In Great Waters Page 3

  At this, she reached up and pulled another piece of fabric from over her shoulder. The boy had not noticed it against the other garments she had on, but suddenly he found his hand being forced through a tight tunnel of cloth, his head pushed through a hole, his whole body grappled into a prison of fabric. He was so appalled that he could think of nothing to do; urine ran down his legs, and the woman stepped away, lifting aloft the garment he was now trapped in before turning to mop up the mess with some of his precious rags, his nest, the only thing between him and nights on the hard stone floor. He lunged for them, falling hard, and gathered the remains to his chest, rocking to and fro, gripping all that was left of comfort in the world. The stiff, dull-scented fabric gripping him checked and baffled his touch at every movement, as if he was tangled in seaweed; again, the fear of drowning rose in him and he gasped at the air, kicking his legs as if to swim up to the safety of the ceiling and draw breath in some saner world. With his back to the nurse creature, he began tearing at the fabric she had forced on him; with blankets, he had never dared rip until left alone, but the cloth on his limbs was simply unbearable. The woman called, and the red man returned. Together, they took another of his rags and tied his hands together.

  Bound hand and skin, the boy rocked to and fro, too inconsolable even to take the fish that the woman proffered. There would be days upon days of fighting against clothing before hunger pressed him to take a bite. Once he had taken his first mouthful, it only took him another day to realise his mistake: they had seen that he could eat clothed. Ever after, food only came once the clothes were donned.

  Nakedness was, he soon learned, a forbidden thing. Though he was a little warmer dressed than bare, the notion that clothes were for warmth was not one he considered: in the sea it was always cold, and his garments were a blindfold for his body. Shoes were even worse; the day they forced his feet into these flexible traps, he panicked himself into a tantrum that ended up gouging his own face in his struggles. How was he to swim, to get anywhere, with his soles smothered and his webs bound together? The harsh floor of his room had rubbed his feet raw, uncalloused as they were from a lifetime in the water, but he felt no protection in these monstrosities; it was like having a clam clamped around your ankles, and the boy drew breath in fear, struggling to believe that these dreadful things weren’t going to hold him down and drown him.

  Once he was used to being dressed, though, he managed to grasp that the creatures surrounding him were also dressed; their shape was not clear or easy to see under the concealing garments. Seeing them naked became an urgent priority. The difference in shape between himself and them, or between them and the tribe, could tell him whether they might wage war on him. The legs of the red man, he had seen, were stiff: bifurcated like his own, but single-jointed, upright, too rigid to flex well in the water. This had always been the difference between himself and the tribe, his double tail, and he had taken enough pinches and scratches to learn the cost of it. Two limbs, and a mutation between them: the mollusc shape between his legs was a deformity he had never seen on the smooth-fronted tribesmen. Out of the water, he developed a habit of tugging anxiously at it, but this was a habit he was forced to learn to keep private, as his nurse would grasp or bind his hands if she saw him doing it, or refuse to hand food over. But a second man came to visit the nurse on occasion, and would sometimes pull her into another room. The two rooms were linked by a door, and Henry, disturbed at this half-proximity and concerned that damage might be done to the woman who brought him food—even if she did also bring clothes and bound hands—pressed his eye to it, watching her for safekeeping.

  It was in these circumstances that he learned that, like his own hated garments, the clothing of the landsmen was removable, and under it, they were recognisably human. Flat-chested men and swollen-chested women, as with the tribe, but the jellyfish-skirted women concealed under their clothes two plain legs like the men. They were not like him, but neither were they like the tribe; closer to him than to the tribe in appearance. Perhaps close enough. The motions he observed through the chink of the door seemed familiar to him, almost like the ordinary swimming movements he had grown up among; if he ignored the panting, the incredible breathlessness of all who now surrounded him, the sight was a relaxing one. He had enough sense to scamper away when his nurse showed signs of rising upright and returning to him, picking up the sticks he had been left and conspicuously practising pushing himself upright on them, but his chest was a little looser than it had been. Attack was still a possibility, but these creatures were not entirely alien. There was a chance that they might not war upon him.

