Chorus Skating

by Alan Dean Foster

  Both arms extended as she stretched them over her head. Her lips pursed in a fey pout. “Then it would be uncomfortable for you to make love to me.”

  “I don’t think you’d enjoy it very much, either.” The degree of disappointment in his voice surprised him.

  “I will tell my sisters of your promise to help.” She turned abruptly and rolled back into the water.

  “Hey, wait!” He rose to his feet. “I didn’t promise anything!”

  Her head and shoulders reappeared, her flowing hair clinging to bare skin. “If you could hold your breath long enough, I would give you a kiss of thanks.”

  “I don’t suppose there’d be any harm in that. Just a kiss, I mean.” He moved to the water’s edge and crouched.

  As their lips met, a feeling coursed through him the likes of which he’d never encountered. He’d done scuba and felt the sea all around him, warm and embracing and fickle, a salty full-body caress. That was what her kiss was like—a passion that spread throughout his entire being, electric with sweet deep promises and the echoes of preternatural beauty. It was as if she were palpating his soul.

  When she drew back, she left the taste of salt and sugar on his mouth. Subsequently he sneezed, causing her to laugh delightedly. Her gill slits rippled like a manta’s, the upward-slanting eyes glistening wetly.

  “It never works anyway,” she told him. “If I come out on land I flop around like a beached flounder and love slides away. If the man enters my realm he can never hold his breath long enough or float without treading water.” Tail flashing, she rolled and dove.

  “That’s okay,” he assured her as she reappeared farther out. “I’m not much of a swimmer, and it was a wonderful kiss.”

  “I’m joyful you found it so. Find our music, spellsinger. Find our songs and restore them to us and you’ll gain the gratitude of myself, my sisters, and all our companions in the sea.” Floating on her back, she batted lazily at the water with her tail. “Practice your breath-holding skills and who knows what might become possible one day? Surely your allergy would not affect you underwater.”

  With that she arched her back and dove.

  She was right, he realized. If he was underwater and holding his breath or breathing canned air, his allergies wouldn’t be affected.

  “Wait!” He waded out through the warm, clear water until it lapped at his knees. “Come back!”

  No tail of shining peridot broke the surface, no eyes limpid with promise peered back at him. She had gone, leaving only the memory of that kiss lingering on his lips, rich as chocolate, pungent as dew. A kiss, and a plea.

  What was happening to the world’s music?

  Reluctantly, he turned back toward the woods. She would have done better to encounter a human with fewer allergies and greater lung capacity.

  They’d finished more than half the necessary repairs when a muting of the light announced the arrival of evening. The sun was stealing away to the west when Mudge casually accosted his friend.

  “Ain’t seen you all day, mate. Where’d you take yourself off to?” Though Jon-Tom didn’t reply, the smile on his face was response enough to pique the otter’s curiosity. Mudge didn’t press the inquiry, preferring to wait until his friend looked less dazed. Or perhaps dazzled would have been a more accurate description.

  Besides, Pivver was waiting on him. Only to talk, but otters were naturally physical creatures. A little touch here and there, he told himself. For now more here than there, but with time, who knew what marvels might transpire?

  Did he want marvels to transpire? Wrestling with his damnable new conscience, he trotted off muttering to himself, leaving Jon-Tom to stare curiously at the otter’s retreating back.

  The following day the princesses pitched in to help with the work. Not because they were feeling particularly egalitarian but because they were already bored to tears. Though accommodating enough, the island was singularly lacking in excitement. With her natural strength, Umagi of Tuuro proved especially helpful, though everyone did their share. Watching Ansibette work, Jon-Tom reflected, was even more dangerous than watching her doing nothing. He concentrated on his own contribution, which consisted of keeping resolutely out of the way.

  By the following morning they’d done all they could within the range of their limited resources. Anxious moments followed as they waited for the tide to lift them free. The boat’s keel was firmly wedged in the sand, and Naike floated the possibility (as it were) of launching their single lifeboat, affixing a line to it from the ship’s stern, and trying to pull the bigger vessel free. Alternatively they could haul the anchor out on the lifeboat, drop it, winch the ship backward, and in this fashion kedge their way off the beach.

