The Kraken and the Lion

Chapter 32

by Technomad

Asha Greyjoy Lannister

Asha looked carefully at the elderly dromond that her husband and nuncle had obtained. It looked odd to her eyes, with one of the two banks of oars removed, and two ballistas mounted so that they would fire just over the gunwales. "I don't know, Tyrion. I'll want to try taking her out to sea and see how she handles."

"I know. She'll handle differently from a standard dromond. And with only half the oars, she'll be slower than a standard dromon, if the wind drops and she has to be rowed."

"Shall we see what she can do?" Asha and Tyrion stepped on to the gangplank, boarding the ship, where King Euron was awaiting them. The King of the Iron Islands gave them a mocking grin.

"Welcome aboard the Harren's Revenge!" When they had found her, laid up in-ordinary, the dromond had borne the name King Aerys, and it had been unanimously agreed that a name change was in order. Since Harren, the builder of Harrenhall, had been ironborn himself, and had died resisting the Targaryen invasion, Euron had argued successfully that the ship should be renamed for him.

"Now that we're all aboard, we can cast off!" At Euron's command, the crew leaped to cast off, and the sail was set, beginning to catch the wind. Slowly, Harren's Revenge began moving, pulling away from the quay and into the harbor. As the sails tautened, the ship seemed to come alive, plowing through the water faster and faster, with more and more of a bone in her teeth.

Asha watched things critically. So far, she had to admit, things hadn't gone badly. Of course, her nuncle was a skilled sea captain, and the crew they'd been given were some of the best sailors in Kings Landing. Between real fear of their captain, whose reputation had preceded him, and a desire to show off their skill, they had the ship running along perfectly. As the wind freshened out on the open water outside the harbor, the ship heeled over, and Euron, Asha and Tyrion all automatically grabbed for handholds.

Tyrion Lannister

"I see my beloved niece is making a seaman out of you, Tyrion!" Euron's tone was slightly mocking, but Asha could see approval in his eyes. To an ironborn, any seaman was far superior to a landlubber. On the Iron Islands, they wrested much of their living from the waters, and children learned nautical skills naturally, as mainland children did their parents' trades.

"I'd never been to sea before I met her!" Tyrion said, a smile wreathing his face. "I've found that I love it!" Back in Lannisport, he had acquired a small sailboat of his own, and he and Asha often went out on it for pleasure jaunts around the harbor. He had become reasonably skilled at handling the boat, although Asha still took the tiller for complicated manouvers.

Euron looked up at the sail and the skies. "Right, we're far enough out. Helm a-lee!" he called, and the helmsman put the ship about, sailing closer to the wind. Euron looked thoughtful. "She's handling fairly well. Better than I had anticipated, truth be told. Now let's see what she can do!"

Euron began to bark orders, and the Harren's Revenge went into a series of complex manouvers. Tyrion rapidly lost track of what they were doing, but he noticed that Asha was watching with great interest. He knew that compared to his wife and her nuncle, he was no seaman at all, so he just kept quiet and let them do what they did best. He knew that he was smart, but he was also smart enough to know that he did not know everything there was to know.

He enjoyed watching Asha when they were at sea together. While she was always loving and affectionate toward him, and clearly did not begrudge the time they spent on land together, she seemed to truly come alive with a heaving deck under her feet, the sea breeze blowing through her hair and ruffling her clothes, and her eyes on the horizon. At sea, she seemed to be twice as alive as she was anywhere else.

And he noticed that Euron had the same reaction to being back at sea. Tyrion thought it was an ironborn thing. He figured that to the ironborn, going to sea was what battle was…or had been…to Jaime. Tyrion wondered if taking Jaime out to sea for a quick voyage might perk him up. While he'd thrown himself into training the Kingsguard wholeheartedly, when he wasn't absorbed in that, Tyrion had seen a deep, deep sadness in his brother's eyes.

Mentally, Tyrion damned the Bloody Mummers' souls to the hottest of the seven hells. Tyrion thought that it would have been far more merciful of them to have just killed Jaime. Instead, they had taken his hand, and all but destroyed his self-confidence. He had always been happiest, and most at home, on the battlefield or the tourney field, and that had been taken from him forever.

