Chapter 28: Mountainside City

Tom had given Lord Black his freedom, as well as a ship and any of our prisoners who would swear oath to him. It was enough to make up a small crew. Most of them were sailors, and it wouldn’t take long to shake out into a proper crew.

Andrew -Lord Black had asked us to call him that in private, as he was only “Lord Black” to us- asked if he could have some of North Harbor’s ships instead of us just sinking them. We had to think about that one. Wouldn’t the previous owners just take it from him, using North Harbor’s soldiers if necessary, if he showed up in a ship we had just confiscated from them?

Yeah, probably. We could give him some ships if he came up with enough crew to need more than one, but not any ships from Mountain Isle. It would have to be a ship we’d captured somewhere else.

Maybe we’d capture some more ships from elsewhere before we were done. Or, when we had recovered the Damsels and were ready to go home, he could probably have a couple of our transports. A lot of them were ships we’d captured here in the islands.

Andrew took a few hours to get his ship and crew straightened out while we were stripping the rest of the North Harbor ships. We gave him all the supplies he wanted and when his ship -he’d named it the “Honest Work”- was ready he told us he was going back to North Harbor to talk to its ruler. If he wasn’t thrown in jail, he would try to find out what was going on with Alfred and his crazy people and get back to us.

We hoped to see him again soon, and continued our sweep down the Cut.

We split the fleet into three sections as before, with a section up against the shore on each side looking for ships and the remainder in the middle where we could watch for ships trying to escape and also support either wing if needed. And finish stripping and sinking the ships we’d taken from North Harbor.

It was the same sort of sweep we had done around the other islands, just inverted with us on the inside. The Cut had a lot of buildings, farms and estates and so on along the shore, but we continued with the agreement we’d made with North Harbor and left all the small boats alone. All we were doing was destroying the occasional ocean-going ship we caught.

Some of the ships were marginal, so our men boarded them to see what they were used for. No matter how large or small it was, if it was clearly a fishing boat we left it alone. People gotta eat. Someone could convert them into ocean-going cargo or passenger ships, but whoever did that would have to deal with all the people who weren’t getting fed any more by the fishing boats. The island had fields and pastures, but most of the population would depend upon the sea for a lot of their food.

It took a couple more days, going slow to clear the shores, before we reached Mountainside City. David’s Cut was long, going well over half of the island’s width. By the time we reached the end we were far closer to the southern coast than we were the northern coast. If the island wasn’t so mountainous it would be easier to reach the city from the south.

We had seen a couple of ships ahead of us in the distance, checking us out. We had let them be rather than allow the fleet to be split up too far for mutual support. Eventually, though, we reached the end of the Cut and we were faced by what was left of Prince Alfred’s fleet in front of the city.

As we had progressed, we had scraped a few more ships off the shore, and we were pretty sure that we hadn’t missed any. If we did it wasn’t a serious issue. The point was being made that continued raiding would hurt them far more than it hurt us, and once the point had been made it really didn’t matter how many ships they had left.

When we finally got to the end of the cut and could see mountains in front of us as well as on both sides, we found about twenty ships drawn up in a loose line waiting for us. There was a sort of narrow point in the Cut before it opened up again into a bay with Mountainside City spread around it. They were in this strait so that they couldn’t be flanked.

Mr. Black had been right, the winds were erratic around here. Still, we kept our sails up. They made us much faster than we were as pure rowing ships. We had the rigging and crew to rapidly change their set. If the winds changed, we could adjust our sails to compensate. Also, as long as we weren’t actually boarding or being boarded, our Marines could help the deck crew row.

I ordered all of our warships to the front with us, except for Flying Arrow which I ordered to remain behind us with the transports. With our added soldiers, I thought that eleven against twenty was a fair fight. I put Filo with Wrong Place on one end of our line and Matto with Thunder at the other end, since they were the fastest and the most experienced. Shark went in the middle with Vengeance, Cleaver, and Eagle 2.

We put all the escorts in a second line between and behind the warships. We weren’t going to talk and we didn’t need to capture any more ships, so I wanted all the warships to sail through their line and just use their missile launchers to sink every enemy ship they could. We were almost done here and there was no reason to take any more casualties than we had to.

Thunder was the only warship we had which only had one launcher, but it was the fastest ship in the fleet so we were expecting them to just keep from getting boarded. Eventually they would get a shot at whoever was bothering them.

Once we were through, we would turn around and come back, trying to sink the rest of the enemy ships. The escorts would have to help us board anyone who was left.

I did ask that we try to spread out as much as we could, as we benefited from a large gap between ships. With more room, we could maneuver better and sink them one at a time. If we allowed the ships to get bunched up we were liable to get boarded by multiple ships.

If any of our ships got bogged down into a mass of ships rafted together like Shark had at the mouth of the Cut, the nearest couple of transports were welcome to join the fight. Otherwise the transports should try to stay out of it so the men could rest. The army had a hard battle ahead of them.

