The Devil and the Deep

by Ellen Datlow

  Sebjørn turns away from the sight of a man sprawled in the sand and watches Sigved wading deeper out to sea, too stunned to say or do anything to stop him.

  “Do you think the captain sent a signal in time?”

  Nils is standing, looking down the beach when he asks. There is little to look at. The waves sweep in slowly, barely moving up the shore. Leaving more of it behind.

  “Hmm?”

  Sebjørn sits in the sand beside Aaron. The wind is making his ears ache. Constantly, now, he hears how it whistles through the bones. How it arcs over the turned boat and cuts between the soft boards of the collapsing shore station. The island is awash with the rise and fall of its music. The keening two-note call that threads through him, low and long.

  “A distress signal,” Nils says. “Do you think he got one out in time?”

  “It’s automatic.”

  The Höðr’s beacon would have activated as soon as the vessel took on water, broadcasting their position.

  “How long before they find us?”

  Sebjørn doesn’t answer. After all, the Lofotofangst had the same equipment. The Bjørn, too.

  “Sebjørn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Aaron lies on his back on the beach, staring at the sky. Blood has pooled around his head, a crimson nimbus that refuses to soak into the wet sand.

  “Sebjørn? Where’s the rifle now?”

  “Brage took it.”

  He can’t remember if he knows that or not. Or if he knows where Brage has taken it, either. Can’t think much of anything with that constant noise. The peep and elongated squeal. Regular enough it seems like song and frustrating in its patterned resounding. But beautiful, too.

  Sebjørn looks back at where the raft sits, nestled between the fishless racks. A red light blinks from it. A white. Mostly they pulse out of time with each other but sometimes, briefly, there is synchronicity. A pattern that stretches out and comes back in and repeats.

  “Do you think he’ll come back?” Nils asks. Adding, “Brage,” because he could have meant somebody else. Anybody else but Aaron.

  Sebjørn has no answer for him. He returns to staring out to sea. It has retreated further still, the shore expanding as the waterline recedes, and recedes, and recedes. And everywhere, all he sees is bones. Pale prisons curving from and on the dark sand. Giant skulls, scoured smooth by the sea, grinning their wide lines of baleen. Tails of spine behind pointing to where the sea retreats, retreats. And carried to him from between them, over and through them, comes that watery, drawn-out sound of low notes.

  Whale-song.

  Sebjørn smiles. Of course it’s watery. Water transmits sound far better than air. And then he thinks, we are 80 percent water. Something like that.

  He slaps at his ears. Head bowed, he strikes himself a flurry of blows, as if he can knock the noise from his head. Muffle it with the singing sting of pain. Yet it is a smell that distracts him.

  Smoke.

  Beside the shelter of the overturned boat, a thick column of dark smoke rises from a fire where men warm themselves.

  “Hey!”

  Sebjørn scrambles in the sand to get up, clumsy with his injured ankle. He lopes towards the men in a limping stagger, dimly aware of Nils moving with him.

  “Hey!”

  The wind tears the smoke ragged, throws it around. Twists the black stink of it into a greasy coil that clings to the skin of the men gathered around the fire. They are not simply warming their hands by the flames. They are working with them.

  “What are you doing?”

  One of them holds something. He makes downward strokes with a blade.

  “Captain? What are you doing?”

  The man glances at Sebjørn through the smoke. His face is bloody. His forehead is dark with it. Hair sticks up in oily clumps. His beard is grimed. It isn’t Osvald. It isn’t anyone Sebjørn knows. None of them are. Each is filthy with the grime of their work, blood-streaked and soot-stained. They are dressed in simple clothes, all cloth and leather. One wears a coil of rope across his chest like a bandolier. Another carves at a slab of blubber with a rusted blade. He cuts it into sections like pages, each of them an inch or so thick. As Sebjørn watches, he fans them out and drops them into a pot that boils over the black fire. A glut of bubbling blubber, dense and popping, belching the heavy stench of melting meat juices. One of the men reaches into the pot, his gloves thick with grease. He retrieves crisp pieces from the oil, skims them from where they float, and casts them underneath into the flames. Fuel for the fire that renders the rest into something new.

  “Sebjørn?”

  We are looking at history.

