Further Out to Sea (2)
Counting from the day they left the Floating Island—and setting aside the stop they made on the long, narrow island—Monia had been living aboard the boat for nearly three days.
Life on the water brought its own set of hardships.
First came the blazing sun and the salt-laden sea wind. There was no escaping either of them, and even sitting still left their skin cracked and stinging with raw pain.
Next was the shortage of fire.
Unlike their days on the island, where firewood could be gathered right in the front yard, every flame had to be rationed for moments of true necessity.
They had cut timber on the long island and stocked firewood, but they could not simply burn through it out here on the open sea.
The third hardship, if one had to name it, was the lack of water.
It sounded absurd at first. Surrounded on every side by nothing but water, how could they be short of it? Yet it was the truth.
Drinking seawater only brought on dehydration. The more you drank, the thirstier you became, and the water in your body simply vanished. All that endless water was undrinkable.
They could endure the lack of fire. They could endure the scorching sun and the salt wind. But the shortage of water was something they could not endure.
So before leaving the long island, Chester had tried to solve that problem first. Even the Grace of the Summit, however, could not strip the salt from seawater.
Of course it couldn’t. The salt in the sea was not a harmful element. If it had been, the Grace of the Summit would have purged every last grain of salt from Chester and Monia’s bodies the moment it entered them.
“Let’s drink fish.”
“What?”
They were resting in the shade of a simple awning they had rigged when Chester said it, and for a moment Monia thought he had lost his mind.
This was the same man who had told them to avoid exercise and just lie still because their bodies couldn’t afford to lose more water. What was he saying now?
“Fish are drinkable.”
“Have you gone crazy?”
When Chester repeated himself, Monia finally raised her voice.
“Ah. I phrased that poorly.”
“You did. I was worried you’d gone mad.”
“You can wring a fish out and drink it.”
“…….”
“I’m serious.”
Chester rose at once, took up a harpoon, and stared out over the water. The moment he spotted a fish swimming beneath the surface, he calculated the refraction of light and the fish’s path, then threw.
The harpoon pierced the fish cleanly. Chester seized the thrashing creature, crushed its struggles with raw strength, and brought his mouth to the place where the spine ran.
Crunch!
He bit hard into the flesh around the spine, then chewed and crushed the wound he had made, drinking the juices that welled out.
When he had finished, he bit into another section of the spine, crushed it, and drank again. He repeated the process along the entire length of the backbone. Then he drew a knife, pried out one of the fish’s eyes, and ate it.
“My father told me this once. Mm. Slurp.”
Having sucked the eye dry, Chester spat out the empty husk and moved the knife toward the other eye as he continued.
“You’re better off not eating anything except the area around the spine and the eyes. Slurp.”
“Why?”
“There’s fat mixed in, so you end up using more water to digest it than you gain from drinking. Ptoo.”
Chester looked down at the ruined carcass—spine crushed, eyes gone—then tossed it into the sea.
“Ah. What a waste.”
“It is a waste, but in this heat it’ll spoil before we can eat it. We’ve taken in so little water that eating anything is dangerous.”
Digesting food consumed moisture as well.
And even under the awning, Chester’s family was still sweating steadily under the merciless sun.
“If we could just stop sweating so much…”
“The awning doesn’t help much.”
“True.”
Every time the boat shifted, the angle of the sun changed. Sometimes the awning blocked the light completely; other times the rays slipped past it and struck them full force.
For a while Chester, Monia, Rex, and Ant caught fish and, like vampires draining human blood, sucked out the moisture and the eyes before discarding the rest, trying to endure the heat however they could.
“It was the same when we walked the plains on the Floating Island. Having no shade makes all the difference.”
“Exactly. Heat you could otherwise handle becomes unbearable the moment there’s nothing to block the sun.”
On top of that the boat rocked constantly, so the heat brought seasickness, headaches, and waves of nausea.
Chester insisted that, whatever else happened, they must not vomit. Vomiting meant losing a huge amount of fluid at once; in severe cases it could tip them straight into dehydration.
Fortunately, after long enough hours of drifting, they grew used to the motion of the sea, and the danger of vomiting gradually faded on its own.
“The seawater’s so cool, though.”
