In Great Waters (2 page)

His mother did not look pleased, but after a moment she leaned towards him. Her free hand gripped hard around his jaw, and as she leaned in, Whistle flinched back: was she going to bite him, snatch out his whimpering tongue? But her mouth closed around his, and as her fingers dug into his face, he parted his teeth a little, and his mother exhaled. A stream of warm air flowed down into his lungs. It was thin and weak, but it was air, and his head cleared just a little before she withdrew her cold lips and handed him over to the other woman, making a fast, graceful drive for the surface. Whistle stayed down, an untrusting grip holding his arm, as his mother raced to the surface to breathe, and the dark shape moved on above them.

As the weeks and months passed, Whistle grew more used to the shapes. He grew bigger, and better able to conserve his breath. Sometimes tribe youngsters were taken up for a peek, but never Whistle. He would remain below, dizzy with lack of air, with a firm grip on his wrist holding him down. When they returned from the passing shapes—there was a word for them he learned,
ships
, a word that featured frequently in the chants about which route to take in which season—they would bring food, sometimes great handfuls of it, enough to share freely. It was a good day when a ship sailed overhead. The fish would be plentiful, so much of it that there was no need even to fight over it, and Whistle could eat until his stomach was full, a sensation he never knew at other times. The fish tasted odd, a little stale and lukewarm instead of the chilled, chewy flesh that the hunts caught, but it made a change from scavenged crabmeat. The ships had nothing about them that suggested any kind of threat, and the tribe were always quick to follow when they heard one. Nonetheless, the undefined word, the thing they did not want dropped, preyed on Whistle’s mind. It was uncanny and dangerous, living with a mystery, and Whistle, new to the uncanny, decided he did not like it.

It was some way into his fifth year that Whistle’s mother took him for a swim on their own. She was obliging, slowing her pace to his, sharing fish she caught rather than letting Whistle stop to search for crabs.
The water around them grew brighter, cloudier, the floor rising up and up, pressing them closer to the surface. The lack of space made Whistle nervous; everything seemed to be shrinking. If he chirruped, sound bounced back at him fast: there were no distances to scan. Something was blocking the echoes. He made to turn around, and found his mother’s hand on his arm, dragging him on, faster than before. The floor loomed up beneath them, nearer every moment, and there were suddenly barriers on either side of them, walls of rocks, and then a harsh new sound beat in his ears—for a few yards up ahead, the world gave out, the water thinned to a ragged edge, crashing again and again, dying on the bank.

Whistle found the floor was right up against him, the surface breaking over his back. His mother gave him a shove. His feet felt the pressure of the sand: his eyes saw a vast bank of it, terrifyingly dry beyond the waves. He turned, holding out his arms to his mother, saying,
Move on. Bad place
. She pushed him again, raked her nails across his arm. The push took him into the breakers, and he fell on all fours, unbearably heavy without the water to hold him up. Whistle tried to get into a pleading stance, to beg for her kindness in the posture of appeal, but the air would not support him and he stumbled. He turned again, and received a slash across the chest. His mother waited in the shallows, teeth bared, and lifted a rock in her hand.

Whistle, light-headed with the endless amount of air, turned his back and crawled up the beach, sitting on the wet sand where she could not follow. His mother watched him for a moment, then turned. She had to thrash to free herself from the bank, and then she was gone, swimming fast out to sea.

For two days, Whistle sat in the surf, digging for buried molluscs to eat, hungry, dry, utterly alone. On the evening of the second day, he heard a new sound, a rhythm like the waves, only faster, multiple. A creature appeared: finless, square, four narrow legs pounding upon the beach. On its back sat a man, covered in colours like a crab, but with a face almost like the ones he knew, and, like himself, split down the middle, a leg on either side of this beast. Whistle was afraid of the animal, but he also knew, with the clarity of one who has always been
close to the edge of survival, that if he stayed here, he would die. He did not look back at the sea. He drew himself a dizzying lungful of air, reached out his arms, and called.

The journey was a long one, and unnerving, but Whistle showed nothing on his face. The man had stared at him, paced to and fro on the sand and stared again. His expressions were not unlike the expressions of people from the tribe, but his square teeth and white-rimmed eyes were distracting. In bulk, he wasn’t large, but the air was so thin here and gave no support: Whistle was collapsed on his flexible legs, unable to rise, and this long-boned, upright creature towered over him. In the sea, he’d been small, smaller than other boys his age, but this skinny creature made Whistle feel tiny. Most strange of all was the tint of his skin, a pink-red pale colour like you got in the first few feet of water below the surface, before descent into the depths greyed everything out to shades of blue and green and white. The man himself gasped endlessly for air, inhaling again and again, faster than the waves beating on the shore. Whistle watched the straight limbs of the man as he paced, bizarrely inverted with his body upright as if permanently breaking the surface. Salt was drying on Whistle’s skin and itchy sand stuck to him instead of falling away in the water; as he rubbed at them, he saw a shade of colour in his own webbed hands, on his own scratched arms, that was pinker than he had thought, pale, but closer to the pacing being’s redness than he had ever seen. It was not his own colour, could not be. This sight was worse than that of the gasping, striding creature before him, and Whistle sat frozen, still sick with oxygen, looking fixedly at his own arms as the man eventually lifted him up and set him atop the large creature. The smell of it was appalling: sensation flooded Whistle, new and horrifying, entirely alien to a nose used only to the mild salt of the sea and the beach, a rank, choking, red-coloured rush that jolted him almost as much as the animal’s motion as the man climbed up behind him and jerked them forward.

