A navy drills. This is not up for debate. It is, in fact, the single least debatable thing about a navy, right up there with the part where it’s supposed to have water.
We have one of those two things. I’ll let you guess which.
So this morning, under a Ghost Tide running light and mean out of the northwest, seven signed souls and one captain who still resents the title assembled on open grass to conduct the Company’s first drill. I had spent the previous night writing the order of the day, which is a captain’s privilege and a captain’s curse, and I will tell you it is a strange feeling to write “board the enemy vessel” when the nearest vessel of any kind is a rowboat someone’s grandfather left to rot four counties over.
We improvised.
The first hour went to formations. I had drawn diagrams. I am proud of the diagrams. Nobody could read the diagrams, because I drew them at midnight by a candle I have grown, as previously logged, emotionally attached to, and emotional attachment is not a light source. So we did it the old way, the way it’s always actually been done, which is me pointing and saying “there,” and seven people going “there?”, and me going “there,” until everyone was roughly where I meant.
Roughly. Log the word. It’s the most honest word in the drill.
The Bosun, God keep the Bosun, was assigned to hold the line’s left flank. Instead the Bosun held the line’s left flank AND, upon seeing a gap open on the right, crossed the entire formation at a dead sprint to plug it, which is not a maneuver in any manual I own and is now, as of this morning, a maneuver in the one manual that matters, which is ours. We’re calling it the Bosun’s Crossing. Future crews will practice it on purpose. This morning it was panic with good instincts, which, if you strip the paint off it, is what most tactics are.
Second hour, weapons drill. Here is where a landlocked navy has a genuine, unfair advantage that nobody talks about: you cannot fall overboard from a field. You would not believe how much braver a person swings a blade when the worst available outcome is the grass. We got real work done. The one who brought their own quill to the muster — you’ll remember them, I flagged them as a future problem and I stand by the assessment — turns out to swing steel like they were born mid-argument with it. I asked where they learned. They said the quill and the sword are the same discipline, you just follow through differently. I have decided this is either the wisest thing anyone has said in this company or complete nonsense, and I have further decided those are frequently the same category and I will not be sorting them today.
We broke at midday. The Quartermaster produced provisions, because the Quartermaster produces provisions the way the Ghost Tide produces wind, unprompted and slightly ominous. And I regret to log that there was, again, cake. Not the same cake. A new cake. I want it on the record that I opened a formal inquiry into the sourcing of Company cake and the inquiry was immediately overruled by the Company eating the cake. Democracy. I’ve read about it.
Here’s the part somebody asked me, mouth full, sitting in the grass with a practice blade across their knees, and it’s the part worth logging.
They asked what we’re drilling for.
Fair question. Cruel question. The kind you ask a landlocked navy to watch it flinch. Because the honest answer is that there is no fleet coming over the horizon this week. There is no port to defend, no line to hold, no enemy sail. There is grass, and wind, and eight people pretending very hard, and a flag.
So I gave them the true answer, which I’ll set down here so I don’t have to keep giving it:
We are not drilling for a battle. We are drilling for a shore.
When the sea comes back — and it is coming back, the going out was never the ending, I’ve logged this and I’ll log it again — it is not going to send a letter first. It’s going to rise out of the west some ordinary evening with real salt weight behind it, and it is going to want to know, immediately and without patience, whether the people standing on its returned coastline are a crew or just a crowd that happened to be there.
A crowd scatters. A crew holds the line. And the only difference between the two, the ONLY difference, is that one of them spent the dry years drilling on grass while everyone with sense told them there was nothing to drill for.
That’s what the formations are for. That’s what the Bosun’s Crossing is for. That’s what the quill-swordsman and the dental-plan skeptic and the whole wobbly-table lot of us are for. We are getting good at the shore before the shore exists, so that when it does, we don’t have to get good at it in front of the sea.
I did not say all of that out loud. I said “for the shore,” and they nodded, and went back to the cake, and that was enough, because a crew that understands the short version doesn’t need the long one. The long one’s for the log. The log’s for the historians. The historians can have their drill diagrams too, if they can read them, which I remind you they cannot.
We drilled until the light went amber and the Ghost Tide picked up its evening argument with the tree line. Eight people, sore and grass-stained and no closer to an ocean than we were at dawn, and somehow the exact right distance closer to being ready for one.
The hawk watched the whole drill from a fence post. When we ran the Bosun’s Crossing the third time and finally got it clean, the hawk left the post, circled the formation once, and returned to the post. I am not going to tell you that was approval. I am also not going to tell you it wasn’t.
The sea left. We didn’t.
And now we can march in a straight line about it.
Logged at dusk after the first drill, first year of the Company. Bruises: several. Casualties: the cake. The Bosun’s knee, veteran of the muster, held the left flank without complaint and then held the cake plate steady on the walk back, which is the whole Bosun in one sentence. The hawk logged nothing. The hawk never does.