  The red man returned repeatedly, addressing the nurse woman and examining him. As he repeated certain words, the boy came to recognise them, but understanding how to react eluded him. He knew he was being addressed; he just didn’t know what he was expected to do. The clothes fretted him endlessly; rocking was still possible, but the cloth pinched and folded with every movement. The nurse woman patted him as the red man spoke; the boy disliked the impact, but bore with it: the sight of her dual legs and smooth-swelling chest had reassured him a little. He still had the sense that she might grasp a rock and shove him away at any moment, but there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that he was placating the one who fed him: it was the only means of controlling his fate he could find.

  Over and over, the sounds were repeated. Henry. Henry. Henry. It was said to get his attention, but not to get anyone else’s, so, like Whistle, it might be applied to him. Given that the man was a stranger, the fact that he kept trying to use a name was bewildering; why he thought Whistle’s name was Henry, two odd exhaled syllables, made less sense still. However, the boy was too wary not to look around when the word was said, and often enough, a pat on the shoulder or a small piece of fish would be presented to him when he responded.

  Henry, then. If it was the price of food, he could accept it, as long as no other means of survival were at hand—and even as he tried to master the sticks in moments of privacy, learning to lean his weight down and prop his bending legs up, to hunch over two canes and shuffle forward, upright like a land man, he realised this method of getting around was slow, a crustacean’s crawl after the darting miles of the ocean. And there seemed to be no other choice. Henry was learning to see a little further, but still, the temptation to swim out of the window was ever-present. Only the dazzling green of the lawn beyond had kept him from it on the first few days; having taken dozens of falls against the painful stone, and learning from experience that the further he fell, the worse it hurt, he could understand, in his head at least, that even if he could slip through the bars, any attempt to launch himself out could only lead to a longer fall, more pain, a crash like the impact of storm-waves hurling you against a cliff wall. Still, his instincts pressed him to it, the more so as the words were repeated endlessly, frustration upon frustration, nerves and boredom wearing him down equally as he plucked at his binding clothes and stared at the bright square that looked so deceptively like an escape. Though an escape into what, he couldn’t have said. Whatever they were hiding from, it must be serious enough to make people endure these imprisoning walls.

  “Deepsman,” the red man said, indicating Henry. “Deepsman.” He indicated himself. “Landsman. Deepsman. Landsman.”

  Henry rocked, head averted. It was a bright day, and light was slanting in. Even the light was straight in this world: fixed and unshifting for hours, never flashing or glimmering off the still surfaces that surrounded him, slicing through the window in clean-sided bars. Under the water, surfacing to breathe, he had seen such shafts of light before, but they had been wavering, moving under the waves like stroking fingers. Here, it was bright in the day and black at night, and even yards down below the window, the light still shone, the depth lending no sheltering darkness.

  “No, Henry,” the nurse said, pulling his hand from between his legs, where it had strayed to alleviate his boredom.

  “Deepsman,” the red man said.<
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  Henry rocked, growing tense. Except at night, they never left him alone. These endless sounds wore thinner and thinner on his patience.

  “Staff.” The red man indicated one of the two sticks that Henry used to walk around. Henry watched out of the corner of his eye; he had learned the purpose of the sticks, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that he knew how to use them if it meant associating them with these endless demands. They were just sounds. Back home, the tribe had litanies of its own, but they were about things, they told you where to go and what to eat. They recited, and you picked it up as you went along; no one was stupid enough to say a single, pointless word over and over. “Staff,” the man said again. “Staff.”

  Henry looked out of the window. The sky reached up above him, fading into blue like the depths of the ocean, but bright enough to hurt his eyes. Something flew past, and that caught his attention: a creature that could swim in the air. He shuffled to the window to watch it.

  “Staff,” the red man said, proffering the sticks. “Staff, Henry. Staff.”

  Henry was not about to beg for the staff if it meant accepting the sounds. He leaned forwards, pulling himself on his hands until he reached the window, then grasped the ledge to lever himself up.

  “Staff.” The man stood over him, holding one in front of him. Henry pushed it away. “No, Henry. Staff.”

