Durgay had overestimated the size of the sirenian by about five feet, though with a tonnage of 12,000 lbs length became inconsequential. Gazing up at a broad, neckless head stretched into a blunt and deeply cleft bristly snout which sulked over its lower lip, Najoli sought out the piggish, beady eyes enfolded by rolls of blackish skin textured like petrified bark. Intelligence, albeit rudimentary, sparked rewardingly in those umber pits.
"You are ryba choloviky, fish-men, yes?” the siren postulated, forwardly nuzzling Najoli's upturned face. She recoiled from the contact exhibiting surprise more than disgust, tickled by the caressing bristles. Easily the most sensitive part of sirenia anatomy, the hairy snout, split in two parts, was ideal for communicating in their peculiarly touchy-feely way.
"And you're a sea cow,” she exclaimed back, never having seen one firsthand but knowledgeable thanks to Cetari teachings.
"Sea bull,” the titanic sirenian disputed, patting his elephantine belly with a flattened, paddle-like forearm of fused finger bones, the four dished nails more in the nature of hoofs. “Gavinellar is me."
"I'm Najoli, and this here's Durgay."
Gavinellar appraised the Cetari individually with his ridiculously puny eyes. “Names fit you,” he pronounced, as if a forename, and not your actions, defined the person you were.
Najoli smiled at the compliment. “Where're you headed, Gavinellar?"
"Obviously north, dummy,” Durgay muttered exasperatedly. This was neither a good time nor place for shooting the current with an itinerant foreigner.
"Na pivnich, northward, yes,” the travelling sea cow affirmed, “to summer in kelp-rich Polyarnyy Okean."
Concerned, Najoli asked, “All by yourself?"
Gavinellar's amused rumble sounded like a far off seaquake. “No, little korova. My chereda, herd, swims, er...” Having trouble finding the right words in global Seaspeak, he swivelled and pointed with his left flipper.
"Further out in the channel? By the islets? Behind you?"
Gavinellar gesticulating vehemently with his outstretched flipper rebutted the mergirl's guesses.
His patience thinning, Durgay clicked growlingly, “We haven't time to play charades, girlie."
"East!” she construed with a satisfied smile. “Your herd is swimming up the coast in the seas on the other side of the mainland."
"Yes. Thkhid Okean. Gavinellar wrong turn make. Go this way. Meet tovarysh, comrades, in middle."
"Ask him something useful, Najoli. Did he come across any megasharks in the approaches to the alley?"
Gavinellar became twitchy, his facial bristles tremulous. “Velykyy Akula. Bad fish ... very bad. No see is good."
"Let's keep it that way. Come on, Najoli. I'm sure blubberguts here is anxious to be resuming his trek too."
"Durgay hrubyy!"
The Fisher glanced suspiciously at his travel companion. “That's good, right?"
Her shrug was unhelpful. “Gavinellar. You and your comrades must know the northern currents well."
"Pivnichnyy potochnyy? Gavinellar swim them blind."
"With those eyes, its no wonder,” Durgay wisecracked, stressing his rudeness.
Abruptly righting himself, the sea cow apologised, “Meni shkoda. Gavinellar need povitria,” before pushing his head above the surface to breathe, the used air staling his lungs telling him that his ten minutes of submergence was up. A trail of gaseous bubbles accompanied the surfacing behemoth. The strictly vegetarian sirenia diet produced a particularly offensive side effect in the form of excessive flatulence, caused by the protracted absorption of nutrients in a lengthy digestive tract. Passing wind, or in their case bubbles, was as second nature to the sea cows as grazing the seaweed beds.
"Damn air gulpers,” Durgay whistled grumblingly. About to warn Najoli off from ascending alongside the sirenian, the annoyed merman was pitched sideways by a gushing pressure wave erupting from below. Glimpsing the slate-brown and white countershading of an enormous bulk rocketing upwards as he rolled away, Najoli tumbling uncontrollably on the other side of the wedge hurtling between them, masked from Durgay's sight, his brain realised the danger even before his eyes registered the attacking megashark.
