The Pilot of the Blockade

• Chapter 1 The Foreign Channel
• Chapter 2 Sails upon the Horizon
• Chapter 3 The Iron Cordon
• Chapter 4 Trapped in the Roads
• Chapter 5 Council of the Desperate
• Chapter 6 Sounding the Shallows
• Chapter 7 First Blood at the Breakwater
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Harbor Tavern
• Chapter 9 The Stranded Cog
• Chapter 10 Night of the Fire Rafts
• Chapter 11 Shifting Sandbanks
• Chapter 12 The Admiral’s Demand
• Chapter 13 Chains Across the Narrows
• Chapter 14 Skirmish on the Mudflats
• Chapter 15 Treachery in the Fog
• Chapter 16 The Blind Channel
• Chapter 17 The Siege Engine Sails
• Chapter 18 Blood on the Tide
• Chapter 19 Sinking the Hulks
• Chapter 20 Under the Enemy Bows
• Chapter 21 The Gathering Tempest
• Chapter 22 Luring the Flagship
• Chapter 23 The Shoals of Doom
• Chapter 24 Clash in the Breakers
• Chapter 25 The Broken Line
• Chapter 26 Open Seas at Dawn

The water had turned the color of bruised slate, which meant the bottom was rising faster than the captain thought.

Milo stood on the forecastle of the Saint Jude, his knuckles hooked into the frayed hemp of the starboard stay, his wooden sounding-pole balanced lightly against his hip. He was forty leagues from the rocky coves of his native Dalmatia, stuck aboard a wallowing, double-ended Flemish cog whose timbers smelled primarily of stale bilge, rancid tallow, and turnips. Beneath his boots, the ship groaned as she took the swell, a clumsy beast with a high waist and a single square sail belly-full of north-easterly wind.

"Heave it, boy," Milo said, not turning his head.

Behind him, Jean, an apprentice whose knees had shaken since they had crossed the outer sand-spit, swung the lead line in a sluggish arc. The lead was seven pounds of tallow-bottomed metal, shaped like a fat sausage. It plunged into the grey foam with a dull smack. The braided cord whipped through the lad’s raw fingers until he checked it, felt the tug of the seabed, and pulled upward with a grunt.

"Five fathoms!" Jean shouted into the teeth of the wind. "White sand and crushed shell!"

Milo spat over the bulwark. "He lies. The boy is reading the mark late because his hands are cold. We have four fathoms, no more, and the shelf runs diagonal to our keel." He turned to face the waist of the ship, where Master Gervaise stood near the tiller, bundled in wool grease-soaked against the spray. "Bring her two points south, Master! You are crowding the Abbot’s Rib!"

"The Abbot’s Rib lies half a mile east!" the Flemish master yelled back through cupped mittens. His beard was frosted with brine, his small eyes stubborn with the pride of a man who owned two-thirds of his own cargo and hated paying foreign pilots by the hour. "My chart shows a straight lead directly into the estuary!"

"Your chart was drawn by a monk who has never seen salt water without wine in it," Milo muttered under his breath. Louder, he barked, "Turn her, Gervaise! Unless you intend to sell your wool to the crabs!"

Gervaise glared, but the pilot's tone possessed that flat, irritating certainty which usually belonged to priests, bailiffs, and men who understood currents. The master barked at the two burly hands wrestling the long wooden helm-bar. The great ash tiller creaked across the deck; the steering oar groaned in its iron mountings, and the cog swung slowly, heavily, like a loaded hay-wain turning in a muddy lane.

A shudder ran through the ship—not an impact, but that sickening, velvet drag that occurs when a keel kisses the soft sediment of an offshore shoal. The timbers hummed a low, ominous note that vibrated directly into the soles of Milo’s boots.

Jean went pale. Gervaise went red.

