Chapter 18
I row. Everyone rows. And if the wind seems to curve and shift so that it’s suddenly not fighting us back but urging us onward, if the waves seem almost to rearrange themselves around Silas, propelling us onward, I can’t think too hard about it.
We are close. The water grows choppier. The clicking and groaning are so loud now I can feel my teeth vibrating. I risk a glance over my shoulder as I row, just as a spout trumpets up from the whale’s back, not thirty yards away now. Chills ripple through me, skin tightening with anticipation.
The other boats have pulled into position ahead of us, fanning out around where the Livyatan—its gray bulk like a small island arcing out of the water—floats and breathes, each breath sending a mist of white water high over our heads.
The wind blows the vapor into my face, and it’s warm, smelling like musk and salt, unmistakably the breath of something alive.
I understand suddenly why whalers go out to sea again and again in all seasons, leaving behind their families and all the comforts of life on land.
The adrenaline crowds every thought out of my head, leaving no room for grief or fear or responsibility or anything at all but the task set out for us: Catch the whale.
Kill the whale. Faced with such a massive creature, I feel a bond of kinship connecting me with every soul on our three little boats, even the ones who just days ago were howling for Silas’s blood. We have a common purpose now.
The harpooners at the stern of each boat rise slowly, metal shining in their hands. The tide pushes us faster. But it doesn’t drown out Mance’s scream of “Now!” or the bang of the harpoon guns or the whistle of weapons through the air or the thud of metal into flesh.
And it certainly doesn’t drown out the cheers that rise up from the Heralder’s men, or the simultaneous deep, inhuman groan that radiates from the whale—a sound that, although I’ve never heard anything like it before, I recognize as pure, terrible pain.
It punctures through the thrill of the chase. Dashes coldness into my heart.
I’m panting, my muscles screaming, by the time our boat pulls into formation with the other two and everyone jams oars in the water, bringing us to a stop. I turn in my seat, gripping the sides of the boat to keep my balance against the choppy water, mouth dry.
August’s harpooner missed and is hauling the rope back now.
Mance’s harpooner, though, has struck the target; a rope trails from their boat to the whale’s flank.
Zimri pulls his arm back, harpoon pointed down, but before anyone can get off another blow, the whale dives.
Waves ripple out from where it disappeared, and I clutch the side of the boat, instinctively leaning into the wave that drenches my clothes.
“Let out the rope!” Mance barks. The men in his boat lean out of the way as the whale’s clicks and groans grow dimmer, replaced by the hiss and clatter of rope being let rapidly out of its tub, the line stretching down into the water.
As the waves die down, a strange quiet settles, everyone waiting to see how deep the whale will go.
My heart beats in my throat. Mance’s men throw buckets of seawater on the rope as it feeds out, wetting it so it doesn’t catch fire.
A towheaded man seated in the back by the line tub counts the distance.
“A hundred feet. A hundred fifty.” His voice gets higher and more nervous with every declaration. “Two hundred.”
Each of the line tubs holds three hundred feet of rope.
If the whale dives deeper than that, the crew will be forced to cut the line or be pulled under, unless they can extend it.
Teuila grabs a coil of rope from our boat and tosses it over to them; August does the same, eyes focused.
Mance’s men get to work trying to tie off the ends, but—
“Two fifty!” The prow of Mance’s boat dips, the rope going taut. It’s spooling out too fast for them to tie it. The men glance to one another frantically and my stomach drops. Little though I like Mance or his men, I don’t want to watch them drown.
“Two seventy-five!” The man shouting the numbers pulls out a machete, ready to slash the rope, but Mance shouts, “Hold! It’s slowing down.”
He’s half crouched at the back of the boat, which is tilted thirty degrees downward.
His men lean back in their seats, faces twisted in fear as every coming wave risks swamping them.
But Mance is right; the rope stops tugging, and for a stretching moment all is still.
Like the whole world is holding its breath.
Then—“It’s going slack,” the blond man shouts. “She’s coming up!”
As the nose of Mance’s boat rocks upward, his crew begin to frantically crank the line tub, pulling the rope back in as fast as they can, but the whale is coming up faster.
