The small boat reacted to his touch as it should have and soon he was travelling at a decent clip.

The closest islands passed him by at a run and the farthest at a sprint and then they fled behind him chasing the secret that lay beneath the curve of the horizon and if they found that secret they would know what had been done yet he wondered how anything in existence could not have felt the reverberations of death weighing down the contours of reality and stretching it as if it were some infinitely mutable substance as if the basic laws that all creatures lived by weren’t laws but suggestions that could be shattered by a single question.

Check the heading.

Then he was past the point of sane men and in the open sea and the absence of everything but the boat and sun and cloud and water and wind and himself crushed his brain and he felt it might pulp and run out his ears except it didn’t and the concern drifted away as he meticulously kept his heading to the mountain that lay behind the setting sun and night fell and suddenly the sky burned with more than he could comprehend so he focused on trickster Salden’s basket of fruits and adjusted every time it rotated and the sun rose and he ran away from it and when it reached its zenith he began to chase it and the boat rocked and he felt the carrion eaters pick at flesh and bones and felt himself begin to die.

Trim the sails.

Yet despite his flinching mortality the ire of the sea would not dissipate against the lip of the vessel for there was little ballast to be had and the bow of the fishing boat cut through the tops of waves sending the decapitated water coiling onto his deck and the water threw itself up the hull of the boat and onto the deck in an attempt to bury him in the hungry depths and his bailing was a constant task but he lay the bucket beside him and every mad leap towards the sky rolled the water back into the bucket where he would take it and hurl the writhing water back to its greater self yet for all his efforts sometimes he would be forced to leave the tiller to frantically scoop whatever liquid remained.

Bail the water.

The ocean rolled beneath the vessel and curled around its outer edges to send water to lick at the insides of the boat but there was nothing in it that would be tainted by a consecration of salt because there was very little inside the boat but him and a few buckets and a fishing pole and a fishing spear and though the shadowed recesses of memory knew this was a foolish thing he himself did not.

Endure.

The ocean was an endless god resolute in its constancy and he was but a human and its hatred was constant and though his efforts were that of a monk appeasing a furious deity his mindless devotion yielded to failing flesh and so he pushed forward and so he cast his rod’s line into the depths but it hated him and he too hated and the fish were wise or they were forewarned because none took a bait and he struggled against the weight of the sea and won a thousand tiny battles but the war against the weight of exposure and exhaustion had always been hopeless.

Succumb.

He dreamed of innumerable hands reaching through the hull and coiling around his bones and organs and they pulled and he came apart without pain and a hand offered his beating heart to his eyeballs.

He woke and saltwater lapped at his body and a sweeter water fell from the sullen clouds above like a curse from the damned and he rose and a flock of birds huddled beneath the bow swinging from the winds or clung to the leeward side of the mainsail as it strained against the mast and he caught two birds and broke their necks and drunk their blood and ate their flesh and while most of those remaining fled onto the winds of the storm there were some that stayed and were strangely optimistic and he took them in his hands and killed them.

The buckets grew heavy with rainwater while he fought to keep the vessel afloat and the corpses of seabirds drifted on the constant layer of water inside the deck and the heavens were subsumed by the blanket of clouds above which transformed the ocean into a labyrinth where the one feeble guide that remained was intuition and he continued anyway and when fatigue shoved its tendrils into the gaps in his bones he would curl and pass out and when the water lapped at his chest he would wake and eventually the clouds and wind lost their fury and moved on and it was just him and the ocean and the sun’s ubiquitous heat and when the darkness of night returned it was pierced by blazing fonts of light looking down on him and he shivered.

Time slid past on the flesh of birds and grace of the elements and days rose and nights descended.

Yet one night as the cold shook him the stars began to vanish from the hemisphere above like the endless black had hidden them in its cloak and he wondered whether the monsters of the deep were had finally smelled him and had heaved their vast mass from the water to look down at him but there was no shine of eyes and the widening strip of vanished stars stretched too high and the fingers of the sun clutched the horizon and he realised that the Spine was there across a vast strip of empty water then pale empty sand and within a ring of woodland it rose for longer than possible and he stood to get a better view and saw it had no length for it was endless and the boat shuddered with a grating screech and the boom swung and knocked him off the deck and over the lip and into the water below.

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The water had him in its shockingly cold grasp yet it was his plate armour that anchored him to its depths dragging him down past the reef that had broken the vessel’s keel and past the wreckage of larger vessels and through the light twisting through the inky darkness of the water he saw the day fall away from him and he clawed at the water but it only slowed his descent so he gripped his breastplate yet it remained to trap him so he bent past the stiffness of his form and his breath vanished from him in pockets of air racing to the sun and his howls of agony were swallowed by the darkness and he wrenched his arm and when it popped out of its socket he slid the breastplate and his tassets off but a fire scoured the insides of his chest and a final darkness crept along the edges of his vision and he swum upwards, past his own sinking boat and past the reefs and he broke the surface of the water.