  Who said that?

  As if suddenly aware that Sebjørn watches, each of the men looks up from their work. Together, they open their mouths wide.

  Sebjørn slams his hands to his ears and crouches, turning away. He expects that drawn, hollow vowel sound, the two-note chorus of whale-song, to come from the mouths of those who once hunted them, and he turns from it quickly. Strikes the pot suspended over the fire. Nothing spills, though it falls to where there was once a fire and is gone, dispersed into absence like the wind-driven smoke. Like the men, too, gone with the song that retreats, retreats. Summoned away by the sounds of its own diminishing echo as it retreats. Retreats.

  And repeats.

  Sebjørn scoops up snow and sand with each hand and clutches them to his head. Packs ice coarse with grit into his ears to silence what he can’t not hear. Handful after handful of sand, snow, stones. Forcing it in tight. But the song remains inside his head. He fights the pull of it, the rise and fall of its siren call, and shudders. Shivers. Spasms with the cold forever in his bones. And all the while his hands are at his ears, pressing them flat. Forcing a hush of blood that sounds like an empty ocean.

  The hand on his shoulder startles him. He makes fists in reflex and so has no choice but to hear:

  “What are you doing out here?”

  He is crouching at the shoreline, Nils standing beside him. A wave laps over their feet. Sebjørn stands slowly and looks back at the long, long expanse of beach behind. It stretches far away from him …

  … away …

  … away …

  Right back to where an old boat leans out of the sand like a rotten loose tooth.

  Nils reaches for Sebjørn—

  “Come on, come with me.”

  —but Sebjørn steps away. He faces the darkening sea as a wave comes in, bringing with it more of the same music, and when it recedes it takes it away again. Leaves more shore behind. There are prints in the sand, impossible prints that have not been washed away. That lead into the sea and its music.

  Nils positions himself in front of Sebjørn, holding his arms out as if to embrace him. Block him. He is speaking, but Sebjørn can’t hear more than a muffle of noise because he has covered his ears as he walks with the receding tide. He does not stop walking, treading wet sand into gurgling puddles. A drowned man’s splutter. Every step he takes is the sound of a throat closing with water as the sea draws back, and back still, and shows him the Höðr. The Lofotofangst. The Bjørn. Others. All of them beached and leaning vacant.

  We are looking at history.

  Sebjørn limps towards them, hands at his head like a marched prisoner. He thinks of the taut rope that tethers whalers to the whale. The tight line that tows one behind the other across the tops of white waves.

  It’s not just whales we’re chasing, Sebjørn realises. It has never just been whales.

  Suddenly the sea retreats from him no more. Where once there had been a growing expanse of shore comes a final surge and swell of surf as the ocean rushes in to meet him. It engulfs his knees, his thighs, climbs high up his vestless chest, and turns him about in its violent tide to show him a beach in illusory movement, the bones of whales rushing back into the swift encroaching sea.

  And here are the whales now. Two of them. Three. Four of them. Five. They swim with him amongst them and dra
w him away, out to sea. Arcing slow curves as they appear, then submerge. Raising tails that make wide Vs in descent. Waves that haunt the minds of men in their beckoning.

  On the diminishing shore, Nils struggles to free the raft that will save him, surrounded by whaling men. Sebjørn opens his mouth to call a warning but the water hushes him, rushing in with the roar of a whale exhaling as the island that had been slowly rising to heave itself free of the sea dives once more with a mountainous flip of its tail.

  A SHIP OF THE SOUTH WIND

  BRADLEY DENTON

  Uncle JoJim slid his shotgun into its scabbard behind Calico Girl’s saddle, then walked into the shin-high tallgrass to retrieve his sixth prairie chicken of the day. Charley, perched atop his chestnut stallion, Bird King, waited alongside Calico Girl. As he did, he looked past Uncle JoJim and saw a narrow plume of smoke a mile to the south. It was too small to be from a grass fire. But it was a definite line of gray against the treeless green hills and cloudless sky. It smudged into the blue as the wind caught it.

  “Who would have a fire out here?” Charley asked as Uncle JoJim returned. He pointed at the smoke. “Grandmother says no one lives in these hills except ghosts. Ghosts wouldn’t need a fire.”

