And The Ocean Was Our Sky

by Patrick Ness

  This was by far the most he had ever spoken, but I was astonished at more than the length. I knew men studied our culture as we studied theirs, but we prided ourselves on keeping them in ignorance. The top of the sky was far too high for them to dive. No man had ever seen a city of ours from more than the greatest distance. They had to guess at what we did there, how we lived, what we believed (much as, it must be said, we had to do with their own great cities on land). And yet, here was this male, this young male, speaking of prophecy.

  “We are not evil,” I said. “We are protecting ourselves.”

  “I have seen inside your hull. How do our floating heads protect you?”

  “How does dumping our skinned carcasses in the sea protect you?”

  “I never wanted to hunt. I was conscripted. Forced aboard. Taken from my village, beaten so I would agree, imprisoned in the hull when I would not.”

  I was confused. “Why should this be so? Hunting is primary in your culture. You seek it out as your highest destiny–”

  “I have never killed anyone, neither man nor whale. Unlike what you’re about to do. How does that make you better than me, Bathsheba? How does that not just make you another rumor of Toby Wick?”

  He stopped, his chin dropping to his chest. Only then did I realize he had been without man food for at least a day, nor any of the water they drank with the salt removed. He was right, he would die soon.

  One of the tales of Captain Alexandra’s legend was how she had once chased a man all the way to shore and harpooned him as he stood on his own beach. Her pod had found a ship sinking in a storm and helped to finish the job, scuttling it and harvesting the men. This one man escaped on a launch, the winds carrying him fast away.

  How he must have blessed whatever gods he served when he saw the shore. How his heart must have thrilled when he landed not even on rocks, but a beach, the violent ocean spitting him out onto the softness of the sand. He was free, not only of the sinking of the ship, but of the whales he had seen dragging his shipmates to their dooms.

  Our Captain had followed him. The water was deeper than most shores, obviously, but still only barely deep enough for a great whale. The legend is that he taunted her from the beach. “I beat you!” he shouted. “I beat you in your own element, you filthy, stinking whale!”

  Captain Alexandra launched her harpoon from the water and dragged him back into the ocean’s crushing hands.

  “Wrong,” she whispered before she broke him in half. “I beat you in yours.”

  I frequently imagined that man’s face. The outrage, the sense of injustice as he stepped into the arms of freedom only to be yanked back. I imagined his terror as my great Captain spoke the last words he would ever hear.

  It was how I always imagined the face of men. Taunting, defeated. It was one of our best ways of dealing with the fear of the hunt.

  But now here was this man before me, entirely in my own element, close to death. There had been no taunts. There had been no chase. There had only been fear and sorrow. He looked blearily out to me, and I could tell the depth of the shock that still addled his mind and body. He would be lucky to live out the day.

  For a moment, that troubled me. But it could only be the novelty of such close proximity to a man. Even the most senior whales only spoke to one or two men in their entire lifetimes. Yet here I was, a mere Third Apprentice, in full conversation.

  Yes, the novelty. It must be that.

  “I will bring you fish,” I heard myself saying. “They will be raw, but the fluid in them will at least keep you hydrated.”

  I didn’t wait for him to answer, just swam to our Captain to tell her what I’d discovered.

  20

  “THAT IS A LIE,” TREASURE SAID, AS SOON AS I spilled my news. “One ship. Ridiculous. A trap, and only a fool would believe it.”

  “And why does he yet live?” Willem asked, seeming genuinely curious.

  “I believe he knows more than he has said,” I explained, but only to the Captain. “I believe he speaks what he thinks to be true, but we might learn valuable more if we keep him talking.”

  The Captain, staring into the great emptiness ahead of us, said nothing for a long, long moment. The deepness in this part of the sky was too high above for even us to echolocate its limit. Even now, in this modern age, we pondered what it might contain, what other civilizations might lurk in that eternal dark.

