Blankmap: Book I

40. Ashore

For how many hours they continued on in silence Solomon could not say. The night sky was empty of clouds and smeared with stars. As he lay looking up at them from the bottom of his boat, it occurred to him that the three of them might be the only family any of them had left. There was his mother, maybe, but what if they never found her? And Juda and Miya's mother--my aunt, he had to remind himself--what had become of her? Melion--well, he couldn't bear to finish the thought.

"Don't they get tired?" he asked, rising up on his elbows.

"Who?" asked Juda, rubbing his hand across his eyes and stifling a yawn.

"The Lodrik."

"I do not know. This is the longest I have ever ridden one, though."

"What would they do if you got in the boat?"

In a minute Juda and Miya had climbed aboard, holding tight to opposite sides so as not to tip the small craft over. Miya's water horse gave a tremendous sigh, spraying a fine mist of saltwater through heaving nostrils. 

"Want to see something?" whispered Solomon. "We can all go fast, even the horses, even while they're resting."

Taking the map from its hiding place, Solomon was pleased to see that it still showed all the detail of the sea, even in starlight. Perhaps once you woke it up, it stayed awake until you had no reason to use it anymore. 

"That's us," he said, pointing to the bobbing trapezoid buoyed by the occasional splash of ink as it drifted across the page. Melion's children crowded him on either side, pressing their heads against his arms as they peered closer. Even after their submersion he could still smell the earthy, dreamy odor of coconut oil in their black hair. "Hold on to me tight."

They stared at the page as they reached the same conclusions that Solomon had the previous day. Despite the fog of his grief and the nagging anxiety of all that lay behind him, Solomon still felt deeply the affection that he'd grown for Juda and Miya over the past weeks, and along with it a desire to help assuage their own fears and sadness. Melion was their father, after all, and he knew what it was like to lose one of those. Melion might not be lost, he reminded himself. But all the same he wanted to help.

So he drew his finger quickly across the page and even managed a laugh as Juda and Miya were thrown backward, and again when they rose drunkenly from the heap they'd become. 

"Did you do that?" Juda asked, attached to Solomon's side once more, eyes fixed on the map. 

"You bet I did. And look--"

Solomon gave the small, inky water horses a nudge, and from behind them came a loud whinny as the great beasts were bumped along on a wave that had risen from nowhere on the quiet sea. 

"Now, let's get to Wokje."

The night passed, and the following day wheeled behind. In the early hours, the half-lit stretch of deepest blue when all the world seems on the edge, waiting for something other than itself, Solomon Hyrax had slept. His cousins breathed lightly, the soft sleep of the young long since having taken them into its embrace, and he had eased himself down between them, head resting on the hard curve of the sturdy rowboat. The last thing he had thought before sleep took him was how nice this might have felt in some other life absent from grief and loss.

In the morning Juda had fished for them, and they'd eaten and drunk their fill for the day. Shortly afterward they'd lost the Lodrik, who'd made a break for a tiny island to the south of the little boat after a night of bobbing lazily in the wake of the rowboat. They'd find crabs and seaweed aplenty there, Miya assured him, and they'd be happier out here than near Wokje, anyway.

 The day had been a long one, even boring at the hottest stretches (That I should be bored amidst all this! Solomon had marveled), but as it, too, was winding to a close, as all days do, the right edge of the map began to color itself in. Miya, whose eyes were keen even against the harsh reflected sun across the tops of the waves, noticed the same.

"Land!"

The three of them looked out at the horizon together, Juda grinning from ear to ear in spite of himself. It was hard for Solomon not to follow. Their ordeal was, at long last, coming to a close.

"Should I give us a little more speed?"

"Yes, please." Miya didn't bother looking back at him. She did not share her brother's smile, but looked fiercely at the island that slowly came into focus in the distance as though daring it to try to break her. 

Solomon glanced at the map one final time, making sure that the spit of land rising before him could be nothing but Wokje. He folded it back into its leather case, which he slid back into the bag. There was nothing for it, now. He was going to land there, whatever it brought, no matter how much Melion loathed it. He was going to find The Sign of the Seahorse, wherever it was. And he would have to do whatever came next, little though he knew what that might be.

His bow pointed towards the shore. The sun was setting to his right, and he took a moment to look over his shoulder at the dazzling spray of color that it poured over the water before him, behind him, around him. He reached into his shirt, pulling the black key from within, and tugged the cord up and over his head. Looking west, he dangled it at arm's length, where it caught the golden embers of the day. He let go of the cord pinched between his fingers and watched the key sink into the depths. Five minutes later they were ashore.