Accidental War Mage

I hit the water with arms and legs spread wide, the better to slow my fall by creating a large splash. Weighed down with over a hundred grivnas of Corsican brass, however, I still sank below the surface rapidly. Screams and gunshots were muffled; underwater, the louder sounds were the creaks and groans of wooden structures coming apart, the thrashing splashes of men in the water, the squeals of dolphins, and the beautiful songs of the mermaids. Sound is indeed richer under the water, and I spent several stunned seconds appreciating that fact before I started trying to swim upward.

Fortunately, dolphins are very helpful creatures, fond of humans in general, and I had little difficulty convincing one I ought to be conveyed back to the surface. The more difficult part was holding on; seawater is slippery, and dolphins are both smooth and shaped quite unlike a horse, donkey, or mule, which accounted for the entirety of my previous riding experience.

On our third attempt at an ascent, my head finally broke the surface of the water not far from a small leaky boat filled with pirates. As I filled my aching lungs and the spots faded from my vision, the pirates briefly discussed my presence and decided to paddle away with blistering swiftness. Most of the aft half of the pirate’s galley was still floating, though poorly; of the front, there was no sign other than a spreading field of flotsam and desperate men.

The galley slaves had the worst of it, being chained to their benches. As the dolphin brought me to the ragged floating wreck, I told him I would appreciate it if his friends tried to keep the chained men from drowning. I had not yet seen any familiar faces, but the fact that some of my own men had been stolen away put the fact that the slaves were not voluntary participants in piracy at the front of my mind.

I said nothing about the pirates themselves, a fact that would cause me shame later as the dolphins spent considerable effort bringing several dozen thoroughly drowned galley slaves back to the surface and very little on the pirates in the water. Dolphins are in general optimistic creatures, particularly on the subject of how long a human might be motionless simply trying to conserve its air; perhaps if their attention had been focused on the unchained men, more men might have lived.

The only galley slaves that survived from the pirate galley we had rammed were some of those in the still-floating aft part of the wreck. Unfortunately, even though I struck the chains off them as quickly as I could, my bronze sword cutting through the cheap iron like a sharp knife through overcooked beets, I could not save all of them, either. If the children’s fairy tales Felix later told me were true, perhaps a few of those who slid into the ocean were rescued by mermaids and chose to stay with them below the waves. It is sometimes said that a mermaid’s kiss is a fine comfort to a drowning man.

Unfortunately, I cannot accord those tales the status of confirmed truth. Children’s stories are often made up to entertain them, and the mermaids I spoke to were not forthcoming on the subject of their private lives. All I know is that they displayed some undisguised interest in human men, some degree of insecurity in their appearance, and odd feelings about the unfair fact that human women generally came supplied with two lovely legs instead of a tail. That particular reserve might be peculiar to the mermaids that roam between the Aegean and Axine Seas; Felix, upon being challenged, claimed the mermaids of the distant north were more forthcoming.

The rate at which the wreck of the rammed galley sank slowed as I proceeded on my mission of rescue and salvage. Wood generally floats, men and wood together tend to be roughly buoyant, and anything much denser had already slid off into the ocean. By the time I had finished severing every chain I could find, the cannons and arquebuses had fallen silent. One pirate galley had fled and the third was a blood-soaked hulk riddled with grapeshot.

The battle completed, we rescued as many men as we could from the wreckage, whether pirates, galley slaves, or other captives. This included many of the slaves on the intact hulk, as the decking had afforded them some protection against the grapeshot fired by the steam knights’ cannons.

In theory, that bullet-riddled hulk might have been repaired and set back into motion in spite of the damage from our artillery, provided one was willing to spend the effort on cleaning the dead and the debris off, mending the sails, and manning it with oarsmen. In consideration of our limited manpower, we rescued who we could rescue, took what we could take aboard, and fired the hulk with the dead aboard.

While setting the ship on fire was not strictly necessary, it made me feel better. It seemed cleaner somehow. I also thought it was a more respectful way to give the dead pirates a funeral than leaving the bodies to slowly rot on a floating hulk. The hulk burned almost to the waterline, sinking lower and lower under the weight of its bombard.

