Leviathan's Huntress, Ch. V: The Khahal

This was no hunt. This was a murder.

This is Chapter V of Leviathan’s Huntress.

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Chapter V: The Khahal

Under a mild wind the cry arose from the masthead:

“Blows! Blows! She blows!”

The Embanesa exploded with movement. Alacrity possessed the crew. Men dropped their duties and ran for the deck. Iona followed despite her better judgement. Master-Surgeon Gartzela quit his cabin and stepped onto the quarterdeck. “Where away?”

“Broad on starboard! Blows! She blows!”

First mate Fose threw himself upon the gunwale with a savage glee. Just beneath the horizon there bloomed the twain, split-shaped spouts geysering one after another in the late morning light. “Right whales!”

Around Iona a few harpooners and oarsmen were already divesting shirts and extraneous coats wherever they stood. Iona quietly thanked God and all the Halloweds that they retained their breeches.

Motza ran past her up the forecastle and agile as a sparrow leaped the gunwales and grasped the shroud to lean over the waters. His pale eyes never lost their melancholy but he too grinned like a child. “A whole pod!”

“Motza,” laughed Fose, “if this be your song then all is pardoned!”

The decks were still flooding with men. “Blows!” the lookout honked on. “Blows! Blows!”

“Aback the mainsails!” commanded the Master-Surgeon. “Back the yard and heave to!”

“Lower the kalpas!” commanded Gogor. “Let ‘em fall!”

The kalpas were the pursuit boats, tackled to crane-like devices called davits for their raising and lowering. Iona and four others took up the second mate’s order, uncovering the kalpas and readying the davits.

“Jula? Where’s my harpooner?” cried Fose, switching from mania to raw fury in a breath.

Jula came trotting up the companionway with a harpoon in each hand and a feathered merchant’s hat melting over his mop of hair. Hailing from Gulterland, astonishingly young — perhaps even younger than Iona — and sporting inadequate facial hair. More than once Iona had witnessed him respond to a mate’s order with a churlish retort, often muttered in his native Gultrich tongue.

But he was lethally good at what he did. The Embanesa’s success depended on his throwing arm. He knew it, and he acted like it. His lay was one-fortieth.

“Hie, Jula!” blasted Fose. “Hie, you lusty yonker! Your kalpa’s dropping!”

Without even looking at his mate, Jula sallied to the wale and leaped into the lowering kalpa and stood erect like the master of all nature. Fose’s oarsmen followed.

The other kalpa crews were still gathering — Motza was tossing irons and drogues into his own kalpa and maneuvering the davit over the gunwale — but Fose was looking down at his own descending craft and counting. “Three… four… five. Five! We’re down two men!” He looked again and identified his delinquents. “Inygge! Zitis! Damnation on their crowns, where are they?”

Zitis staggered up the companionway, closely followed by Errolan the cooper. Both men looked bewildered and kept shielding their eyes as if they’d never seen the sun before.

“Zitis!” the first mate bellowed. “Where is Inygge?”

Zitis looked behind and around himself like he’d lost something, but Errolan stepped between. “I believe Inygge’s taken ill, sir… thought I spied him in his berth.”

Motza stripped off his shirt showing ornate tattoos coursing down and around his honed frame. He gird his loins with his leather belt, then dove gracefully overboard to join his kalpa. Gogor and Oxara’s boats were nearly ready to pursue. Fose was being left behind.

“Fiend take Inygge, I’ll skin him if he costs me this hunt! Get me another oarsman!... You!” He seized Iona and brought her close to his face. “Who are you?”

“I uhh… a greenhand, sir!”

“What’s your name?”

“Raifin, sir—”

“You’ll do.”

And grasping her coat he lifted her off the deck and threw her overboard.

She could not swim.

The world spun and the horizon turned and all her air escaped. She fell longer than she’d ever fallen then suddenly splashed into the ocean where air and light and sound dissolved and salt ran into her head and burned in her chest.

Something grabbed her. One hand and then another hand seized her and hauled her into the kalpa.

“Get up!” cried her rescuer as he placed her sitting backwards in the kalpa’s thwart. An oar was thrust into her hands and her hat was plopped onto her head sopped as a drowned vermin.

