The First Expedition (Part 3)
The Sun's Vengeance reached Jalkelainen on the second of Malachite. Once again, it seemed that the whole city turned out to see her. Its governing council had already named a street in honor of the ship; when it arrived, the city's mayor, Kalle's Neä, was so overcome that she named another one after it as well. The amber workers' commonalty voted honorary memberships for her entire crew; not to be outdone, the city's furniture makers made K.'s Taavi their honorary moderator.
It was therefore something of a shock when U.'s Yrjö marched down the gangplank and interrupted the mayor's speech to demand that K.'s Taavi be placed under arrest. At first, Neä thought he was drunk; when she realized he was not, she told her master-at-arms to lock him in a closet until dinner. She later claimed that she had meant it as a figure of speech, but at the time, her order was taken literally. The man who was supposed to be in overall command of the expedition fleet therefore spent his first few hours in Jalkelainen in a clothes cupboard, pounding on its door so hard that he broke a finger.
K.'s Neä managed to patch matters up later that evening, but it was another bundle of twigs on the fire of U.'s Yrjö's resentment. K.'s Taavi continued to insist that command of the Sun's Vengeance was his, and his alone, while the vessel was at sea; he made an ostentatious show of vacating the captain's cabin as soon as she tied up, while letting everyone know that he still had a key to its door. Most of the ship's crew sided with him; predictably, her marine contingent---several of whom had served under U.'s Yrjö during the Rebellion---took the other side in the dispute.
None of this seems to have reached the ears of a young boy named Tomonainan's Petta, who later said that he fell in love with the Sun's Vengeance the moment he set eyes on her. Aged eight, he was the second son of a moderately prosperous marriage that owned two small squidding smacks. He had sailed on deep water almost since the day he was born, and, like other sea-struck gens his age with stars in their hearts, spent his free time practicing knots and making small models of the ships he hoped one day to captain.
During the week the Sun's Vengeance was in port, T.'s Petta spent almost every waking moment studying her. He queued for hours with one of his fathers for a chance to walk her deck, then ducked lessons the next day to do it again. For an eighth quartering he bought a hasty charcoal sketch of the ship coming into the harbor, which he hung on on the wall next to the bed he shared with his older and younger brothers. Thirty years later, that same drawing (much folded and faded) would hang in his cabin on board the Unshadowed Land.
* * *
The Sun's Vengeance was scheduled to spend two weeks in Jalkelainen, but left after only eight days. The official reason was that as she had come through her first storm so well, she didn't need the time that had been allotted for refitting and repairs. Unofficially, of course, the whole city knew of the tension between her two erstwhile commanders. Both had posted several letters a day back to the capitol while in port; both were looking forward to presenting their side of the argument to the debates.
Aided by a strong following wind, and the Ocean's currents, it took the ship only four days to reach Ruuda-in-Ruuda. She arrived an hour after sunset. Normal practice would have been to stand off and wait until daylight, but U.'s Yrjö ordered his marines to deploy the ship's small skenren lans so that they could practice night-time navigation. This was a new maneuver for everyone involved: while fishing vessels often worked by lantern light, no one had ever tried to steer a vessel the size of the Sun's Vengeance by the focused light of a skenren lans.
Perhaps surprisingly, K.'s Taavi agreed to the order. Some have suggested that he did so in the hopes that some mishap would occur that would discredit U.'s Yrjö, although it seems implausible that any captain as dedicated as K.'s Taavi would put his vessel at risk. More likely, Taavi simply wasn't willing to seem a coward in front of a landlubber like U.'s Yrjö.
The astonished crew were therefore ordered to lay on bottom sails and out the sweeps. As the marines played the light of the skenren lans back and forth across the dark waters outside the harbor's breakwater, K.'s Taavi bellowed orders to the gens scrambling about in the rigging and straining at the sweepstays on deck. Under a half-turned moon, she slid toward her berth.
Word of her arrival had of course already spread through the city. Hundreds of gens were waiting for her; unknown to K.'s Taavi, dozens more had taken to small boats to escort her home. Among them was a scull with eight cobblers' apprentices on board, all of whom had been drinking for several hours by the time the Sun's Vengeance entered the harbor. One of them proposed that they should "board" the Sun's Vengeance and "claim" her for their commonalty. Shuttering their one lantern, they rowed alongside the warship, slipped under her great sweeps, and took hold of one of the lines laid over the side in preparation for making fast. A heartbeat later, five of the apprentices clambered onto the ship's deck, seized two startled marines, and declared that they were taking the Sun's Vengeance as a prize.
Unbeknownst to them, U.'s Yrjö had secretly ordered the marines to arrest K.'s Taavi while the ship's crew were busy making fast after docking. Thinking that their plan had been uncovered, and that the sailors were launching a preemptive attack, the marines drew their swords. Amidst cries of treachery and betrayal, the two sides fell upon one another. U.'s Yrjö and K.'s Taavi both called for calm, but to no avail.
By the time order was restored, two of the five apprentices who had boarded the Sun's Vengeance lay dead on her deck, along with one of her crew, and a double dozen marines and sailors had been badly injured. In full view of a bewildered and horrified city, Yrjö and Taavi were both arrested and led away to jail in chains.