Anthology - The Search For Magic

He waved to them, his face stretched in a grin. He’d never thought hearing that title would sound so sweet. He wished that every child who’d so sneeringly called him “Captain” and every adult who’d smiled indulgently or snickered at his passing could see him now, like this handful of children. He wished they all could see him sailing!

Then he had no further thoughts for them, as he used the sail to turn his boat at an angle to the arm of the breakwater. The boat wallowed and groaned as it turned with all the sluggishness of a fat, sun-warmed grub, but he loved even her clumsiness. He’d expected it. With the midship and the stern built so wide, there was no way she’d be a fast vessel, but what he’d sacrificed in speed, he regained in balance. She rode low, strong, and stable, even in the churning storm.

The wind fought him as he pulled in the sail until it was close-hauled, almost parallel to the lines of the boat itself. The wind tore at the sail as if it would rip it from its fastenings, but the strong cloth held, and the boat leaped away from the wind.

All before him was darkness. Roiling clouds and sheeting water and lightning flashed like fire in the sky. The wind was solid as stone. It battered him, the wood beneath his feet, and tried to snatch the boom from his hands. It drove the salty rain into the side of his face so that it felt like stinging sand on his skin. It was madness to sail toward that black wall of storm, but that was just what he did.

Effram understood the maneuvers necessary for sailing into the wind, even though he’d never had occasion to attempt them. In order to go forward, toward that unnatural blackness, he knew he had to zigzag, back and forth so that he tricked the wind into taking him into it. It seemed only another test of his will, like all the past years had been tests, leading up to this moment.

He sailed leeward for a short while, never taking his gaze from the black horizon. As he shifted, knowing that now he must change course and sail at an opposite angle, he lost his hold on the boom. The boat careened wildly and he fell as the sail went flat. Effram flailed about and finally caught the lines that trailed from the boom. He yanked it into position, the wind grabbed the sail, and the clumsy boat turned and shot away into the storm once more.

Effram threw back his head and laughed with the joy of it all. The pure delight of accomplishment, the pleasure of the salt wind in his face, and the rushing power of the sea, singing through the planks beneath his feet.

This! This was why he’d done it all. This was why he’d spent his life building this thing that had no life except that which the sea could give it. He knew that, whatever else life brought him, he’d be a happy old man someday, to sit in the sun and remember the life of the sea beneath his feet.

As he tacked again, he noticed that the black of the storm was no longer ahead of him. It was all around him. Rain pounded steadily, unrelenting, so that he could barely see through the sheets. The rain tasted of cold blood, salty, coppery, and alive. The only light came from the harsh streaks of fire that zigzagged across the sky, guiding his course through the storm- as if the lightning reached earthward, fighting against the clouds.

Was Effram the only soul left in the world? Alone, isolated in a storm that he realized could not be natural. Could not be real. This was no hearty downpour of water from over-laden clouds, no swirling of wind from the struggle between the cold air of heaven and the hot air of desert sand. This was… magic? Punishment sent from the gods? Except there were no gods, or if there were, they no longer cared about the pitiful races of Krynn. But someone, something, was surely angry. To pound the sky with thunder as heavy as boulders. To drown the smells of sun and sand. To leach the colors from the land.

For the first time since he’d shouted his exuberance at being afloat, Effram feared.

It was not safe to be so far out to sea, not safe to be surrounded by the roiling black silk of a magical storm. For the first time since he’d set his feet upon the deck, he felt the cold as something clammy and unwelcome. His shirt clung to his back like a worm clings to the stone under which it hides. His shoulders hurt from fighting the wind, his ribs still burned where he’d fallen against the post, and his legs ached from straining to stay upright. His feet were numb with cold, his ringers pruned and old from the wet.

For one heart-stopping moment, he did not know from which direction he had come. All about him was the same. Black and gray, unrelieved except for flashes of yellow, orange, and sometimes blue. Thunder groaned so loudly that he could feel it in his numbed feet. It vibrated into his clenched hands, overshouting even the song of the sail.

He closed his eyes and let the boom line slide through his fingers until it swung free. The sail flogged in the wind, a crunching angry sound of threads being beaten and abused, of a sail hungry to be filled. He was lost at sea in the middle of a dark and supernatural storm. Now he would die, unvindicated, and all those who had called him crazy would be proven correct.

The solution came to him as quickly as the despair had, gusting over him like the bursts of aberrant wind. The fear made him feel stupid and slow. To even have felt it for a moment was to deny all the years he’d spent believing in himself.

He’d been tacking into the wind. All he had to do was turn about and let the wind take him home, or if not home, then to shore. For surely that feeling that he alone lived upon the sea was purest fantasy? The raging sea could not have covered the whole of the continent. Surely there was land somewhere to the north or east of Tarsis. All he had to do was let the wind push him to safety.

He worked the sail and the tiller. The boat wallowed, a great clumsy beast fighting the stronger monster of storm. The pressure of the sea against the keel threatened to swamp him, but then the stern caught the current and the nose swung around. The sail billowed in the strong wind and snapped loud as a blow, skin on skin. For a moment, Effram thought he wouldn’t be able to manage the boom-that either he would give way, the sail would snap free of the mast, or maybe even that the mast would crack at the base like a young tree snapping in the wind.

The strain on his fingers was almost unbearable, the pull on the sail even stronger, but all held. His fingers did not break, the sail did not give way, and the mast creaked and groaned but held. The sailing was as different as the gait of a swift steed was from that of an oxcart.

To run before the wind was like flying! Like being given wings and a great span of free sky in which to try them. The sail whispered and ballooned out, pregnant with storm, with the strong southerly wind that was blowing the sea of Tarsis home. The clumsy boat flew with Effram astride it, faster than any bastard sloop with a tallship’s bow and a carrack’s heavy stern should. It flew so fast the wind dried the water from his face, so fast it felt as if the wind would just lift him up and carry him over the sea.

Only the lightning saved him from smashing headlong into the city. One moment, he was flying across the frothing water, surrounded by the gray-black of the storm. The next he saw, in a flash of white light, the seawall that formed the other protective arm around the harbor of Tarsis arrowing toward him.

Lightning blind, he barely had time to yank the boom in, bleed the sail of some of the wind, and slow the forward slice of the boat. It turned and in the next flash of lightning, he saw the blunt end of the seawall on the starboard side. The boat slid past into the calmer water of the harbor.

The wind was still strong, swirling in angry gusts, as was the water, but it was less choppy. It was an advantage that he appreciated only now. This protected haven had been what made Tarsis the great seaport it had once been. The harbor was a circular refuge backed by the city and enclosed by a semi-circle of breakwater on one side and seawall on the other.