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CHAPTER 1 | THE DEAD WHALE

I AM NOW DRUNK ENOUGH to feel the sea flowing backwards. Somewhere beyond the cove, a cyclonic core has grown in the water to pull the inbound waves back out. I feel it reaching down my throat to pull my stomach up.I’ve been wondering tonight how much of my body is in the sea. Whether it’s enough to strain out and build a second one. Flesh from the burns I cleaned with the saltwater, tadpole clouds of blood lost to the sharp edges of rocks, crescents of fingernail and toenail scattered off the cliffs on morning walks. For the last three years, I’ve been wheedling the sand with my wine bottles, letting the waves wash the tears and red vomit from my face before they stain it. My skin and hair will pull away like lichen soon enough. My skeleton will erode slow like the cliffs, but I will lie here as long as they do.Yesterday, I found myself moaning, “I want my mamma, I want my mamma,” between bouts of vomiting. My mother might have heard me from the valley, if she was awake and the windows were open. She didn’t come. There’s a monster on my back, a spined thing which towers even when it crouches. If they dragged me home, it would gash the new thatch on the roofs, poison the wet daub in the walls. It’s dread.We buried Nene in the sea. It was the only grave big enough to hold him. We dragged him out beyond the cove, like he was a whale which had washed up rotten on the shore. I’m waiting now to drown myself, let my skirts drag me down to the seabed where he lies, his verdigris skull with marrow pikes between its plates my first and ultimate glimpse of Heaven, but I lay down three years ago to wait for him to come to me. He would walk out of the surf, wringing water from his shorts. He would be cold in my arms, so cold his skin stuck to my nails. He would say he was sorry he'd taken so long. All that water, all those knots, all that weight upon his back, all nothing when he heard me screaming for him.The moon is high and dazzling, making a night like a day with a clash of opaque shadows painted in. The gabbro cliffs are light-eating black against a blue sky, but sandy brown against this grey one. The half-built houses and streets of Magmate crowd the valley behind the cliff. The sounds of dogs barking, mothers calling children, and clip-clopping hammers and hooves swirl up in its bowl and streak free in distorted howls. There’s a group of men, miners, on the prong of cliff to my right, dancing between the slate sky and the red thumbprint of their fire. I hope the dark rocks camouflage me from them.Lying on my front, I spread my arms and scoop up two handfuls of wet sand. Half gabbro, the sand is solid grey, like the clay we mine in the quarry. I spread it onto my bodice beneath my breasts, let it drip off, and then collapse again, face-first. I miss the passion with which I used to detest myself. It’s half-hearted nudging now. Poking a dead fish with a stick and cringing when it lifts its tail.I crawl down the beach on my belly until the first wave hits me in the face. It’s warm, like being struck playfully with a dishcloth. A stronger one bursts down the collar of my dress. I will drown in this one, I think. The next few come weaker but recede stronger, sucking my hair up off my neck. I will fall asleep before the next one comes and drown in that one. The last wave slings my hair in a wide, shallow arc, sparing my face completely, and then jerks away, as if ripped by a current.I will vomit into this cavity of sand and suffocate on it.Wondering why the waves have stopped touching me, I struggle up onto my elbows and part my wet hair from my face. The waves are lapping at the bottom of the sand bank, twenty paces away. All along the cove, a band of beach lies newly exposed, smooth silver studded with stranded mussels and razors.I give a slow, bovine blink, letting my chin thud against my chest, and when my eyes refocus, the silver band has tripled in size. The sand which foams as it absorbs the last wave is never submerged again. Perhaps I am drunk, and the hours I have been watching the tide retreat only feel like minutes. Perhaps I am drunk, and have forgotten that the tide always retreats in minutes. There won’t be a flood. There wasn’t an earthquake I was too drunk to hear. The sea is not flowing backwards, dragged into a cyclone over the grave beyond the cove. There is no glow in the water at the epicentre.I stagger to my feet, shield my eyes with my arms. Between the two prongs of cliff which form the cove, something is glowing blue: The deep, gauzy blue which bruises the tips of yellow flames. It looks like a reflection, but it lies beneath a dun stretch of slate and bronze sky, not beneath the moon.And it pulls. As I gaze at it, drooling from my open mouth, it needles a hole through my navel and ties a taut string to my bladder.I run down the sand bank until I’m ankle-deep in the ocean and start throwing up. Thin, dark vomit and lots of it. The retches weld my eyes shut and lash my face to the water. When I look back up with my fist ground against my stomach and see the glow still there, blue-purple