Blankmap: Book I

34. The Drums, The Drums

"It is no wonder you did not see your father in the cells," Melion hissed. "It seems they are keeping him in the mokomat -- the galley."

"Why?"

"I haven't the faintest idea, Solomon Hyrax. But it is our job to try to get him out."

"I don't understand any of this."

Melion steadied him with a hand on his shoulder. "Your father has done a very foolish, very brave thing. It worked for him once, as you heard today. I am not entirely surprised that he tried it again," he whispered. "I am not sure we have any prayer of helping him escape. Do you understand me? We, or you, may very well leave here without him."

It was too dark to make eye contact, but all the same, Solomon looked away. He shook his head.

"They are many. We are very few. We will do what we can," Melion said.

At that moment there was another bellow of pain from the galley, just out of sight from the dark corner where they crouched. Solomon's body was afire. It was a conscious effort for his brain to connect the sounds he was hearing with the man he knew as his father. Jacques was so strong, so willful, so forcefully alive, that it went against everything Solomon knew to admit that yes, it was his father crying out, over and over again. Solomon Hyrax, age sixteen, had never felt angrier, nor more unmoored from the world.

Several minutes passed, anger and grief festering in Solomon's young heart. He had never noticed just how closely related the two feelings were; now, bound up in them with nothing to distract him from his father's cries of pain, he thought that perhaps he would never stop feeling them. At the thought his heart raced just a little bit faster.

Finally, the Dammerung (or ri-Gotterdamm, Solomon was never sure which to think of them as) finished their terrible meal, and as a crowd filed out of the ship's mess from a door opposite Solomon and Melion's. The heavy wooden door had scarcely clicked shut when Solomon began sprinting across the cavernous, empty space, bumping tables and chairs without prejudice as he tore through the half-dark. It was all Melion could do to keep pace.

Solomon cleared the final long dining table, flickering in the light of a lone torch hanging from a brazier, and there he was: Jacques Hyrax knelt before a roaring furnace, shackled to the floor behind iron bars. He had heard the commotion of Solomon's coming and was bracing himself as though he was to be struck another blow, but in his eyes there was fire. The grim resolution on his face melted as he recognized his son.

"You've come," he croaked. In his voice was an emptiness that was as terrible to Solomon as the blood that poured freely from the cut above Jacques' left eye.

"Yes," Solomon whispered, face pressed to the bars, looking at his father across the smallest of impenetrable distances.

"No use," said Jacques, seeing Melion approach and study the apparatus that separated them. "I did what I could to try to take it down, damage it in any way. They came in for a nightcap at the tail end of my efforts. You can see what they thought of my trying to escape." He gestured with one arm at his own bruised body, and it was only then that Solomon noticed the awkward angle at which the other hung. It was broken.

"Why here?" asked the Irooj. "If only we had not wasted so much time searching the cells!"

"It would be difficult for so many of them to make sport of me at once, if I were locked away up above. No, I was--I am to be...entertainment." The bearded man gave a dry cough. A muscle was working in his jaw. For a moment, none of them spoke, but Jacques Hyrax's eyes never left his son's.