Blankmap: Book I

1. Bed-Moving Dreams

When Jacques Hyrax was a boy, he would often wake in the night feeling as though his bed had moved. It was not uncommon for him to feel the motion of waves rolling beneath his mattress as a whiff of salt air filled his nostrils, or for the frosty blasts of a snowstorm to howl by just outside what might have been a cave tucked away in a mountain.

Of course, the bed never really went anywhere, but such is the kind of imagination that, if it is cultivated and allowed to grow tall, produces the kind of people who go on grand adventures and have many tales to tell. Jacques Hyrax was of just such a mind. He would eventually go on to have adventures of the sort that he had imagined as a boy (some of which will be related here), or else there would be no tale to tell, but life is long and can be dull in the early going when one is unable to get out and see the world. For now, what we should note is that Jacques Hyrax eventually had a son. The son was named Solomon, and he too happened to be the sort of boy who woke in the night feeling as though his bed had transported him somewhere strange and wonderful.

On the occasions that Solomon would wake with this feeling, he would lay awake for awhile with his head and torso out of the covers until the sounds of pounding surf or howling wind or driving snow faded back into the recesses of his imagination. This did not always come quickly or easily, and if sleep refused to come he would slip out of bed and pad softly down his hall to the top of the stairs. Because he was quick and slender he made no noise in doing so, which allowed him to scan unnoticed the familiar sight of the ground floor below him. More often than not, he would peer down and see his father sitting in his favorite armchair in front of the wavering embers of the fireplace. On the infrequent times that he deigned to speak to his son, his father was kind, though rarely cheerful, and on those fire-lit nights the older Hyrax wore the thousand-yard stare of a man who had seen and done regretful things. Of course young boys rarely have much to really regret, and as such Solomon was only vaguely aware of what might be stirring behind his father's distant eyes. But it didn't take a lifetime out in the world to recognize that all was not settled in the mind of the private, solitary man who had raised him.

He had noticed that when the two of them would walk into town together (down the dirt road flanked by towering ancient trees and across two winding hills before coming to the cobbled street of smiths and bakers and chemists) that people on the street always gave his father a wide berth. The older Hyrax had a distant stare for these occasions too, though it was not the stare of a man lost in thought so much as one of shutting out the world before it could do the same turn to him. Solomon could not remember his father wearing anything other than sleeves that buttoned all the way to the wrists and shirts with high stiff collars, even on the warmest of these days in the town, and he always supposed the townspeople's stares might have had something to do with the odd fashion in which his father chose to dress.

The two of them would run these errands perhaps once a week, the fiercely bearded towering man and the tall slight youth. Anyone watching them would have known them as family only by their matching shocks of red hair. Otherwise they could not have been more dissimilar—the man hawk-nosed and muscular, pale year-round; the boy elfin-featured and lean, with a deep tan to his skin even in the winter months. Jacques' eyes smoldered turquoise blue, while his son's were the gray of a storm cloud out across some distant sea. The assumption of the townspeople had always been that the boy's looks favored his mother's, though none of them could ever recall seeing or knowing her. For that matter, neither could the boy.

They said little as a rule on these excursions, for although his father had never forbade his asking questions, young Solomon seemed to sense intuitively that intrusions into the pensive mind of the older man were unwelcome. Jacques went about his business quickly and firmly, often stopping in a number of stores and buildings marked by words that the boy was unable to understand. He had never been taught to read, and his education had consisted entirely of learning the paths of the forest behind his house, the calls and cries of any number of wild animals, and the climbing of trees. They had no neighbors near their house, a petite castle of pink-tinged stone, as their property was bounded by forest on two sides and rolling fields of grass and clover on two others. As such Solomon had no friends, but he also did not know the want of them. He passed his hours at home going about the chores his father set for him, or learning every inch of the forest, or building model ships in his room. He had never been on a ship, or even seen one in person, but they often appeared in his dreams. If it could be said that the boy felt he was missing anything in his landlocked existence, it would be the absence of ships and the sea.