The Sands of Saturn - Chapter 25

The Kushor

Kanmi watched the last bit of shoreline disappear as they passed the last part of the continent, continuing on towards Britannia, hoping the god of the sea that his ship was named for, was watching over them. Normally they would travel further along the northern part of Gaul until they got to the shortest span between the two landmasses, but that required traveling between the northern part of Iberia and the southern coast of Britannia.

They’d already encountered a handful of merchants and fishermen since passing the corner of Iberia, and the closer they got, the more likely the Romans would be able to guess their destination. Unlike the ships of the Northman, their quinquereme was too heavily loaded to just pull up onto any beach. If they only had the trireme’s, they could have found one of the shallow sandy shores to pull onto, but they needed the quinquereme to carry all the men and equipment they needed for this campaign.

The larger boats’ deeper drafts meant that they needed some kind of port. Although it would be preferable to have an actual built-up port with a functioning harbor, the governor’s loss of the island kept that from being an option, leaving only one of the natural harbors scattered along the coast, where they could get close in and use smaller boats to ferry everyone ashore. It would be a slow process, however, which also meant it was even more important to not attempt it under fire, which meant they needed to keep the Romans guessing until enough of their force was ashore to form a beachhead.

The good part was they had a series of surveys of the southern half of the island going back twenty or thirty years, so he knew what his options were. Which is why he was forced to cross as soon as they could, heading straight north once they hit the corner of Iberia, even though it meant a long stretch without land they could follow.

Although the waves didn’t get to the heights they would if he moved directly away from the continent, he still had his ships pull in tighter, which was a problem all on its own.

The Victoria

“Knowing where you are and if you’ve traveled too far north or too far south should keep you on that line,” Ky said, handing the circular metallic object he’d had Hortensius work up, back to Valdar. “At night, you can also use the north star to do the same thing.”

“That’s basically how we’ve been doing it, getting direction from the north star or the sun, but I never imagined it’d be anything more than a general guide of which direction we were facing.”

“Which is probably pretty effective. If you have the right maps, showing you the seas broken down in sections that match the degree marks on the astrolabe, you can always know exactly where you are, at least when going east or west. There are ways to tell where you are north and south as well, but that will take more time; so for now, this will have to do.”

“I don’t suppose you have one of those maps handy?” Valdar asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Ky said, handing over a rolled piece of vellum, the prepared animal skin was expensive but able to hold up to the constant humidity on the ship.

Valdar unrolled it, looking at the burned-in lines and shapes of the continent showing the known world. Ky had another version he’d hand over later, that showed North America and the Pacific, instead of stopping partway across Asia. He needed to lay more groundwork before he revealed what the entire world looked like and he didn’t want them trying an Atlantic crossing in the ships they had currently, as they wouldn’t stand up to it. As it was, this would go a long way to revolutionize sea travel, especially once they finished with this invasion force and he could get Hortensius to produce compasses. The two together would be enough to allow vessels to break from the coastlines, creating more efficient trade routes and opening up new lands to them.

“You realize the value of something like this? Your enemies would be able to do a lot with something like this.”

“I do, and they’re our enemies now,” Ky said. “And I’d suggest you keep it close, although eventually I expect it will eventually get out. All of our ship masters will need something like this, if we’re going to continue our expansion and become self-sufficient. We can’t let the fear of our enemies getting this keep us from using it. We’ll just have to come up with new advantages once these get out.”

“None of which helps now, since knowing where we are doesn’t tell us where their fleet is.”

“Between your ships you have circling the area and the fishermen we asked to keep an eye out, we have a rough idea where they are.”

“Rough being the key word. A few mille passus this way or that, and we could completely pass their entire fleet. And it’s costing me a fortune having them circling the sea between Iberia and Britannia, instead of running back up towards Asia, now that the northern ports are starting to lose their ice.”

“Rough is enough and we’ve already agreed to cover your losses while they help search for this fleet. As long as we can get within thirty or forty mille passus, I’ll be able to direct us to them. Besides, I have a good guess of where they’re going to land, especially if your last captain was right about seeing them hold straight off the coast.”

“He was at a pretty far distance, but he’s a good man. If he said they held a northern course, then they did, so unless it was a feint and they suddenly turned east to head up the channel, then yes, I think it’s right.”

