Chapter 18: Planning for War II

As Duke of the Western Marches, I could formally order the Commander to prepare a force for our invasion of the Brotherhood’s lands. I wrote such an instruction, but I went to Widemouth and met with the Council to talk about our relationship first. The Commander was there, of course.

I had long recommended that we not accept Tom as our King unless he made it worthwhile. Well, Tom had co-opted me by naming me the guy in charge. I would only be Duke of the Western Marches if I accepted Tom as my King. How did the Council feel about it?

They were ambivalent, of course. What was in it for them?

Well, to start with, there was nothing in it for the council members themselves, personally. As the ruling Council for the town, perhaps a lot. Widemouth would be my first choice of capitals for the region. And, Widemouth wanted to be the regional capital. If we accepted King Tom, we would both get what we wanted. And they would still be the town or city Council, responsible for and holding authority over the town and its immediate surroundings as it grew.

On the other hand, the Council would NOT be in charge of the whole region, the duchy. I would be. I would listen to the Council on matters that concerned the town, but I may not on other matters.

We had previously discussed my apathy about town improvements. It wasn’t MY town, why should I pay? Now, however, if we accepted this appointment -and I put it that way, as something for us all to decide- Widemouth would be ‘my town’ and I would consider it my duty to make it better. They would get a larger, healthier, wealthier town to run. But, they would have to accept my authority. And, sometimes I might make decisions they may not like.

Like what? Well, it looked like we were going to be invading the Brotherhood soon. I had been directed by the King to raise some troops for that purpose. It would be the same as the fleet I’d built. Many men would take part. Some would come back rich. Many would come back injured. Some wouldn’t come back at all. Overall, though, as long as we were winning, the town itself would benefit.

In the end they had decided to accept my appointment as Duke of the Western Marches. After the Commander pointed out the alternative, that is. If they didn’t accept it, but I did, then I would have the rest of Hunter Island behind me when I isolated the town from the rest of the region. As much as I needed the town to do the things I wanted done, the town needed me and the prosperity I had brought it just as much.

After the council meeting, I hand-delivered that document to the Commander, as I wanted to talk to him privately about it first.

“Commander, I am giving you a written order that you must obey. However, I want to explain it first. I am telling you this because you need to know what is happening but I want you to keep it to yourself. No one except me, the King, and a couple of his most trusted advisors knows the truth. The truth is that we are NOT going to invade the Brotherhood. They are far too large for us. They have tens of thousands of soldiers. We attacked that fort because it fired at one of our ships and for no other reason. If another Brotherhood fort fires at us, we will attack and burn it, too, but that is all. It is a limited response to a limited attack.”

I continued “No, what we are really doing is preparing to attack the Pirate Isles. We are going to remove their ability to raid our Island, or anyone else. However, we don’t want them to know we are coming, so we are telling everyone that we are going to conquer the Brotherhood. This order is for you to prepare for that war, but I wanted you to hear from me in person that it’s really the pirates we are going after. I want you to tell everyone that the men must be prepared for a short sea-voyage of several days and then a fight on land, but the truth is that it will be a long voyage and then a series of fights on several islands.”

With that, I gave him the sealed order and waited while he read it.

“From Jason, Duke of Widemouth, the Long Lake, and the Western Marches and Guardian of the Southern Shores, to the Commander of the Widemouth City Guard: You are hereby requested and authorized to raise a force of not less than one thousand men for the purpose of making war on the Brotherhood. They will be trained, equipped, and organized under competent officers who have your trust. This force must be ready within one hundred days to take ship in Widemouth, or to march to another port as directed, for passage to the mainland where they will be used to destroy the Brotherhood.”

“And yet you say that they will not be used against the Brotherhood?”

“Yes, Commander. The Brotherhood is an evil group, but we are not strong enough to oppose them on their own land. All we can do is use our ships to ensure that they do not bother us. This force you are raising will be carried to the Pirate Isles where they will be used to destroy the pirate’s ships, their shipyards, and anything else that might be used to build more ships. That document is written so that you can show it to anyone who questions your actions.”

“Who will command this force? Surely not my Captain?”

“No, Commander. He is not yet ready for such a responsibility. No, I will command the fleet, while Sir Tony will command the landing force. Sir Tony has the King’s complete confidence on land, as I have the King’s confidence at sea. I would like your Captain to accompany us, so that he can learn from the experience. Perhaps, in ten or twenty years, when we are much stronger and the Brotherhood is weaker, we might find him in command of a real invasion of the Brotherhood.”

“I understand your intentions, my Lord, and I will obey your orders. As large a force as I can create will be ready for you in one hundred days.”

“Thank you, Commander. Now, if we are done, I must go out and explain to everyone how badly we are going to defeat the Brotherhood.”

I think that was the second time I had ever seen him smile. The first was when we had repulsed the pirates from our walls, and then he had seen the last surviving pirate ship turn tail and row down the river with its bow smashed, of course.

Each of our warships carried roughly a hundred men who might serve as soldiers on land. They could carry more for short periods if used as troop-transports, but stuffing them full would slow them down and reduce their ability to fight. If I had any say in it, the warships would remain as warships and only carry their core crews plus the assigned Marines and archers/spearmen. The soldiers would be carried in cargo ships. Our warships would be needed to keep trouble away from the transports.

Our sailors could fight on land, too, in an emergency, but if we had enough soldiers it would be better to leave the sailors onboard so that we could use the ships if needed. It would all depend upon how many transports we could round up. I certainly didn’t want to deal with some of the independent traders that we’d hired for the fort-raid.

