Ider's Mountain

"Come and hear!" came the voice of Grayer over the swift current that was flowing that day, "Come and hear!"

Her voice rose and fell like the tolling of a bell. The story keeper was a central person in the gam and Grayer had proven herself better in the role than many who had held it before her. While not having the most powerful voice, she had great understanding of everything she could do with her voice within her range. Sometimes her voice was as soft and cajoling as the lap of the waves in calm weather, and other times it was as rough and inconstant as the scrape of rocks that hang loosely together.

"Hear the word," she called again, "Come and hear the word that lies beneath all things."

In the midst of all their grounds was the great atoll that was the center of all their lives in that corner of the world. The people called it Ider's Mountain in honor of the original owner of that place.

Owner is perhaps not the right word for the concept of possessions was quite unknown among the swimming folk. The mountain held his namesake. More than any kind of thing that we name in our world, the naming of a place held a significance in their culture that we only attribute to the naming of a visible star or a constellation. Though there are indeed many more immediate things in the waters to be named, this is done seldom in history.

Ider was the greatest bull, not only of his time, but for many generations before and after. He roamed the poles and swam in the deepest waters and the most dangerous grounds. He was never bested by another bull before his people and his descendants are many - so many that they cannot be now remembered.

But this is not why he earned a place in the lore, not just of his own folk, but in the greater and permanent landscape of the waters.

It was his story, the events of his life remembered because of their strangeness and their impact in preserving and changing the lives of the Ceto that had given him the stature of such a bull. That and a signature event, a story of stories, that made him the stuff of legend.

Ceto had heard his story told before in parts, for the whole story few learned, and even fewer were mighty enough singers to remember and convey. His aunt had learned several key points to the tale and would choose one of these to related at the gathering of the folk.

So it was that now, when the bulls returned from the deep and cold places, and the season of the year was turning to change, that she lifted her voice up to quiet the others. She called in the drum, drum, drumming of the chant that would bring every Ceto in hearing to the low sound of swimming only. To us it would be like the sounding of a bell.

"Oh Immortal Sound Winder give my voice strength to carry,

To the corners of the waters of the world and make my song,

As full of tenor as the rushing waves that break and breach.

I will sing of Ider, the bull with flanks like white mountains

I will sing of his song, the song that rumbled like the earth moving

I will sing of his deeds, the deeds that linger in our memory.

When Ider came in spring to his home all his people were starving,

All the deep grounds were deadly to the folk who dive alone

And the great monster Eto and his children drove them from food.

Eto and his children, like a demon and his sons in the darkness

Eto who moved in deep quiet, quiet like the quiet of death swimming

Eto who's fingers gripped like ice and dragged bulls suffocating to death

Ider came in the Spring and beheld Aral the mate of his life

Aral whose voice was as sweet as the waves lapping against the shores

Aral the mother who bore twenty heathy babes in her thirty years

Aral was weak and her calves were near the door of the dead and she

Was silent in her grief and want and said nor sang any word and her

Silence was the greatest grief like a winter that has no Spring to end it.

Ider, the bull who could swim in air when he breached the waves

Had not yet become the voice that we hear through the waters of time

And was young come to his maturity and his deeds both unknown and unsung

Ider looked on her and spoke his thought aloud, though his words stuck

Ider whose voice halted and stuttered like an uneven wave slapping the rocks

'Death would be better than to see my children and wife suffer starvation.'

And when he dove, even then his dive was like a mountain falling Aral

Thought he meant to bring an end to his days and hers and her children's

As bulls in the years before song are said to have done to cheat dishonor.

But Ider did not go with death in his deeds and he swam beyond hearing,

And as he clove the heavy darkness and he felt the weight of the waters,

He dove seeming heedlessly like any fool bull of few years into deaths arms.

And it so happened that one of the sons of Eto was in those waters and he

Had come there with the purpose of driving the Ceto from those grounds

And he was wicked and delighted in imprisonment and suffocation and silence.

Olo was his name and he heard Ider and swam with the arms of death and

Thought that he would grasp him by the nose and take him down to where the

Hag Fish strip the flesh from Ceto's and the bones of many fathers lie in dishonor.

Olo was a master of snares and he lay hid behind and above a cloud of small squid

Olo of the great silent arms, Olo the eldest of the children of Eto, Olo of death

And his arms were flung wide with expectation at his desire and he waited.

In those days, the days of the tooth, all bulls were taught to chew and to rend

And this slowed them in their eating and their movement and clouded their vision

And Ider, the bull with flanks like a white mountain, came to disdain his teeth.

He swam with his nose aloft and his teeth silent and he detected the trap that Olo

Had set and he swam through the cloud of young squid with his teeth quiet

And when Olo sprang at him with his arms flung wide, Ider swallowed him whole.

Whole he took him as no bull had ever done and whole he held him in his belly

And when words of his deeds spread through the waters of the world he taught

By his tale the ways of our people to those that were starving and they learned.

Such is the tale that we tell of Ider near the mountain that bears his name,

And though this is but one of the many deeds of his that we remember, it is still

The first that brought his name beyond the bounds of his grounds and to the wide waters."

Grayer finished her singing and the sound of it went up and was echoed in part by many of those who were present. And the melding of the staves of her song by so many voices all at once and in unison was like a chorus whose voices are as lovely and various together as a bouquet of flowers can be to our eyes.