“Good. Then our course should get us close enough that I can bring us onto target.”

“Then we only have to hope those monstrosities are worth your men carving up my ship. With the wind like it is, I’ll be able to outrun any of their oar-powered ships, but I’m not going to be able to fight them,” Valdar said, pointing at the forward-mounted cannon pointing on either side of the bow and then to the symmetrical pair on the other end of his ship, pointing off it’s stern.

“They will,” Ky said, looking past the guns into the open sea.

“I hope so. Now, can you explain to me again why we had to give my boat a silly Roman name?” Valdar said with a smirk.

They’d had this same argument every hour since Ky had come on board, although he was pretty sure the shipmaster was now doing it as a way of messing with him, since he wasn’t a fool and could understand all of the reasons why Ky thought the ship should be Britannian, not just borrowed from a Scandi merchant.

Ky was pretty sure the man just liked to argue, as he started to list off all the reasons for the hundredth time.

The Kushor

Kanmi was tired as the sun came up across the water, showing they were still heading more or less north. They’d have to adjust once they saw land again, but all in all, he was happy with their progress, especially considering he had more boats under his command at one time than any other sailor in the history of the empire. It looked as if they’d lost another five ships in the night. Two he knew for sure, seeing them collide and hearing the screams. The rest was word passed from ship to ship when he called for a check for the status of the fleet, which meant it could have been a few more or a few less, but either way, the numbers were acceptable. He’d probably lose another handful before the journey was over, but they’d still land with an army large enough to crush whatever the Romans threw against them.

“Sail, my lord,” the lookout leaning against the prow of the boat called out, pointing north.

Walking past the exhausted rowers, Kanmi stared over the water, trying to make out what the lookout could see. The young man had been picked for his excellent eyesight and even with his help, it took several minutes for the Kanmi to find what he’d seen. The ship was still coming over the horizon and only the single sail was visible from this distance, although that was enough for him to identify the ship.

It was too large to be that of one of the fishing boats they’d seen and even a Roman trireme’s sail would be masted closer to the body of the ship than this was, with the ship up higher along the mast, which meant it was one of the Scandi. The quarrelsome merchants didn’t venture into the middle sea often but they were all over Oceanus and far down the coast of Oceanus. They paid their tribute and had enough difference to keep from having their ships seized when they came into ports, but they had a stark independent streak that Kanmi hated.

There’d been word that the Scandi had been more active in the area since the island fell to the Romans, taking advantage of the breaking of Carthaginian control of shipping. The emperor had made comments that suggested their willingness to trade with the Romans was enough to change their status with the Empire, making their ships open season for all Carthaginian captains, but as of yet, that hadn’t happened. The Scandi had a healthy sense of self-preservation, though, and the several Scandi ships they’d seen had turned and run as soon as they’d seen Kanmi’s armada. This one seemed to have less sense, continuing on towards him, the body of the ship coming into view.

“If he keeps coming at us, send one of the unloaded Trireme’s to intercept it. It can’t carry enough men to stop even one of our ships, but there’s a chance they’re working for the Romans and if they’re suicidal enough, they could light their ship off once they were in among us.”

At their current speed, the small boats they used to pass messages as well as offload men and supplies couldn’t make it back and forth, meaning they had to use a message line with a waterproof pouch attached to a shot and line and thrown by the strongest man on the boat. It sometimes took several tries, but eventually they made it.

Then something happened that Kanmi didn’t count on. As the ship closed the distance, two plumes of smoke appeared at the front of it, partially obscuring it from view. Kanmi was just starting to try and think what could have caused the smoke to suddenly appear, when two booms like the sound of rocks falling from a great height onto a stone bottom, sounded several seconds apart, one after the other. Then the unthinkable happened.

There was a crashing sound on the ship to his left as wood planks shot into the air just above the waterline and men began to scream. He couldn’t see the ship on the other side of it from him, but the way the mast started to twist, something had happened there too.

They were in the middle of the ocean, so it wasn’t possible that they’d struck anything. The way the boards shot out, it was almost like when a catapult shot crashed into a ship, except that happened with a stone falling straight down, and that hadn’t happened here. The explosion had been at the water line and the boards had shot out horizontally, as if it was struck directly on. Which was impossible.

