Sea Sickness

On this bright morning with the sun shining and the heat promising to be excessive today, a short extract from The Xandrian Quarters, the second book in The Collector of Tales series. It's about sea sickness..ew!

When I woke it was light and as I came rather sharply into full awareness I realised that the subliminal movement that had been there in my dreams was in fact a reality. The hard wooden bench wasn't moving relative to me but it was moving. Of course I was at sea - and I mean that literally rather than figuratively.

This was not a good thing because I am and always will be the kind of person who really likes to keep the solid earth beneath his feet. I don't even like heights because of the inevitable gap that I can see between where I might be standing and the obvious base level some several or several hundred feet below with all that space in between.

Still, looking on the bright side, I didn't need to worry about being sick and soiling my clothes because I had apparently already done that in my sleep. There was an unpleasant smell of curry and vomit hanging around me and as I sat up I could see that I had extracted myself from a pool of viscous yellow-green material that was slipping onto the wooden deck below with each roll of the...

This time I managed to get to the gunwales in time and for this I was grateful. However I had forgotten the wind, which was against me, and although not particularly severe it still managed to fling back some of my gastric offering to the sea gods.

"Watch out, he’s awake. Ja'bas!" yelled a voice close behind my right ear.

It was Scrytrek. He was seated behind where I had been sleeping and held the end of a huge oar in his large hands. He grinned at me as he pulled back in time with a drum beat that once more I recognised from my somewhat troubled dreams. Weirdly, I noticed how bad his teeth were.

"Morn'en!" I mumbled as I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve.

"No worries, old man, " he replied, still grinning although more with effort I suspect than with pleasure as once more he pulled back on the oar.

"Happen you’ve eaten already?"

He coughed a short laugh as he watched the expression on my face: the one that I had just before I projected the remaining contents of my stomach into the sea.

I was obviously in error when I referred to the remaining contents as, over the next eight hours or so I continued to repeat the performance, admittedly with a diminishing degree of output. During that time I received a number of suggestions about how to prevent sea sickness, none of which struck me as even remotely plausible.

"You shouldn’t look at the sky line." was Marfus' suggestion.

I didn't believe that one because I had been sick several times before I could even focus on the horizon.

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