The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  19

  The Sacrifice

  She went below and lay in her bunk but the unsteady beat of the diesel, now stronger, now fainter, would not let her sleep. She could not help wondering if something else also listened, miles distant, fathoms down. But they’d been sailing for nearly a whole day since they’d seen it last, first dodging amid the ice, then running fair in the open sea. Sixty miles last night; at least a hundred since the thing had body-slammed them. Surely distance would screen their signature amid the constant crowd noise of the sea.

  At last she got up and went aft. Auer snored behind her curtain. The water she waded through was no shallower than it had been when she came off watch. But it wasn’t any deeper, either.

  Suddenly ravenous, she found crackers and jam and made herself a plateful in the galley, looking out the portlight at the sea surging only inches below the greasy salt-streaked glass. The food seemed insubstantial, as if her body were a furnace that demanded fat and meat, but she stoked it with grape jelly and saltines until she could eat no more. Perhaps later she could make something more substantial. It did seem like a long time since they’d sat down to a real meal. Baked yams. Beans and rice. She dropped to the damp mildew-smelling banquette and leaned back, blinking at the black streaks on the overhead.

  She woke after some interminable time and had to pee. The engine noise was louder as she squatted in the head. She turned a tap, then remembered: frozen. She cleaned up with hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Wiped down the commode seat, which needed it. Remembering guiltily how Quill had driven them to keep things clean. They’d have to start paying attention again. Once they had time to do more than steer and bail.

  The slow clump of steps on the companionway ladder. She opened the door of the head to see a stooped Madsen looking toward Auer’s curtain. “She asleep?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I hate to wake her. Can you take it awhile? I want to check that pump. We’re still on zero eight zero.”

  “Sure.” She got back into her suit, wound Tehiyah’s scarf around her jaw, and found her goggles.

  The day was grayer now. No sun in sight. Thick clouds frosted the sky from one horizon to the other like black icing. She checked the sails, then the compass. Adjusted the self-steerer. She wasn’t on deck for more than ten minutes when the first flakes drove down, skidding and zigzagging over a slaty, lumpy sea to crash and be instantly absorbed. When she looked back the sea behind was weathered tar. Their faithful albatross had left them; it no longer hovered like some benediction or curse. She stood at the wheel, looking at the wrapped shape on the bow. Each time the boat sagged off, Dorée seemed to be walking across the sea.

  She yawned, and gradually the hollowed waves became long dunes rising from shining sand where lilliputian plovers darted back and forth, tiny legs clicking smartly as windup toys. Above stretched the wind-scalloped curves of Smith’s Point, dotted with poverty grass and the tiny dancing pink flowers of searocket. And above them, the bent low wind-twisted bonsai shapes of pitch pines and scrub oaks.

  The cottage stood above a salt pond on sturdy pilings black with age. It had been built of driftwood, planks swept overboard and blown ashore, bits of long-wrecked ships. A rocker, white paint flaking, nodded on the porch, pushed by the wind that howled without cease, sandpapering the world to a satin finish and bleaching every color to its ghost. A flame-light glowed in a window high above the marsh. She trudged toward the glow but it did not come nearer. Instead the world grew darker, the sky more threatening. Saltbushes thrashed in the wind, and the clouds raced as if fleeing Armageddon. Someone was waiting in there. Someone she’d once known. For a moment she almost glimpsed him, or perhaps her, though the antique wavy glass, half lit by that flickering flame. Then it shrank, vanished, and she kept slogging upward, but now the cottage was even farther away than when she’d first come up from the beach where the plovers and sanderlings still skittered, spindly legs clicking like clockwork.…

  Madsen bulled through the half-closed hatchway, shouldering it aside. Something cracked sharply. “Pump’s working. You awake? Maybe you better go back below.”

  She roused herself and twisted her ear. The pain obliterated dunes, cottage, the waving cattails. “Tehiyah’s unwrapping,” she said. “I’m going forward to fix her.”

  “Keep your line clipped.” He wedged himself against the genny mast and sank into his own somber study of the sea.

