Serial Sunday: Tranquillity, Part V
By Paul Leone.
The Doloire’s crew were perhaps still dazed from the encounter with the ætherokhelone. Its roar was legendarily and literally deafening, even to those men cursed with manning the cannons, themselves hardly whispering weapons. Or perhaps they did not expect the smaller, less heavily armed ship to swing about and come straight towards them.
Whatever the case might have been, it took a few seconds for the pirate ship to react when the Tranquilla did just that.
They tried to turn to bring their guns to bear before the Tranquilla could draw close, but Yim and the others in the bridge were able to match them, move for move, and the two ships held a steady relative course, each on its way to pass the other by.
Letizia leaned forward and gripped the deck railing. She studied the other ship intently, dearly hoping her insight proved true. If it didn’t, they were all likely to be dead in the next five minutes.
A gleam caught her eye. It was one of the stars shining behind the Doloire, a celestial ruby she recognized as Aldebaran, Ptolemy’s Lampadias. More stars cast their glows all around it. Letizia forced herself to focus on the ship, not the stars. But for a fleeting moment, Letizia could see the bright stars of Orion through the distant lens of the Doloire’s foremast. One of the Psalms came to mind just then, and Letizia smiled just a little as she recollected the words of David: Quoniam videbo caelos tuos, opera digitorum tuorum, lunam et stellas quae tu fundasti.
The reddish-brown bulk of the Doloire grew larger as the two ships closed on each other. Letizia could see, or imagined she could, the peeling paint on some of the letters in Caveat Dolatorium on the enemy’s bow.
“Captain,” Emma hissed. Her face was taut and pale. Letizia understood. The bowspits of the two ships were almost even now. In a moment, the broadsides would be facing each other, six guns to four.
Almost...
Almost..
“Now! Dive!” Letizia yelled. “Dive!”
The Tranquilla lurched as it left the plane of rotation and sank below the celestial center of gravity. Everyone aboard sharply jolted upwards before they steadied themselves. The pull was not yet too strong to resist, but it was unpleasant. Letizia could feel the blood rushing up into her head.
Letizia waited only a few seconds before calling out her next order. “Hard roll clockwise!”
A second later, the Tranquilla tilted sharply to the right. Loose objects slid that direction before veering upwards again, however improbable that seemed to Letizia’s understanding of the laws of creation. She hardly had time to ponder it, though. Instead she stared up at the pirate ship as it seemed to rise upwards, away from them.
“Hold... hold... fire!”
Emma repeated the order, rather more loudly, from her position by the speaking tube.
The Tranquilla’s four starboard cannons thundered. A second or two later, there was an answering roar as they struck the Doloire all along the aft portion of the keel. The keel... and the rudder. All of it was smashed to bits.
With a single blow, the Tranquilla had crippled its foe.
Letizia held her breath for a moment, then relaxed when it was clear neither shot nor shrapnel had detonated the pirate’s aeolipile. That would have been quite inconvenient for her purposes.
The rest of the battle was a target practice exercise for the Tranquilla’s crew, an exercise they attended to with considerable enthusiasm. Emma took the lead, directing cannon fire at the Doloire’s foremast to destroy the crystal there and prevent even prompt repairs of the rudder from allowing the ship to do more than limp on its way. Then the crew took care of the Doloire’s cannons, drawing from a heavy bronze and iron crate full of ceramic hand explosives to do so. Again, Emma took the lead. To be fair, her aim was excellent. She even managed to throw one of the explosives down the barrel of one of the cannons instead of just next to it. At any rate, within moments, the Doloire was without the means to propel itself, steer or shoot.
Letizia wasn’t surprised that they ran up the white flag of truce almost immediately. She strode to the railing around the forecastle and raised an ornate elvish speaking horn, a bronze thing delicately carved with scenes from Martian history, to her lips. “Captain Langley! Your ship is defeated. Will you surrender?”
There was a loud gunshot from the Doloire’s bow, but Letizia expected that. When none followed, aimed at either her or at her ship, she knew it was the traditional shot of surrender.
“I salute your skill, Captain Langley,” Letizia said. This was not entirely true. A cannier captain might not have fallen victim to her tactic. But the time for harshness was over. “May I come aboard and collect my due?”
Silence.
“Captain Langley?”
“Come aboard.” His voice was quiet and bristly. It made Letizia think of a cat with its fur up.
“Very good, sir,” Letizia said. “I shall be there presently.” She handed the speaking horn to Emma, who passed it on to another crewmember and followed Letizia down the steps to the main deck. Letizia raised an eyebrow at that.
“I will board at your side, Captain,” Emma said.
“Will you? And who will command the ship in our absence?”
“Yim, of course.”
Letizia pursed her lips. It was the obvious and best choice. Yim had long ago earned his position as third in command. But it was almost as irksome as it was touching that her first mate insisted on also serving as her bodyguard. Finally, she nodded. “Let us be about it, then. And let us hope Captain Langley remains so well-mannered.”