  “I would only have one ship if I were Toby Wick,” our Captain finally said.

  “The fewer to share any bounty with,” Treasure said.

  “The fewer to share the glory with.” The Captain looked back to me. “And you think this young male knows more?”

  “I have said I would bring him food,” I answered. “I believe he wishes to speak and that showing generosity rather than pain will make him do so.”

  The Captain was thoughtful again. “You may be right. You will kill him, Bathsheba, but not just yet.”

  I turned to swim back to the mast. “Bathsheba’s in love,” Treasure taunted as I passed.

  “With a man?” Willem giggled, with scandalized pleasure. “How would that even work?”

  I left them behind to their nonsense, though my skin felt hot and angry against the water.

  21

  I WAS ON FIRST WATCH THAT NIGHT, THE sky dark above my head, the Abyss dark below, save for the glimmering, shifting moon that pulled the tides. My species of whale rarely slept fully, when we would hold our bodies vertical in the water, gathered in an almost-prayerful circle for protection, and only then for mere moments. Mostly, we half slept, as now, the Captain, Treasure, Willem, and the sailors swimming slowly in the water, their consciousnesses dipping just below the surface of their waking day. Even Demetrius slept, having finally eaten.

  “We don’t eat them raw,” he had said, after I herded some small fish to him and had his hands unbound.

  “Your fire has no place in the ocean. Eat or not. I do not care.”

  He looked up. “Then why bring them?”

  I had no answer.

  Now, I swam just beyond the tip of my Captain’s great forehead. With our comparative sizes, my slipstream was utterly inadequate to pull her along, but the feel of it was enough for her to follow without waking. The Apprentices and sailors were behind her, her slipstream alone enough for them all.

  We swam toward the prophesied mountains. I have heard that men navigate by the stars, the small lights that dapple the Abyss around the moon. We used the magnetic fields we sensed in the water, but that did not stop the stars from being beautiful. I looked at them when I dipped into the Abyss to refill my breather bubble.

  If we could reach the stars, I wondered, could we swim in those? Would they hold our weight? Could we swim from one to another, like between mountains in the ocean? There seemed to be none of the great unknown continents upon which men lived, continents whose coasts we knew intimately but whose vast middles contained only guessed-at mysteries.

  And the moon? What was that? It moved through the Abyss like a ship. A ship whose face showed no men at all. Was it a place without war? Was it a place where a whale fed a man? Would we be safer there? Could the hunt end forever?

  I was pulled out of my pondering when I felt motion to my side. Thinking the Captain was waking, I turned to receive my relief orders, but it wasn’t her. It was a shark, little more than a tube with teeth and a malevolent brainlessness. It was one of the blues that followed us, hoping for man scraps, but “followed” is the right word. They were lazy and hardly ever stirred themselves to pass us.

  But here was another. And another. They swam past me, past the ship, onward, toward something.

  Then I scented the blood in the water.

  22

  “A MASSACRE,” TREASURE SAID, STUPIDLY, pointlessly, for it was all there to see.

  “But they’re intact,” said Willem, her eyes wide and fearful. “The hunters have taken nothing from them.”

  “It is a message,” said the Captain.
/>
  The night sea ahead of us was darkened by the blood of at least fifty whales, their bodies – yes, intact – bumping against one another. The moon lit them up from below, making shadows against the night.

  “How can all of them have been hunted?” Treasure asked, fear in her voice. “What happened here?”

  “It is a message,” the Captain repeated. “From Toby Wick.”

  The float of bodies was starting to quiver as the sharks took their feed. We knew what we had to do, but we were reluctant. We couldn’t stop them from eating our dead any more than we could stop the thousands of birds already rising to the under-surface of the Abyss to do the same, but there were personal tokens to gather, families to be informed at a later time, perhaps even salvage and cargo to be rescued. We did not waste.

  Unlike men.

  “As much as we can,” said the Captain. “All of it, if possible.”