"Three fathoms," Milo said calmly, catching the hemp line as the boy hauled it in. He rubbed his thumb over the hollow base of the lead. The tallow was packed with fine grey silt and yellow clay, flecked with red gravel. "The spit has moved since the autumn storms. It always does. The river spits out its mud, the winter gales kick it back into the throat of the channel, and fools with old parchment find themselves walking home along the sea bottom."

"You swore you knew this coast, Dalmatian," Gervaise grumbled, lumbering forward with his heavy coat flapping. "The harbor masters in Southampton said you could steer a blind pig through an oyster bed."

"I can," Milo said, wiping the tallow grease on his breeches. "Provided the pig doesn't argue about the trough. We are clear of the spit now. Keep the stone beacon on the headland two fingers to the left of the church tower, and keep the sail trimmed. The tide is turning; if we lose the flood, we will spend the night anchored in the chop, rolling our guts out until morning."

The port of Oakhaven was not a welcoming sight from the sea, but on an overcast March afternoon, it was better than the grey expanse of the Channel. It lay tucked into the throat of an irregular estuary, protected from the open sea by two long, crooked claws of land. The northern claw was a spine of chalk cliff topped by gorse and an ancient, squat stone watchtower known as the Crow’s Nest. The southern spit was lower, a sprawling waste of shingle, mudflats, and eelgrass, broken only by the timber skeletons of fish-weirs and the occasional rotting hull of some vessel that had failed the very passage Milo was now navigating.

Between these two arms, the tide squeezed through a narrow throat, carving a deep, treacherous gut known locally as the King’s Trench. Within that throat lay the harbor: a crowded, forest-masted basin of stone quays, timber jetties, low-roofed warehouses, and the slate spires of a town that had grown fat on the wool trade with Flanders and the wine trade with Gascony. High above the town, dominating the eastern ridge, rose the square grey bastions of Castle Montfort, its pennants hanging limp in the damp air.

Milo knew the place well enough. He had spent the last three years working the western reaches of the Channel, having fled the Adriatic after an inconvenient disagreement with a Venetian galley captain over the ownership of a cargo of salt. A man who could read the shifting channels of northern waters, where tides rose and fell twenty feet twice a day—a monstrous phenomenon that still seemed unnatural to a Mediterranean sailor—could always find work. The local pilots were a guild of suspicious, close-fisted Englishmen who guarded their landmarks like family gold, but in the peak season, when the merchant fleets arrived all at once, foreign talent was tolerated, if rarely loved.

"Slack the brails!" Milo shouted as the cog entered the mouth of the estuary.

The roar of the open sea died away with surprising suddenness, swallowed by the high cliffs to port. The wind dropped, baffled by the bluffs, and the water changed from the chopping, white-capped froth of the Channel to the oily, brown-green swell of the river mouth. The smell changed too—the clean, cold sting of salt was replaced by the dense stink of a thriving medieval port: woodsmoke, cured herring, wet hides, horse manure, and the sour effluent of tanning pits emptying into the tidal mud.

From the northern watchtower, a bronze bell sounded three measured strokes. It was the standard harbor greeting, acknowledging an inbound merchantman.

"See to your warps," Milo told the Flemish mate, a sour-faced man with a squint. "The tide will catch our counter as we round the town quay. You’ll need a heavy spring-line on the starboard bollard or you’ll stove your stern against the fish-market pier."

The mate spit into the scuppers and went to rally the hands. Gervaise remained beside Milo, his sour expression slightly softened by the sight of the stone wharves. Ships were packed into the basin three deep: round cogs from Danzig, low-slung caravels from Lisbon, broad-beamed hoys from the Low Countries, and dozens of local fishing smacks whose wet nets hung from their spars like gigantic black cobwebs.

"It looks peaceful enough," Gervaise remarked, pulling a lead coin from his purse and handing it to Milo. It was the pilotage fee, agreed upon at the outer light. "They said in Bruges there was talk of a campaign. Some dispute over the duchy. My factor worried the king might press our bottoms for troop transports."

