Solomon Stone- Survival

by Diana K Potter

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked Stone, for the sake of politeness, but also curiosity. She wondered if nightmares dogged him as well.

  He shook his head, sitting up and stretching, treating her to the brief, but pleasant sight of a strip of skin that his tunic did not cover. “It still felt like I was on the ship. When we’re moving, I’m fine, but lying still—I can feel the waves rocking me up and down.”

  Alexis nodded. She felt it as well. “My father spoke of such things,” she said. “He once crossed the sea. It will pass.”

  Her words caused an amused smile to pass over his face, similar to the one the she had drawn from him the previous night, also unwittingly. Were she more prone to fits of paranoia, she would have thought the man was laughing at her. Together, they each drank a swallow of water to chase away the thirst that had settled in sleep, before allowing themselves to eat a few of the vegetables, raw and unwashed. She could have made a simple stew out the ingredients at hand, but to boil the potatoes and carrots, water would be a necessity. Still to consider, was the very real danger that came with building a fire. The footsteps had aroused her suspicion enough that the risk did not seem at all worthwhile. She had been cold last night, and Stone had remained close enough that she had considered, as she fell asleep, the tempting possibility of rolling closer.

  On the slave ship, they had often dozed without meaning to on one another’s shoulders. It was never mentioned aloud and was perhaps not something that could be practiced outside of such dire circumstances. The contact had never made her feel uncomfortable and waking to the heat of his skin against hers had been a comfort.

  She leaned against the boulder a long moment, watching the sun begin to rise as Stone chewed the last bite of his breakfast. The desert was so silent around them that the only sound was the crunching of the carrot between his teeth.

  “Your sword,” Alexis asked. “Might I see it?”

  “Sure thing,” Stone said. He removed the sword from his belt with clumsy, unpracticed movements, and passed it to her awkwardly, blade first. Alexis took it easily, an expert at the art of handling sharp objects. It was not an impressive weapon at first glance. It was a simple short sword, unlike the longer blades and spears preferred by most warriors of her homeland. It looked old, perhaps even forged before the time of her father, and was in decent shape to have been around for so long. Someone must have taken good care of it, kept it sharpened and free of rust for many years. In spite of its plain appearance, the balance of the blade was as close to perfect as could be found. Alexis stood and gave the sword a few experimental swings. It felt like a better weapon than the well-crafted sword she had taken from the Captain’s belt while blood still flowed from his wounds. Frowning deeply, Alexis adjusted her grip on the hilt, eyes focusing eventually on the bit of red in its center. The stone was relatively small and perhaps not worth nothing at all, but the sight of it there called to mind a story that made her smile.

  Alexis passed the blade, hilt first, back to Stone.

  “You’ve heard of Leonidas?”

  The man blew a huff of air through his nose, his expression affronted by some perceived insult. “Of course I have.”

  “Just making certain,” Alexis said. “You didn’t know who was king in Sparta currently. Why should I assume you know of our past heroes?”

  “Everyone knows Leonidas. His…fame was even notable to many of those in my land.”

  His defensiveness very nearly made her laugh, but she managed to push down the rising noise. “Your sword,” she said, nodding at the blade. “In the legends, the sword of Leonidas, the one he fought with at the battle of Thermopylae, it is described as having a similar look—plain, with a red stone set in the handle.”

  Stone looked down at the blade, eyes narrowing as he turned it this way and that to examine the details she had mentioned. For a moment, he merely looked amazed, but it quickly shifted into something closer to bitter humor. “I know the stories,” he said, smiling at a joke she did not understand. “It’s magic, right?”

  “So some say,” Alexis said. “Or, at the very least, exceptionally lucky.”

  There was the slightest bit of laughter in his voice when he replied. “Maybe it’ll prove useful then.” He hefted the sack of supplies, always growing lighter. “We should get going,” he suggested, “before the heat gets any worse.”

  ❖❖❖

  She’d seen no such land before. The sand was difficult to walk in; infuriatingly, it seemed as though they were taking twice as many steps to cross the same distance.

  As they put more distance between themselves and the horrors of the sea, Alexis found that her voice returned to her; the tightness in her throat loosened, and she told stories once more, speaking to Stone about all sorts of things as they put leagues between themselves and the wreckage of the ship. They drank sparingly; it was easier to ignore their thirst while they were both distracted. She told him of the gods, curious to know if their reach expanded to his far away land. He surprised her by smiling, a wry twist of his lips. “Everyone knows of Zeus and Neptune and Hera, however far away they’re from.”

  “But they are not your gods?” she asked.

  Alexis had always been intrigued by new places, and perhaps would have been more interested in exploring them were it not for the farm and her family. She wanted to know a thousand things about the faraway land Stone claimed to hail from.

  “No,” he said. “Not as such. Some of my people worship a god, but they believe there is only one. Me—I don’t really have a god.”

  She’d met such people before and had always thought them a bit on the odd side. Her father had friends who hated the gods, believing them responsible for their every misfortune. The idea of believing in nothing at all, not even something to question or to hate, gave her a strange bottomless feeling that was a bit like falling into nothing.

