The Deep
Page 11
“Children are dead,” Ephras says, leaving our embrace.
We nod. “And more will die. Perhaps even most of us. But they will not do what’s necessary to prevent that.”
“Then convince them to do it. Or convince others and we can do it without the council. People believe in you.”
“They fear me,” we say.
“Wajinru will do what you say, regardless of the council’s recommendation,” Ephras says.
We circle Ephras’s den. Can’t stay still. Claustrophobic, we swim out into the sea, where the water is much colder.
Ephras comes after us, but he’s forgotten his cretuk lantern and stumbles into us clumsily. We grab hold to steady him, our fins on his shoulders. We feel every nook and cranny of him as the sensation of his body moving in the water sends waves against our skin. We rest our head on his shoulder.
“Basha. Please. I don’t want to die, and I could not bear it if you died. Or my amaba, or any of my pod. My siblings. I have never seen or felt anything like that—what did you call it?—bomb, in my entire life. We are not ready. We must prepare. We must do something. I’ve never been this scared of anything.”
He weeps as we hold each other with our front fins. We will ourselves not to be bent by his words, but truthfully, we would die for him. And we will always do anything he asks of us.
* * *
Omju and the council do not listen, but other wajinru do.
We go to the sacred waters and wait. When we are here, people come. We need not even call them. The sense memory of the Remembrances is strong enough in them that the slightest tweak in the water alerts them of our presence even miles and miles away.
When Omju arrives, he calls this gathering unauthorized. “Unauthorized by whom?” we ask.
“Me!” says Omju.
“And who are you?” we ask.
We shoo him away as he tries to answer. The sacred waters fill with wajinru despite his claims. People are worried about the recent deaths and know instinctively that a new world is coming. They believe we will have answers where the council doesn’t.
“Wajinru,” we begin, addressing the masses gathered around. Perhaps twenty-five thousand. Perhaps more. “Seventy-five years ago, under the time of the previous historian, beings from above came down into our waters caged in metal fish to scout what lay beneath here. They came multiple times, but claimed only one life. An older wajinru woman who was caught up in the metal fish’s spinning back fin. She died in such agony that the historian felt it, swimming toward her to capture her memories in time.”
They gasp as we speak.
“It cut her up into pieces. In the rememberings, I have been her as she died. I know intimately what it feels like to be spun by blades to death. But as I tell you this, the most important thing to know is: This is not even a speck of what the two-legs are capable of.”
“Two-legs?” several call out.
“They are surface dwellers. They do not live in the sea, but on the land, and they walk on fins that split all the way up to their thighs, called legs,” we say, leaving out other details that they’re likely not ready for.
“Those who came before were scouters. Their purpose was to see what gifts of the deep they could steal from us. Below us, deep beneath the sand, there is a substance they crave. It is their life force. Their food. They feast on it like blood.”
The crowd of wajinru shudder at that imagery. “What is it? What is this thing?”
“I know not its name. Only that we are rich with it, and they would mine it from us like scavenger creatures picking off bones,” we say. “For whatever reason, they left us in peace for some time, but they are back now, with weapons. They have spent the intervening years honing their special tools. What they did then was beyond what any of us can understand. Think what they can do now.”
The sacred waters are not holy and silent after we speak. It sounds like the bustling city. Constant movement, constant conversation. “Then what do we do?” someone asks.
We have been waiting our whole lives for someone to ask such a question. “We fight.”
* * *
The council wields more power over wajinru than Ephras said. They convince them we are simply dramatic, so maddened by the rememberings that we make up lies.
“A metal fish with a spinning tail fin with land dwellers inside?” Omju says. “It is something only a foolhardy, stubborn man like Basha could make up. He wants a war because he was born for battle. Do not listen to him.”
Ephras holds us tight as Omju makes the announcement that the wajinru will not be fighting. They will set up perimeters to protect our waters, but nothing more, because anything else would be excessive, would be entertaining the fantasies of a madman hungry for blood.
We are hungry for blood, that is not untrue. We may well be mad, too. We swim and swim until a remembering takes us to Zoti, the moment she saw a living two-legs thrown overboard. We come out of the memory angrier than we were before. We cannot settle.
For days we swim and swim without cease, without rest. We only pause to eat, and we purposefully seek out big, challenging prey. We know that Ephras is worried for us, especially with little means to find us.
It’s the sound of death that finally draws us back home. There’s a thunderous roar that near deafens us. It stuns our scales and we cannot orient ourselves. We spin in a dizzy loop for ages, passing out then waking again. Screams call us from the distance. The deep smells like burnt things.
When we make it back to the city, we pay no mind to the carnage. We are only looking for Ephras. At least his body. Please let there still be a body. We need to hold it one last time.
After that we will find Omju, if he is not dead already, and devour him.
“Basha!”
Ephras is alive. He is well, sustaining no injuries but the one from his previous encounter. Hundreds of others are not so lucky. We fume. Not even Ephras can calm us, and soon we are shooting sparks of electricity through the water, stirring it up with our rage. We want to fight, but as hungry as we are for battle, we know it would be foolish to proceed alone.