Fose swung from the chainwales and thunked into the kalpa, then in hardly a moment raised and socketed the mast and propped the sprit. “Now!” he cried, leaping astern and snatching the steering oar. “Now! Now! Row, you bastards! An allowance to the kalpa who darts a whale!”

The mechanical strokes began. Iona had attended precisely none of Motza’s trainings but she got the rhythm. Lean forward. Pull back. The spritsail engaged and Fose adjusted the lines. The kalpa gained speed.

“Faster!” bellowed Fose. “Faster!”

Lean forward. Pull back. The rhythm increased. Each stroke burned and she could feel water still in her lungs. The Embanesa was sliding away and the other three kalpas were still ahead. This was the first time she’d been off the ship since that fateful night in Azketa. Here in the kalpa the ocean was closer and the sky wider and she felt herself suspended between vastnesses.

On and on they rowed. To one side Iona saw Oxara’s kalpa falling gradually behind. Gogor’s would be next. Over her shoulder and still a distance ahead of them, Motza’s complement was half-made of greenhands he’d personally trained, but still he was in the lead.

“Half-mile!” someone announced.

“Choke up!” Fose commanded and stood to collapse the spritsail and unstep the mast — even a shadow thrown by a masthead might gally a whale. Instantly Iona felt the loss of motive power. Strokes grew harder and she huffed through her mouth. Now they passed Gogor.

Jula mounted the kalpa’s bow. A wooden cleat was built there as a brace for the harpooner’s foot and he kicked his boot therein and bending his knees slightly rode the kalpa‘s stem. “Nigh! Nigh!” he called.

“Oars in!” said Fose, not a shout but an intonation. The crew fell to careful silence and drew the oars into the kalpa. Iona thought they might be done but then everyone began turning around in their thwarts. Now they faced forward with Jula at the bow and someone was handing Iona a paddle rather than an oar but she could only stare transfixed at the waters before them.

The whales.

Thirty feet ahead. Puff and blast. Black and glistening hides marked with rough and stone-like callosities. The great smirking split of the mouth… and the eyes! Such small eyes! Their backs crest out the spumy blanket and their V-shaped geysers hiss ten feet, nay twelve feet high! The flukes — the mighty tails — lift and spill the water in roiling buckets then disappear or clap the surface into foam that rolls away in their tremendous wakes.

There a bull, fifty feet long, and there another surfaces beside. Near the pod’s center swims a calf, fifteen feet long, her mother nearby. Spouts report and hiss and form a vaporous veil that falls like sudden daytime rain and rings the sun in iridescence. The kalpas enter this cloud and mist graces her face and she can feel it.

Whales. These be whales.

Between them and the pod was Motza’s kalpa. He was raising his harpoon…

“No!” Iona screamed despite herself but someone else screamed louder:

“Give it to her, Jula!”

Jula did. His dart passed beside Motza who ducked with his crew but the harpoon flew on with the rope it was attached to convulsing behind.

The dart struck the calf.

“No!” Iona screamed again, but again the cacophony of waves and orders drowned her wail.

“Stuck!” cried Jula.

“Stern all!”

Every paddle stabbed down. The kalpa lurched to a stop. Iona nearly hit the man in front of her.

Ahead the pod was gallied, turning fluke — raising their tails high to dive.

“Is she sounding?” Fose asked.

“Aye! The whole pod’s showing heels!”

In the kalpa ahead Motza burned. “Are you mad?! You could have hit me!”

The harpoon line was still paying out, zipping audibly over the rail.

“Throw the drogue overboard!” commanded Fose but it was too late, for at the standing end of the harpoon line was an airtight barrel — the drogue — that suddenly reached its end and leaped from the kalpa’s bottom and over the oarsmen’s heads, skidded along the surface a few feet, then plummeted, pulled toward the depths by the whale it was attached to. And soon enough t’would pull that whale back up.

Iona could feel tears burning her eyes. “That was a calf.”

They all looked at her. She’d spoken Weslish.

A reattempt in Luraldish: “That was a… a… damn it, the word…”

“Whale?”

“Nay, not whale… ‘twas…”

“Khahal,” someone said helpfully. He held his hands close together, suggesting diminution. “Khahal. ‘Twas a khahal we darted.”

Iona stared. Khahal. So that was what khahal meant: whale calf. “Why?” she choked.

They looked at one another.

“Why? Why the khahal?!”