“Signal the fleet to slow,” he yelled as the other ship began to sink. “Prepare to rescue the men in the water.”

He hadn’t ordered the fleet to stop specifically to help. He’d let the other ships that had gone down during the voyage to fall behind in their wake, but he wasn’t sure what had caused the damage to make two of his ships begin sinking. Ramming the rest of his fleet into whatever it was, would just create more disaster.

Although he’d been looking at the ship in the distance, it wasn’t until it again let out a puff of smoke and a set of booms that he realized whatever had hulled his two ships had come from the Scandi ship in the distance. It boggled the mind that the ship would be able to do anything at this extreme distance, but he saw two streaks this time, as whatever the projectile that sunk his first two ships passed across the canvas of its original victims before ripping through his next two boats. The one he could see, the tear was higher and went at a steeper angle, tearing a long gash down the front and out the side just at the waterline, letting sea rush into the boat, already causing it to list.

No catapult he’d ever heard of could do what he was seeing! Firing at that distance, at that angle, and with that much power? It was plowing through thick ship timbers like twigs. Except there was clear evidence that this one did. The crashing sound didn’t make sense, especially one so loud it could be heard over the sound of waves, but it didn’t change what he needed to do.

“Get us moving. Rowers to the double stroke. We need to get to that ship. Archers on deck. Order the fleet to follow and take that ship.”

With his ship taking off like it was, it would be hard for them to throw a message line or yell to the next closest ship, but they’d see him moving and figure it out. As the largest of the quinqueremes it was unlikely even his extra set of rowers would be able to catch the nimble Scandi ship, but once his smaller Bireme’s got into the chase, especially the unloaded ones he’d planned to use as flankers and scouts, they might have a chance of catching it, especially if they could chase it closer to shore where the cross winds would slow the sail drive ship down.

The Victoria

“They’ve figured out we’re the problem,” Ky said after the cannons fired a fifth and sixth time, sinking two more ships. “Turn us around.”

“I’ve given up asking how you can tell,” Valdar said, turning to yell orders at his men.

“You men move to the stern cannon,” Ky said to the loaders Hortensius had loaned him for the battle.

They’d at least trained on how to properly reload a cannon, which is all Ky needed. Only being able to bring two cannons to bear at a time and the number of ships he had to sink with limited gunpowder, Ky had taken the task of aiming and firing them upon himself. Even with a full bank of guns, learning to aim guns on a ship that was constantly raising and lowering with the waves took hundreds of hours of gunnery practice and a significant amount of gunpowder, neither of which Ky had in great abundance.

What he did have was a tactical computer capable of tracking thousands of variables a second and plotting continually adjusting firing solutions. Eventually Ky was sure he’d miss, but so far he’d managed to down six ships with six cannonballs. It helped that these ships weren’t built like the ships of the age of gunpowder and sail, their overlapping boards being much harder to patch than the fitted boards on later designers, which could be potentially be planked over to regain a water-tight seal.

He’d also taken the time to fire a few shots the day before, so the crew would have some comfort with the booming canon and could continue doing their jobs without panic. He’d actually hoped the Carthaginians would panic more, and gained a grudging respect for the admiral, who’d only needed two volleys to figure out what was going on. Ky had hoped they be paralyzed by fear for a little longer, allowing him to pick off a few more before they got their act together.

Still, phase one had done what it needed to do. Now it was time to start phase two.

The Kushor

Sweat gathered on Kanmi’s neck in spite of the cool early spring weather. The chase had been going on for the better part of four hours and it wasn’t going well for him. The demon-spawned ship was faster than his larger, more durable ships and could sweep away his smaller ships as easily as if the gods had stabbed a mighty finger out, sending them to the depths at their whim.

After those first few minutes of confusion, he’d actually thought they might be able to end this early as his smaller ships began making headway as the sail-driven Scandi ship fought against the wind during its turn back north. They weren’t. As soon as the ship turned, sailing away from his armada, it began spitting the plumes of smoke again, sending its projectiles tearing through the ships that had been closing in.

