by Diane Duane
”Aroooon u’aoluor, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.” „
“I consent,” the Blue said in notes so deep that coral cracked and fell on rock shelves some yards away, “and I will weave my voice and my will and my blood with that of those who sing, if there be need.”
“I ask the second time, that those with me, both of your Mastery and not, CTiay hear. Do you consent to the Song?”
“I consent. And may my wizardry and my Mastery depart from me sooner than I abandon that other Mastery I shall undertake in the Song’s celebration.”
“The third time, and the last, I ask, that the Sea, and the Heart of the Sea, shall hear. Do you consent to the Song?”
“Freely I consent,” Aroooon sang with calm finality, “and may I find no place in that Heart, but wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song or what it brings about for the good of those who live.”
“Then I accept you as Celebrant of the Song, as Blue, and as latest of a line of saviors,” S’reee said. “And though those who swim are swift to forget, the Sea forgets neither Song nor singer.” She turned a bit, looking behind her at Hotshot. “Might as well get all of you done at once,” she said. “Hotshot?”
“Right.”
The dolphin went through the Oath much faster than Aroooon had, though his embarrassment at being referred to as Swift-Fire-In-The-Water was this time so acute that Nita actually turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at him. As for the rest of the Oath, though, Hotshot recited it, as Nita had expected, with the mindless speed of a person who thinks he has other more important matters to attend to.
S’reee turned to Nita. “We can’t give K!t the Oath yet,” she said. “We don’t know who he’s going to be.”
“Can’t you just give it to me and leave that part blank or something?” Kit said eagerly. He loved ceremonies.
“Kit!”
“No, Kit. HNii’t, do you know the words?”
“The Sea does,” she said, finding it true. S’reee had already begun the ritual questioning; Nita felt for the response, found it. “I consent, and I will weave my voice and my will and my blood with that of those who sing, if were be need.” It was astonishing, how much meaning could be packed into a few notes. And the music itself was fascinating; so somber, but with that odd thread of joy running through it. She threw herself into the grave joy of we final response. “… And may I find no place in that Heart, but wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song or what it brings about for the good of those who live.”
“Then I accept you as Celebrant of the Song, and as Silent One, and as the latest in a line of saviors. And though those who swim are swift to forget, the Sea forgets neither Song nor singer.” S’reee looked at Nita with an expression in those blue eyes of vast relief, so much like the one she had given her and Kit when they’d first agreed to help that Nita shuddered a little with the intensity of it, then smiled inside. It was nice to be needed.
“That was well done,” Aroooon said slowly. “Now, S’reee, give me names so I’ll know whom to call.”
A few moments of singing ensued as S’reee recited the names of five whales Nita had never heard of. Her inner contact with the Sea, moments later, identified them all as wizards of various ratings, all impressive. Aroooon rumbled agreement. “Good enough,” he said. “Best get out of the area so that I may begin Calling.”
“Right. Come on, Kit, HNii’t. Till the Moon’s full, Aroooon—“
“Till then.”
They swam away through the darkening water. S’reee set the pace; it was a quick one. “Why did we have to leave in such a hurry?” Kit said.
“There aren’t many wizardries more powerful than a Calling,” S’reee said as she led them away. “He’ll weave those whales’ names into his spell, and if they agree to be part of the Song, the wizardry will lead them to the place appointed, at the proper time.”
“Just by singing their names?”
“Kit, that’s plenty. Don’t you pay attention when someone calls you by your name? Your name is part of you. There’s power in it, tied up with the way you secretly think of yourself, the truth of the way you are. Know what a person’s name means to him, know who he feels he is — and you have power over him. That’s what Aroooon is using.”
That was a bit of information that started Nita’s thoughts going in nervous circles. How do I think of myself? And does this mean that the people who know what I think can control me? I’m not sure I like this…
The first note rumbled through the water behind them, and Nita pulled up short, curling around in a quick turn. “Careful, HNii’t!” S’reee sang, a soft, sharp note of warning. Nita backfinned, hovering in the water. “Don’t disturb his circle—“
Looking back, she wouldn’t have dreamed of it. The water was growing darker by the second, and as a result the glow of the krill in it was now visible — a delicate, shimmery, indefinite blue-green light that filled the sea everywhere. The light grew brighter, moment by moment; but it was brighter still at the surface, where the waves slid and shifted against one another in a glowing, undulating ceiling. And brightest of all was the track left by Aroooon’s swimming — a wake that burned like clouds of cool fire behind him with every slow stroke of his tail.
At the head of the wake, Aroooon himself traced the grand curves of his spell, sheathed in bubbles and cold light. One circle he completed, melding into itself as he sang that single compelling note; then he began another at right angles to the first, and the water burned behind him, the current not taking the brilliance away. And the blue’s song seemed to get into the blood, into the bone, and would not be shaken—
“HNii’t,” S’reee said, “we can’t stay, you said you have to get back—“
Nita looked around her in shock. “S’reee, when did it get so dark! My folks are gonna have a fit!”