bobbing in rings like mug stains on a tablecloth, I howl. The howl hurts, dragged up by wire hook through my vomit-sored throat.I turn and sprint along the beach. The jetty lies along the cove’s leftmost wall. Ersilio, who doesn’t tether his fishing nets lest they capsize him nor himself when he works on roofs, moors his coracle by wedging its prow underneath the jetty. Whereas the other boats beached by the fleeing tide are craning their heads up in their moorings, the coracle sits loose in the sand. I drag it into the sea and plunge after it without lifting my skirts.As I settle in the coracle, I’m sure that the current is aiding me. The cyclone will pull the boat out without a single stroke rowed—but not quickly enough. I seize the oars. I used to be strong, but I have leached fat and muscle like sweat into this beach, and three strokes make my arms ache like I’ve been rowing all night.The cliffs move past me at a creeping pace. When I stop rowing to look over my shoulder and search for the glow, my stomach burning with the effort of holding me upright, I can’t find it, and the waves seem small and aimless again, jouncing the coracle from all sides. Silence redoubles and compounds my drunkenness, makes thoughts pull down my neck and back like they have weight.I lie down in the boat. Lower myself carefully on both arms and slam my head down with a bang. If I fall asleep, I might roll and capsize it, and the cold might not be enough to shock me awake.For the first time in three years, I pray that I live. I pray that I live long enough to apologise to Ersilio.Opening my eyes supine, I expect to find that morning has come. Instead, I see the moon still high, soaking a hole through a fast-moving black cloud. The two prongs of the headland, bent together in the sky, creep downward in my aspect and out of sight.Something thin and white moves downward at speed. Much closer to the boat.I sit up, lurching the boat enough to pull my stomach back into my mouth.The ocean all around me is full of pale heaps of something. They stretch a valley’s length in every direction, depressed into wells of seawater in places and stacked into nodulous pillars in others. The white pillar I saw first is twice as tall as me, and wears a purplish balloon as a hat. The valley of flesh is moving with the directionless tide, making glottal mud-bubble sounds as air and water push through its fissures. Its rotting smell is piscine and bovine, treacly blood and stomach gases drenched in salt.There’s a familiar texture to the flesh. The edges of the lumps are soft and thin, and spread and clump on the surface of the water like white hair. Whale blubber. Last year, the corpse of a whale washed up on the jetty after a thunderstorm, and festered there for two weeks. When the fishers rolled it over, the clear skin of the upper flank peeled off the inflated innards in long white fronds like these. This heap of whale flesh is too enormous to be one whale, but too uniform to be a whole whale. No red or grey intestines, no muzzle, no bone.I gaze for a long time, passionless, panting. There’s another yank on my bladder through my navel. Dread bends me over the side of the coracle, stands me up, bends me over further. I stay balanced long enough for my eyes to follow the white masses down into the navy murk of the bottom of the sea, then swerve to follow the fish which swim between them. I stay balanced long enough to notice the silence and stillness of the corpse, to anticipate in vain a great shivering to life, an opening of eyes or mouths, a voice. A voice which asks me why it’s so cold and dark down here, where I buried it.I stay balanced long enough to choose to dive.When I leap from the prow, the coracle rears up onto its edge and then flips upside-down. As the bubbles clear to reveal the bulk of pale behemoth suspended in the water, the shock of noise and cold doesn’t clear with them. My first impression is of a stuffed and swollen head, of lockjaw, of all the world’s oceans above me crushing at once. A white star exploding. Tentacles straddling an altar. Legs and wings braided out of tornadoes. My body washing up on the beach at daybreak, tangled in an old fishing net.The sprawl has no centre. Knots of tentacle, intestine and gibbous-moon saccule are strung between the surface and the distant seabed like a net to strain the ocean clear. Rabbitfish swarm around the myriad limbs like flies around a horse’s ears, but the limbs make not a twitch to frighten them away. Just under my feet, two of the little brown fish are worrying their long snouts inside the brain-pleats of a membrane. They are eating it. When I look toward the seabed and see the film and viscera bubbling against it as they bubbled against my boat, I am struck by a thought that there’s no such thing as up and down. The bedrock is another surface of another sea, and when I crashed down into the water, I was flying upward into a pressurised, haunted sky. So solid are the walls of flesh around me that the only way I can see into the distance, can fix my drunk, exhausted eyes on unbroken darkness, is by looking up.Two things happen. Simultaneously or not. Maybe