Leviathan's Huntress, Ch. VIII: The Stroke-Oarsman

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“Blows! She blows! She blows!”

Half-mile away just afore dawn. Single bushy spout angled forward and bent to larboard as though the cetacean were marking its intended course. Sperm whale.

The crew flew for the kalpas and Iona with them.

Hoary sky. Cold air. Their oars pulled them over the blue waters and up each unbroken crest down into the next one’s trough. Fose kept glancing at Iona as though some surprise were coming. She thought on Motza’s words and pulled the oars harder.

But the sperm whale sounded before they could reach her. The kalpas fanned out, waiting and watching. Luck was on their side and the whale rose early and near and they raced again. Only Gogor got there in time before the second sounding.

“Did you stick her, Gogor?”

“Unto the hitch!” The second mate radiated.

They spread out again. The morrow had advanced and sharp yellow sunrays shafted between the twin blankets of cloudcover and ocean, warm on their faces. The whalers leaned on oars and looked yonder in what would be their last moments to breathe.

“Drogue, ho! Drogue, ho!”

Up bobbed the drogue, and with it the exhausted whale. A female — strange to find a cow all alone without pod or khahal — and unusually large for her sex.

And she was enraged.

Her square gray head rose from the spume like a smooth, floating boulder, high enough that her straight lower jaw emerged like a giant’s sawblade — no baleen, but teeth this time. Real teeth. She ran the water and when they approached she raised her fluke and slammed it down and the waters cracked beneath it like gunshots and the ocean curdled white.

The kalpas surrounded her, lances ready to churn her lungs into pink paste. But the white wakes rolled out and the sudwaters sloshed o’er the kalpas’ rails so they could not approach.

“We’re swamping!” wailed Zitis sitting beside Iona.

The mates turned their bows toward the cetacean to stop their crafts from broaching. Four boats in a white ocean pointed at the kicking beast.

Below the din some steady tremor was resonating through the waters with the staccato of a nail in a bucket and the sharpness of distant guns, rapping inside the kalpa’s wood and into the thwarts and rattling in Iona’s bones. It was the whale. The whale was clicking. She could feel it in her teeth.

“Sir!” Jula roared from the fore, his voice scarcely audible above the fluke’s report.

“Aye, harpooner!”

“Methinks she’s to sound!”

Amid the veil of seaspray and the rollick of the kalpa Iona saw that Fose was looking at her with a cruel smile. “Shall we spade her fluke, Jula?” he shouted back.

Jula looked back, and with a fury rivaled only by his joy he cried, “Spade her fluke!”

“Then take it up!”

In the world of harpoon irons, darts are for sticking, lances for churning the lungs once the whale was exhausted. But spades, broad and flat at their end, are for flensing blubber from flesh during the cutting-in. Not for hunting.

Iona watched Jula pull a spade lying in the kalpa’s hull and return to the bow.

“Face forward! Oars in, paddles out!” commanded Fose.

The stroke-oarsmen turned. The stone-gray cow was still kicking and throwing suds that turned to gold in morrow’s rays.

“Go on the flukes! Now… row! Row!”

Paddles attacked, cutting for the water beneath the spumy blanket. The kalpa moved wide to the beast’s stern until they were directly behind her where the violence was strongest. Her fluke fell like a forge hammer but Jula was licking his lips and gripping the spade.

“Hold, Jula!” cried Fose. “Be yare!”

The air was all vapor and the ocean bucked but as the cow’s fluke rose again Iona could see, along the underside of the tail stock, the stout rope of her precious tendons and arteries which she used to propel herself through the oceans and pound the seas, exposed as a victim’s throat before the executioner.

And then she remembered that which the whalers had spoken of. That channel was called ‘the small,’ and cutting it would fatally immobilize the beast. And using the broad, flat spade, Jula was going to sever it. He was going to spade the fluke.

And to do that, they would need to get right underneath it.

Fear tingled on her hands and feet like sparks but she gripped her paddle and readied for the plunge.

“Be yare, Jula!” Fose cried. “Be yare, ye!”

Salt stung her eyes and the kalpa swayed among the wakes but the fluke was submerged and rising more slowly from the water this time, observing some finality before it broke the surface.

“Now! Row! Row!”

They rowed, catching the fluke’s rising which displaced the water and sucked their kalpa faster into the pocket the whale had left. The fluke lifted higher as a counterweight for the beast’s head so she could dive again and escape the hunters but Fose’s kalpa was there in the hollow passing into the fluke’s very shadow with death above their heads. Iona looked for an instant at the dripping, glistening mass suspended on high, ready to fall and slam them to bits.

“Give it to her!” cried Fose.

“Give it to her!” cried someone else and it was Iona.

Jula did. The spade flew and found its home, the whole branch severing as surely as the pruner lops the bough and out spated blood.

“Stern all!” screamed Fose as they pulled back as her fluke collapsed mere feet in front of them.

***

“Mister Fose! Mister Jula!” shouted Beletz as they climbed out of the kalpa and onto the main deck. “Are you children? Do you think us made of timber?”

Fose and Jula grinned at one another like misbehaving pupils.

“Rive your kalpa with such recklessness and I won’t fashion you another!” Beletz spat on the deck, evincing uncharacteristic degrees of anger. “Make sport with your own lives as you please, but endanger not your command with such antics!”

“My command was fain to…” Fose stopped when he saw Iona standing next to him. His smile fell and he walked away.

