The Reformer

Hmmm, Adrian thought. This time he felt the wonderful tension-before-release mental sensation of almost grasping a concept; it was like sex just before orgasm, only better. But they have a lot of. . what was that phrase? Social mobility?

correct, Center said. if anything, an excessive amount.

Sure, you can get ahead, here, Raj said. But you can't stay ahead. Everything here turns on the fall of the dice; the ruler's favor, a lucky pirate raid. This place is as unstable as water, while the mainland's set in granite. You can carve granite into a new shape, though; water will just run through your fingers.

Adrian shook himself back to the world of phenomena; the mental conversation had only taken a few seconds, but he was attracting looks. Most of them were tolerantly amused; the Scholars of the Grove had a solid reputation for otherworldly abstraction.

If only they knew, he thought to himself. Aloud: 'Fire! '

The gunner carefully squeezed the trigger. There was a chick-shsss as the hammer came down and the priming caught in a little sideways puff of fire and dirty-white smoke. Then: Bdannggg as the arquebus fired; the cloud of smoke from the main charge was enough to hide the target from Adrian's eyes for a second. Esmond gave a silent whistle of relief beside him; the bullet hadn't missed. Casull's eyebrows went up as well, and the Islander grandees were laughing and slapping Adrian on the back; eight ounces of high-velocity lead had smashed a hole the size of a fist through the Confed shield, through metal facing and plywood and tough leather, and then removed the entire top of the target's head in a spatter of pink-gray froth and whitish bone fragments.

Adrian swallowed. 'So, you see, my lord King,' he said. 'Many such arquebusiers could sweep the decks of an enemy ship, beyond the effective range of archers.'

'But not beyond the range of catapults and ballistae,' Casull said. 'Still, a dreadful weapon, yes. These. . arquebuses? Arquebuses, yes-they can fire faster than catapults, and we can put more of them on a ship. The Confed marines have always been our problem, the Sun God roast their balls; we're better seamen, but as often as not they swarm aboard and take the ship that rams them.'

'Lord King, I'm just getting started,' Adrian said with a grin. 'Next is a much larger version of the arquebus, for use against ships and fortresses.'

The King's dark eyebrows looked as if they were trying to crawl into his widow's peak. 'Show me!' he commanded.

'This is the weapon,' Adrian said, signalling. A half-dozen of his men dragged it over; a bronze tube seven feet long, mounted on a low four-wheeled carriage of glossy hardwood. 'I call it a cannon.'

The barge teams in the military harbor were busy again; this time they towed out a small and extremely elderly galley. It was listing, and the dockyard workers had stripped it of most of its fittings; they anchored it to a buoy two hundred yards out in the harbor.

Meanwhile Adrian's men were busy around the gun. Adrian gave Casull a running commentary: 'First, as you see, lord King, a linen bag full of the gunpowder is pushed down the hollow-the barrel. A wad of felt goes in next, to hold it in place.'

The crew shoved the bag home with a long pole, grunting in unison as they slammed it down. 'Now the gunner runs a long steel needle through the touch-hole, to pierce the bag, and fills the touch-hole and this little pan on top of the gun with priming powder-finely ground.'

'And here is what the cannon will hurl,' he said. The team paused for a second to let the King see what they were doing.

'A bronze ball?' Casull said. 'Wouldn't stone do just as well, and be much cheaper?'

'We will use stone balls to strike fortress walls,' Adrian said. Cast iron would have been better still, but the only furnaces capable of making it were in Vanbert, and not many of them. All the ironworks in the Islands were what Center called Catalan forges, turning out wrought iron.

'But this is a shell, lord King,' Adrian amplified.

'You mean it's hollow?'

'My lord sees as clearly as the eye of the Sun God. It is filled with the gunpowder, and this'-he pointed to a wooden plug in the side of the metal ball, with a length of cord through it-'is the fuse. It is a length of cord soaked in saltpeter; when the cannon fires, the main charge lights it. Then in ten seconds, the cord burns through to the charge in the middle.'

While they spoke the crew had been fixing the cannon's tackle to bollards sunk in the stone of the dock, and aiming it with handspikes and main force. The gunner glared down the barrel with its simple notch-and-blade sights, then stepped back and adusted the wedge under the breech of the cannon that controlled its elevation.

'If my lord wishes, he may fire the first shot,' Adrian said, bowing. 'If it please my lord King, please stand well to one side-the cannon will move backward rapidly when it is fired. And,' he went on, raising his voice for the assembled dignitaries, 'this time the noise will be much louder.'

Casull was grinning like a shark as he brought the length of slowmatch at the end of the long stick down on the little pile of fine powder. It caught with a long sssshshshshs, and an appreciable fraction of a second later. .

BAMMMMM!

This time some of the Islander magnates took startled steps back, mouthing curses or prayers. The gun leapt back until the breeching ropes brought it up with a twang, belching a cloud of smoke shot through with a knife blade of red fire. The wind had picked up, and the smoke swept to one side in good time to see splinters and chunks of frame pinwheeling up from the target galley. Then three seconds later there was another crack, muffled by the wood the shell was embedded in. A quarter of the light galley's side exploded outward; when the smoke cleared from that, it was already listing to one side. . and burning.

Casull gave a whoop and hiked up his robe in one hand, snapping his fingers and hopping through the first steps of a bawdy kodax dance; one could see he'd been a sailor long before he was King. His son stood blinking, red spots on pale cheeks; the buccaneer admirals and mercenary commanders were swearing, spitting, thumping each other on the back.

The King stopped first, pausing to turn and shake a fist to the east. 'Now see who goes to the bottom, you turnip-eating peasants!' he shouted.

Then he turned to Adrian, eyes snapping. 'What else have you for me, O Worker of Wonders?'

Adrian smiled thinly; the problem with getting the reputation for being a magician was that he had to live up to it, and when they expected him to be infallible. . Esmond was looking hungrily at the burning galley and a slow, deep smile was spreading over his face.

'There are two other types of shot the cannon can fire, lord King,' he said. 'Solid stone balls, heavy basalt or granite. Those will pound down the walls of forts, as catapults might, but since they strike much harder from further away, they do it quicker. The other is case-shot. It's a leather bag full of lead balls, like the arquebus fires, but a hundred of them. Imagine them flung out in a spray, into a dense formation of men-a Confed infantry battalion, or a section of marines about to board.'

Casull nodded hungrily. Esmond, from his expression, was imagining precisely that.

'Why didn't you make these for the Confed nobles you were working for?' the monarch asked.

'First, lord, I didn't have time. Second, they didn't take me seriously enough to give me what I needed. These cannon take a lot of bronze, and bronze is expensive-this one twenty-four pounder takes more than two tons of bronze.'

Casull grunted as if belly-punched, losing a little of his joy. 'That is something to think on,' he said. 'Not just the money, but the bronze itself-there isn't all that much around, we'll have to import. .' He clapped Adrian on the shoulder again. 'Still and all, you've done all that you promised and more. And there is still another wonder to lay the world at my feet?'

Hardly ambitious at all, all of a sudden, isn't he? Raj observed.