He imagined that Asha or Euron would react the same way if they were unable to go to sea ever again. While Asha loved him dearly, and adored their babies, it would be like amputating a limb for her not to be able to spend time at sea. While she'd been recovering from pregnancy, and at other times when she couldn't go out, he had seen her staring out over the blue water with pure longing in her eyes.

After a while, Asha and Euron had figured out what they needed to know, and Euron directed the helmsman to take them back into the harbor at Kings Landing. As they came in, Tyrion wondered if Daenerys Targaryen had any spies in town, and if so, whether they would report this or just pass it off as some eccentricity on the part of the dwarf and his ironborn family-by-marriage.

Asha Greyjoy Lannister

When they'd tied up to the quay and the gangplank was down, they disembarked. While she had been a little worried about Tyrion, he negotiated the gangplank as though he'd been ironborn himself. He came up to her.

"What have you learned, my love? Will this idea work in practice?" In his reading, Tyrion had come across many ideas, including ideas about how to improve ships, that sounded wonderful in theory but didn't work well in the real world. Asha had decades of practical experience, but she knew that Tyrion's scholarship could turn up things she didn't know about.

"It's early days, and we'll have to do more tests, but this does look like a workable alternative to the ships we now have, my darling." Asha had been quite intrigued at how the Harren's Revenge handled. Not having banks of oars and oarsmen aboard meant that her freeboard could be higher, which meant that she could turn more sharply than a standard dromond could under sail. Asha was wondering if eliminating oars would improve longships. She did not propose to experiment with her own Black Wind, but with the wealth of the Lannisters at her disposal, she could easily buy one from one of her poorer countrymen, and make such changes as she thought would help. A different rig, just for starters, she thought. Fore-and-aft sails help bring the ship closer into the wind than square sails do!

Her nuncle came up beside her. "Sweet niece," he purred, "shall we adjourn to someplace where we may think out the implications of what we have done today?"

"Only if my husband accompanies me," Asha replied. "Your reputation with the ladies precedes you, and as a good-daughter of the Lannisters, I must be careful of my reputation!" Of course, she would have her guards with her, but she knew better than to rely solely on them.

A little while later, the three of them, and Tyrion's and Asha's guard details, were ensconced in a light, airy room near the top of the Red Keep. On a table sat a ship model, resting atop a piece of paper with lines marked to indicate the directions the wind was taking.

"With this rig, we can go farther into the wind than any square-rigger," Euron explained, pointing out the diagram that hung on the wall of a fore-and-aft sail. "The limitation on a square sail is how close you can get to the wind before the for'ard edge of the sail starts flapping and you start losing speed. The for'ard edge of a fore-and-aft sail, being attached to the mast itself, eliminates this problem."

"If so, why doesn't everybody use them?" Tyrion asked.

"Square sails have their own advantages. When running before the wind, or with the wind to sternward, they are more efficient. And most sailors, I have noticed, are not fond of sailing too close to windward." Euron was warming to his subject, which pleased Asha greatly. All ironborn loved ships and sailing, and in any tavern in the Iron Islands, this sort of discussion would draw everybody in, from the patrons to the proprietor to the very barmaids. Women captains, such as Asha, were very much the exception, but many women went to sea, mostly on fishing craft, and could handle them as well as any man. Her crewwoman, Jinjur, was the daughter of one of her crew, Hagen the Horn, and when his son had died, Hagen had treated Jinjur as though she were a boy, training her to be able to take her place on a longship's crew.

"How many ballistas could a ship carry?" asked Asha. "There's limits on how much extra weight you can put on a ship, you know."

Euron gave his niece a sardonic grin. "I've thought of that, beloved niece, and as always, I'm miles ahead of you. I weighed a ballista, and multiplied that number several times. By my best calculations, four ballistas…two to a side…should be optimal. More than that would make the ship top-heavy and prone to capsize." He raised an eyebrow at her expression. "Why are you looking at me that way? Did you think I was ignorant? I have to use mathematics a great deal when I navigate!"