While we were getting ready, Flying Arrow came up behind us. I noticed that the yellow flag was no longer on their mainmast below the ensign. When they reached us its captain told us that King Tom had moved to one of the transports to allow Flying Arrow to participate.

I could only welcome them to the party. The crew was well trained, but it had not actually participated in any combat yet so they had no experience. Still, all reinforcements were good. They had to help. I put them at the right end just inside Thunder.

That gave us seven warships in our front line. All we had to do was sink three ships each and we’d be done here. Thunder would only have to sink two.

That turned into another mess. Not as bad as out at the mouth of the Cut, but it was the next worst fight I’d ever been in. Naturally, as soon as it started I was too busy to be an admiral. Shark was, of course, still the largest ship we had, and it was in the middle of our line. Whether they thought the commanding officer was on Shark or not, it was a priority target. We got four enemy ships all trying to board Shark.

We were able to put missiles into both of the first two and then avoid them as they sank, but we didn’t have a chance to reload the launchers before the other two came alongside. So, we got boarded from both sides at once. Still, we saw it coming and had plenty of time to prepare for them. The Commander had had a couple of days to integrate the soldiers, but it was still going to be ugly.

It wasn’t too bad, though. Between the archers and the shieldmen very few of the boarders actually made it onto our decks. The fight didn’t last anywhere near as long as it could have, because almost as soon as we had pirates alongside they had our other ships alongside them, too. Neither one of them was prepared to be boarded from the back while they concentrated on us, and their crews melted away quickly under a hail of arrows. Since our escorts were all deemed too small to carry our launchers, they compensated by carrying more crew. Most of them left Hunter Island with forty Marines and sixty archer/spearmen.

We ended up in the same sort of double sandwich as out at the mouth, with Lion on one end, then an enemy ship, Shark in the middle, another enemy ship, and then Sunshine on the other end. This time, though, the help arrived long before our situation became desperate and we never had to get worried about the outcome.

No matter how many men a ship carried, if they were armed with axes, swords, and knives they couldn’t last long against sixty archers. And, being attacked from behind they had no idea that they were getting shot at until they got an arrow in their backs. What little organization they still had went away when they got boarded from both sides by our Marines, wearing hardened leather armor and carrying a shield and a sword.

There were very few survivors among either crew. Mostly, it was sailors who weren’t armed and had stayed out of the fighting. All of the armed men fought on until they died.

Once our part was done, I climbed up the mainmast into the crow’s nest to look around. Alfred’s fleet had started with twenty or twenty-one ships. I could see all of our ships, the two-masted brigs. Good, we hadn’t lost any. We had Lion and Sunshine with us and two captured ships.

There were several other groups of ships rafted together. Eagle 2 was easy to identify, it was the only brig without sideboards. It had a ship alongside it, and another one beyond that, but that second one looked more like one of our transports than another pirate ship. There were two other brigs with a ship on either side. They looked like Vengeance and Cleaver, our two ships from Widemouth, and there was one pirate ship with a brig on either side.

That was it. It looked like only eight of Alfred’s fleet were still floating. I had to carefully look at the two brigs with a prize on each side to make sure that it was our people who had won. In both cases I could see our Marines walking around on all three ships, but just to make sure, I called down to Sunshine’s Captain and told him to go make sure Vengeance didn’t need any help, then I called down to Garry on Lion and told him to go check on Cleaver. My crew could deal with what was left of our two prizes’ crews.

Then, finally, I could look to the south where I could see Mountainside City on the horizon. I’d done my job. I’d gotten our fleet and the army here. Now it was Tony’s job, to find Cathy Nurse and Abbie Sailor somewhere in that mess and return them to the fleet.

Mountainside City was huge. The Cut opened up again south of the strait, maybe four or five miles wide or so. The Cut was another ten miles or so long before it ended, and the whole shoreline was covered with structures. Many were wood, but many more were stone. In most directions I could see more buildings behind them, up on the slopes. This was a far larger city than any I’d seen here on Chaos.

I began to realize that we may have been slightly premature in giving Andrew his freedom. He grew up here, he could have shown us where Alfred lived. If we couldn’t find a native guide we’d be blundering around, and before long we’d be bogged down and after that we’d get overrun by the locals.

I signaled for Eaglet, and when it came up I sent it to Tom and Tony with a message. “Should we send a couple of ships to ask Lord Black for help here? How do we tell where Alfred and the Damsels are?”

Soon after that, two of our transports left the fleet heading back north up the Cut, so they must have agreed. After that, the rest of the fleet joined us and we moved in to start working on Mountainside City. If nothing else, we could start destroying their ships, repair facilities, and naval supplies.

Meanwhile, we started questioning our few prisoners.

While Tony and Tom tried to figure out what their next step was, all the transports joined in on the raiding. If the ship or pier a ship was going to wasn’t well defended, one crew could deal with it on their own. If there was an organized defense with lots of defenders, though, they could call on some nearby ships and send several companies from the army to deal with them.