  It wasn’t possible. The sharks were too many, eating too fast, and though they skipped out of my way as I approached, the gap behind me swiftly closed again with hungry mouths and blind, stupid eyes. Plus the blood, all the blood, meant we were swimming in a confusing, shifting murk in which even echolocation was of little use. Still, we pressed on.

  With my mouth, I gathered mostly coral engravings – our form of identification and how we exchanged money for goods – but also the jewels some of the older generation wore in their scars, adorning them with pride. I gathered small foodstuffs and at least six heater crabs, putting them all in the slings of my harpoon harness. The water grew darker, and so did my mood. I found several defensive harpoons, all unused – all? What did happen here? How big was the devil we were chasing? – but there was little time to think. I merely kept gathering, as did the others, trying to reclaim as much as we could before the bloodied and flesh-filled water became intolerable.

  Then I came upon the child.

  Normally our young were the easiest pickings for the sharks – their size, their vulnerable surprised cluelessness – but this one was tucked under the fins of her mother, out of immediate sight. I wouldn’t have found her myself if I hadn’t been recovering another heater crab that turned out to be dead, too. The child was little more than the length of my harpoon, too small to carry anything but the toy starfish she held tightly under her fin.

  The mother had clearly tried to protect her, used her own great body to shield her baby from whatever calamity had come from the Abyss. The larger whale had a bloody wound down from her blowhole, already being made larger by twisting sharks, but the little one didn’t have a mark on her. Not a single one.

  She had drowned. The hardest, most senseless death of all our kind. Not fast, not painless, avoidable as the Abyss was almost always in reach. She had been so afraid to leave her mother that she had allowed her breather bubble to empty and wouldn’t go to refill it.

  It felt as if something gave way inside me, small, nothing huge or fatal, but a collapse of some internal tissue, near my heart, near my lungs, near the very center where I hid all my hurt and worry.

  And anger.

  You are thinking I saw my own mother protecting me, and of course, you’re right. But I also saw myself as the larger whale protecting my mother. And every whale in turn, again and again, from generations ago to years from now, folded under the fin of another, and another, and another, shielding us from the enemy who would cause a child, the tiniest calf, to drown.

  I swam slowly forward, touching her side with my forehead. I let a low wailing keen rise from me, a keen for the calf, for this massacred pod, for myself and all of us here in this eternal war. Whale speech is long and slow, it carries for miles like a current. There can be no match, in this universe or any other, for its expression of grief.

  Leaving the starfish with the child – let her take it with her to the hereafter that awaits us all – I turned in the murk but couldn’t see far enough to our ship, to the one tied to our mast, a breather bubble that would have saved this little one’s life now saving his own.

  (I did not want to be a hunter.)

  Yes, but you are a hunter nevertheless, I thought. And you will lead us to Toby Wick, whatever he is, however many men make up his legend.

  And you will all perish.

  A shark came to feed on the child. I broke its back with my tail and sent it to die in the deep, lonely oblivion.

  23

  “BUT HOW?” I ASKED DEMETRIUS AGAIN, not bothering to conceal my anger. The massacre of the night before had left the thoughts of none of us.

  “There is no other answer,” he said, pleading. “Only what men tell each other. No one sees him. We only say that Toby Wick is a devil. A devil who will do the same to you when you find him.”

  “You are right that we will find him. You are wrong that he will have a chance.”

  “You don’t see the trap? He waits for the challenge of the whale who will dare to come to him. He wants it. And he will be victorious.”

  “You might want it, but he will not get it.”

  “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WANT IT?”

  And at that, at this flash of impatience, of impertinence from one whose people had killed so many of mine, my own anger overflowed. Without knowing what I was going to do, I blew a breather bubble around his entire body and grabbed him in my mouth again, tearing him away from the mast.

  I dove. Up high. And fast. I could feel questioning clicks from Treasure and Willem and even our Captain behind me, but I left them.

