Kit Whitfield - In Great Waters

B Y K IT W HITFIELD

Benighted
In Great Waters

To my parents

HENRY

H ENRY COULD REMEMBER the moment of his birth. Crushing pressure, heat, and then the contact with the sea, terrifyingly coldbut at the same time a release from constriction, the instant freedom of the skin. His mother gathered him up in her arms and swam to the surface, cradling him on her slick breast to lift his head above the water for his first breath. Henry never forgot it, the mouthful of icy air, the waves chopping his skin, a womans arms holding him up in a world suddenly without warmth.

For the first five years of his life, Henry swam with the tribe. His name was not Henry then, it was something else, a sound best rendered by the word Whistle. The boy was a slow swimmer. His bifurcated tail was weaker than the strong fins of the other children, leaving him unable to keep up at full speed. Nor could he stay under for as long; even his youngest companions could last half an hour without needing to surface, while Whistle was breathless in half that time. Sometimes the other children would mob him, try to pull him down; usually the adults would pull them off and give their ears a sharp twist. Usually, but not always.

One day, the children surrounded him, pulling at his legs and chattering, Stranger, stranger. He called out for his mother. She appeared from the depths and viewed the struggle for a moment. Then, with a twirl of her arms, she twisted in the water, presenting her back to him. Small hands were gripping him, hard nails digging into his limbs, ready to drag him down. Whistle was desperate. He looked again at his mother, but she was floating upright, still not turning to help him. His chest was starting to throb in panic, the air in his lungs shrinking, sucking his chest in. He was going to die.

With the last of his strength, he cried out again: Shark! Shark! His mother turned, other adults appeared, grabbing for their children to make a break for it, and the clawed little hands tugging at him broke free as the children fled, leaving Whistle to swim as fast as his legs could propel him to the surface to gasp in the air.

At three, Whistle knew that he was a stranger. The others were stronger than him, but they were also stupid. The predator trick worked more than once. His tribe did not think hard about motivations and could not afford to ignore a possible threat. The adults, he realised, were frightened, frightened continually. Even the smallest risk had to be evaded.

Whistle himself lived with fear, but he could not have put a name to it. He could identify shark, killer whale, poison fish, sharp rockand he knew the feelings that went with them, a pulse in his chest, a shiver against the chill of the water, a speeding up of things that made everything appear brighter. His mother would clutch his hand and tug it away from a stark-spined creature that otherwise looked like a meal; she would grab him by the arm or the hair and drag him away if a shark burst into view. He saw others taken. When such things occurred, he saw eyes widen on the others faces, and he felt his chest beat, but this sensation was not something he could have explained, even had his mother done more in the aftermath of a chase than examine each of his limbs for cuts, then turn to carry on swimming. His chest was always tight. His hands could relax, his legs could stop churning the water, but the feeling of looseness and rest was not something that ever reached his chest, and he no more thought it could than he considered trying to see with his feet. Tightness was part of his body. But he would not flee from a threat at someone elses call, not without looking around to see it first for himself.

He was growing, becoming too big for his mother to carry in her wake. She cradled him less, left him to fend for himself more. Fish were difficult to catch. It wasnt hard in theory: as the tribe swam their routes, they rehearsed strategies, singing lessons back and forth among themselves, and Whistle learned the chants easily enough. He understood the method, could remember all the tactics, the different kinds of prey and styles of hunt and changes of attack when opportunities flashed bybut he wasnt as quick as the others. He swam and corralled, heading off shoals as well as his legs would drive him, but seldom managed to grab one before some other tribe member got there first. Always his hopes rose as the tribe rallied together, driving up from below to surround and snatch at a swarming shoal, the fish coiling round and round in a sparkling whirl of bodies that whisked themselves out of his griponly to have his hand knocked aside by a stronger reach, or, in the moments when he did manage to grab a fish of his own, to have only a few seconds of live, grappling food held tight in his fist before nails were digging in and his prize was pulled away to be eaten before his eyes by a bigger child. When his mother was around, she would share with him, splitting her catch between them, but she was not always there; when other predators caught the sound of the hunt, when marlin or dolphin threatened them for the prize, there would be a fight, the stronger men and women rising up to fight them off. On those occasions, the children would be herded together, one or two women keeping watch on all of them. Injured fish might flop their way, and the women would share what they had with their own children, the children of their sistersbut no matter how much he begged, no gifts ever came into Whistles hands. For the most part, he lived on crustaceans, teaching himself to break open the shells of these slow, rich-fleshed crawlers. Whistle learned to lever and bend, to slip tools into the chinks and twist, releasing white drifts of meat to stuff into his mouth while he hid behind rocks and under weeds, away from the sharp ears of the tribe. Having learned, he knew he should pass the knowledge on, add it to the tribes greater store, but he didnt dare. Better to hunt for himself and guard his catches: he was still too small, and the older he grew, the less his mother passed him a share of her own food. If others started beating him to the crabs, he might get nothing to eat at all. Secrecy was not an easy thing to maintain, but though it strained his nerves, he kept his discoveries to himself. It was becoming clear that it might be a choice between secrets and starving.

He was also getting old enough to wonder about the great dark shapes that passed overhead, the ones his mother always kept him away from, even as she grew less and less interested in protecting him. They were a recurrent presence; not every daynot as common as a huntbut still, familiar. The first time it happened, Whistle remembered for the rest of his life.

A sound preceded it, carrying down from above, steady and unfamiliar. Whistle was used to chirruping voices, the crash of wave against rock, but this muffled, regular drumming was strange and alarming. It sounded like something thudding, but the rhythm was weirdly fast: nothing large enough to make that much noise could be wielded under the water. Whatever it was banging away, it must be horrifically strong. Whistle was already anxious by the time the shape, a great long swell of a thing, cruised overheadand as it came into view, there was a call from one of the women: