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Chapter 280: Redwater River Ambush (Part 1)

The fleet came late.

They had expected the enemy by late morning of the fourth day. The sun crossed its zenith, descended, and it was already afternoon when ten sailing ships finally appeared at the far end of the river channel — small shapes first, then shapes with masts, then shapes with sails, moving slowly upriver against the current.

Van’er carried the sighting report forward through the earthwork to the sixth compartment, relayed the order to prepare to fire, and returned to his position.

“Where are they now?” Rodney asked, lifting the window cover to look.

“Still several hundred meters out,” Cat’s Claw said, craning toward the skylight window above his head. “I can’t see past the roof weeds. Miss Leaves really did something extraordinary with those.”

“Her name is Miss Leaves,” Van’er said. “Not the green hair witch.”

“I know, I know.” Jop wiped a rust streak from the cannon barrel. “But what she can do — wherever she walks, grass comes up to her waist. After she came through this bunker, the whole thing looked like a natural hillside. I couldn’t tell it from real earth if I didn’t know.”

“What’s ordinary about a witch?” Rodney shrugged. “One builds earthworks in a single night. One covers the ground with vines before dawn. One flies wherever she wants. One turns into a giant dove.”

Cat’s Claw’s voice went soft with something approaching reverence. “If I had to choose the most remarkable one, it would be Miss Nana. I wonder sometimes whether getting wounded is actually an honor now. You see her close up. Maybe she says something.”

“Pay attention to the enemy position,” Van’er said flatly, “or you’ll be cleaning the latrine for a week after we get back.”

Cat’s Claw stuck out his tongue and pressed his eye to the skylight.

Van’er let out a slow breath in the silence. He had noticed it over the past months — the way his men had changed, the way he himself had changed. The pre-battle trembling was gone. The cold-palmed fear that used to arrive the night before combat had not appeared this time; he had slept through the night without once waking. At the moment when fighting had been new and its rules had been unclear, every encounter with an enemy had felt like the edge of something unknowable. Now it felt like a scheduled task with established steps.

Load. Aim. Fire by the rules. Reload by the rules. Win.

He had watched the King’s New Militia during the Border Town defense engagement — men who had been given drugs to make them stronger than knights, who had come at the walls without fear of death, who had run forward howling and kept running even as their comrades fell. Humanoid beasts. And the engagement had lasted half an hour. When it was over, he had not felt tired. He had felt like he had just finished a training warm-up.

Is this what war becomes? He stared at the cannon in the dim compartment light. Distance keeps increasing — the day will come when we destroy the enemy from so far away we never see their faces at all. Just operate the machines. Just follow the rules.

He didn’t know if that was better or worse.

Cat’s Claw shouted from the skylight: “I see them!”

“Load!”

The compartment came alive. Every man had run these steps until the sequence lived in the body independent of thought: powder charge, shell, seal, check. Under combat conditions, with the barrel already seated and the angle pre-set, Van’er’s crew could complete a firing cycle in twenty breaths. The guns nearest the bank were loaded with canister — for the deck crews. The others carried solid shot aimed at the waterline.

Roland and Iron Axe had designed the engagement. Van’er had memorized the plan until he could recite it from sleep. When Lightning waved the red flag from her observation position, every cover plate in every compartment on both banks would go up simultaneously. The guns would open fire without any signal delay.

He settled at his position and waited for the flag.

From the hilltop observation point, Lotus could see the enemy fleet without a glass.

They were river vessels — low-hulled, narrow, built for the channel rather than open water. No tall rigging, no elevated fences. The long oar-helms on both sides of each deck moved in slow rhythm, the sailors pulling in unison, the sails swollen with the afternoon wind. Ten ships, spaced apart, moving in a column up the main channel.

Still no orders from His Highness.

Her hands tightened on each other. The leading vessel was approaching the position of the earthworks now — she could see the weed-covered hillsides from here, indistinguishable from the natural bank. If the fleet passed through the fork without stopping, there would be no chance to block both branches simultaneously. All of this preparation would dissolve.

She nearly called out.

The leading ship’s bow crossed the invisible threshold above the bunkers.

A sound reached her a fraction of a second before she understood what it was — and then she understood, because she had heard guns fire before, but not like this: sixteen at once, the merged reports arriving as a single concussive blow that traveled across the water and up the hillside and hit her in the chest. Thick smoke billowed from both banks. The shapes in the smoke were gun muzzles, one after another, recoiling and returning.

She looked at the river.

The leading ship’s deck was — she could not immediately find a word for it. Exploded was wrong; it had not been destroyed from within. But the near side of the deck, where the scullers had been sitting in their rows, had ceased to exist as an organized arrangement of human beings. Wood chips, arms, portions of things — all of it thrown outward in the same motion. More than half of the deck crew was gone in the first volley. The bloody aftermath of it settled, and the guns fired again.

The mast caught something. Shuddered. Bent. The upper section came down with a long slow crack and landed across the deck and did not stop moving, rolling over two knights who had emerged from the cabin at the first sound.

The ship slowed. The river current caught it and pushed it sideways, and the ships behind it began to fan out, trying to avoid the collision, and their crews came up from the hold to look at what was happening — and the second volley was already in the air.

The second ship’s deck turned red. Lotus watched people who had been standing upright simply cease to be standing. Those nearest the bank were reduced to fragments. Those further back — alive still, screaming, pressing their hands against things that should not be visible — went over the railing into the river, choosing water over the deck. The screaming reached her even at this distance, carried across the water on the still afternoon air.

Lotus could not stop watching. She could not make herself look away.

She had understood, theoretically, what earthwork bunkers with clear sightlines would do to a fleet confined to a channel. She had helped build the structures herself, shaped the soil walls with her ability, listened to His Highness explain the geometry of the T-crossing.

But understanding and seeing were different things. Entirely different things.

How? she thought, meaning not the engineering but something else. How did his men do this so — completely?

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