Lesson 12: Whales

Every child on the Shore of Lamps is told, long before it can hold an oar, that the whales of the northern sea are monsters. They rise beneath a ship without warning, take her keel in their jaws and drag her down into the dark where the drowned bells ring, and a crew who hears them breathing at night must row away as hard as it can and never look back.

You have heard that story at a dozen fires, and you have never once doubted it, because the people who told it were old and serious and had lost brothers to the sea.

So when the sound you heard all through the short night comes again in the grey before dawn, a long, hollow rush of air followed by a wet sigh, you lie very still under your damp wool on the deck boards. Your heart is running like a boy in the first lap of a race, far too fast to last.

The breathing in the dark was not the sea

The light comes slowly on the twentieth day, as it has come every day of the calm, without wind and without colour. The sea and the sky are one sheet of pale grey pewter, and the Heron lies in the middle of it like a dropped feather.

Then something breaks the sheet a long stone’s throw off the steering side. A dark curved back slides up out of the water, broad and glistening, and from the front of it a column of mist shoots up as tall as three men standing on each other’s shoulders. It hangs in the still air, slowly spreading, and drifts down over the water in a fine rain. The sound reaches you a moment after the sight, that same hollow rush you heard all night, and with it comes a smell of old fish and wet stone that you will remember for the rest of your life. The back rolls forward, shows a small hooked fin, and is gone, and only a smooth, oily circle on the water marks the place where it was.

Another rises behind the bow, and another beyond it. When Wenna climbs to the masthead in her bare feet, she calls down in a voice that is trying hard to stay calm that there are nine, no, eleven, no, more than she can count, all around the ship.

Ingrith is already sitting up on her chest by the chart table, her cloak around her shoulders and her good eye on the nearest circle of oily water. Her face has the look you have seen on it over her little board of stones, when she sees, three moves ahead, what the other player is about to do.

What the Old Song Says

Dunn knows the verse, and he says it under his breath, not quite singing, as men do when they fear that singing aloud might call the thing they sing about: “Where the grey ones rise and blow, the deep will open, down you go. Keep your oars in, keep your voices low, and the grey ones pass where the cold roads go.”

Every sailor on the Shore of Lamps knows what those lines mean, or thinks he does. The whales are the guards of the deep, they open the sea under ships which come too close, and a crew can only hope to be passed by if it makes itself small and silent and begs the Wind Mother for a breeze.

Askel says the verse is the oldest in the song and therefore the truest, and nobody aboard argues, because nobody aboard has ever been so far north, among so many of them, on a sea so flat that there is nowhere to hide.

Only Ingrith says nothing. When you look at her, you see that she is not listening to Dunn at all but counting under her breath the time between one breath of the nearest whale and the next.

Bran reaches for an oar and Ingrith stops him

It is Bran who moves first, because Bran always moves first. He takes up his oar and lifts the blade out over the side, meaning to strike the water and make the loudest noise he can, the way men on the shore beat pots to frighten wolves away from the sheep.

“Put it down,” Ingrith says, not loudly, and the oar stops in the air. Bran turns to her with his jaw set, like a wrestler who has gripped his man and been told by the judge to let go.

“They will have us over, navigator. Any one of them could lift us on its back like a child lifts a toy boat.”

“Any one of them could,” Ingrith says. “Not one of them has. They have been around us all night, Bran, while you slept with your mouth open. If they wanted the Heron, they have had the whole of the dark to take her. Put the oar down, and listen with me.”

Bran lowers the blade so slowly that it does not touch the water, and the whole crew sits with their hands in their laps and listens.

A grey back passes under the keel

What you hear, when you stop being afraid long enough to hear anything, is that the breaths have a rhythm, and it is not the rhythm of anything angry. A whale comes up and blows, once, twice, three times, each breath a little closer to the last. Then the great back arches higher, and the tail rises black and dripping into the air, broad as a sail and notched in the middle, and slides down without a splash. For a long while there is nothing at all. Ingrith counts in a whisper, and you count with her past two hundred, until the whale comes up again far off on the other side of the ship. It blows hard, like a swimmer who has held his breath to the end of a long dive in the river and bursts out gasping.