  Neither arduous option had to be exercised. The tide crept in just enough to float them clear. The stalwart little vessel straightened as they backed sail and drifted out into the lagoon. Under Naike’s increasingly assured direction she was brought about and they made confidently for the passage through the reef.

  Only when they were once more safely out on the open sea did everyone relax. Heke and Karaukul hurried belowdecks to check on the state of the repairs they’d made. There was still some seepage near the bow, but the rest of the patches were holding firm. To compensate for their lack of skill and technical knowledge, they had overcaulked and overfilled even the tiniest gap. Profligacy with time and material on land translated into safety at sea.

  “She’s tight below, sir,” Heke reported proudly.

  On the other side of the wheel Jon-Tom studied the hazy sky. “We should be okay unless we run into another storm. I don’t know if she can take another pounding like that.”

  A small, powerful paw came to rest on his arm. “Be of good cheer, spellsinger. Do not seek storms, lest they seek you.” Naike swatted absently at the string of chords swirling near his head. The music made his ears itch.

  They weren’t an hour out from the island, Jon-Tom regaling his companions with song, when Heke’s voice reached them from the platform affixed to the top of the mast.

  “Something five points to starboard, sir!”

  The Lieutenant squinted at the lookout. “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell. But it’s big, whatever it is.”

  Leaving the mongoose to hold the wheel, Jon-Tom rushed to the railing. So did the excited princesses.

  They drew back as a titanic shape rose from the water. It was far larger than their vessel, slick of side and pale of hue. It reeked of abyssal depths. The boat rocked slightly in the waves induced by its emergence. A wary Jon-Tom readied his duar.

  Weighing more than a hundred tons and stretching well over a hundred feet in length, the stupendous sulfurbottom carefully nuzzled the side of the boat. From within the forepart of that curving rampart of pale blue flesh a plate-sized eye focused firmly on Jon-Tom. The air vibrated with a voice sufficiently sonorous to set his teeth to aching.

  “DON’T I KNOW YOU?”

  More than a little bemused, Jon-Tom examined his reflection in the whale’s eye. “Um, I don’t think so. If we’d met before, I have a feeling I’d remember it.”

  “THAT MUSIC …” The leviathan effortlessly kept pace with the ship. “I COULD SWEAR I’VE HEARD ITS LIKE BEFORE. AND SEEN ITS MAKER.” The eye swiveled slightly. “SURELY I KNOW YOU AS WELL.”

  “Me?” squeaked Mudge as the orb centered on him. “I ’ardly think so, Your Immoderateness. Not that I ain’t never forgot folks I’ve met, but ’tis a tetch difficult to imagine forgettin’ someone your size.”

  “I SUPPOSE SO.” The eye returned to transfix Jon-Tom. “BUT I COULD SWEAR … NEVERTHELESS, YOU ARE THE SPELLSINGER OF WHOM THE MERMAID SPEAKS?”

  “I guess so, unless she’s swam into another one in the past couple of days.”

  As if this admission was somehow the answer to everything, the whale arched its back and sounded, leaving the boat to bob wildly for a moment in its wake.

  “Well now, mate.” Mudge sidled close to his friend. “Wo
t do you make o’ that? An’ wot’s this about a mermaid?”

  “Not much. I had a chat with one day before yesterday. She spoke of her kind losing their music, and the cetaceans likewise. I guess news travels faster underwater.”

  Faster than he knew, as Heke confirmed by calling out a second time from the masthead.

  “There’s another. And another, and another!”

  The air was filled with expansive whooshing sounds as whale after whale surfaced and spouted. Soon the boat was surrounded, not by dozens of individuals but by dozens of pods. Not just blues, but all manner of tribes were represented. There were humpbacks and fins, sperms and seis, rights and orcas. Scattered among them like so many PT boats escorting a fleet of aircraft carriers and battleships were hundreds of agile, uncatchable dolphins and porpoises, leaping and darting among their more massive cousins.

  “Isn’t that a grand sight!” declared an awestruck Aleaukauna.

  “Truly wondrous.” Along with the other princesses, Pivver gazed raptly upon the cetacean flotilla.

  Taking turns, the goliaths swam alongside to have a closer look at the boat and its occupants, who were delighted to return the favor. Eventually the parade made way for a patriarchal humpback whose head was as gnarly as the root ball of a sequoia.

  “YOU BE THE SPELLSINGER?”

