How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Iron Coast
Jocelyn had not kept a meal down since they cleared the estuary. He hung over the leeward rail of the Gull-Wing, one hand wrapped so hard around a hemp stay that his knuckles looked like peeled turnips, his forehead pressed against the green, slimy oak of the gunwale, and the salt spray crusting on his eyelashes felt like sand ground into the corners of the lids after forty hours without sleep. He retched again, a thin, miserable spasm that brought up nothing but yellow bile and the bitter dregs of mint-water Victor had forced down his throat at sunrise.
“I’m going to kill my brother,” Jocelyn wheezed, his voice rattling in his throat like gravel in an empty pail. He didn’t lift his head. A grey roller slapped the hull three feet below, throwing a cold, stinging sheet of brine across his hair. “I swear it by the Seven Wells. When we get back to the Shire, I’m walking into the manor hall with an iron spit and driving it through his liver while he’s eating his venison.”
Victor sat three paces back on a salt-beef firkin, trimming a frayed leather cinch-strap with his thumb-knife. His own stomach was unsettled, the constant, sickening corkscrew roll of a flat-bottomed river barge trying to climb four-foot coastal swells was enough to churn any inland gut, but he kept his jaw set and his boots wedged firmly between two floor-timbers.
“Your brother didn’t buy the barges, Jocelyn,” Victor said, paring away a sliver of rotten rawhide. “Your father bought them. Three three-hundred-ton coastal haulers, built of mountain larch with iron knee-braces, currently saving you thirty-two days of dragging your baggage through the mud of the Northwind highway.”
“I would rather drag a wagon with my teeth,” Jocelyn groaned, his fingers slipping on the slimy stay as the barge lurched down into a trough, the bottom timbers shuddering with a hollow, groaning whump that vibrated straight through Victor’s boot-soles. “Look at the water, Victor. It isn’t even blue. It’s black. It looks like ditch-slop under an outhouse.”
It wasn’t ditch-slop. It was the Storm Sea, grey-green, freezing, and thick with torn bladder-wrack that drifted past the hull in vast, tangled mats.
Ahead of them, three cables out, the four lead transports pitched and wallowed in a ragged column, their single square-sails of coarse, oiled flax belly-tight in the northern headwind. They looked like clumsy wooden shoes bobbing in a horse-trough. Every time a swell took them broadside, the sweeps on the weather side would rise clear out of the froth, flailing like the legs of overturned beetles, before the heavy steering-oars slapped back down to bite the chop.
A man with arms like peeled ash-trunks came down the narrow starboard walkway, balancing without holding the rail, his boots tracking black bilge-grease across the deck.
Jonas Salt-Foot was fifty, smelled of sour rum and pickled cabbage, and carried an ancient, notched gaff-hook tucked into the broad hemp rope that served as his breeches-belt. He had lost the little finger of his left hand to frostbite off the Cape of Crows twenty winters back, leaving a neat, round pink knot where the knuckle should have been.
“Wind’s hauling east-northeast, my Lord Baron,” Jonas shouted over the hiss of the foam, his voice carrying that flat, deaf screech common to men who had spent forty seasons shouting against gale-rigging. He stopped beside Victor, took an unlit plug of mountain dock-leaf from his gums, spat a jet of brown juice into the froth, and tucked the weed back into his cheek. “The bar at the Huchen estuary will be breaking white before midday tomorrow. If the tide catches us outside the spit, these flat-bottomed tubs will roll their ribs out on the shingle.”
Victor looked up from his strap. “Can we clear the shoals under sweep?”
“Under sweep?” Jonas let out a wet, whistling laugh that sounded like an old pump losing its prime. “With forty central-valley weavers who think an oar is something you use to poke a hog out of a briar patch? Look at ‘em down there, sir. Half the rowing-gang has their heads in the ballast-gravel, praying to Saint Jude to take their souls before their gizzards turn inside out.”
Victor stood up, his hand catching the timber shroud-brace as the deck tilted beneath him. His joints were stiff, his balance adjusted to the hard, unyielding heave of the sea.
In his head, behind the temple where the cold wire thrummed, the Cinder had already completed the hydrodynamic projection.
