“Are you ready for the Oath?” S’reee was saying to the dolphin. “Any last thoughts?”
“Only that this is going to be one more Song like any other,” Hotshot said, “even if it is your first time. Don’t worry, Ree; if you have any problems, I’ll help you out.”
Nita privately thought that this was a little on the braggy side, coming from a junior wizard. The thought of talking to an Advisory or Senior that way—Tom, say—shocked her. Nevertheless, she kept her mouth shut, for it seemed like Hotshot and S’reee had known one another for a while.
“And how are our fry doing here?” Hotshot said, swimming careless rings around Nita as he sang. “Getting used to the fins all right?”
“Pretty much,” Nita said. Hotshot did one last loop around her and then headed off in Kit’s direction. “How about you, Minnow—eeeech!”
The huge jaw of a sperm whale abruptly opened right in front of Hotshot and closed before he could react—so that a moment later the dolphin was keeping quite still, while Kit held him with great delicacy in his huge fangs. Kit’s eyes looked angry, but the tone of his song was casual enough. “Hotshot,” he said, not stopping, just swimming along with casual deliberateness, “I’m probably singing too. And even if I’m not, I am a sperm whale. Don’t push your luck.”
Hotshot said nothing. Kit swam a few more of his own lengths, then opened his mouth and let the dolphin loose. “Hey,” he said then, “no hard feelings.”
“Of course not,” Hotshot said in his usual recklessly cheerful voice. But Nita noticed that the dolphin made his reply from a safe distance. “No problem, M— ” Kit looked at Hotshot, silent. “—Kit.”
“Minnow?” Kit said, sounding casual himself. “Sure, why not?” And the four of them swam on.
Nita dropped back a few lengths and put her head up beside Kit’s so that she could sing her quietest and not be heard too far off. “What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure,” Kit said—and now that only Nita was listening, he sounded a bit shaken. “S’reee might have been right when she said this body doesn’t actually have what’s-his-face’s—”
“Aivaaan.”
“His memories, yeah. But the body has its own memories. What it’s like to be a sperm. What it means to be a sperm, I guess. You don’t make fun of us—of them.” He paused, looking even more shaken. “Neets—don’t let me get lost!”
“Huh?”
“Me. I don’t rough people up, that’s not my style!”
“You didn’t rough him up—”
“No. I just did the ocean equivalent of pinning him up against the wall and scaring him a good one. Neets, I got into being a wizard because I wanted other people not to do that kind of stuff to me! And now—”
“Don’t freak,” Nita said. “I’ll keep an eye on you.”
They were coming up on another foghorn now, a loud one. And there was something odd about that horn. Its note was incredibly deep. That has to be almost too deep for people to hear at all, Nita thought. What kind of—
The note sounded again, and Nita shot Kit an amazed look as she felt the water all around her, and even the air in her lungs, start to vibrate in response to it. One note, the lowest note she could possibly imagine, held and held until a merely human singer would have collapsed trying to sing it… and then slurred slowly down through another note, and another, holding on a last one of such profound depth that the water shook as if with thunder.
S’reee slowed her pace and answered the note in kind, the courtesy of one species of whale to another on meeting or parting—singing the same slow, somber sequence, several octaves higher. There was a pause; then she was answered with a humpback’s graceful fluting, but sung in a bottom-shaking baritone.
“Come on,” S’reee said, and dived.
The waters around Sandy Hook boil with krill in the spring and summer, so that by night the krill’s swarming luminescence defines every current and finstroke in a blaze of blue-green light; and by day the sun slants through the water, brown with millions of tiny bodies, as thickly as through the air in a dusty room. As the group dived, they began to make out a great dark shape in the cloudy water, moving so slowly it barely did more than drift. A last brown-red curtain of water parted before them in a swirl of current, and Nita found herself staring down at her first blue whale.
He wasn’t blue in this light, more a sort of slaty maroon; the faint dapples on his sides were almost invisible. But his color was not what impressed Nita particularly. Neither was his size, though blues are the biggest of all whales. This one was perhaps a hundred twenty feet from nose to tail, and Kit, large for a sperm, was almost as big. But that voice, that stately, leisurely, sober, sorrowful voice that sounded like a storm in mourning, that mattered to her; and so did the tiny eye, the size of a tennis ball, that looked at her from the immense bulk of the head. That eye was wise. There was understanding in it, and tolerance, and sadness: and most of all, great age.
Age was evident elsewhere too. The blue’s flukes were tattered and his steering fins showed scars and punctures, mementos of hungry sharks. Far down his tail, the broken stump of a harpoon protruded, the wood of it rotting, the metal crumbling with rust. Yet though the tail moved slowly, it moved with strength. This creature had been through pain and danger in his long life, and though he had learned sadness, it had not made him bitter or weak.
Nita turned her attention back to the others, noticing that Kit was holding as still as she was, though at more of a distance; and even Hotshot was holding himself down to a slow glide. “Eldest Blue about the Gates,” S’reee sang, sounding more formal than Nita had ever heard her, “I greet you.”
“Senior for the Gate-waters,” said the Blue in his deep voice, with slow dignity, “I greet you also.”
