Leviathan's Huntress, Ch. VI: The Tryworker

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The sky was bruised. A storm approached. The mother and her khahal both floated lifeless in a red ocean, fins raised high. Against the scudding clouds birds flitted gray and quicklime-white. They screamed and bickered over the corpses.

As with the khahal, Motza gave the mother fresh water from his skin. Then they rigged two kalpas each to a whale and rowed off toward the Embanesa. The cetaceans dragged and tarnished the waters and sitting aftward in her thwart Iona stared at them the whole way.

An hour back to the Embanesa. Davit lines lowered and the hunters climbed aboard. Despite their blood-sodden clothes Master-Surgeon Gartzela embraced each of the mates.

“Well done! Well done! Whose complement was it?”

“We stuck both!” shouted Jula.

“We churned the khahal!” Oxara interjected but was ignored.

“We’ll sort out commissions, but for now let’s all go below. Lo, Hartz has prepared a meal — eat first, then let’s get to cutting in!”

Iona knew not what ‘cutting in’ was, but wanted no part of it. She doubted she could even eat, but a whaler pulled her toward the mess. “Nay, lad. Sup. You’ll need it anon.”

Inygge was there, and Fose confronted him. The stroke-oarsman stammered and weakly contended he’d not heard the call. Fose slammed his fist into the man’s gut and kicked him until he whimpered away to the berths.

Gogor remained on deck, donning a woolen suit. High above his head the mainsail and topsails were furled and the mainyard taken aback. Between the main- and foremasts men were rigging a clevis and bolt — tackle and iron designed for whale processing. One end of this tackle connected to a windlass on the Embanesa’s larboard side. The other end supported an enormous iron hook.

Gogor watched it swing in the whipping wind like a hangman’s noose. He stood at the starboard waist where the bulwark had been removed and the two cetaceans — mother and khahal side-by-side — knocked against the Embanesa’s wale. The ocean was dyed red and the water around the corpses was curdling into pink cream. Sharkfins cut everywhere. Already he could see white chunks of the cetaceans’ undersides ripped away. Whalers hated sharks more than rats. Several men stood by with flensing spades — flat-headed blades on fifteen-foot poles for separating blubber from muscle sheath — and were stabbing at the sharks despoiling their kill. But there were dozens. In another hour there would be over a hundred.

They needed the blubber off quickly. But first the whales needed to be secured.

Gogor nodded to the man next to him, who fitted a lifeline around his back. The sky was getting darker, the waves higher. In his ears, nose, and mouth Gogor could feel that peculiar emptiness to the air that presages an awful storm.

“Godspeed, Mister Gogor!” called Master-Surgeon Gartzela, watching from the quarterdeck. No empty prayer, for the rest of the operation depended on this dangerous moment. If Gogor slipped, he’d fall to the sharks and be devoured. If the waves rose or the carcass rolled, he’d be crushed against the ship.

He took up two iron hooks — far smaller than the one swinging high above, but still the length of his forearm. At his neck was a talisman his wife had given him which he briefly kissed, then after another wave passed he leaped off the deck and landed on the slippery black skin. Padding his way to the skull, he deftly inserted the hook into the whale’s eye and pulled taut. “Hook in!” he shouted, then repeated with the other.

“Haul taut! Heave away!”

The Master-Surgeon sighed in relief. The whales were now secured to the Embanesa and the cut in could begin.

But the ocean had not had its final say.

***

Nothing could prepare Iona for what would happen that night. And she would never forget stepping up the companionway and onto the deck.

Twilight was obstructed by the tarnished pewter sky. The Embanesa was all lit with lanterns and the tryworks smoldered. A baleful wind rushed through the rigging and thrashed the sea. But all Iona could do was look up, up, up at the clevis and bolt high above and the object suspended from it.

An enormous strip of blubber. Five feet wide, a foot thick, and three-quarters the height of the mast. A veritable blanket as wide and long as an alley hung from that hook, stripped from the slain whale.

It was still bleeding. Blood and oil fell from it like raindrops from canopy and slicked the deck. Its scent was everywhere.