“Take up oars,” Silas orders, and the others and I obey, loath though I am to let go of the boat as the sea seethes beneath us.
I’m seized by a sense of how very small we all are out here in the waves, even with our boats and ropes and killing tools, and of how the sky and the sea and even the whale are only playing a game with us.
Humoring us for a little while until it’s time to swallow us whole.
Then a burning at my collarbone makes me gasp.
The pendant beneath my shirt has gone hot.
I clap my hand to my throat, scrabbling to pull it away from my skin.
Everyone’s attention is on the water; no one notices but Silas.
He looks down at me, eyes wide with understanding.
The pendant appears the same as ever, but the surface is hot even through my gloves.
Yet there’s no room to think about it. I sense the whale’s approach more than hear it, at first. A disruption in the pattern of waves, a clicking that feels more like something inside my body than outside it, traveling up from the soles of my feet to my limbs, to my chest, my teeth, the top of my skull. A dark shape in the water.
It sounds angry. It sounds enraged.
It’s right beneath us.
“Down!” Silas’s cry cuts through the air, above the sudden clamor of swearing and shouting. He drops into a crouch, and the rest of us grip the gunwales just in time.
A hundred things happen at once. The whale breaches, its entire body erupting like a volcano directly between our three whaleboats, Mance’s rope still hanging from the harpoon fastened in its side.
None of my lessons could have prepared me for its mass.
Not the diagrams in my books, not the skull hanging in Papa’s library or the massive vertebrae I’ve seen in the warehouses.
Vertical in the air, the whale towers over us—as tall as a house, as long as a ship, outlined in red and white spray.
Its thunderous clicks rattle my insides.
My senses are crystalline sharp with adrenaline, or maybe it’s the heartbreak curse kicking in, the monster part of me surfacing when shock and fear have chased all else away.
In slow motion I realize the whale is twisting, falling in our direction.
I see it coming down, blocking out the sun.
Awe fills me. Like seeing the Maker’s hand coming down from the sky. For a second, I forget to be afraid.
Then Ezra grabs me and hauls me over the side with him, pushing off from the boat with his feet, and I catch a glimpse of the rest of the Whistler crew doing the same, even as Mance’s and August’s crews throw more harpoons and lances.
Our just-vacated boat shatters. The boom of the whale hitting the water sounds like a thousand cannons, like the end of the world, as water swallows me.
The shock wave seizes me—seizes everyone—and the current tears me away from the others, our crew flying in all directions.
Bubbles stream from my mouth in a silent scream.
When I open my eyes, the light from above—broken by the battling masses of the whale and the two remaining boats—is far away and getting farther.
I flail, but my clothes pull me down; I frantically kick off my boots, wrestle out of my coat and gloves, letting it all sink.
I can’t see the Whistler crew anywhere. Panic blooms as my air dwindles.
All the while, the pendant burns and burns against my skin, even as the chill of the ocean consumes the rest of me.
Then my heart skips. Another whale swims toward me from below. This one is still huge, but not as massive as the one overhead, the one we harpooned, the one that breached.
I make myself not scream, not give up any more precious air. Pedal my arms and legs, but then realize it’s not aiming for me—it’s angled toward the surface, the fight. Its flesh is smooth and light gray, not puckered and scarred. A juvenile. A calf.
It swims past me, my entire field of vision filling up with a toothed jaw, a glittering eye, a frantic fin. And suddenly, with a surge of adrenaline, I know what I have to do.
I kick forward, seizing hold of the whale calf’s fin as it passes by. It feels smooth and alien under my hand, but I force myself to kick, to wrap my other arm around its body, my legs too, so I’m lying flat to its back as my chest aches for air.
The whale wheels in shock, emitting a series of higher, shorter clicks.
Its flesh is slick and featureless, nothing to grab onto.
But my claws are exposed, longer and sharper than they’ve been in weeks, and I sink them into the calf’s hide, clinging to its back, one objective fixed in my mind as if dropped there by a higher power:
Don’t let it reach the surface. Don’t let this one be killed too.