Chapter 18 #2
The young whale twists and thrashes, but swims still toward the surface, toward the adult whale I know instinctively must be its mother.
The clicks from both whales ping back and forth; I can feel them in my teeth—one high and one deep, a frantic exchange I can understand all too well.
Shouts and yelps from the men, the legs of other crew members dangling in the water.
A cloud of red blooms out from around the mother whale.
When she twists, I see more harpoons, more ropes tangling her fins, a wide rolling eye.
I’m running out of oxygen, my body weakening, but I beat at the calf with all my strength, kicking, tearing at it with my hands.
My scratches don’t go deep enough to draw blood, but I must make it understand that hope is lost. Its clicks speed up into something like a scream, and it whirls beneath me, eye turning up to meet mine.
I scream too with my last scrap of air, the bubbles trickling out weakly, as our gazes meet, creature to creature.
A great semitranslucent lid sinks down, then rises up again over the dark, liquid eye. Its pain and confusion and sorrow fill me to overflowing. I feel what it feels. After all, my parents were taken from me too.
Go, I think, my vision going black at the edges. I’m sorry. Go.
It goes, disappearing into the depths. I hang there in its wake, stunned, my oxygen-starved brain slow to process the certainty spilling through.
This is unconscionable.
This must end.
Air. I remember—I need air. My chest feels like it’s on fire. My vision is dimming.
I kick upward, but suddenly the light isn’t where I thought it was. I look around, but I can’t see anything. I must have sunk farther down without realizing it. My limbs feel numb, and I can’t tell if my eyes are open or not. It’s so cold—when did it get so cold?
Hope dissipates as Lydia’s voice sounds in my head. Good job, Annie. Your whole life dedicated to killing whales and now you’ve killed yourself saving one.
Then he’s in front of me, close enough to see through the murky water and my fading vision. Silas, eyes wide, dark hair floating around his face like seaweed.
He grabs me around the waist, kicks for the surface, but I’ve sunk too far. I won’t make it. I open my mouth to tell him I’m sorry. That I would end whaling, I would, but he’ll have to find someone else. I try to speak, but water rushes in instead.
We stop moving. His hands frame my face, pulling me closer. I’m strangely at peace knowing his storm-cloud eyes are the last thing I’ll ever see.
My own flutter closed as he presses his mouth to mine.
At first I think it’s a hallucination, my dying mind trying to distract me from my aching limbs and screaming lungs, replacing them with Silas’s hands framing my face, his body pressed against mine, warding off the icy immensity of the sea.
But then, the smell of petrichor. Air rushing into me, oxygen. The pain in my chest lifts as I gasp. My limbs come back to life and my hands find Silas’s waist, cling to him, as his chest rises and falls beneath mine.
Not a kiss. He’s breathing air into me, the sharp tinge of enchantment filling my lungs, my veins, every cell of me. Finfolk magic, keeping me alive as the battle rages on far above us, as the mother whale thrashes and the men scream.
Our chests move together as time stretches and life comes back into my limbs. An almost painful warmth, like holding my hands in front of a fire in winter. A feeling of the world coming unfastened around me, light and air pouring in through broken seams.
Finally, he breaks away, loops an arm around me, and swims us up toward the surface.
We emerge into chaos, the sun blinding after the dark of the sea.
Air burns as it pours into me. I splutter and choke, spitting up water over Silas’s shoulder.
He’s pulled me against him with one arm while he swims, my legs wrapped around his waist and my arms over his shoulders, my cheek pressed to his wet hair.
I dimly register the impropriety of it all, but I don’t have the strength to move, my limbs still numb and lead-heavy.
As my senses recover, the chaos around me organizes itself into recognizable shapes.
More sailors from the Heralder have arrived with a spare boat to replace our shattered one, and Ezra, Josephine, Teuila, and Zimri huddle inside, but other men have spilled into the water; meanwhile, Heralder men a few yards away have landed more harpoons in the Livyatan, tangling her in a net of ropes and bloody iron.
She has stopped clicking, and distantly I wonder if it’s because the young one has fled.