one causes the other.Blue light rushes into the viscera and I scream a name. A name I think is the monster’s. The water seizes the scream and crams it back down my throat.The blue is scarcely a glow. It’s as dark as the water around it, but a hundred times saturated. It draws arteries through the corpseflesh and backlights shadows inside it, the shadows of writhing, dancing things as tall as I am.As I stare, shocked by the light as though by the swipe of a rag down a dirty window, appendages of noise pour into my head, spread out, stretch my skull away from my brain.It’s a voice.A voice like whalesong whose high notes wheel in the sky above me and whose low notes vibrate in the base of my neck.Don’t be scared.A rabbitfish darts out of my hair. As it pauses by my arm, I see that it, too, is glowing from the inside. The blue light pulses sore in the hinge of its jaw. It is swimming upside-down, its flat white belly like the blaze on a horse’s head.I open my mouth. Salt water pours in. I let out a bubble of a cough.Solavita.“That’s not my name!”Like the one before it, the shout is slurred red by the wine and green by the water. It doesn’t carry past my throat.Then what is your name?“Not that!”The enormous voice laughs. In staccato throbs, heat coagulates me, shields me from the deep sea’s cold.You’re not scared.“I’ve seen you before.”But I haven’t seen you.“No? So you’re God, then? You think you’re God?”I do.I curl up and cackle, like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. “Oh—for fuck’s—sake!”This isn’t the body I buried. This isn’t the voice of the body I buried. This isn’t him. I lay down swearing that nothing could peel me off the beach but him, and something else has.I have called you because Magmate was once my most loving and most beloved village, and now it lies corrupted. You are my chosen, my prophet. You will restore your people to their faith.“You—you—what?” The water still slurs me. “Do you know why my people renounced their faith? What was done to them?”Of course.“What, then?”An earthquake. Beyond the cliff, you are still rebuilding, eight years later.“Who MADE the earthquake? Or weren’t you God then?”You know it was me.“Then you were there when we denounced you too.”You tore down your church. A church built from good white stone in a lowly village is a more precious tribute than a cathedral of gold.“How about eight houses of good white stone in a half-built village?”It is a testament to my mercy that I will not ask you to tear them down to rebuild the church. But you will rebuild the church.Surprise dawns in a shockwave of laughter.“Who TOLD them to tear down the church?” I shout. “Who led them in denouncement?”I know it was you.I am unbearably warm. The blue light could be boiling the sea. The heady thrumming of the voice and the tightness of my lungs wash over me in a cross current.“And I’ll rebuild it, will I?”If the mob are to repent, the first to repent must be their leader.“And why would I repent?”There’s a ripple in the water around me. It takes me a moment to notice that the rabbitfish have retreated. It seems like a mannerism of the monster’s. A blink.“Because I’ve been… ordered, yes?”God does not barter.“Nor does He pick His enemies for prophethood.”God does not offer rewards.“Then why does He suppose His enemy will do it?”If you refuse, I will choose another, and forever damn you.“Who will you choose? Someone else in Magmate you stole light and life from eight years ago? Perhaps someone from whom you stole less? Nought but the house from above him?”What is dead to you can never be brought back.“There are TWO things dead to me!” I shriek, throwing my arms up in a tremor of desperation. “I’m not asking for Nene back! I know you ATE him! I know the mouth of God destroys what it eats!”I expect God to ask me what else I want. God knows what else I want.
God says nothing.“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m not their leader anymore. They’re terrified of me now. Terrified of becoming me. I’m a… ruined thing.”God does pick ruined things for prophethood.“Only if prophethood will put them back together.”Purpose can put anyone back together.“I don’t want a purpose! I crawled to this beach to gather the strength to drown myself!”And did you succeed?With the rabbitfish gone, only the shadows inside the monster are moving.When the blue light fades to nothing, they vanish as well.Something has happened to the moon. It is impossibly dark. The monster’s shape is a thin phantom in devouring black water.I open my mouth. No! I try to say. Come back! Bargain with me! But all that comes out is a whine of terror and a bubble, the last mite of air inside me.My lungs begin to burn. I’ve never felt pain like this, the pain not of drowning but of emerging from numbness already half-drowned. When I kick, fresh cold slides up around my calves and slices down. Bewilderment and despair overwhelm me as instead of moving upwards, I turn upside-down and begin to descend.I surface.The rabbitfish were never upside-down. I dove in headfirst, and was upside-down all along.As gasps rock me back and forth like a coughing fit, I still feel the monster laughing.