Milo bit the coin, found it sound silver rather than lead, and slid it into the leather pouch beneath his wool tunic. "Kings are always disputing duchies, Master. Usually it means the price of oats goes up and the harbor bailiffs demand larger bribes to let you clear port. If you unload your cloth quickly and take on salt fish, you can be back in Zeeland before any duke remembers where Oakhaven is."

"God grant it," the Fleming muttered, crossing himself. "A ship at sea earns her bread; a ship tied to a pier only eats rope."

They drifted past the western battery, a low earthwork mounted with three crude iron bombards that sat on oak balks, their wide muzzles pointed out across the roadstead. A pair of men-at-arms in rusted mail coifs leaned on their bills, watching the Flemish cog with the dull, bovine disinterest common to garrison soldiers everywhere. A knot of children on the shingle beach threw stones at a dead seal. Everything had the mundane, timeless rhythm of an ordinary Tuesday.

Yet, as the Saint Jude swung her nose toward the town quay, Milo felt a strange, persistent prickle at the nape of his neck.

He was not a mystic, but twenty years on the sea made a man sensitive to small irregularities that others missed. The harbor was full—too full. At this season, half the English fleet should have been across the water, carrying winter wool to the marts of Ghent and Antwerp. Instead, the merchantmen were banked up against the quays like logs behind a mill-dam. Furthermore, upon the stone terrace of the castle, a courier’s horse stood lathered and drooping, its head hanging between its knees while a stable boy hastily loosened the girth.

"Look there," Milo said, pointing toward the Custom House at the head of the main pier.

A small skiff was pushing off from the stone steps, rowed by four men in liveried jerkins of dark green and yellow—the colors of the town’s High Bailiff. In the stern sheets sat a stout figure wrapped in marten fur, holding a bundle of parchment rolls bound with red wax.

"Bailiff’s clerk," Gervaise grunted, recognizing the plumage. "He smells my broadcloth already. He’ll want the harbor dues before we even drop the bower anchor."

"That’s not the dues collector," Milo said. He recognized the man in the stern: Master Peter, the town recorder, a man who rarely left his dry desk unless the town council had caught fire. "And he is not carrying the customs ledger. Those are royal warrants."

The skiff drew alongside the Saint Jude with a sharp clatter of oars. One of the rowers caught the cog’s main-chains with an iron boathook, jarring the vessel. Master Peter stood up, balancing with some difficulty on his plump legs, his round, doughy face flushed red from the wind.

"Master Gervaise of Ghent?" the clerk called up, his voice cracking slightly against the lapping of the water.

"I am he," Gervaise called back from the rail. "I carry fifty bales of dressed woolens and twelve tuns of vinegar from Middelburg. All manifested, all certified by the guild of—"

"By order of the King’s Council and the Warden of the Western Marches," the clerk shouted, unrolling one of the parchments and reading from it without looking at the master, "all sailings from this haven are hereby arrested. No vessel, whether of English registry or belonging to the leagues of Flanders, France, or the Easterlings, shall clear the bar until further warrant be given. All mariners are commanded to remain aboard their craft on pain of forfeiture and imprisonment."

Gervaise went entirely still. The Flemish mate dropped the coil of line he was holding; it hit the planking with a wet thud.

"Arrested?" Gervaise’s voice rose an octave, shredding into fury. "On what authority? My clearances were bought and paid for in Sluys! I am a free burgher of—"

"The King's peace is broken," Master Peter interrupted loudly, as if reciting a lesson he had already repeated twenty times that morning. "The fleet of the Duke of Valois has cleared the Seine. A hundred sail, with mercenaries from Genoa and knights of Brittany. The herald arrived not two hours ago from Dover. The narrow seas are closed, Master Gervaise. If you leave this harbor, you will be taken or burned before you raise the North Foreland."

A heavy silence descended upon the deck of the Saint Jude. The crew, though speaking Flemish, understood the word Genoa and the tone of the clerk well enough. Men began to mutter in low, frightened voices, looking out toward the mouth of the channel they had just traversed with such difficulty.