  The waves heaved. She snapped the carabiner and began working forward. The deck was worn and here and there cracks showed in the gelcoat where they’d beaten the ice off. There was little now except where it had lodged in crannies, but the snow was coming down harder, blowing past in big flakes in a steady river that tickled her cheeks under the goggles.

  She got to the bow and hauled herself erect. Dorée gazed unflinchingly ahead, slender neck encrusted with a white rime of salt. Her eyes were open. This seemed strange, as Sara could have sworn they’d been closed when they’d tied off the tarp. She tried to reclose them, but the lids were frozen solid to the eyeballs. With one elbow around the stay, she hauled in the flapping tarp, wrapped it tight again, and tied it off. Then dropped to hands and knees and crept aft.

  She was halfway back when she glimpsed something in the hazy sea astern. A crack in the ocean, through which knobby protuberances showed. Then a wave broke over them, veiling them with trailing spray mixed with falling snow.

  “Lars!” She pointed and Madsen, at the wheel, turned quickly and looked back, but when he did there was only a scar on the sea and nothing more and that too vanished as flakes blanched the roiling gray. He stayed twisted, eyes shaded with a glove, as she struggled forward. Then something caught and snatched her back, and she jerked at it, panicky, until she realized it was only her safety line, snagged on a sheave.

  “Thought I saw something,” she panted, swinging her legs down into the cockpit. “Out in the fog. Over there.”

  She pointed again and he pulled the binoculars from their waterproof stowage and swept them over the sea. She stood indecisive in the blowing flurries, then bent to the companionway. “Eddi! Hy! Get your suits, and get up here!” she yelled.

  The whale came in from dead abeam, pushing up a black fold of weltering sea like the cowcatcher of some old-time locomotive. He materialized from the snow-mist out of which the flakes blew ever thicker, driving parallel to the wavecrests until they reached up and pulled them down. Sara watched him come, the huge vertical forehead only partially visible behind the swell he was pushing. Then bent again and screamed down, “Get up here! Now!”

  Anemone lifted as the bulge in the sea neared, but not fast enough. When the whale hit she folded around the impact like a hollow vibrating tube. The jury-rigged forward stay snapped instantly. The whale kept coming, bulldozering them, a boil of sea white behind it. She saw the tail down there, whipping up and down with unbelievable rapidity for its size. The boat careened over and began to slide through the water sideways.

  Her ears seemed to turn off then. Madsen’s mouth was open, yelling, but no words emerged. Gear was falling from aloft. The noise must have been terrific, but she didn’t hear it. The mast toppled, toward them, veering aside only at the last moment to crash down beside the cockpit. Then it too, still attached by a crazy snarled mass of steel and nylon rigging, was being shoved through the water by a frenzied power as the whale nodded its way through the seething sea, leaving a foamed highway twenty yards wide behind it.

  At the companionway, the pale oval of Eddi’s features. Her gaze sought Sara’s, then slipped aside as she fell back down the ladder.

  Then sound came back. The clatter and crash from below. The tail emerged from the sea, pointed flukes notched deep, and slammed down flat with the doom-crack of a close strike of lightning. The livid sea rolled back almost biblically, opening like thick lips, then reversing itself and surging back in, filling a sudden vacancy where a vast sand-colored mass had just submerged.

  Anemone screamed and rolled
back upright, quivering along her whole length. The snarled cordage and wire and aluminum and sailcloth that lay tangled and heavy along her whole starboard side grated on her deck. She groaned to port, then to starboard, but her rolls were different now. Shorter. Quicker.

  Quill’s red toolbox was flung up, followed by Eddi Auer, the videocamera slung around her neck. Kimura was close behind. Both were in the bright red mustang suits, but neither had gloves on. Eddi looked over the side and whistled. “Shit. It finally came down.”

  “The whale rammed us again,” Sara told her. “It knocked the mast down.”

  “Oh, holy King Jesus. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Madsen said, head whipping anxiously around, the boat hook brandished like a spear. The waves surged and dropped away, blue and black, looking as if they were coated with granular grease. Snow blew out of the mist. He must have realized how ridiculous it was as a weapon, because he lowered the pole and set it aside. His face was strained. “But it’ll probably be back.”