  All familiar words. No usually meant he was about to be stopped from doing what he wanted, but Henry wasn’t going to let on that he’d grasped that; it would only encourage them to stop him more. He hoisted, and then he was leaning out of the window, propped on the hard stone, following with his eyes the white creature swimming through the sky above him. It was a gull; such creatures were familiar from home. Henry had seen them floating on the surface, ducking for fish, sometimes congregating above while the tribe harried a shoal of fish and diving down to snatch a share of the prize, those white wings swimming through the water with stretched, forceful strokes. His vision had never been good enough to see what happened when the gulls took off into the air, leaping above the water like dolphins: he had no idea they could go so high. Was it possible that his webbed hands and feet could beat at the air like that? Could he swim through the air?

  Gull, Henry said to himself in the language of the tribe, ignoring the red man. The man looked at him sharply; the boy had never made a sound in his presence before. Henry shook his hands in the air, spreading his fingers out and trying for lift. Nothing. The breeze cooled his palms, but he was still earthbound, heavy in the air.

  “Bird,” the man said, pointing. Finding himself observed, Henry abruptly sat down, tearing his eyes away from the gull. He resumed rocking, testing the beat of his webbed fingers against the unresisting air.

  The man pointed at the painting on the wall. Henry ignored him.

  Finally, the man exhaled heavily, and spoke to the nurse. His voice rumbled; Henry could make out the sounds better than he could have done a few weeks before, but the speech was too rapid for him to pick any familiar syllables out of it. The nurse evidently understood it, though, for she disappeared out of the door. Henry sat on the floor, refusing to turn his head at the red man’s attempts to interest him in other words, rocking quietly and thinking about the gull. Maybe he could try to eat one, if he could catch it. Tribesmen had sometimes managed it, swimming with slow stealth up from below, barely stirring the water around them before shooting up their arms in a sudden, violent grab, pulling the birds down into the water in a flurry of feathers. Henry had tried it himself, but he had been too little; it was a skill only the adults seemed to possess. It would be difficult to catch one here, but the sight of it, flying alien through this new sky, quickened his homesickness, filling him with an angry desire to store the bird safe in his stomach where it could change no more of its ways.

  While Henry considered thus, the nurse returned. In her hands was a curious object, a bright circle that flashed with light like a fish scale. The shiny surface and round shape caught Henry’s attention: sea urchins were round, and fish eyes, and in this boxed-in world, it was a fascinating sight. Desire for something not dull and square overcame Henry’s determination to ignore his lesson, and he reached out for it.

  “Crown,” the red man said, as Henry played with the circle in his lap. “Crown. Crown.”

  Henry licked at the metal. It had an unfamiliar non-taste, no strong smell. Light glimmered off it like sunlight on waves.

  “Crown. Crown, Henry?”

  Red hands reached into his lap. Henry bared his teeth, gripping hard onto his shining circle.

  The hand descended and patted his shoulder. “Good, Henry. Crown. Crown.”

  Henry tightened his hold. The man was going to take it away; he could see it from his posture.

  Mine, Henry said in the language of the tribe. The sound was a high-pitched squeak, and the man did not seem to hear it.

  “Crown.”

  Mine.

  The red hands closed over Henry’s own and lifted the circle up. Henry refused to let go, and his fingers, he knew, small as they were, were too strong for the man to pry apart. However, the man did not attempt to pull his circle loose. Instead, he lifted it up and fixed it on Henry’s head.

  Henry flinched, pulled away. The touch of a circle around his head was the snap of a shark’s mouth, the bite of a killer whale, a predator’s fatal grip. He thrashed back, kicking desperately against the hard floor.

  The hands persisted, held the circle down over his head. “Crown, Henry. Good, Henry. Crown.”

  The band pressed down, gripping his head on all sides. Horror overwhelmed Henry, freezing any ability to think. A metal mouth had him in its hold; any moment, there would be teeth.

  “Crown,” the voice persisted.

  Henry shrieked. The word came to him, strange against his tongue, awkward in his mouth, high-pitched like the cry of a bird, but it was all he could say to free himself of the terrifying grasp. “No! No! No!”

  The red hands relinquished him at once, the crown clattering to the floor. There was a long moment when two pairs of eyes stared at him.

  Henry reached out and retrieved his circle, rocking, staring at its soothing light.

  The red man breathed, breathed again. A patting hand hit the boy’s shoulder. “Good, Henry,” the deep voice said. “Good. Good.”