We consider abandoning reason when more die, as our restraint is nearly overwhelmed by the desire to fight back. Another batch of a hundred die in a blink. Then thrice that much in an assault on a small village on the seafloor. We wait to be numbed by it, for the grief to become so much that we no longer feel it. That point never arrives. Our numbers reduce, and the rage grows.
We know we need to fight, but how? We have been humbled.
It is not long before our sprawling city is gone. All traces of dwellings, ash. Omju says we need to go outward, to expand to other sections of the deep and build there. We tell him what’s really necessary is to go upward.
“We must go to them. Fight them. The ocean made us. Therefore it will take care of us,” we say. “We must simply call on it.”
Omju tries to interrupt us, and we hurl our body toward his, signaling a fight. “If you want to be king of the wajinru so badly, then be willing to fight for it. Be willing to fight me for it,” we say.
Not one to further sacrifice his reputation to the onlookers already disappointed in him, Omju shows his teeth. Like us, he is small and agile, but we have the benefit of generations of wajinru fighters and warriors. We know everything they know. We’ve learned all they’ve learned.
We go for his throat, and he is done, his breathing apparatus inside our own.
“There has been a change in regime,” we say. There will be no more foolish leaders. No more councils. We are the historian. We carry the sacred rememberings. Who but us knows enough to lead?
The wajinru are no longer frightened of us. They are emboldened by what we represent: war with the creatures who cut our population in half. “The two-legs will not stop until we are extinct,” we say. “Like salmon, like the mighty hammerhead, monk seals, various sea turtles, fin whales, and so many others. Are you ready to take back what belongs to us?”
* * *
We pass on rememberings to them. They must have the depravity of the two-legs fresh in their minds. Ephras swims next to us. He is never out of our line of sight.
Many cannot survive the rush of light and heat. Is the sun any different than the bombs? With all the pain so fresh, many choose simply to sink and die. The others we stir to action with more memories. Psychically linked, we are stronger. Our connection makes us a beast mightier than the blue whale.
We swim upward and upward, bodies in formation. We are arranged in rings, a circle of forty over a circle of forty over a circle of forty and so on. We move in a spiral as we ascend, creating a twister in the water.
Not all of us survive. For some, the shock of the near pressureless water compared to the deep is too much, and they die. Two-legs wage war against us, even as we’ve left the place they want so badly to claim as their own. They know we’re coming for them.
The power of our upward motion agitates the water into a protective cyclone only wajinru can enter. Our shared fury makes us stronger. We continue to rise.
As we near the surface, we lose sight of what we are doing. We are not Basha anymore. It is like we are in every remembering at once. We are every wajinru. As one, we make the ocean waters rise and create a tidal wave that lifts us high above land.
This is the first time the other wajinru are seeing the two-legs outside of the Remembrance. They are shocked by their faces, similar in many ways to our own. They know what we have known since taking on the History. The two-legs are our kin.
This does not make us more gentle. It has the opposite effect. We send endless waves of salt water onto the land, flooding the whole earth. This is only our first assault.
* * *
We remember.
9
RAIN FELL WITH SUCH FORCE that Yetu half convinced herself that the sky was another ocean. Since Suka’s departure, the precipitation had increased from a steady pulsing to a smothering. Were the surface dwellers to look up, they’d drown.
Yetu worried for Oori and the other surface dwellers, who were likely unprepared for this wrath from the heavens. She worried for her fellow wajinru, too, suffering woefully because of her neglect of duty.
No easy solution presented itself to her, no scenario where Yetu maintained her peace and freedom, and the world survived.
Maybe the sacrifice of a single person was the only path forward. It would result in the fewest amount of deaths. Yetu knew how to contain the rememberings. If she took them back, the uproar in the water causing this storm would calm, saving two-legs lives, including Suka, their people, and Oori. It would save the wajinru from their grief. Yetu hoped that they hadn’t already starved themselves.
The sea rose as rainwater bashed its surface. Waves crashed over the boulders surrounding the tidal pool. Yetu sunk down into it. She couldn’t jump the rocks with so little room to give herself proper leverage, but she could still gather up her strength. She let the salt water cleanse her with its mix of constancy and fluidity. A beautiful reminder of balance.
Yetu tuned in to that essence as she let herself be buried by ocean in the small pool. The burn of salt and the cool flow of water. The warmth she’d felt for Oori and the sadness that had flooded her when she’d chosen to leave. Wanting to see her amaba alive again. Wanting the world to exist, to be more than just a place with a history no one would ever know.
These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating. It was something that she’d learned to do when dealing with the rememberings, to try to find a modicum of quiet and accept the multitudes inside herself. She never reached calm, nor even a steadiness, but she did it anyway. It made her remember that she existed.
She luxuriated in the sloshing water. Tiny fish fluttered past her again, reminding her that she was alive. A crab clicked against the stones above, far from shelter. Water, outside her in the pool, inside her body in the form of life-sustaining blood and wet tissue, both connected. She saw it all move in a circle as real as a remembering. Inside her, outside her, one.
