Blankmap: Book I

39. Asleep Among the Bones

When he awoke his head was throbbing and his tongue was swollen. He raised himself from the swaying bottom of the boat, looking out at the sunlit sea before him. It was blue in all directions, cerulean sky meeting turquoise waves, without wisps of cloud or spits of land to break the blanket of color. Overhead the sun beat down, unforgiving. Groggy as he was, it took Solomon several minutes to realize the cause of the pains in his head.

"Water," he croaked.

There was none to be had, and nothing remotely resembling a hint of rain in the sky. He gazed about him, blinking slowly, before sinking back into the boat in defeat.

How long he sat there he could not have said. He was alone with his black and terrible thoughts, and as so often happens when these are all keeping one company, he had no sense of time, no break in the anguish to hint at just how long he had been stewing. Beneath all of his squeals of pain, of horror at killing and grief over his father and terror for his friends--his family--on Kwajro, pulsed the steady current of water, water, water. He was growing more useless by the minute without it.

After some time a bird wheeled across his line of sight, a momentary interruption of the merciless sun. The bird, for its part, had awoken that day with no notions of saving lives or inspiring genius. All the same, the bird, with its black-flecked white wings and slender orange beak, provided just the salvation that Solomon Hyrax, prisoner of despair, needed. Its wingtips skimmed the surface of the water close to the place where Solomon's boat bobbed along happily in the current. It appeared to be in no hurry.

When it had dipped its wingtips a handful of times the bird made a dizzying climb up into the aether. At its zenith it flipped over neatly before corkscrewing down into the waves at an astonishing speed. Solomon watched groggily as it resurfaced. A fish wriggled in its beak.

There is something of the animal in each and every person, an animal that can be brought out in the right circumstances, no matter the person's disposition. At that moment, in that place, there was no better candidate than Solomon Hyrax to crack his human shell and let loose the primal thing buried deep within him. He was not conscious of the lifesaving qualities of blood, that it could be drunk to sustain life. But the feral creature that is kept deep within every person's brain, under the lock and key of society and civilization, knows all too well the things that it can take to get by. Solomon, the Solomon that he himself knew as Solomon, knew none of this, of course. But all the same the cruel disbanding of all he had held dear seemed at once to have surrendered guard of his deeper instincts. Without a thought, Solomon dragged himself up and over the side of the little boat. A moment later, as the bird wheeled off into the sun, he emerged, a fish gasping its last between his pointed teeth.

Several minutes later, he lay fast asleep once more among the bones. He slept a long time. He did not dream.

In the afternoon when he had awoken once more Solomon crammed his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself from screaming. When he could taste the tang of his own blood, he pulled out his hand and screamed anyway. There was no echo, no affirmation of his anguish returned to him by the sky. Solomon screamed until his throat began to crack, and then turned to rasping exhalations that shook his frame in helpless rage.

With something like finality, he slumped backwards into the rough bottom of the little boat. A moment later he had sprung up once more. He tore into his turtleskin bag and found the heavy book that lay within it. Opening the cover, he tore from its hiding place the blank page that had caused so much anguish already. With a voice barely audible he lit into the paper with every invective and curse he knew, and when those ran out he repeated them, and when he grew tired of repeating them he created brand new oaths to hurl in the face of this pristine page, enjoying the way that the combinations of words shot like darts from his tongue.