CHAPTER NINE
I remembered nothing for a tide or tides, I know not which. I
stirred as one waking from a frightful sleep. I stretched and my body
ached. I looked around and found that I was close to the breakers
but a short way from the shore. I listened, but there was no song.
I knew that what I had hoped I had dreamed, was real. I was alone
with the memory of the Song of the Sea.
The memory.
Of all that is holy, the memory!
The pod was dead!
My mind was flooded with memory. The delights, the laugh-
ter, the fears. To remember was to ache with such gut-wrenching
pain that to think was effort, not worth the price. I twisted in my
own sea of guilt as I wondered the impact of my singing of the
Narwhal song. I agonized my journey and the singing of that song.
How much of all of this was my own responsibility? How much guilt
was mine truly earned? How deep was my conceit at the wonder
of the song. How hollow is a song when there is no one to sing it
to? Now, being Scribe was not an honor. Now, being Scribe was
charged with the horrible prospect of passing this hideous ritual on
to another pod, as it had been passed on to us. Others–and still
others–would die, and like those interwoven nets of kelp, it would
keep building until all the seas would be silent forever.
“No!” I screamed, “This will end with me. This will end for-
ever here. I will join the others in their futility, rather than take the
chance that this song might be sung again.”
Slowly, I turned my back to the sea and rushed to the dry-
side. I began to sing of recrimination. I was the one who returned
from the journey and passed on the hatred of the sandwalker. I was
the one who had listened to the dreams of the Narwhal and passed
on their vengeance to the pod.
“The pod. The pod.” I cried again and again. Then, with the
speaking of the word, came fresh memory anew, and like a sharp-fin,
it ripped at my heart and devoured my soul.
“Melody and Progeny, my own sweet mother, Rhapsody, all
are dead,” I wailed, and the tears blurred my vision of purpose so
that I could not see. A wave lifted me higher and threw me closer to
the shore and to the end I so desperately sought. The coral sand
began to scrape along my belly; still I fought higher and higher, up
the land shelf into the dryside. Finally, I could swim no more and
was beached like a monstrous log in the land of the sandwalkers.
With a calmness that belied my spirit, I sang of other days.
I sang loudly so the Song of the Sea would be carried on the winds
of the dryside, and all the sandwalkers could hear what I had done,
what they had done, what we all had done to the world. I sang of
destruction. I sang of the lives lost and the friends departed. I
waited for the end . . . the beginning.
As I lay there, prepared for death and embroiled in my own
self-pity, I felt a biting, a pulling at my tail. “Odd,” thought I, “al-
ready the feathered-furies are pulling at my flesh.” But what mon-
strous feathered-furies! These strange furies not only pulled at me,
they yanked. I felt myself being scraped backward. The oddity of
this event momentarily snapped me from my private wake, for no
feathered fury could pull a whale back to the sea. What was hap-
pening? “Ah, no matter,” I mused out loud. “It matters not at all
whether it is a feathered fury, or a great sharp-fin pulling me into the
sea as a meal. It matters not, for the song is dead.”
Suddenly, my self-pitying reverie was broken by excited
chitterings and a voice that sang from out of the past, “You blub-
ber-brain. Help us for pity’s sake!”
“Help us? Help who?” I asked deliriously.
I heard my own words being mimicked like an echo gone bad,
“Help us? Help who? Help me? Help you? Come on, flounder
butt, help yourself.” My brain was fogged with grief, but still and all,
echoes don’t add to words spoken. Echoes don’t speak in squeaky
voices. Then the voices were remembered — Little Brother and
Laughter Ring.
“Let me die!” I cried. “The song is silent, and the pod is
dead!” I pulled from their grasp and once again began inching my
way back up the shore, but once again I was held short of my goal.
“By all things that are holy, let me die! For all is lost!”
“Not quite all,” shouted Little Brother, yanking me rudely again
toward the sea. “For out there wait the children that you saved. Did
you save them only to let them die of neglect and confusion?”
I paused in my struggle, and far out to sea I could hear the
gentle, tiny squeaks of the babies. All in the pod were not dead.
