Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [76]
Now dressed and ignored by the crew as they went about their jobs, Niah hung over the side again watching Tyndall’s air bubbles lazily pop to the surface in a steady stream.
For Tyndall it was all fascinating and he felt he’d been down for hours. His body and head ached and he had lost track of time. If it hadn’t been for his boots planted firmly on the seabed and a glimmer of light slanting through the water above, he would have easily felt disoriented and imagined himself drifting into a silvery aqua oblivion. He concentrated and focused on tiny objects and watched a small marine creature inch its way across a coral-encrusted rock.
It was Niah whose attention was diverted from the stream of bubbles breaking the surface to a distant movement on the water. It was fleeting, and for a while there was nothing more to be seen and she was about to look away when it came again, a brief spurt of water. She called out, ‘Whale!’
All heads shot up and they stared in the direction of her pointing arm. The seconds, a minute, ticked by in silence. Yoshi was standing, shading his eyes, Taki held Tyndall’s line, poised to give three rapid tugs, the shell openers sat with motionless knives as they too scanned the sea. The two men on the pump were the only ones moving. Ahmed looked back at Niah with a raised eyebrow.
She was about to shrug and protest that she was sure she had seen the blow, when, so loud, so fast, so surprising they were all stunned, a massive whale breeched beside the lugger, slapping its giant flukes against the hull.
Niah screamed and the Bulan shivered with the impact of the brush from an old bull longer than the lugger. The crew sprang into action, Taki sending an urgent message to Tyndall they were bringing him up as Ahmed and the crew began to set the sails.
‘Quick, bring back tuan, quick,’ cried Niah, tugging at Taki’s arm as he methodically wrenched in the lifeline. Ahmed shouted at her in Malay to move back and she stood by wringing her hands. Once again the whale surfaced, regarding them with a small imperious eye and showing a hide encrusted with barnacles.
There was near panic on board as the whale scraped along the starboard side as the boat heeled well to port. The tender fell to the deck and momentarily lost control of the lifeline and air hose which were over the port side of the boat.
Tyndall, who had been unceremoniously jerked towards the surface, now dropped back to the seabed, wondering what the hell was going on. Then, before he could make sense of the situation he was again jerked upwards. He felt the pressure swell inside his head, and he gasped long sucking breaths of air, wondering what had happened. Then all movement stopped and he was left dangling like a puppet on a string. He tilted his head to stare upward.
As if looking through the wrong end of a telescope, the scene above him seemed unreal and he felt his heart squeezed with fear. The silhouette of the Bulan was dwarfed by a great black lolling shape just below the hull. Tyndall was astern the lugger and as his vision adjusted he saw the flukes of the great tail were directly between him and the lugger. He watched in helpless horror. The whale moved upward so its back was against the Bulan. Tyndall waited, terrified the whale would flip over the lugger.
On the deck everyone was again flung off balance as the Bulan rolled and shook while the whale started scratching the barnacles off its crusty hide.
The lugger began to move forward now that sails were going up but they couldn’t get fully under way until the master was safely on board, and that was impossible now that the whale was between the boat and the diver. Taki took a turn around a bollard with the hose and lifeline. Yoshi and Ahmed conferred