Holy Land

by BlndDog

Chapter 7

Good sailors as they were, Gingersnap and Coral Frond were up with the sun. They got dressed quietly and snuck on deck, where they were immediately spotted by the pilot. Fortunately their curfew had passed, and they were allowed to enjoy the fresh morning air. The ship had sailed all through the night, and now island after island passed on either side. They were all floating mountains with steep cliffs to the sea in many places. The water below was full of jellyfish. A pod of dark grey porpoises played in the wake, squeaking occasionally.

Gingersnap looked in all directions, but the giant shape from the previous night was nowhere to be seen. He was not sure if he should be relieved or disappointed. The Infidel was no pleasure yacht. Even against a proper gunship she could probably hold her own. What was Morning Breeze so afraid of?

A young earth pony stallion in a tuque rang the bell for breakfast as a replacement team emerged from quarters. Gingersnap was about to follow the sailors to the mess, but Morning Breeze came out of his cabin and called them over. He was wearing a different jumpsuit, blue and orange now. His beard was nearly trimmed, and he looked refreshed. He looked barely over thirty, but Gingersnap had thought of him as somepony from the generation before his own.

“We are dining with Master Hornpipe,” Morning Breeze said. “Come on. He is a cruel master before his coffee.”

Breakfast consisted of warm scones and jam. Hornpipe’s mug was almost as big as the kettle. Contrary to Morning Breeze’s advice, he still seemed displeased after he had downed half its content of black coffee.

"Can we talk plainly, Breeze?" He asked, glaring at Gingersnap and Coral Frond.

"They're my guests," Morning Breeze assured him before addressing the boys in a serious tone. "We are about to discuss some important matters. I can trust you two to forget what you're about to hear as soon as you leave this room, right?"

Gingersnap nodded hastily. A part of him wanted nothing to do with pirate politics, but mostly he was curious. Many a time he would have given anything to see the secret meetings of his commanding officers. Maybe then he would have some insight into their baffling ways. Now he was given a chance, and practically for free.

“We’ve added two full days to our passage,” Hornpipe said. “We can’t just go back the way we came. And the Snow Queen is still on our heel. She followed us all through the night. We’ve made some distance, but Yellow Jack knows where we are.”

“He won’t follow us here,” Morning Breeze said, waving towards the window as another island drifted by. “It’s not deep enough.”

“You know that’s not completely true,” Hornpipe said. “But you're probably right. He won’t risk coming in here. If he’s smart, he’ll be waiting for us at Oakfort. And if he’s not, he’ll try to cut us off at the end of these islands. That too might work in his favor if the winds aren’t right. We can’t stay here long, in any case. I don’t want to meet the Snow Queen head on.”

“Who’s the Snow Queen?” Coral Frond asked with his mouth full, making Gingersnap cringe.

“Well, while we’re here, I say we should take some precautions,” Morning Breeze said, ignoring Coral Frond. “Jack isn’t supplied. I doubt he could bring many cannons over the mountains behind Port of Mercy, and there’s not one depot big enough to arm him fully. And that's assuming he can fight his way into a guarded depot. You’re sailing at half draught now. We can collect the cache here before he starts looking and bring it to a safer site.”

“Who’s the Snow Queen?” Coral Frond asked again, speaking clearly after a swig of coffee.

“But if the Snow Queen comes…” Hornpipe began.

“You’re only carrying thirty light cannons, Hornpipe,” Morning Breeze said, looking the bigger pony square in the face. “This won’t weigh you down. If Jack finds us after we take the cache, at least you’ll have a fighting chance.”

“That’s not a fighting chance!” Hornpipe bellowed, drowning out Coral Frond’s question.

“How big is this Snow Queen?” Gingersnap asked.

Morning Breeze and Hornpipe both turned slowly to look at him.

“You’re clever, you know that?” Morning Breeze said, a sly smile creeping onto his face. “Go on then, what do you guess?”

“She’s Yellow Jack’s ship,” Gingersnap said shakily, his eyes darting between Coral Frond and the pirates. It was the first time anypony had called him clever. “And Yellow Jack is a pirate. But not one of yours!”

“That’s close to the truth,” Morning Breeze said. “The Snow Queen isn’t Yellow Jack’s ship. I loaned her out to him. Well, go on. What does that tell you?”

“He betrayed you,” Gingersnap said. “But the Snow Queen wasn’t fully outfitted.”

