Gods of Earth by DeLancey Craig

Author:DeLancey, Craig [DeLancey, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2013-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Wadjet loved the water. Warm and slick, it touched her everywhere: the salty blood of the Earth, wrapping her in its life. She parted her lips and teeth and tasted the wet quick of it: salt and iron, magnesium and air, and the indefinable subtlety of tiny animals and plants, living and dying against her tongue. She snapped her teeth, wishing she could swallow it all as it swallowed all of her.

Then her body shook, from the deep center of her heart out to her fingers and toes: the call of the whale that slowly bent through the dark water beneath her.

“Little thing from above,” it sang out. Identification constituted, for the whale kind, a greeting. “Hard. Silent. Slow. Tailless.”

Wadjet surfaced, gasped air, and dove into the blue again. She kicked till her hands touched the rough skin of the whale, sharply coarse with small barnacles. She pressed herself against it, getting her throat close to its ear.

“I sing.”

“You sing,” the whale responded.

“Why do you follow?”

“Promise,” the whale began. But she could wait no longer. She had to listen as best she could while surfacing for air.

“All the seas made clean again,” it continued. “Whales given ocean dominion.”

Her head broke the surface, and she gasped twice. Chance stood on the boat, looking at her. The thought flashed into Wadjet’s mind: innocent, but only a little wild, this boy. He would never immerse himself into the dark ocean and give himself over to uncertainty. Part of her mischievously longed to seize him, and pull him into the depths. And to do other things with this dark-eyed boy. Her fangs against his flesh. Against his.…

She dived back to the waiting whale. Still looking toward the boat, she saw in the bow the Guardian; the coyote; feeble, trembling Thetis; and the sword bearer. She liked the sword bearer. She liked Sarah more because Sarah disliked all of them. Sarah was another she’d like to seize, to taste again.…

Wadjet flashed her teeth at them as she passed.

The whale moaned, a vague prompting to Wadjet.

“The…” she hesitated, as she settled again by its ear, not knowing the whale phrase for a god. “The strong surface dweller. The powerful one. He promises?”

“The worldchanger,” the whale answered. “His servants promised sharing if we follow you who escaped the encircled school of men.”

The whale, taking pity on her, surfaced with Wadjet lying atop. She took a few slow breathes, and then they slowly sank under the water so that the humpback could sing.

“His servants may ask us to stop you,” the whale said. “His servants may ask us to force you to thin water.”

Wadjet was growing breathless. She did not love being under the water long, when it was so much work to hum the words.

“We ask clear way on the whale road. We go to the skyriver.” She did not know if that was the right word for Yggdrasil, though she remembered that phrase from somewhere.

“We swim with you,” the whale answered, uncommitted. “We wait to hear from distant pods.

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