While the ground force was being trained in the various towns and the fleet was being gathered, I had my most trusted captains out doing some research. We’d been messing with it for a while, but now it was important. In order to trust our pilotage, we had to know how fast we were going, both across the water and actual groundspeed due to currents.

I had long before assigned Erna the task of developing, testing, and tweaking our speed-log. We did a lot of speed runs along the coast, where we could actually measure out a known distance and see how long it took to cross the markers. Of course, that also meant we had to make some hour-glasses so that we could judge time.

Man, the first few of those were crude! They didn’t even use glass, at first. They were just a bucket of sand going into a funnel that drained into another bucket. And we learned quickly that humidity was a problem. As soon as we could, we had our glassmakers start making real hourglasses that were sealed so that moisture couldn’t get in and make the sand sticky.

None of them were standardized. We had no reference clock, at first. I spent a while messing around with water-clocks. Those were mechanisms that used a small hole in a tank to allow a fixed amount of water through that filled something else that could be counted. Water clocks were simple and they worked but they were messy and pretty much immovable and I didn’t like them. And the water flowing and splashing just added to the moisture in the air, making our experiments with open hourglasses even more aggravating.

I ended up hiring a junk trinket trader who could do small work with metal, and once he got the idea we spent a while building a grandfather clock out of wood. It didn’t work well at all when it was rainy, but once we had demonstrated the concept he started replacing all the parts with bronze. Once all the wooden gears, hooks, and bearings had been replaced by bronze parts the thing became a lot more reliable and he started making a second smaller one out of bronze.

We had found layers of various ores in the cliffs around the Narrows, but we had no idea what any of them were until they were taken to the blacksmith and heated up until they gave up their metals. A lot of them just sat there unaffected, so I assumed that they needed a hotter fire than we could make. Still, we could identify some ores as producing lead, copper, tin, and zinc.

Mixing the copper with tin and zinc gave us bronze and brass. I knew that silicon bronze was best for bearings and that phosphorus bronze was best for seawater uses, but that was still in the future. We were still in the “don’t use anything with lead in it for food preparation” stage.

Getting the minute hand and the hour hand to agree was easy, that was just gearing for a 60:1 ratio. No, that wasn’t right, and within an hour of getting it working it was obvious why. The minute hand wasn’t supposed to go around its dial sixty times for every one revolution of the hour hand, it was supposed to go twenty-four times for every one revolution of the hour hand. That was easy, again. We just changed to a 24:1 gear set. And set the 60:1 gear set aside for when we wanted a second hand.

It was getting the speed they ran at adjusted to be right that was hard. We had to mess with the pendulums a lot. It wasn’t the weight that mattered here. We had to have enough weight on the pendulum to keep it moving, but adding more weight didn’t change the speed. What did that was changing the height of the weight, the distance between the weight and the pivot.

Between the the two clocks and my sundial we slowly got them adjusted until eventually one and then the other had its hour hand and minute hand both straight up at noon for three days in a row.

I had liked the military’s twenty-four-hour system, and had no desire to start the AM/PM thing here. The minute hand circled its dial twenty four times per day, and the hour hand went around its dial once per day. Yeah, they were on separate dials. We were nowhere near ready for coaxial shafts where the hour hand’s shaft was hollow and the minute hand’s shaft went through it so that they could both use the same dial. Nope, I didn’t even suggest that as an idea. The two hands had separate dials.

The reason the hour hand pointed up at noon was because, if it was facing north and a viewer was in front of it facing south and looking at it, the hour hand followed the sun. At noon it was overhead. In the evening the hour hand pointed to the west. At midnight, it pointed down, and at dawn it pointed to the east. The hour hand’s pointer had an actual real-world meaning, one that anyone could instantly grasp.

Once we had the two clocks and they both agreed with the sundial, we could make hourglasses that really meant an hour! Actually, we made them for a half-hour. That was a pain in the butt, constantly messing with them at the glassmaker’s furnace and then after they cooled taking them to the clocks to test them, but thankfully it wasn’t my pain. We had apprentice glassmakers dealing with that.

I took the large clock with me to Jayport, but the small one stayed at Widemouth where it was set up next to my sundial out at the shipyard. People went to look at it as a novelty, but knowing the exact time wasn’t important to anyone. The only reason we were doing this was to be able to calibrate our speed logs.

Once we had a reference to make our hour-glasses with we were done building clocks, and I set the jeweler to trying to figure out how to draw copper wire. I didn’t even try to explain what it would be for. There’d be plenty of time to show him, once he had enough to run experiments on.

Anyway, determining the currents around the Island and to our west took some thought and effort. We came up with a sort of sea-anchor, something big and bulky that weighed the same as water so that it neither floated nor sank. If it was held below the surface, it grabbed the water but not the wind, and that mostly cancelled out the wind’s attempt to push our ships around.

Then, we could put a weight on a line, then the sea-anchor, and last a float, and we could tell what the current was at whatever depth the sea-anchor was at. The float fixed the top of the line, the weight forced the line down, and the sea-anchor would be at whatever depth the line allowed below the float.

One thing we discovered was that around the Island the water was fairly shallow, and the current went all the way down to the seabed. Once we got well west of the Island, though, the water was much deeper and the current was only on the surface. That made sense, if it was driven by the winds coming from the west. The current would be strongest on the surface.