“They breathe as we do,” Ingrith says softly. “They are not fish. They must come up for every breath, and rest at the top before they go down again. A creature that must come to the surface to live is not a creature of the deep. The deep is only where it goes to find its food.”

Just then the water beside the ship turns a lighter shade, and a long shape slides beneath the keel. It passes so close that you can see the pale scars and the clusters of barnacles along its side. The whole Heron lifts a hand’s breadth on the water it pushes ahead of itself and settles back again, gently, as a mother settles a cradle.

Lise grips the gunwale with both hands. Dunn shuts his eyes. Nobody breathes.

The whale rises beyond the bow and blows a long sigh that drifts across the deck and wets your face with its stinking mist, and it swims on without even turning its head.

“It moved the ship to pass us,” Ingrith says. “It did not move the ship to sink us. A bull in the field will push the gate if the gate is in its way. That does not make the bull a monster or the gate an enemy.”

The whales are eating, not hunting ships

When the sun at last burns a pale hole in the grey, you see what the whales are doing, and once you have seen it you cannot understand how anyone ever thought anything else.

The sea around the ship is thick with tiny reddish creatures, no longer than the end of your little finger, swarming in clouds just under the surface. In places the water looks rusty with them. The whales come up underneath the clouds with their mouths wide open and their pleated throats swelling like bellows. They close their jaws on whole fields of the little creatures and let the water run out between the fringes that hang in their mouths, and the birds come down screaming to take what spills.

“They are eating,” Wenna says from the masthead, and she starts to laugh, a short, surprised, shaky laugh that runs down the ship like the first drops of a rain. “They are only eating. They are like Bran at supper.”

Bran does not laugh, but his shoulders loosen. After a while he says, in a lower voice than you have heard him use since the calm began, that the one with the white patch on its tail has come up near the bow four times, and that it seems to be watching the ship as much as the ship is watching it.

Ingrith nods as though he had told her something important. You understand that he has, because Bran has stopped seeing enemies and started seeing animals, and a man who watches carefully will learn more in an afternoon than a frightened man learns in a year.

Cold water lies on one side of the line

What Ingrith has seen, and what you only see when she points it out with her chin, is that the whales are not scattered evenly around the ship. They are strung out in a long bending line that runs away into the haze toward the north-west and back the other way toward the south-east, and the Heron is lying almost exactly on it.

“Fetch the bucket,” she says to you. “Two buckets. One from each side.”

You lower the leather bucket over the steering side, where the water is clear and dark blue-grey, and then over the far side, where it is green and cloudy with the little red creatures. Ingrith makes you put your hand into one and then into the other. The difference is so sharp that you snatch your hand back from the green water as if from a flame turned to ice. It aches to the bone, and it smells sharper, like the air before snow.

“Two seas,” Ingrith says. “The warm river that has carried us north these last days, and something else, coming down from somewhere colder. Where they meet, the cold water brings food up from below, and the little red things feed on it, and the whales feed on them. The whales care nothing for us. They care about this line, and they follow it as a hunter follows a path in the snow. If you want to know where the cold water runs, watch the whales.”

She tastes the green water from the tip of one finger, spits it over the side, and stays quiet for a long time, looking north-west along the line of rising backs.

Ingrith reads the old verse again

In the afternoon, while the crew sleeps in turns in the thin sun, Ingrith calls you to the chart table. She asks you to say the verse back to her slowly, as if you were saying it for the first time and did not know what it meant.

“The people who made that song were not fools,” she says when you have finished. “They were sailors, and they saw what you saw this morning: great beasts, and ships lifted by them, and once or twice, surely, a small boat overturned when it rowed among them in a panic. They kept their oars in, and the whales passed, and they made a warning out of it. Do not row among feeding whales. Do not shout. Be still. That part of the song is true.”

You think of the fires on the Shore of Lamps, of the old fisherman with the stiff hand who told the whale story every winter and always lowered his voice at the same place, and of how the smaller children would hide their faces in their mothers’ shawls when he came to the drowned bells. You had hidden your face, too, the first time. You remember how good the fear felt there, safe and warm with the wind outside, like a game of hide-and-seek in which you know you will be found and want to be. It has never once occurred to you that the old man might have been wrong, or that a story can be frightening and true at its centre and false around its edges, all at the same time, like a bow that is well made but strung too tight.