Skimming the bottom undetected, the stalking predator launched its surprise attack on the vulnerable, air-hungry sea cow, streaking vertically like a submarine launched ballistic missile. Twenty tonnes of supersized shark slammed into Gavinellar at over thirty knots, the greatest fish of all time hurling its forty-foot body fifteen feet out of the water skywards, the stunned sea cow clamped in its merciless jaws. Horrified by the brutal suddenness of the strike, the shocked Cetari cringed as the megashark splashed back into the sea with a frightening THWOOSH, releasing its squealing victim. Nearly bitten clean in half by the shark's savagery, Gavinellar wallowed on the surface in a funeral shroud of liquid crimson, gallons of blood pumping out of his rent flesh into the roiled sea, the lapping waves stained a deathly red.
His attacker circled condor-like a discreet distance away, pectoral fins slanted rigidly in a fixed downstroke, all the while waiting for the mortally haemorrhaging sirenian to bleed out before moving in to feed proper. For all their unrivalled awesomeness and ferocity, megasharks exercised astonishing prudence when hunting sea mammals. A thrashing, biting seal could inflict an appalling degree of damage upon the shark's hypersensitive snout. Their hunting strategy was accordingly unfussy. Strike hard and fast unseen from below, bite a two hundred pound chunk of invitingly warm meatiness out of the prey, then safely back off a ways while the victim bled to death or drowned, whichever mode of expiration claimed it first.
For poor Gavinellar that was exsanguination. In a matter of just a few seconds the ill-fated sea cow fatally drained of blood, his blubbery carcass shark tucker. Suspended in distress beneath that enlarging claret-coloured spillage, at the centre of which the ruptured sirenian lolled lifelessly, Najoli's shocked mind wondered if the simpler ocean inhabitants subscribed to any form of religious belief. Hardly spiritual herself, it did not prevent the saddened mergirl commending Gavinellar's essence to Nupterus, hoping the Sea God in all His omnipotence guided to the hereafter those the Cetari arrogantly deemed soulless.
Durgay was not having the same thought, escape foremost in his mind now that he stopped spinning. Of late he had spent of lot of his time in flight; fleeing from the Landhopper lagoon with its pet croc, absconding from Cetari justice with equal haste. Why should his exile be any different? The crucial events in his life usually turned out badly anyway.
Bloody merwomen!
Aside from Ochar, they were the bane of his life. That stigma extended even to megasharks, as invariably the bigger specimens were female. The she-fish in question returned to her kill and began making a meal of Gavinellar, shaking the corpse furiously like a dogfish worrying a ratfish, serrated teeth shearing through blubber and bone with equal efficiency. Now was a good time to leave while the killer shark was occupied stuffing her gullet.
Yanking Najoli by the hand, Durgay set an underwater merfolk speed record for the hundred fathom dash, completing their passage through Megashark Alley unstopped by further shark activity. Ahead lay the scarily open ocean, the craggy bottom of the channel falling away into the blackening blue of near bottomless water. The next question was, where to go? Once the shark finished devouring her unlucky prey, she might well investigate the paltry Cetari couple and Durgay held no illusions of them outrunning a trailing, tireless, titanic fish.
A smaller megashark emerging sinisterly out of the murky water in the near distance, cruising unenergetically at a depth of fifteen feet, took that decision out his webbed hands. Small was a misleadingly relative term. The sixteen-footer juvenile, in all probability a shadowy male, was big enough to pose a serious threat.
Before Durgay could take evasive action the shark literally bumped into him, the conical snout nudging against his midriff. Debilitated by numbing terror, the frozen merman's trident felt painfully deficient in his hands, dropping useless
ly to his side. He might as well be wielding a fork against an extinct sperm whale. Najoli twinned his immobility, anchored to the spot by her own qualms, shrinking behind Durgay as if his fright would shield her from harm.
The prodding megashark backed up then drifted terrifyingly slowly by, eyeballing the merman with an impossibly black, unfriendly orb the size of Durgay's fist, its sandpaper skin grazing his shoulder. Mouth agape in a three-foot wide charmless smile, the giant fish seemed to be intentionally baiting the Fisher, its huge body blithely slipping past making a tempting target. Time stretched out improbably long before the nearly symmetrical crescent tail swept languidly by, slapping Durgay in the face as a parting slur.
That slap galvanised him out of his torpor. Practically pulling her arm out of its socket, Durgay towed Najoli forwards, no clear destination in his mind other than putting as much ocean between themselves and finned death.
