The Protector's War (31 page)

“That I was. Didn't envy you a trip to Ian's Rump, either, sir.”

Nigel frowned slightly; in fact, he shared the opinion. The Principality of Ulster might loudly proclaim its loyalty to the king, and to his brother Prince Andrew—chance had stranded the latter there when the Change came—but he didn't particularly like the bloody-minded military–Orange Order-cum-Free Presbyterian junta that had ended up ruling the northeastern quarter of Britain's sister island—or what was left of it, between starvation and mutual pogrom.

“Take a look,” he said, handing over his own binoculars. “Tell me if you recognize that ship.”

Hordle looked for a moment, and pursed his lips. “No doubt about it, sir.
Cutty Sark.
I saw her in for repairs, after she shuttled in her last load of Icelanders, back in CY3.”

Nigel whistled silently, and Nobbes went slightly pale. Partly, Nigel thought, because that might mean the king had decided to give chase regardless, and to hell with offending far-off Tasmania; the
Cutty Sark
was a Royal Navy vessel now. And partly because the ship was legendary, the last and greatest of the China tea clippers, brought back to sit in glory in drydock on the Thames after a career that had included record-breaking runs on every route she sailed.

“But sir?” Hordle went on. “They had us doing fetch-and-carry work there, and from what I heard of the dockyard maties talking, she wasn't what you'd call sound even then. Even for something a hundred and thirty years old.”

Alleyne's regular-featured face was thoughtful as he nodded. “I read the report, Father. Her keel—the wooden keel—is waterlogged, and the corrosion on her frame…” He turned to Nobbes. “Captain, you know she's iron-framed, with plank sheathing?”

Nobbes snorted. “Yes,” he said, in a tone that also meant
And the sun comes up in the east too, my gracious Pommie-lad.

“Sorry, sir. Well, the frame's been corroding—not just weakening it, they could cure that with riveted patches, but the rust is pushing the stringers away. She needed to be stripped bare in drydock, chipped down to solid metal, and rebuilt from the keel up. Instead they just did what they could from the outside, pounded in more caulking, and kept putting the basic work off. Perhaps they thought it would be easier simply eventually to scrap her and build new.”

“She's still almighty fast,” Nobbes said thoughtfully.

“Not as fast as she was once,” Alleyne said. “They also cut down her sail plan, to lessen the strain on the hull and the working of the planks. Not so many studding sails and such.”

“What have they been doing with her?”

“Refugees at first, starting in March of 'ninety-nine. Then cargo on the Gibraltar run,” Alleyne said. “Manufactured goods and settlers out, food and fiber back—sugar, cotton, wine, citrus, olive oil.”

Nobbes grinned in a lopsided way. “England has an empire again, eh?”

“In a way,” Nigel said; the irony of it had struck him too. “Interesting to see how that turns out…”

“It'll be interesting to see if the
Sark
's loaded with troops and out to see us knackered,” Hordle said bluntly, jerking his head northward. “Sir.”

Nigel winced slightly, but there was no point in delaying further. “Perhaps it's rude of me to ask, but what will you do, Captain, if it is?”

Nobbes looked embarrassed, and spoke reluctantly: “I'll run like buggery, Sir Nigel. If they catch us up and it's just a matter of dodging, or trading catapult bolts at long range, I'll do that. But if it means saving my ship and crew, I'll have to hand you over, and that's the dinkie die.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Captain Nobbes,” Nigel said courteously.

And Hordle looks like he's thinking of ripping your head off in that event, and I think you're beginning to notice. Best defuse matters and change the subject.

He relaxed and smiled. “Let's hope we can avoid such a choice, eh? And that ship
could
just be running down to the Rock. We're…they're…resettling the choice bits of southern Spain and northern Morocco—the Gibraltarians and immigrants get farms, the realm gets trade, everyone's happy. Though the ghosts must be raining curses on us in Spanish and Arabic.”

“Thought of moving there meself, sir, and taking up land,” Hordle said, glad of a chance to break the momentary chill. “Nice climate and the brambles aren't as thick about the edges as back in old Blighty.”

“Maybe God
is
an Englishman,” Nobbes said. “The world drops dead, and the Poms get the whole of Western Europe out of it.”

“Only if we breed very enthusiastically,” Alleyne said. “Killing off all but one in every two hundred of us seems an odd way for the Supreme Being to show family-feeling, even if it does make many corners of foreign fields forever England in times to come. Though I think it's definite that He isn't French, what?”

Nigel nodded. “On the evidence, my boy, He seems to be Tasmanian.”

“I thought Australia was bad, until I saw Europe,” Nobbes said, with a gesture of half agreement. “And America's worse if anything…”

“Most of the parts we can reach are bones,” Nigel said judiciously. “Some islands did well and we don't know anything about the interior or the western portion.”

Alleyne put in: “There's quite a few Italians left, though—ten thousand in the Alps, fifty thousand in that clump in Umbria, two hundred thousand on Sicily. A fair number of Greeks farther east on Crete and Cyprus, and of course as you get east of central Poland…It
will
be interesting to see how things shape in the next couple of generations.”

Nobbes nodded. “Right now we'll see if
Cutty Sark
really is chasing us. Clear for action!” he called. “Helm, come about—right ten degrees. Let's see how high that beaut can point.”

 

“Damn my eyes, but she's fast,” Nobbes said, standing by the wheel of his ship and watching the
Cutty Sark
in the double circles of his binoculars as she tacked, beating up into the wind.