“Didn’t I mention that time didn’t run the same way below the water as it does in the Above?”
“Yeah, but I thought—“ Kit said, and then he broke off and said a very bad word in whale. “No, I didn’t think. I assumed that it’d go slower—“
“It goes faster,” Nita moaned. “Kit, how are we going to get anything done? S’reee, how long exactly is the Song going to take?”
“Not long,” the humpback said, sounding a bit puzzled by her distress. “A couple of lights, as it’s reckoned in the Above—“
“Two days!”
“We’re in trouble,” Kit said.
“That’s exactly what we’re in. S’reee, let’s put our tails into it! Even if we were getting home right now, we’d have some explaining to do.”
She turned and swam in the direction where her sharpening whale-senses told her home was. It was going to be bad enough, having to climb out of this splendid, strong, graceful body and put her own back on again. But Dairine was waiting to give her the Spanish Inquisition when she got home. And her mother and father were going to give her more of those strange looks. Worse… there would be questions asked, she knew it. Her folks might even call Kit’s family if they got worried enough — and Kit’s dad, who was terminally protective of his son, might make Kit come home.
That thought was worst of all.
They went home. It was lucky for them that Nita’s father was too tired from his fishing — which had been successful — to make much noise about their lateness. Her mother was cleaning fish in the kitchen, too annoyed at the smelly work to much care about anything else. And as for Dairine, she was buried so deep in a copy of The Space Shuttle Operators’ Manual that all she did when Nita passed her room was glance up for a second, then dive back into her reading. Even so, there was no feeling of relief when Nita shut the door to her room and got under the covers; just an uneasy sense of something incomplete, something that was going to come up again later … and n
ot in a way she’d like.
“Wizardry…” she muttered sourly, and fell asleep.
Ed’s Song
“Neets,” her mother said from where she stood at the sink, her back turned. “Got a few minutes?”
Nita looked up from her breakfast. “What’s up?”
Her mother was silent for a second, as if wondering how to broach whatever she had on her mind. “You and Kit’ve been out a lot lately,” she said at last. “Dad and I hardly ever seem to see you.”
“I thought Dad said it’d be fun to have Dairine and me out of his hair for a while, this vacation,” said Nita.
“Out of his hair, yes. Not out of his life. — We worry about you two when you’re out so much.”
“Mom, we’re fine.”
“Well, I wonder… What exactly are you two doing out there all day?”
“Oh, Mom! Nothing!”
Her mother looked at her and put up one eyebrow in an excellent imitation of Mr. Spock.
Nita blushed a bit. It was one of those family jokes that you wish would go away, but never does; when Nita had been little and had said “Nothing!” she had usually been getting into incredible trouble. “Mom,” Nita said, “sometimes when I say ‘nothing,’ it’s really just nothing. We hang out, that’s all-We… do stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Mom, what does it matter? Just stuff!”
“It matters,” her mother said, “if it’s adult kinds of stuff… instead of kid stuff.”
Nita didn’t say a word. There was no question that what she and Kit were doing were adult sorts of things.
Her mother took in Nita’s silence, waiting for her daughter to break it. “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Neets,” she said at last. “Are you and Kit getting… physically involved?”
Nita looked at her mother in complete shock. “Mom!” she said in a despairing groan. “You mean sex? No!”
“Well,” her mother said slowly, “that takes a bit of a load off my mind.” There was a silence after the words. Nita was almost sure she could hear her mother thinking, If it’s true…
The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could have. “Mom,” she said, “if I were gonna do something like that, I’d talk to you about it first.” She blushed as she said it. She was embarrassed even to be talking about this to anybody, and she would have been embarrassed to talk to her mom about it too. Nevertheless, what she’d said was the truth. “Look, Mom, you know me, I’m chicken. I always run and ask for advice before I do anything.”
“Even about this?”
“Especially about this!”
“Then what are you doing?” her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there was another sound in her voice — wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something. “Sometimes you say to me ‘playing,’ but I don’t know what kids mean any more when they say that. When I was little, it was hopscotch, or Chinese jumprope, or games in the dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she’s doing, and she says ‘playing,’ I go in and find she’s doing quadratic equations… or using my hot-curlers on the neighbor’s red setter. I don’t know what to expect.”
Nita shrugged. “Kit and I swim a lot,” she said.
“Where you won’t get in trouble, I hope,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn’t said anything about lifeguards or public beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What do they do with their families?… But her mother was waiting for more explanation. She struggled to find some. “We talk, we look at stuff. We explore…”
Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. “He’s just my friend,” Nita said finally. It was a horrible understatement, but she was getting hot with embarrassment at even having to think about this kind of thing. “Mom, we’re okay, really.”
“I suppose you are,” her mom said. “Though I can’t shake the feeling that there are things going on you’re not telling me about. Nita, I trust you… but I still worry.”
