Chapter 12: Juggling all the Balls

We stayed in Widemouth for some time. I had a lot going on. Filo had known it would take longer than the day or two that I had told him. He’d even told me what would take longer. He’d been through it several times as my second in command, and he’d even done it as captain a couple times. He knew how long I’d be here.

The first thing I did was get the two prizes’ values formally estimated and buy them myself. It would have been better to have that done at a major seaport like Bridgetown or Pollocks Bay, but I had to do that immediately because my crew wanted their share of the prize-price before they went home and I wanted them to have it. They had well earned it. I also owed them all their pay for our time away from home, but their pay paled against their shares of the prize-price.

I felt somewhat silly selling the ships with one hand and buying them with the other, but it had to be done to keep everyone happy. As usual, I gave 10% to the town’s treasury and pocketed another quarter as my own personal profit.

I pointed out to the town’s council that sooner or later they were going to have to have their own warships, as once my base down south was complete I would probably move there. If my ships were based elsewhere, and I could get crews from elsewhere, I would stop giving them the ten percent of the prize-price that I was freely giving them for being our home port.

That got them to blink a couple of times, and they agreed to buy the next two prizes that we brought in as suitable for use as warships. I was pretty sure that they would figure out on their own that if I and all my men were down there, we wouldn’t be up here. We’d still be stopping any pirates we saw, but we wouldn’t see any pirates headed for Widemouth. Not only did they need their own ships for the income, they needed them to defend the city.

Next, I had the shipyard start emptying the two prizes as the first step in converting them to our use. I wanted them to do Vengeance first, as it was smaller and would be easier and go quicker. The sooner they got Vengeance back out at sea as a warship the better off everyone would be.

Once they were done with Vengeance I wanted them to do Shark, but I had an added upgrade for it. It was large enough, and stable enough, for more weight aloft. I wanted them to add top-masts to both the foremast and the mainmast, and put yards on them for topsails. I wanted the two topsails to be half the size of the mainsails, so the yards needed to be sized for that.

Of course, that would all be done after the mast had been pulled, the hull hauled out, inspected, and cleaned, a rudder with centerline wheel installed, a bowsprit installed, a foremast and mainmast installed, four sideboards installed, spaces cut in the waist railings for a pair of missile launchers, and all the other changes we wanted. The top-masts, yards, and sails would go on last but they needed to be thinking about how to mount them and how to secure the stays.

The yard’s second river cargo-galley was almost complete. It was slightly larger than the first, but should last much longer as it included several lessons learned building Pride. And it was built from wood that had seasoned longer. The yard had stopped work on it because it was not yet needed.

The “Pride of the River” was handling all the river-cargo just fine on its own. There wasn’t much yet, mostly just tools and supplies and men and horses for the work up at the Narrows but occasionally supplies and building stone for the lookout-fort that the town was building down at the river-mouth.

Pride was also beginning to see passengers going up or down the river between the villages. I had directed them to freely accept any passengers who were going the same way, but to try to get them to pay something even if it was just this morning’s eggs.

If we could get people moving around it would give us several benefits. One was simply a tighter-knit society. If the farmers and shopkeepers thought of each other as their friends and neighbors instead of simply strangers to be cheated, the area as a whole would benefit.

Another was a general rise in education and intelligence. If someone spent their whole life on a farm or in a village, they would have limited experience and imagination. Someone who had traveled around, though, would see that things could be done in more than one way and they would be more open to ideas. They may even come up with new ideas or ways to do something on their own.

Better communication would also help spread new ideas faster. If someone came up with a better salve for burns, the more people moved around and talked the faster that everyone would know about the new salve.

Farmus’s new ox-powered grain mill was almost complete. All that was really needed was for him to pick a good time to shut down, move his stones, and set them up again. That might take a few days. The miller would have to live at his old place until the second floor was complete, but that wasn’t that much of a hardship. The new mill could grind more grain and faster, leaving him with more free time until he got more business.

As a sort of partnership, one of the townsmen was setting up a bakery right beside the mill where he could get fresh flour every day. As long as he had a good product and didn’t charge much, he would have a huge business. The whole town would rather buy ready-baked bread from someone who was good at it and had a good baking oven instead of having to bake their own every few days.

Erna was done with his stone quay up at the Narrows, and there were people up on the cliff-line arguing about the best place for a wagon-trail. It would still be a while before we were ready to set up our second outpost up on the Long Lake, so I asked him if his piling-drivers could make it around the island to our base at Jayport. I still had trouble saying that name without grinning.

Erna didn’t see any problem with the boats getting there, as long as someone went with them to fight off any pirates. All of the fishing boats had long seen the value in what we’d done to our ships to allow them to tack, and all of them could sail down the coast with no trouble. They would be helpless if a pirate ship saw them, though. Sure, we could do that.

I was going to want to leave those boats there when they were done building a quay and a couple of piers, and have them go back to fishing. We didn’t need any more pilings driven anywhere on the Wide River for a while, and Jayport and Clear Creek needed their own fishing boats. The one that Clear Creek had might be repairable if we got to it before it sank, but in the meantime they needed to be able to fish.

Yes, I would buy them both if the owners didn’t want to relocate to a beautiful new bedroom community on the south coast. No, Erna’s boat was not made of gold and was not worth THAT much. I would subsidize having a couple more fishing boats built at our shipyard if Widemouth really needed them, but I was pretty sure that the town was getting more fish than it really needed already. Besides, hadn’t Erna been talking about retiring?