In the other kalpa Motza was listening and his face was stone, but Fose chuckled. “Raifin, aye? You’ll soon see, Raifin. Now unpeel eyes, ye, and watch for that drogue!”

***

The Embanesa unfurled its topsail — not for wind, but to signal its kalpas two miles away. Gogor used his spritsail to respond: whale stuck, watching for drogue.

Clouds of steel and lead gathered on the horizon. Someone mentioned a storm was ignored. The kalpas spread to search further. Waves rising and falling. Fose reminded his men multiple times that they’d receive extra pay for this. Motza kept looking out and shaking his head in disapproval.

Iona watched the pod’s suds disperse and felt a dreadful guilt. The calf — the khahal — was down below, bleeding, being dragged away from her mother and family and back toward the merciless surface by the drogue. She was already doomed.

“Drogue, ho!” screamed a man in Oxara’s boat.

Fose positively threw the mast into its socket this time. “Hie! Hie, children!”

The oars returned and Iona sat backwards and her body groaned, but her heart beat for the khahal. Please, God, she prayed with each stroke. Please let her escape.

“She rises! She rises!” came the cry.

“Yonder!” Fose exclaimed.

There was the khahal a mile away. Resurfaced, running the water, blowhole working.

“Catch her! Before she sounds again!”

This time they did not switch to paddles, did not turn forward — the khahal was too exhausted to sound again. By spreading out Oxara was far ahead, though the others were catching up.

Iona had seen animals killed before. She had helped her father slaughter pigs. But there was a deeper injustice at work here, a more profound sin. This was no hunt. This was a murder. “Please let her escape. Please let her escape. Please, God… please…”

But when she furtively glanced over her shoulder, Oxara’s kalpa was already there alongside the khahal.

“Churn, man!”

That is what they call it: churning. The place they called ‘the life’ resided behind the left flipper, for therein lie her lungs. Oxara’s harpooner took up not a dart but a lance this time, and pitched it into the khahal’s flank again and again. He churned.

The waters went red.

“Stern all!”

Oxara’s kalpa hove to. The other kalpas did the same and all waited.

The khahal was not yet dead, but death was inevitable. ‘The flurry,’ they call this stage. She swam around and around along the surface in a wide circle as though she might yet outrun them, but in sooth she was drowning in her own blood. Her blowhole worked continuously, but the spouts grew weaker and weaker, thicker and thicker, first issuing sickly pink and then vermillion and then richest red until the whole creature was naught but a sanguine fount and the ocean turned to blood for hundreds of feet around like some apocalyptic omen and still she blew and blew and with every gush was something precious and irrevocable lost. The whalers waited as in her fear and delirium she passed even five feet from them and her spout drenched them in blood — warm blood — and it fell upon Iona’s hands and head and hair and she bent forward and thank God nobody heard her sobs. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!...”

Minutes more passed. The khahal grew too exhausted, her lung too burdened with her own blood. She languished onto her side with one fin high as though in surrender.

“She’s finning out!”

“Let’s finish her!” shouted Fose.

“Wait!” cried Motza. He waved his kalpa to approach first.

“Oh God,” groaned Fose, “must we, man?”

Motza guided his craft to the khahal’s head. Her mouth was partly open and the massive combs of her baleens were visible in the frothy, bloodstained sea. At Motza’s waist was a pouch — a skin of fresh water. Lifting this, he popped the stopper free with his teeth, then leaned forward and poured some of its contents into the dying cetacean’s mouth. His kalpa held solemnity and he began to sing.

“I don’t think it’s water that fish needs, fourth mate,” Fose ridiculed but was ignored.

Iona was trying not to shudder. Her mind kept turning, kept torturing her for not somehow intervening, but what could she do? This was whaling, and men had done this for centuries. Would they stop today? More likely she would reveal herself, and then she would be executed, and then she would never find Durian. She watched as Gogor took a lance and carefully pricked the khahal’s eyeball — dead.

“It’s over,” she whispered to herself. “It’s over.”

But it wasn’t.

“Another blow!” cried an oarsman. “She blows! She blows!”

The whole company took up the cry as they turned to windward where a lone whale was heading toward them.

“That, Raifin!” cried Fose. “That is why you dart the kahal first: because the mother always returns!” He worked the spritsail until it caught the wind. “Oars out and to windward! Jula, ready another dart!”

***

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