  “So what do we do?” Eddi said.

  He shrugged, looking around. White sclera gleamed at the margins of blue irises. “What can we do? Other than wait.”

  Sara said, “Eddi, are we leaking more below?”

  “I don’t know. I smelled fuel, though.”

  “We ought to check, Lars.”

  He didn’t answer. Just stared off to where the snow was blowing. Anemone heaved on a long-backed sea, then sagged. The mast grated, dragging a few more feet overboard.

  “Hadn’t we better cut that loose?” the Japanese suggested.

  “There it is.” Lars didn’t point, or turn toward it. Just kept looking off to starboard. As one, they turned in the same direction.

  * * *

  The blowing snow made everything inchoate, softened, seen through petroleum jelly smeared over a lens. The whale rode up within a swell as if cast into it, like some enormous antediluvian insect sealed into graygreen amber. The gigantic squared-off head lay half turned toward them, one paddle-shaped flipper tilting this way and that to keep the whole mass floating miraculously motionless within the surge. It was anything but white. Dark seams ran though it, like mineral-laced travertine. Strange bumps and callosities speckled it, those, too, contrasting with what seemed to be its proper integument. Yet its unnatural paleness, suspended against the dark sea, filled her with all the terror Melville had ascribed to it. As the crest rolled away over it that crooked spout jetted, became mist, smoking in the wind, and blew away to leeward with the falling snow.

  “What’s it doing?” Auer breathed, voice shaking. “Is it watching us?”

  Kimura moaned aloud. When Sara glanced his way he was hauling himself atop the cockpit seat, steadying his ascent with a hand on the helm pedestal. He let go and swayed with the boat’s jerky roll. He made an obeisance left, right, to the left again. Pain crossed his face each time, but he bowed very low.

  Straightening, he removed a Baggie from his pocket, tore it open, and scattered it about the cockpit. A few grains hit her face, and she tasted salt. He clapped his hands, bowed again to the whale, and raised his hands. Loudly, he began what she assumed was another invocation.

  “Lars?” Sara said. He didn’t respond and she tugged at his arm. “Lars!”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he muttered. “God damn it. God damn it! After all we risked for them—”

  “Can we use the engines? Get away?”

  “I smelled fuel,” Eddi said again. “I don’t think we even want to—”

  “We’ve got to do something,” Sara said, but more to herself. Waves of dizziness were sweeping up from her feet, prickling her face, which burned as if it had been thrust into a furnace. At the same time her mind seemed to float free, regarding them and herself as if from some enormous distance.

  The swell receded and the immense bulk, perhaps sixty yards away and longer than the boat, dropped with it, with incredible grace. The snow thinned and for a second or two she saw the whale quite clearly. It was arching its back in a strange way, the finless deformed-looking hump flexing until it pierced the roof of the sea. Kimura’s voice rose, droning on, sentence after sentence. For a moment she wondered: What is going on? Is this truly some sort of communication? Then the tail rose, immense, dripping, the sea running off it in creeks. When it dropped again the crash rolled like artillery.

  “See that? He’s trying to shake the harpoon out,” Auer breathed, beside her.

  Sara turned to see the aimed camera. The ruby filming light. Eddi’s knees were shaking, but her hands were free of the slightest tremor. When she looked back at the creamy-colored mountain that rode the swells Sara made out the shaft and the attached line dangling from its side, above the small lateral fin. The eye must be forward of it, but she couldn’t make that out.

  “It’s waiting,” Eddi breathed. She crouched, gasping for breath.

  “Eddi, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s waiting for us to help it.” She dropped the camera and hugged her belly, as if slugged in the stomach. Then, with an abrupt gesture, unlooped the webbed strap and thrust it into Sara’s hands. “Here. It’s recording.”

  “Eddi—hold on. What are you—”

  But Auer was already climbing the sagging mass of fabric and wire and boom. Picking her way carefully but rapidly, dancing across that shifting mass like a tightrope walker. Kimura lowered his hands and stopped in midsentence. Madsen shouted hoarsely. Sara stood frozen. Then, without thought, lifted the camera.