Milo leaned against the forecastle timber, his jaw set. "A hundred sail?" he called down to the skiff.

The clerk looked up, blinking at Milo’s strange accent and southern complexion. "Who are you?"

"Milo of Ragusa. I brought this tub in through the shallows."

"Then you brought her into a trap, pilot," Master Peter said, sighing as he tucked the roll back into his sleeve. "The Duke’s ships were sighted off the Isle of Wight three days ago, sailing east-northeast with a following gale. They are sweeping the coast. Our own Lord Admiral is trapped in the Thames with the grand fleet, unable to clear the shoals against this cursed wind. There is nothing between Valois and this town but forty miles of salt water."

"And the castle," Gervaise sputtered, pointing a shaking finger toward the stone towers of Montfort. "The King’s garrison—"

"The castle cannot walk out into the deep water to defend your wool, master merchant," Milo said quietly.

He stepped to the rail and looked back toward the harbor entrance. From this angle, inside the gut, the sea was visible only as a narrow wedge of iron-colored light framed by the chalk cliff and the low, sandy spit. It looked small, innocent, and deceptively easy to cross.

"They won't just sweep the coast," Milo said, speaking more to himself than to the others. "If Valois has a hundred ships and the wind at his back, he won't bypass Oakhaven. Not with forty merchantmen sitting in the pool like fat capons in a coop."

The clerk made no answer to that. He merely signaled his rowers, who shoved off from the cog’s side and turned their skiff toward the next anchored ship, an armed caravel from Bristol whose crew was already leaning over the bulwarks, shouting questions into the gathering dusk.

"Pilot," Gervaise whispered, his hand coming down heavily on Milo’s shoulder. His fingers were trembling. "What does this mean?"

Milo looked at the coin in his palm, then closed his fist around it. The wind was freshening from the east, carrying the bitter, clean tang of sea-spray over the greasy smells of the town. Out beyond the headland, the tide had fully turned, beginning its fierce, inexorable rush back toward the deep sea.

"It means, Master Gervaise," Milo said, "that your wool is not going to Flanders. And it means my fee will not buy me passage home to the south." He looked up at the grey sky, where the gulls were wheeling in erratic, frantic circles, fleeing the cold air of the outer bay. "It means we are all going to stay right here, and watch what the tide brings in."

The quayside at Oakhaven did not descend into panic all at once; it curdled slowly, like milk left too near the hearth.

By twilight, the tide had ebbed to a glistening expanse of black mud that smelled of rotting bladder-wrack and stale sewage. The Saint Jude sat lopsided in her berth, her round belly cradled by the silt, her hemp warps groaning around the slimy oak pilings as she settled. Milo swung himself down the crude rope ladder, his sea-boots hitting the wooden boards of the Town Pier with a hollow thud. Around him, the ordinary commerce of the evening was falling apart at the seams.

Porters carrying sacks of rye had stopped mid-stride, arguing with Flemish drovers who refused to sign the tallies. On the steps of the Wool Exchange, three factors from the Hanseatic League were shouting in guttural Low German at the harbor constable, their ledgers brandished like broadswords. The constable, an aging man whose liveried tabard was missing half its pewter buttons, merely held up an iron-shod staff and told them to talk to the Bailiff, who had already locked his front door and drawn his shutters against the chill.

Milo worked his way through the press of bodies, dodging two brawny skinners hauling a cart of salted oxen hides. A sailor with salt-sores on his neck caught Milo by the sleeve.

"Is it true, pilot? Have they burned the Isle of Wight?"

Milo shook the man off without breaking stride. "Ask the Bailiff. He has the parchment; I only have the sounding-pole."

