damned boat actually floats,” this new addition said, as soon as his feet touched the deck of Effram’s boat. He smiled sheepishly to ease the sting of his words.
Effram knew this face, too, and the grating tone. The man was a merchant in the main market, one of those who smiled nicely to his face then snickered and snorted when he went on his way. Effram’s anger must have shown in his eyes, because the man flushed and turned his head away.
A few feet away was another ship-house, crawling with bodies trying to avoid drowning. Effram directed the boat to them without being told and stood bracing the tiller, fighting the current’s attempt to push them onward, while those who could stand in the rocking boat helped these new ones climb aboard.
“All this time,” a man gasped, “I thought this thing was a waste of trees.”
Someone snickered in response and a woman shushed him, reprimanding him as if he was a naughty child. “Captain Effram saved us. He’s the only one who could.”
That silenced the snickers, but not the other voices. Where before there had been only the lonely, lovely voice of the storm, the crash and crack of thunder and lightning, there was now coughing and crying and gasping and moaning, screams for help and demands to be saved. Watery voices thanked the long-gone gods and the hands that reached over the railing and fished them from the sea to lie like gasping, floundering fish upon his deck. Some even touched the sanded and waxed deck beneath them with reverence and joy. Most of them thanked Effram. A few even took up the woman’s words and praised him as the “only one” who could have saved them.
Effram stared at those collapsed on the deck of his boat at his feet, sodden and pale as fish. They mouthed the right words, the words that should rightfully have come to him from the moment the first rain drop splashed down.
But they were too late. Too little.
“Should have said that to begin with,” he mumbled softly under his breath. “Should have said that all along.” He stiffened his spine and turned his boat towards the docks even though there were more waving, shouting people farther into the clump of prostituted ships. He could not bear to load more of that noise onto his boat.
“Hey!” Blaies waved to larboard as Effram turned the boat. “There’s more over there.”
Effram ignored him. He ignored the scowl of Blaies’s big friend. They would have to kill him to make him let go of the tiller. They would have to break his fingers to uncurl them from around it.
Effram looped his fingers through the rigging that controlled the sail. Ignoring the sharp pain of the lines, cutting into his flesh, he yanked on it. It gave, barely, the blocks squealing in protest as he put his weight on the line and on his hand. The sail edged up. Up the mast, reaching greedily for the wind.
The boat leaped forward, bringing shocked gasps from his passengers. He could almost hear their nails dig into the planks of the deck. His fingers felt as if they might fall off his hand, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care if the passengers all washed off the deck and back into the water from which they’d been fished so long as he got them off his boat. Quickly.
It was difficult steering the boat with one hand wrapped in rope and the other clamped around the tiller. The wind tearing at the sail was as strong and angry as he was. The current inside the harbor was stronger-strange, almost as if a whirlpool was building at its center, the water starting to froth and show little white-capped waves out across its gray, mottled surface.
Two passengers, a man and a woman, joined Blaies, protesting that there were still more people out amongst the wrecks. They all went silent at one glance from Effram. He growled, “If you don’t like it, you can swim.” It felt good to see them shrink back and shiver and clutch at their chests. It felt good to see even the big man stagger as Effram put his considerable muscle on the rigging.
His skin broke under the rough rope, and slick drops of blood dripped down his wrist like warm rain. The sail inched higher, catching even more of the mad wind. The boat rushed inland, toward the waterfront that was visible now through the gray air. Effram could make out the different buildings, the white stone of the main dock, the muted yellow of lanterns trying to shine through the storm.
The dock sped toward them at an alarming rate, approaching even faster as he hauled up more of the sail. A woman squeaked in fear, threw her arm over her eyes, then changed her mind and clutched at the person nearest her. Blaies staggered toward him, fists balled, then stopped. A flush of power ran down Effram’s spine, hot and spangled and sweet as wine. They wanted to stop him. They all wanted to stop him, but none of them knew how to sail his boat. None of them knew how to stop it from smacking into the wall of stone.
At the last moment, just before he’d gone too far, just before he committed his boat into slamming her elegant bowsprit into the dock, he shoved the tiller viciously to larboard and swung the boom in. It barely missed cracking the head of the little monkey child, but it did send Blaies sprawling across the deck.
The boat turned, faster than Effram thought it could, with such elegance it made his heart swell. The boat swooped in a graceful circle before the waterfront. Effram could see faces pressed to the cloudy windows of the nearest tavern. Some of the more hardy patrons ran out into the wind and rain to watch them sail past. Effram wondered if they could hear the shocked, gull-like cries of his passengers, the shrill pleas for rescue.
For good measure, he sailed along the dock, just so they could all see him. Then he took his ungrateful passengers for a great looping ride across the waterfront. Maneuvering the boom, the tiller, and the twisted ropes around his hand, he slid the boat into place alongside the dock with the expertise of the only sailor in Tarsis.
Blaies and his big bully of a friend grabbed hold of the dock. They clung to it with all their strength, though the rough stone must surely be cutting their hands to ribbons.
“All ashore that’s going ashore!” Effram called heartily. He’d read that in storybooks. He suspected that it was something made up, something no sailor had ever really said, but these fools didn’t know the difference, and it felt good to shout it, to see them all slip and trip and fall over each other in their rush to exit the rocking boat.
His passengers greeted the stone dock with glad cries and much scrambling. He gave them one last chance to look at him the way they should. He stared at them, at their mewling little children as they climbed to safety. In none of those wet faces did he see the respect or the grudging admiration he was due. All he saw was fear. They dragged their belongings or their children up onto the docks and even further up into the town, all the while glancing fearfully over their shoulders at the sea and the storm.
At him.
There was reason to fear. In just the few moments while he’d been at the dock, the storm had darkened more than seemed possible. Water shrieked past, so fierce it stung his ears, blowing rain almost parallel to the deck. The rain looked like streaks of gray satin ribbon, whirling and twisting in the wind. The blackness he’d likened to night was a pearly gray compared to the encroaching darkness on the horizon.
At least, right now, he could still see the waterfront buildings, the gawking tavern patrons who stood against the front of the building as if it could shield them. In the flashes of lightning, he could still see the jumble of ships- become-homes, but the coming darkness threatened even midnight.
What would that velvet darkness be like? How black would darker than night be? Would he even be able to see the lightning? He raised his arms up to the rain, as if it could wrap itself around him and trail behind, like the ribbons on a girl’s hat. Would the rain follow him the way it followed the wind?
“You are to be commended!” he screamed into the sky. “Whoever you are, it’s a glorious storm!”
The last quaking passenger, Blaies, who had also been his first, pulled himself up the wet, slick stone and wobbled a few steps. From the safety of still land, he paused to look back at Effram. “You’re mad,” he hissed. “Mad.”
Effram laughed at him. Inside, in that dark place where dreams slept, darker even than the storm, his hope of vindication warbled, shivered, and died. Shriveled, it dropped back down to silence, another dream that would never come true.
Effram wrenched at the boom and tiller in unison. It was automatic to him now, the way these two moved opposite each other, but to the same effect. His boat slipped away from the dock with practiced, expert ease. He turned back into the harbor.
To starboard, the tall, abandoned ships were suddenly more menacing than the blackness of the sky. They’d only been shorn up to bear the weight of occupancy, not completely clipped of their wings, and now the water reached that one inch more of height that was enough to bear their dead, beached weight. The storm lifted them, those ghost ships. They shifted and groaned with each slosh of water and threatened to break free of the land that locked them.
He barely heard the scream, followed by an unmistakable splash, over the roar of the wind. He looked back in time to see a whirl of white cloth and frothing foam sucked underwater. A moment later, a woman- really only a
