by J A Hutson
His father nodded. “Best we in the village could tell. There were a few bodies that washed up the next day, along with some things from the ship, shards of wood and shreds of sail, a crate of broken pottery. Old Tannin found a silver bracelet studded with green stones big as walnuts. Thought he was rich as a prince, but a passing peddler later told him they was just colored bits of glass.”
Keilan smiled, imagining Tannin strutting around town, proud as a rooster, and what his face must have looked like after the peddler had dashed his hopes. Knowing the old fool he had probably had the bracelet appraised in front of as large a crowd as possible, just so everyone could envy his good fortune.
His father stopped rowing. “About here, boy?”
Keilan glanced around, trying to estimate where the school he had sensed would be by now. “This should be a good spot,” he said, with only a trace of uncertainty.
His father might have noticed his tone, but still he grunted agreement and bent to his nets. Keilan helped him thread a few more pieces of bait into the mesh, then took the far end of the net and brought it to the back of the boat. At the count of three father and son tossed the weighted corners out into the ocean and watched them sink, fastening the other ends of the nets onto iron hooks driven into the side of the boat, while also holding tight to the lines that ran down to the weights suspended in the deepness. Now they just had to wait.
Sometimes it could take an hour before they caught anything, or his father grudgingly gave up, but today Elara’s bounty was swift, and almost immediately they felt the lines begin to thrum with the feeling of thrashing fish.
“Up boy, pull it up!” his father cried, hauling on the line that ran down to the net’s weights. Keilan did the same, and slowly the net cinched closed, rising toward the surface. His father let out a whoop when he saw how many squirming, silver bodies they had snared, and with a great heave father and son dumped the wriggling fish into the ship. Each was about as long as Keilan’s arm, and his father’s guess had been right, as their heads were large and black and bony, almost as if they were wearing helmets. Keilan jumped back a step, wary of their snapping jaws. He’d watched his father’s cousin lose a finger to one of these fish before.
“Ironheads! Ten, eleven . . . twelve! Just about the best first cast I’ve ever had. Elara smiles on us today, boy.”
Keilan grinned broadly, more for his father’s good humor than for the catch they’d brought up. In the past year there had been too many days of sullen silence trapped together on this boat, followed by nights of drunken rage and sadness. Since the night they’d lost her.
They dipped their net a handful of times around the rocks, bringing up a few more ironheads and also a small shark that must have been stalking the school. His father offered a quick prayer to Ghelu for the pardon of killing one of his most beloved children, then slid his boning knife into the shark’s eye and finished it off with a twist. Shark meat was popular in Chale these days.
His father didn’t ask him to dowse again for fish, and Keilan didn’t volunteer. Doing so more than once in a day left him with a splitting headache the next morning.
Finally satisfied with their catch, his father took up his oars again and began rowing for home. The sun had started its slow descent by then, burnishing the bare slopes of the eastern hills so that they gleamed like sheets of beaten gold, while to the south the purple stain in the sky had faded to an ominous black.
Keilan began stuffing the fish they’d caught into a large sack; although almost all of them had stopped breathing, he was still careful of their hooked jaws, as even after death they sometimes snapped shut with a terrible strength. His uncle had told him this was a last attempt at vengeance by a lingering spirit, but Keilan secretly thought that the fish were simply too stupid to know that they were dead.
As they approached the beach Keilan saw that most of the other fishing boats had already returned and been dragged up into the tall grass where they could better weather the coming storm. Shadowy shapes milled around on the sand, and tarps had been laid out displaying each fisherman’s catch. Long before he could make out faces Keilan recognized the spindly legs and barrel chest of Pelos, the old fishmonger from Chale, who traveled to their village most evenings in his great, rickety wagon to sift through Elara’s bounty. He was gesticulating fiercely with a tall, stooped man that Keilan thought was probably his Uncle Davin.
When the boat’s bottom scraped against the sand, Keilan hopped over the side into the surf and began hauling on the rope tied to the prow. His father joined him moments later, and together they wrestled the boat partway up onto the beach. Keilan spread out the tarp they used to display their catch, and his father pulled from their boat the sack bulging with ironheads, then began to lay them out carefully in neat rows. While he was doing this a few of the other fishermen who had already concluded their business with the fishmonger hoisted his father’s boat onto their shoulders and carried it up into the beach grass, setting it upside-down beside the others.
Pelos strolled over, trailed by Keilan’s Uncle Davin, and whistled appreciatively after a moment of careful inspection. “By the Ten, Farris, you had a good day. Two dozen ironheads and a decent-sized snapper.” The fishmonger jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the other catches. “Your brother here insisted there was nothing to find out there today, and I’d just about given up hope that this trip would be worthwhile.”
For the first time, Keilan noticed that the other catches on display seemed unusually small, both in quantity and the size of the fish, and that his uncle’s mouth was set in a thin, hard line as he watched the fishmonger peruse what they’d caught.
“There was nothing,” his uncle insisted, with more than a trace of bitterness, “Farris must have brought up everything in the bay worth catching.”
His father finished laying out his fish and then stood, wiping his hands on his tunic. “I whistled to the fish and they came. Old fisherman’s trick.”
Davin snorted, gesturing with a bony finger at Keilan. “It’s the boy. He’s just like his mother.”