Asha and Tyrion exchanged glances. To her shame, Asha had to admit that she had just thought of her nuncle as a barbarian raider, with no more idea of mathematics or other such subjects than a horse would have.

Tyrion changed the subject. "Let's build a simulated ship, on dry land, and use that to train crews to aim and fire these machines." He smiled rather grimly. "Learning how to use them in the midst of battle does not strike me as a good idea!"

This met with general approval, and the meeting broke up. As they left, they ran across Cersei, who was clearly lying in wait for Euron. At the sight of her, Euron's one visible eye lit up, and he purred: "Most beauteous queen! At last we see each other again!"

Cersei bowed slightly, and smiled. Unlike most of her smiles, this one was perfectly genuine. Asha had seen her smiling that way at her children before, and Asha knew that one of Cersei's few non-toxic emotions was her love of her children. No matter whom their father was, Cersei adored her children.

As they turned to go, Asha noticed that Cersei had a detachment of bodyguards, and she recognized some of them as among the men who had escorted the unwilling dowager Queen from Lannisport back to Kings Landing. She hoped they would be sufficient to keep things between the Queen and "King" Euron at least reasonably decorous. Things had been going rather well, and a scandal involving the mother of the King turning up unexpectedly pregnant would be disastrous.

When she mentioned that possibility to Tyrion, her husband smiled. "Cersei knows all about Moon Tea. Many women take it to control their monthly cramps, and it also makes sure that any little unintended mistakes never see the light of day."

Asha felt a proper fool. She'd forgotten all about Moon Tea. The stuff wasn't used on the Iron Islands, and since her marriage, she'd had no need of the stuff.

Tyrion Lannister

Tyrion looked with approval at the contraption they had constructed. It was almost exactly like the main deck of one of their modified dromonds, complete to bow and stern castles, and a stump of a mast. On it were mounted two ballistas, both pointed to port.

The part he was proudest of was the system of rollers it was mounted on. When those were being cranked, the deck would roll, heave and pitch exactly like a real ship at sea. Once the crews were proficient at loading and firing the ballistas with the deck still, they'd be required to learn to do the same with the deck rolling under them as though the "ship" was out at sea. Asha had said that the simulated movement was more violent than normal for the sea, but she agreed that making sure that the crews could handle their weapons under less-than-optimal conditions was vital.

The first crew appeared, and after they had paid Tyrion their respects, trooped aboard the "ship" and took up their positions. Slowly at first, then faster and faster as they became accustomed to the new tasks, they spanned their ballistas, dropped six-foot-long darts into the troughs, and triggered them. At first, their aim was very bad, with darts flying everywhere but into the targets, but as they gained confidence and learned their way around their new tasks and weapons, they became more accurate.

After a couple of hours, Tyrion blew a whistle. "Right, that's enough for a day. We've got others who want to take a turn too. Go out and retrieve those darts, then head on in to your barracks. I'm told there are barrels of wine there waiting for you." With a cheer, the sailors did as they were told, playfully competing to see who could gather the most darts, then trooping off toward their barracks singing a bawdy song about a girl in Kings Landing who could do some rather remarkable things. After they were gone, the second crew to be trained reported in, and the process was repeated.

By the end of the week, all the navy's crews knew how to fire sea-borne ballistas. They had yet to do so with the deck rolling and pitching under them, but Tyrion figured that would come. He was relaxing with Asha, watching as their babies rolled around and gurgled in their double-sized crib. "I've got to say, this may just revolutionize war at sea!"

"Why just stop with mounting ballistas on ships? Can't we improve their missiles, too?" asked Asha. "Like, say, making them able to spit wildfire?" She looked grim. "I remember how much your wildfire impressed me at the Battle of the Blackwater, my love."

