The Baltic War(214)
"Tell him I'll drop a round shot through the bottom of his miserable boat if he doesn't stand clear!" Grosclaud snapped.
There'd never been a fisherman born, no matter what his nationality, who wouldn't claim a warship had overrun his nets and torn them to pieces. The chance of having anyone believe him might be minute, but it was worth trying. Especially when the warship belonged to someone who was playing paymaster to the fishing boat's monarch. Grosclaud, however, wasn't in the mood for it.
The sailing master waved his own hands, shouting more loudly than before as he cut off the meaningless babble of Danish. The fisherman stared up at him, shaking his head in artfully feigned disbelief, and Grosclaud snorted again. Railleuse was on her way home to France, and the captain had no intention of allowing a wretched fisherman's false claims of damage to delay his ship's escape.
All the fault of those damned books from the future, he fumed silently. All that nonsense about year-round "close blockades." Madness!
He didn't know who'd been responsible for deciding to apply that particular piece of lunatic brilliance to the present. It might even have been Richelieu himself, for all Grosclaud knew. It was the sort of convoluted, cunning notion that would have appealed to him, by all accounts. But even assuming that the books in question had told the truth (a point Grosclaud was inclined to doubt), those Englishmen of the future had never done it with ships like Railleuse. Nor, so far as Grosclaud had been able to discover, had they even tried to do it in the accursed Baltic!
He shuddered as he considered the winter just past. Ice had been a significant problem once a ship got north of Gotland, and the Gulf of Riga—as usual—had frozen over. The winter's icy winds and wet misery had turned the lot of the ships' companies assigned to the blockade into a nightmare, and the fact that Captain Admiral Overgaard had been unwilling (for reasons Jean-Marie Grosclaud found perfectly understandable, however little he liked them) to take his ships any farther up the Trave River than he absolutely had to had only made things worse. Poor diet, inadequate clothing, poor sanitation, nonexistent hygiene, miserable, wet, unheated living quarters, and treacherous conditions aloft, had killed scores and left the ships full of sick and injured crewmen . . . as anyone but an idiot must have known would happen. The attrition rate was always high aboard ships that were forced to remain at sea for extended periods; doing so in the middle of a Baltic winter had only made it worse.
Which, of course, was the reason—or one of the reasons, at least—why Grosclaud had no intention of letting a Danish fisherman's spurious claims of damage interfere with his departure.
The sailing master shouted one last sentence, jabbing his pointing finger sharply westward, in the direction of the mist-blurred outlines of the island of Funen. The fisherman grimaced. Then he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders eloquently, and started shouting at his motley four-man crew instead of Railleuse, and Grosclaud snorted a third time—this time in satisfaction.
The fishing boat's sail filled as the crew sheeted home, and the smaller craft bore away from Railleuse. It was considerably faster in the current light wind conditions than Railleuse, and Grosclaud watched it go for several moments. Then he returned to his interrupted morning's exercise, walking up and down the leeward side of the poop deck as the mist turned the fishing boat into a fading ghost.
So much for that, he thought. If God is good, that's the last Danish I'm going to be hearing this side of Hell! And even if He isn't, I don't see any—
"Sail ho!" The shout came down from aloft, and Grosclaud's head snapped around as he heard the consternation in the lookout's cry. "Sail—ships—on the port bow!"
John Simpson had decided against any sort of finesse as he made his way from the North Sea to the Baltic. His squadron had crossed the Skaggerak, rounded the tip of the Jutland Peninsula, swung east of the island of Laeso, then south through the Kattegat straight for the Great Belt, the passage between Zealand and Funen. It was the broadest (and most easily predicted) route he could have taken, but it was also a minimum of ten miles wide—once he got south of the east and west channels on either side of the island of Sprogo, at any rate. That was the decisive factor, as far as Simpson was concerned.
He had his doubts about the probable effectiveness of mines built with seventeenth-century technology, no matter what pointers the builders might have acquired from purloined up-timer sources. On the other hand, he'd seen sufficient proof of seventeenth-century ingenuity to prevent him from investing too much confidence in those doubts of his. He'd come to the conclusion that the contempt some up-timers—Quentin Underwood came rather forcibly to mind—felt for the inherent ability of native-born denizens of this century was . . . misplaced. Given the persistent reports of King Christian's fascination with the concept of moored mines (and the fact that, for all his fondness for alcoholic beverages and his famed bouts of excessive enthusiasm, Christian was anything but stupid), John Simpson had no intention of entering the narrow waters of the Sound until he had to.