Ironically, the last great chase of 1635: The Papal Stakes was cut from the novel. Reason: it simply was not essential to the plotline that we see the failed Spanish attempt to intercept the rescue forces that extracted Frank and Giovanna Stone from their prison in the high reaches of the Castell de Bellver’s lazarette. It was only necessary that the reader know the general parameters of the escape plan and that it had obviously succeeded.
However, in this restored scene, readers get a chance to see how Estuban Miro’s canny plans ensured that the group would wholly elude Spanish pursuers, starting from the very moment they cast off from the dock in Palma de Mallorca…
With the sun coming up any minute, Captain Bernardo Villarda y Ruiz, master of the Petrel, gave orders to cast off the moment his executive officer, Alfonso Ricardo Torres y Pizarro—yes, a relative of that Pizarro—clambered somewhat awkwardly onto the deck. “Nice of you to join us, Don Alfonso,” he commented drily.
“I am lucky to be here at all, Captain,” the much younger man and pampered scion replied with a measure of heat. “With all the confusion surrounding what happened last night—“
“That does not concern us. Our task is to pick up the trail of these saboteurs and assassins and stay on them. The rest will come out and follow our lead; we are the first hound in the chase.”
From the spot on the wharf in Porto Pi, furthest south of the moorings in Palma Bay, Torres y Pizarro looked back toward city’s main docks. “I do not recall seeing any major warships there, to bring down the prey.”
“No galleons, if that is what you mean, but there are two frigatas and a brig, if they are even needed: the attackers might have come in smaller ships. But right now, that is not our concern. Hoy, mate, cast off. Raise the yards.”
The Petrel got under way just as the first hint of false dawn was limning the east: she was a barca longa with clean lines and known for speed. But that reputation was not going to help her contend with the forces of nature that pushed against her now.
Don Alfonso, newly arrived in the Balearics (and none too happy with what he considered—rightly—a backwater assignment) noticed the slowness of their start. “What is our problem?”
You are our biggest problem, not having an ounce of maritime experience to go along with the many pounds of silver whereby your family purchased your commission. But instead, the captain—mindful of how frequently this impertinent man-boy’s lips came close to influential ears—chose to educate instead of castigate him: “Our problems are two-fold: the currents and the wind. Whoever planned this treacherous attack was not an idiot; he knew the seas in these parts quite well. The current that runs into the bay is peaking now, and the Llebeig, the wind out of the desert to the southwest, is rising early. The clouds that covered the approach of this, this—balloon—they used, was also the harbinger of stronger weather from Algeria—of winds against which we will be sailing directly.”
Don Alfonso looked outraged, almost personally insulted. “So we are pinned here, unable to pursue?”
Villarda y Ruiz managed not to sigh or close his eyes on exasperation. “No; you are once again thinking of square-rigged vessels. They are helpless—or nearly so—in a headwind. We can make progress, but slowly, and only by tacking back and forth across the wind, and in this case, the current as well.”
“So we progress in a zig-zag pattern, not a straight line.”
Miracle of miracles: the man-boy actually did have a brain! “Exactly. But all this puts us even further behind an adversary who already has a long head start. He will be at least ten miles ahead of us by the time we are a mile out from the bay, I fear. Possibly much more.”
* * *
The captain of the Bitch stood alongside Thomas North as one of his men lit the small oil burner close to the base of the rather immense Kongming—or ‘flying’—lantern and tested the thin, silken string to which it was affixed. As they watched, it began to rise slowly into the air from the stern of the ship.
“How high will you run it?” asked North.
“Don Miro said fifty feet should be more than sufficient. It’s small but those Spanish dogs”—he jerked his head at the distant speck of dim sail far behind them—“will see it clearly enough as we let them get a bit closer. The sky is still dark enough that they’ll see the light. Which, if they got any decription of the dirigible, will look like the burner to them.”
North squinted at the bright white, lacquered “shade” of the lantern. “And Miro believes a seaman will mistake that for our airship?”
“Hell,” admitted the captain, “it fooled me the one time we tested it. If you’re not familiar with an airship already—and I wasn’t—it’s hard to know exactly what you’re seeing when you’re too far away to make out a silhouette. All you know is that something is hovering in the sky near a ship, and is bright. At that range, your sense of relative scale—how big the thing in the sky is in comparison to the little dark dot under it—is pretty unreliable. And if they don’t know about these,”—he gestured to the Kongming lamp—“what would you think a distant, hovering light in the sky was?”
North smiled. “Good point. But once the sun comes up, the light won’t show up as well against the sky.”
“No,” allowed the captain, “but then the white silk and shiny lacquer on the shade will start reflecting, along with those big paint chips Miro brought from Grantville. He called it ‘crown’—?”
“Chrome,” North corrected. “Chrome plating. Mostly from automobile bumpers, I believe.”
“From what?”
“Never mind. And how long will the lantern stay aloft?”
“Longer than we need. Now, what can you see through those double-telescopes of yours?”
“Well,” said North, raising his binoculars to fix upon the trailing Spanish ship, “I’ll tell you in just a moment.”
* * *
Captain Villarda y Ruiz sighed when his sharpest-eyed sailor shrugged uncertainty. “They are gaining on us again.”
Don Alfonso scowled. “Even with that balloon in tow?”
“Yes, even so. Check on the other boats; are they catching up, at all?”
Alfonso turned around and was silent for a second. “Sir, they are veering off!”
“Both of them?”
“Yes!” The young man turned back, fury in his face. “Sir, what could it mean? Are they such cowards that—?”
Villarda y Ruiz shook his head. “No, no—it would not be that. I am concerned that they saw another boat and have given chase, presuming that they could be of no use to us, since if we slowed down to let them catch up, our prey would slip away.”