“Then you’ve heard, Aroooon.”
“I have heard that the Sea has taken Ae’mhnuu to its Heart,” said the Blue, “leaving you Senior in his place, and distressed at a time when there’s distress enough. Leaving you also to organize a Twelve-song on very short notice.”
“That’s so.”
“Then you had best be about it,” said the Blue, “while time still remains for singing, and the bottom is still firm under us. First, though, tell me who comes here with you. Swift-Fire-In-The-Water I know already—”
Hotshot made the closest sound Nita could imagine to an embarrassed delphine cough. She smiled to herself; now she knew now what to tease him with if he got on her case.
“Land wizards, Aroooon,” S’reee said. “HNii’t—” Nita wasn’t sure what to do, so she inclined the whole front of her body in the water in an approximation of a bow. “—and Kit.” Kit followed Nita’s suit. “They were the ones who went into the Dark High-And-Dry after the Naming of Lights—”
To Nita’s utter astonishment, Aroooon inclined his own body at them, additionally curling his flukes under him in what she abruptly recognized as a gesture of congratulation. “They’re calves,” S’reee added, as if not wanting to leave anything out.
“With all due respects, Senior, they are not,” Aroooon said. “They came back from that place. That is no calf’s deed. Many who were older than they have not come back from such enterprises.” He turned his attention to Kit and Nita again. “You will sing with us then? What parts?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Kit said. “S’reee needs to see if all her people come in.”
“The Silent Lord,” Nita said.
“Indeed.” Aroooon looked at her for several long moments. “You are a good age for it,” he said. “And you are learning the Sng—”
“I got most of the details from my manual,” she said. She had been up studying late the night before, though not as late as Kit had; a lot of exertion in salt air always left her drained, and she’d put the book aside after several hours, to finish the fine details of her research later. “The Sea will give me the rest, S’reee says, as we go along.”
“So it will. But I would have you be careful of how you
enact your part, young hNii’t.” Aroooon drifted a bit closer to her, and that small, thoughtful eye regarded her carefully. “There is old trouble and old power about you and your friend… as if blood hung in the water where you swim. The Lone Power knows your names. It will not have forgotten the recent disservice you did It. You are greatly daring to draw Its attention to you again so soon. Even the Heart of the Sea—Timeheart as your kind calls it—will not be quiet for one who has freely attracted the Lone One’s enmity. Beware what you do. And do what you say; nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”
“Sir,” Nita said, rather unnerved, “I’ll be careful.”
“That is well.” Aroooon looked for a moment at Kit before speaking. “It is a whalesark, is it not?”
“Yes, sir,” Kit said in the same respectful tone Nita had heard him use on his father.
“Have a care of it, then, should you find yourself in one of the more combative parts of the Song,” said Aroooon. “Sperm whales were fighters before they were singers, and though their songs are often the fairest in the sea, the old blood rises too often and chokes those songs off before they can be sung. Keep your mouth closed, you were best, and you’ll do well enough.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Enough politeness, young wizard,” Aroooon said, for the first time sounding slightly crusty. “If size is honor, you have as much as I; and as for years, keep breathing long enough and you’ll have as many of those as I do. S’reee, you travel more widely now than I, so I put you a question. Are the shakings in the depths worse these days than they ought to be at this time of year and tide of Moon?”
“Much worse, Eldest. That was why Ae’mhnuu originally wanted to convene the Song. And I don’t know if the Song will be in time to save the fishing grounds to the east and north, around Nantucket and the Races. Hot water has been bursting up close to there, farther east and south. The Shelf is changing.”
“Then let us get started,” Aroooon said. “I assume you came to ask me to call in some of the Celebrants, time being as limited as it is.”
“Yes, Aroooon, if you would. Though as the rite requires, I will be visiting the Pale One tomorrow, in company with hNii’t and Kit. The meeting place for the Song is to be ten thousand lengths north-northeast of the shoals at Barnegat, three days from now. A fast rehearsal—then straight down the channel and through the Gates of the Sea, to the place appointed.”
“Well enough. Now administer me the Celebrant’s Oath, Senior, so that I may lawfully call the others.”
“Very well.” S’reee swam up close to Aroooon, so that she was looking him straight in one eye with one of hers; and when she began to sing, it was in a tone even more formal and careful than that in which she had greeted him—
“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 the 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, may 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 Kit 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?”
“Alas no, Kit: it doesn’t work that way. 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 there 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 shivered a little with the intensity of it, and then smiled inside. It’s 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? It’s at the root of you. There’s power in your name, 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 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 sudden 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. And right now. It’s going to take too long to get back, they’re going to be furious—”
“If we surface and change back,” Kit said, “I can do the beam-me-up-Scotty spell, teleport us back —”
S’reee looked at Kit in shock. “So close to what Arooon’s doing? I wouldn’t recommend it, Kit. Doing a low-level spell so close to something as high-powered a wizardry as a Calling would almost certainly derange the lower-powered one. And if you’re considering a teleport, there’s no guarantee you’d come out where you were headed. Or come out at all.”