David Drake - Tyrant

"Not so fast, dammit," she growled. When Adrian turned about, looking suitably guilt-faced, Helga gave him a fierce embrace and a kiss. Fierce, but brief. She understood that this was no time for lingering affections. She simply wanted — something.

He gave her an embrace and a kiss just as fierce as her own. So, after the door closed, she was able to face the moment with something close to serenity.

"You didn't tell him, did you?"

That was Ilset's voice, coming from behind her. Helga turned and saw that Jessep's wife was standing in the doorway, her own infant in her arms and a questioning smile on her face.

"The gods, no, " growled Helga. "If Adrian finds out I'm pregnant again, he'll never let me out of the wagon. Not once — you watch — in the whole coming campaign."

Ilset shook her head. "Why in the name of the gods would you want to? I mean — when soldiers get into their own lingo—" She made a face. "Gods, and they say women are boring!"

Helga didn't try to answer. There was no way she could explain. Not to someone like Ilset, at any rate. Nor, she suspected, to any woman she knew.

Her brother Trae would have understood, but he had long since departed. Trae, too, came from that ancient line which had never forgotten their duty , however much all others who claimed to be of noble blood might have done so.

She was too young to understand the absurdity of her sentiments. Her father could have explained to her how ridiculous it was to call treason "duty." Yet, all the while, he would have understood her perfectly.

Of course, Demansk also would have forbidden her to leave the wagon during the campaign, had he known she was pregnant. In that, if nothing else, the authoritative father was just as much a creature of custom as the rebel lover. Even if, to the world at large, the two of them were about to turn everything upside down.

Chapter 18

"Casull probably beheaded every priest in Chalice before he set out," jeered Thicelt, glancing up approvingly at the clear blue sky. "You can bet he's had them praying for bad weather for the last three months straight."

Standing next to him on the raised quarterdeck of the huge quinquireme which served as his flagship, Demansk smiled coldly. Whether or not the King of the Isles had actually executed any priests, Demansk had no doubt at all he was thoroughly disgruntled with them by now. And with his own deities, for that matter. Especially Lemare, the Goddess of the Sea.

The weather was perfect —had been for a week, with no sign of any change. The sea was calm, the winds just heavy enough to have made the fleet's passage down the coast and across the Western Ocean to the archipelago a matter of an easy week's voyage. Now, the largest fleet ever assembled in history was off the northeast coast of the island of Chalice. From his vantage point on the elevated quarterdeck, Demansk could see the caldera which formed the harbor of the capital, if not the city of Chalice itself. And, not too far to the west, perhaps ten or fifteen miles, the snow-covered Peak of the Sun God. The largest volcano in the archipelago was still somewhat active, although it had never erupted in historical times. There was a thin plume of smoke rising from its crest to the heavens — and rising almost straight up. Even at that altitude, obviously, the winds were light.

Demansk didn't doubt that every morning for the past many weeks the first thing King Casull IV had done, rising from his sleep, was to go out upon his balcony in the royal palace and stare up at that volcano. And then curse bitterly, seeing the same steady rise of the plume.

Half a century ago, the Confederacy had conquered and absorbed the Emeralds; and then, with that example before them, had coerced the Roper League and Hagga into accepting "auxiliary nation" status. From that moment forward, with the entire north coast of the continent under their control, there had been only three things which had kept the Confederacy from finally putting paid to the obnoxious pirates from the Western Isles.

The first was the increasing turmoil and lack of discipline among the Vanbert nobility, whose energies became more and more devoted to endless scheming and maneuvering for internal power. No one had been willing to allow any Speaker to gain enough power to amass the resources necessary to subjugate the archipelago — resources which, technically speaking, were quite easily within the reach of the Confederation. As Demansk had just proved, in a few short months.

The second was that when a leader did emerge who had the power to do so — Marcomann — he had been preoccupied with maintaining his own power. For all his undoubted ability, Marcomann had been guided by no vision whatsoever beyond his own aggrandizement. So he had turned the resources of the Confederacy toward a conquest of the western coast, the last area of the northern continent which still held enough territory to provide the land grants needed to win and keep the allegiance of his huge army.

Which, however shrewd a maneuver that might have been from the standpoint of keeping power, did the Confederacy no real good at all. It simply stoked the flames of internal feuding — Demansk's own father had spent most of his life preoccupied with gaining new lands in the west for his family — and just gave the pirates a fertile new area for plundering. Helga, in fact, had been seized in one of the raids on the western coast which had become so easy for the pirates in the last two decades.

The third and final factor was weather. Even for superb sailors like the Islanders and the Emeralds, bad weather could prove disastrous. For the lubberly Vanberts, one of the obstacles to devoting the resources needed to create the kind of giant fleet that Demansk had done was that a single storm could destroy it in a day. More than one Vanbert fleet, though none anywhere near as large as Demansk's, had met that fate.

Demansk had maneuvered successfully past the first two obstacles. The problem of weather he had solved in the simple and straightforward manner he had built the fleet itself. He'd simply timed his attack to coincide with the one time of year, late spring and early summer, when the weather in the northern reaches of the Western Ocean was almost invariably mild.

Still, it had been a gamble, even if one with good odds. But now that the gamble had paid off, Casull had no choice but to come out and fight a sea battle — against a fleet that was at least five times larger than anything he could assemble himself.

He couldn't simply keep the fleet in the harbor at Chalice, much as he might have wanted to. Granted, that harbor — and the city itself which rose up along the inner slopes of the caldera — was about as impregnable a fortress as any in the world. The ancient volcanic crater in which Chalice nestled still had three quarters of its circumference left. Casull could have easily blocked the narrow entrance to the harbor and bled the Vanberts for weeks, if they tried to break through.

Nor would he have had to use many men to guard the crater rim. Chalice had no walls for the simple reason that it didn't need any. The knife-edge ridges of the caldera itself were superior to any curtain wall and battlements ever constructed.

But that was also Chalice's weakness. The city was the best harbor in the world, true, but it was only a harbor. There was nothing — not a single path, much less a road, across the stark terrain which circled it — which connected Chalice by land with the rest of the island. The city depended on seaborne trade and fishing for everything, beginning with the food it consumed every day. Ironically, it was the worst city in the world to withstand a siege, for all that it could withstand it the best in narrow military terms.