  “I be,” replied Jon-Tom evenly.

  “YOU WERE MADE KNOWN TO US BY FRIENDS.”

  “The mermaids; I know.” He felt a tug at his side.

  “’Tis best not to volunteer too much until we know wot they’re about, mate.”

  “What are we going to do, Mudge? Refuse to answer their questions? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a little over-matched here.” He peered back over the side. “Can we do something for you? Surely this impressive gathering isn’t all for my benefit.”

  “IT IS HOPED THAT YOUR PRESENCE WILL BE TO OUR BENEFIT.” The old humpback had rolled slightly onto his right side, the better to see aboard. Thick with barnacles and whale lice, a massive pectoral fin rested on the side of the boat.

  “I don’t understand.” Actually Jon-Tom was afraid that he did.

  “WE HAVE LOST OUR MUSIC, JUST AS HAVE THE MERMAIDS. THE ONE YOU TALKED WITH SAID SHE IMPRESSED ON YOU THE DANGER THIS POSES TO US. WITHOUT SONG WE CANNOT FIND OUR WAY.”

  “I don’t know what I can do for you. At least not right now.” Jon-Tom gestured forward. “First I have to escort these six ladies homeward. After that I follow a solitary piece of music wherever it may lead.” The demands on his time, he mused, were beginning to verge on the absurd. His sinuses gave a twitch, but he didn’t sneeze.

  “SINCE LEAVING YOUR LAST LAND WE HAVE PLOTTED YOUR DIRECTION.”

  “For now we go where the music leads us, but soon we’ll turn east toward our passengers’ kingdoms,” Jon-Tom explained.

  “FOR NOW.” The humpback brooded. “CAN IT BE YOU DO NOT KNOW WHERE YOU ARE HEADING?”

  Man and otter exchanged a look. Then they turned as one to stare at the lightly luminescent cloud of music that danced and pirouetted just forward of the bowsprit.

  “How do I tell the princesses that we’re not heading straight for Harakun?”

  The otter shrugged. “Don’t tell ’em. Say we ’ave to make a short stop on the way. Looks like we’re goin’ to, whether we likes it or not.”

  Jon-Tom nodded thoughtfully. “It was that storm that forced us to change course. You don’t suppose our happy ball of harmony could have had anything to do with that little discrepancy in the weather, do you?”

  “Don’t very well see ’ow music can call up a storm, mate. But then there’s more than one wonder in this world that I fails to understand. Like, for example, if your spouse finds somethin’ on sale for fifty coins that regular costs a ’undred, ’ow come she insists she’s saved you fifty coins instead of ’avin’ spent fifty?” He shook his head. “The mysteries o’ the cosmos confound me continually.”

  “I as well.” Jon-Tom looked back over the side. “I guess we’ll keep on this way for a while longer, at least, and see what develops.”

  “WE KNEW YOU WOULD. THE MERMAID ASSURED US.”

  “Did she?” Apparently he’d made more of an impression on that bathyal beauty than he’d thought. Damn allergies, he thought to himself.

  “GIVE US A SONG, SPELLSINGER. WE HAVE BEEN LONG WITHOUT SONG. THE MERMAID TELLS THAT YOU STILL CONTROL YOUR OWN MUSIC.”

  Jon-Tom modestly brought the duar around. “I suppose a song or two wouldn’t hurt anything. Of course, I don’t have your lungs. I can’t sing like you.”

  “’Ell, ’e can’t even sing like a ’uman,” Mudge informed the humpback.

  “ANYTHING AT ALL WOULD BE MOST WELCOME. MUSIC IS AS LIFE TO US.”

  “All right. As long as you don’t expect too much.” His fingers rested on the duar’s strings as he tried to think of something that might appeal to their escort. After several moments spent in contemplation, he began to sing.

  A number of whales and dolphins crowded closer, nudging the ship and making her timbers creak. Whenever this happened the offending individual immediately moved away. The cetaceans continuously rotated places so that as many as possible would have the opportunity to hear.

  When he finished the first song Jon-Tom received a kind of applause new in his experience. A hundred individuals spouted simultaneously, vitalizing the air with sound and pungent exhalation. Only the humpbacks and some of the porpoises were equipped for actual clapping. They acknowledged Jon-Tom’s effort with more familiar, if decidedly damper than usual, expressions of approval.