I knew that Erna had been, well, talking out his ass was a good way to put it. What would he do if he retired? He’d be on one of the other boats as a deck-hand within ten days, arguing with the captain or owner about doing it all wrong. What I was offering was a sort of semi-retirement. Once we had our quay and piers, he could go back to fishing part-time just as something to do, since Jayport wasn’t big enough to eat all the fish that he could bring in.

Clear Creek was the same thing, only smaller. Once a week would be enough to feed them all the fish they could stand. Build a sort of tank or weir in the creek and they could dump everything they caught into it and keep the fish alive until they wanted to cook them. Okay, maybe out by the shore would be better, since the fresh water would probably kill them. Still, all it would need would be a bunch of pilings, right? Set close enough that the water could flow between them but the fish couldn’t get out?

Erna had to agree that someone could probably be found to drive the pilings to make their fish-tank. Yes, he would take his boat and another one, and go help us build our base on the south coast and probably stay there after they were done. Meanwhile he told some of the men who had worked with him on all the different projects about the weir idea. Soon Widemouth would have a pair of live fish-holding tanks, one just upriver from the town for the freshwater fish they caught on the river and the other one down at the sea for all the saltwater fish.

I spent a lot of time at home with Ceecee. She had given birth while I was gone and had a little girl she had named Annie. Annie wanted more to eat than Ceecee was providing, so Ceecee was just as glad to see Millie as she was me. With Millie there, we had enough milk for both babies and me.

Ceecee’s breasts had grown some more and were fuller and more perfect in every way as far as I was concerned, while the rest of her figure was slowly recovering from giving birth. And we proved that nursing made Ceecee horny, too. Gina got shoved into the background for a while until I’d made Millie and Ceecee feel loved and appreciated again.

When I wasn’t upstairs with the women I spent a lot of time with Brian. He hadn’t really been forced into too many decisions. Mostly it was just reviewing requests for payment and making sure that the right people got paid the right amounts. He’d been surprised a couple of times when my account balance jumped, but when Filo had come asking about it he’d found out what was going on.

I was getting fifteen percent -actually ‘a tenth-part and a half of a tenth-part’- of the sale price for every ship captured by ships I owned. As Captain commanding, Filo got one tenth for himself, the town got a tenth for its part in supporting our ships, and the crew got the rest -six and a half tenth-parts- of the prize-price. Filo had been sharing out the money he’d gotten from selling his prizes in his earlier cruise, and Brian was seeing the result.

We’d been home for eight or nine days and I was beginning to gather the crew again and resupply Wrong Place to return to Jayport when the council sent a member to ask me about buying Vengeance. They wanted a warship to patrol the approaches to the river, and if it just happened to go too far south and capture a pirate ship or two that would be okay.

I would be delighted to sell Vengeance to the town for the same price I had paid for it, if they paid for the shipyard work being done. Or, I could pay for the shipyard work myself and then sell the ship to them at a higher price to recover that investment. They were disappointed that I wasn’t willing to pay for all the work myself, but it was only honest. Once the yard was done the ship would be much more powerful and useful as a warship or even just as a fast cargo ship, and its value would be higher. The change in value would be much higher than the shipyard cost would be for the conversion.

They looked at the numbers and agreed to buy Vengeance as it was before work started for my cost, and they would pay for the work. I went to a formal council meeting where they ratified our agreement, and then I went to the bank with their new treasurer to transfer the money. This time Brian was right there and he saw why my account jumped by a hundred and twenty Conchs.

It would have been a lot more if they’d bought Shark but they didn’t need it, I did, and they didn’t want to spend any more than they had to.

We’d all been talking, and Millie wanted to turn the shop over to Henry or Jim, either one, and go live with me at Jayport where I would come home to her every night. Whichever of Henry or Jim didn’t stay here would go to Jayport and set up an arms shop. I thought that was a great idea. Ceecee was willing to go as well, since Annie was healthy enough to travel by sea and needed to follow her food-dispensers anyway. I liked that plan, too.

We would call Jayport our home for now. I could ride up to Widemouth in a couple of days if I needed to, since we had some horses now. That was another skilled tradesman we had moving to Jayport, a farrier or horse-tender. He wasn’t going by ship, though, like the family was. He was going by road and bringing a couple of helpers and about twenty horses. We’d have to build him a stable before winter.

Someone put two and two together, and that expedition turned onto a wagon train with about half of the shop’s merchandise, parts and supplies, and tools, with Jim coming along to run the new shop at Jayport. I thought that it would have all fit on the ship just fine, but Jim didn’t want to go to sea and drown.

Henry was staying in Widemouth to run the original shop. Officially Millie would still own it, but Henry would be on his own. Theoretically, Millie could come back at any time and take over again, but unless Henry completely botched it that wasn’t likely. We all knew that Millie had never wanted to be an armorer in the first place. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mommy, taking care of her husband and children. Circumstances had forced her into this.

With the wagon train came a bunch more people, basically anyone in Widemouth who wanted to start over again. Everyone had seen the way I subsidized things I thought needed done, and I agreed to do the same thing at Jayport for people wanting to start a new shop or farm.

I spent about a week ... okay, that was another Earth concept I needed to just forget about here. With no moon and no ‘month’, there was no handy time period to divide by four to make a reasonable work/rest cycle. Most people around here just dealt with three days: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Anything else was numbers: in four days, three days ago.