BY SCHISM RENT ASUNDER – snippet 108:
.XIV.
Ferayd Harbor and
Main Shipping Channel,
Ferayd Sound,
Kingdom of Delfarahk
Sir Vyk Lakyr swore violently as another broadside lit the night. At least his harbor batteries were finally beginning to shoot back, but that was remarkably little comfort under the circumstances.
He stood in an open freight door on the second floor of one of the dockside warehouses, under the gaunt, looming arm of the gantry used to raise crates and casks to it. He'd chosen his lofty perch as an improvised command post when the bedlam, shouts, shots, and screams had made it painfully obvious his effort to accomplish his orders with a minimum of violence and bloodshed had come to nothing. He had no idea what had initially precipitated the violence, but even the fragmentary reports he'd already received made it abundantly clear that what had been supposed to be a quiet, orderly property seizure had turned instead into something with all the earmarks of a massacre.
Not that it had all been one-sided, he thought grimly. None of the Charisian merchant ship's company's were large enough to hold off his troops and borrowed naval seamen more than briefly, but some of them, at least, had clearly cherished at least some suspicion about what was coming. Many of them had had weapons ready to hand, and they'd managed to fight back hard — hard enough to inflict more than enough casualties to infuriate his men. And the even more infuriated, consecrated voices of the inquisitors who'd attached themselves to his boarding parties without Father Styvyn's having happened to mention their intention to Sir Vyk had helped turn that completely natural anger and fear into outright bloodlust.
Even as he watched, another of the Charisian galleons caught fire, joining the two already blazing at dockside. At least it didn't appear that the flames were going to communicate themselves to any of the warehouses, but they provided a suitably hellish illumination, and he could see at least one galleon which was still holding off every attempt to get aboard. It looked as if the crews of two or three other Charisians must have managed to get aboard her — probably by swimming when their own ships were taken — and even as he watched, another wolf fired from the ship's high bulwarks. There were even matchlocks firing down from her, and someone was throwing lit hand grenades down onto wharf, as well.
That, he was grimly certain, was only going to make the attackers even more savage when they finally overpowered the defenders, although it was unlikely anything could have made them less savage after what had already happened.
And the fact that I'm technically the one in command of this rat-fuck means I'm the one who's going to be blamed for it by the Charisians, he thought even more grimly.
He didn't much care for that, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that no man wanted to be remembered as a bloody murderer, especially when he'd done his very best to avoid getting anyone killed. At the moment, however, he had other things to occupy his worry, and his teeth clenched as yet another broadside thundered out of the dark, sweeping the embrasures of one of his waterfront batteries with a storm of grapeshot.
Obviously, at least one of the galleons anchored out there had been a disguised privateer. The good news was that the number of guns which could be concealed behind disguised gunports was limited. The bad news was that the guns in question — much heavier, from the sound of things, than he would have thought could have been successfully concealed — were clearly some of those new, quick-firing Charisian pieces he'd heard about . . . and the gun crews behind them manifestly knew what they were doing with them.
The galleon swept steadily, majestically, across the waterfront under topsails and jibs alone, firing savagely at the harbor batteries. Here and there, one of the slower-firing defending guns got off a shot in reply, but even though Lakyr couldn't make out many details through the smoke, darkness, and glare, it didn't look to him as if his gunners were scoring very many hits. And they obviously weren't coming even close to matching the Charisian's rate of fire.
* * * * * * * * * *
Screams from forward told Captain Fyshyr Kraken had just taken another hit. That was the fourth, and whatever her other qualities might have been, Fyshyr's ship had never been designed and built as a true warship. In some ways, her thinner scantlings actually worked in her favor, since they tended to produce fewer and smaller splinters than the heavier sides of a warship. On the other hand, they also offered negligible resistance to the round shot slamming into her, and he'd already had at least seven men killed and twice that many wounded.
Which is less than we've cost the bastards! he thought with savage satisfaction.
Kraken's broadside and bulwark-mounted wolves had caught the pair of Delfarahkan launches headed for her completely by surprise. The wolves alone probably would have been enough to slaughter the launch crews, but the twelve thirty-pounder carronades in her port broadside, sweeping the water with double charges of grapeshot, had reduced the launches themselves to splintered driftwood. There'd been no survivors from either of them.