Cutting in. Windlass, clevis, and bolt were rigged high aloft and lowered. Tryworks were stoked and glowed. Blanket unpeeled, ascended — nearly mast-high all dripping and glistening in the sunlight. The Embanesa listed toward the slain cow. The clouds were thin and the sun was strong. Iona settled into the monotony, crouched over another horsepiece, and sliced it into pages. “Book done!” she shouted and handed it to another man for the tryworks. Birds gathered and screamed. The ocean bled. Sharks swarmed.

The cook — a former monk named Hartz, lay one-ninetieth — brought his industry to the weatherdeck. Standing next to the try-pots, he rolled dough into balls and using a ladle lowered them directly into the roiling blubber alongside the man skimming cracklings, then he walked the ship and cried out like a baker at market: “Fritters! Fritters! Eat afore they’re gone!... Lo, greenhand… greenhand!”

Iona didn’t look up from her work.

Hartz shuffled crabwise across the slickened deck, swinging his steaming-hot skillet against the Embanesa’s loll. He came and stood directly above the kneeling Iona. “Is this one deaf?”

“That’s Raifin,” answered Fose from the quarterdeck where the cow’s head had been sawn off and the spermaceti in her skull was being extracted. The first mate came to the rail and crossed his arms to watch the proceedings.

Hartz rapped Iona on the head. “Raifin! Hoy, Raifin!”

Iona’s hazel eyes turned up and met the cook’s.

His ladle was aimed at her face. The fritter inside still sizzled.

She snatched it and popped it in her mouth.

Scalding hot. Instantly peeled all skin. Tasted of whale. Everything in this world tasted of whale.

Not half bad though. “Cook!” she cried. “Cookie!”

Hartz was twenty feet away, but stopped and glared at her. In another life and another land that loathing gaze would have made her afraid but now she opened and closed her hand at him.

“Another, man. Another! I’m famished!”

He grabbed a handful and tossed them before her like scraps. She scooped them up quickly and wolfed them down. This time they were soggy for they’d sponged up some seawater and blood and whale oil. Some voice within her wondered if she should be repulsed, but the ocean was crashing and the tryworks were sizzling and the mates were barking and the gulls squealing. The voice of disgust was too quiet, and that was perfectly agreeable.

Fose made a small sneer and walked away. She noticed but said naught. Her knife sliced through the porous flesh and the oily blood slipped beneath her tar-stained fingernails.

Thus the hours passed. The sun crawled across the sky. The third blanket that rose cast shade upon the cutting stage and those working thereon, but Iona did not look up. “Book done!”

***

During the afternoon, Iona was permitted sleep, then roused with her watch at twilight with the western horizon burning the same hue as the tryworks. The sun died but the tryworks did not. They labored into the dark and sometime after midnight they capped the forty-second and final barrel. All hands shambled for the berths. All save two.

Motza prayed. Iona practiced with the iron.

Despite her exhaustion she stuck the barrel thrice in a row. Panting and grinning, she looked over at Motza.

He had finished praying and was staring at the stars. He hadn’t even seen it.

“Aye?” she shouted to him. “We aren’t all born into this like you!”

Motza looked at her, then at the skewered barrel still rolling around the forecastle. “You stuck it.”

“Aye. Thrice.”

His head bobbed back skyward.

She spat and took up the drogue line and began hauling back her iron. “Why do you care?”

“Eh?”

“You asked why I wish to become a harpooner. Why? Why do you care? First mate Fose scowls at me, but I served as a stroke-oarsman today! I fought beneath a spermaceti whale’s fluke! Does that mean naught to you?”

He waited awhile, then swung his feet into a kneeling position and began to collect his bones. “First mate Fose is not a complex man. He scowled at you because he’d hoped to see the sperm whale unman you.”

Iona stopped hauling and looked at him.

“Be at peace. Your position in his kalpa is secure. His trick might be ruined, but Fose is nothing if not a practical man, and you’ve proven yourself. But tell me, why are you angry with me? Why crave my approval?”

She spat. “You won’t train me. And you told me I wasn’t prepared for the spermaceti.”

“Aye.”

“So I’ve proven myself to the first mate, but not to you.”

At that moment there came the distant sound of a whaleblow.

Iona ran for the railing and looked out at the gray object a mile away, rolling to windward and throwing water with her fluke. Her mouth opened to rally the crew when Motza hand rested on her shoulder. “Hold,” he said. “There’s no use.”

“No use? ‘Tis a whale!”

“Aye, a fin whale.”

“We should hunt it, then!”

Motza was smiling. “You won’t catch a fin whale. Too fast for canvas or oar.”

And even as he spoke the cetacean was farther on, reporting her location with mast-high watercolumns rendered argent by the moonlight.

“I should still summon the crew,” she argued. “It’s my watch.”

“You may. Raise the cry, flood the decks with men. You’ll tumble into your kalpas and row like galewinds. You might even loose a dart or two. But you won’t reach her. She’s too swift.” He leaned upon the gunwale and rested his cheek in his palm. “Some treasures, the ocean covets for herself.”

She looked at him, beaming out at the ocean and making lover’s sighs.

“You are wrong,” he said. “You said I was born into this. I was not. My adoptive parents taught me everything I know. My adoptive parents, and the whales.”

A peculiar anger rose in her chest and she stormed away and below decks, leaving the drogue line attached to the broken iron stuck in a broken barrel.

The fin whale blew again. Motza watched her sound and made a small gesture of gratitude.

***

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