He made his way past the fish-stalls, where gutted mackerel lay in silver ribbons across the ice, toward a narrow lane of timber-framed tenements that leaned toward each other like tired drunkards. Above the lintel of a low, whitewashed doorway hung a sun-bleached bundle of dry rosemary: the sign of the Sign of the Anchor, a taphouse frequented by the men who earned their living by knowing which parts of the sea would kill you and which parts would merely rob you.

Inside, the air was warm, greasy, and thick with the blue smoke of peat burning in an open hearth. A score of men sat crowded along the trestles, hunched over wooden jacks of sour ale. When the leather door-curtain fell back and Milo stepped in, the muttered talk died down to a dull rumble. In the corner sat old Aldous, the dean of the Oakhaven Pilots’ Guild. Aldous was a man who looked as though he had been carved out of salt-hardened driftwood; his whiskers were yellowed with pipe-weed, and a cloudy cataract had stolen the sight of his left eye thirty years ago when a staysail block had parted under strain.

"The Ragusan," Aldous said, his voice grating like gravel under a keel. He did not look up from his horn of small beer. "Brought the Fleming in on a falling tide, did you? Thought you’d have him high and dry on the Abbot’s Rib."

"The Fleming is tied up at the South Quay, sound in every rib," Milo replied, sliding onto the bench opposite the old man. He pulled a silver penny from his belt and knocked it against the grease-stained pine. The tavern girl, a broad-hipped creature named Bess with flour dusted across her bare forearms, dropped a leather pitcher of thin ale in front of him and swept up the coin with practiced speed.

Milo took a long draught. It was sour enough to strip the tartar from his teeth, but it was wet and washed away the grit of the river silt. "They’ve closed the roadstead," he said.

"We heard the horn from the Crow's Nest before you even crossed the bar," Aldous grunted. He picked at a splinter in the table with a broken fingernail. "Duke’s ships out of Harfleur. Two score large cogs, they say, and fifty Genoese oarsmen. A great muster. The Warden of the castle has called out the militia, and the town watch is busy arresting every French cooper in the fish-quarter for fear they’ll set fire to the ropewalks."

A younger pilot sitting down the bench, a local fellow named Ned with a nervous twitch in his cheek, leaned forward. "They won't come into the gut, will they, Aldous? Nobody takes forty fathoms of beam through the King’s Trench without a local man at the helm. It’s suicide."

Aldous gave a harsh, wheezing laugh that ended in a wet cough. "Suicide for a solitary merchant, aye. But when you have forty great ships and two thousand men in iron caps, you don't need to ask permission of the channel. You throw three hulks onto the shoals, use them as stepping stones, and burn the rest of the harbor with Greek fire. The Genoese have galleys, boy. Galleys don't care about the sandspit. They row where they please on five feet of water, and they carry swivel-guns that spit iron pellets the size of hen’s eggs."

Milo set down his pitcher, his brown eyes narrowing. "Galleys in these waters? The swell from an easterly gale will roll a Mediterranean galley like an empty barrel. Their floor-timbers are too thin for the English surf."

"They don't need to fight the surf," Aldous retorted, turning his good eye on Milo with a glint of old malice. "They only need to reach the throat. If they slip into the roads behind the northern spit, where the cliff breaks the wind, they can pick this port clean as a kipper. What do you think, southern boy? You’re from the country of oars. Could your cousins from Genoa take the channel?"

"They aren't my cousins," Milo said evenly. "The Genoese burned my father’s brigantine off Corfu when I was twelve years old. If they’re out there, they have three hundred mercenaries at eight florins a month on every bench, and captains who navigate by Italian compasses and dead reckoning. If they have an English renegade at the steering-oar, they’ll find the King’s Trench. If they don't, they will pile up on the Abbot's Rib just like any other fool who tries to read these tides by starlight."

Before Aldous could reply, the heavy oak door of the tavern swung wide, banging hard against the whitewashed wall. The peat smoke swirled violently in the sudden draft, revealing a tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the threshold. He wore a rust-stained brigandine of boiled leather and iron scales over a fustian tunic, with a long broadsword slung across his back in a scabbard bound with greasy rawhide. Two men-at-arms, carrying six-foot ash bills with rusted sockets, crowded behind him in the lane.

