Blood in the Water

“Should we go to meet them,” he asked to Grayer who swam ahead of him.

“Go if you want,” she said, “I don’t think it will matter much to them. You’re just a little bull after all.”

Ceto listened to hear the direction from which the bulls were coming. Their voices were fading.

“Diving,” he thought, and listened again.

The voices had nearly disappeared into the endless undertone of the ocean at rest.

“It will be a while now,” he thought, “must be hungry. They’ll want to breach and bask when they’ve had their fill too. It could be hours before they arrive.”

Ceto listened again. There was something this time. But it was not a Bull.

“What is that sound,” he thought to himself, “It’s not one of our tribe certainly. It’s not a mathematical language.”

The sound he heard was more like to what you and I would call singing. Whales of Ceto’s tribe did not sing so much as they clicked. The sound came through the nose of the whale and not the mouth as it would for you or me.

The clicks had proved a very useful form of communication for his people and they had advanced their language to the point that it exceeded many of the languages of men. For one thing, the clicks communicated not just words and expressions, but also information about the depth or temperature of water. Direction and speed and other navigational information was also part of common discourse. And much of this was communicated in what we would think of as numerical sequences.

“Three - Seven - Seventy Five - Eight - Twenty Two - Down,” or something very much like that. I suppose if you or I heard it without any translation it would sound like a lot of un-intelligable number gibberish. Like a man calling out numbers to a crowd of people and not knowing if he were talking about money or a bus schedule or a game of bingo.

But this sound. This was like something more that a person would understand. It had tone and pitch and resonance. Ceto had heard something like this before when he was with his mother.

“Grass eater,” she said, hearing the sound, “Harmless old cow. Just ignore it.”

But at the time, the sound had been bouyant, happy, almost exhillerating in it’s song. Ceto didn’t understand a word of it, but the resonance as it hit his body and thrummed through his nose was like a massage to a man who had long stooped over some dull task.

This sound was mournful, and though equally sensational in it’s feeling, it felt like a dirge was being sung.

“Don’t seek out the others in the water,” were the words of his aunts an mother, “Leave the wild place to it’s own business. It’s full of the care of creatures that thrive on blood. Take no part in it.”

“Blood,” thought Ceto with a shiver, “I can’t imagine living like that.”

The whales of Ceto’s line had given up their taste for blood in an immemorial age beyond the reach of song or history. It had been so long indeed since they had hunted in the water with their teeth that only the lower set of their jaws still held visible teeth. Their mouth they rarely used for anything other than sucking in the squid that was the largest part of their diet.

Squid they considered a bloodless creature, and the truth be told, they considered them hardly more alive than we would consider a field of wheat to be alive.

The creatures of the ocean that throve on blood they considered in the lesser ones such as small fish, pitiable, and in the greater ones, cannibals. Sharks and Killer Whales they regarded with the same disgust that we regard the lowest orders of people, pirate or brigands or any breed of people whose customs are brutal and thrive on cruelty.

The sounds were growing more distinct now and among the notes of the other whale, Ceto could discern the light grating sounds of a small boat. In that moment, it was the instincts of his people that drove him to seek out the other creature. For they were a kindly race, and time had made them more protective than predatory.

As he approached the spot the color and texture of the water changed. It was thick with blood. Only once before in his life had Ceto encountered such a quantity of blood in the water. It had been an attack of Killer Whales on a lone mother and her cub. Ceto did not like to think of that encounter. The Killer Whales had drowned them both through exhaustion and then eaten only the parts of their dead bodies that they preferred, leaving the remainder to rot and sink to the bottom and defile the sacred fishing rivers. Then he had been among many, and though revolted by the sight, he had not felt the utter horror that he felt now.

He surfaced among a confusion of sounds in the dazzling light of the open ocean. Waves were rough and he peered through his right eye at a scene that he would never forget. Knots of men in small boats were lashing the great body of the singing whale to the side of their small boat while he bled and sang his life away.

He was maybe fifty yards from the scene of carnage when he felt a sharp burning pain in his own back. He could not see what it was, but he knew he had been hurt. He yanked and pulled away from the pain instinctively and felt the pain increase and his body drag. But even in such a pass, and at less than full size, Ceto had great strength. Driven by what counter impulse, he did not know, he turned back, and fortunately for him, directly into his attackers.

His head drove into their small boat broad sided and he felt the keel grate over his back and the small forms of the men spill out of the craft and onto and off of his back like pellets of water. The pain was there, but the drag on his heft was gone. He heard the shouts of the men and the dwindling song of the dying whale opposite him. He turned again and for a moment found himself eye to eye with the alien creature. Something, some say a spirit of understanding passed between them in that fleeting moment, and Ceto’s fate was sealed. He dove, taking (had he known it) a heavy Nantucket line, harpoon and net along with him.

He swam with what strength remained to him back towards the meeting place of his Gam and as he heard the familiar sound of the voices come up to meet him, faded into a long spell of unknowing thought.