Letizia brought with her just a small boarding party. If the crew of the Doloire trampled their honor and made trouble, even her full complement would be overwhelmed. This way, more than enough remained behind to completely destroy the defeated ship, a fact that Letizia was certain that the pirates were fully aware of. Aside from Letizia and Emma, there were Reynolds, Yeung, and Korr-Kohera.
The Doloire’s crew didn’t make trouble. They watched sullenly as Letizia and her party crossed the gangplank laid between the two ships and stepped aboard the Doloire. Letizia looked at them in turn as she walked across the broad main deck of the pirate ship. She envied the spaciousness.
Langley stood with his back to the Doloire’s deck railing, seemingly unfazed by either the crippling or the boarding of his ship. His sword was in a fine black leather sheath at his side. He was taller and younger than Letizia expected, taller even Friar Matteo (himself rather tall at 5'8") and little older than Letizia (twenty-six), and ‘roguishly handsome’ as the balladeers might put it. Dark hair, green eyes, a muscular frame. If not for his brass-rimmed spectacles, Letizia might have guessed him a common sailor, but the spectacles lent him a vaguely philosophical guise.
Letizia nodded approvingly, indeed slightly more approvingly than she realized, as she stepped closer. “Good afternoon, sir. You have more than proved your honor.”
“I think your scales are more easily tipped than mine,” Langley said.
Letizia smiled tightly and went on. “I am not interested – much – in your gold and the rest of it. I will take a tithe, to keep my people fed and happy. The rest you can keep. All except a certain book. That I will take.”
“A book?”
“Yes. The Chorographica Aegyptæ that you stole from terrestrial corsairs, who themselves stole it from a certain fellow Genoese of some wealth. I assume you have kept it safe.”
“I have. But I will give you neither Chorographica nor coin, Captain Bruzzone.”
Letizia pursed her lips. “No?”
“No. Not a page, not a penny, not for blade or bite,” he said, looking first at Emma and then at Korr-Kohera.
“Come now, be reasonable.” Letizia said, trying to hide her pique at that comment. “I am not a brute. You have my word as a Christian that no harm will come to you. Besides, there’s nowhere for you to go, Captain Langley.”
“At last, she makes a mistake! There is everywhere for me to go, Captain Bruzzone.” Langley raised his hand in salute... then, just as Letizia realized his intentions, he grabbed the deck railing and swung himself over it, right into the fathomless æther. She lunged and her fingertips brushed the back of his shirt – too late. The English captain soon disappeared, swallowed up by the velvet darkness. For a second, she could hear his laughter before it faded beneath her quickened heartbeat.
Letizia stared into the æther, eyes wide, then she stepped back. “I’ll remember your courage,” she murmured as she crossed herself.
***
The book was an Italian codex, perhaps a 6th century priest’s copy of the Latin original. Letizia turned the brittle parchment pages very, very carefully. A look of reverence was on her face as she gazed down at the antique tome. The words were faded, but not so much she couldn’t make them out. The illuminations were rather more vivid. This particular page had an image of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
“Ah...” She sighed. “From your quill to my mind, great teacher, pray God.”
The Chorographica Aegyptæ was St. Victoria of Alexandria’s work about the mundane and mirabilia of her native country. It had been lost since the 5th century, when Gregory of Tours and Boethius had separately quoted parts, and Priscus the same, at somewhat more length, in various places in his history of Byzantium.
“A long voyage and a hard struggle for a book,” Emma said. She and the other officers were crowded into the captain’s room, where the codex lay on her desk.
“I would travel twice as far and struggle thrice as hard for this book,” Letizia said.
Yim looked at her, at the book, and then back at her. He said nothing, but nodded approvingly.
“And now to return it to Fregoso?” Friar Mateo asked after a moment. He eyed Letizia, not quite smiling beneath his salt and pepper beard.
“Fregoso? Fregoso??” Letizia scoffed. “‘The ass that heareth the lyre’ and nothing more! He does not deserve such a treasure. This I will read, and transcribe, and then I will deliver it to the Palatine Library in Rome myself.”
“We can keep the gold, though, right?” Emma asked.
“We can keep the gold,” Letizia assured her without looking up from the precious antique on her desk. “The usual distribution. And someone make a note of Captain Langley’s bravery, please.”
“Suicide is a most perilous sin,” Friar Mateo said.
“If he’s dead then it is right mass is sung for him, brother. If he died in sin, and who doesn’t, then we'll have two masses sung,” Letizia said. Then she waved them away. Once she was alone, she turned back to the first page.
If there is a longer river in the world than the Nile, I have not heard of it. If there is a fairer country in the world than Egypt, I have not heard of it. Let me tell you the facts of the land and its people.
Letizia sighed, happier than she had been in a long time, and settled in to read it properly...
FIN
Discuss this Article
Paul Leone is an author who, among other works, wrote the book In and Out of the Reich for Sea Lion.
Comments