Three Fates

again, sent him sliding along with countless others toward the mouth of the sea. He shot out a hand, managed to grab the rail with his clever thief’s fingers and cling. And his free hand closed, as if by magic, over a life jacket as it went tumbling by.
    Muttering wild prayers of thanks, he started to strap it on. It was a sign, he thought with his heart and eyes wheeling wild, a sign from God that he was meant to survive this.
    As his shaking fingers fumbled with the jacket, he saw the woman wedged between upturned deck chairs. And the child, the small, angelic face of the child she clutched against her. She wasn’t weeping. She wasn’t screaming. She simply held and rocked the little boy as if lulling him into his afternoon nap.
    “Mary, mother of God.” And cursing himself for a fool, Felix crawled across the pitched deck. He dragged and heaved at the chairs that pinned her down.
    “I’ve hurt my leg.” She continued to stroke her child’s hair, and the rings on her fingers sparkled in the strong spring sunlight. Though her voice was calm, her eyes were huge, glazed with shock and pain, and the terror Felix felt galloped inside his own chest.
    “I don’t think I can walk. Will you take my baby? Please, take my little boy to a lifeboat. See him safe.”
    He had one moment, one heartbeat to choose. And while the world went to hell around them, the child smiled.
    “Put this on yourself, missus, and hold tight to the boy.”
    “We’ll put it on my son.”
    “It’s too big for him. It won’t help him.”
    “I’ve lost my husband.” She spoke in those clear, cultured tones, and though her eyes were glassy, they stayed level on his as Felix pushed her arms through the life jacket. “He fell over the rail. I fear he’s dead.”
    “You’re not, are you? Neither is the boy.” He could smell the child—powder, youth, innocence—through the stench of panic and death. “What’s his name?”
    “Name? He’s Steven. Steven Edward Cunningham, the Third.”
    “Let’s get you and Steven Edward Cunningham, the Third, to a lifeboat.”
    “We’re sinking.”
    “That’s the God’s truth.” He dragged her, trying once more to reach the high side of the ship.
    He crawled, clawed his way over the wet and rising deck.
    “Hold on tight to Mama, Steven,” he heard her say. Then she crawled and clawed with him while terror raged around them.
    “Don’t be frightened.” She crooned it, though her breath was coming fast with the effort. Her heavy skirts sloshed in the water, and blood smeared over the glinting stones on her fingers. “You have to be brave. Don’t let go of Mama, no matter what.”
    He could see the boy, no more than three, cling like a monkey to his mother’s neck. Watching her face, Felix thought as he strained for another inch of height, as if all the answers in all the world were printed on it.
    Deck chairs, tables, God knew what, rained down from the deck above. He dragged her another inch, another, a foot. “Just a little farther.” He gasped it out, without any idea if it were true.
    Something struck him hard in the back. And his hold on her slipped.
    “Missus!” he shouted, grabbed blindly, but caught only the pretty silk sleeve of her dress. As it ripped, he stared at her helplessly.
    “God bless you,” she managed and, wrapping both arms tight around her son, slid over the edge of the world into the water.
    He barely had time to curse before the deck heaved and he pitched in after her.
    The cold, the sheer brutality of it, stole his breath. Blind, already going numb with shock, he kicked wildly, clawing for the surface as he’d clawed for the deck. When he broke through, gasped in that first gulp of air, he found he’d plunged into a hell worse than any he’d imagined.
    Dead were all around him. He was jammed into an island of bobbing, staring white faces, of screams from the drowning. The water was strewn with planks and chairs, wrecked lifeboats and crates. His limbs were already stiff with cold when he struggled to heave as much of his body as possible onto a crate and out of the freezing water.
    And what he saw was worse. There were hundreds of bodies floating in the still sparkling sunlight. While his stomach heaved out the sea he’d swallowed, he floundered in the direction of a waterlogged lifeboat.
    The swell, somehow gentle, tore at the island and spread death over the sea, and dragged him, with merciless hands, away from the lifeboat.
    The great ship,