  “What are you doing?” he panicked. “I won’t survive!”

  I dove, faster still. The ocean grew dark around us. I kept having to put more air into his breather bubble as the pressure grew, crushing it, trying to crush him. The cushion of air around him was the only thing keeping him alive.

  The water rushed along my skin as my tail worked, my blood pumping warmth that would only counteract the decreasing temperature for so long. The air in my lungs, too, would also be compressed, that which I wasn’t wasting on keeping the young male alive.

  “Is this my death?” he shouted, struggling to be heard over the rush of water.

  “I want you to see!” I shouted back and dove up and up and up and up and up, past where we usually floated our cities, past where even the brightest sunlight would reach, past where my armor of blubber would keep me from hypothermia for only so long, up and up and up.

  Until there was only blackness.

  “There is nothing to see,” he said, his teeth chattering. Even a heater crab wouldn’t save him down here. We only had mere moments.

  “Here,” I said, “in the cold, in the dark. This is where a whale is taught she will see her real self.”

  “Your real self is blackness?” he said, confused.

  “No, your real self is blackness. I can see perfectly well with my echolocation. Leave you alone in the black and you become nothing. You are the darkness. But I still see you! I swim in the blackness and I still know who I am, Demetrius!”

  I could tell by his silence he was as surprised as I was.

  I had used his name.

  “You sound like him,” he finally said, quietly. “You talk the way men talk when they want to emulate him. The way they use his name to do terrible things. If you fight the devil, you become him.”

  “Maybe it takes a devil to fight a devil,” I said.

  “But at the end of that fight, Bathsheba,” he said, “don’t only devils remain?”

  And for a moment in the ocean, there was only blackness. We were alone. Even with ourselves.

  And whatever devils lurked, unseen.

  24

  “HE EXPECTS US TO BELIEVE A POD OF FIFTY was killed by a single ship?” the Captain said, rightfully scornful. “By Toby Wick’s ship alone?”

  “This is what he believes,” I answered, ignoring the hostile glare of Treasure and the more thoughtful but still frightened glance of Willem. They had grudgingly accepted my explanation that I had taken Demetrius into the deep sky to frighten him. Though it had gone
right up to the very, very edge of too much independence in the face of a Captain, which I was sure she would not forget.

  “He is also certain we are swimming into a trap,” I said. “That we are being led by Toby Wick to our deaths.”

  “You put a lot of faith in his certainty,” the Captain said. “I ask for information, Bathsheba, and you give me opinion.”

  “Captain–”

  “Silence,” she said, so quietly and coldly, I was immediately afraid. The sun was passing out of the Abyss, reflecting pinks and yellows across its surface. In the distance, I could see the faint lights of a far-off city, where whales were living their lives, away from the lonely souls who protected them.

  “I do not believe we are swimming to suicide,” the Captain finally said.

  “It was prophesied,” Treasure said. “We are the ones who can defeat Toby Wick. That’s why he wants us to chase. No other fight is worth the effort.”

  “I want to hunt this prey as well,” I said. “I am merely wondering–”

  “You wonder what it costs to kill the devil,” the Captain said, fast, harder than I expected, again noticing more than I wished. “You wonder if you would become one yourself.”

  She suddenly loosed herself from the tow ropes and rounded on me, so fast I couldn’t avoid bumping into her. She swam to nearly vertical, her great chest filling the sky above me, forcing me back. Her fins and tail churned to keep her in position, and I could feel the power rolling off her. A current on her own. An ocean I could never hope to navigate.

  “Tell me, Bathsheba,” her great whale voice booming, stretching through the water, so loud Treasure and Willem had to swim away. I remembered the question Demetrius asked me in the sky. Is this my death?

  “Do you consider me a devil?” my Captain demanded of me, and I felt – I knew – that my life depended upon my reply.

  She swam closer, pushing me back once again. “Answer!” she commanded.