What's in a Name
Fifth Day of Elnu-Hamba (Elnu Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)
Antonio hated waiting, he never had. As a boy he would run to the docks whenever there was any rumor of a Giustiniani docking, especially one from the east, he had a love of sweet fruit and strange trinkets and most of all for strange tales. It seemed fantastical to him that one could go so far over the water to lands where men spoke with twisted tongue and dressed in fantastical garb, bright and fanciful such that his mother, God rest her soul, would tsk behind her hand every time one of his uncles or elder cousins came and entertained her all too precocious son. She would have wanted him sent to the Church rather than off to the east to trade with as she put it 'foreign devils'. He had laughed then and hugged her, told her he would not change one whit from the journey.... he had been lying through his teeth.
The life of a captain on the far off trade ways was hardly monkish, he had lied cheated and stolen and if there was one Commandment he had not broken it had been the one about honoring his father and his mother, mostly for he distance. He had not been there at his father's bedside when he died and though by chance or Providence he had come to port in time to spend his last days at the side of his mother. It had been in one of the years when the Turks and the Greeks had been fighting fiercely, though that did not narrow it down too much. He recalled it as though he could see it before his mind's eye even now in the torchlight The dark bed, its heavy burgundy drapes drawn close as though the very light of the sun would burn the last of the light out of her eyes. She had made him promise that he would not get caught up in the battles of kings and princes.
What could he do? Antonio had promised, he had lied. No man could promise not to get tangled in the wars of the mighty, no more than one could promise not to get in the way of plague of famine.
Standing here, now under alien skies, looking onto the lights of a city that was more foreign than anything he has seen in his first thirty years of sailing he could not help but think of that day, of the fact that he had promised to join a mercenary company whose business was war as much as it was trade. There really were foreign devils in those walls, the sorts with horns and hooves perhaps.
You knew I was a liar since I stole those figs as a boy mama, he thought, wondering in a moment of strange fancy if the dead could hear the living in their minds or only when they spoke.
At least I named the ship after you. The name was commonplace enough that he had never had to explain it to anyone and it had been many years since he had sailed with anyone who recalled the name of his mother of all things.
A vague sense of... not unease, but something akin to it swirled at the back of his mind, a familiar feeling like fingers lightly brushing against the inside of his head.
Curiosity, he realized, that was what it was... and not his own. Antonio looked down at the grain of the wood under his fingers and under the flickering lantern light it seemed almost as if many eyes looked back from the knots in the grain.
"A mother is someone who carries you into the world," he tried to think at the ship, the way the otter-kin told him to do so that he might be heard more clearly. It felt at once uncanny to be explaining that to the ship he was a captain of and at the same time strangely... right like letting out a breath freely when he had been breathing in smoke below deck for too long.
"She would not want me to go to war.. and here I am leading men in it."
"Time Turning... you not you..."
It took Antonio a long while to parse out what the ship's mind meant, he was not the young man who had made that promise. He could only nod, not expecting the conversation, such as it was to go any further. As far as he had been able to get out of Esha the spirit of the ships did not feel the passage of time as men did so it would pick up on some stray thought and try to make sense of it and then fall silent for days or weeks.
"Glad I named for good mother-person. I fight too."
The Marcella has pledged to fight somehow in the coming battle
OOC: Before you ask Antonio had no idea how the ship is planning to fight, especially if you guys go for a land battle. 