As she stared, the great piece was sliced free at the bottom and swung above the ship’s waist and with its immense weight the ship rocked with it. When it settled the windlass payed out and the blanket lowered to the tryworks, sacrifice before altar.

On the starboard, the lamplight fell upon the mother being unpeeled like a fruit, supple muscles visible beneath.

“Raifin!” someone called her over to the blanket. There she was handed a blade, and thus began the most wretched toil which every whaler loathes.

***

The whale is being made into not a whale.

The blankets they cut into chunks the size of a child’s chest, heavy with liquid and oozing oil and a little blood. These chunks are called horsepieces. The horsepieces they then cut sidelong into pages still connected at the end which fall open when turned. Like a book. A fleshy, porous, bleeding book where every page reads the same. The books go into the try-pot.

Cutting. Slicing. Deck slicked with oil and blood. The tryworks smolder and hiss and spew black smoke that renders the rigging above only by its infinite shadows. The light drops and the storm comes closer to watch them and screams in their ears and rips drops from wavepeaks that fly like bullets in the dark and hiss on the try-pots and their brick foundations. No rain, only wind. Riling skies and churning ocean. Every crewmember with any experience knows the storm is still growing. The Embanesa lists to starboard, pulled askew by the weight of the cetaceans. If the waves grow high enough they might court capsize. But if they stop now, they’ll lose the whales.

“Faster!” bellows a shadow called Fose, barely audible above the keening wind.

The hours pass. The storm grows toward a squall. Another blanket rises, lowers. Horsepieces and books. Oil renders in the try-pots. Cracklings, brown and crisp, float to the top and are skimmed and fed sizzling to the flames below. They are burning the whale. They are using the whale to burn the whale. Now render out the oil, pour it into tanks to cool, then casks to store. Beneath a swinging lantern below deck Errolan the cooper assembles barrels. The ship heels and he reaches for his mallet but it’s skidded away in the dark.

Two more hours. The world is naught but black, oceanic madness and the tryworks’ crimson glow. The whalers who work betwixt are painted half in fiery red and half in pitch, twain aspects of man. They are exhausted and cursing and every time the ship heels they slide and heel with it. Waves grow higher and send their spume running across the deck and boiling upon the tryworks then fleeing back away with the ship’s rocking. A shark is thrown convulsing upon the deck and is hacked apart and pushed overboard and eaten by its siblings. Gartzela orders all weatherdeck hands be secured with lifelines, then sends four men to work the bilge pumps.

“Faster!” rages third mate Oxara, then turns his face toward the screaming oblivion. He thought he saw something.

They say the leviathan can summon storms.

The wind blows again. The wind and spitting water are frigid, the oil and blood are lukewarm, and the tryworks are hot as kilns. Timbers groan and a cutting knife skitters off the cutting stage and overboard into a black and churning ocean. Raifin is sent belowdecks for a replacement blade but slips on the companionway and slams onto the darkened steerage deck and there she lies in a welter. Her body is crushed from fatigue and her heart weighs heavy as a leadline and cold as the ocean floor. Her head sings with pain but it’s among a deluge of other injuries.

Someone raises and steadies her. “Come on, Raifin!” reassures Beletz the carpenter. “Come on, lad. Be strong. We’ve got a job to do.”

He puts the carving knife back in her hand. They ascend again.

The wind howls. The windlass turns. The mother’s head is hauled onboard and Iona watches it lowered to the cutting stage. There her mouth is propped open and her gray, serried baleen removed like giant flaxen sheaves, bundle by bundle until the head is a risible, wasted thing with eyes carved out and empty jaw. Even the tongue is removed — they say it’s delicious. And as Iona takes another baleen bundle smelling of the sea itself she begins to no longer feel for the whale nor for herself. Too much pain becomes no pain at all. Iona is being made into not Iona.

The ship heels. A scream from nearby as a man slips, slides to starboard, vanishes over the edge. Four shadows leap for his lifeline and drag him back onto the ship coughing and shrieking like an animal. Someone brings a lantern. Orange light plays across a mangled calf muscle. Only for a second did he submerge, yet in that time he was bitten by a shark.

Gartzela stares at the pattern of perforations running with blood. “Ligature!” he commands. “And convey him to my cabin! Jakue, fetch my supplies!”

