In Great Waters (3 page)

After that, the man tried a fish. Whistle recognised the shape of it, but the flaking, loose-skinned texture convinced him that the fish was rotten, unsafe to eat, especially in this new environment where excrement stayed where it lay instead of washing away on the tides. The man showed it to him again and again, and Whistle rocked, hunger clamping his stomach, paralysed with indecision. It was many minutes before he came to the conclusion: eat or die. A sore stomach was better than an empty one; better to eat and be ill than starve and be dead. The fish was still in the man’s hand, and Whistle had no desire to be close to him, but there was no sign that the man would give it up. He leaned over, took two quick bites, swallowed. His empty stomach immediately convulsed, spewing the food onto the floor. Whistle took another bite, then another. Almost none of the food stayed in his stomach, but he kept on biting until the fish was gone and there was no more hope of nourishment in it.

After a while, the red man took to bringing raw fish. Whistle liked this little better, seeing the limp tails and dull eyes and tasting the beginnings of corruption in their flesh, but he bolted them down. His stomach always ached. The red man stared as the boy took food from his hand, but Whistle never met his gaze. He was too wary of the man’s white-rimmed eyes.

Along with food, the man brought other things. One was a pair of sticks, brown and straight. Whistle chewed them when left alone, rattled them along the floor, trying to break them. The clash of them
against the stone was the loudest thing he had heard since leaving the sea, but the noise reached his hearing thinly, with none of the vivid, intimate echo of sound carried through water. The red man held the sticks in his own hands, tapping them against the floor and leaning his weight against them, walking to and fro, four-limbed with the sticks as supports, but Whistle did not watch.

The other thing quickly introduced to his room was a flat square framed in some oddly bright gold wood, pink and blue and red in the middle. All he saw of it at first was that it was, like the door and the cupboards and the windows with their blurred green light, four-sided. The man presented it to Whistle and turned his head towards it, trying to get his interest, but, though the bright colours and curved lines within the frame were not unpleasant, Whistle, intimidated by the square shape, struggled and twisted his face from side to side, trying to escape from it. The man persisted for some time before giving up and lifting the object to hang on the wall. Safely away, Whistle squinted at it, but now it was too far away for him to distinguish details. Seeing him squint, the man pointed, and said a word so strange Whistle could hardly process it as speech. He could make out syllables, just about, but they meant nothing to him: Angelica.

I
T WAS ONLY
when other individuals started to appear in his doorway that Whistle understood the trouble he was in. One red man and a prison of lines was dismaying enough, but with unfresh fish to keep him from starving, it was a little better than oblivion. After a few days and nights, however, another creature appeared in the doorway. Its voice was higher pitched than the red man’s, a bit closer to the shrills of home, but its body was incomprehensible: bowed out over the lower half with huge, rustling fabrics, swollen at the chest like a tribeswoman but black to the wrists and neck, covered in cloth. Whistle, still naked and shivering against the stone, tentatively considered that the figure might be female, but this was an uncertain comfort, even if her hands held no rocks and her teeth were sheathed by pink lips. As the figure approached him and bent down, he froze. Tribeswomen other than his mother had little liking for him if he came too close; only in the case of some dire outside threat had women shown much concern for his life. While he was dimly aware that pining for his mother was something he could ill afford, the idea of her lingered in a current of hurt and confusion that he could not swim against.

Such feelings were only vaguely present at the appearance of this woman. So strange was her aspect that it was unclear to Whistle whether she could be considered a person at all. As she stepped nearer, the swinging bulb overlaying her lower half resolved itself as the same
flexible stuff that was providing him with a little padding against the rock floor, and that was a more definite solace than any action on her part. Whistle reached up his sharp-nailed fingers to tear off some strips, hoping to add to his bedding.

A jump, a shriek, and the creature was back against the wall. The movement had revealed, under the layers of cloth, limbs like the red man’s. Whistle froze again, retreating his attention back into himself and rocking to and fro. The swathed woman was like the red man, two of a kind, and that was a disaster. There were more of them.

Warfare was something Whistle had understood almost from birth. Marauding dolphins swam in packs through the sea, strong-tailed and sharp-toothed as the tribe; even when rights of way and shoals of prey were not in dispute there was little mercy between them. A single dolphin was always a creature to attack: Whistle had seen the tribe circle and mass on lone swimmers, biting fins and gouging eyes, raking long scratches with their clawed hands and leaving dark billows of blood drifting through the water. Dolphin meat was not good to eat, and the corpse would be left to sink into the depths for scavengers to swarm on, but no dolphin swimming unprotected was ever ignored. A child of the tribe, found by a troop of dolphins, could expect no greater mercy. Its ravaged body would spiral in a slow descent to the ocean floor, only its tongue and jaw chewed away as a trophy. It was when the tribe encountered dolphins in groups that Whistle’s chest tightened the most: the tribe would stiffen, the dolphins would poise, the very water would tense around them as the two bands circled each other, weighing up for combat. Whistle and the other children could only swim around the melee as dark shapes thrashed and struck, churning the water, a teeming mass of shadows slashing and grappling in silent, furious killing; stay out of the fray and keep lookout for other predators homing in, calling alarms and scanning the blood-dimmed water for the sight of their own mothers, watching to see whether they would come out of the war alive.

This was what Whistle understood of other peoples. The dolphins were another kind, strong as the tribe but different in form and language. There was a concept for that in his tribe’s speech:
enemy
.
Whistle was isolated, away from the group, surrounded by what could only be another tribe, different in form, different in language. So far they had offered him food, but there was no certainty that this wouldn’t change. The boy rocked back and forth, waiting with averted head to see whether this new woman would define him as an enemy.

