Flashes of white, partnered by streaks of black, wheeled about the tower's broad faces as Lasbow took note of thousands upon thousands of cave mouths riddling the flat-stoned crags. The seabirds were to be expected, even welcomed. The presence of flocking black-headed and black-backed gulls indicated a plentiful food supply in the local waters they fished. What bothered the observant Merking was the orderliness of the caves. Arrayed in columns of two and three across, the strangely rectangular shaped grottos soared as high as the gashed uppermost reaches of the tower and as low as the foaming surf crashing about its base, where diving birds such as cormorants and razorbills sheltered from the choppy seas. Roosting seafowl took advantage of dimples and grooves marking the coarser cliffs of Castle Rock, but those indentations resulted from normal weathering. The regimented caves on this newfound stack, staring like numberless rows of unblinking and vigilant eyes, looked to have been methodically arranged. While natural formations could display a random uniformity, the tower felt out of kilter. There was wrongness to its overall form, a shaped peculiarity hinting at an unfathomable intelligence at work.
No, had been at work, revised Lasbow. Whatever ingenuity fashioned this edifice was long dead, relegated to a past silted over by time. Thoughts of death reminded him again of his own mortality, of what the white whale's visitation foretold. In all probability fated to die this day, he was living on borrowed time.
The aura of unmistakable artificiality hung over the protrusion, the misting rain palpably accessorising this alien atmosphere. The Merking astonishingly saw the screaming gulls circling the sea stack in a different light. Acquainted with his race's belief that on death sinners were judged by Nupterus and sentenced to an afterlife trapped in the body of a seabird, doomed to forever fly above the oceanic safeness they enjoyed when merfolk, it crossed Lasbow's mind that those lost souls might now be trying to redeem themselves by advocating this spot as the new home for the Cetari. Either that or he had found their version of Hell.
It's no good! Why I can't get my head around this religion stuff?
Belief in an obscure legend had brought Lasbow and his merpeople this far, and still he was not ready to fully commit himself to faith. Had not the vision of the white whale proved the existence of a metaphysical realm, at once removed from and connected to the seaworld?
Falling back on skills and experience, solid truths in a corporeal world he could rely on to sustain him, Lasbow made a crucial decision based on instinct. The admittedly weird sea stack had to have a rocky support and rocks formed the anchor point for corals, upon which reefs were built. The solution to Cetari homelessness lay under the waves. Turning his tail on the mystery tower, the Merking submerged determinedly amid a flurry of white water and expectation.
Collecting Dribben, he commanded Dulby and Yaggle to stay shallow and conduct continuous sonar sweeps of the area around the tower bases while the Merking and Retriever went deep. Lasbow was counting on their vigilance to detect anything untoward that might head the divers” way. That early warning system might just spare all their lives if the reputed kraken decided to make an appearance. Doubting the four of them could fend off the fabled monster, with adequate notice they stood a chance of gaining any rock shelter handy.
Offloading their holdalls on to their travel companions, the divers took with them only what was essential. Hefting their weapons and the sole lamp Lasbow insisted on bringing, they commenced their dive in taut silence. Not since the days of Hulcer had an attempted exploration of the Deep been fraught with epic consequences.
Dribben's deepwater experience negated Lasbow's kingship, entitling the morose Retriever to pilot the dive. More of a leader than a follower even before his crowning, Lasbow could not completely relinquish command and swam alongside Dribben, not behind him.
Saluting his descending king with his dipped trident, Dulby moved quickly ahead with Yaggle before splitting up; the scout taking the inshore side of the first set of foundations they encountered, with the bulkier Seaguardian swinging left out into the seaward side. Each had a healthy respect for the known perils of the ocean and advanced confidently, their plainly audible clicking a comfort to the diving regent.
Down, down they dropped. Diving nearly vertical, their descent was cautiously slow. Battling to illuminate the resilient depths, the chalky daylight faded completely before Lasbow and Dribben had sunk a further fifty feet. There was no usual gradation of light into gloom, of deepening blues subtly progressing into black. One moment the divers were moving through opaque sunlit waters, the next they were enfolded by sudden and utter darkness. The sea around them went eerily silent, as if the suppressive shadow muffled all noise, and a black iciness permeated their bones. To the mermen came the disconcerting impression of having crossed the threshold into a sinister sister dimension, where joyous light and sound cowered before a terrible and bleak presence which fed off hope and courage, sapping resilience.