I remembered in a rush that in my madness to break the spell of
death I had pushed several young calves back to the deep. Now,
with no one to guide them, they floated and called to the parents
that could not hear.
But obstinacy is born of pride, and I shook their simple
songs from my ears and would not listen. “No!” I bellowed. “I am
whale, and my destiny is to die as the others before.”
Suddenly, my friends from long ago let go. “Fine,” taunted
Laughter Ring, “and the Narwhal are right as they sing. But what
happens when there are no more whales? What happens when all
the whales have cast themselves upon the shore? Do you think the
sandwalker will feel your protest after you are gone? No! They will
push your fat, rotting carcass back to the sea or better still, leave it
where it lies. Then they will quickly forget and continue their ruin-
ation of the world.”
“But,” I protested weakly, “I have carried out my responsibili-
ty. I have sung the song.”
“That’s a floating pool of carp crap, and you know it,”
snapped Little Brother. “Who do you sing to as you die? Do you
sing to the children, so they can continue this madness? Or do you
sing to the sandwalker? There is good reason why the sandwalk-
er does not sing the Song of the Sea. For how can you sing that
which you cannot hear?”
I froze in my undulations to reach the dryside. I paused.
Perhaps they were right. The sandwalker does not sing our song,
and we, the whale, can’t sing his. With a sigh breathed deep, I ex-
haled all that was wrong with my soul and began slowly to turn back
to the sea.
I flipped and flopped, helping my friends to extricate me from
the shore, and slowly inched my painful way from the sands of the
dryside. The salty waters of life burned my wounds but, all in all,
soothed my dry skin. As my wounds tingled with the sharp bite
of healing, I dropped into the deep to soothe that tortured melody
echoing in my mind. My little friends let me be while I mused my
situation. The children must learn the Song of the Sea, and from
its singing change would come. All must learn the song, not only
whale but flipper-fin and dolphin. All of the waters of life must sing
the same, not bits of melody here and there.
While there, on the bottom of the world as I knew it, I found
answers that had never been questioned. For there was a way to
protest the sandwalker. There was a way to remove the sandwalker
for all time from the sea. Exalted with rebirth and buoyant with the
spirit that has made the whale strong for all of time, I breached. For
the first time, for the last time, I breached for the life of all living
creatures in the sea.
Sustained by the new life within me and aided by my dear
friends, we searched for the children of tomorrow. We found them
not far from shore, confused and so alone. There were seven in
all. They sang to us for guidance. They asked for the song, and
they asked for food. Fortunately, all but one of them had tried the
first taste of fish and needed not their mothers’ milk. Little Brother,
Laughter Ring, and I swam ourselves ragged, hunting fish and re-
turning to feed the hungry mouths that waited, still in shock from all
they had seen but settled by normalcy of eating.
Though we tried to feed the littlest one, she was so dis-
traught she would not eat the fish we offered and cried fitfully for the
warmth of her mother’s milk. “What are we to do?” I asked of the
others, “I can soothe the young ones with the song and feed them
with the fish, but this little one I can do nothing for.”
“It has been done before,” Laughter Ring said quietly. “We
are both of the family of the sea. I will nurse the young one until
she can be taught to eat the fish. It may not be much, but it will
have to do.”
“That’s ridiculous,” snorted Little Brother. “You can’t nurse
another unless you are with child.” He paused and looked foolishly
at his mate. “Are you? Are we with child?”
Laughter Ring laughed true to her name, “I don’t know about
you, but I am. If you haven’t noticed these last many tides, I have
been growing large with child.”
Sure enough, I now noticed that Laughter Ring was filled with
child, and it was easy to see that she would have little trouble nurs-
ing a young one, even a whale.
“But, but,” stuttered Little Brother, “I thought you were just
getting a little fat. I mean, I thought you were eating a bit more
than I …”
“Hmm,” muttered laughter Ring, as she sought out the child.
“You and I shall talk of this another time. Fatter indeed.”
Later, when the silverside replaced the golden light with its
silvered reflections, we fed ourselves. Sated, we dozed, rocking
on the now gentle seas. I would sleep for a time, and then wake
abruptly, thinking I had heard Melody’s song calling to me from the
dryside. After listening for a time and hearing only the gentle rush
of the waves falling on the sea, I would fall back into my fitful sleep.