Comprehensively versed in fish behaviour, he rightly fathomed the exploratory collision was only the precursor to the main event. Lacking hands, sharks investigated unfamiliar objects with their mouth. Such nosiness entailed the obligatory bump, followed by the shark entering a holding pattern, evaluating the item's prey potential, before the explosive charge which ended in a bite to test the edibility waters; a “nibble” that usually crippled the unfortunate—terminally.
Backstroking crazily with her free arm, Najoli tugged the protesting merman to a standstill. “What're you doing?” he demanded from her, gills pumping furiously from exertion and distress.
"We can't possibly outdistance that megamouth, Durgay."
His reactionary eyes glanced downwards, optimistic that the Deep might offer sanctuary, his dread of razor teeth sawing through his body greater than the trepidations the crushing blackness held.
"Neither can we out-dive the monster,” regretted Najoli.
She was right again. Megasharks habitually dove to the two thousand foot mark preying upon deepwater quarry, frequently descending up to three times that depth, a nightmarish phantom materialising soundlessly from out of the saturating dark to viciously strike terror into the light-shunning fish and squid. There simply was no escaping the gargantuan, snappy fish-finder.
Vowing, ‘I'm not going down without a fight!” Durgay hoped to dredge up the mettle to reinforce his bravado. Najoli gently squeezing his hand reminded him how that was folly. “We can't outfight the damn thing either,” he muttered, frustration embittering his clicks.
"Do you fear death or dying?"
The mergirl's challenge scuttled him. “I am not afraid to die. I was on death row,” he blustered. “I'm just not keen on doing it in the jaws of an overgrown snapper. You're the one who convinced me of the value of fighting for life. Are you just going to throw in the seaweed wrap?"
Scared witless by the sea cow's demise at the teeth of the horror soon to be visiting them, Najoli whistled meekly. “What else can we do but give up?"
"Try,” Durgay stated, refusing to concede defeat. Gulping in a swallow of fortifying seawater, he plunged toward the petrifying Deep, dragging Najoli with him to whatever fate hid below.
Chapter Eleven
They sank like stones. Gritting together his interlocking teeth, Durgay led Najoli by the hand, frequently glancing back over his shoulder during their fearful plunge down a sheer wall of unbroken oceanic bedrock, looking out for a pursuing megashark. Worried more by the lack of any sign whatsoever of the voracious fish than seeing striving jaws opened in a yawning, four foot high gape bearing down on them, he beat his flukes more rapidly, hastening their descent. The water blued from aquamarine to cobalt to sapphire, the cooling changes in hue heightening, or more appropriately deepening, the Fisher's fear of depths.
Sensing the building pressure, which had nothing to do with the increasing deepness, Najoli was experiencing difficulty dealing with her own inborn dread as they passed the 300 foot threshold, the monochrome ocean palette darkening to the purplish blue of indigo. Frigid saltiness aside, all manner of monsters purportedly lurked in the sunless abyss. Bus-sized giant squid or kraken, armed with tentacles thicker than a merman and grouped around a powerhouse beak said to crush the toughest rock with the same ease a triggerfish nibbled coral, paled in comparison when measured against the colossal octopus of twice that unexaggerated length. Their inconceivable existence recounted by badly shaken whalebone retrievers, many scared witless by mind-blowing sonar glimpses of these beastly enormities, it cheered Najoli somewhat to consider that megasharks were themselves demoted to the lower end of the food chain at the bottom of the ocean. But while plumbing the depths of the frightening Abyssal Zone was not on the cards, the thought of even skimming the roof of the leviathans” domain gave the mergirl the willies.
Durgay was losing the battle repressing his own heebie-jeebies even faster. Pulse racing, hands palpitating, mind conjuring up day (not night) mares, his resolve battered by doubts, the terror of it all flooded the assailed Fisher, washing the last vestige of courage from him. He baulked and pulled up hard astern, abruptly stalling their descent.
His hesitation spared them both.
The lunging megashark swept underneath the halted Cetari, sail-like triangular fin slicing the black water inches from Najoli's ovular tail as the momentum of its ruined attack propelled the thwarted fish back into the cloaking darkness it had stormed from.