For the
Pride,
that was easy—just put the helm over, let the fore-and-aft booms swing across the deck above head-height, and the ship was making another leg of its zigzag course upwind. A square-rigger couldn't point nearly as close to the wind, and it was much easier for her to be “caught in irons,” left bobbing helplessly with her sails pressed back against the masts and yards. The
Sark
was crossing her bowsprit over the eye of the wind nearly as nimbly as the schooner.

“And…mainsail
haul
,” Nobbes murmured, the command that would set the crew to pulling the big square sails round on the clipper.

I think our good skipper is envious,
Nigel thought, amused despite the tension of the moment.
But then, what sailing-ship captain wouldn't be?

As they watched, the tall sail pyramid of the pursuer passed through the vertical and lay over; the sails that had been clewed up to the yards dropped down again and her bow-wave grew taller, until white water raced from her knife-sharp prow down the long sleek sides and her mizzen chains were nearly buried in the foam.

“My oath, but she's
fast
,” Nobbes said again. “If she weren't sailing four miles to our three, she'd have caught us by now.
And
she's got three times my displacement and a crew to match.”

“Do you think there's much hope?” Alleyne Loring said.

At Woburn Abbey, Sir Nigel and his wife had been under administrative detention on vague allegations of sedition. If the Lorings and Hordle were recaptured, they would face court-martial on very specific charges: desertion, murder and levying war against the forces of the Crown for all three of them—a noose for Sergeant Hordle, and the gentleman's ax for the officers. Swords and armor weren't the only ancient things that had turned up resurgent in the aftermath of the Change, and the Emergency Powers regulations were still very much in force. That had been one of the matters Sir Nigel had objected to.

“Well,” Nobbes said, then unexpectedly grinned. “Not much hope on a straight chase like this. What's more, a few hundred more miles and we hit the westerlies—and running before a wind, we wouldn't have a chance in hell of keeping ahead. But the glass is falling, and those clouds look dangerous.”

“Ah,” Nigel said. “And in a blow—”

“Right, sport. I've a solid welded steel hull under me arse, and steel lower masts and steel-cable running rigging. That beaut old lady has fragile bones. The worse the blow, the better for us. Let's see what the weather has in mind.”

 

Be careful what you pray for,
Sir Nigel thought six days later.
You may get it.

The bowsprit of the
Pride
rose and rose, until the onrushing wave seemed to tower above them like a mountain of steel-gray water, sliding down towards them with a ponderous inevitability. The top began to curl, collapsing under its own weight and the fury of the northerly gale. Long streamers of spray and foam flew out from its top, ghostly in the half-light through the dense cloud overhead. More surged down the slope ahead of the breaking wave…

…and struck.

White water leapt ahead of the surge as the bows went under, and the wave raced the length of the
Pride
's deck towards him. He braced himself, involuntarily flinging up an arm before his eyes, and then the water struck—first a foam like the head on a giant's glass of beer, then a solid smashing blow of cold sea. The cord that linked his belt to the safety line stretching fore and aft kept him from going over the taffrail as he was tumbled and pounded in the darkness, but when the wave passed he was on his knees, coughing the wrack out of his lungs as he blinked his eyes and checked that the two helmsmen were still on either side of the wheel.

They were; one of them was John Hordle, and he grinned under his dripping sou'wester. His mouth moved—he was probably shouting, but the keening wail of the wind through the rigging and the white roar of the water made it impossible to hear at all, much less to understand. One moment's error by either of them, and the
Pride
would broach to, tumble as the waves took her sidewise and sink like a rock with all hands in thirty seconds of terror.

Nigel scrambled up; the schooner was cresting the wave like a chip of wood washing onto a beach, and as she cleared the crest the force of the wind snatched the breath from his mouth and made the skin of his face burn. For an instant he could see for miles, across a seascape of waves three-quarters hidden by the white froth that tore from their tops, as if the ship was sailing through the storm clouds themselves rather than the ocean. Then the two scraps of staysail set forward to keep her nose into the wind caught the full force of the gale and jerked her forward with an acceleration that made his teeth snap together. She skidded down the steep north face of the wave like a skier down a mountainside, faster and faster, the high whine of the rigging turning to a deeper note as the walls of water gave a momentary protection from the storm. Another burst of seawater came over the bows and raced along the deck as they slid into the trough of the wave and dug in for an instant; this time the wave was only waist-high when it struck the quarterdeck, and he kept his feet easily enough.

As the
Pride
began the long slow climb up the next wave rain slashed down. At first Nigel didn't notice it—everything was thoroughly wet as it was—but soon it cut visibility noticeably. The cold chill that made his bones ache in the spots where they'd been broken and put knives in his joints was no worse, but it
felt
so. It took him a moment to realize that the two dim figures in their gray rain slickers were newly on deck.

“You are a good relief,” he said semiformally to Alleyne—or as formally as you could when you had to shout to be heard—and then smiled. “And a very welcome one! Is the galley fire lit?”

“It is, Father. And plenty of
actual tea.
I'm getting quite used to it again.”

The other was Captain Nobbes. He shouted something, then repeated it as he came closer, snapping his safety cord onto the lifeline with practiced ease.

“…you taste it?” he was asking. “The rain!”

Well, it's rain,
Nigel thought, then concentrated; he knew better than to dismiss something an expert said about his own field. He took a mouthful of the downpour and ran it over his tongue—it was pleasant to get the salt taste out of his mouth anyway.

“Grit!”
he shouted back.
“There's grit in the rain!”

Nobbes grinned back under his sou'wester and came close enough to bellow into the Englishman's ear. “We're off the coast of northwest Africa, then—I thought so, from the way the wind was turning, and that clinches it. Read about the grit in an old book they dug out of a museum for us. It's Saharan sand. Means the storm will blow out soon.”