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The makeshift boat he had grafted together from the wreckage of ships struck down by reefs and rocks and lost beneath the waves sat in the cove and on the boat’s surface were the remnants of barnacles and pieces of coral that careful scraping had failed to uproot. He stood next to it, proffering a chunk of cooked fish to the dog who gazed at it balefully but nevertheless plodded over to it and gently extricated it from his hands allowing him to thread both arms beneath her belly and lift her atop the vessel, immediately provoking a litany of barks which failed to prevent him from shoving the boat out to sea.

He dove through the waves after it and the saltwater fell around him resoaking his worn clothes and with great overhanded strokes he cleaved through the ocean’s fury stinging his eyes and underwater the fish swept away with their empty gazes while their smaller cousins dove away from him and his open palm swung down and smashed the wood of his boat. He pulled himself up and the dog calmed and licked the water from his face and as she did so he took the oars and heaved them along the route he had memorised over weeks of diving yet outside his memory the only guide that remained were the peaks of rocks exposed by the rolling of waves and even so they cleared it. The oars were rough in the palms of his hand and in the straining of his seven remaining fingers he sorely felt the missing ones.

When he was certain he had passed the reefs he unfurled the mainsail from the ropes that bind it and allowed the boom to swing freely as the dog investigated the baskets and buckets he had placed throughout the vessel and they chased the rising sun on the broken wings of shipwrecks. Soon the dog had settled into the heat and he had draped a leather sheet over his head and the small boat ran true and clean despite its derelict nature and they fled the dying of the day and when night blanketed the heavens above his eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

To keep himself awake he crooned quiet words to the sleeping dog as her legs and eyelids twitched while she pursued some dreamlike quarry and the words were jagged and rough as they emerged from his throat and assured the dog that everything would be alright because he knew the ways of water and wind and how to coax safety and direction from the boat. He said that they would eat well because he had the means to feed them and that his earliest memories were his parents returning home with baskets of fish. He remembered his da would tell him the ways of the many kinds of fish and what the liftfins and goldenhorns and pearlstens wanted, then when they were at home his ma would tell him the fish-stories and explain to him why the fish wanted the things they did and on their little boat they pulled nets full of fish from the water. He did not tell the dog that these were distant things.

When the sun rose they broke their fast on the fish he had stored and drunk from buckets of boiled water and the dog left strings of bubble-lined drool drifting through the liquid and he shook his head and fished them out and he spoke only occasionally. The things he did say were hollow in the light of the day or the quiet of the night and though he knew himself to be an eloquent man in the way a bird knows that air would alight beneath its wings his tongue was a rotten mass in his mouth. In the shadowed recesses of memory he told his people many things and he made them many promises and he said it all with the charisma self-assurance grants and adrift in the endless sea he felt those earnest words like an absence in his chest.

He saw a dozen birds swooping a stretch of glimmering water and lowered his woven net to run along the length of the boat and they sailed through it and when he pulled it back up several fish sat in it. He stared at them for some time then pulled the net up and watched the fish struggle and die and he deboned them and fed one to the dog, filleting the rest and dipping them in brine before tying them to a line attached to the mainsail. The dog lifted onto its hindlegs to pull one down and he warned it sternly but it did not listen and lost its balance and fell into the surf.

The boat slid past her and he swung the tiller back but it broke off in his hands and he looped a rope around himself then hung off the stern pushing the rudder with his feet and he could feel himself slipping and the vessel turning and she paddled back towards him and he grabbed her by the scruff and braced his legs against the back swearing and yelling and catching his heels on the lip of the hull and hauling the two of them up until they sprawled on the deck. The dog huddled against him and he stared at the clouds and felt sickness churn in his stomach. After fixing the tiller he slept and did not dream.

Instead the dreams slept within his waking hours emerging in the shapes of clouds or ripples of water or the empty space between moments and the dog would snuffle and he would jerk upright and recheck their heading or reef the sails in heavy winds or unfurl it more amiable ones and the memories that had hidden behind destiny’s bloody gauze could no longer be concealed. Abreast of those moments he feared and the dog would place her drooping jowls on his knee and he would scratch her behind the ears but unlike her he knew what was waiting for them at the end of the journey. Sinuous forms uncurled beneath the waves and he wondered why they continued to let them travel unmolested.

When they sighted the first islands he knew the course had been stayed and his words to the dog had become truth but his hands shook on the tiller and saliva fled from his mouth. Home waited.