Nor had Kraken been idle since. She was the only Charisian ship in the entire harbor which could truly be considered armed, and she could only be in one place at a time, but she'd intercepted –and slaughtered — boarding parties headed for two other anchored galleons, and her own boarding parties had retaken three more. Fyshyr had too few men to divert to still more boarding parties without depleting his gun crews or dangerously weakening Kraken's own ability to stand off boarding attempts. But in addition to the five ships her direct intervention had saved, three more had managed to join up with her. All of them had at least a few wolves — enough to discourage any more boat crews from trying to get alongside them, now that their crews knew what was happening, at any rate — and Fyshyr had taken his own ship in as close to the waterfront batteries as he dared, scourging their embrasures with grapeshot in an effort to suppress their fire while other Charisian ships tried to fight their way out of the chaos closer in.
It didn't look as if very many of them were going to make it.
A third galleon caught fire, and Fyshyr's teeth ached from the pressure of his jaw muscles. He had no idea who'd set the flames aboard any of those ships, but unlike the seamen of most other nations, who had a tendency to sink like stones in deep water, Charisian seamen, by and large, swam like fish. Kraken had already recovered at least a dozen swimmers from the harbor water, and their gasped out, fragmentary accounts — plus the number of bodies Fyshyr himself had seen floating in the flame-mirrored harbor — made it horrifyingly clear what was going on aboard the beleaguered merchantmen. Even if they hadn't, he'd been close enough to see one of the galleons himself, silhouetted against the flames beyond her, as Delfarahkan boarders dragged struggling Charisians to the side of their ship. Blades had flashed in the fuming glare, and then the suddenly limp, no longer struggling bodies had splashed into the water like so much refuse.
"That's it, Sir!" Kevyn Edwyrds shouted almost in his ear. Fyshyr looked at him, and Kraken's first officer grimaced. "No one else is getting out of that, Sir!" Edwyrds said, waving one arm at the chaos, violence, and flames roaring along the wharves. "It's time to go!"
Fyshyr wanted to argue, to reject Edwyrds' evaluation, but he couldn't. There were too many Delfarahkan troops swarming over the galleons tied up at dockside. For that matter, most of the anchored Charisian merchantmen had already been taken by boated boarders, as well. Kraken and the eight ships following in her wake were the only escapees he could see, and the others weren't going to make it to sea without Kraken's continued protection.
"You're right," he admitted. "Shape a course for Spider Crab Shoal; we'll take the main channel."
Remember the Maine.
The Maine was a coalfire accident used as political leverage before serious investigation could prevent a war.
Right now, it’s looking like one man and virtually one ship taking over the main channel of a city’s harbor. This should be interesting.
God and Langhorne…
What a clusterbeley.
Sounds like Safehold’s version of pearl harbour. I guess once the surviving merchants return back to charis and their stories are told, Charis navy probably won’t have problem getting their funding for their expansion program.
Poor Navy bastards of Charis’ enemies…… They should all switch occupations now.
That privateer ship will be quite famous, I think.
E
The cause of the Maine’s destruction is still unknown, but the fact that Maine had never had a coal fire and was loaded with #1 anthracite, which rarely suffered from spontaneous combustion, was the basis for the Naval Board’s rejection of the coal fire overheating the magazine theory at that time. Rickover’s book nearly eighty years later blames coal, but I am not the first to point out that it would require a very high level of incompetence to fail to check BOTH bunker and magazine temperatures for long enough to allow the magazines to overheat. That was a standard four hour (once every watch)check.
I think that the board of naval officers in 1898 would have had a better grasp of that problem and the mechanism’s the navy had in place to prevent it than a single naval officer who had almost certainly never served on a coal fired warship.
In any case, “Remember the Maine!” was a rallying cry. “Remember Ferayd!” will probably be another.
CS
And her captain.
J
Seems to me that the inquisitors are going to be happy with this turn of events…at least initially. After all, since they’re fighting on God’s side, anything they do is justified so long as it hurts the “heretical” enemy. And they were probably planning on executing the sailors anyway, seeing as that’s how most repressive fundamentalist churches worked historically. The thing is, all that these types of slaughter do is invite reprisals, and even if (or perhaps though) the Charisians refrain from responding in kind, the inquisitors had better hope that Charis doesn’t win.
In their eyes, Charis can’t win. So no fear on that account.
Boy are they in for a suprise
I don’t think that the inquisitors will be happy how this came about. I looks like eight ships had been able to flee.
I hope that the son of the captain who has been described in the last snippet has survived.
Sir Vyk deserves to go down in history as a murderer, for his orders guaranteed needless deaths.
The only way on God’s green Safehold to accomplish this plan with a minimum of bloodshed would be to quietly, and secretly get the boarding parties on the docks, opposite the gangways of the merchies, with the men in front armored but carry bludgeons only, and those behind carrying swords and unloaded arbelests. Then, when they’re all ready, the barges to take the ships anchored in the harbor set out. When the noise from the harbor shows that the barges are boarding their targets, the men on the piers rush the gangplanks.