“Annie!” August’s distraught cry hooks my attention.
He kneels at the side of his boat with four other men.
The others are gripping the rope from their line tub with all their strength, trying to prevent it from swamping them as the whale bucks at the other end, but August ignores the chaos to reach out to me.
His blue eyes skim over Silas and search my face, but I can’t read his expression as Silas swims us over and grabs the side of the boat so my fiancé can grip me beneath the arms and haul me in.
Bracing one hand on the back of my head to keep it clear of the snapping rope, August settles us on a bench and wraps his arms around me while Silas crawls into the prow.
August takes in my bare hands and feet, and I think of my gloves, boots, and coat settling on the seafloor, crabs and fish making homes of them.
“I thought you were gone,” he whispers as he pulls a damp blanket from the bottom of the boat and hurriedly wraps it around me.
The other men are too occupied with the rope to notice, but I see his eyes flick to Silas and back to me as I shiver.
He sees what I see. The rips in Silas’s soaked shirt between his shoulder blades, ten small points of blood seeping through in the shape of my clutched hands.
I’m freezing all over, except for the spot on my chest where the pendant burned me and my mouth with the memory of Silas’s lips pressed to mine.
It wasn’t a kiss, and there’s no way August could know about the not-kiss anyway.
But I feel like it must be written all over my face, this current of mingled shame and electricity lighting up my veins.
A wave from the whale’s tail rocks the whaleboat, then another, tilting us sideways, and August holds me tight to him. Men swear and water splashes into the boat as the whale thrashes, its tail striking the water again and again like a hand of a god.
But it’s flagging, its movements slowing.
Its breaths come fast now, the plumes of white from its blowhole stunted and piteous.
The screaming—because that’s all I can think to call it, a scream, even though it’s lower than any human voice could ever be—feels like it’s going to shatter all my bones as Mance in the other boat readies another harpoon.
“Aim for the heart!” Silas cries, standing in the prow with his fists clenched. Wind whips at his wet hair, his clothes.
But if Mance hears him, he doesn’t acknowledge it.
The captain’s harpoon pierces beneath the whale’s eye; blood flies.
The waves push us away from the whale, then yank us closer, like gravity has vacated the earth and now resides in the whale’s massive body.
She gnashes her jaw and groans thunderously.
The froth from her blowhole comes out tinged red.
“Aim for the heart!” Silas screams again at Mance, voice rising with the wind. “Damn you all! The heart!”
Then something seems to change in him. Even with his back to me I can see it in his posture, how he goes still, the horror draining away and an icy determination flowing through him in its place. He turns back toward me, our eyes meeting, and my blood goes cool and slow.
“A lance,” he says with cold authority, and I pull out of August’s arms. My hand moves seemingly of its own accord, freeing one from a nearby bundle.
The metal is cold under my wet hands, and the arrowhead tip glitters in the sun as I pass it up to Silas.
The heartbreak scales glitter too, but no one is looking at me.
Silas holds all eyes like gravity as he plucks the lance from my fingers.
August pulls me back as Silas strides across the benches of our pitching whaleboat, steady and deliberate. “Silas,” August says with a scornful laugh, but I can hear the fear beneath the brittle surface. “What are you—”
But Silas is already moving, launching himself out of our boat onto the new one from the Heralder, the one holding his crew.
His weight rocks the boat and shouts of protest rise up, but before anyone can tip into the sea, he’s moving again, running the length of the whaleboat and flying onto the next, Mance’s boat, the one fastened to the whale.
He lifts the lance as he moves, up to a ready position. The crew’s faces are tilted up to him in shock—all except for Mance himself hunched at the prow, stabbing mindlessly at the whale. For a moment, I’m sure Silas is going to bury his lance in Mance’s back.
But instead he launches himself off the prow and into the sea. He catches himself on the whale’s side and scales it, using the snapped and straining harpoons as grips, and rises to his feet on the whale’s heaving back.
Each of the beast’s choking breaths outline him in pink water. His eyes are wide and inhuman as he raises the lance over his head. As he brings it down.
The next and last breath from the whale’s blowhole paints him in a fountain of blood.