The Crossing of Ingo (29 page)

“It’s very bad manners to approach a logging whale from behind,” she observes. “Besides, there’s a risk they will lobtail.”

“What do you mean?”

“They strike the water with their tails, not only when they are angry but also when they want the rest of Ingo to knows its place.”

The whales’ echolocation will have sensed our presence long ago. They don’t seem bothered by our approach, but Seiliko still slows down courteously as she rises to the surface and breaches in front of the cliff of a whale’s head.

Everything I see is so familiar. A rush of homesickness for my dear friend the whale almost overwhelms me. I long to see her and hear the happiness in her voice as she recognises me.

Greetings, little barelegs. How long it seems since I’ve seen you.

But this whale doesn’t know me. I look up at the vast box-shaped head, the skin that is so rough and creviced that it’s like the skin of a giant prune, and the jaw that hangs a little open, relaxed. Teeth show in the whale’s lower jaw.

Slowly she swings her head and then raises it clear of the water. The sea makes a waterfall as it streams down her brow, and then she submerges herself again, like a hippopotamus sinking into the mud. She regards us with one eye. Behind her, to the left and right, the other whales are stirring.

“Greetings,” says Seiliko.

“Greetings,” rumbles the whale, “but what creature is it that rides on your back?”

“A new kind of creature,” says Seiliko boldly, although I can feel tension in her body now. “One who has human form and Mer blood, and is at home in Ingo.”

“Are you sure it is not a human being? It looks human enough to me. Are you sure that it hasn’t deceived you? Humans are full of deception. Once humans find our logging places, they come with ships and harpoons.”

I think of how comfortingly my whale friend greeted me when she first met me in the Deep. I was afraid of her, but she put me at ease. She called me “little barelegs”. What if she’d held me responsible for the killing of sperm whales by whalers? If she’d felt the same way as this whale feels, she would have left me to die in the Deep. I’ve got to convince these sperm whales that I’m not an enemy. I haven’t deceived Seiliko, and I would never betray them to the whale hunters.

“I am a friend,” I say aloud. “We came to find you because we are looking for the daughter of a whale – one of your kind – who lives on the other side of the world. She sent her daughter here to avoid the sickness that killed so many sperm whales in the oceans back where I live. Do you know her? Have you ever heard a story like that?”

The whale dips her great head so that she can examine me more closely. It’s not a friendly inspection. “Come closer to me,” she says at last. “You will have to leave this dolphin if you want to speak to me. She claims that you can swim alone in Ingo. Show me.” The whale’s head rises. All I can see is her scarred, mountainous flank.

“I’ll have to go alone, Seiliko. You go back to the others,” I whisper. I can feel Seiliko’s hesitation. She senses the whale’s hostility and she’s not happy about letting me approach her alone. I lean down until my lips are against Seiliko’s skin and whisper again, more urgently, “I’ve got to do it, Seiliko. She won’t trust me otherwise.”

Seiliko’s answer is the softest murmur. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

I don’t feel very sure as I slide off Seiliko’s back and she turns with a graceful twist of her body and dives. I swim towards the whale’s vast, rugged side. It towers above me, making a heavy shadow through the water. There are tentacle scars deep in her flesh, and a healed slash that probably came from a giant squid’s beak. She’s been attacked while hunting in the Deep. As I swim close the shadow seems to darken even more. I peer around through the water. The other whales are drawing near, as if they want to talk to me too.
Or maybe they’re just curious and they want to listen,
I tell myself as I try to calm a mounting sense of unease.

Through a gap between the whales I see a calf in the middle of a protective circle of adult females. All the whales in this pod seem to be female. The calf is afraid. Its anxious cries echo through the water, answered by booms of reassurance. But it can’t possibly be afraid of me. I’m tiny, even compared to a baby whale. I’ve got no weapons. Something that my dear whale friend said once tugs at my mind.
The water turned red with our blood.
She was talking about a whale hunt. Maybe whales teach their babies to be afraid of humans.

“Come closer,” booms the whale. I wish she sounded more friendly. The voice of my friend calling me “little one” or “little barelegs” echoes in my head. I never even thought about how she could crush me with one blow from her tail.

These whales loom over me, ominously. I remember how Dad taught me never to go into a field of cattle when the cows
have their calves with them.
Even a cow that knows you can kill you if she thinks there’s a threat to her young.

How huge these whales are. None of them is logging quietly on the surface now. They’ve moved so that I’m cut off from the dolphins by massive walls of whales’ flanks. I’m not scared; of course I’m not. Whales are not our enemies. I clench my hands and will my heart to stop beating so fast.

“Closer, closer,” orders the whale. I’m barely swimming now, but they are still moving. They are drawing closer around me, in a circle that tightens second by second. The free water between their bodies is shrinking. There’s barely a chink left to swim through.

Way behind me I hear Seiliko’s voice, muffled by the whales’ bulk, calling to me, “Swim back, Sapphire! Swim back to me!” It’s when I hear the fear in her voice that for the first time I’m truly afraid.

“Saph,” says a calm, familiar voice immediately behind me. I turn, and it’s Conor.

“Con, how did you get here?” I’m so relieved to see him that I want to clutch him tight in case he disappears again.

“Dived under the whales. I knew something was wrong when I saw them crowding together.”

“Con, you shouldn’t have come! It’s dangerous. They don’t like us being here.”

But even if Conor wanted to go back, I don’t think he could now. In the few seconds he’s been here, the whales have moved even closer. We are surrounded by rugged walls of flesh. The
only space is above us. My heart pounds in my ribs, almost suffocating me.

“I’m going to speak to them,” says Conor.

