by Patrick Ness
She left with a traveling pod, and I waited for her to arrive. And I waited. And I waited. Until finally, the shipyard master – my teacher – swam urgently to me from the open ocean.
“Blood in the water,” he said. Only those words, and I was already swimming as fast as my tail could push. “It’s too late!” he called after me. But he followed, for which I will always honor him.
We were the first to the slaughter.
The pod my mother traveled with was mostly gone, the sloppy harvesting of men already begun. My mother was one of the few who still fled. I saw her first in my echolocation. Then I saw the launches of men pursuing her with a vengeance that seemed unhinged, even for them.
My mother, though sometimes unfocused to a degree that maddened me, sometimes dreamy enough for me to blame her as the reason my father never returned from the farms he helped run, was a remarkable athlete when she put her mind to it. She could beat them. She would.
“Mother!” I called and tried to swim faster, putting myself at terrible risk. My echolocation refined and I could see the harpoons already in her body, attached to barrels that made it harder for her to escape to the depths of the ocean above. But she was ahead of them now, gaining in distance.
“Bathsheba!” I heard her yell. “Get away!”
It was only when she swam into my actual vision that I saw why. A second ship, a full sailing vessel, not another launch, cut brutally across the Abyss from a direction I hadn’t even bothered clicking in.
“Turn back!” was the last thing my mother said before the men were on her. It was only the shipyard master’s much greater size that prevented me from swimming to her anyway and meeting the same fate. Instead, I could only watch as they murdered her, sloppily, wastefully, prolonging her suffering until finally casting her to the sharks as so much trash.
I am not alone in my hurt. I would never pretend to be so. Every whale has been affected, directly or not, by the actions of men. I took my broken heart (still beating, I can feel it even now) and hid it away inside myself, deep and geologic, like a volcanic vent, unseen but making the ocean around it boil.
They would pay. There would never be enough of them to pay fully.
And now, here, I tell you why I say “they.”
The myth of Toby Wick, of his great white hull, was it him? Was he the Captain of the ship that killed her? The hull was white, though that could have been barnacles.
But no, my eyes saw her die, and my eyes saw no devil. They only saw the men who did it.
Men. Not myths. Certainly not the myths that followed this attack. Even the shipyard master started speaking of how it must have been Toby Wick himself who took on and slaughtered a pod that size, how no fierce group of whales could be taken by anything less than a devil.
But I saw what I saw.
Here is the truth behind the myth: all men are Toby Wick.
For who needs devils when you have men?
14
WE SWAM EAST-SOUTH-EAST AT A PUNISHING pace, the Captain’s great bulk towing our ship, we Apprentices in drafting position behind her. Our job on the trek was to keep the ship in her slipstream while the sailors adjusted our sails to catch the currents, lightening her load.
It was not thrilling work.
“Don’t men lie?” Willem said, glancing over to the mast where our young man – Demetrius, as I had not yet decided to think of him – was still tied.
“Always,” Treasure said. “It is the basis of their culture. They can never be trusted. Never.”
“Then why does the Captain follow what the man says?” I asked, out of nothing more than annoyance at her certainty.
“She is wily,” Treasure said. “She knows she is being lied to. She is merely preparing.”
“How?” Willem asked, in seeming innocence. Though perhaps only seeming. You did not get to be Second Apprentice on the Alexandra by being daft.
“That’s for the Captain to know,” Treasure snapped, and if my story makes her seem unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up, that’s because she was unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up. “Know your place, Second Apprentice.”
Willem looked over to me with a wink.
“Just think,” Treasure said, her own eyes glazing with foreseen glory, “we will be the ones who take Toby Wick once and for all. We will be part of the legend of our Captain. We will be legends ourselves.”
“Or maybe the disc is symbolic,” Willem said, half dreamily. “Maybe they’re not mountains at all. There are three peaks. There are three Apprentices. The disc is a precious metal, what men use for tender. Perhaps the three marks mean that the price Toby Wick will extract is the Captain’s three Apprentices.”
“You’re wrong,” Treasure said to Willem. “The disc is a prophecy.”
I groaned internally at this word. “Not everything is a prophecy.”
Treasure rounded on me. “A hand sticking through the hull of a man ship, meant for us–”
“We don’t know that–”
“Sending us to three mountains, where we shall all meet our destiny. Perhaps Willem is partially right. The three marks are the three Apprentices. The disc is our Captain. But Toby Wick has given himself over to our oblivion. It is prophecy of the purest sort.”
We are always saying things like this, us as a people. Prophecy of the purest sort. What does that even mean? If prophecy were pure, it would be fact, but it is not. And yet how it drives us, even when all I have ever seen is that the only prophecy that has any accuracy – any purity – is the one that self-fulfils.
We would get to the mountains. We would meet our destiny. But was it a disc that made it true? Or our dogged pursuit of it? Will the world end in darkness because it is foretold? Or because there will be those who believe it so strongly they will make it so? In the fear that I always try to hide in my heart, I wonder if there is even a difference.
