Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [45]
I lost sense of time. We went far from the boats, but there were other whales, playing like kittens about us. We ran with them, rainbows of spray on the air, always following the same whale, which sounded and breached, sounded and breached, drawing us on for miles. God knows how Comeragh always knew just where she’d breach. Our aching backs had turned to water and no longer mattered by the time we closed on her. She was tired too, sitting on the water, a small, sad, shining eye watching us, interested. What a peculiar place for an eye, I thought, right down on the side like that. What kind of a face is that? Like an elephant’s eye, the elephants in Jamrach’s yard. Good old elephants! Her white mouth opened on sharp little teeth all along the lower jaw.
Simon stood with harpoon poised, leg braced against the cleat, broad shoulders knotted. She spouted a thick mist-cloud of stench that covered my face, stinging my eyes. I closed them.
“Now!” said Comeragh.
Opened them.
Simon froze, a ridiculous small thing trembling before the blunt, black head. The harpoon shivered and flew and fell short. Sam pulled it in immediately, the veins thick and knotted on the backs of his hands, and Comeragh cursed. “Take the oar, baby,” he said to Simon, moving forward with an agility that scarcely moved the boat, “get back there.”
Simon passed me with tears streaming down his face and took the steering oar, wiping his sleeve roughly across his eyes.
A whale sees nothing before or behind. It sees two worlds, either side. I don’t know what the whale saw. To me it seemed she was looking at me all the time, that’s what it was like. As if she was curious. I daresay there were wiser whales. Comeragh darted and she was struck. She pitched, turned the front of her head at us in a soundless scream, thrashing her tail three or four times and causing the sea to boil, then fled along the slippery surface of the sea with the harpoon quivering in her side, dragging us after. We jumped and bounced, teeth clashing, bones rattling. No fighting it. When she sounded, I thought we’d go under for sure, but we flew on, the elements screaming in our ears and the whale line singing and vibrating, till she surfaced in front of us, making the sea pitch us high.
She rolled, open-jawed. Salt stung my eyes. Comeragh rose steady in the bow with the lance. “Pull in, pull in,” a voice said, and we hauled hand over hand nearer and nearer to her, Sam leading. Her eye was still bright. It blinked slowly, once. Then the stabbing began. The lance was twice the length of Comeragh but he handled it with such skill that all my fear evaporated. She rolled over, snapping her jaws. She twisted. The sea turned red. He stabbed her again and again, seven, eight, nine times, probing determinedly for the heart which, when found, caused her to spout a dark spume from the blowhole, a fountain of blood that burst up and rained down from on high all over us.
“Back! Back!” cried Comeragh and Sam, and we took oars and got away and watched her die.
It was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am. So much blood. This was not like the fish on the quay, fresh caught, lying flipping and flopping, death on a simmer. This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fell stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly. We watched in awe, wordless. Ten minutes, fifteen, more. As she thrashed, she swam around in an ever dwindling gyre, and I begged her to die.
How long till she listed? No more than twenty minutes. She heeled at last and lay still, one fin pointing at the sky. So passed Leviathan.
We pulled in the line, Sam leading. Stronger than he looked, Sam. We were rowing in blood. A foul flotsam, the contents of the whale’s stomach, bobbed around us. My part was to keep the line from