Pragmatism balanced out panic for Durgay, the immediate danger backlogging his phobia. “He'll be swinging back around right after,” he forewarned, even so barely managing to keep the hysteria from his voice. The attacker may have been the inquisitive male or another fish entirely. In the long run it hardly mattered whichever megashark was having a go at them.
In a supreme gesture of sacrifice he courageously volunteered to hold off their finned assailant, giving Najoli a chance to escape. When she told him his gesture was absurd, Durgay's rejoinder carried an injured note. “I thought I was being noble."
"More like suicidal."
"Better that one of us makes it, than we both perish.” He winced when Najoli meanly jerked his arm.
"We started in on this adventure as equal partners, old merman,” she reminded him, a faintly bluish shape against the deeper purple. “We'll see it through to the end, together."
"That'll come with his next pass,” Durgay solemnly predicted, all expectation leached out of him by the chronic hopelessness of their predicament. If only there was a sea cave handy.
Najoli suddenly grew animated, exclaiming, “There's something further down! I can just see it glinting in the blackness."
"Probably another damn megashark,” Durgay glumly whistled, presumptuously dismissing her find as more bad news without even bothering to look.
She tugged his arm again, more hurtfully than before. “Don't be such a gloomy guts. Where there's light, there is hope. It's worth investigating."
Taking a gander this time, he indeed saw a sliver of white gleaming boldly in the purple-black deepness below, its true distance unfathomable due to the poor light. Durgay trained his acoustical sight on the mystery object, compiling from the echoes bouncing back the fuzzy sonar picture of a sizable and hollow something perched precariously on a narrow shelf of rock sticking out from the cliff wall. The time delay between sending and receiving his ranging clicks indicated Najoli's curio lay a further sixty feet down.
"Let's check it out before the megamouth tries another dive by,” she urged, her tone one of desperation. “It was your idea to take the plunge. Don't pike out now."
"I can't. I'm afraid.” His bathophobia seemed unconquerable.
Shifting her grip to his wrist, Najoli reasoned, “What's scarier; the deep sea or that big shark?"
"How about that big shark in the deep sea."
Wasting no more time, Najoli insisted, “Dive or die!” anger over his resistance curbing her reluctance as she forcibly restarted their descent, hauling the heavier mermale along for the dive. Orienting on her objective, she bossed Durgay to keep an ear out
for the circling shark.
Like the cautionary beam cast by a sturdy lighthouse puncturing a stormy night, the unblinking whiteness beckoned the Cetari closer. That magnetism emanated from an object as foreign to the merfolk as walking on dry land. Shaped superficially like a manta ray, though startlingly bigger with a halved wingspan approaching 140 feet, its brightness stemmed from the blemished ivory skin, sloughing in patches revealing snatches of a bizarrely silvered skeleton beneath.
Astounded, Najoli gasped for saltwater. “What manner of carcass is that? Is it sea monster?"
Durgay said nothing, needing to check his rapid breathing. Completely alien to him, the dazed Seaguard instructor could only liken the bizarre remains to the coral encrusted shipwrecks roving Fishers periodically discovered junking the seabed. Roughly comparable to Landhopper outrigger canoes, those rusting steel hulks, home to colonising polyps and molluscs, were as gigantic as they were enigmatic and frequently raised the question pertinent to the unknown shipbuilders: just how many paddlers did it require to propel such a titanic boat over the wave tops?
But this find went beyond his comprehension. Smaller than those wrecks, larger than the biggest fish, oddly biologically configured, it smacked loudly of otherworldliness.
The Cetari had no way of knowing what they were viewing with wide-eyed incredulity was a leftover from a past age. Just what mishap had caused the stricken airliner to make a pancake landing in the sea of the tropics those myriad centuries ago would forever remain an unsolvable mystery. Whatever the reason for the Blended-Wing-Body passenger plane gliding powerless out of the designated airways to skip across the oceanic whitecaps before turning turtle and going under rested in peace with the two gallant flight crew and six hundred odd terrified holidaymakers who went to an unmarked watery grave. Their bones, long since scavenged clean, later muddled by shifting currents into disconnected skeletal jigsaws, offered up no clues as to what race of people plied the skyways aboard a higher degree of the technological sophistication evidenced by the catamaran freighters wretchedly dotting the seafloor.
Three Times Chosen Page 17