15
THE NEXT DAY, TREASURE SUDDENLY ROSE from her duties, scanning the empty ocean. I could hear the clicks of her echolocation. She swam hurriedly to the Captain, who listened closely to her. Then both turned to us.
“Parley,” the Captain said. “A pod approaches.”
Our sailors instantly switched the sails to drag, slowing the ship so that the Captain could release herself from the tow ropes. The rest of us were already at work, helping to turn the ship to best defensive advantage.
“Not you, Bathsheba,” the Captain said. “You will hide our captive.” Her great forehead loomed over me threateningly. “No one shall hear of Toby Wick’s prophecy except those for whom it is meant.”
So the prophecy had already become something so valuable it must be kept secret.
“Aye, Captain,” I said. “But we are in clear ocean. Won’t that mean–”
“You will have to take him in the hull.”
I blew some bubbles out of my blowhole in alarm. “But Captain–”
Without warning, she opened her mouth and bit my forehead, the single most humiliating thing one of our kind can do to another. My chest burned with the outrage, though I could do nothing but submit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Willem and Treasure watching with a terrified glee.
“You came to me with vengeance in your eye, Third Apprentice,” she said, in almost a growl. “You came to me promising death and blood in the water. But instead of letting me deliver that to you, you have somehow entered into the belief that my commands are not commands, but openings for discussion. This is the second time. There will not be a third.”
“Aye, Captain,” I said, pained.
“You will go into the hold with our captive. You will keep him there and alive. Or you will no longer be Third Apprentice.”
She let me go, small streams of blood flowing from my head, top and bottom, where her teeth cut it. The school of blue sharks that always followed us at a wary distance visibly perked up, though they could only still be gorged on the leftover men from yesterday.
I swam, humiliated, to the young male. “What’
s happening?” he asked. I didn’t answer, just took him in my jaws – too roughly; he cried out, sputtering more water – tearing him loose from the mast and swimming to the stern of our ship.
Where I took him inside.
16
IF YOU ARE NOT A HUNTER YOURSELF, my reluctance, nay, my horror at having to hide inside our hull while our Captain parleyed will be a surprise to you. We kept stores there, yes, but we needed less than men do: spare food for lean days, extra harpoons, buoyancy controls, little more.
It was mainly a slaughterhouse. A rendering plant, where we kept the bodies and spoils of all we hunted. A place of ghosts, crying out in their nonsense language. A dead and stinking place.
A place which it was the worst luck in the sea to enter without a kill.
I swam the young male – Demetrius, I suppose – into the empty hull, an obedient sailor closing it behind me, plunging us into a darkness lifted only by small square windows that looked out into the ocean.
“What is this place?” he asked. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I will if you do not keep quiet,” I said, eyeing our surroundings, despite a strong wish not to.
I knew the instant Demetrius did the same. Even with his man eyes, unsuitable for the gloom of the ocean, he could still see the limbs of his former shipmates tied in bunches, their torsos bundled into bales, their heads bumping one another in great coral jugs. The water was murky with blood and flesh, small fish eating the floating bits.
Demetrius was quiet, seeing it all, his mouth agape (how tiny were their mouths, how useless to eat anything but one bite at a time, how oh how did they contend for mastery of the world with us for so long?).
“You are monsters,” he whispered.
“My mother’s head was severed from her body while she yet lived,” I whispered back, ferocious in my quiet. “Her body stripped of its fat, then dumped into the ocean for the sharks to eat. You aren’t even efficient monsters.”
“This is a horror,” he said. “A hell.”
“One you will join if you do not keep still.”
For even now I heard it from inside the cursed hull.
Another pod was coming for a parley.
17
“PERMISSION TO APPROACH,” THE OTHER Captain said. This was required for all parleys; if our Captain declined for any other reason than plague on our ship, however, it would be considered an act of aggression. Though aggression was never far away whatever the case.
“Permission granted,” our Captain said.
“I am Arcturus,” the other Captain said. “We swim from the western ocean.”
“And I am Alexandra. We swim from the southern. You are far from home, Captain.”
“We have been on the hunt for nearly four years.”
This was a remarkable statement. Most hunts lasted a year, two at the very most. Ours was nearing its projected end, though the exact date was always at the whim of the Captain. Who knew when we would finish, now that we were on the hunt for Toby Wick?
“Are you the pod that took the bounty yesterday?” the other Captain asked, though the weight of our hull and the bones currently boiling on our deck made the question as much a formality as his permission request.
“Aye,” our Captain answered. “A weak bounty, but we make do.”
“Only two Apprentices? Was one lost?”
“One is on a mission. We are not missing any crew.”
“Do you hear that, boys?” Captain Arcturus was, I assumed, talking to his own Apprentices. Crews didn’t have to be single gender, but apparently his was as much as ours. “The good Captain sends her Apprentices out on missions. What does this tell you? That she trusts her Apprentices? That she uses them to further her hunt?”
“It tells us that she has more than one mission,” one of Arcturus’s Apprentices answered.
“It tells us that our hunt is purer,” said another.
“It tells us that we outnumber her,” said the third.
Our Captain didn’t respond to this threat. You never did to that of Apprentices. If you took the insult, you were the weaker one. She rightly left it to her own Apprentices to answer.