Grateful for his light-fish lantern weakly fighting off the dark, Lasbow made the pointless observation, “This isn't normal."
His face ghosted by the precious lamplight, Dribben grimaced. “Nothing is, it seems, in this part of the ocean."
Loath to let the stillness of the black water dominate, the Merking restarted his unfinished conversation with Dribben. Guessing more than he actually knew, Lasbow dispensed with propriety and asked, “Erops's debt to you. Does it have anything to do with how he came to lose his hand?"
Glancing sharply at him, the cynic sighed and muttered, “Secrets never stay secret,” resigned to the fact that, in his gloomy perception, bad happenings outweighed good times by a huge margin. “Those morons in my diving fraternity didn't heed my warning to stop messing about with that giant clam. It was his own fault Erops got his arm stuck."
Playing along, Lasbow struggled to fit the final pieces of the story together. “He was lucky that you were there, Dribben."
"Luck had nothing to do with it. I was the only one left after those cowards cleared out."
Snap! The puzzle was complete. “And you were left to save Erops from the shark, by cutting him free,” reasoned Lasbow. “That was heroic of you."
"Anyone in that position would have done the same."
Not so sure of that, Lasbow challenged him. “You don't strike me as the selfless kind."
Refusing to meet the Merking's dissecting gaze, Dribben gazed dead ahead and tried keeping his own counsel.
"Why did you really saw off Erops's hand?” prodded Lasbow. “The other divers left him to his own devices. Were you scared stiff, too frozen by terror to swim away with them?"
Dribben reacted angrily, coming to an abrupt standstill and whirling on the probing king as he halted too. “I am not cowardly!” he growled, thrusting the prongs of his trident at Lasbow's chest to assert his valour. His face contorted weirdly in the swaying lamplight, a mask of outrage sheathing vulnerability. “Was I so afraid that I peed my peduncle? Any Merman who claims to fear nothing in the oceans is a swimming corpse. A hunting megashark is enough to scare a fool shitless and a hero witless. I'll admit to having never been so frightened in all my life. But I stayed put. When my compatriots fled, it was me who had guts enough to remain behind and carry out what needed doing."
"Freeing Erops."
"Giving the shark a distraction, enabling those of us not trapped to escape the area unmolested.” The horrified look on Lasbow's face in the halo of shimmering bioluminescence goaded Dribben into revealing the terrible truth. “That's right, Merking. I bled Erops to deliberately lure the megashark onto him. I'm not ashamed of what I did. If put in a similar predicament again, I would behave exactly the same way."
Studying the Retriever's clenched jaw and stony eyes, chilled from just hearing his remorseless account, Lasbow totally believed him. “Yet you cut completely through his wrist."
Poking his trident at Lasbow's arm, the barbed tips pricking the skin, condescension spread across Dribben's face the same way winter's frozen breath iced over the se
a. “Hacking off a merman's hand is easier than you think, especially when you have motivation."
"But..."
"But what? You think I lopped off Erops's hand to give him a fighting chance too? jeered the diver. “I got carried away with my sawing. Before I knew it, he was an amputee and collapsing in my arms from the shock. When the shark didn't immediately attack, I lugged Erops all the way back to the Rock. Don't think I was being noble by rescuing him. Erops was insurance. I used him as a shield in case that dumb brute changed its mind. I would've gladly fed him to that monster fish to ensure my getaway. As it turned out his sacrifice wasn't needed.” Dribben shook his head. “That's why Erops thinks of me as his hero, that he'll be indebted to me until the day he does die. I'll never be chummy with my colleagues, but thanks to my “act of heroism” they at least respect me."
"Then why tell me the sordid facts?"