“It is….”
With no better option, Chester and Monia dangled their bare feet in the sea, cooling their bodies by chilling their feet.
They would soak their feet until they felt cooler, then pull them out and let the salt water dry, only to dip them again when the heat returned… and so on.
At first that was enough. But as the heat grew harder to bear, they began soaking their clothes in seawater and putting them back on, cooling their entire bodies that way.
Luckily the sea stayed cold even under the blazing sun, so the method worked quickly. And once the clothes dried, sitting under the awning let them hold onto that coolness for a while longer.
Of course the salt left rashes across their skin, and as they had already discovered, their skin cracked and burned. But Chester and Monia solved that problem brilliantly.
The universal answer they had found on the Floating Island: the Grace of the Summit.
Even the Grace of the Summit could not turn seawater into fresh drinking water, but it could heal the rashes and the raw, broken skin.
“Haaah…”
When Monia lay down, Chester took pieces of the Grace of the Summit in both hands and carefully rubbed them over her body, treating every rash and every cracked place.
As the Grace of the Summit stroked her skin, a cool sensation spread through her, and the itching, stinging, painful wounds simply vanished.
When Monia’s treatment was finished, it was Chester’s turn.
Monia took the Grace of the Summit and rubbed it gently over his skin, careful not to hurt him.
“It works so well even without dissolving it in water.”
“There are stones that stop bleeding and speed healing if you rub them on a wound, so it’s not that strange.”
“Really?”
“Really. Well—only for tiny scrapes, not serious wounds.”
Once they had massaged their whole bodies with the Grace of the Summit and restored their skin, they soaked their clothes in seawater again and faced the heat once more.
Little by little, Chester and Monia were learning how to live on the open sea.
By day the sea was dazzlingly beautiful, a jewel-blue expanse. But once the sun sank and the moon rose, it showed an entirely different face.
It revealed its other side: a pitch-black, terrible darkness that looked ready to swallow everything into the void.
Even looking out over that black sea from the deck of a large ship was hard enough. How much worse was it from a raft that bobbed and swayed with every wave?
They had dropped anchor so the raft would not be carried far by the swell, and Monia had meant to sleep. Yet staring at the dark, heaving water, she found she could not close her eyes.
Fear pressed in hard.
The black sea sometimes called up the eyes of her father, the Duke. At other times it brought back the captain of that nameless ship who had clung to her with such unnatural obsession.
Looking at it summoned things she feared.
Now and then the stars and the moon reflected on the surface, painting the night sky across the water in a breathtaking display—but only for a moment.
Monia gazed quietly at her own face mirrored on the sea.
Expressionless, her eyes dyed pure black, she looked exactly like the person she used to be.
The old Monia who had possessed no will of her own, nothing more than a doll that moved exactly as the Duke desired.
The past was supposed to be all right now. So why did it keep rising up again, bringing fresh pain?
She was thinking how truly complicated the human heart could be when she suddenly heard Chester’s breathing.
He’s not asleep.
She heard his breathing every night. She could tell whether he was sleeping or not without even looking.
Turning over, she saw Chester lying with his eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
He does that sometimes.
Whenever something needed deep thought, Chester behaved this way.
He would pretend to sleep and simply lie still, thinking hard until she herself drifted off.
Ordinarily he could work through several tasks even while turning a problem over in his mind. But when something truly demanded his full attention, he did nothing else.
He’s worried about the natives who live beyond this sea, isn’t he?
If only she were stronger, he wouldn’t have to worry.
Feeling a pang of guilt, Monia wriggled closer, then pounced on him the way a cat pounces on its prey, pinning him beneath her.
“……Monia?”
Startled, Chester called her name without opening his eyes. Monia smiled seductively, lowered herself until she was pressed flush against him, and kissed him.
“Worrying too much isn’t good either, is it?”
Her hand slid downward, gently stroking the most precious part of him, and she whispered against his ear.
“Pour everything out and feel better.”
“Ueeeegh!”
“I told you not to overdo it.”
Chester rubbed Monia’s back, helping her finish vomiting as quickly as possible. The unusually vigorous up-and-down motion, combined with the constant rocking of the raft, had hit her hard.