On the Deep Waters

Chapter Ten

Solomon could still remember his first day at sea.

He tried not to think about it. He did everything he could not to. But all the details were there, buried deep but not deep enough, waiting for the right moment to be dug up.

He remembered trying his hardest not to cry. Some tears still fell, despite his efforts, but he ignored them and kept looking for a way out. There was the door out into the hold, but that was guarded, and the few slits in the sides for arrows were too narrow for him to fit through. He had been thinner and shorter then, but even that wasn't enough to possibly free him. Even if he had been thin enough, the chain around his ankle kept him from going very far.

There were other captives below with him, sitting at the oars, their eyes downcast and dead. Solomon tried to speak to them in common tongue and in Palesan, but no one replied. It was like he didn't exist. The terror of that thought drove him to shout hello?! over and over again, desperate for someone to answer him.

A member of the crew did answer, not verbally, but with a smack across the mouth. It was hard enough to split Solomon's lip. The taste of blood and the sheer shock from it stunned him silent. After that blow, Solomon curled up in the corner, watched, and waited. Waited for what, he wasn't sure at first. But the feeling that something was coming for him was persistent and overwhelming.

That something came later in the day, in the form of two figures stalking their way into the hold and towards him. They were both tall and imposing, a muscular man with braided blond hair and a dark-haired woman with cruel eyes. The Sabinuses.

"Is this all you could get?" Jana Sabinus asked. "He's table scraps. I could feed him to the guppies and they'd still be hungry."

"People might've said the same thing about you once," Hafleikr Sabinus said. He crouched in front of Solomon, taking him in curiously. "How old are you?"

Solomon didn't answer. It was stubbornness as much as fear; foolishness, in hindsight. If he were able to go back and do things differently, he would have played the part of a compliant and fearful child. He wouldn't have been so stubborn.

They liked breaking the stubborn ones.

Solomon learned this that day, but the lesson didn't come from any physical blow. What happened instead was them unchaining him and dragging him onto the deck like he was a misbehaving child. When they arrived, he saw nothing but the sun starting to set and water all around them.

"You can try to swim for shore," Hafleikr whispered to him. "If you really want to. It would be amusing for me, at least."

Solomon wished he'd stopped to think. That he had realized this was a trap. If he had just thought about it for longer than a few seconds, he would have known.

But he didn't think. Instead, he ran for the edge without hesitation, jumped, and started swimming. He didn't know where he was going, and in that moment of blind panic he didn't care. He just wanted to get away.

Hafleiker and another crew member followed him in a rowboat. They stayed a good distance behind, but they were persistent in following him. That gave Solomon just as much incentive to swim as his desire to escape.

He tried to adjust where he was going, using the sun as his guide, hoping that it would get him closer to land, but it didn't. All that happened was he swam until his legs and arms ached, and all he got for that pain was a dark sky. There was no sign of land.

There was nothing.

His swimming slowed as he grew weak; eventually, it was near impossible for him to keep his head above the water. Just as he started to slip under, a hand grabbed his soggy shirt and dragged him into a rowboat. It was Hafleikr. He was smiling.