The taverner dropped a stoneware jug, which shattered on the flagstones. The room went dead silent.

The newcomer stepped inside, ducking his head beneath the low lintel. He had a scarred, crooked nose that looked as though it had been broken by an iron gauntlet, and eyes the color of stagnant puddle-water. He scanned the room, his gaze flicking past the local draymen and stopping directly on Milo's foreign woolen cloak and tanned skin.

"Which of you is the Dalmatian?" the soldier asked. His voice was deep, clipped, and completely devoid of courtesy.

Aldous immediately looked down into his beer. The younger pilots pressed themselves flat against the wall, eager to become part of the timberwork.

Milo did not move. He kept both hands resting flat on the greasy board. "I am Milo of Ragusa. What does the garrison want with a pilot? The castle has stone walls; it doesn't need to be steered into the wind."

"Sir Baldwin of Montfort wants you," the soldier replied, stepping forward until the iron rings on his leather coat clinked against the table-edge. "I am Walter Crane, sergeant of the castle gate. You brought the Flemish wool-carrier through the outer spit an hour ago, while the other pilots were sitting on their hands waiting for the dawn tide. The High Bailiff told Sir Baldwin there’s a foreigner in town who knows the bottom of the Trench better than the locals do."

Aldous spat on the floor. "He doesn't know the Trench. He guessed. He dragged his keel across the sand twice on the way in."

"He got forty bales of broadcloth to the quay without drowning them," Crane said, not even looking at the old Englishman. He kept his cold grey eyes fixed on Milo. "The knight wants you at the upper works. Now. Take your boots and your sounding-pole."

Milo looked at the half-finished pitcher of beer, then at the sergeant's scarred jaw. A sensible man who had survived three years in the English Channel knew that when a feudal knight sent an armed sergeant into a waterfront tavern, refusing was merely a longer and more painful way of obeying. He stood up slowly, tightening the leather belt that held his purse and his short, double-edged seaman’s dagger.

"Sir Baldwin can pay the pilotage fee," Milo said, picking up his five-foot ash sounding-pole from the corner behind the bench. "I don't climb the hill for prayers."

"You’ll climb the hill because I have two bills behind me and five more at the end of the lane," Crane said without heat. "Move your legs, sailor."

They stepped out into the damp, salt-laden night. The fog had begun to creep into the town, rising off the drying mudflats like steam from a dyer’s vat. It clung to the timber overhangs of the houses and muffled the sound of their iron-shod boots as they began the steep climb up the High Street toward Castle Montfort.

The street was dark, save for the flickering tallow cressets set outside the armorer’s shop, where two apprentices were frantically hammering rivets into old iron breastplates on a stone anvil. The ringing of their hammers—clink-clank, clink-clank—echoed down the narrow alleyway with an eerie, rhythmic urgency. Behind shuttered windows, women were weeping, and from an open stable door, the smell of hot pitch rose thick and choking as town laborers prepared buckets of boiling tar for the gate defenses.

"How many ships did the lookout see?" Milo asked as they climbed the steep stone steps that led to the castle’s barbican.

"Look for yourself when we reach the parapet," Crane muttered, breathing heavily under the weight of his mail. "The sun went down an hour ago, but the fires out on the water don't go down with the sun."

They passed under the groined vault of the castle gatehouse, where the heavy oak portcullis hung suspended by massive iron chains, its pointed iron shoes glistening with fresh tallow. A dozen men in padded gambesons stood guard, their bows unstrung and protected from the mist inside leather cases. Crane led Milo up a spiral stairway of cold, slippery limestone, out onto the wide stone flags of the seaward rampart.

The wind hit them like a physical blow. Up here, eighty feet above the harbor pool, the air was entirely free of the town's stench. It blew straight off the open Channel, freezing cold and salt-laden, whistling shrilly through the stone crenellations of the battlements.