Meeting Day

Ceto swam in the middle waters of what was known as the Great River Canyon of the northern freedom. He was an adlo, a young bull whale, and still attached to his mother's pod and constrained to travel with them on their annual migrations and feedings. He had not yet reached the age at which he would be declared a cento, a free bull, and would go to the deep waters to dive and live out among the mighty bulls of his father's ancestry. 

Ceto was, of course, only a child's name, a term of endearment to a whale that had not been called to the open sea. It was a common nickname for such young ones - it meant something not unlike a cross between urchin and nuisance and babe. 

Ceto was unhappy. He and his mother were cross with each other, though they had formerly been close, their relationship had begun to deteriorate into something like bitterness. Ceto blamed most of this new friction on his aunts who were not friendly to him.  

"Little Sisk," his aunt Skimmer called him with a hiss, and the others laughed, "Ugly little Sisk who won't find a cow." 

Skimmer had always had a cruel streak. She was the oldest of his aunts and the queen of their business. 

Sisk was the word for runt in the language of his folk. It was a kindly word when used with a bull of small years, but when applied to an adlo it was a shaming word - it meant one who would not learn to swim or catch his own food; one who would die of weakness. 

His mother permitted him to be called names like this because he had begun to worry her. He was small for his age and had been in her keeping longer than was ordinary. Also, the hallmarks of his character, his dive and his spout were odd and un-beautiful. 

"Stop doing that!" she said when he let loose with his spray at the end of a dive, "It splits. It's not normal."

"I like it," he said obstinately, ignoring her obvious dislike of him, "It's fine."

"It looks weak," he caught her muttering to herself on many occasions, loud enough for him to hear - he thought. 

He longed for the solitude that would come with his coming of age. He hated the constant enforced togetherness of the maternal pod. It suffocated him. He wanted to see the open waters and hear the sounds of the deep ocean. He wanted to fish for the wild squid that frequented the deepest waters. He wanted to learn to sing with the mighty singers of his father's folk who could make the waters carry their songs across the deep mountains of the south. 

But when that day would come was not certain. 

To leave the pod and be acknowledged by the folk of the waters, his father would need to return to the River Canyon and call him out. 

His father. His father. Ceto had heard many tales of his father. 

"A fearsome bull," Fisher had told him, "A swimmer who has touched the ice mountains of the Imprisoner and the dark water of Tenah." 

This was, of course, only figurative language for any bull, but it was seriously meant. Ceto dreamed of his father's return and longed to be called out. He had never seen him - which was not unusual - and wished to understand the stuff that he came from. 

Fisher was the ancient bull that grazed in the waters near the atoll that Ceto's pod called home. He had long retired from the deep places of the south. The driving spirit had left him and he had returned to the middle waters to await the last season of his days. Fisher had taken his name for obvious reasons as he was a skilled squid hunter and had a marked scar from the great monster squid of the south. 

"Never had a chance to catch him," Fisher had told Ceto truthfully once, "Lucky actually, he never got a good hold of my nose. Felt like hot ice those tentacles of his."

Fisher went on short journeys, but was never gone for more than a week at a time. And though he could still mount to the depths of the river, he mostly sang in the regions close to Ceto and his maternal pod. He was Ceto's only real friend and he missed him when he was away. 

It was on this day that Ceto heard what he had heard only once or twice before in his life, the sound of a boat. It was a strange scraping sound on the top of the waters; not like the rushing noise of another whale skimming the surface; but a rough scrape. It hurt his sensitive ears to listen to. But he was also attracted to the noise. 

"Water demons," Skimmer had said ominously, "Death, surely."

On an impulse, Ceto ascended from the depth that he had been swimming at and rose to the level of the surface. His nose breached the water and he felt the air on his body and across the sensitive area of his eyes. 

A whale's eyes are very weak and they were not his primary way of navigating or knowing where he was. Still it was pleasurable to see when there was something to look at, and Ceto had better eyes than some. Looking sidelong in the distance, he spied a dark irregular shape skimming the surface of the water. It was as large as a full sized bull, but it did not move with flexes and bows; it moved at a steady clipping gait. It was not moving towards him, but away; away out towards the deep water of the middle abyss that he had never crossed.

"Like my dream," he thought, remembering the strange squared shapes filled with the hue and cry of voices that he had never heard, "I wonder what it means."

He did not follow the boat. He watched it for a time until it drifted out into a tiny speck and was swallowed up by the dark mass of waves. 

He returned to the water to find that he was being called for. The voice was steady but urgent. 

"Ceto! Ceto! Ceto!" it was his aunt Grayer. 

"What," he asked from across the span of water that separated them, "Can't I have a little peace."

"Not today, not today," she said excitedly, "Come back, come back."

"Why," he asked half curious, half suspiciously. 

"Meeting day," she said gasping with excitement, "Meeting day. Their voices... can't you hear them. Your father might be among them."