The bombard may have been valuable, but it was far too heavy to try to transfer from the hulk to our quinquereme. We did retrieve cargo that included silver, amber, spices, salted fish, olive oil, wine, grappa, and a very nice chess set carved in an exotic style out of ivory and ebony. There were also three or four captives who had not been put to work in the galley, including a nobleman who claimed his safety was worth a good ransom, two women, and a very pretty boy dressed in a feminine manner whom the women insisted was not a pirate in spite of his lack of chains.

The captain of the surviving pirate galley must have decided that discretion was the better part of valor; that ship was nowhere to be seen by the time we finished cleaning up after the battle, having sailed away at its best speed.

With a wakeful weather-witch, the wind moved us along at such a clip that the blonde mermaid asked me if I would drop a line off the aft end of the ship for her to cling to. She was tired; we were moving quite quickly; and she wished to follow us. If we gave her a tow, then she could relax and later call her sisters to let them know where to follow. Cognizant of the role of mermaids in bringing me the ship in the first place and increasingly aware of the fact that a man in metal armor with the water of the sea beneath him is well-served by having friendly aquatic creatures nearby, I granted her request without reservation.

The lot of a galley slave is not a pleasant one. Men chained for long periods are likely to develop sores, to fall ill from the bad air, and a whiff of grapeshot tends to be accompanied by wounds that can easily be infected in the filth of the rowing benches. Even men not struck directly by grapeshot or round balls or the shrapnel of an explosive shell may be blasted with splinters or have part of the deck fall in upon them.

In the next two days, eleven former galley slaves and three former pirates died from their wounds, infections, or as a violent consequence of attempting mischief of some kind. We tossed their bodies overboard with as much ceremony as we could afford, funeral services being conducted by an ex-slave who claimed to have been a monk.

He was at least fluent in Latin, although I am not sure the proper Latin service in the western style includes commending the soul of the deceased to the Archangel Lucifer, bringer of light, and imploring said fallen angel to torment the damned soul of said deceased without mercy. This particular prayer was only included in four out of fourteen cases, adding to my sense that it was a very irregular addition to the liturgy.

With favorable winds whenever the weather-witch was awake and more experienced sailing hands ready to help transform partially favorable winds into forward motion, we made quite swift progress even before repairing and replacing enough oars to bring the rowing-engine back into action. We did not encounter any more pirates as we sailed on, or at least, none that came close. We did see a French cruiser in the distance near Crete. The spinning paddlewheels, the gleam of Corsican brass, and the markedly larger size of the vessel made identification easy.

The journey was pleasant, and I spent half my time in the crow’s nest. It is ironic that the most private place on the ship was also the place with the best view. I explicitly discouraged Katya from shooting the blonde mermaid, telling her that it was difficult for a man in metal armor to remain afloat without assistance from aquatic animals. I did not mention that in my case, it had been a helpful dolphin; I felt sure that the friendly mermaid would have been similarly willing to assist had she been closer.

The blonde mermaid continued to inquire after Ragnar’s well-being; I was happy to inform her that he seemed to have shaken off most of his saddened mood. In rare private moments, he wrote poetry on scraps of paper; at sunset, he would go to the edge of the railing, peering in the direction he imagined Venice to be, whisper the poem under his breath, and then cast it into the sea.

The mermaid collected several of these poems, committing them to memory before the seawater blurred the ink into illegibility. She recited one for me; it was a sonnet about a masked woman with golden hair who guarded a ruby-red treasure. When the mermaid asked if the poem was about her, I paused for a moment. Recalling how Katya had reacted when I compared her assets to those of the baron’s daughter, I decided it was probably kinder not to launch into a comparison of Bianca’s attributes and how those attributes more closely matched the description in the poem.

Instead, I asked her if she guarded a ruby-red treasure beneath the waves, which helped move the conversation in a different direction without hurting the mermaid’s feelings.

We stopped twice at small islands to take on fresh water and let off whoever wished to be let off; at the first stop this meant the two women, the boy, and half of the surviving former galley slaves; at the second stop, two of the former pirates, both of those being men who spoke fluent Greek. The nobleman, after several days of telling me a ransom would be paid for his release, proved uninterested in being let off at a small fishing village; he said he would rather accompany us to Negroponte, where we would surely be able to collect a reward for our troubles.

So, I agreed to take him to Negroponte, thinking it would be no trouble at all.