“Quick, before the gap closes.” I stare up the steep, pitted side of the whale who told me to come nearer.
She
deceived
me,
getting me to do that. But if we swim straight up, then maybe there’s still a chance of escape …

The whales are all around us. If they even jostle us a little, we’ll be crushed to death like swimmers caught between a giant liner and the quayside.

“It’s the calf that’s making them nervous,” Conor murmurs.

“Another human,” rumbles the whale warningly as she sees Conor clearly for the first time.

“She’s got to listen to us. She’s got to,” I mutter. “Conor, let’s go for the gap now.”

The space between the whales is narrowing. I kick as hard as I can, and we shoot through the gap above us just before it closes. The water beneath us shudders as the whales’ vast bodies nudge together.

“Up to her head,” calls Conor. “Higher, Sapphire!”

I swim past the whale’s jaw. There is her eye, watching us as we come. Conor stops swimming, and sculls himself into position near the whale’s eye.

“You don’t need to be afraid of us,” he says to her. In spite of the danger, I almost laugh. We’re surrounded by whales who are all at least ten metres long – apart from the baby – and who seem to hate us, and Conor’s telling this whale that
she
doesn’t
need to be afraid. “Don’t be afraid. We haven’t come to hurt the little one. We are not hunters. There is no ship.”

The whale’s eye is unreadable. “Why should I believe you?” she says. “Our blood has turned the water red too many times.”

“Not this time,” says Conor. “We come with a message from one of your sisters, who stayed on the other side of the world when her daughter left to escape the sickness. What’s her name, Saph?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I call the whale my dear friend, but I don’t even know her name. “You know I’ve always just called her ‘the whale’…”

“Not particularly helpful, Saph,” says Conor aside to me. “Quick, say something that’ll make them recognise her.”

My mind is blank. She is huge and gentle, and she calls me “little barelegs” and she says I please her. These whales won’t want to hear any of that. “She – um – she …”

“You seem to know very little about our sister,” observes the sperm whale coldly, “even though you claim to come with a message from her.”

“She …” Light breaks on my mind. “She tells jokes! That’s what she does. She tells lots of jokes.”

“Tell me one of them.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t. They’re too – too.” I hesitate, torn between the truth and loyalty to my friend. “Too what?” demands the whale.

“Too – well, they’re too bad, really. They’re not funny at all. They’re the kind of jokes you try to forget.”

“Saph,”
groans Conor. Already the whale’s body has started to move. She’s going to crush us against another whale. We won’t be able to stop her. Conor will be killed because of me.

Quivers run through the whale’s body.

“Con!” I grab hold of him. I’ve got to protect him. He’s only here because of me. The water billows. The whale’s trembling grows stronger. A rumble begins somewhere deep under her blubber. It grows stronger. Tremors ripple under the scarred, hoary cliffs of her sides. The cavern of her mouth opens and waves of sound rush into the water, deafening us as we cling together.

“Conor!” In the distance I can hear the dolphins filling the water with desperate calls to us. The water shakes and we are thrown from side to side.

“Saph!
Saph!”
Conor’s hands grab my shoulder. “It’s OK! It’s all right! They’re laughing.”

“Laughing!”

The thunderous belly noise swells from one whale to the next. They are moving apart a little now. There’s free water between the whales and the vast bodies with their box-shaped heads are all quivering and booming with … Yes, Conor’s right. It’s not a roar of anger. They’re laughing. All of them except the baby, and he’s swinging his head from side to side eagerly, as if he wants to find out where the joke is.

At last the whale closest to us calms down enough to speak.

“It is our sister. You describe her truly. She has not changed.”

“Were you laughing because you remembered one of her
jokes?” I ask hesitantly. Relief floods me, although I can’t quite believe that we’re safe

“No, my child. You know my sister and that it is impossible to laugh at the jokes she tells. We are laughing because we are happy. Our sister is alive and has sent us news of herself. That dolphin was speaking the truth. You are a new kind of creature that we have never met before. Your shapes are human, but your hearts are whale’s hearts.”

Conor is back beside me. “Just as well they’re not really,” he murmurs in my ear. “A whale’s heart is twice as big as a man.”

“Shut up, Con, my hands are still shaking.”

“That’s nothing. Look at my knees knocking together.”

“Now, let us talk,” booms the whale magisterially. “We are all hungry for news of our sister. Her daughter is hunting in the Deep, but she will return soon to feed her baby. Imagine what happiness she will feel.”

But when the whale’s daughter does at last return, she doesn’t seem to feel quite so much happiness as the rest of the pod expects. She goes straight to her baby and we hear her mutter irritably, “I can’t think about anything else until I’ve fed him.” After the calf has fed she fusses over him for a long time. It’s as if she doesn’t
want
to talk to us. The other whales are obviously taken aback and disappointed that their wonderful surprise isn’t working. They keep whispering to
Conor and me about how stressful life is for new mothers, and they hope we’ll understand. I mutter as if I do, and Conor just looks embarrassed.

At last the whale’s daughter finishes being busy and swims slowly towards us with her calf at her side. The other whales have already told her that we know her mother. She doesn’t even greet us (too stressed and busy for that, obviously).

“How do you know my mother?” she asks abruptly.

“She helped me in the Deep the first time I went there – when I was lost. And then she took all of us back to the Deep to defeat the Kraken. We’d have died if she hadn’t rescued us. She carried us to safety inside her mouth. She was amazing …” Words pour out of me eagerly. I want her daughter to know just how amazing her mother has been.

“Inside her mouth,”
repeats the whale’s daughter. The other whales’ tails start to swing. I’m afraid they’ll begin lobtailing, but luckily they subside.

“We have heard that the Kraken woke.”

“News came to us.”

“We did not know of our sister’s action.”

“My mother should never have gone anywhere near that Kraken,” snaps the whale’s daughter. “It was a terrible risk for her to take.”