The shipyard at Glarentza
The shipyard lay behind the southern mole, past the rope-walk and the pitch sheds, and by the time Constantine and Theophilus reached the gate they could smell the work before they saw it: hot tar, sawdust, the thin green smell of fresh-cut oak. The guard at the gate came to attention and was waved back to his post. Constantine had not wanted a parade. He had brought Theophilus, a clerk, and a few guards at his back, and that was enough.
Inside the fence the noise took over: hammers at three different tempos on the sterncastle of the new ship; farther back, an adze ringing on oak with the steady two-beat of a skilled man on a long plank; a saw whining through green timber. The pitch kettle bubbled, and each time the ladle went in and came out there was a hiss and a thin curl of smoke. Men called across the hull in the yard's own Greek-Portuguese pidgin, and a boy passed with a coil of tarred rope nearly as large as himself.
The new ship dominated the slip. Her hull stood almost finished in the cradle, the planking run up past the row of gunports, the sterncastle framed and partly decked. From where Constantine stopped to look, she seemed larger and more composed than the Katarina: the gunports a bit smaller but more evenly spaced, the sheer of her deck line cleaner. Rigging lay in heaps on tarpaulins along the slip wall. Two men were up on the taffrail measuring something with a knotted cord.
"She is coming on well," he said.
"She is a month from the water," Theophilus said, "or so I am told. I will let them give you the figure themselves."
Diogo Gonçalves came down from the scaffolding by a plank that bowed under his weight, and Afonso Vaz followed by the ladder on the yard side. Both wore canvas aprons over their shirts. Diogo had tar dried on the back of one hand; he tried once to wipe it off on his thigh, saw it would not come away, and left it. Afonso reached them first, made a short bow, then seemed to think better of it in a yard and straightened.
"Majesty. It is good to see you back."
"Good to be back. The work looks well."
"The Katarina…" Diogo said it and stopped, because it was a question he had been carrying for months and he did not know how to ask it without sounding as though he were asking after his own child. "She held."
"She did more than hold." Constantine looked up at the new hull rather than at him, which made it easier. "Her broadside changed the shape of the fight at Gallipoli. Her first volley took the rigging out of the nearest galley and broke the line behind it. After that the Ottomans came at her anyway, because they had to, but they came without order."
"The ports took the recoil clean?" Afonso asked.
"Clean. No splits I heard of. The master gunner complained of the smoke, but he complains about the smoke on every deck he has ever stood on."
Diogo almost smiled. "The ribs held."
"They held. You built her well, both of you."
Neither of them spoke at once, and Constantine did not hurry to fill the silence. He knew that look on the faces of men who had made a thing with their hands and sent it out among strangers.
"We would have liked to see her in battle," Afonso said at last.
"I would have preferred you farther from the shot," Constantine said. "Come up to the castle tonight. Both of you. I will tell you more of the campaign over dinner, there is more than I can give you standing under a hull. Now show me this one."
They took him around the hull. Diogo did most of the talking under the bows, where the bracing was — he ran his palm along a rib and explained what they had changed from the Katarina, a heavier knee here, a second iron strap there, a joint remade because the first one had shown a hair crack when they loaded it with a dead weight that a single broadside would not match. Afonso came in on the finer work, the gunports and the gun carriages stacked in the shed alongside the slip, and he was quieter about it, touching the wood rather than tapping it, the way a man touches a thing he has thought about for a long time.
"She is not larger than the Katarina," Diogo said when they came around again to the stern. "Not by a foot. But she is, to speak plainly, Majesty, a better ship. We learned from the first one. A hundred small things, most of them where you cannot see them."
"How long until she swims."
"Four weeks to the water. Six before she is fit for sea, if the rope comes when we are promised it and the sailmaker keeps to his word." Diogo glanced at Afonso. "Eight if it does not."
Constantine looked up the length of the hull and down it again. Theophilus was a few paces behind him with the clerk, saying nothing.
"I had thought she would be in the water sooner."
He said it plainly, without edge, but both men straightened a little when he did. Afonso looked at Diogo, and it was Diogo who answered, as though by a standing agreement between them that the harder questions were his.