Rather than point and call, however, the woman raised odd, web-less hands to cover her face, and began to make a harsh, throbbing sound. Out of the corner of his eye, Whistle saw with puzzlement that droplets were rolling down her face, out of her eyes. From its motion, falling like beads of brine when a tribesman surfaced for breath, it could only be water. Never had the boy seen such a feat before, and curiosity briefly contended with his fear. The keening continued, and Whistle struggled to think about it. The noise was unfamiliar, but her posture and manner suggested defeat. Perhaps she was not a threat.

Earthbound on his curved legs, Whistle pulled his way across the floor. Catching at her skirt, he made an effort and pulled himself closer to upright. The woman covered her face, cowering back, and Whistle gazed in astonishment at this great creature that flinched away from him with such fear. The water fell faster, and he reached up, yanking her down with more confidence. She tensed again, pulling back, but when the red man made some kind of sound across the room, she stopped, not leaning down but ceasing to retreat. This stillness Whistle understood as submission, and with the authority of a dominant tribesman, not sure how he had come by this position but determined not to relinquish it, he tugged her down and touched the tears falling from her eyes.

The taste of them was familiar, not unlike the sea, though with a meaty undertone that unsettled his stomach. As he tracked them across her face, his sharp nail drew a line across her pink skin, and he stopped, poked again, puzzling at its softness, the way it yielded under his callused finger and split, leaving a thin trail of red at the touch of his nails. His clawing touch made her shiver, and the flow of tears increased; interested, Whistle poked at her cheek, giving rise to still more tears.

At this, the red man strode across the room and grabbed his wrist. The gesture was cautious, but Whistle recognised it from years of being pulled out of danger, away from a passing whale or down out of sight of the dark ships overhead, and he froze again, unwilling to provoke the bringer of food. The man spoke to him in a raised voice that made Whistle struggle with an impulse to cower: “No, Henry.”

Whistle froze.

The man reached for the sticks lying on the ground, the latest of a series of repeatedly renewed pairs that Whistle had not yet managed to break, and pushed one into each of the boy’s hands.

“Up, Henry,” he said, lifting the boy high on his bending, sliding legs.

Whistle staggered, paddling at the floor, falling this way and that. The rapid approach of the ground as he swayed almost drove him to panic, but as the man set him again and again on the sticks, Whistle gripped at them as the only way to keep hold of the man’s supporting hands. Sticks were not entirely new; his lifetime of levering flesh from crustaceans had given him an interest in anything that could be used to prise, and as the man pushed them down again and again, the boy began to place them against the floor, levering himself up against the threatening stone.

Finally the hot red hands withdrew, and the boy stood there for a few seconds before the sticks wobbled in his hands and he tumbled down with a jarring crash. The pain of the stones against his knocked flesh distracted him, but the man was leaning down and patting him. The boy squirmed: the impact did not hurt, but, unshielded by water, was more forceful than he was used to. The man spoke again. “Henry,” he said.

The woman in the corner shivered, but the boy made no move to acknowledge her, uncertain now as to their relative status.

“Henry,” the man said. He laid his hand on his own chest, with another word: “Allard.” The red hand pointed at the square on the wall that the boy was still avoiding: “Angelica.” Then again, indicating the boy with a lighter touch: “Henry. Henry. Henry.”

This was a new difficulty: the acquisition of a name. By the time a second woman appeared in the doorway, then another man, the boy had begun to grasp the degree to which he was outnumbered. Those four people were all he saw for a good length of time, but he had not survived the tribe and the oceans for nothing: he had always needed to be less stupid than his companions. If there were four, there were others. There were no fathoms of cloudy water for them to swim out of, but they might appear at any moment, from behind any rock. Surrounded on all four sides by walls of stone, the boy could only use his reason to understand the likelihood of an attack. Day after day, it didn’t happen, but that did not mean it was impossible. He saw how the land people surrounding him watched the windows and started at noises from outside, and he understood. This hard-sided, hard-ceilinged cave was a shelter. They were all hiding from something.

T
HE WOMAN
who had first appeared in the doorway was seen little. The boy was not sorry at her absence. Members of the tribe were sometimes taken by sharks or dolphins before his eyes, and sometimes swam away and did not return; possibly she had been taken by some land creature like the stinking animal he had ridden to this place. In any case, her skittishness had bothered him; fear-frozen creatures sometimes lashed out, and he had found her impossible to predict.

Another woman appeared soon after, guided by the red man. “Nurse,” the man said, pointing at her; the boy kept rocking, not meeting the man’s eyes. The man seemed to have a habit of staring at him when he made certain sounds, usually shorter ones, saying them over and over. The sounds were too far removed from the language the boy knew to make any sense, but the staring was threatening. Clearly the man wanted something from him when he made these noises, but whether he was demanding a display of submission—but how to perform it in a way the man would understand?—or that the boy give him something—what? he had nothing, no fish or clams or crabs to hand over—the boy could not tell. Until he could work out what the man was demanding, it was safer to rock and hope that, like a tribesman, he was too stupid to work out that the boy had heard him.

So, the woman associated with the command of “nurse” drew little response from him at first. The red man, however, left the two of
them alone together. At the sight of her settling down to watch him, claustrophobia gripped the boy: the walls of the room seemed closer than ever, and with someone’s eyes upon him, he did not quite dare return to the frenzy of tearing and snapping that released some of the tension oppressing him when he was left alone. Anxiously, he raised his fingers to his mouth to nibble at them; the pain was sharp, but in the absence of salty water stung less than he would have expected. Pain and interest together held his attention for a while, and he continued to take careful nips at his hands, sharp, tiny teeth punching through his tough skin.