Glass tinkled, soft as wind chimes, onto the floor in one of the second floor rooms he rarely used. Little feet thudded on the deck in imitation of a sailor’s jog as the children laughed and cheered, celebrating the particularly well aimed throw. The four children, their faces dirty and their hair wild and uncombed, were all from one family. The littlest one was being newly initiated in the fine art of harassing crazy Captain Effram.
He stormed onto the back porch, reaching for the sling he kept hanging on a post for just such visits. The stones he kept beside it weren’t big or heavy enough to really hurt. They were just enough to give the little brats a smart pop for trespassing again. Just enough to leave a sting in exchange for the hurled insults that still had a sting of their own, even after twenty years.
Effram stepped into the yard and drew back on the sling. The children gave him ample opportunity for a very good shot, but just as he was about to fire, a big raindrop plopped right into the middle of his forehead. He missed his shot. With a loud thunk, the stone bounced carelessly off the hull of the boat, and the children cackled with glee.
With high pitched shouts of “Ahoy, mate!”
“Where you gonna sail today, Captain-on the Sand Sea?” the children ran away, leaping directly from the deck of the boat onto what had long ago been the breakwater for the harbor, then down into the dry bed that had once been the Sea of Tarsis.
Effram ignored them. Sniffing the air, he scanned the sky to the south of the city, following the wet scent of rain to the pewter sight of rain. Boiling, silver-gray clouds stretched away to the horizon. The sky was barely recognizable as the same sky under which he’d lived for almost thirty years. Gone was the interminable, unwavering, blazing new sun, painted over with the dull, slate gray of an approaching storm-a fat, ungainly storm with a belly full of water. He hadn’t seen a real storm, a wet storm, since he was a boy in Ankatavaka.
There were no storms in Tarsis, not nasty ones anyway. Sometimes there were gentle rains. In the winter there were snows, but usually the blue sky was obliterated by a wall of white, stinging sand that could peel the paint off the leeward side of a building or the skin from an unwary traveler. The old books, the ones he’d found in the ruins of the city, spoke of sea storms, of walls of gray water pounding down on the city, but there was no one alive on Krynn who remembered those days. The First Cataclysm had taken the sea, and with it gray storms and the white, flapping sails of hundreds of sailing vessels.
Now, after hundreds of lifetimes, there was a storm coming. A wet, cool, gray storm. And there was his seaworthy vessel, with a white sail, ready to catch the wind.
Effram climbed down into the pit in which his boat rested on its nest of scaffolding. He’d dug the pit himself, with his own hands, into the now useless breakwater that had once protected the harbor. In a fit of faith, he’d angled the deep ditch in such a way that his ship could be floated out to sea where there was no sea.
But, faith or no, what good was a boat built in landlocked Tarsis? Effram ran his hands over the smoothly joined planks of the hull and down to the polished keel, checking the stability of the scaffold that held the boat in drydock. The sturdy, silken heart of oak had no answers. No more than he had answers.
He didn’t know why he’d spent the majority of his adult life building a boat in the middle of the desert, laying himself bare to insults and jeers. He didn’t know how he’d become the crazy eccentric who lived down near the breakwater. He only knew that he had looked up one day, and the boat had been almost finished, and he had become daft Captain Effram. He had faith that one day he, as well as those who called him crazy, would understand.
As he slid his hands across the oiled hinges that held the rudder to the ship, he gazed up at the sky. The furtive spitting of rain threatened at any moment to become a deluge. The boat, a miniaturized, bastardized version of a schooner, with its wide, low deck and a sail made of tarred canvas, was as seaworthy as he could make it. He had known, for some months, that his work was done, that he was only waiting. Waiting for truth and vindication. Now, gazing at the gray line of water approaching from the south, smelling the storm in the air, he knew his waiting was over.
He tested the hinges on the rudder, which he had scavenged off the huge doors of some long-dead lord’s stable and refitted to his smaller vessel, and checked the last of the waterproofing he’d done on the hull. The feel of storm in the air, the twisting wind and the spitting rain demanded action. It demanded he be ready when the time came.
He went inside his hulking, old house and made sure the shutters were closed and fastened. He stuffed a piece of leftover sailcloth in the window the children had broken. Having stalled more than he could bear, savoring the anticipation, he changed into his sailing clothes. His arms and legs felt like a stranger’s inside his skin, moving jerkily and without coordination, not at all like the well oiled shifting of muscle to which he was accustomed-until he put on the heavy breeches and tunic, the cloak with its heavily waterproofed seams, the boots with soles scuffed with sand so that he wouldn’t slip on a wet deck.
In his finery-sticky and smelling of tar-he walked down the street to one of the neighborhood markets. It was swarming with people, and he had to be among them. To see their faces as they saw him in his rain gear.
The rain was falling softly now, big fat drops that splashed onto the cobbles and bounced back up from shining puddles. The air was cool, prickly, strange compared to the heat which normally beat down upon their heads. People hurried, heads bent, zigzagging from stall to stall, as if they could wend their way amongst the raindrops.
The tarps erected over the stalls to keep out the broiling sun flapped in the unusual breeze and shielded the melons, vegetables, and apples from the rain. Children ran squealing, jumping from puddle to puddle. Old women scurried from stall to stall, gathering food into their baskets as if they thought the rain would wash it away.
The air was wild and tumultuous, alive and energetic, just like the beating of his heart, and the people responded in kind, taking up the feel of it-the blowing wind and the dancing raindrops and the peculiar coolness. Effram couldn’t help but be caught up in it. Elation wavering with fear at the approaching storm. He bought a thick loaf of black bread, just in case there was no market tomorrow, and tucked it safely under his cloak.
Despite his elation and enthusiasm at the wind and rain that was pattering ever harder onto the tarps, he saw no difference in the faces of his neighbors as they looked at him. No appreciation that he alone wore clothes that could stave off the rain and sea. He saw no realization of what the approaching storm meant.
The baker, a man his age but with more hair and much more girth, looked him up and down, and though he said nothing, his disdain was evident. The man who sold milk and cheese and butter snickered to his wife about the Captain’s “crazy get-up” before Effram was out of range. The fruit seller refused to let him touch her, but made him put his coins down on the table instead of into her hand.
Children darted about him, their voices sharper than the stinging drops of rain, lingering in the air despite the worsening gusts of wind. “Captain! Hey, Captain! Here’s a puddle for you to sail your boat in!” They tugged at the tail of his cloak and stomped in the rapidly swelling puddles of water, splashed him to test the worthiness of his rain gear. But at least they noticed how the drops splattered against the knees of his oiled trousers, bounced on the back of his cloak, and slithered away.
The adults laughed and shrugged. After all, they were “just children,” and what did he expect, always acting so crazy? Only Lydia, the carpet maker, chased them away, chiding them in her lovely voice for teasing him. Effram was as surprised to be championed as the children were to be scolded. She had never noticed him before, never spoken softly to him. Beautiful women like Lydia did not notice men like him.