  Uncle JoJim paused, looked toward the line of gray, and tilted his head upward. He sniffed, and then he frowned.

  “It’s no one who will bother us,” Uncle JoJim said, stepping up to Calico Girl. He used his teeth to help tie one of the chicken’s legs to a rawhide string hanging from the saddle. Charley knew better than to offer to help. Uncle JoJim got along fine without a right arm.

  “But who could it be?” Charley asked. “The Kaw are all on the reservation, and the whites are all in Council Grove. Do you think the Cheyenne have come back?”

  Uncle JoJim finished tying the prairie chicken to Calico Girl’s saddle, then gripped the saddle horn and swung up onto the pinto. “It’s not the Cheyenne.”

  “Who, then?” Charley didn’t like not knowing.

  “White travelers sometimes pass through the Flint Hills,” Uncle JoJim said. “They never stop long. It’s of no concern.”

  But Charley was concerned anyway. “It’s too early for travelers to stop and cook supper, isn’t it? And they shouldn’t make camp out here anyway. The thunderclouds have been coming fast in the evenings. So they should spend the night in Council Grove. We ought to tell them.”

  Uncle JoJim glanced back at the smoke. “It’s rude to tell others their business. Besides, there are those who don’t mind wind or water. Or thunder, or lightning.” He nodded toward the next hill to the east. “I remember a patch of rock up there. It would be a good place to race to. If anyone wanted to race.”

  So Charley spun Bird King and urged him up the slope. The July sun was hot on his neck, and he imagined it was Calico Girl’s breath.

  But when he and Bird King reached the bare patch of limestone and clattered to a stop, Charley looked back and saw that Uncle JoJim was far behind. Calico Girl was moving at a walk. The prairie chickens hanging from her saddle, three on each side, swung lazily.

  Charley realized that Uncle JoJim had tricked him. But he didn’t know why. Unless it was just to tease him. Uncle JoJim did that, sometimes.

  “You didn’t even try,” Charley said when Uncle JoJim finally drew alongside.

  Uncle JoJim stopped Calico Girl with a click of his tongue, then adjusted his battered brown hat. The wind had bent up one side of its brim. Charley wasn’t wearing a hat, and the wind ruffled his straight black hair against his ears.

  Uncle JoJim shrugged, and his empty right shirtsleeve flapped. “I didn’t say I would race. All I said was that this would be a good place to race to.” He patted his mare’s dappled red-and-white neck. “Besides, I had not asked Calico Girl if she felt like running.”

  “I think you were just afraid you would lose,” Charley said.

  “Of course I would lose,” Uncle JoJim said. “I’m a one-armed old man in a loose saddle on a tired mare. You’re a boy riding bareback on a young stallion.” He paused. “And you’ve become a good horseman.”

  Charley was amazed. Uncle JoJim’s remark would have been a high compliment from anyone among the Kaw. But coming from Uncle JoJim, it meant even more. Uncle JoJim had given Bird King to Charley and had taught him to ride. And he had offered plenty of criticism in the process. But never, until now, had he offered any praise.

  “Thank you, Uncle JoJim,” Charley said. “You’re very kind. And I don’t think you’re old.”

  Uncle JoJim gave a snort. “You’ve lived eight and a half years. But I was here forty summers before you. And if you think I’m kind, ask your Aunt Margaret. She’ll tell you I spend too much of my day in selfishness to have any time left over for kindness.” He shifted in his saddle. “No, if I say you’re a good horseman, it’s because it’s true. I ought to know, as I once saw the best horsemen in the world.”

  Charley was intrigued. “Who do you mean?”

  Uncle JoJim squinted toward the northeast. “Twenty years ago, when I had both arms, I was hired to drive cattle to New Mexico to feed soldiers fighting the desert tribes. As I returned to Kansas with some of the soldiers, we were attacked by Comanche warriors. Those Comanches would slip down to the sides of their ponies to fire their bullets and arrows. Then they would slip back up and turn backward so they could keep shooting at us after they had passed. This was all done while riding as fast as their horses would run. One warrior even rode upside-down, shooting arrows between his pony’s forelegs. It was as if the horse spat arrows from its chest.”

  Charley was fascinated.