“And the deep opening?”

“That is what frightened people add, the way a fish grows longer every time its story is told at the fire. But listen to the last line. The grey ones pass where the cold roads go. Somebody, long ago, watched them as we are watching them now and saw what they showed. The fear is only the wrapping. Inside it is a chart.”

The Mark on the Chart

You unroll the chart from its oiled leather tube and weight its corners with the four flat stones Ingrith keeps for that purpose. She lays her finger not on the place where you think the ship is but on the ice field she charted on the way north, at the top edge of the skin, where the Northern Way threads through the white.

By the star she measured on the fifteenth night, by Dunn’s knots since, and by the slow drift of the warm river, she judges that the same ice must run on past the top edge of the hide, two or three days’ rowing north and west of the Heron. The cold water in your bucket, she says, has come down from it, as meltwater comes down from a hill in spring. If you follow the whales north-west, you will be following the cold road back to its source.

You mark the position with a small circle, and beside it, in the careful letters she taught you, you draw a little curved back with a spout and the line of the whales running off toward the ice.

In the log she makes you write: Day twenty. Calm. Whales in great number, feeding along a line of cold green water that runs north-west. Where the whales feed, the cold current runs. A thing that breathes as you do is not your enemy.

The black sails are still on the edge of sight

Toward evening, when the light lies low and gold along the water for the first time in many days, Wenna calls from the masthead that she can see the black sails. They are four marks no bigger than flies on a whitewashed wall, low in the south where the warm water runs.

Askel climbs up beside her and stays a long time, his hand over his eyes, and when he comes down his face is tight. They are rowing, he says. He can see the faint flicker of the oar banks when the sun catches them, and they come on as steadily as men pulling a rope at the midsummer fair, one heave and then another, never fast and never stopping.

“They will reach the whales by tomorrow,” he says. “If the song frightens them as it frightened us, they will turn aside, and that gives us a day.”

“Morvane is not a man to be frightened by a song,” Ingrith says. “He will row straight through. But he will keep to the warm water, where the rowing is easy, and he will not see the line we have seen. He will be too busy watching our mast.”

The edge of the current becomes a road

So while the light lasts, Ingrith tells Askel what she means to do, and Askel listens with his arms folded, then unfolds them and nods, slowly, the way he has begun to nod to her these last days.

The Heron will cross into the cold water and turn north-west along its edge. The cold current runs against her that way, out of the ice, but only weakly at the edge, where it rubs against the warm river and slows. A crew that keeps close to the line, as a runner keeps to the inside of the track and lets the others run wide around the bend, can row against the cold road with half the effort of a crew that blunders into the middle of it.

“And the black ships?” Askel says.

“They will see us go and follow,” she says. “They will row into the cold water where it runs strongest, because the shortest line to our mast lies through it, and every stroke they pull will give back half a stroke to the sea. Let the sea do the work. We have done enough of it ourselves.”

The rowers take their benches at dusk. Bran sets a stroke so long and so quiet that the blades go into the water without a splash. The whales open a lane for the ship and close it again behind her, rising and blowing on both sides like the crowd along a road who watch the runners pass in the last miles of a long race.

You stand by Ingrith at the steering oar and feel the cold come up through the deck boards into your feet. The air thickens and grows damp, and the stars that come out one by one are smudged at the edges, as if someone had breathed on the sky.

Late that night, when the whales are far behind and the only sound is the dip and creak of the oars, Ingrith sets out her board of stones on the chest between you. She lets you play first, and then she says nothing for so long that you think she has fallen asleep.

Then she lifts her head and sniffs the damp air, and her clouded eye catches the faint starlight like a pale pebble under water.

“Smell that,” she says. “There is ice ahead of us, a long way off yet, but it is there. The whales have shown us the road, and the road goes where the songs say a ship must never go. That will be the next lesson, and the people on the Shore of Lamps have it as wrong as they had the whales.”