As she felt herself carried away in the rush of feeling, her body seemed to ignite, electric. She’d never felt so synchronized with the ocean before. Her emotions were as dark and tumultuous as the deep. Spurred by her need to leave and leave now, she zeroed in on the water with as much focus as she could, hoping this would work.
“Rise!” Yetu said. If she could generate enough charge in her body, the water would be attracted to her, and she could bend it.
“Rise!” she said again, not to the water, but to herself, demanding her body to focus. “Rise.”
The water moved, but not to her will. Storm and wind jostled it, but she could feel that more was possible, as emotions and sensations kindled her body into sharp awareness. If the wajinru could bring this tempest, she could make the water in the tidal pool carry her to freedom.
Yetu closed her eyes and stopped breathing with her mouth. She visualized the water in the tidal pool going upward to great heights, carrying her over the boulder back to the sea.
There was a stir in the pool, distinct from its normal movement. Yetu reached out to it using the same technique she did when she reached out to the wajinru during the Remembrance. She had to slit herself open and spill herself out. Yetu gave her whole being to the ocean the way the ocean had given all of itself to her, giving the wajinru the spark of life, showing them that if only they knew how, water could be breathed.
With that, the water rose, and Yetu cleared the rocks. As soon as she splashed back into the open sea, she swam toward the center of the coming hurricane, ignoring the pain that still touched every part of her.
* * *
The deep embraced her, and oh, how glorious the dark was. Her eyes had been burning for weeks, and she hadn’t realized until the open ocean soothed the ache. Racing as fast as she could, she made it to the wajinru in only three hours. The wajinru were still in the sacred waters, though their flailing had destroyed the thick walls of the womb. Despite the wajinru being cradled in the ocean’s depths, their turmoil had affected the whole sea, extending up to the surface where the storm raged.
Yetu watched them with her ears and skin. Their bodies seized in a thousand different directions. Though individuals quaked to the rhythms of their own bodies, as a whole they moved as one. Together they formed a giant teardrop, but there was no pattern to any single wajinru’s movement.
The wajinru were thin and malnourished. While Yetu had been onshore feasting on Oori’s offerings, they’d lost the ability to hunt, too deep in the trance. Three weeks without food had shrunken their bodies.
Yetu swam closer. It wouldn’t work to shout. Shouting had never woken Yetu from being lost in the History. Instead she channeled her energy into connecting with them, the same way she would’ve done traditionally at the end of a Remembrance before taking the History back. She touched each one of them, figuring out who each wajinru was outside of the oneness the Remembrance brought.
That mattered. Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together. For so long, the wajinru hadn’t felt like living creatures to Yetu. Just a mass that fed off her rememberings for their own benefit. But like Yetu, they were their own people too. They’d not asked for the emptiness any more than Yetu had asked for the History.
Amaba had said it herself before the Remembrance: they were cavities. Oori had felt that way too, robbed of her people’s past.
It shouldn’t be that way, and it wouldn’t have to. Yetu would search every last remembering of the History until she found a way to free her people from this cursed relationship of wajinru to historian, but first she needed to take the rememberings back on.
The water was ripe with electrical energy, and it took her no time at all catch their flow. Their minds plowed hers, knocking her over physi
cally so that she rushed backward in the water.
Desperate, they clawed at her for mental purchase, and Yetu let them. It was like a thousand sets of teeth were biting into her at once, but she relaxed into it. She had to do this: for her amaba and the rest of the wajinru, for Suka and their family, and for Oori, whose homeland was likely already destroyed.
Yetu let her people flow into her, then focused on their thoughts. The rememberings were happening all at once. Millions of memories. Without time.
Yetu recognized each one. A part of her had held on to this, or it had held on to her. She plucked rememberings one by one. With time and distance, their impact had become less visceral, less gutting. She wept as her people wept, but she was able to maintain her focus.
“Yetu!” someone called.
Overwhelmed by the effort necessary to relieve the wajinru of the History, she didn’t recognize the voice at first.
“My Yetu.”
It was Amaba. She’d found her child through the haze of rememberings. “Stop. Stop.”
The voice grew louder. Amaba was coming closer. Yetu couldn’t imagine how she was navigating the waters with all that was happening.
“I will save you,” Yetu said.
“You will not,” shouted Amaba. “Stop!”
Yetu kept plucking rememberings, reabsorbing them into herself. She needed to concentrate, or the accumulation of agonies would undo her.
Then Amaba was on her, holding her tight. “Stop this! Stop!”
Yetu jerked away. She was desperate to prevent the future without the wajinru, without Oori, without any history at all. Even if she was not successful in saving the world, she could save the memories of it. Pain filled her, but so did knowledge, beauty. She felt mighty Basha’s fury turn to softness when in the embrace of his lover. She felt Zoti’s longing for companionship and how it had given her the ambition to make the wajinru into a people, a chorus. All of these things had made Yetu.