“But how can we tell if that is what occurred?”
Villarda y Ruis smiled. “We would need one of the wonderful telescopes you have spoken about, Alfonso—like the one you peered through when you visited your uncle’s galleon.” The lack of a telescope—or simple spyglass, for that matter—had already become a bitter point in their pursuit of the enemy ship. When they spotted the balloon in the sky next to it, shortly before dawn, it would have been helpful to have been able to better discern the range of the ship, the balloon, the distance between them. That would have made it unnecessary to indulge in broad guesses as to their size and configuration. And now, as they drew further away, and the light increased, the ability to discern details diminished further: at greater range, and without the same clear contrast against the dark, the balloon was no more than a winking speck in the sky.
Don Alfonso was, obviously, equally distressed by the lack of necessary equipment, and a great deal more vocal about it. “We must have a telescope! How can you go to sea without one?”
Villarda y Ruiz had expected some such outburst and was thus able to conceal his smile. The young intendant of the Spanish Empire, a hidalgo’s presumptuous scion, Alfonso’s sparse experience with ships had been of precisely the wrong sort: he had lived in close concert with excellent maps, up-to-date sextants, recently acquired up-time charts, and sherry in the great cabin with the captain and officers. And, of course, telescopes. But again, Villarda y Ruiz kept these sardonic observations to himself. “We do not have such expensive instruments on a working ship such as this one, Lieutenant,” the captain replied, emphasizing the word “working” as he did so. If the boy had ever had any hope of becoming a genuine seaman, the aristocratic insistence of familiarizing him—first and foremost—with so-called ‘great ships’ had clearly ruined him. Those great looming hulks of galleons—barges with square rigged sails—were hardly ships at all: more like floating treasure houses with thick sides and cannons to complete the comparison.
And now he was in a genuine naval chase and could not read the unfolding signs—signs as clear to a thirteen-year-old ship’s boy as his letters and sums. Clearer, probably, given the low quality of itinerant tutoring afforded students of such humble means. “Reason it out, Alfonso: you remember how our look-out thought he saw sails to the south, as well.”
“Yes, but he was not sure.”
“”True, but that does not mean he was mistaken. It could simply mean that the ship there was hovering at the edge of visibility.”
“Why?”
“So that later—as we see now—he could edge in closer, and show his sheets to the vessels coming after us. And, thereby, draw them off after him.”
“But to what purpose?”
God help the poor crew who winds up serving under this imbecile. “To split us up. Consider: the attackers knew Palma, evidently knew the Castell de Bellver. They probably also knew the approximate number and kind of pursuit ships we had ready in the bay. And so now, they present us with numerous hulls and all on different headings. So we must choose: follow all and spread ourselves too thin, or choose one and hope that we have luckily chosen the right one. And at our current range, we have no way to signal to the ships following us: their masters are making their own decisions, and so we have no way to tell them that we are following the ship with the balloon.”
Alfonso’s brows lowered and what he said made Villarda y Ruiz decide that he would pay any price to get the young aristocrat off his boat: “It’s just not fair,” announced Don Alfonso.
* * *
The sun had just passed the high noon point when the lookout in the bow of the Petrel called attention to something floating in the water, less than half a mile to starboard. Captain Bernardo Villarda y Ruiz ordered the steersman to bring her over two points and squinted into the spray.
Minutes later, he clearly saw what it was in the water: a strange hybrid between a balloon and a paper lantern. He had heard of such things from sailors who had served on the galleons that traded east beyond India, all the way to the Philippines, but had attributed it to the tall tales of professional seamen—seamen who spent much of their shore liberty drunk on whatever local spirits came to hand. Evidently, there had been some truth in those tales after all, which he conceded he now had learned the hard way.
“We have been chasing a…a toy?” Don Alfonso nearly screamed.
“For the last hour, yes. I conjecture that when they had opened the range between us to that point when they could no longer see our sail, they rightly reasoned that, reciprocally, we could no longer see theirs. At that time, they cut this ‘balloon-lantern’ free”—he pointed to the fine silken thread in the water—“and let it follow the wind. Then they turned at right angles to that heading, and so are gone. Quite gone. It would be sheer luck for us to find them again.”
Villarda-Ruiz stared down at the shiny lacquered surfaces of the ruined lamp. Its light, and its reflective sheet, had fixed their attention just as intended, particularly with sun dancing in and out of the scattered clouds, sending flashes off the lantern’s sides like taunting beacons. And while they had played hide and seek with this lure, the real balloon and escapees were—
—Where? He turned in a full circle, staring at the surrounding horizon: 360 degrees of flat, empty dark blue capped by feather-clouded light blue. The real culprits could be anywhere, by now.
Naturally, he and the other captains would all give up the chase, returning to report the ruse with all possible dispatch. A tongue-lashing would be meted out, new orders would be given, and the search radius expanded, to the extent that wind conditions and prevailing currents would permit. But the odds of catching the assassins were now slim, at best. And if they had had the foresight to have had yet another fast ship in readiness, which set out on a course entirely different from those he and his colleagues had been led along, the odds of intercept became negligible.
Like he, the other captains would realize this even as they went out from Palma Bay on their second, futile sweep. But they would continue to search, of course: to do any less would be to invite greater wrath from already displeased superiors. Because although failure was bad, and incompetence worse, any sign of lethargy meant not merely dereliction of duty, but a diminished fear of the disapproval of one’s betters. And in Imperial Spain, that was the sin that could not be tolerated, for its rule—from august monarch down to humblest hidalgo—was informed by the same notions of statecraft that had been articulated by Nicolo Machiavelli but a century before: it was better to be respected than loved. But it was better to be feared that respected.
Much, much better.