A small group of men stood huddled near a stone brazier where charcoal glowed a sullen, wind-whipped red. In the center stood a man in his late forties, wrapped in a heavy mantle of wolf-fur over an arming coat of polished steel plates. He had a high, aristocratic forehead, deep-set dark eyes, and a neat, grey-streaked beard trimmed in the French fashion. This was Sir Baldwin of Montfort, knight, castellan, and the man responsible for defending six leagues of barren shingle and five thousand sheep from the French crown.

Beside him stood the High Bailiff, looking pale and miserable in his wet furs, and an elderly friar holding a small brass astrolabe against his chest as if it were a crucifix.

"Is this the man?" Sir Baldwin asked, turning as Crane and Milo approached. His voice was calm, possessed of that light, dangerous politeness that aristocrats used when they were about to order commoners to their deaths.

"Milo of Ragusa, my lord," Crane reported, giving a brief, stiff nod. "Harbor pilot. Handled the shipping out of Southampton two winters back, and brought the Flemish broadcloth in through the shallows this afternoon."

Sir Baldwin looked Milo up and down, taking in the coarse Mediterranean wool of his tunic, the salt-crusted boots, and the ash pole gripped in his brown hand. "You are from the Republic of St. Blaise? Ragusa?"

"I am," Milo said. He did not bow; sailors bowed only to the sea and the altar. "And my rate is two groats a fathom for navigation, three if there is iron in the air."

The High Bailiff made an indignant noise in his throat, but Sir Baldwin merely waved a gloved hand to silence him. "If the iron stays in the air, pilot, you will have more silver than you can ballast your pockets with. If the iron comes ashore, your silver won't save your throat from a Breton dagger. Come here. Look."

Sir Baldwin stepped into one of the stone embrasures, gesturing outward into the darkness. Milo joined him, leaning his forearms against the cold granite coping.

Below them, the harbor pool was a dark, convoluted bowl of black water, the riding lights of the trapped merchant fleet swaying rhythmically in the tide like fireflies trapped in a bottle. Further out, the mouth of the King’s Trench narrowed to a silver-grey line where the river current fought the sea swell. Beyond that lay the outer bay—and beyond the outer bay lay the black, uninterrupted void of the open sea.

Except it was not void.

Far out on the horizon, five or six miles to the southeast, tiny prickles of orange light dotted the boundary between sea and sky. They were not the steady, cold white of stars, nor the yellow glow of shore-beacons. They were the raw, flickering orange of pitch-soaked pine cressets and deck lanterns, dancing on the heave of the swell.

Milo leaned out into the wind, squinting with the trained eye of a man who had spent his youth watching for Turkish galleys off the Dalmatian coast. He began to count.

One, two, three... five in a cluster... two more to the windward... a long gap... then another cluster of ten.

"They have anchored in the lee of the Outer Shoals," Milo said, his voice quiet.

"Can you tell their size?" Sir Baldwin asked, his gaze fixed on the distant lights.

"The ones with the lights set high on the stays are great cogs," Milo said, his mind calculating the height of the lantern above the waterline based on the angle and the sway. "Three-masters, probably out of Rouen or Honfleur. Four hundred tons or more. You can tell by how slow they roll. The quick lights, lower down, are balingers or supply hoys. And those three lights running in a straight line, keeping distance from each other like soldiers on a march?"

Sir Baldwin leaned forward. "What are they?"

"Galleys," Milo said flatly. "Genoese. They have doused their mast lanterns, but their watch-fires on the rowing decks are burning. They’re running on sweeps, holding their station against the ebb tide."

The High Bailiff groaned, pressing his hands against his stomach. "Merciful Christ. They’ve brought the oarsmen. If they run into the harbor at dawn—"

"They won't run into the harbor at dawn," Milo interrupted, his tone dry as hardtack. "The dawn tide is a neap tide. There won't be three fathoms of water over the bar until two hours after prime. If those big Norman cogs try to enter before the water is full, they’ll break their backs on the outer bank before they even smell the town dung-heaps."