“Exactly,” Morning Breeze said, pointing across the table with his good hoof. “So what do you think? Everypony knows what he did. He can’t land at my cities without getting arrested, and he doesn't have enough marines to win a fight on land. All he has is a ship. But in my early days I set up several emergency depots on small, mostly uninhabitable islands, in case I was ever cut off from support. Jack knows about two of them; the one here, and another hundreds of miles away. Should we take the supplies already here, or should we leave it to him?”

“I agree with you,” Gingersnap said. “But I’m not the master.”

Morning Breeze turned to Hornpipe with a smug smile on his face.

“Alright,” he said. “How many dories do you want? I need enough crew onboard in case something happens.”

“I’ll take four dories and ten of your sailors,” Morning Breeze said. “These two are coming with me.”

“You don’t worry that they'll run away?” Hornpipe asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Where would they go?”

That was a question for Gingersnap and Coral Frond. Gingersnap glanced out the window at the little islands, completely foreign to him. A strong swimmer could perhaps get between them, but there was no sign of roads or habitation as far as he could see. Just dense forest and boulders.

He's going to leave us here.

But Gingersnap could think of anything to say, and Morning Breeze took his silence for agreement.

The landing party was assembled by nine o’clock. The dories at least were of a standard design. Morning Breeze got into the first one along with his two guests and an earth pony stallion from the Infidel. Coral Frond immediately began to put in the thole pins, but Morning Breeze told him to stop.

“We’re about half a mile from the nearest island,” Coral Frond said. “How are we supposed to get there if we don’t row?”

But Morning Breeze just reclined against the side of the boat. With his left rear hoof he started tapping out a rhythm on the floor.

“Just relax,” Gingersnap said, mostly for his own sake. He stuck his head over the side to look into the water. Below them was a dense forest of kelp.

The creature shot straight up. Gingersnap leapt to the other side of the boat with a cry of surprise, startling the others who immediately moved to compensate for the shift in weight. Another one had appeared just past the bow. Their glistening green heads rose out of the water on long necks until they could look down into the boat.

“Any news about Jack?” Gingersnap asked the one at the bow.

“He was heading south,” the creature said. Its raspy, sighing voice sent shivers down Gingersnap’s spine. It sounded female, but he had no idea how a male would sound.

“And the other ship?”

“No sign of her yet,” she said. "We are searching that area thoroughly. Nothing will be missed."

“Thank you,” Morning Breeze said. “Now, I need your help. I’m here to collect my cache. We are short on time, and this approach is too treacherous for oars. I need you to tow these dories to that island over there, and keep watch while we’re away.”

“Say no more,” she said. She saluted with what looked like a hoof. There was a bright red fin behind her foreleg.

Morning Breeze tossed down a bow line. The two creatures dived head first. Their long, snake-like tails slipped beneath the surface with the tiniest splashes. Moments later the line pulled taut and the dory began to move, gathering speed quickly.

“What are they?” Coral Frond asked, staring straight down into the water in front of the bow.

Gingersnap was beside him. The creature was swimming like a fish. Her forelegs were flared out, her fins open like brilliant red wings.

“Sea ponies,” Morning Breeze replied. “You know, the scary ones that eat land ponies. Except they don’t actually do that.”

Gingersnap watched the one towing their dory, mesmerized by her graceful, effortless movement. He did not notice the cliff until its shadow fell over them. After that he kept himself well within the edge of the boat.

For the rest of the approach Coral Frond and Gingersnap sat huddled together in the middle of their bench, clinging to the sides of the boat. Pillars of rock rose around them, and at times the cliff loomed so close that they could have easily touched the wet stone. Sea birds swarmed around them. More than once the sailor from the Infidel had to raise one of the long oars to deflect a diving gull.

The notch appeared suddenly; ten metres wide only and battered by white-crested waves, even the fastest rowers would have been hard-pressed to clear it without being smashed on the steep rocks on either side. Gingersnap would have covered his ears had he not needed his hooves to hold onto the bench as they picked up even more speed. The narrow portion was thirty metres long, and the cliffs slanted inwards as they rose. When the waves lifted them up Gingersnap thought the passage was collapsing.

The dory was heaved into the calm bay at the crest of one wave, and the water came to within half an inch of the brim.

The bay was near-circular and only about two hundred metres from one end to the other. Cliffs cut off view of the sea in most places, and a constant icy wind howled through the shaft. Gnarly plants grew on the grey stone, some clinging onto life with barely a dozen sickly leaves.

The sea ponies pulled the dories to the rocky beach. In shallow water they stood up, folding their fins. Their gill plates clamped tight against their cheeks and seemed to disappear. In this form they resembled lanky ponies with flat manes and long, pointed tails.