  “You do not pray?” she wondered aloud, sometime later, when the sun had shifted in the sky and they had both given into the urge to take a sip from their steadily dwindling supply of water.

  “Not really,” Stone said. He was walking ahead and turned back to look at her, his eyes lingering on her face, on her eyes, in a way that was unlike the rest of the men who had cast a glance her way. “Sometimes I wish for things, if that counts.”

  Alexis wasn’t sure.

  “I do not pray as much as some,” she said. “But I will ask my gods to watch over you the next time I speak with them or make a sacrifice.”

  She expected him to tease her, but there was something honest in his answering smile. “I’d appreciate it,” he said. “Between that and our lucky sword, perhaps we’ll make it out of this in one piece.”

  He spoke more freely that day than he ever had aboard the slave ship. He did not tell stories, not in the same sweeping manner as she did, but she managed to coax bits of information from him in fits and starts. Engaging him in conversation about something other than survival was no longer the equivalent of pulling out a rotten tooth. He was still somewhat careful with the exact words he used to answer her, but he no longer thought about them for minutes before mustering a reply.

  “I was a scholar,” he admitted to her, as they made camp once more in the middle of nothing, waiting for the sun to sink downward so that she could examine the stars above them a second time. “It was my ambition to study different places, different peoples—so you might say that me getting lost here is kismet, in a way.”

  On more than one occasion, the strange words he used made no sense to her. This made her feel much younger than she was, and she disliked it greatly. “What is ‘kismet’?” she asked, ducking her head to hide the slight flush she could feel overtaking her cheeks. Gods willing, if he saw it, he would attribute it to the energy she was expending upon starting a fire.

  “It means something that is lucky, something unexpected, but good. Perhaps something meant to be.”

  “Like the Fates,” she suggested. Perhaps the three spinners wanted him her
e, entwined with her journey in such a way.

  One side of his mouth quirked upward. “Sure,” he said agreeably.

  Alexis focused on the task at hand until sparks finally bloomed from the wood. She bent low, feeding the small coal her breaths until it was sated enough to grow into a true fire. Alexis wasn’t at all sure how a man could live without knowing such a basic skill, but the awed expression on Stone’s face told her that building a fire was not something he could do himself. It was late, and the sky was dark above them. She decided to ask him about it at a later time. It could be another story for tomorrow, more words to pass the time, to distract them from their growing misery.

  “Well,” Stone said, following her gaze upward. “What’s the verdict?”

  Another strange, nonsensical word. This time, Alexis was too weary to ask for a definition. She answered with her best guess.

  “We’re headed in the correct direction,” she said.

  Beside her, Stone fell back against the sand and looked upward with her. “Anything up there about the likelihood of us stumbling across a town before our water-skins run dry?”

  Alexis squinted, straining her eyes as she pretended to study the sky more closely. “Yes,” she said, pointing with one steady finger. “Just there. It says ‘tomorrow’.”

  “Right,” Stone said. He rolled onto his side, letting the heat cast by the fire warm his back. “I’ll take it.” Facing away from her, she could not see the smile on his face, but she could hear it well enough. It was like this between the two of them. They could joke about death. After their time on the ship, they were bonded.

  ❖❖❖

  Morning dawned bright and boiling as all the others. The fire had burned down to embers throughout the night. A small trace of heat could still be felt when she held her hand over the dying coals. They ate one small withered apple, swallowed down with two small drinks of water. A curious, lost expression passed over Stone’s face.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  In answer, Stone turned his canteen upside down. Not even the smallest of drops remained to drip into the sand.

  With a shuddering sigh, she reached into the sack of supplies that grew lighter with each breath they took, and removed the third canteen, the last one. It contained but a few swallows of water, as did her own. She passed it to Stone without comment. There was nothing to say.

  Whatever land Stone hailed from, she could tell by the worry marring his handsome face that he understood the trouble they were in. She doubted there was a man alive, however privileged, who did not understand the necessity of water, who did not know the number of days one could live without it passing their lips. This countdown had not yet started, but with the empty spaces in their water skins only growing, it was only a matter of time until it did.

  They stood, joints aching, and began the endless walk. There was nothing more they could do.

  “Footprints,” Stone said, when they had walked not far at all. Their own struggling steps had led them to the top of a dune; Stone’s finger pointed down into the valley between two hills of sand. Alexis stood beside him, the brief, slight contact of his skin against hers sending a thrill through her despite the direness of their situation. She strained her eyes, until what she first thought was nothing more than a shadow became a series of small, concrete shapes. The prints could have belonged to anyone, but the sight of them sent a prickle of unease through her all the same.

  “Should we follow?” Stone asked, as though she were the expert on such things. In comparison, perhaps she was. Privately, Alexis had come to the conclusion that Stone had lived a very sheltered life in his homeland, perhaps within the walls of a palace. She cast no judgments upon him for this. A person could not change what sort of world they were born into.

  “They could be our slavers,” she said. “The three who walked away from the shipwreck.” Thoughts whipped through her head, like clouds blown quickly across the sky. “Even if this is so, perhaps they have water we can relieve them of.”