That might work, provided you’d sequestered most of the boarders a few days earlier, and had them rehearse the whole operation a few times.
As it is, his orders were certain to result in the situation that occurred.
Yes Stephen, you are probably right, but he didn’t have free hand how to plan and execute the action, because the priests were there.
It’s more than just Charis not winning in the Church’s eyes, they’re behind the power curve on intelligence and the only ones who know about the Charis-Chisholm unification are Charis and Chisholm and soon Emerald. The Church is about to lose 1/3rd of the planet and they don’t even know it yet.
I think the Inquisition is about to take the blame for this one. Sir Vyk and others like him will be able to give testimony to the effect that the Inquisition is the puppet master, which will serve to give people an “entity within the church” to blame rather than the Church itself, something that in time will ease the transition away from myth-authoritative leaders.
Snippet 102 said there were about 25 Charisian merrchants in the harbor with about 1/2 at the docks. 8 to 10 should escape. With the timing they should return just after the wedding begins. With the SNARCs, Merlin and Caleb will know and have an appropriate response. But they need to clean up their own backyard before going after this group. I can see Caleb leading the fleet in some dark night and just tearing this harbor apart.
Remember a town being burned in that snippet from the 3rd book? Care to bet it might be this one?
I think it’d be more in keeping with Cayleb and Merlin’s characters to burn the port, but not the port -town-. Torch all the warehouses, the shipping, the shipyards, anything directly related to maritime trade. Then leave.
It sets a clear, limited objective. It keeps the Charisian involvement limited, and doesn’t allow the marines to get drawn in or surrounded by (likely late) responding forces.
And it all spells out a clear message of “You attacked our shipping, unprovoked, and now you have none.”
I imagine the Inquisition is trying to orchestrate attacks like these across all Safehold as simultaneously as one can in an Age of Sail, but perhaps, if Charis can muster a raid quick enough, a few port commanders will give pause when the idea is presented to them.
Talking about the military response to this is all well and good, but this event needs to held in light of the issue of religion. Before now very few of Charis’s citizens have been killed and most of them were military members in battle. Now we have situation where a large number of Charis’s people have been “murder” (I put the word in Italics to show it is an opinion) at the hands of the church. Yes Sir Lakyr was the commander of the operation, but the common man will see who is really responsible and it is no longer just the “group of four.” Now with the introduction of the Inquisition it becomes plain that the the entire church is now out to destroy Charis. Here is where the title of the book comes from. This is the event, I believe, that will cause the final break between the church in Charis and the main church. Here is the schism and the true beginning of Safehold’s holy war.
Remember that Charis and Merlin’s eventual goal will be to win the favor of the populous in other nations so as to spread the truth. For that to happen, Charis has to present itself as the savior of everything right in the Church, and at the same time encourage innovation and free thought in its enemies. Charis is basically replicating itself in its foes by forcing them to think technologically, and thinking in one area will encourage questioning of other areas of thought.
There’s an appropriate phrase for this whose source I cannot remember:
“There is a single light of Science, and to light it anywhere is to light it everywhere.”
I’d like to see where the technology boom is atm in Charis.
So nine ships escape, out of 25 – not good, but not bad either. Looks more than ever like Ferayd will be torched in reprisal, and as a lesson to others. After one or two more of these, I would expect a competent and clever ruler somewhere to quietly assassinate the more foam-at-the-mouth local Inquisitors (blaming it on Charisian spies) so as to minimize their ability to drag HIS country into a Ferayd-like debacle. For all the small kingdoms, the name of the game now is hunker down, not be dragged into the fight, and elevate smuggling to an art. And keep removing any inconvenient Inquisitors, or distracting them, while keeping the economy going somehow. If they can survive economically while the larger empires get dragged into war with Charis by the Church, the smaller countries have an excellent chance to come out of this with their positions actually enhanced.
What snippet of third book?????
Hmm….How did the Inquisition in Europe especially where it held the most sway – in Spain and Italy, finally lose power and influence? That would be the path to try to emulate and improve upon.
What happened to the city is briefly described in the snippet from book 3 that can be found in the comments to BSRA snippet 88. It’s pretty clear that the reprisal does not occur in BSRA.
See http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2008/04/25/by-schism-rent-asunder-snippet-88/#comments
Yep, I was right. Same city. The old memory is good for something after all. Damn it, can the publication date get here soon enough?