“What of the cut in?” cries Fose.

The Master-Surgeon is silent for a time, seemingly frozen. His men await, their collective fates bound by his verdict.

“Hang the cut in! It’s not worth our lives! All hands below decks until this abates!”

The storm wins.

***

Shadows shambled belowdecks. Coats sloughed away and men fell into their berths. On the way down, Errolan tapped Inygge and Zitis. The three stole off unseen toward the orlop. Motza took his bag of bones, found a dry and empty space, then methodically began to arrange them around himself.

The lantern swung with the ship’s rocking. Iona rolled into her hammock and fell asleep almost instantly when something bumped the hull. “What was that?!” a man cried.

“Fix yourself, Taran! ‘Tis only the carcasses rocking against the ship.”

“What if it’s the leviathan?”

Many eyes shot open. A chorus of voices joined the discussion. Every soul knew they shouldn’t speak of it — talk of leviathans and shipwrecks while at sea was a grave and sometimes punishable taboo — yet in their shared exhaustion the very mention opened all mouths and ears:

“Fie, don’t say so.”

“I hear it can control the weather, though! And we just slew a khahal and mother. Was not the leviathan summoned by such avarice?”

“Aye, I’ve heard the same.”

“They say it’s in the shape of a spermaceti whale, but also of the krakens, the squids the spermaceti feed upon in the canyons of the deep. Tentacles grow ‘round her fins and writhe from her mouth.”

“Quiet! Quiet, damn ye!”

“But the leviathan hunts both ships and whales, aye? If most whales are left in the deeps wouldn’t it chase them there rather than being where the right whales are?”

“We’ve two whales rigged to our vessel, though. If it sank us, ‘twould win ship and whale both.”

Timbers groaned. From another cavity they could hear Motza begin to sing.

“What’s he saying?”

“God knows. He speaks the old tongue. He was raised by traditional hunters, the ones who built the towers along the coast. That’s why he gives fresh water to each kill.”

“Do you think he sings against the leviathan?”

“Or does he sing to beckon the leviathan?”

“I said quiet, ye!”

“Aye, quit that! He’s training the greenhands in the kalpas. He’s a good whaler.”

“But truly! Have you heard him fight with the first mate? Did you see his face today when Jula stuck the khahal?”

“Maybe he sings to the leviathan. Maybe he wants us sunken.”

“And he with it?”

“Maybe the leviathan spares him.”

“Your wits are awash. Let’s turn fluke, ye.”

Thunder rumbled outside. Like deep, menacing laughter. The Embanesa heeled and returned.

“My brother was on a nau, the Betixa… ‘twas sunk by the leviathan last year! So was the Gosvinta, the Iuxta, the Cinna…”

“I heard of the Gosvinta. A dreadful fate.”

“Was the Iuxta the one with the red sails, mastered by Berasko?”

“Aye, ‘twas she!”

“What of the one with the yellow jib sails?”

“The Antsa?”

“Aye, ‘tis she?”

“She’s sunken, too.”

“I knew her second mate, Orti. A good man. Did he survive?”

“Nay, only a single kalpa survived, and I knew those men… met them when last we were in port. The rest were taken under.”

“What of a ship with a flag of white and blue? One that sailed by Thrisland?”

That was Iona. There was a pause. Her voice had never been heard in this congress.

Someone finally answered: “The Talesia… that’s a flag of white and blue, aye?”

Many voices confirmed. Iona’s question hung in the dark for much longer before anyone said it.

“The Talesia sank.”

“Sank?”

“The leviathan took her too.”

Iona sat up. “When?”

The others seemed to sense her unease. “Two months past?”

“Were…” She coughed. The air was thick and she had to fight to inhale. “Were there any survivors?”

“Nay. Every soul taken. I knew a man who found her wreckage. All hands gone… did you know a soul aboard her, lad?”

The sound of her hitting the deck. Nobody spoke, just listened to her footfalls heading for steerage.

Her head swam. She’d left her coat and hat but did not care, stumbling toward steerage and stopping at the companionway. She steadied herself on the railing as the sky squalled in the opening above.