  Mine, Henry said in his own language, clutching the crown to him in tense little hands. Mine.

  FOUR

  HENRY HAD BARELY learned enough English to get by before the red man—Allard, Henry eventually gathered, was his name—began telling him stories. These stories made little sense to Henry at first; the names of people and places rattled off were too different from his native tongue to be easily remembered. Allard’s tales had no shape to them, no echoes of sound or regular beats, and he tended to say them only once—and if Henry needed a repetition, would tell the story again, but in entirely different words. Used to rhythm and rote, Henry found his attention bent in new, uncomfortable directions. What he did learn quickly was that there were more than four of these red people, these “landsmen,” as Allard called them. More than there had been members of his tribe, of “deepsmen.” More, if he understood right, than there were fish in a shoal. Places tended not to have names in Henry’s language; he understood the concepts of current and surface and rock, of places with good food and empty stretches to be travelled at speed, of summer route and winter route and the migrations his people made as the seasons turned. For a place to have a name like a person, though, was a difficult concept. How would you name a stretch of ocean, when the water flooded to and fro and moved endlessly from one place to another, when things changed and shifted and the miles stretched before you on all sides with nothing to stop you swimming through? A name was something you used to call someone, only useful for getting a person’s attention, and when Allard sat in his room and said words like “England” and “France” and “Spain,” nothing replied.

  What Henry did understand wa
s that these stories told of conflicts, of other peoples. Given the fact that these people were enemies, Henry supposed that the landsmen of France were entirely different from the landsmen of England like Allard. Allard showed him pictures, though, flat images that Henry had to struggle to perceive as anything other than lines on a page, and when he could get his eyes focused for long enough to work out what the lines meant, he could see no signs of difference: two legs, webless hands, red-pink skin, white-rimmed eyes. Henry had seen other tribes in the sea, which must be what Allard was talking about—other tribes, rather than other creatures—but the idea of long-running battles with them seemed bizarre. Some tribes stayed near shallow coasts where the fish were rich and plentiful, others followed the currents, tracing the same paths every year, and one tribe trying to encroach on the hunting waters of another would find itself in a fight fairly quickly—but once those fights were settled, the losers retreated, went back to seeking their food elsewhere. Long-running clashes, when there seemed to be enough to eat in all the countries involved, were a crazy waste of energy. These stories failed to capture his imagination; Henry sat on the floor, tossing his crown from hand to hand and blinking.

  Personality was something that Henry understood; he had learned, faster than other children of the tribe, which members—which deepsmen—could be trusted to spot a dolphin and which would start at the click of a harmless fish, which would always steal his food and which might leave him alone if he stayed unobtrusive. Allard was difficult for him to understand, though. Sometimes restless, pacing and staring, at other times he would seat himself with a long feather in his hand, dipping and scratching at a thin, tan leaf of something, as if levering at the flesh of an invisible crab. Sometimes he appeared with objects in his hands—book was the word he repeated, pointing to them and trying to persuade Henry to pick them up, but their square shape and meaty smell were too nasty for Henry to want any contact with them. These books hinged open and closed neatly like joints, and their insides, which all looked similar to Henry, seemed to puzzle Allard; he would look from Henry to book and back again, and shake his head, scratching at the leaves with his dark-tipped feather. This action irritated Henry, but nothing he did seemed to prevent it; whether he rocked and refused to meet anyone’s eye, or obediently sat up for his fish, straining his voice around the syllables of “thank you,” whether he cricked his back tottering around on the sticks Allard seemed so insistent on or lay curled on the floor stroking his rags and refusing to move, Allard’s feather scratched and scratched. Most gestures meant something in the sea; posture and motion emphasised or softened words or expressed relationship, but Allard was a mess of gestures, all apparently meaning nothing. Had a deepsman spent so long fiddling with a shell or stick, Henry would have assumed he was deranged with nerves, but Allard was quick to pull Henry’s limbs into line, to grab him before he could scratch his nurse, and the nurse and the man with her obeyed Allard quickly and without protest, which made the idea that he was nervous all but impossible: such open anxiety would sit ill on a leader. It would be an invitation to any who wished to depose him.