Chapter 186: Home, Considerably Changed
🏴 [FLEET OVERVIEW — CALLOWAY’S FLEET]
Bloody Rose — Flagship
Type : Brigantine
Size : Large for her class
Role : Line Combatant
Armament : 44 Broadside Cannons, 2 Mortars, 4 Swivel Guns
Perks : [The Rose’s Luck], [True Shot], [Devil’s Hull]
Status : Homebound, Combat Ready
Grand Dame — Man o’ War
Type : Galleon
Size : Large for her class
Role : Line Combatant
Armament : 46 Broadside Cannons
Perks : [Coastal Giant]
Status : Homebound, Undermanned
Marianne — Screen
Type : Sloop
Size : Average for her class
Role : Skirmisher
Armament : 14 Broadside Guns
Status : Homebound, Combat Ready
James kept his hands on the wheel and watched the reef show pale beneath the water ahead.
It was the very stretch of coral that had put the first grey hairs on Grey’s head when they found this bay, and James had no doubt the reef was pleased to see him again.
It had been near enough two months since the Marianne sailed out through this very passage, with the ambition to find a home for plunder nobody had managed to sell.
About one week had gone into reaching Havana, when Ambrosio’s hospitality turned into betrayal.
Then came the days spent healing, followed by more days to plan for getting himself into a Spanish prison on purpose.
Then came all the lunacy required to get himself back out.
Then there was the battle.
Then there was the Rose finding him with scarcely few minutes to spare.
And after all that came the week of nursing more than five hundred tons of Spanish timber across open water with a skeleton crew aboard to do the work.
So it came to almost two months since he’d last seen this reef, and James suspected not a soul aboard either ship had been keeping tabs with anything like the care he had.
He remembered the argument that had put him at the Dame’s wheel instead of the Rose’s, several days earlier, before either ship had reached the island.
"Bloody hell Captain, ye’ll not put a hull that size through the channel."
Grey had replied instantly as flat and final as a door slammed in the face. "I’ve soundings marked to the foot for near two months, and I’m absolutely sure some fat galleon draws a fathom more water than this bay has ever forgiven a ship for carryin’."
"The Dame’ll manage."
The navigator facepalmed. "To hell with manage, she’ll manage exactly as far as the first bend, then she’ll manage herself onto coral, and I’ll spend my life explainin’ why I let one galleon run aground like a damned blind whale."
Cudjoe hadn’t even wasted his breath with the soundings. "I’ll nae take that wheel either, Captain. Shout at me all ye like, I’ve watched ye survive things a reasonable man has no bluidy business survivin’, and I’ll nae push my own luck standin’ about waiting for the day ye finally lose it."
"Great touchin’ vote of confidence."
"It’s the only confidence ye’ll get from me today."
Grey pushed the chart flat against the table again. "Four fathoms at low tide, Captain, five if we’re generous. That fat ship draws six, by my reckoning, and reckoning is the one thing in this whole ocean I trust."
"Then it’s a good thing I’m not askin’ either of you to trust numbers, only me word."
Neither man had looked particularly comforted by that.
James hadn’t pressed the matter, chiefly because there was no way to explain the one fact that actually mattered without explaining to both men a supernatural ability that would have been hard on their sanity and considerably worse on his own.
So he let them keep their dignity and their places aboard the Rose, while he took the Grand Dame through himself, grinning all the way at a secret he had no earthly means of sharing.
Now, ahead of the bow, fresh markers occupied the channel’s edge.
They hadn’t been there when he’d left.
Stacked stones rose from the banks, each topped with an iron cage packed for pitch and tinder. They stood close enough together that a man could pick out the safe water by eye instead of trusting to memory alone, as Grey had been doing for months.
James gaze wandered over to the deck, and there amidst the crew, Anne was making Milagros’s life miserable over a length of rope.
"Great way to make a knot look like some birds nest."
Anne stood over her with her arms folded.
"Do it again, and do it right, or I’ll have you up that mast a third time."
"I’ve done better knots blind, guapa. The rope’s cursed, not my hands."
"The rope’s fine, it’s the hands working it that needs teaching."
Milagros muttered in Spanish, then untied the whole miserable thing and started again.
That told James all he needed to know about who had won that particular argument.
A few paces away, some of the crewmembers were running a wager loud enough for the entire ship to hear.
"Two shillin’s says the Dame kisses coral before we pass the second bend."
"I’ll take it gladly. Two shillin’s, and that bottle ye think I don’t know ye’re hidin’."
"Only if it’s a strike though, runnin’ soft aground don’t count. Has to be a real holin’, timbers and all."
"And if the Dame goes down with the whole lot of us still aboard her?"
"Then neither of us has the coins, and I’ll count the debt resolved by drownin’."
"Seems fair enough to me."
James let the whole foolish business carry on without him.
He ought to not interrupt another man’s wager concerning his captain’s chances of drowning. There were standards aboard ship, after all.
Up at the bow, the leadline went down and came back with the exact report since the ships entered the reefs.
"By the mark, four!"
"By the deep, four and a half!"
🏴 [PERK ACTIVATED] — Coastal Giant
The Grand Dame replied to every turn of the wheel in her own time, heavy and stubborn as ever.
James eased her through more by feel than sight, watching water that, by every respectable measure, had no business carrying a ship of this size.
The crew was flabbergasted by the fact the fat galleon could, indeed, navigate through these reefs.
The Dame passed through the last bend without a scrape, without even the smallest shudder through her timbers, and the water parted open ahead into the calm, deep blue of the bay beyond.
Then cheers exploded across her deck.
Disbelief turned directly into shouting, which was probably the most natural order of things.
"Pay up, ye miserable bastard!"
"Aye, aye. Keep yer bloody shirt on."
Beyond the bay, Concordia came into view a piece at a time.
Rows of timber-framed houses reached farther inland than James remembered leaving them. There were more cookhouses than the settlement had possessed before he sailed for Havana.
Near the ridge stood the pale, half-finished skeleton of a shipwright’s yard. Its timber ribs still waited for him to put the rest of the ship around them.
Closer to the crossroads, an assembly hall stood finished and roofed. Beside it was a smaller, plainer chapel with its own bell already hung.
Both were plain as could be and impossible to miss from the water.
The docks themselves had the Black Fortune, sitting easy at her mooring, and nothing else.
The Rose found her berth easily enough, sliding in beside the Fortune as though she’d never been gone.
That left James at the wheel of a ship built to carry three hundred souls, in a bay locked behind reefs with not a single berth that looked remotely interested in taking her.
"Right then."
He looked across the docks, which had never before been asked to hold anything remotely this large.
"Reckon that’s my problem."
⚓ [ALLIED TERRITORY — CONCORDIA]
Faction : None (Independent)
Status : Pirate Democracy (Imperfect)
Population : Approximately 750
Stability : Reasonably Secure
Harbor : Sheltered Bay, Protected by Reefs, Large Wooden Pier, Beacon-Marked Channel
Major Facilities : the Code, Residential Quarter, Sailors’ Quarter, Farmland, Shipwright’s Yard (Under Construction)
Faction Status : Chairman (Vague Mandate)
Perks : [No King But the Sea]
The population has grown considerably in your absence while governance remains, charitably, a work in progress.
I trust you will find both developments equally exhausting.