The beach went upwards, channeling into a single narrow crack in the cliff above several boulders. Morning Breeze led the way, with Gingersnap and Coral Frond close behind. There were two griffins in the group, each with one of the long pole weapons on their shoulder; rifles. Gingersnap had heard of that word mentioned by other sailors, but nopony had ever said how they were supposed to work. He had always assumed based on descriptions of griffin traders that they were some kind of spear.

The sea pony from Morning Breeze’s dory stopped at the base of the first boulder and turned towards the beach. The others stayed in the water with only their heads exposed.

“Bring the boats to the loading site when the tide comes in,” Morning Breeze said to the sea pony.

The crack grew narrower; they had to go through one at a time. The griffins stood up on their hind legs, pointing the rifles down the path over the ponies’ heads.

All at once they emerged into a forest of windswept trees. Behind them were tall grey cliffs, and the land rose around them in all directions. Tall conifers grew dense all around them, and there was no path through the senescing undergrowth.

“Alright,” Morning Breeze said, pointing away from the cliff. “The cache is a quarter of a mile that way. How’s your lifting magic, Coral Frond?”

“Not good,” he replied. “I can lift a cannonball, not much more. Count me as an earth pony.”

“I will,” Morning Breeze said. “We’ll have to work fast. There is a slope on the east side where a dory can land for about ten or twenty minutes as the tide comes in. In the meantime we’ll have to move thirty 28-pounders, sixty kegs of powder and one thousand cannonballs.”

“And you want to fit all that in four dories?” One of the griffins asked. He had been counting off his fingers as Morning Breeze was talking.

“Not all of it,” he said. “I expect to bring seven cannons, four kegs and a hundred cannonballs, and that’s with us in the water.”

Gingersnap stood perfectly straight and stiff as a board at that suggestion. The pirates exchanged worried looks.

“We’re scuttling the rest of it,” he said.

There was silence. Morning Breeze put his face into his good hoof and shook his head.

“It’s that bad?” The griffin said at last.

“I can’t risk it,” Morning Breeze said in a desperate whisper. “He has rifles and pistols for his whole crew. If he gets cannons…”

“We understand,” the griffins said, walking over and putting a hand on Morning Breeze’s shoulder. “Lead the way.”

The ground turned out to be wet mud. Gingersnap slipped on a moss-covered log. Although the sailors from the Infidel all carried machetes, Morning Breeze did not let them clear a path.

The forest floor soon became a field of lush green basins full of moss and lichen. The air was thick with the sharp sweet scent of fertile earth and pine needles. Morning Breeze signaled for the group to stop, and descended cautiously into one of the pits. He sank almost to his knees in the moss, and Gingersnap saw that the vegetation barely hid a respectable amount of water.

“It’s safe to drink,” he said, slurping some through the moss to prove his point. “You should have some before we pull all this up and make it murky. We put caulked planks above the pits where we hid stuff. That’s why they’re not draining like they should. You three, start going through the other ones. There should be four more.”

An earth pony, a pegasus and one of the griffins left the group, while the remaining sailors clambered into the sizable pit. Morning Breeze got out and supervised from the relative dryness of higher ground. The water was icy cold even through well-knit wool. It was sweet and fresh, and Gingersnap drank his fill before taking a mouthful of moss and pulling. It came up easily, and immediately became pasted against his chin and neck like a messy green and brown beard. The rest of the group laughed.

In a few minutes the floor had been cleared, and they stood in about five inches of moss puree. Gingersnap could feel the boards bending beneath his hooves, and occasionally saw the lines of black caulking between bits of moss.

“Open it up anywhere,” Morning Breeze called into the pit. “Just scrape up the caulking and let it drain. Once that’s done, you can pull up the boards.”

The water gurgled away through the breaks in the seal. Gingersnap heard a muffled metallic ringing from below; water dripping onto cannons, no doubt.

The three others had returned. They had found the remaining pits. Gingersnap and Coral Frond helped pry away the boards, the latter using his horn as a wedge. A lime green unicorn carried the long boards out of the pit with her magic, half a dozen at a time.

Black metal glistened two feet below. The cannons had been stacked without bases with no space to spare. Three cannons covered the width of the pit, and big wooden barrels labeled with black paint filled in the rest of the space. It was not the pirate’s treasure from foals’ stories, but the stash of seemingly brand new cannons was breathtaking to behold.

“Where did these come from?” Coral Frond asked between his teeth as he struggled to drag one powder keg to high ground.

“I don’t remember,” Morning Breeze said. “I might have traded for them. They might be the ones I brought from Equestria in the beginning. I might have intercepted them at some point. You’d be surprised how many cannons end up lost. They weren’t manufactured in the Chain Islands, that’s for sure. We have our own heavy cannons now, more compatible with the ones that the Children of the Night use.”

