Jess Lebow - The Colors of Magic Anthology

"Blast!"

Crucias stalked to the basket, lifted the glaring lantern, and stared down at that shrieking face. He had expected to despise the child-a thing wet at both ends and smelling of sour milk-and to be sure, she was not a beauty in her screaming fury. But there was such loneliness and fear in her cry. Alone in this strange place, her screams unheeded for hours, her mother gone, and only growling, glaring seamen all about… Crucias saw something of himself in her, not just in the form of eyes and lips that were undoubtedly his, but also in the desperate anger of a creature forsaken.

The child's spastic kicking dislodged a slip of paper folded beside her swaddled leg. Crucias gently lifted the note and unfolded it. The handwriting was that of the admiral's daughter who had cost him his sea career. He read:

"She is yours. I cannot raise her. "

Crucias's brow furrowed. "And I can? An outlaw? A privateer?" He scratched his head. "I'd have to start all over. I'd have to settle down. I'd have to stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything. "

The baby let out a wail so forlorn that Crucias instinctively set down the lantern and note and gently raised her in his arms. His hands left trails of blood across the pink blankets. She clutched at his cloak, wet with sweat and spilled ale, and quieted.

"There, there, Darling. There, there. "

The baby tugged on his buttons, struggling to claw closer.

"Blast. "

Half the crew abandoned him that very hour-those sober enough to heed the yammering. A quarter more deserted in the deep of morning.

A female on a ship was bad luck. A female baby on a ship was preposterous.

Crucias agreed. It had seemed reasonable enough that first moment, as the poor, lost creature quieted to his touch. It seemed much less reasonable when she awakened, hungry and implacable, an hour later. She couldn't make headway on crackers or jerked beef, and ale was out of the question. She needed milk. She needed a mother. So, still bloodied and half-drunk, Crucias marched her back up the streets he had descended, in search of the admiral's daughter.

A bloody privateer lugging a shrieking infant through downtown streets at three in the morning was not the sort of spectacle Sumifa allowed.

Crucias was jumped by a patrol of armsmen. Half a dozen fists ended his objections. He and the baby were hauled to the constabulary. The soldiers charged him with kidnapping and threw him in a cage with a couple of drunks. One of them turned out to be the man Crucias had beaten bloody earlier that night. There was no repeat of the fight, though. The fellow saw him and pretended to be more drunk and beat up than he was. Crucias was glad-the armsmen had been none too gentle in bringing him in. They'd treated the child little better, letting her kick and scream in her basket in the corner while they went about their business. He shouted to them to find her some milk, to see if she had dirtied herself, to fetch the creature's mother, to do something to stop that blasted howling!

Eventually, the constables did fetch the admiral's daughter. She entered, still young and defiant in her blue Jamuraan dressing gown, a cloak over her shoulders and an outraged father over the coat. The night Crucias had first met this woman, her skin seemed white as ivory. Tonight it seemed like a shade of ice.

She took one look at Crucias, spat on the floor, and said, "The girl is not mine. She is not anyone's. I doubt this man is a kidnapper. I doubt he is anything at all."

Crucias flung his hands out of the bars, imploring. "How can you say that? Can't you hear her crying?"

White-mustached and red-faced, the admiral pulled his daughter back. "My daughter would not truck with cutthroats-"

"She trucked me three times that night," Crucias interrupted.

"-and I resent the implications that dragged us from our beds-

"Come now, Admiral. You must have known of the pregnancy. How can you care so much for your daughter and so little for your daughter's daughter-?"

"Forgive us," one of the armsmen was saying as he ushered the two away from Crucias. "And you-shut up. See if you can't get this brat to shut up, too."

Crucias had never broken out of jail before. He'd been in dozens of them and had never reason to escape from any. But tonight, the child left him no choice. He couldn't bear her cries a moment longer. When the armsman returned to upbraid him, Crucias wrapped the man in a stranglehold, stole his keys, tried each until the lock opened, and departed.

He had never broken out of jail before. Even if he had, he would never have snatched a screaming baby en route. But, once again, the child left him no choice. She was as alone as he. She was as desperate and terrified as he. They were more than father and daughter. They were soul-twins.

Impossibly, stupidly, Crucias fled with her and the basket. He fled, armsmen hot on his tail, through the streets of Sumifa. At the wharf, he lost his pursuers long enough to wrangle one cow out of a herd on an adjacent ship. With curses and lashing fingers, he drove the noisome beast up the gangplank of Backstab.

It was tough sailing the brigantine out of dock. His crew was reduced to only five seamen, five drunken and utterly reluctant sailors.

After all, Backstab now hosted two females-a baby and a bovine.

"Blast," Crucias noted to himself as he milked the one to feed the other. This baby was going to change everything. If she was going to survive, if he was going to survive, she would change everything.

Soon, he found himself at sea with her-with her and a cow and no crew. In cowardly collusion, the five had taken one of Backstab's longboats and rowed back to Sumifa.

It was impossible for a single man to sail the brigantine. It was impossible for Crucias to man sails and rudder and pumps all at once. It was even more impossible that he should do it while caring for this child, and caring for the cow that fed her. They were all doomed to drift and die, he was sure.

And yet, somehow, looking at that beautiful, sad, abandoned face, he knew he would do it. He would do the impossible. He would stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything.

It was quite a scene. The battlefield stretched out in the near distance, and a group of sapphire skinned mer-folk had gathered for the afternoon's entertainment in a cluster off the port side. The nobles on the boat had gotten up from their settees to stand along the rail and watch in awe.

The island of Argoth was wide and gray in the afternoon light, reaching arms out to encompass the eastern horizon and threaten Nunieve. She lay in deep waters beyond the harbor where Mishra's war crafts crowded. Against the shoreline, their masts and spars formed a forbidding thicket. If man or machine had remained aboard any of those ships, Captain Crucias would have done well to prepare for a quick departure, but every ounce of muscle and mechanism was currently engaged inland.

In front of Crucias's pestering passengers lay the Argoth plains-what had been immemorial forest only a year ago. There the titanic armies of Mishra and Urza clashed. Atop shorn tree trunks and shredded vines, soldiers swarmed like insects. Yotian warriors gleamed in the sunlight amid Mishra's defenders in black-ant armor. Among them moved clay automatons, maggots tearing into whatever flesh presented itself. Men charged and fought and fell and died.

"They are really killing each other, aren't they?" enthused one codger between sips of red wine.

"Yes, " Captain Crucias answered flatly. "Six months ago, you would have seen them killing only forests. Now you get to see them killing each other. "

Madame Gheiri's face had flushed healthily once the anchor was down and the war was unfolding before them. "You say they fight at night, too? They will be fighting all through supper and on into the evening?"