Nita just nodded. “Can I go out now, Mom?”
“Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark,” she said, and Nita sighed and headed for the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed out to everyone’s satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her. It griped her.
There’s no reason for it! she thought guiltily as she went down to the beach, running so she wouldn’t be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she knew; and the guilt settled quietly into place inside her, where not all the sea water in the world would wash it out.
She found Kit far down the beach, standing on the end of the jetty with a rippling, near-invisible glitter clutched in one hand: the whalesark. “You’re late,” he said, scowling, as Nita climbed the jetty. “S’reee’s waiting—“ Then the scowl fell off his face when he saw her expression. “You okay?”
“Yeah. But my mom’s getting suspicious. And we have to be back by dark or it’ll get worse.”
Kit said something under his breath in Spanish.
“Ay!” Nita said back, a precise imitation of what either of Kit’s folks would have said if they’d heard him. He laughed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“We’d better leave our suits here,” Kit said. Nita agreed, turning her back and starting to peel out of hers. Kit made his way down the rocks and into the water as she put her bathing suit under the rock with his. Then she started down the other side of the jetty.
Nita found that the whale-body came much more easily to her than it had the day before. She towed Kit out into deeper water, where he wrapped the whalesark around him and made his own change; his too came more quickly and with less struggle, though the shock of displaced water, like an undersea explosion, was no less. S’reee came to meet them then, and they greeted her and followed her off eastward, passing Shinnecock Inlet.
“Some answers to Aroooon’s Calling have already come back,” she said. “Kit, it looks like we may not need you to sing after all. But I would hope you’d attend the Song anyway.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” he sang cheerfully. “Somebody has to be around to keep Neets from screwing up, after all…”
Nita made a humpback’s snort of indignation. But she also wondered about the nervousness in S’reee’s song. “Where’s Hotshot this morning?”
“Out calling the rest of his people for patrol around the Gates. Besides, I’m not sure he’s… well, suited for what we’re doing today…”
“S’reee,” Kit said, picking up the tremor in her song, “what’s the problem? It’s just another wizard we’re going to see—“
“Oh, no,” she said. “The Pale One’s no wizard. He’ll be singing one of the Twelve, all right — but the only one who has no magic.”
“Then what’s the problem? Even a shark is no match for three wizards—“
“Kit,” S’reee said, “that’s easy for you to say. You’re a sperm, and it’s true enough that the average shark’s no threat to one of your kind. But this is no average shark we’re going to see. This shark would be a good candidate to really be the Pale Slayer, the original Master-Shark, instead of just playing him. And there are some kinds of strength that even wizardry has trouble matching.” Her song grew quieter. “We’re getting close. If you have any plans to stay living for a while more, watch what you say when the Pale One starts talking. And for the Sea’s sake, if you’re upset about anything, don’t show it!”
They swam on toward Montauk Point, the long spit of land that was the southeastern tip of Long Island. The bottom began to change from the yellow, fairly smooth sand of the South Shore, littered with fish havens and abandoned oyster beds and deep undergrowth, to a bottom of darker shad
es dun, brown, almost black — rocky and badly broken, scattered with old wrecks. The sea around them grew noisy, changing from the usual soft background hiss of quiet water to a rushing, liquid roar that grew in intensity until Nita couldn’t hear herself think, let alone sing. Seeing in the water was difficult. The surface was whitecapped, the middle waters were murky with dissolved air, and the hazy sunlight diffused in the sea until everything seemed to glow a pallid gray white, with no shadows anywhere.
“Mind your swimming,” S’reee said, again in that subdued voice. “The rocks are sharp around here; you don’t want to start bleeding.”
They surfaced once for breath near Montauk Point, so that Nita got a glimpse of its tall octagonal lighthouse, the little tender’s house nearby, and a group of tourists milling about on the cliff that slanted sharply down to the sea. Nita blew, just once, but spectacularly, and grinned to herself at the sight of the tourists pointing and shouting at each other and taking pictures of her. She cruised the surface for a good long moment to let them get some good shots, then submerged again and caught up with Kit and S’reee.
The murkiness of the water made it hard to find her way except by singing brief notes, waiting for the return of the sound, and judging the bottom by it. S’reee was doing so, but her notes were so short that she seemed to be grudging them.
What’s the matter with her? Nita thought. You can’t get a decent sounding off such short notes— And indeed, she almost hit a rock herself as she was thinking that, and saved herself from it only by a quick lithe twist that left her aching afterward. The roaring of the water over the Shoals kept on flowing, interfering with the rebound of the song-notes, whiting them out. S’reee was bearing north around the point now and slowing to the slowest of modes. Kit, to keep from overswimming her, was barely drifting, and keeping well above the bottom. Nita glanced up at him, a great dark shape against the greater brightness of the surface water — and saw his whole body thrash once hard, in a gesture of terrible shock. “Nita!”