A Lost Boy

Ceto's early days had been a struggle. He didn't move correctly and needed constant tending to ensure that the both took breath and ate. Had he been born into a gam with only younger mothers, he might have been lost. But it happened at the time that he was born that there were a number of females past the age of birthing who assisted the younger mothers.

"Oh, that one is work," Gerontia, the eldest of the gam, had said to her sisters after taking a shift with the infant male, "Can't do much for himself."

"And such a strange one too," said Asher, a younger matron, "Have you seen his color."

"Yes," said Gerontia in a whisper, "But let that be - there's not been one like this for all my time."

"Why," said Asher, "What is there in it?"

"Never mind that," said Gerontia, "You'll come to know in time. It doesn't mean the thing for certain. It's just not a welcome thing considering all the other challenges with this boy."

Neither remark had been made with any rancor or bitterness. Gerontia and Asher had both raised children of their own and helped with many others. Their words were more in the tone of a sculptor presented with an odd piece of marble.

"What can we do," said Asher, "But to help him live. That is the only thing to do."

And live he did. When a few months had passed, he began to show signs of both independence and stubbornness - he slapped his keeper more than once.

"Did you see that one hit me," said Asher when her time was changing, "Slapped me with that little flank of his."

"Good," Gerontia replied, "Good. Got some fight in him. He'll need it."

"He can't go straight though," said Asher with less humor, "He pulls to one side."

"I know," said the older female, "Not sure how to stop that."

To help him, and to encourage him, they took it in turns to reign him in on his driving side. This made things slow and tedious and required more of the gam to assist.

Grayer Departs

They'd been some days on the move through the barren waters when Ceto felt land grow closer. The edge of the groundswell was still miles off, but even from that distance he felt the great wall of it hemming him in. It's a feeling that no bull relishes. He tried to ignore it.

"Perhaps we'll head into deeper waters soon," he thought hopefully and labored on beside his aunt.

"Is it dangerous being this close," he asked when he could not stand the silence any longer.

He'd expected her to react angrily, and to tell him that he was a fool - that this was one of those adult things that a child fears foolishly, but he was wrong.

"Keep moving," she said flatly, "These are not nice places."

"Why," he asked with a little fear, "Are there Killers here?"

"Just mind your direction and don't stray," she said without answering, "If we're fortunate, we'll go unnoticed. It may be that these grounds have changed too and there is less to fear than I think."

"What do you remember," Ceto asked.

"The smell of death is still heavy here," she said, partly in a dazed voice, "There were many who died in these crossings when I was a girl."

"Why did..." he began to ask, but there was no need - Grayer went on.

"These are still the only ways down to the lower ices and the summer grounds of old. Those are still good places to fish and grow fat and strong. Just a little to our east are cross currents that would confuse our paths and make this trip impossible. There are seasons when they drift even further east, and we need to swim in the shallows."

"What do you remember," he asked again, "hoping partly that she would not tell."

The Grotto

Ceto followed her as best he could. The ropes that held fast his strong side seem to have grown tighter as the waters had grown colder. Every yard forward was a struggle and he wondered how long he could keep up.

It grew hard too to follow her through the narrow lightless channels of ice, under roofs of ice and through literal tunnels under the ice. He shivered and thought of what would happen if he lost her in this maze - he struggled on.

There was a grinding and a shifting like the sound of heavy slabs of stone rolling over crushed rock that troubled him and made him wish for open waters again.

"One long dive ahead," she said.

He wondered what she meant and thought to ask, but nearly as soon as she spoke, she put her nose to the depths and dropped like a stone. Ceto, too started to be fearful, put his nose behind and tried not to think of his exhaustion or pain. He could sense the huge wall of ice that they were decending along. He wondered how deep it went.

On. On. On. For what seemed like an hour at least, they dove. He felt the great wall begin to taper inward until at last there was space beneath it. There was no sound. He caught the faintest hint of her turn ahead of him and he did his best to place himself behind her and struggle on.

"Warm," he thought suddenly, "There's a heat coming from somewhere."

It seemed to him that the water began to grow less cold. That and there seemed to be a light growing up around them, a whitish green sort of light - wholesome. It was not the light of the sun.

In his wonder he forgot himself and he drew upwards with her towards the surface of whatever or wherever they were. As they rose the water grew more temperate, cool and comfortable. He passed through great schools of small squid and fish and then at last he breached.

"We're here," she said at last after they'd taken many breaths, "Welcome to my grotto."

He was in a place the like of which he'd never seen before. It was a great sheltered bay surrounded by ice mountains and open to the sky. The circumfirence was hard to determine, but he guessed it was miles and miles across - a wide hidden sea. Warmth filled the waters beneath him and the place seemed to be filled with schools and schools of food.

"Eat if you like," she said, "There's enough for many gams here without worry of lack and we are only two."

Then, for many hours, for he had a great hunger, he dove and ate and ate until he felt content and tired.

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.

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."