don’t know what to do so he stays my friend. He changes…
And Kit was going to be in that whalesark for more and more time in the next couple of days. Would she even know him if this kept up?
Would he know her? Or want to? Humpbacks and sperms were different. Her own aggressiveness had frightened her badly enough, after the fight with the krakens. Kit’s had been worse. And he had been enjoying it…
Listless, Nita reached under her pillow for her wizard’s manual and a flashlight. She clicked the light on and started paging through the book, intending to kill some time doing “homework”—finishing the study of her Parts of the Song, the Silent Lord’s parts. They were mostly in what whales used for verse — songs with a particular rhythm and structure, different for each species, but always more formal than regular conversational song. Since she wasn’t good at memorizing, Nita was relieved to find that when she was in whaleform, the Sea would remind her of the exact words. What she needed to study were the emotions and motivations behind each song, the way they were sung.
She riffled through the book. There was a lot of background material — the full tale of the first Song, and of others, including the disastrous “Drowned Song” that ended in the downfall of Atlantis; the names of famous whale-wizards who had sung and how they had sung their parts; “stage direction” for the Song itself; commentary, cautions, permitted variations, even jokes, for evidently though the occasion was serious, it didn’t have to be somber. Then the Song proper, in verse, with the names of the ten Lords of the Humors: the Singer, the Gazer, the Blue, the Sounder, the Gray Lord, the Listener, the Killer, the Wanderer, the Forager, and of course the Silent Lord. Each of them ruled a kind of fish and also a kind of temperament.
Some of them struck Nita as odd; the Killer, for example, was the patroness of laughter, always joking: the Gazer looked at everything and hardly ever said what he saw. And the Silent Lord— Nita paused at the lines that described “the one who ruled seas with no songs in them, and hearts that were silent; but in her own silence, others would sing forever…”
And of course there was the Pale Slayer. And another odd thing; though the names of all the whales ever to sing the Song were listed, there was no listing for the Master-Shark, except the mere title, repeated again and again. Maybe he’s like an executioner in the old days, Nita thought. Anonymous. The commentaries weren’t very illuminating. “The Master of the lesser Death,” one of them called him, “who, mastering it, dieth not. For wizardry toucheth not one to whom it hath not been freely given: nor doth the messenger in any wise partake of the message he bears.”
The manual was like that sometimes. Nita sighed and skimmed down to the first canto: S’reee’s verse, it would be, since the Singer opens the Song as the other Ten gather around the lonely seamount Caryn Peak, the Sea’s Tooth. Alongside the musical and movement notations for a whale singing the Song, the manual had a rough translation into the Speech:
Blood in the water I sing, and one who shed it: deadliest hunger I sing, and one who fed it— weaving the ancientmost tale of the Sea’s sending; singing the tragedy, singing the joy unending.
This is our shame — this is the whole Ocean’s glory; this is the Song of the Twelve. Hark to the story! Hearken, and bring it to pass; swift, lest the sorrow long ago laid to its rest devour us tomorrow!
There was much more: the rest of the prologue, then the songs of each of the Masters who were part of the Song and their temptations by the Stranger-whale, the Lone Power in disguise. Nita didn’t need to pay any attention to those, for the Silent Lord came in only near the end, and the others, even the Stranger, dared use nothing stronger than persuasion on her. The whale singing the part of the Silent One then made her decision which side to be on — and acted.
That was the part Nita had gotten up to. Almost done, she thought with some relief, seeing that there wasn’t much more beyond this. Only a few more cantos. Boy, how do you manage to be cheerful while singing this stuff? It sounds so creepy.
Must I accept the barren Gift? Learn death, and lose my Mastery? Then let them know whose blood and breath will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game—
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed—
the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed.
But past the fear lies life for all—
perhaps for me; and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!
Glad that wasn’t me back then, she thought. I could never have pulled that off… Nita read down through the next section, the “stage directions” for this sequence of the Song. “The whale singing the Silent One then enacts the Sacrifice in a manner as close to the original enactment as possible, depending on the site where the Song is being celebrated…”
She skimmed the rest of it, the directions detailing the Pale Slayer’s “acceptance of Sacrifice,” his song, the retreat of the Lone Power, and the song’s conclusion by the remaining Ten. But she was having trouble keeping her mind on her work. Kit—
“Neets!”
His voice was the merest hiss from outside the locked window. She got up and peered out the window to see where Kit was, then waved him away from the wall. The spell she had in mind for getting out needed only one word to start it. Nita spoke it and walked through the wall.
Between the distracting peculiarity of the feeling, which was like walking through thick spiderwebs, and the fact that the floor of her room was several feet above the ground, Nita almost took a bad fall, the way someone might who’d put his foot into an open manhole. Kit staggered, barely catching her, and almost fell down himself.
“Clumsy,” he said as he turned her loose. “Watch it, Nino—“
He punched her, not as hard as he might have; then spent a moment or two brushing himself off, and redraped the whalesark over one shoulder, where it hung mistily shimmering like a scrap of fog with starlight caught in it. “Is that locked?” he said, looking up at Nita’s window with interest.
“Uh-huh.”
“And the front and back doors are too.”
“Yeah.”
Kit threw a wicked look at Nita as they made their silent way out of the yard and toward the beach. “Your mom and dad are going to be real curious how we got out of the house and then locked all the inside locks when we don’t have the keys.”
“Uh-huh,” Nita said. “If we’re gonna get in real trouble, we might as well confuse them as much as possible. It might distract them…”
“Wanna bet?” Kit said.
Nita didn’t answer.
The beach was desolate. Nita and Kit left their bathing suits under a prominent boulder and slid into the chilly water. Nita changed first and let Kit take hold of her dorsal fin and be towed out to deeper water. She shuddered once, not knowing why, at the strange cool feeling of human hands on her hide as she swam outward.
Beyond the breakers, the water was peculiarly still. The sky was cobalt with a hint of dawn-silver in it; the sea was sheenless, shadowless, the color of lead. And rising up from the listless water, four or five hundred yards from shore, a tall white fin was cruising in steady, silent circles, like the sail of a ghost ship unable to make port.
“I didn’t think Ed was going to be here,” Kit said. He let go of Nita’s fin and slipped off into the water.
“Neither did I,” Nita said, not knowing if he heard her before he dived. When he was finished changing, she dived too and made her way toward where Ed swam serenely.