Tyrion leaned over and kissed his wife. "You always have good ideas, my love. I should talk to the Pyromancers' Guild. We used up a lot of wildfire, but I think we used it very wastefully. If we can figure out ways to put the stuff on-target, we can get by with using a lot less of it at a time." He began doodling on a sheet of paper. "I wonder if one of these designs would work?" He held up the paper, and Asha's eyes went wide. He'd drawn a cross-section diagram of a ballista bolt, with the head designed so that when it hit a solid surface, it would retract into a hollow space that contained a small container of wildfire, crushing the container and releasing the wildfire to spew out over the surface, lighting it on fire.

Asha looked at it carefully. "It does look like it might work. Maybe we should get a few of these made up, with green paint in place of wildfire, and see how they work in practice?" She grinned wickedly. "I'd prefer to make any mistakes we make with green paint instead of wildfire. I've learned a healthy respect for that stuff!"

Asha Greyjoy Lannister

Asha had thought that her nuncle would be excited about this new idea, and she had been right. Euron took to the idea of launching wildfire from ballistas with an enthusiasm that almost frightened her. She never allowed herself to forget just what kind of man he was.

At least, she consoled herself, the only source of wildfire was Kings Landing! If Euron wanted to play with the stuff, he had to get it through the Pyromancers' Guild, and they answered only to the King or his Hand. She made a mental note to make very sure that no Pyromancers decided that the Crow's Eye offered a better deal than the Iron Throne. If necessary, she was quite willing to order any would-be defectors were assassinated. She made a mental note to see if the Faceless Men would be willing to have a few people on hand for just such an emergency.

The crews they had trained to handle the ballistas were also enthusiastic. They worked with a good will, laughing every time a bolt struck home and splattered the targets with green paint. "Yeah! That's another enemy ship on fire! Burn, you bastards, burn!" she heard them yelling.

By this time, they were working together smoothly, ignoring the pitch and roll of the decks under their feet, and hitting their targets more often than not. She smiled to herself at the surprise that Daenerys Targaryen, or anybody else, was going to get if they tried invading. The last time the Seven Kingdoms had been invaded, they had been divided among themselves and unprepared to face dragons. Even so, they had put up a fight, and Dorne had successfully avoided being annexed for quite some time. They'd even shot down one of the original three Targaryen dragons, Meraxes, and her rider, Queen Rhaenys, had either died from the fall, or in the dungeons of Hellholt.

Just then, Euron came up to her, his face set in lines of concern. "Beloved niece, I think this is something you need to be apprised of," he said, gesturing for one of his men to come forward and hand her a piece of paper. This sort of arrangement kept her guard detail from getting twitchy, which suited both Greyjoys down to the ground.

Asha read the paper, and felt like her blood had turned to ice water. It said that Daenerys Targaryen had taken control of the cities of Slaver's Bay, and had forced them to build her a fleet for the invasion of Westeros. Moreover, it appeared that Daenerys had also been thinking about the long-time usages of war at sea, and had had an idea of her own.

The Dragon Queen has commanded that each of her ships be equipped with what she calls a crow; this is a gangplank, held vertical until an enemy ship comes into range, whereupon it is dropped and a hook on the end holds the enemy ship fast, allowing the soldiers on the Queen's ship to board and take her. She feels that this is a way for her soldiers, who are Dothraki and Unsullied, and unskilled in the ways of the sea, to fight at best advantage.

Asha called for Tyrion. This demanded all of their ingenuity. "When will she be sailing, and how did you come by this, beloved nuncle?" she asked tensely.

"She will sail in six months, and I got this through a 'business contact' I have in that part of the world, beloved niece. I've been to Slaver's Bay before, but their main business is distasteful to me, and I did not linger long." Asha nodded in agreement. Taking prisoners as thralls was one thing…a thrall's child would be Ironborn, and some of her mightiest countrymen had thralls in their family trees…but outright buying and selling of people was something that the ironborn found as repulsive as anybody else in Westeros.

When Tyrion saw the message, he went pale. "We'd better step up our training, I think. I'm glad we thought about new ways of war at sea." He smiled an evil smile. "Seems that Daenerys Inbred also has been thinking. But her one brain is no match for our three!"