Every day since he’d been seven and had first decided he would have to sail someday, he had stood at the edge of the salt sea and stared out at where white met the shimmering blue of the horizon. And where so much else had become smaller and meaner and more disappointing as he’d grown, it had remained just as vast and entrancing as ever.

Knowing how skiffs rode it and exactly how many kilometres lay between him and the far shore didn’t bring the horizon any closer. Knowing how carefully those slender, shallow-floating vessels had to balance water stores against crew and saltline and speed, how many corpses still lay mummified in the sea’s sifting dunes, didn’t quench his need to ride one of them himself. To see that far shore, yes, but more so the sea, to know how it would feel to look around and see nothing but white to blue in every waterless direction.