  He laughed at this. The sound made her feet feel lighter for a while.

  They followed the tracks loosely. Alexis would have turned from the trail had they taken her wildly off course, but they headed in nearly the same direction she had wished to travel herself, always north and west, with only small, temporary deviations.

  “They could belong to local tribesmen,” Stone suggested hopefully, after a time.

  “Perhaps,” Alexis said. “Though with our luck thus far, I think it is unlikely.” His smiles were not like her own, quick and sharp. They were always wide and lasting, much like the sun above their heads.

  Before the sun had set, the tracks disappeared, blown away by the persistent wind that begun blowing around midday. They walked in the same basic direction, and were rewarded, just as dusk fell, with the sight of a small structure on the horizon. It was far too small to be a village, or even a house, but their feet took them resolutely toward it all the same. In three days, it was the only thing they had seen in the desert that was not rock or sand. Her eyes scanned the area carefully for threats, fearing a trap of some sort, but there was nothing around them but stillness.

  When the distance grew shorter, they both began to run. It was not a suggestion that one of them made to the other. It simply happened, as though neither of them could stand waiting an extra few minutes to see what they would find. It was a childish waste of energy, and an ultimately pointless one at that, but neither of them seemed able to squash the impulse.

  When they reached the structure, they fell to their knees before it, breathless with exertion and filled with growing hope. The small structure, a collection of stones and sticks, the top of which barley came to Alexis’s chest when she’d been standing, was unmistakable as anything but a well.

  The rope was already extended, and the bucket waited deep in the darkness of the tunnel. Together, they pulled it to the surface, taking turns at the rope. When progress had been made, Alexis leaned over the side of the structure, and indulged herself in peeking over the edge before the bucket reached them. The struggling, flaring joy in her chest was quickly snuffed out. She should have known better.

  “Let it go,” she told Stone with a sigh.

  He did, the ancient wooden bucket, filled to the brim with heavy sand, tumbled back into the depths of the long dry well. For a moment, they sat back against the side of the structure that had just betrayed them, catching their breath and composing themselves. When Stone turned back to her at last, he had chased every trace of disappointment from his face. She admired him a bit just for that.

  He stood and offered her a hand just as he had on the beach days before. She let herself be pulled to her feet and forced herself to relinquish the comforting contact of his skin against hers.

  “North and west, still?” he asked.

  Alexis nodded once. “North and west.”

  Both their mouths were dry, both their stomachs growling.

  The desert did not evoke the same fear in her, the same anger, as the sight of evil men. The desert made no choices. It existed around them, above them, and below them, presiding over their suffering like an indifferent god.

  It should have felt hopeless, but with Stone beside her, their struggle felt worthwhile.

  Stone

  On the sixth day, he woke to find Alexis pressed close to his back, her face burrowed between his shoulder blades, one of her hands tangled in his threadbare blue shirt. They’d slept alongside each other many nights in a row, but this, touching, had not happened since they left the forced close quarters of the ship behind. Her breathing was still slow and even with sleep, and he had no way of knowing if the closeness was a conscious decision on her part, or just an animal instinct to turn toward warmth and hunker down. Stone sat up slowly, every muscle in his body screeching its protest as he untangled himself from Alexis’s warm limbs, careful not to wake her. The last thing he needed was for her to wake up embarrassed. Their days were long and miserable enough with
out awkwardness between them.

  The previous morning, they had drunk the last of their meticulously rationed water, and since then, their misery had been compounded.

  As he stood over her sleeping form, contemplating the rising sun before him, he remembered the sweet taste of his final drink, soothing his scratchy throat and swollen tongue, and wondered if he would have the chance to taste it again. The thought of simply turning a handle or flipping a switch and seeing water burst forth was laughable now. It already seemed years away instead of weeks; his old life was beginning to seem more and more like a dream.

  His eyes drifted away from the rising sun and toward Alexis, checking to see if she’d woken yet. Her position had shifted since he last looked down, but she was still fast asleep, one lightly sun-burned forearm flung over her face to hide from the soft morning light that would turn searing within the next hour. He could not help but stare at her, in these moments of vulnerability, when she would not feel the weight of his gaze. She was lean and strong, though prolonged hunger had begun to strip away her muscle in places. They had been fed regularly on the ship but never enough to truly sate their hunger; since the wreck, they’d had even less to eat, and nothing at all for the past two days. The bones of her face were becoming too prominent. To him, this made her no less lovely to look at.

  Something warm and dangerous stirred in his chest, stretching its legs and spreading further. He did his best to ignore the feeling. He cared for Alexis; of course he did. They had gone through hell together and were going through hell now. But that didn’t mean he had the time or the inclination to feel anything for her deeper than camaraderie, than friendship—than whatever was experienced by people who had faced down hardships together.

  “Alexis,” Stone said. He did not say her name often. He liked the way it felt in his mouth, liked the sound of it in the still air. They were going to die horribly, and this was what his brain had decided to become fixated on.