Gingersnap’s ears perked up at this yet another mention of the Children of the Night. They were ponies who lived in the griffins’ homeland, shrouded in mystery. Though their navy was supposedly far superior to Equestria’s, few Equestrian ponies had ever seen their warships. Their civilian ships were the fastest and most pleasant in any harbor in Equestria, but even Gold Standard himself could not procure one.

In an hour the supplies had been moved out of the pit: fifteen cannons, eight kegs and around one hundred cannonballs. Gingersnap was feeling rather winded. A few days in the lap of luxury had softened him. Even the hardy sailors from the Infidel walked at a reluctant pace to the next pit, their heads down and intermittently wiping their brows.

“Not you two,” Morning Breeze said suddenly, gesturing at Gingersnap and Coral Frond. “Gruff, stay with them. I want you to start moving this stuff to the cliff that way. All of this can go. Walk slow, and don’t get too close to the edge. If you fall in, we can’t save you.”

Gruff was a griffin with glossy brown feathers and a kink in his tail. He kept his rifle ready as he helped Coral Frond with the cannon. Gingersnap was strong enough to drag one all by himself. It was nearly two kilometres to the shore, and mostly uphill. The trees became shorter as the ground grew rocky.

Near the cliff the land became too steep to climb. Gingersnap wedged his cannon on a protruding rock and lay down on the tall grass. Gruff and Coral Frond were still quite far down the slope, just emerging out of the treeline. The griffin still had his rifle propped against his right shoulder. From this angle Gingersnap could see that the rifle was a hollow stick with a perfectly round bore.

It’s a tiny cannon.

Cautiously Gingersnap crawled up the steep slope, stretching his hooves to probe the ground in front of him. When he felt the rocky edge, he pulled himself forwards just enough to see over it.

The drop was about twenty metres into frothing waves. The cliff had been shielding them from the wind and the sound. When Gingersnap backed away, he no longer heard the waves.

Looking back the way they had come, he saw that the land flattened out at about five metres above water level for several kilometres. There was only one short section where the cliff looked rounded and sloped enough perhaps to climb; that was probably the landing site.

As his eyes scanned down the coast, something large moved suddenly. Gingersnap sat up and shielded his eyes with one hoof.

There was no mistaking it; a blue jacket. A brass button flashed once as the pony below dropped prone into a patch of tall yellow grass.

Gingersnap hopped down the slope to his companions, feeling light as a feather without the burden of the cannon.

“There’s somepony down there,” he said quietly, pointing to the spot where he had last seen the pony.

Gruff reached into a breast pocket and took out a spyglass, operating it with one hand while he steadied his rifle with the other.

“Equestrian Navy,” he said, clicking his beak irritably. “I see four… five. They’re watching us.”

He put away the spyglass and raised the rifle up to his eye. He leaned forwards slightly.

Gingersnap let out a startled yelp at the loud report. Gruff turned slightly and fired again. No less than six hundred metres away, a dozen ponies leapt out of their hiding spots, desperately looking for cover. At least six of them had crossbows. Bolts spilt out of their quivers as they tried to set up on the spot, glancing constantly between the hill and their weapons.

“Stop!” Gingersnap cried desperately as he cowered in the grass with his hooves over his ears. “Stop! They can’t even hit us from that far!”

“But I can hit them,” Gruff said loudly enough to be heard from a mile off, though he stopped firing. “I have two hundred chances, in any case.”

“Don’t!” Gingersnap said sharply, pulling down the warm barrel with both his hooves. He turned around. The ponies had stopped moving and were all staring at the trio on the hill.

“Guys! It’s me!” Gingersnap shouted at the top of his voice. “Coral Frond is up here too!”

“Gingersnap?” Came the reply from below. It was Snowsong.

“Yes!” He yelled, smiling from ear to ear. “We’re alive!”

Even from this distance the others’ relief was evident. They put away their crossbows and began up the slope.

Gingersnap did not notice Morning Breeze and the others until they emerged from the trees. Gruff raised his rifle again. The group near Morning Breeze immediately formed a wall between him and the Equestrian navy officers, though they were still well out of range. The ponies with crossbow sat down instantly, trying to recock their bows with shaking hooves.

Gingersnap facehoofed.

“Everybody calm down!”

That was Morning Breeze. For a moment his hoarse voice became clear and piercing. He cleared his throat and looked over his shoulder with a grimace. Looking into Gruff’s face, he motioned for him to lower his gun.