“Durain…”

He was dead. The words were there, but not their consequence. Grief had stuck her and she had sounded, but the drogue pulled her and soon she would need to surface. To breathe.

“Durain… Durain is dead.”

The Embanesa yawed in the storm. Her head tipped with it. A cold wave followed, spilled down the companionway, drenched her.

She felt nothing.

“Durain.”

Footsteps. Ten paces ahead of her in the steerage deck’s darkness a figure stopped. Was it Durain? Durain’s ghost? Fourth mate Motza? Nay, too short. Rounder shoulders. Who, then?

Lightning splintered above. It blanched her and all her surroundings and left behind green afterburn in her vision. But now she knew who stood there.

Eyes wide. Pupils needle-tight. A bloody rag balled in his hand.

“Khahal,” stroke-oarsman Inygge whispered, staring at her for the first time without coat or hat, just as he’d found her that eve beneath Azketa’s docks.

Her breath was held. She took a step backward up the companionway.

“My khahal! I’ve found the Magnela, and she is my khahal!”

Panic overtook her. On all fours she clambered up the steps into the storm’s wroth. Instantly the whipping winds overtook her and the deck was slicker than wet ice but still she crawled and then ran out onto the main deck where the tryworks still glowed and seethed as another high wave struck and sent white surf scurrying about her ankles then receding. White lightning splintered and rendered black the mast and yardarm, tackle and clevis, the massive iron hook swinging with every heel and then gave back the dark.

Inygge grabbed her shirt. He was calling her khahal and she wrenched herself away and ran blindly out onto the cutting stage when another wave came and the ship heeled and its timbers groaned and clicked and now they fell and were sliding starboard toward the missing bulwark and raging ocean. She kicked her feet and dug her fingers onto the oil-slicked deck and lightning cracked again and she saw before her the whale carcasses and water red and roiling and alive with sharks. She was heading overboard.

As her legs slipped over the side and dipped into the surf she grabbed the mainmast shroud. A shark banged against her but she scrambled onto the ratline. The Embanesa was listing so the shrouds ran near vertical above the cold-boiling ocean and the carcasses and the sharks but still she climbed and when lightning flashed again she looked down and saw Inygge climbing after her.

Higher. Nowhere to go but higher.

Up and up she went toward the wrathful sky. The squall ripped at her shirt and trousers but still she heard him slaking and screaming: “Khahal! Khahal!”

He was gaining.

Another gust struck the Embanesa and she heeled to larboard. The incline eased momentarily, the ratline’s slope flattening. Inygge was right below her and close enough to grasp her ankle but when the wind eased the Embanesa swung back heavily to starboard pulled by the corpses’ weights, leaning, leaning, leaning, leaning until they dangled over the ocean.

Inygge cried out. Lightning showed him hanging by only his two hands above the carnage.

And she did not even think. She let her legs swing free, then on the way back kicked him in the face.

He dropped. Down, down into the blackness. By another lightning blow she watched him bounce off the carcass and be swallowed by spume and frenzy, torn apart by predators.

The ship righted. She fixed her feet again. Tried to breathe.

She had killed a man. It had happened so quickly, on impulse.

“Durain is dead,” she said again just to see if she might feel something this time.

Timbers groaned. The storm bared its teeth.

“Durain is…”

Another lightningbolt. Distant, and long enough to fracture the sky. And by its light for the briefest instant she thought she spied it: the body rising from the waters, the massive spout blowing against the chaos, tentacles writhing and twisting among the horse head waves.

The creature that killed her husband. The leviathan.

And belowdecks they heard. They all heard. The hands in their berths awoke. Fourth mate Motza stayed his song. Master-Surgeon Gartzela and his steward Jakue paused in their treatment of the bitten man. The opium bottle stopped in the air between Errolan and Zitis and both men cast their eyes upward toward the dreadful sound of a twice-injured woman’s keen.

Ocean churned. Sky broke. Tryworks glowed and hissed and screamed. Mother and khahal lay side-by-side defiled by whaler and bird and shark. Grief found its ingress, and in its cold, dark forge was wrought the leviathan’s huntress whose heart had been reworked into a weapon of revenge.

***

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