“It tells you she has trained her Apprentices to be more than sucker fish,” said Treasure, and for a moment, even I was proud of her.
“It tells you she is unafraid of meeting another pod in this wide ocean even with only two Apprentices,” said Willem.
“It tells you she is the legendary Captain Alexandra,” said Treasure, “and the rules she makes are her own.”
“It tells you she is uncatchable,” Willem said, and even before she finished, I knew it was going wrong. “Toby Wick himself says so.”
An uncomfortable silence in which only the currents could be heard.
“Toby Wick?” Captain Arcturus said, a spike of curiosity in his voice.
“I’m afraid my own legend has grown mythic,” said our Captain. “My Apprentices can be overeager in their worship. Obviously, a problem you don’t have to contend with.”
“Our Captain also hunts Toby Wick!” the other ship’s First Apprentice said, angrily.
“Silence,” Captain Arcturus said, in a voice so calm, I began to wonder for the first time if our Captain had met her match. “We all hunt Toby Wick,” he continued. “In the sense that the hunt is never over. In the sense that the hunt, every hunt, has only a single aim.”
“The eradication of man,” our Captain said.
“The eradication of man,” Captain Arcturus agreed.
“Because who among us would be fool enough to go after the man himself?”
“Who indeed?”
Another quiet, the ocean tending to its own mysterious concerns.
“Well,” Captain Arcturus said. “We have no news or messages to offer for the direction you are heading.”
This was the traditional wrapping-up. Ships of old would carry news and post from ships they met out in the open ocean. Our cities now were numerous enough to reduce the necessity, but it was still custom to offer.
“Nor do we,” our Captain said. “I think we’ve gathered all the information we need from this parley.”
“Indeed,” said Captain Arcturus. “Good hunting, Captain. Parley concluded.”
“Parley concluded.”
I heard the pod begin to move away, with many clicks sent back to us, many more sent to the hull where Demetrius and I were hidden.
“You won’t beat him,” he whispered to me in the dark.
I thought he was speaking of Arcturus. “He’s merely a braggart. Our Captain could defeat him with very little–”
“Toby Wick,” he said. “It’s what they were talking about, wasn’t it? The only words I understood were that name. You won’t beat him. He’s not a man. He is a devil.”
“If he exists, he is merely a man.”
“A man no other man has ever seen and lived to tell,” he said. “A man all of us fear.”
I was surprised at this. “No living man has seen him?”
“Nor any whale who has survived. Or so the legends have it.”
“Why would Toby Wick kill men?”
“Because he can.”
I watched him, warily. “You have let your devil get away from you.”
He looked genuinely confused. “To what other purpose is a devil?”
18
“THEY WILL FOLLOW US,” CAPTAIN ALEXANDRA said after we were on our way again.
“Let them,” Treasure said, defiant.
“You have that much confidence in your Captain?”
“I do.” Treasure was almost visibly inflated with pride.
Our Captain turned to Willem and me. “And what of my other Apprentices?”
“I would follow my Captain anywhere,” Willem said simply, no doubt truthfully.
“Bathsheba?”
“I hunt men,” I said. “And you are the Captain who finds them.”
“And Toby Wick? Will I find him, too?”
“All men a
re Toby Wick, and there is no one better at finding them than you, Captain.”
“That almost sounds like prophecy,” she said, humor in her voice. She looked at me, as if trying to read my mind. “Perhaps it will be you, our doubter, who puts the harpoon in the side of Toby Wick himself.”
“Not if my harpoon is first,” Treasure said.
“Or mine,” Willem joined in.
Our Captain made a contented sound at their enthusiasm, then spoke some final words to me. “Bathsheba, our captive . . . ?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“There can only be so many answers left,” she said. “Find me all of his.” She turned deep into the current, pulling our ship. “And then kill him.”
19
I SWAM BACK TO THE MAST WHERE DEMETRIUS had been retied by the sailors. His head lolled in the current, the breather bubble lolling with him. I thought he might have died, but–
“Have you come to kill me?” he asked.
“I have come for answers.”
He raised his head. “It matters not. I am dying anyway.”
“How so?”
“Our skin isn’t meant to be wet for this long. I can feel great sheets of it sliding from my hands.”
I swam behind him. The bones of two fingers were exposed, the flesh quite gone. “Are you not in pain?”
“Do you care?”
“I am curious,” I said. “But if you prefer, I will stop being so. How many ships will Toby Wick have waiting for us?”
“Just one,” he answered, wearily.
“A falsehood. Everyone knows he travels in a fleet.”
“Every whale may know that. Every man knows he travels in a fleet of one. It’s his arrogance. Otherwise, he doesn’t consider it a fair hunt.”
“These are lies. I will hurt you more, if I must.”
“If you must,” he spat. “Yes, I have heard of your musts. Whales and their precious prophecies. ‘We must do this. It has been prophesied.’ You relieve yourself of choice. Relieve yourself of consequences. Torture me, harm me, kill me. Do all these things, but do not pretend there is a must. That is how evil is rationalized.”