Sir Baldwin turned to look at the pilot, his eyes reflecting the dull glow of the brazier. "Then we have until midday?"

"You have until the water rises," Milo said. "The wind is holding steady from the north-east, which means it’s blowing directly out of the harbor mouth. That’s the only good luck you have tonight, Sir Baldwin. The big ships can't sail in against this wind; they’ll have to be towed by their galleys or wait for the sea-breeze to back around to the south. But the galleys... they don't need the wind. They can pull against an easterly chop if their rowers have had their beans and their wine."

The knight rubbed his bearded chin with the back of an iron gauntlet, producing a dry, rasping sound. "We have two hundred men of the town militia, forty archers from the manor lands, and twenty men-at-arms in the keep. Down on the spit, we have three bombards on timber beds, but the master gunner says the powder was wetted by the spray three days ago and has not yet dried."

"Throw the powder into the sea and use the guns for mooring bollards," Milo said without hesitation. "A bombard that won't speak is just an expensive anchor. If you want to keep them out of the pool, you have to fight them where the water is thin."

The High Bailiff bristled. "Listen to the foreigner! Sir Baldwin, the Guild of Pilots has already given their counsel. Master Aldous says we must sink two stone-laden barges across the Trench, chain the boom, and pull our ships tight against the castle wall where the garrison’s archers can cover them!"

Milo let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. "Sink your barges in the Trench? If you sink them there, you choke your own throat! The tide will scour out a new gutter around your wrecks in forty-eight hours, right through the soft mud of the southern spit, and then the French will have a channel twelve feet deeper than the one you just blocked! And what happens when the Duke sails away? How will your wool-cogs get out to sea? You’ll be locked in your own cellar while your children starve."

"He speaks truth about the scouring," Sir Baldwin said quietly, his voice cutting through the Bailiff’s protestations. He stepped closer to Milo, smelling of old leather, steel oil, and cold wool. "You have no love for this town, pilot. You are not an Englishman. Why are you telling me how to save it?"

Milo looked the knight squarely in the eye. "Because I have twenty pounds of silver locked in Master Gervaise’s chest on the Saint Jude, which represents three years of eating salted herring and sleeping on wet canvas in this miserable, frozen ditch of an island. If the French burn the ships, my silver burns with them. And because I spent three years dodging Genoese galleys in the Adriatic, and I have no desire to end my life chained to an oar-bench in the Mediterranean pulling their oars for them."

Sir Baldwin stared at him for a long, silent moment. The wind whipped between the battlements, throwing sparks from the brazier high into the black night.

"Crane," the knight said suddenly.

"My lord?" the sergeant stepped forward.

"Go to the Custom House. Bring me every chart, every sounding-book, and every harbor register they possess. Then go to the Guildhall and fetch the keys to the boom." Sir Baldwin turned back to the parapet, his hand resting on the hilt of his broadsword as he looked down at the distant, glittering line of French watch-fires. "And bring the master of the King’s Works. If we are to fight them on the water, we had better know where the water ends and the stone begins."

Sir Baldwin looked back at Milo. "You are pilot to the castle now, Dalmatian. If we hold the bar, I will see your twenty pounds doubled by the King’s exchequer. If we lose it, you will have the privilege of drowning before the rest of us."

"A fair contract," Milo muttered, turning his eyes back toward the horizon.

Out on the dark water, the distant orange lights had begun to shift. Two of the galley fires were separating from the main cluster, beginning a slow, rhythmic creep forward into the black expanse of the outer bay. They were moving like hunting hounds cast into the brush, testing the wind, feeling for the scent of the channel in the dark.

Milo gripped his sounding-pole tighter against his ribs. The tide was at its dead low, the mudflats bare and defenseless, and out beyond the shoals, the hunters had already begun to row.