Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 74: Shipbuilding Project

“Why can’t we afford it?” Roland asked, looking at the analysis Barov had set on his desk.

Barov cleared his throat. “A brig costs eighty to a hundred and twenty gold royals in manufacturing alone, Your Highness. Add the crew wages — captain, helmsman, sailors — and you reach two hundred, easily. The town hall’s current balance after the Willow Town trade is three hundred and fifteen gold royals. Spending half of it on a vessel would leave us unable to pay the militia.”

“I told Willow Town I didn’t need sailors or a helmsman.” Roland tapped the table. “I don’t need a captain. I need the boat.”

“That is precisely the difficulty.” Barov’s voice carried the patience of a man who had been explaining the same thing for several months through different conversations. “In this industry, the ship and its crew are almost never separated. The owner is typically also the captain — either a merchant working the trade routes, or a nobleman who employs a deputy. Their crew are hired on contracts of one to three years, paid in advance. If a captain sells you the boat and walks away, he loses the prepaid wages of every sailor he’s released. For a hundred gold royals, that is a loss most men won’t accept — even among the nobility.”

“You said most of the time.”

“There are two exceptions.” Barov folded his hands. “A merchant in urgent financial need may disband his crew and sell quickly. Or an owner replacing an old vessel with a new one may sell the old hull separately. Both situations occur. Neither is common.”

Roland was quiet for a moment. “The new vessels — where are they built?”

“Port of Clearwater. Seabreeze District. Farsight Point. Any city with a dockyard.”

All of them impossible. Too far, and without a crew, no way to bring the hull back. He nodded slowly. “I’ll need to think about it.”

Barov left.

Roland sat with the problem. Ships were not optional. The cannon was nearly useless without a way to move it fast enough to matter — the roads in this territory were ruts in dry seasons and trenches in wet ones, and even the best roads anywhere couldn’t absorb the weight of artillery the way water could. Duke Ryan’s army would march at the pace of farmers-turned-soldiers. The artillery would fall behind even that. The only way to arrive ahead of an enemy was to travel the river.

He spread a fresh sheet of paper.

Requirements: able to carry two cannons and thirty people. River use only — shallow draft, stable. Easy enough to operate that militia could learn it in a few weeks.

He wrote them down, then looked at them. The answer was obvious. A flat-bottomed barge.

He had seen barges on rivers all his life — wide, low, piled with sand or gravel until the railing was barely above the waterline, indifferent to current, towed when the wind failed them. Simple in conception. The problem was not the design; it was the material.

He wrote down three options: wood, iron, concrete.

Wood was the natural beginning of any shipbuilding tradition — everything from the first log raft to a ship of the line had started there. It was also the material he knew least. He had no trained shipwrights, no knowledge of how to properly shape and seal a hull. Without expertise, what he could build would be a large raft at best, and a large raft that fell apart at the worst possible moment was worse than no vessel at all. Cross wood off.

Iron could work. Anna could weld — seamlessly, at temperature, with the precision of a machine — and a welded iron hull with a crisscross keel would be rigid enough for river work. But iron was needed for everything else first. Steam engines, cannon barrels, tools. He was not yet at the point where he could afford to melt his reserves into a boat. Last resort only.

That left concrete.

The city wall was finished, and the raw materials surplus had not been fully allocated. Anna could calcinate the lime as needed. The process was straightforward in principle: build a wooden template, fill in iron bar reinforcement, pour and cure. The technique required no specialized shipwright knowledge, only good template construction and patience. Concrete boats existed — he had read about them somewhere, a footnote in engineering history, a technology that had been discovered and then forgotten, used in the ancient world and not again for centuries. They did not rust. They required almost no maintenance. And in a river, where depth could be controlled and hulls never had to withstand ocean swells, the weight disadvantage over wood mattered very little.

He picked up his pen and began to draw.

The shed near the Chishui River was plain and functional — four walls against the wind, charcoal braziers keeping the interior above freezing so the concrete would cure properly. The wooden template of the hull was already assembled when Roland arrived: a bow shaped in a smooth curve to reduce drag, a squared aft to maximize load area, the whole form eight meters wide with a length-to-width ratio of three to one. Compared to any traditional vessel it was absurdly fat. Roland did not care. A river barge didn’t need to be graceful.

Two masts rose from the centerline, seated in the deck and connected down to the iron framework running the length of the hull. A reserve rudder was mounted at the stern. Everywhere inside the template, iron bars crossed at right angles — Anna had welded each intersection clean, creating a continuous rigid armature through the whole structure.

“You’ve never built anything like this,” Anna said. She was looking at the template with genuine interest — the same expression she turned on every new problem Roland put in front of her. Not uncertainty. Assessment.

“Neither has anyone here,” Roland said. “Which means we can’t do it wrong.”

She considered this. “That isn’t how that logic works.”

“It means we have no bad habits to unlearn.”

A pause. The ghost of something — not quite a smile. She turned back to the template.

The workers poured the first batch of concrete into the basin-shaped form. The material filled the space the way water fills a bowl — covering the keel, rising around the iron bars, settling against the wooden walls that would become the cabin sides. When it cured, those five-meter walls would be the hull. The whole thing would look, until launched, like an outsize bathtub.

None of the workers — carpenters, assistants, the two men managing the charcoal — could quite stop looking at it. The same material that had gone into the town wall, the same grey mixture that had hardened into something that stopped arrows and held off demonic beasts, was now sitting in the shape of a boat.

Roland stood at the edge of the frame and watched the pour.

It will float. He was almost certain it would float. The mathematics were right, the material density was manageable, the hull geometry should displace enough water. Almost certainly.

He turned that probability over in his mind the way a coin turns over in a hand, and said nothing.

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