  They sailed on with Jon-Tom energetically serenading the cetacean host. Mudge and Pivver frequently joined their benthic escort in energetic swims, diving and twisting with the skill of any porpoise, though they could not match them in speed or endurance. It was something to see them clinging to the fore edge of a humpback’s fin as it breached, casting themselves free, and spinning in the air with an agility the best human diver could only dream of before neatly reentering the water.

  Once, a pair of pirate craft bore down on them in threatening manner. Confronted by several dozen blue and sperm whales, the oared galley and converted merchantman turned tail as fast as their crews could back sails and oars, those of the galley dipping and rising at a rate that verged on the comical.

  “Per’aps if we manage to find their missin’ songs,” Mudge commented thoughtfully, “we can inveigle a few o’ these bloated blue blokes to convoy us across to Harakun. They ’ave a way o’ discouragin’ unwanted visitors, they do.”

  “We not only have to find their music, we have to restore it to them as well.” Jon-Tom idly fingered the duar’s strings. “Where do you conceal missing music? In a chest, in a stoppered bottle, in an enchanted disk? As part of my education as a spellsinger I’ve researched such things with Clothahump. Whatever storage device can be imagined can be made. CD-ROM, for example.”

  “Wot’s that?” The otter made a face. “Some kind o’ special room?”

  “A very small room. You have to know what you’re doing when you access that kind of storage. It stands for ‘Charged Demons—Reconstituted Out of Mayhem.’ You have to handle them carefully, by their edges. There are many other kinds of containers that would hold music. Finding them’s not the problem. Accessing them often is.”

  “You’ll ’andle it, mate. I know you will.”

  Jon-Tom eyed his friend in surprise. “Why, Mudge. It’s not like you to show such confidence in me.”

  “Oh, it weren’t that, mate,” replied the otter cheerily. “I just know you can confound any sorceral opponent because o’ your unpredictability, which comes from the fact that you usually don’t ’ave the foggiest notion o’ wot you’re about. See, if you don’t know wot you’re doin’, ain’t no way wotever you’re fightin’ can anticipate your next move.” It was not merely a backhanded compliment, it was positively inside out.

  “You know, mate, we started out on this ’ere little ram
ble to trail a few bars o’ wanderin’ music to wherever its anxiety might ’appen to take us. I don’t know about you, but it strikes me as ’ow things ’ave become a bit more complicated than wot were originally intended.”

  Jon-Tom grinned down at his whiskery friend. “They always seem to, don’t they … mate.”

  Chapter 20

  THE ISLAND APPEARED on the fifth day. It was drastically different from the inviting, sandy low isles among which the travelers had repaired their vessel. A nightmare sculpted from stark black basalt and decomposing schists, the towering peaks clutched at the pallid clouds which struggled to draw away from them.

  The ancient fires which had formed the central crags had long since been extinguished by time. Over the intervening aeons rain and wind had gouged at the central crater and its subsidiary pumice cones, sharpening and furrowing them. The island was imperceptibly dissolving into the ocean.

  Waves smashed into sheer black cliffs that rose precipitously a hundred feet and more from the glassy green sea. As the whale pods led them south and then southwest the travelers came into the lee of the isolated landmass and the agitated surface of the sea flattened out. A shattered and tumbled lava reef further muted the force of the swells.

  Once again the venerable humpback laid himself alongside the boat. “HERE BE THE PLACE.”

  “HERE IS THE PLACE!” boomed the somber cetacean chorus.

  “Here it is, here it is!” sang out the smaller dolphins and porpoises.

  Mudge turned from scrutinizing the intimidating interior of the island to confront his friend. “I could be wrong, mate, but me unerrin’ instinct tells me that we may very possibly ’ave arrived.” Arrived where? Jon-Tom wondered. The entire aspect of the island before them was morbid and threatening.

  “WE CAN GO NO FARTHER,” the humpback declared. “ALREADY THE WATER GROWS TOO SHALLOW FOR COMFORT. BUT YOU MUST GO ON. FIND OUR SONGS AND RETURN THEM TO US.”

  “FIND OUR SONGS AND RETURN THEM TO US!” implored the vast mammalian choir.

  “WE’LL BE RIGHT BEHIND YOU.” The humpback rolled and pushed off toward the open sea.