And The Ocean Was Our Sky

by Patrick Ness

  Dedication

  For Jared and Anne,

  Friends

  Epigraph

  “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

  Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Authors

  Books by Patrick Ness

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  CALL ME BATHSHEBA.

  It is not my name, but the name I use for this story. A name, I hoped, that would be free of prophecy, free of the burden of a future placed upon it, free of any destiny that would tear it from my hands and destroy worlds.

  You think I overstate. You are wrong.

  We are a people of prophecy, and when I was a child and still a stupid calf, ignorant of all beyond the reaches of our own stretch of sea, my grandmother had said, simply, “You will hunt.”

  It carried the weight of prophecy.

  “But we are not hunters,” my mother had replied with the fearful bafflement that was her regular face to my grandmother. “We do not hunt. We have never hunted.” Her voice took on a hopeful and hopeless tone, the one that used to irritate me into fury but the memory of which now breaks my heart quite in half. “Unless you mean the small hunts,” my mother said, hopelessly hopeful, “the ones that every family must–”

  “I do not,” said my grandmother.

  She did not.

  And everything I might have been, the different futures I might have taken, all my different lives and deaths that existed in their endless possibilities were extinguished in a single repetition of her three words. “You will hunt.”

  Was it prediction? Had she had a proper vision? Or was it a command, as it so often feels in the case of the prophetic? When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of that future do you then cause to happen?

  These are questions that haunt me.

  At the time, though, they weren’t allowed to matter, for into training I immediately went – my mother never strong enough to overrule my grandmother – into the schools and the vocationals, into a new way of life until, at sixteen, the age of Apprenticeship, there I was, where this story begins: harpoons strapped to my back, swimming along the decks of the great hunting ship Alexandra, our sails catching the currents, the Abyss below us, the ocean our sky.

  And all that might have been was long, long gone.

  For I, a lowly but eager Third Apprentice, was about to begin the final hunt that ever was. The hunt for a legend, a myth, a devil.

  Pray for our souls.

  Because this is the story of how we found him.

  2

  “LOOK SHARP,” SAID CAPTAIN ALEXANDRA. As is traditional, our ship bore her name, much like her body bore most of the ship, the ropes from the bow tied to her fins, broad as any three of my young shipmates. The Captain pulls her ship, as is right, as is proper.

  We sailed silently over the Abyss. I was Watch Left, swimming above and to the side of our Captain, matched further out front by First Apprentice Treasure and to the side by Second Apprentice Wilhelmina, “Willem,” Watch Right. We scanned the surface of the Abyss below us, its sun shining from underneath, like sailing across boiling light.

  Behind us, on the Alexandra, our sailors made ready. The Captain was sure we were close to a prize. She could smell it, she said, and though this seemed improbable, we had learned in the months of this voyage not to doubt her. Never to doubt her. Captain Alexandra was both famous and infamous, little of it for good reason past her success at the hunt. Everyone knew about the short, rusted end of a man’s harpoon still sticking from her great head. She was the Captain who’d survived, the Captain who even though the harpoon must, on some level, impede her echolocation, nevertheless persisted, thrived, became the one thing that everyone, everyone, was sure about Captain Alexandra: she was the best hunter in the sea.

  “Something approaches,” she said, eyes forward, great tail increasing its kick. “Something rises.”

  “Where?” whispered Willem to my right, desperately searching the white froth below us.

  “Quiet,” Treasure said back. She was senior Apprentice. How often do you suppose she let us forget that?

  The water filled with the clicks of our echolocations. The Captain left us to it, trusting her sense of smell, her eyes, her clairvoyance, for all I knew.

  “Less than a league,” Treasure said. “Center right.”

  “Look sharp,” the Captain said again.

  “Yes,” Willem answered. “Yes, I’ve located it.”

  “And our Bathsheba?” the Captain asked, not looking back.

  For I had remained silent. I had not located it yet. I furiously sent out my clicks, waiting for the responses to echo off the great ball of waxy liquid in my forehead. I heard nothing from the center right, from where Treasure and Willem were claiming such certainty. I clicked again, and nothing. All I sensed there was empty ocean. I was the newest Apprentice, barely a year into our hunt, but I was not incompetent. And though my anxiety was growing, I also began to suspect Treasure and Willem were lying to impress their Captain, perhaps falling into one of the traps that even I knew she occasionally set for unwary Apprentices.

  “Bathsheba?” the Captain asked again, her voice somehow both playful and menacing, as if I were prey kept alive only at the whim of its predator.

  I clicked. Again, and nothing. Again, and–

  I turned sharply left. “Not center right,” I said, surprised even at myself. I clicked once more. I was nervous. But I was sure. “Third of a league. Left and left again.”

  “No–” started Treasure.