A few of his larger ships actually managed to take several shots before sinking, but they still sank. Any ship that the Scandi vessel decided to single out was destined to rest at the bottom of the ocean. After losing a large portion of his smaller, faster vessels, and it became clear he had nothing that could get close enough to the Scandi ship without sinking, he’d tried to disengage. He was already losing more ships than he could afford, sending not just sailors and boats to the bottom, but hundreds and hundreds of well-trained soldiers needed for the battle once they made land. Kanmi decided it would be better to ignore it as he would a buzzing fly and go on with his mission.

Unfortunately, the fly had a bite. As soon as he got his ships turned away from the chase, it too turned, and began picking off the back of his fleet, two ships at a time. It was clear there was no way he was going to get away from it before it managed to sink his entire fleet. His only hope was to push it against the coastline and hopefully hem it in and force it into a boarding.

That last turn had been hours before, and the damage it inflicted was incalculable. Several dozen more ships had gone down and his overall fleet was now almost half the size of what it had been when he’d watched the sunrise that morning. The only good news in the entire debacle so far was that the gallows damned ship’s destruction had greatly slowed. That morning, its noise and smoke announced destruction every few minutes, but as the day wore on, that had slowed until now it only destroyed a handful of ships an hour. Still much faster than his fleet could take, but at least not at the rate that he would run out of ships before he reached the coastline.

He just had to hope that the rate of destruction continued to slow enough that he still had even part of an army left to put on shore.

The Victoria

“Why have your …” Valdar started to say and then paused, searching for a word.

“Cannon,” Ky said.

“Yes, cannon. Why have your cannon stopped firing as fast? As deadly as those things are, you could have destroyed the entire fleet by now, if you’d kept it at the same speed you were going this morning.”

“Not enough ammunition,” Ky said, pointing at the now greatly shrunken stack of supplies he’d had loaded onto the ship during their hurried departure from Devnum. “We could only bring so much gunpowder and cannonballs. It’s okay. We’ve shown them we’re a threat and forced them to follow us a little longer. We need to keep them on the hook, though. Pull in a little more sail, let’s let them start to gain a little ground on us.”

“That’s risky. If we get a bad wind and they’re close enough, they could overtake us,” Valdar said. “That’ll become a real danger once we get closer to the coast.”

“Just do your best. I need them to stay on us until we pass that point,” Ky said, pointing at the map.

The Kushor

The sun was low in the sky as the cliffs of the southern shore came into sight. Kanmi hadn’t sailed this close to Britannia before, but if they kept this heading, after catching up to the damnable Scandi, there was a port he could use. It would at least give him a chance to offload what soldiers he had left and try and repair the damage to the ships caused by running through their destroyed fleet mates.

The ship had continued to slow its destruction of his fleet, but he was still losing ships and men he couldn’t afford to lose, with just over forty ships left on the water. Enough soldiers had gone to the bottom that he wasn’t confident that the army he had left to land would be able to go up against the Romans.

At this point, it would be smarter to turn around and head to a friendly port on the continent and try again another day …or at least, it would be smarter if that wouldn’t lead to his head in a noose. The amount of resources put into this force meant the emperor would be displeased if it was unsuccessful, more so if he lost most of the ships and men in the process. And the emperor’s displeasure was usually only placated with deaths.

The only bright point was that he had started to close on the Scandi, who’d started to pull in sail as they got closer to the shore. It had taken hours to make up the ground. Hours where he kept losing ships, but he was now just outside of arrow range. At the rate he was gaining, it would be dark by the time he got close enough to drop his boarding hook, but there was supposed to be a full moon that evening, which would have been enough to let him board the smaller ship.

“Archers at the ready,” Kanmi called out as they turned west to follow the coastline, the distance closing a little more, putting them into extreme arrow range, or at least extreme range on the water.

“Is something burning on that cliff?” one of the sailors near him said, pointing up towards a cliff to the north, interrupting the order to fire.

Kanmi looked up to the cliff as the first projectiles screamed down on them from above, a cloud of smoke already obscuring whatever had fired. It had been a trap. All of it. The Scandi ship had stayed in range, slowing their fire to keep Kanmi chasing them, allowing him to get a little closer every hour, to make him feel like they almost had the battle won, in spite of the damage it had inflicted, all to keep him walking into their trap.

Kanmi started to yell for the men to turn hard away from the coast when a cannonball tore him in half before plunging deep into the ship.