“… Sea, hear me now, and take my words and make them ever law!—“
“Right, now swim off a little. No one hears this part. Upward, and toward the center, where the peak will be. Right there—“
“ ‘Must I accept the barren Gift?
learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game—
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed— (“— Oh Lord—“)
the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed.
But past the fear lies life for all—
perhaps for me: and, past my dread, p
ast loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!’ “ and then the paleness came to circle over her, bringing with it the voice that chanted all on one soft hissing note, again and again, always coming back to the same refrain—
“ ‘Master have I none, nor seek.
Bring the ailing; bring the weak.
Bring the wounded ones to me:
They shall feed my Mastery…’”
That strange excitement was still growing in Nita. She let it drive her voice as she would have used it to drive a wizardry, so that her song grew into something that shook the water and almost drowned out even Ed’s voice, weaving about it and turning mere hunger to desire, disaster to triumph—
“ ‘Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death part of me;
By my acceptance it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea—
yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!
Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye—
so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!’ “
… The last time she sang it, Nita hung unmoving, momentarily exhausted, for the moment aware of nothing but Kit’s anxious eyes staring at her from outside the circle and the stir of water on her skin as the Pale One circled above her.
“That’s right,” S’reee said at last, very quietly. “And then—“
She fell silent and swam out of the circle of Celebrants. Behind her, very slowly, first the Blue and then the rest of the whales began to sing the dirge for the Silent Lord — confirmation of the transformation of death and the new defeat of the Lone Power. Nita headed for the surface to breathe.
She came up into early evening. Westward, sunset was burning itself into scarlet embers; eastward a Moon lacking only the merest shard of light to be full lifted swollen and amber through the surface haze; northward, the bright and dark and bright again of Ambrose Light glittered on the uneasily shifting waves, with the opening and closing red eyes of Manhattan skyscraper lights low beyond it; and southward, gazing back at them, the red-orange glow of Arcturus sparkled above the water, here and there striking an answering spark off the crest or hollow of some wave. Nita lay there gasping in the wavewash and let the water rock her. Heaven knows, she thought, I need somebody to do it.
Beside her Kit surfaced in a great wash of water and blew spectacularly— slightly forward, as sperms do. “Neets—“
“Hi,” she said. She knew it was inane, but she could think of no other way to keep Kit from starting what he was going to start, except by saying dumb things.
“Neets,” he said, “we’re out of time. They’re going to start the descent as soon as everybody’s had a chance to rest a little and the protective spells are set.”
“Right,” she said, misunderstanding him on purpose. “We better get going, then—“ She tilted her head down and started to dive.
“Neets.” Suddenly Nita found that she was trying to dive through a forty-foot thickness of sperm whale. Nita blew in annoyance and let herself float back to the surface again. Kit bobbed up beside her — and, with great suddenness and a slam of air, threw off the whalesark. He dogpaddled there in the water, abruptly tiny beside her bulk. “Neets, get out of that for a minute.”
“Huh? Oh—“
It was a moment’s work to drop the whaleshape; then she was reduced to dogpaddling too. Kit was treading water a few feet from her, his hair slicked down with the water. He looked strange — tight, somehow, as if he were holding onto some idea or feeling very hard. “Neets,” he said, “I’m not buying this.”
Nita stared at him. “Kit,” she said finally, “look, there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve bought it. Literally.”
“No,” Kit said. The word was not an argument, not even defiance; just a simple statement of fact. “Look, Neets — you’re the best wizard I’ve ever worked with—“
“I’m the only wizard you’ve ever worked with,” Nita said with a lopsided grin.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Kit said — and regretted it instantly.
“No need,” Nita said. “Kit — why don’t you just admit that this time I’ve got myself into something I can’t get out of.”
“Unless another wizard gets you out of it.”
She stared at him. “You loon, you can’t—“
“I know. And it hurts! I feel like I should volunteer, but I just can’t—“
“Good. ‘Cause you do and I’ll kill you.”
“That won’t work either.” He made her own crooked grin back at her.
“ ‘All for one,’ remember? We both have to come out of this alive.” he looked away.
”Let’s go for both,” Nita said.
Silence.
She took a deep breath. “Look, even if we don’t both get out of this, I think it’s gonna be all right. Really—“
“No,” Kit said again, and that was that.
Nita just looked at him. “Okay,” she said. “Be that way.” And she meant it. This was the Kit she was used to working with: stubborn, absolutely sure of himself — most of the time; the person with that size-twelve courage packed into his size-ten self, a courage that would spend a few minutes trembling and then take on anything that got in its way — from the Lone Power to her father. If I’ve got to go, Nita thought in sudden irrational determination, that sheer guts has got to survive — and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to make sure he does.
“Look,” she said, “what’re you gonna tell my folks when you get back?”
“I’m gonna tell them we’re hungry,” Kit said, “and that you’ll fill ‘em in on the details while I eat.”
I did tell him to be that way… “Right,” Nita said.
For a long time they stayed where they were, treading water, watching the Moon inch its way up the sky, listening to the Ambrose fog signal hooting the minutes away. A mile or so off, a tanker making for New York Harbor went by, its green portside running lights toward them, and let off a low groaning blast of horn to warn local traffic. From under the surface, after a pause, came a much deeper note that held and then scaled downward out of human hearing range, becoming nothing but a vibration in the water.
“They’re ready to leave,” Kit said.
Nita nodded, slipped into whaleshape again, and looked one last time with all her heart at the sunset towers of Manhattan, until Kit had finished his change. Then they dived.
The Song of the Twelve
Hudson Channel begins its seaward course some twenty miles south of Ambrose Light — trending first due south, parallel to the Jersey shore, then turning gradually toward the southeast and the open sea as it deepens. Down its length, scattered over the channel’s bottom as it slowly turns from gray-green mud to gray-black sand to naked, striated stone, are the broken remnants of four hundred years’ seafaring in these waters and the refuse of three hundred years of human urban life, mixed randomly together. There are new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long since gone to rot and rust; great dumps of incinerated wood and ash, chemical drums and lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal; sunken, abandoned buoys, old cable spindles, unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all commingled with and nested in a thick ooze of untreated, settled sewage — the garbage of millions of busy lives, thrown where they won’t have to look at it.