Killer

The killer Aipalookvik cradled the Eskimo against its chest almost protectively, moving its great tail to hold the tiny raft steady, to prevent it sinking under its great weight. Job waited dumbly for the end: against a god what else is there to do?

As he waited, the killer Aipalookvik, Biter and Destroyer, gave a strange low loving call.

The water parted scant yards from Job. The black point of the mate’s fin, the black sail, the black shoulder, came . . . and her face, out of the water, mouth agape, hurling the ocean aside. Job’s mind raced into prayer. “O Lord, out of the depths.” His lips screamed wordlessly and she was upon him, flipped half on her side, her jaws closing round his legs.

Oh Lord, out of the depths . . . Job felt her teeth grate on his bones. She backed away. His trousers flapped in rags against the bloody ruin below his waist. He did not look down. Oh Lord, out of the depths . . . said his mind; “COLIN!” he screamed.

Colin, seeing him like that, saw Jeremiah five years earlier, asking to be left to die. He assumed that Job was demanding the same thing – to die well.

Perhaps he was.

“THE DYNAMITE,” screamed Colin. “JOB, THE DYNA­MITE.”

Job held the stick, fused and ready to light, in his left hand. He fumbled for a match. His eyes went up, he could see Colin’s face looking as though it were carved of bone. He turned his face away, lit the match, sheltered from the wind by the bulk of the whale. The fuse hissed into life, spitting fire . . .

And the mate came at Job again, her mouth opening like a mantrap at his knees. He saw the teeth, the water flowing past them in little red eddies, pink waterfalls; he saw the great pink-white blade of her tongue working, the crimson shadows of her throat. He fell forward, thrusting out his arm, and she took it, hand with its spitting bundle, shoulder, deep into her mouth.

The flame of the fuse seared her: she jerked back, snapping shut her teeth. They almost met across his upper arm, and as she slid back whimpering, left the flesh stripped away from shoulder to elbow. The muscled walls of the arteries spasmed shut, the length of the bone shone yellow-white.

Job tore himself back from the terrible sight, and the joint of his elbow, still between her teeth, severed with the strain. The white stick of his humerus stood out from the ruin of his shoulder as he staggered back, on his knees now. His shoulder slammed into the rigid flipper of Aipalookvik for the last time, and toppled forward drunkenly towards the waiting mouth of the killer’s mate.

“Oh Lord,” he said. “Out of the Depths I cry to Thee . . .”

And the dynamite exploded.

On the floe they froze; Kate, her arm round Colin’s shoulders, Simon, his legs wide, his mouth open, the piece of rope caught up as Job began to come back on the wind still in his hands. The red mushroom of mist fell back into the sea, and there was nothing there.

“By God he did it,” said Simon.

“What did he say?” asked Colin. “What did he say?”

Kate had only half heard herself, but she told Colin. “The debt. He said you were free.”

OceanofPDF.com

TWELVE

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The killer whale in which Job had seen the great God Aipalookvik heaved his forty-foot length through the dull water, back breaking the surface so that he could gasp air into his blast-­damaged lungs. A beard of blood clung to his chin and upper chest where his delicate skin had been ruptured by hundreds of shards of bone sent howling like shrapnel on the first wind of the blast, from his consort’s massive skull and Job’s upper torso. He was lucky that his wounds did not extend any further up his white cheeks, for had they done so, his eyes would have been destroyed.

For some minutes after the explosion, the leader had rolled around near the surface fighting for breath, his mind in confusion. One moment his ultimate lesson was proceeding perfectly as he held the man still so that his consort could learn the joy of killing humans; then the sea had hurled itself into his face, into his lungs, seemingly into his mind. As soon as he was out of danger himself, he started to look for his beautiful sleek black and white mate, calling to her with the strange, sad, haunting tones of their language, but there had been no reply. His sonar had found no shape he could recognise as hers in the quiet water, and even when his eyes found her, he did not recognise the truncated mess of her body at all.

Now, instinctively, he was swimming south. The rest of his pack were down here somewhere he knew, and although his ears, damaged like his lungs by the blast, had not yet cleared sufficiently for him to hear the directional and locational cries they were still periodically giving, he knew where they had been before the final attack had started, and that was close enough. He needed the reassurance of his fellows.