"She would have been in the water two months past, Majesty. We lost four weeks on oak alone. The cut from Elis came late, and half of what came was not seasoned enough to use. We had to set it aside and buy again from a Ragusan who charged us twice. The rope hands were pulled off to the mole works for ten days in May, and when we got them back half of them had forgotten the run on the second mast. Iron was steady until April and then it was not." He shrugged. "She lost time to shortages. She did not lose it to bad work."
"I can see that."
"The men know it," Afonso put in, more quietly. "They do not like being asked why she is not ready when they have been here since the first bell every day."
"No," Constantine said. "I would not ask them that."
He went a few steps further along the hull, set one hand flat against the planking, and held it there a moment. The wood was warm from the sun and smelled faintly of pitch where a patch had been laid the day before. He took his hand away and turned back to them.
"The work is good. I am pleased with what I see. I want that said plainly to the men, not only to you." He glanced at the clerk, who had already begun to write.
Afonso inclined his head. Diogo did not say anything at all, which in him was a kind of thanks.
They had come to the end of the hull and were standing now where the slip opened onto the next ground over — a shorter slip, empty at the moment, with the cradle timbers stacked along its edges, waiting for whatever would go up next. Beyond it the smaller yard ran down to the water, where a half-built galley sat on blocks with her oars still unstepped. Diogo looked at the empty slip, and then at Constantine.
"Majesty. The yard is waiting on your word about the next hull."
"I know it is."
"We have timber ordered for a third. We have held the order at Theophilus's sign, but the Ragusan will want an answer by the end of the month. And the men — " Diogo stopped himself. "The men need to know what they are preparing for."
Constantine looked at Theophilus, who did not look back. Theophilus was studying the empty slip as though it interested him more than it did.
"There will be no third great ship. Not this year."
He said it flatly, and went on.
"Constantinople has to be rebuilt before anything else is begun. Gallipoli needs repairs and stores before the winter, and there are too many other demands on the treasury already. I cannot feed a third hull and all the rest at the same table. Not now."
Diogo's face did not change. Afonso's did, a little, not disappointment exactly but the reordering of a thing he had been building in his head for months.
"The yard does not close," Constantine said. "Your contracts stand. I need you both, and I need the men. I want you on other work at once."
"What work," Diogo said.
"Three light galleys. Ships we can put to sea in half the time, for escort and patrol and the strait work the Katarina is wasted on. I need a fleet, not only its crown."
Afonso let out a slow breath through his nose. Diogo rubbed the back of his hand again as though the tar were still the thing on his mind.
"Three we can do," Diogo said, "if the timber comes. Oak for the keels, pine for the upper works. Iron will be the trouble, as it always is."
"Rope we have," Afonso said. "The cordage is steady now. Sailcloth is thinner. And we will need more hands on the galleys than on the big hull — they are smaller, but there are more of them, and a man cannot build three ships at the pace he builds one."
"How soon can the first be on the slip."
Diogo thought about it. "Ten days to clear the ground and set the cradle. A month to a keel that swims. Three months to a hull you would want to fight from."
"Begin clearing tomorrow."
"Majesty."
"And I want one of you on each slip. Not both of you on the same work." Constantine looked between them. "Diogo on the galleys, I think. Afonso, finish the sister. See her to sea."
Afonso nodded once, slowly, and Constantine saw that he had been given the part of the arrangement he would have asked for if he had been asked. Diogo nodded too, less slowly, and Constantine saw that he had been given what suited him as well, though he would not have said so.
"One more thing." Diogo wiped his hand a last time and gave it up. "The galleys will want a different gunnery layout than the Katarina. We will need master Luca's ear early, or we will build mounts he curses us for."
"You will have him this week."
They stood a moment longer under the hull of the new ship. Up on the sterncastle someone dropped a mallet and swore, and someone else laughed at him. Constantine looked from the nearly finished sister to the empty slip beside her.
"Show me the mast sheds before we go," he said to Diogo. "I want to see what you have on hand."