  “Is it?” said Willem.

  “Quite so, our Bathsheba,” said the Captain, surging forward, pulling the great ship behind us to the left and a notch left again.

  “I’ve found it!” Treasure said, too loud because too late.

  “It rises,” said the Captain. And the hunt was on.

  3

  LET ME BE CLEAR, RIGHT FROM THE START. I hate the hunt, but I loved it then. Now, of course, after all that occurred, after all are dead, after I waited for a rescue that might never come, no one would blame me for hating it.

  (Though there are always eager whispers from others, even now, a look of excitement in an eye, a hesitant suggestion that I might perhaps recount my story yet again for the thrill of it. Whose thrill? Not mine.)

  (I have discussed this with soldiers and they have confirmed to m
e that, yes, there are those who romance the hunt the way they romance war; in their safety, they imagine heroism, they imagine a place in history, an invisible pride that won’t feed their children but will raise them above their neighbors; they never imagine the despair; they never imagine the blood and suffering; they never imagine how your heart dies and dies again; I, like nearly every soldier before our wars finally stopped, have taken refuge in a silence so firm it is only the most witless who dare intrude upon it.)

  But now, here, once and for all, I set down my tale. I am not who I was then. I said I was ignorant, and I am not wrong, though by that point I had learned that men lived upside down from us, that for them the ocean was below, the Abyss above, our gravities only meeting at the surface. I knew, too, that our writers speculated about worlds where whales also lived this way around, rising up to meet men rather than swimming down to them, but to us, this was nearly blasphemy, a fantasy of men pretending to a dominance they’d never have.

  I had learned of our pasts, too, how the hunts between whale and man had gone on for thousands of years, as our societies reflected each other, grew together, war driving both to further and further innovations.

  I had learned, in short, to love the hunt, not merely for itself, but for its history, for its part in my identity. And I did love it. I had my own, personal reasons by that point, too, but what more reason did a young whale need than the fact that men had hunted us for time immemorial and hunting men was what we did in return? It was a whale’s duty, if so prophesied, and I embraced it.

  But that was then. If you hear what I say and still wish yourself there, wish yourself a hero, wish yourself a hunter, then either I have failed in my telling or you are a fool.

  4

  WE CLOSED THE THIRD OF A LEAGUE IN moments. This was my favorite part: the thrill of the chase. The water rushing past us, swimming at full speed, the mighty sails of our ship – tended with skill by our six-strong crew of sailors who’d been at sea longer than I had been alive – catching the current to add to the speed with which our Captain pulled. Everything a rush, everything a push, everything full of intent and purpose, the sun below dazzling up with shafts of spinning light.

  The world, alive.

  “Ready harpoons,” the Captain said, and we three Apprentices did so, maneuvering them with fin-flicks on the webbing strapped to our sides, settling the weapons into the coiled launchers held tight against our breasts. Our technology was then so advanced it would require only a flexing of a muscle near the pectoral fin to fire them.

  “We should be able to see it,” Treasure said. “Any second now.”

  “Truly?” said our Captain. “Is it not a league away to the center right?”

  That, at least, shut Treasure up. It was a mistake to ever assume our Captain did not notice something or that she would forget it.

  But we were close. The path favored my side, and my clicks raced forward and back with increasing frequency. We still could not yet see it, the surface of the Abyss growing choppier, foamier, obscuring what our eyes could discern.

  “Ready nets!” our Captain called back to the ship. The sailors had guessed their Captain’s intent, and nets were ready for casting. We would harpoon our prey to either death or incipient mortality, and the sailors would bring in the carcasses. Every bit of the prey would be used, their bones for tallow and soaps, their skin for sails, their meat – inedible to us – as bait for the vast shoals of prey who, once attracted, we could eat at our leisure.

  Mostly, though, in that paradox of all wars, we hunted to prevent from being hunted, just as they did.

  “There!” Willem called.

  And there it was, bobbing up in the foam of the Abyss–

  The bowed hull of a man ship.

  5

  THE CAPTAIN SWOOPED SUDDENLY LEFT, veering into my path. I corrected only just in time.

  “Sharper than that!” she snapped as she swam past, fast as a spear. I swam furiously to keep up, cursing my stupidity. For a fully hulled ship, we always circled first to see its strengths, to see with what weight it bobbed up from the Abyss, where its weaknesses might be, though they were always the same: the great sides, slatted and curved. Hard, but not hard enough to withstand the battering of the great head of a Captain, should she choose.

  She frequently chose.

  A ship like this would be easy prey. Small risk, but potentially great reward. I readied to join her in the attack that would be called for in seconds–

  “There are men in the water!” called Treasure.