"So that you'll know that down here it's every merman for himself. Forget that seahorse shit about unity and camaraderie. At these depths you're on your own. I'd hate for you to be under the illusion I'm covering your back. Not even a king warrants that amount of care from me.” Cackling mirthlessly, Dribben said by way of a closing sentiment, “We're all of us destined to end up as fish food eventually,” and resumed his wary descent, pulling the numbed Merking along in his wake.
A minute later found them still 100 feet shy of the bottom. Undaunted by the uncommonly deep and inky water, Dribben pressed on. Keeping pace with him, Lasbow's bobbing lantern threw feebly light on an underseaworld of cold beauty. Sprouting from the concertinaed seafloor, thickets of familiarly graceful Gorgonian sea fans formed delicate and brittle latticework structures nine feet high. Skimming the tops of these coral “shrubs", heading toward the nearer of the two rock supports, the divers marvelled at what the tiny light-fish radiance uncovered next.
A reef of startling white coral branched outwards from the tower roots as far as the meagre lantern light revealed, extending undetected into the pitch-blackness for hundreds of square miles along the coast and out to sea for a fraction of that distance. Coldwater corals, pretty much the same species found in tropical seas, grew at one tenth the rate of their warm water counterparts. That meant this bed of ivory polyps had been around almost since the time man-apes forewent the sanctity of the trees and tentatively stepped on to the walkway of a much larger world starting on the arid East African plains.
"It's indescribable...” whispered Lasbow, entranced by the purity of the coral, its fragile whiteness stamped starkly against the black backdrop.
Dribben only nodded. Even the normally dour Retriever could not dampen the wonder of the moment.
Pressing on, they began encountering denizens of the pristine reef. Splashes of colour flashed in the lamplight. Four-foot long striped bass swum lazily above the coral scrub, their vividly blue body stripes smearing scaled fields of burnished copper and silver. Shrimp-like crustaceans skittered over the wavy bottom, heard more than seen, their soft multi-legged scrapings on the undulating rock perceptible in the crushing dark. The tenacity of life to exist in the unlikeliest and harshest of places was always impressive, as these variegated organisms demonstrated by thriving beneath the curtain of blackness, the seabed buttressing their will to survive.
"Plenty of food for the kraken,” joked Dribben, his hand sweeping one of the nosier, bigger bass out of his way. Their fearlessness of merman would be a boon to the Fishers who, like all providers in hunter-gatherer societies, culled only what the tribe needed. “If you have your way, there'll be Cetari added to the menu."
Lasbow could not believe his earholes. “They told me your cynicism had worsened into downright fatalism. I only wish I didn't have to listen it."
"What's the point in my being cynical if I can't express it?"
"A little optimism is a healthy thing, Dribben."
"Wishful thinking is the province of those fools without enough gumption to change their misfortune. We're on this expedition, not out of any sense of hope, but because, Merking, you cling to a strategy for improving the Cetari lot in life."
"You sound like you might actually approve of this quest."
"Far from it.” Dribben gave Lasbow a snide glance. “Have you any idea what you're looking for?"
"Atlantis,” Lasbow blandly replied.
Dribben overlooked the obvious sarcasm. “But what constitutes Atlantis?"
The Merking offered up nothing in reply. Truth be told, the legend was rather vague and did not explicitly detail what Atlantis was other than a sunken reef. That ambiguity left it up to believers to fill in the blanks with their imagination. In light of his recent discussions with Minoh, the host of possibilities to explain away the Atlantean myth narrowed down to a single probability. The Merqueen's outrageous claim that the Cetari were descended from a dead race of landwalkers was impossible to accept as true, challenging everything Lasbow had been taught to believe, juddering his convictions. Incredulous as he was, a part deep inside him, buried and dormant until now, lurched awake, questioning his heritage.
"By not knowing exactly what Atlantis is, how will you recognise it when you come across it?” When he got on his soapbox, Dribben sounded like nothing less than a broken record.
Lasbow inwardly smirked. Dribben just slipped up. By saying “when", and not “if", the staunch pessimist had given away the reality that he concealed a smidgen of expectation. Even if the Retriever never admitted it, continued lying to himself and arguing his biased point with others, the fact remained—hope springs eternal.