Current vessel displacement: two hundred and eighty tons. Keel depth: six feet two inches. Estuary approach gradient: one in forty. Tidal velocity through the barrier spit: 4.2 knots during the flood. Risk of grounding under sail alone: seventy-one percent.
“We don’t take the main channel,” Victor said, his voice level, carrying through the wind with that dry, instructional tone he used when laying out ditch-lines. “Look at the shore-cliffs, Jonas. Two miles south of the headland, where the black basalt breaks into the grey gravel terrace.”
Jonas squinted through his watery, salt-reddened eyes, his grey brows knitting until they met over his broken nose. “The seal-cove? That’s nothing but gravel shallows, my Lord. Full of sunken drift-logs and black boulders that’ll rip the planking off a barge like cedar-bark.”
“There’s four fathoms of deep water along the south ledge,” Victor stated, remembering the coastal survey notes he had bought from the Gouen Chamber’s private charts in Brooke-Castell. “The river-current cuts an eddy behind the spit before it dumps its silt into the ocean. If we hug the black ledge within fifty yards, the eddy pulls the hulls in reverse. We don’t fight the flood; we ride the back-wash right onto the shingle.”
Jonas stared at the young nobleman, his plug of dock-leaf motionless between his teeth. For three seconds, his leathery face worked, the yellow seams around his eyes twitching with the deep, instinctive outrage of a sailor who had just been told how to read the sea by a boy who had grown up in an oil-mill.
“You’ve never smelled salt-water before this week, boy,” Jonas muttered, reaching for his gaff-hook.
“I’ve read the soundings, Jonas,” Victor replied, his eyes not wavering an inch from the old sea-dog’s face. “The Gouen factors ran three pinnaces through that cove two summers ago when they were smuggling iron-scrap to the western nomads. The water is there. And if you take three hundred tons of flour across the outer breakers in this chop, you’ll split the garboard-strakes, drown forty of my horses in the hold, and I’ll have Stellan hang you from the forestay by your one good foot.”
A heavy, sullen silence fell between them, broken only by Jocelyn’s weak, gurgling groan from the scuppers.
Jonas spat again, wiped his chin with his grease-soaked sleeve, and turned his back to look at the dark cliffs rising out of the foam to the northwest.
“It’s your flour,” the helmsman growled, though he swung his gaff-hook off his hip and began bellowing toward the companionway: “Deck-hands! Forward, you sheep-fuckers! Get the heavy leads out of the chest! We’re running the ledge before the tide turns!”
Victor didn’t watch him go. He walked down the narrow central walkway toward the main hatch, stepping over coils of stiff, brine-frozen cordage and bundles of spare oars lashed along the coaming.
Below decks, the stench hit him like a wet wool blanket pulled out of a cesspit.
Three hundred horses were packed into the central hold of the three transports, their stalls separated by rough ash-poles lashed to the ceiling-knees with rawhide thongs. The air was hot, thick with the ammonia reek of stale dung, horse-urine, and the sweet, greasy smell of frightened animals. Every time the hull dropped into a trough, forty tons of live horseflesh lurched sideways against the timber bulkheads, the heavy mountain crosses from Fell-Cress kicking the planks with an iron thrum-thrum-thrum that sounded like sledgehammers striking an empty cask.
Stellan was down there, knee-deep in dirty straw, holding an iron lantern whose yellow beam flickered over a wild-eyed bay mare that had slipped her hocks between two floor-timbers.
“Hold her head, you idiot!” Stellan was shouting at a young carter’s boy whose face was white as a peeled turnip. “Don’t pull the halter or she’ll snap the jaw-bone! Get an ash-lever under the knee! Lift when the hull rolls to port!”
Victor dropped down the ladder-rungs, his boots squelching into the wet manure. He didn’t ask questions; he grabbed a five-foot spruce pry-bar from the wall-rack, wedged the flat tip under the mare’s hock, and threw his whole weight down on the lever just as the barge rose on the crest of a roller.
The wood groaned. The mare let out a high, whistling shriek of terror, her nostrils spraying red snot across Victor’s shoulder, but the hooves cleared the gap. She scrambled to her feet on the wet straw, shuddering from ears to croup, her flanks heaving like dry bellows.
“Tie her short,” Victor panted, his breath white in the dark, warm hold. “Two feet of lead, no more. If she drops again, she’ll break the leg and we’ll have to salt her down before the meat spoils.”