  “Dead men,” Willem said, wonderingly, and indeed, as the foam cleared here and there, I saw we were swimming above corpses. Their faces were upturned from the Abyss into the water, something men only did when they drowned. They had not yet mastered the breather bubble, currently resting in the throats of every one of our people, an invention that liberated us almost entirely from the need to turn downward into the Abyss to breathe, an evolutionary calamity we resented, but one that did have other benefits – oxygen to fuel our warm-blooded veins, hearts that pumped rich blood to the brains that had led us to dominate the ocean.

  We were whales, independent and fierce.

  (But there is an “almost” lurking in my words above, and on that “almost” yet hangs an entire destiny. For we do still have to occasionally breathe in the world of men. Which means men must be reckoned with, one way or another.)

  “What happened here?” Treasure asked, and it was a fair question. The man ship seemed intact, but its crew littered the surface, a blanket of them slowly forming itself, yanked apart here and there by sharks.

  The Captain ignored Treasure’s question, accelerating ahead, loosing herself from the ropes that tied her to the Alexandra. “Collect the bodies,” she said to the sailors, who set to work. “There may be another pod nearby.”

  “There’s another pod?” Willem said, looking around as she swam. In regular circumstances, other pods could be friend or foe. When prey was in the water, they were only foe.

  Free of the ship, the Captain moved with a speed it was an effort to keep up with, though she was three times our size at the very least. Silently, she circled the man ship. Then again. We kept back, following her from a height, rising above the Abyss to let our sailors do their work. As is traditional, our sailors were a smaller species of whale than us. A class all on their own, secretive, indispensable. They bit the heads off the men first, tumbling them into a separate net – men’s teeth were valuable as a fake digestive aid and fetched a high price among the gullible rich. The bodies would be broken down when the hunt was over, our sailors working long into the night, boiling, scrubbing, churning.

  “There is something . . .” the Captain said, pulling herself to a stop after a third silent circle. “Bathsheba!” She called me to her side with an unignorable command. “What’s there?”

  Wondering, as I always did, what our Captain saw in her own echolocation, how much the rusted harpoon impaired it, I sent out my own waves of sound at the hull. It was smooth, the same curves that men always made to cut the water, not so very different from the water-slicing shapes of our ships, though ours were flatter and more open to accommodate our superior size. We used masts and sails like men, too, to catch the currents. Or should I say, men used them like we did?

  Still, this man ship was nothing special. A thin blanket of barnacles across the hull, as to be expected, but nothing–

  Click.

  “Yes,” said the Captain, swimming warily. “Investigate.”

  I looked at Treasure and Willem, both a distance away, both as shocked as I was that the order was for me.

  “Do not make me command you again,” the Captain said.

  I had no choice. I swam to the hull.

  6

  WHAT I FOUND WAS THAT MOST CURIOUS of all the odd questions of men, the one that had sparked debate over so very many generations. We knew from our own skeletons that the bones existed in our fins, but there was still distaste for how naked
they seemed on man: the starlike spindle they used to such advantage; that allowed them to make more elaborate boats than ours, despite their utter primitivism; that allowed them to weave their body coverings, another art we had only learned as a spoil of hunting them, though our historians were already beginning to erase this fact and claim we’d invented weaving ourselves.

  All because, in place of a fin, they had a hand.

  For that was what was sticking out of the hull of the boat. I mean these words as I speak them. A hand, sticking out of what could only be a watertight hole cut purposely into the hull.

  A hand sticking out into the naked ocean.

  And it was grasping something.

  7

  “THERE’S A MAN CONNECTED TO THIS?” Willem asked, as we all regarded the hand.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Treasure said. “It is surely a trick.”

  “But what kind of trick?” I said. “The ship is wrecked. Its crew is dead.”

  “But who wrecked it?” Willem asked. “And who killed the men?”

  “Cease this idiotic chatter,” the Captain barked. “It is a message.”

  “A message?” Willem asked.

  The Captain spun sharply, striking Willem hard across the head with her tail fin, sending her spinning up into water, a spiral of blood following her. The Captain turned to me. “What does it hold, Bathsheba? What’s in the hand?”

  I swam down close, aware of the huge tail that could easily send me spinning. I secretly felt Willem was right in her confused wariness. My initial question hadn’t been answered. We hunted ships, ones with living hunters aboard. Occasionally, we’d find one wrecked and picked clean by another hunting pod, but in the year I had swam as Apprentice under Captain Alexandra, we’d never come across one simply dead in the water. Men were barbarous, of course, everyone knew it. But would they kill each other like this? Would they cripple their own ship in the middle of the ocean?

  I could feel my heartbeat pulsing in my head, a thump of nerves I tried to calm as I turned my left eye to the hand, getting close enough for it to reach me, should it want to. Though, surely, the owner of the hand must be dead. Mustn’t he?