firing muskets at each other. Now imagine that one
group can reload and fire three times faster than the other. What do you think
would happen?”

Denes
shook his head. “The slower group would be all dead within minutes.”

“The
Narthani,” Maera said. “You’re saying the Narthani use these ‘cartridges,’ you
call them, to fire faster than our people can. If three times faster, that’s as
if they had three times as many men as they do.”

“If
this is true,” said Denes, “along with what we hear of how easily they
destroyed the Preddi, what chances do the clans have against them?”

“Can
we make these cartridges ourselves, Yozef?” Maera asked, ignoring Denes’s
pessimism.

“I
think so. It would take some experimenting, but the principles are simple.”

“Yozef,
write down what you know about these cartridges and give us the one from the
Preddi. Denes and I can work on this,” offered Maera. “I’ll check in Abersford
tomorrow for women to start working on making cartridges, and Denes can have
them tested.”

Within
a sixday, the first cartridges were found adequate. They took practice to use,
and the user’s face and hands ended with powder smears, but the cartridges
worked, and the rate of fire more than doubled. The problem was in
manufacturing enough cartridges to make a difference, because it had to be done
by hand. Maera scoured Abersford for available workers, and within two sixdays
the Abersford Cartridge Works was staffed by two men and eleven women, turning
out two thousand cartridges a day. The problem was numbers.

“I
know it’s important to fire faster,” said Denes. “Think of the numbers, though.
At a minimum of a hundred cartridges each, supplying a complete muster of
Keelan men would require four hundred thousand cartridges. It would take . . . ,”
Denes pursed his lips, doing the math, “most of a year at this rate of
production.”

“I
know, and it isn’t practical to increase production here, unless we recruit men
and women already busy with jobs and families. I’ll write Hetman Culich to see
if production could start elsewhere in Keelan. What I suggest is that we arm
small groups with the new cartridges and keep the men together, if fighting is
necessary. In one month we can arm three hundred men with a hundred cartridges
each.” Yozef didn’t elaborate that those hundred cartridges per musket would
only last one day’s battle.

Grenades

Yozef
had shelved an earlier consideration of grenades for lack of fuses and safety
concerns. He envisioned more damage inflicted on their own men through
accidents and crude grenades than any damage they could do to the Narthani. He figured
they’d eventually get to the fuses and safe protocols. The Moreland raid
convinced him
eventually
was
now
, and he resurrected the effort.

 The
first thing he decided was to reduce the grenade to the essentials—a container
of gunpowder, a source of shrapnel, and a cord fuse. His fuse problem puzzled
Maera, because fireworks were part of each year’s Caernford Harvest Festival,
and Yozef had seen the fireworks during two Abersford festivals without it
registering that they must use fuses. An embarrassed Yozef discovered the
fireworks came from a single shop in Stent Province, and a letter from Culich
to Hetman Stent succeeded in getting both the method of making paper gunpowder
fuses and a supply of foot-long fuses.

Yozef
settled on a tin container the size of a Campbell’s Soup can. A mixture of
gunpowder and any small pieces of metal available filled the inside, and the
container was glued to a seven-inch wooden handle with the fuse cord attached
to the opposite end. It was a crude version of the World War II potato masher
grenade of the Germans and could be thrown farther than a round grenade, such
as the American military had used variants of for a hundred years.

Lighting
the fuse required carrying live coals in a small insulated box. Flints were too
slow in getting a spark to the end of the fuse, and matches didn’t yet exist
among the Caedelli.

Yozef
hurried to the shops one day in response to a message that the workers had a
surprise for him. He arrived just as a projectile trailing sparks arced into
the air, flew over the cartridge shop, hit a tree, and exploded, severing the
tree trunk eight feet off the ground and sending pieces of wood and bark
showering for thirty yards.

“What
the fuck!” yelled a startled Yozef.

A
red-faced worker explained he had stumbled while hurrying to aim the crossbow
after lighting the fuse.

“Crossbow?
Fuse?” queried Yozef. “What crossbow and what fuse?”

The
worker showed him a large crossbow and longer-than-usual quarrels with grenade
containers tied to the forward ends.

Yozef
looked at the apparatus, then at the worker, then back to the crossbow. “You
gotta be shittin’ me.”

“They’re
not very accurate, but if you’re happy with getting the quarrel within twenty
yards of a target two hundred yards away, they’re okay.”

“That’s
close enough,” said Yozef, suppressing an insane giggle. “Let’s do any future
testing down by the beach. We can anchor targets offshore. And for lighting the
fuse, let’s make it a rule that the quarrel is in the crossbow already aimed
before the fuse is lit by a second person.”

MASH

Successes
with things that went bang prompted another “what if” thought by reminding
Yozef of consequences when men tried to kill one another. If the Narthani
invaded in force and the Caedelli tried to stop them, he cringed at imagining
the number of casualties. During a visit to the abbey, Yozef shared his concern
with the abbot and the abbess.

They
met in Diera’s office in the hospital building.

“Diera,
what if the Narthani attack other clans? Have you thought about how medicants
will treat injuries if large-scale fighting breaks out between the clans and
the Narthani?”

“Large
scale?” questioned Diera. “What do you mean by large scale?”

“During
the Buldorian raid, you had how many casualties to care for?”

“Perhaps
twenty serious injuries and another thirty treated and the people walked away.”

“In
that case, the medicants treated the injuries immediately. What if the injuries
occurred fifty miles from any medicants? What if instead of twenty serious
casualties, there were three hundred? Six hundred?”

“Six
hundred!” exclaimed the shocked abbess. “Merciful God!” Diera stopped talking
as she weighed his questions.

“This
has also occurred to me, Diera,” said Sistian, “though not with the numbers
Yozef proposes. However, I’ve known Yozef long enough to realize he’s not just
asking a hypothetical question. Am I correct?”

Yozef
nodded with a serious expression. “What if the Narthani send their army into
the rest of Caedellium? It could be anywhere—Moreland, Stent, Gwillamer,
Keelan—or even use their navy to land somewhere else on the island. If the
clans resist, battles might involve tens of thousands of men and hundreds or
even thousands of casualties. Given the severity of wounds to be expected, how
will they be treated in time to save lives?

“I
suggest that plans be made to have mobile hospitals to accompany any large
groups of clansmen headed for a fight. The sooner the wounded get medicant
attention, the better their chances of surviving or avoiding permanent injury.”