  Its screen framed something white against a darker ground. It took a moment before she understood it was a splash. From it a reddish form surged up and struck out in a clumsy crawl.

  “Eddi!” she screamed, lowering the camera. A swell rolled past Anemone, obliterating the swimmer, rolling completely over her. Yet she emerged again. Short blond hair flew as she shook her head, raising it to look to where the whale lay off, flippers slowly flexing. It had turned slightly, so that its head was closer to the boat, but still did not seem to be moving from its station. Eddi looked back, then forward again; as if gauging the distance remaining to her, or perhaps reconsidering the wisdom of her act.

  When she resumed swimming Kimura clapped three times. He bowed left, right, left again. Then resumed praying, in a higher note than before, in a tense rapid monotone. Slowly, Sara raised the camera again. Remembering only then how Eddi hadn’t dared to approach the right whales in the icy embayment. That seamed scar serpenting up her body, disguised by the writhe of tattoo—

  Auer sank, submerged by a swell, then rose again on a crest. She’d almost reached the whale, which seemed to be waiting for her. Or was it simply lying to, resting? The great flukes started to lift, then sank back. It lay half tilted over, right side uppermost, the haft of the black shaft buried in its flank swizzling the surface with ripples of foam.

  Eddi vanished, then came up again. Closer. Almost there. Sara shuddered. Even in the insulated suit, the cold water had to be paralyzing. Freezing a swimmer’s breath, numbing legs and arms and face. Already Auer moved more slowly, lifting her arms clumsily.

  The immense tail stirred upward, then once again relaxed. The spout jetted and drifted away. The snow fell. The Dewoitine creaked and swayed as part of the fallen rigging slid off into the water and began hammering the hull at the end of its shroud wires.

  The whale rolled, but kept its position relative to the boat. Auer was moving very deliberately now. An arm came up, lingered in the air, then sank. Seconds later, the other rose. But she was still forging forward. Only a few yards to go.

  The animal rolled upward, then down. Sara could swear it was watching the approaching swimmer, though she still could not make out its eye, which must spend most of its time beneath the surface. Could it see her?

  Hy tore apart another packet. Offering the salt in his outstretched hand, he called in English, “This we offer in purification and regret. Is there another sacrifice we can make? One more pleasing to you?”

  By a gr
eat effort of will Sara concentrated on the little square of image the camera framed. In it a figure floated outstretched, one arm reaching for the dangling harpoon. The whale lay without stirring, head turned slightly in her direction. As if regarding her. As if considering. “God,” she muttered, the camera shaking in her hands so the picture jerked. “God. God. Eddi.”

  With a delicacy so precise it looked almost like laziness, the whale stirred. It pivoted along its length, and the head moved with great majesty and deliberateness around toward its flank. It dipped beneath the surface as the back bent. Then rose again, dragging a dropped length of bone and flesh into view, the lower surface studded with long pointed yellow cones.

  With a single leisurely sweep of its lower jaw, the whale bit Eddi in half.

  The camera jumped in Sara’s hands. She heard herself screaming as the upper half of Auer’s body floated upward, spinning, mouth a round blackness, gazing back toward them, one hand raised, fingers splayed as if in unutterable agony. The stroke had stripped off part of her suit, and on the uplifted arm and shoulder Sara could make out the dark intaglio of creatures against shockingly white skin. Then the blond head tilted back, and went down into a welling cloudy pool of whirling pink. The tips of upraised white stiffened fingers were the last part of her to leave the light.

  “Eddi!” she screamed. The camera dropped from unfeeling fingers, but recoiled before it hit the deck, restrained by the strap. Madsen was bellowing hoarsely, twisting the wheel, though it had no effect. Kimura stood in appalled silence, staring toward where the beast had slowly sunk from sight. A scrap of red fabric floated, then spiraled down. It glimmered beneath the surface, then grew obscure. Until the sea surged empty save for whirls of rocking foam. Anemone rose on a wave, then dropped away, and the burdening hamper scraped and slid. Something knocked the hull from beneath with the insistent thud of a battering ram.