"Maybe I have an inkling on what to watch out for,” hinted Lasbow.
"So don't keep me in the dark, Merking. As chief diver on this outing, I should be privy to all the pertinent facts, even if they are just speculation."
"Be on the lookout for an underwater cave system."
"That's it? Nothing more spectacular than caves."
"I'm betting they'll be grouped in an array vaster than Castle Rock."
"I'm to look for lots of caves then."
"Here's another helpful tip. They're likely to have a carved appearance."
"Hand-built caves?” exclaimed Dribben. He pursed his fleshy lips “You're full of surprises, Merking.” Scowling, he complained, “I neglected to mention I'm not fond of being surprised. What else are you not telling me?"
Among the many privileges his appointed royalty conferred, Lasbow reserved the right to impart information on a need-to-know basis, and Dribben had been given all the specifics he needed to get the task done.
Continuing on in silence, they glided over a seabed visibly scarred from past tectonic fluxes. The Cetari were aware of seaquakes on a deeper level than merely perceiving with their attuned senses the tremors rumpling the saltwater like ripples in a pond. They knew the ocean floor periodically quivered, the shifting plates jostling for position driven by subterranean volcanic forces. Early Retrievers reported stumbling across gaseous springs of boiling seawater in the deep ocean trenches. In a world where sunlight never shone, the saltier water denser and colder even than the polar sea, these hydrothermal vents anchored in place a uniquely marine microclimate which spawned a localised bionetwork based exclusively on chemical, not photosynthesis, energy. Rudimentary bacterial life thrived on the sulphurous exhalation, as did deepwater worms nine feet long and hot water shrimps. Gas, not light, fuelled this ecosystem.
To the technically unsophisticated Merfolk, the internal fires stoking the planet's furnace were beyond their understanding, yet not unexplainable. As a means of warming the tropical seas, Nupterus created underwater heaters in the form of the modest chimneystacks miles beneath the waves. Such a notion was convenient, rational, and partly flawed. Ochar, oldest and shrewdest of her people, thought it a reasonable assumption to make that flues spanned the trenches across the global ocean and should be found in the ancient northern sea, if the contention of these waters being the calving grounds of the ancestral Cetari was to be believed. Taking everything into consideration, coul
d the unheated waters mean that the Sea God disapproved of the migration back by not warming the Tlan Sea in readiness for the merfolks return. She wisely kept that dispiriting prospect to herself.
Coming across their first seabed protuberance, a coral knoll hundreds of yards wide but only twenty feet high, Dribben rose up over its ridged slope and swam on down the other side, never giving the anomalous mound a second glance. Copying him, Lasbow dawdled over the clipped summit to gratify his curiosity before swishing his tail fiercely to catch up to the uninterested Retriever. They encountered a second and a third knoll of similar dimensions, each spaced roughly fifty feet apart and flanked by other mounds equally intriguing to the Merking. The swimmers cruised across this massive, enigmatic debris field for ninety yards and more, Lasbow's interest growing correspondingly.
The Merking's curiosity finally got the better of him when they encountered a truly epic mound spread over sixty thousand square yards and jutting four storeys up toward the surface, erupting from the foaming sea like a welt. This was the disarrayed foundations of the nearer of the two towers they swam for. Forced to go around the obstruction, rather than up and over, the trailblazing Retriever was halted by his monarch's bewilderment.
"Dribben. What do you make of these hillocks?"
Turning to find the fascinated Merking poking at an unremarkable hump of stony polyps with his finger, he jeered. “They're piles of coral encrusted rock. So what."
"Don't you find it odd there are so many of them and that they are grouped in such orderly fashion?"
Dribben shrugged. “We're in foreign waters. The contour of the sea bottom is bound to be different from what we're familiar with."
Lasbow shook his head from uncertainty. “It's more than just alien seas. Give me a hand to dig.” Drawing his knife, he wedged the living lantern into a crevice at head height and started chipping away at the coral growth.
"What are you hoping to find underneath there, a sign pointing to Atlantis?” Failing to get a response, Dribben muttered unintelligibly and joined Lasbow digging.
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