In Great Waters Read Free Page B

man stared as the boy took food from his hand, but Whistle never met his gaze. He was too wary of the man’s white-rimmed eyes.
    Along with food, the man brought other things. One was a pair of sticks, brown and straight. Whistle chewed them when left alone, rattled them along the floor, trying to break them. The clash of themagainst the stone was the loudest thing he had heard since leaving the sea, but the noise reached his hearing thinly, with none of the vivid, intimate echo of sound carried through water. The red man held the sticks in his own hands, tapping them against the floor and leaning his weight against them, walking to and fro, four-limbed with the sticks as supports, but Whistle did not watch.
    The other thing quickly introduced to his room was a flat square framed in some oddly bright gold wood, pink and blue and red in the middle. All he saw of it at first was that it was, like the door and the cupboards and the windows with their blurred green light, four-sided. The man presented it to Whistle and turned his head towards it, trying to get his interest, but, though the bright colours and curved lines within the frame were not unpleasant, Whistle, intimidated by the square shape, struggled and twisted his face from side to side, trying to escape from it. The man persisted for some time before giving up and lifting the object to hang on the wall. Safely away, Whistle squinted at it, but now it was too far away for him to distinguish details. Seeing him squint, the man pointed, and said a word so strange Whistle could hardly process it as speech. He could make out syllables, just about, but they meant nothing to him: Angelica.

T WO
    I T WAS ONLY when other individuals started to appear in his doorway that Whistle understood the trouble he was in. One red man and a prison of lines was dismaying enough, but with unfresh fish to keep him from starving, it was a little better than oblivion. After a few days and nights, however, another creature appeared in the doorway. Its voice was higher pitched than the red man’s, a bit closer to the shrills of home, but its body was incomprehensible: bowed out over the lower half with huge, rustling fabrics, swollen at the chest like a tribeswoman but black to the wrists and neck, covered in cloth. Whistle, still naked and shivering against the stone, tentatively considered that the figure might be female, but this was an uncertain comfort, even if her hands held no rocks and her teeth were sheathed by pink lips. As the figure approached him and bent down, he froze. Tribeswomen other than his mother had little liking for him if he came too close; only in the case of some dire outside threat had women shown much concern for his life. While he was dimly aware that pining for his mother was something he could ill afford, the idea of her lingered in a current of hurt and confusion that he could not swim against.
    Such feelings were only vaguely present at the appearance of this woman. So strange was her aspect that it was unclear to Whistle whether she could be considered a person at all. As she stepped nearer, the swinging bulb overlaying her lower half resolved itself as the sameflexible stuff that was providing him with a little padding against the rock floor, and that was a more definite solace than any action on her part. Whistle reached up his sharp-nailed fingers to tear off some strips, hoping to add to his bedding.
    A jump, a shriek, and the creature was back against the wall. The movement had revealed, under the layers of cloth, limbs like the red man’s. Whistle froze again, retreating his attention back into himself and rocking to and fro. The swathed woman was like the red man, two of a kind, and that was a disaster. There were more of them.
    Warfare was something Whistle had understood almost from birth. Marauding dolphins swam in packs through the sea, strong-tailed and sharp-toothed as the tribe; even when rights of way and shoals of prey were not in dispute