Stellan wiped a mixture of horse-sweat and grease from his forehead with the back of his wrist, his teeth bared in an ugly snarl. “Three more days of this, Master Victor, and half these beasts will be dead of the colic. They aren’t eating the grain. They’re terrified of the floor moving under ‘em. When a horse won’t eat his oats, his belly locks up like an iron box.”
“They eat tonight,” Victor said, catching the timber rib to steady himself as the vessel heeled sharply to starboard. “We’re running for the beach in two hours. We hit the shingle, drop the bow-ramps, and get every hoof onto dry gravel before sundown.”
Stellan looked up through the open hatch toward the grey sky. “The boy said there was smoke on the headland.”
“There is,” Victor said, flatly that meant the ledger was open and the entries were being made. “Jethro’s vanguard was supposed to light three fires if the timber fort was clear, and two if there were nomads on the prairie.”
“How many did you see?”
“One,” Victor said. “Just one. A thin smudge that blew out fifteen minutes after it went up.”
Stellan went quiet. He reached down, picked up a handful of dry straw from an unopened bale, and began rubbing the trembling mare’s neck with long, rhythmic strokes that had forty years of horse-sense in the muscle.
“One fire means trouble, sir.”
“One fire means somebody had their hand on the bellows when an arrow took them through the neck,” Victor said, reaching for the ladder-rungs. “Keep the men in their jacks. Tell Jethro to have fifty billmen with their boots on, sitting by the ramp-pins with their spears in their fists. If we hit that beach and find northern lances in the scrub, I don’t want my infantry coming out of the hole looking for their helmets.”
He climbed back up into the wind.
The coastline had closed on them now, rising out of the grey sea like an iron wall.
It was a bleak, terrifying land. The black basalt cliffs fell sheer into the foam, their faces scarred by centuries of winter surf, topped by an endless, rolling plateau of pale yellow prairie-grass that rippled under the gale like the back of a wolf. There were no trees, only dwarf willows huddled in the deep, water-cut ravines, their leaves already turning the color of dried blood under the early frost. Above it all, three leagues inland across the yellow grass, the dark line of the Huchen River cut through the plains, cold, wide, and silent, winding toward the distant, ice-blue shoulders of the mountain range.
Jonas stood at the high steering-bench, his coat soaked black with spray, both hands locked around the eight-foot tiller-tree.
“There’s the ledge, my Lord!” the sailor yelled, pointing with his three-fingered hand toward a spit of black rock where the sea was boiling into white lace. “The current’s taking us! Hang onto your teeth, boys! We’re going in on the swell!”
The barge surged.
It did not feel like sailing; it felt like being picked up by an iron shovel and thrown toward the stones. The green timber of the hull shrieked as the cross-current caught the stern, swinging three hundred tons of oak and flour sideways toward the basalt wall. Men were screaming along the walkways, clutching the rails, while the great larch sweep-oars bent like willow-wands under the weight of the water.
Then the ledge took them.
Just as Victor had calculated, the back-wash from the river-mouth hit the port flank with the force of a solid wall, checking the drift, spinning the bow forty degrees north toward a narrow gap in the shingle. The water went smooth, not calm, but flat, oily, rushing toward the beach with the terrifying speed of a mill-race.
With a sound that made every man on deck drop to his knees—a long, grinding, bone-shivering roar of oak planking scraping over round river-stones—the Gull-Wing took the ground.
The vessel heeled twenty degrees to port, righted itself as the gravel packed around the bilge, and sat motionless in six feet of churning foam, fifty yards from the dry rocks of Northmarch.
Victor stood high on the forward deck-house, his left hand gripping the forestay, his cloak whipping behind him like a crow’s wing in the gale.
A quarter-mile up the beach, where the gravel gave way to the yellow grass of the bluff, a crude timber observation tower stood against the sky, built of drift-logs and lashed with green willow-withies.
At the top of the tower, fluttering stiffly in the northern wind, hung a frayed, soot-blackened banner bearing the flowering sunflower of House Gold-Tallow.
And beneath the tower, sprawled across the stones like a bundle of wet rags, lay the dead body of an ash-horse, its ribs picked white by the gulls.