Whistle sat as still as he could, making no move to grasp the juddering
animal, no response to the rumblings of the creature behind him, trapped and bewildered as they took him past the yellow-grey beach, on through fields, through lanes, through woods, stretching on for miles, dazzlingly bright, impossibly green.

Whistle was brought to a towering rock, stiff-sided and grey, with a dark entrance like that of a cave. The man lifted him down and tucked him against his side. All of Whistle’s instincts were to struggle, but this place was unbearable, and if the man were to drop him, he would be lost on the blinding green ground, stuck on his crumpled fins with no molluscs to dig for, and then he would starve. This man must eat, and possibly would give him food if he begged. So Whistle turned his head aside from the reeking red skin and took a breath, and stayed still in the man’s arms, muscles rigid, as a smothering dark thing the man wore over his shoulders was draped over him and the man entered this dim, alien cave. Under the edge of the cloth he could see something grotesque, a stack of rocks, all just as straight-sided as this new edifice, and then the man was jolting Whistle again as he began to climb, stepping up and up. With no sea to cushion him, Whistle’s head rocked and bounced on his neck, shaking back and forth until it ached in the empty, thin-sounding air. The movement pressed on his bladder as well, and he released it as he would in the ocean, expecting nothing more than a drift of warm water that would dissipate cleanly into the salty sea. Instead he found scalding rivulets running down his limbs, a stinging sensation over his dry, rasped skin, and a loud exclamation from the deep-voiced stranger, who shook him in disgust. Entirely bewildered, Whistle kept his face turned away. He could think of nothing else to do.

More strides and Whistle found himself in a room with narrow windows and stone walls, straight-sided and smooth to the touch, stacked up against each other in unthinkably neat lines. Regular shapes were not a new sight to Whistle, but he knew only the overlapping half-circles of a fish’s scales or the rounded hexagons of a sea urchin, and these four-cornered shapes were threatening: an endless
profusion of boxes that dazed his focus with their stiff, enclosing order. At the window, a grim-shaped chink of light, were hard, straight objects in a cold substance he had never seen in the sea, barring him in. It was difficult for him to see beyond them: his sight had trained itself underwater, where distance gave way to haze within ten yards and the distortions of the currents and plankton and salt concealed everything in the blue-green blur. Above the water when he surfaced to breathe he had seen further, but focusing on anything more than ten yards away was an effort that made his head ache and his eyes waver, sometimes distorting his vision for minutes at a time.

Whistle was to stay in this room for a long time. He saw no one but the red man who had brought him from the beach. The confinement was maddening; after ranging over wide miles of sea, free to swim off in every direction, the rigid walls and weighty, earth-bound gravity drove the child to rages of impatience. Left on his own he bit at his hands, struck the walls, pulled and tore at the covers that had been left for him on a straw pallet. Sleep was all but impossible: after the yielding embrace of the water, the hard stone floor bruised him into endless wakefulness. It did not occur to him to use the pallet: its smell and colour were strange, and its four-sided angularity was of a piece with the rest of this room, this tense-cornered world. Instead he worried at it, pricking his hands on the straw, feeling nothing but the same enmity he felt for the walls. Once the covers were in rags, he could heap them up into little nests that gave him some relief from the rigid, cold floors, and into these he would crawl, rocking to and fro, amazed at the speed with which his body could move through this new, forceless substance that surrounded him.

The swiftness of the rocking was the only thing that contained him. Unattended, Whistle launched counter-attacks on the room that seemed so hostile to him, hauling himself from place to place across the floor, but when the sound of footsteps came to the door, he froze, sitting where he was, only rocking a little to keep his attention fixed away from the red man who stood tall over him, shaking his head at the devastation.

With him the man brought objects. Whistle had expected to beg
for food, and indeed, the first time the red man appeared, there was something in his hands that he held out to Whistle and, getting no response, lifted to Whistle’s mouth, tapping it against his lips. Whistle recoiled, for the substance was hot like urine, and its brown, seaweed colour seemed utterly inedible. The boy held his breath, refusing to smell, already too threatened by the appearance of this stuff he was expected to eat, and carried on rocking, turning his face aside every time the meat was proffered. He was afraid of offending the man, whose posture was so permanently upright that he seemed to be emphasising every sound he made, but he was more afraid of this corrupt-smelling substance.