For many tides we moved the small pod around in no partic-
ular direction, as all seemed to wait for some decision from me as
to a call to action. What they didn’t know then and know now, is
that I didn’t know what to do. The dream of the Narwhal had filled
my mind with such narcissism as to my importance, that I couldn’t
make a decision, thinking somehow that the fate of the Song of the
Sea rested solely in my wake. I had begun spending more and more
time alone, forcing the two dolphins to care for the calves alone, no
mean task, indeed. It was on one of these reflective sojourns that I
had yet another mysterious chat with the mystical ghosts of the sea,
the Narwhal.
I had been in a deep dive and was actually due to breach, to
fill my straining lungs with air when I heard Godwin’s voice. “Why
do you wait, white whale? Why do you wait?”
I spun around in the water, looking for the source of the sing-
er. In the distance I thought I saw the faded image of Godwin the
Avenger, tail down in the water. I tried to focus on the visage but the
more I concentrated the more faint the image became. Sure that I
was still hallucinating, I called out “You! Why do you haunt me so?”
“You are the salvation. We cannot wait, Godwin called out.
The sandwalker has taken all from you. It has taken your moth-
er, your lover, your life. The prophesy has been fulfilled. You are
alone. There is no one for you to sing to. Call for the gathering.
Call for the Conclave. Let all the brethren sit in judgment of the
sandwalker. It is you and you alone who can bring us together.”
And then, as suddenly as he appeared, Godwin disappeared.
Lungs straining, I breached. I floated there, rocking softly on the
gentle waves that moved tirelessly to the dryside, to the sandwalker.
I was decided.
I rushed back to Laughter Ring and Little Brother and as the
young calves slept I sang, “The Narwhal are right in the sharing of
their wisdom, but they are so wrong in how they teach it. They hide
within their frozen crystal walls and give gifts of hate to any whale
that happens by, and, one by one, the whale is disappearing. The
Narwhal could do no better if they all gave their twisted horns to the
sandwalker, so that they could kill even more of us in the seas. A
new song must be sung. Not a song sung by just a single pod of
whale, here or there, but all in one massive chorus. I call for a Con-
clave, the greatest meeting of all the brethren of the sea.”
There followed a faint echo from afar, “And that is good!”
At first I thought it was again my imagination, the on-going
hallucination, but I was wrong. The two dolphins turned to the
sound also, and although it was faint, they, too, heard it. The Nar-
whal or at least one was somewhere in the nearby seas. “So, the
ghosts do move beyond their enchanted chambers,” I muttered.
“What did you sing?” asked Little Brother.
“Nothing,” I murmured. “Nothing. Draw yourself near. It is
time that I pass to you the entire Song of the Sea.”
“No!” said Laughter Ring, as she backed away, her eyes
opened in horror. “I will not listen. There is no way that I will let
you sing the song and die!”
“There is no fear of my throwing my life to the dryside and
the sandwalker. No, I propose to share the song as it was meant to
be shared. No one, whale or brethren, should hold the song alone.
The song is to be shared and with that I began to sing: This, then,
is my singing of the Song of the Sea.. I was born some seventy-five
hundred tides ago, in a time when the waters and life were mirror
smooth. Before my birth, in…”
I sang it all, leaving out nothing. When I was done, the dol-
phins’ eyes were wide with wonder. “By all that is holy,” whispered
Little Brother, as he twisted and turned, “I never would have thought
any song could be so long.”
“Or beautiful,” sighed Laughter Ring.
“It is the history of the world that you now share.” I sang,
“Go, go my friends. Call your pod of dolphins together, and tell
them of the Conclave. Send them out to the waters of the world and
each one of that group shall go to another and yet another group,
tell them all of the Conclave. Call to the flipper-fin and the great-
backed whale. Call to the blue and the bowhead. We shall all meet
in five-hundred tides near the crystal walls of the Narwhal of the
Horn.”
And with that, I gathered the young calves around and began
moving up the world to meet my destiny, the Conclave.