Keilan felt a hand on his shoulder, and then his father moved in front of him. “He’s a good lad. He’s a true fisherman’s son.” There was an edge to his voice, and Davin must have heard it as well because his uncle stepped back, muttering to himself.
Pelos brushed past his father and tousled Keilan’s rain-slicked hair. “Well, if you helped bring up these beauties, I thank you kindly. So do the good people of Chale, as they’ll be happy to have a bit o’ fresh ironhead on the table tomorrow.” The old fishmonger’s face creased in sudden confusion. “Wait, what’s this?” he said, tickling the back of Keilan’s ear. “I think . . . I think you’ve got something caught back here . . .”
Keilan grinned, knowing what would come next. With feigned amazement the old fishmonger withdrew from behind Keilan’s ear an iron bit, then with a flourish held it out for him to take. “By the Ten, lad, you best be careful where you put your money. All kinds of disreputable folk around these parts.”
Keilan knew that some of the others his age in the village would have sneered at the fishmonger, trying to show how they were too old for such children’s tricks. He’d seen fifteen winters, after all. Another few moons and it’d be the mid-summer solstice, and he’d have to night-dive for Elara’s bounty and prove to everyone that he was ready to be considered a man of the village. But Pelos was almost family – he’d been pulling the same trick for a dozen years, since Keilan’s mother had first brought him down to the beach to watch and wait for his father’s return.
Pelos gave him a sly wink and then turned back to his father. “I’ll take the lot. Three imperial drakes and a dozen bits.”
“Four drakes even, and throw in a few pinches of that salt I know you keep in your wagon.”
“Three drakes, fifteen bits.”
The haggling settled into a familiar rhythm, with Pelos offering up outraged protestations and his father refusing to budge from what he thoug
ht was fair.
While they bargained, Keilan allowed his thoughts to wander a few months hence, when he’d have to stand at midnight on the rock with all the other boys on the cusp of manhood, and then leap into the freezing waters of the bay. He wouldn’t be able to return to the village until he brought back something of Elara’s bounty – most others scavenged sea urchins or crabs, whatever small thing they first found so they could get out of the water as quickly as possible, but Keilan had seen a few others return carrying spiny lobsters, which was considered especially blessed, and that’s what he had once told himself he would hold out for.
Now though . . . the thought of the night-dive had been weighing heavily on him for the past two weeks, ever since his . . . accident. Keilan shuddered, and not from the cold drizzle that was slowly starting to strengthen. Swimming down into the water, pushing into that blackness . . . there were things in the Deep. He had touched one.
It had started innocently enough. They had been out in the boat, a high summer sun beating down mercilessly, and not a breath of wind to give relief. His father had been hunched at the prow with his cloak drawn up, still smelling of the bottle of spiced rum he’d finished off earlier that morning. While they drifted on that glassy sea Keilan had trailed his hand in the water, idly searching. But there were no fish that day that he could feel, at least anywhere nearby, and his father was in no condition to row them elsewhere, or even finish baiting the nets.
So Keilan had stretched himself farther into the water, pushing his senses past the rocky mouth of the bay, into the true Deep. There he had found things. Bright, swift-moving shapes he was familiar with, a great school of fish that twisted and turned as if of one mind. And on the edges of that huge constellation hung cold, clear lights he knew to be sharks, and when he drifted closer he had seen one dart into the school. The lights had swirled and eddied, moments later reforming as if nothing had happened.
Keilan had known he should have stopped then – already he had felt himself starting to tingle with the strain of reaching so far, but he had continued on, into the blackness.
Several times he had passed small, bright, darting things, and once a languid, undulating form, and then his breath had been stolen from him as a collection of vast, ponderous souls pushed past, angling upwards.
Whales, he had murmured, as the giant creatures surged around him. They were different than the other things he had felt in the bay, not warm and clear and predatory, but blazing with inner fire, and almost gentle, their hugeness encompassing him as he floated, awe-struck.
He had sensed his body back in the boat, so far away, begin to shake, but he wasn’t able stop now, not after seeing such wonders. So he had dived deeper, his speed quickening, thrusting himself forward into the darkness.
And that’s where he’d found it. Down there, in the true black, where sunlight never reached. He’d thought the whales were huge, but it had reared out of the gloom like a sudden mountain, vast beyond the limits of comprehension. Terror had sluiced through him, and he knew from whatever tenuous thread connecting him with his body back aboard his father’s boat that he had just emptied his bladder, a distant trickle of warmth running down his leg.
It did not move; it did not glitter like fish or sharks or pulse with the slow majesty of whales. But Keilan had known that it lived, and then, impossibly, an eye bigger than a wagon wheel had slid open in the blackness and found him, flensed his soul open like with a boning knife and peered into his depths. And he had fled, screaming.
His father had lifted from his stupor when Keilan had slumped to the floor of the boat, twitching, blue veins etched against milky skin and his wide eyes staring at nothing.
He had seen a Deep One. And it had seen him.
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About the Author
J.A. Hutson is a pen name for epic fantasy writer Alec Hutson, the author of The Crimson Queen. He grew up in a geodesic dome and a bookstore and he currently lives in Shanghai, China. To sign up for his mailing list or send him a message, please go to authoralechutson.com.