  Uncle JoJim touched his own Adam’s apple. “The soldier beside me died with one of those arrows in his throat. But the rest of us were lucky. A solitary white man appeared atop a nearby ridge, and he drew the attention of the Comanches because he was riding—” Uncle JoJim paused. “It was a wagon. He was riding a big … wagon.”

  “A wagon?” Charley asked. “Wasn’t he easy for the Comanches to attack?”

  Uncle JoJim frowned as he had frowned when he’d sniffed the air. “No. This man told me later that he had come from where the world is nothing but water. As it once was here, long ago.” He gestured down at the limestone slab, which was embedded with the fossilized shells of ancient sea creatures. “Coming from the water, this man had never heard of the Comanches. So he wasn’t afraid. He also had weapons from his old life, and he killed the first warrior who charged him. Then he killed the horses of the next four. That was worse for the Comanches than being killed themselves, so they fled. Yet even while fleeing, they rode well. Some of them had to ride double, and they were still too fast for the soldiers to chase.” Uncle JoJim looked at Charley. “But they were no faster than you and Bird King. And you ride without a bridle. Even the Comanches used ropes around their ponies’ jaws.” He squinted northeast again. “Of course, I’ve never seen you ride upside-down. So maybe the Comanches were still a little better.”

  Charley hesitated before asking his next question. “Were they better than the Cheyenne?”

  Uncle JoJim gave another snort. “A month ago, when the Cheyenne came to raid us, we learned that the Kaw are as good as the Cheyenne. And the Comanches were better than the Kaw. But if you tell anyone I said so, I’ll call you a liar.”

  Charley sighed. “I wish Allegawaho had not sent us to Topeka when the Cheyenne came. I wish we could have seen the battle.”

  Uncle JoJim shook his head. “The Cheyenne numbered more than a hundred, so every full-blood Kaw had to stay and fight. We were the only ones who could go for help. Allegawaho could not have known the Cheyenne would be appeased by sugar and coffee from Council Grove.”

  “Plus the three horses they had already stolen from the Kaw,” Charley said.

  “Yes, plus the three horses,” Uncle JoJim said. He sounded annoyed. “My point is that fetching the militia was wise, and none of the Kaw could go. It was up to us.”

  Charley knotted his hands in Bird
King’s mane. “You might have gone without me. Then I could have watched the Kaw and the Cheyenne ride against each other. The women say it was a marvel.”

  “I believe they exaggerate. But no matter. Calico Girl and I needed you and Bird King. You helped us ride fast for sixty miles.” Uncle JoJim patted Calico Girl’s neck again. “I don’t think I’ll make her run that far or that fast again. She deserves easy rides and hunts from now on.”

  Charley glanced at the prairie chickens hanging from Uncle JoJim’s saddle. “Is today’s hunt finished?”

  “The sun is starting to slide down, but the moon will rise when it’s gone. So we could hunt longer if we wished. But I think six chickens are enough for one day.” Uncle JoJim pointed in the direction he had been squinting. “However, there are now two white men and a boy between us and the reservation. The boy is older than you, but not yet old enough to be called a man.”

  Charley’s gaze followed the line from Uncle JoJim’s pointing finger. Then he saw them, not quite a half mile away: three sunlit figures on horseback, moving at a trot through the grass, heading for the hilltop where Charley and Uncle JoJim had stopped.

  “They might cause us some difficulty,” Uncle JoJim said.

  Charley hadn’t noticed the three riders until Uncle JoJim had pointed, and he was embarrassed. True, the wind was blowing from the south. So it was all right that he hadn’t heard anything. But he should have seen them.

  “Are they from Council Grove?” he asked.

  “They’re strangers,” Uncle JoJim said. “But when they saw us, they changed direction. So they might intend to ask for our help. Or they might intend to rob us. Either way, it will be obvious if we try to avoid them. And they might take offense.”

  Bird King tossed his head and stamped on the limestone. He had sensed Charley’s unease.

  “If we just rode away,” Charley said, “what could they do?”

  Uncle JoJim made a low noise in his throat. “The boy and the man with the red beard have long rifles in scabbards. But those aren’t good from horseback. They might also have pistols, but they aren’t yet close enough to use them. Although they will be soon.”