Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(18) Taiki: Call in the Night

I've lived in the ocean my entire life, and outside the call in the deep offshore from Osogo, I've never heard this sound before. This one is a different creature. A smaller version of the same creature, at least; this call vibrates through my body, but the Osogo call shook the ocean itself. That one was almost too deep to hear. I can hear this one. And then it's more than one, as a second call layers over the first, both of them singing up through the darkness of the stone forest. They must have come from the forest. There's nothing else in the deeper water here.

I don't actually know if there's anything else in the forest's deeper water.

But I do know what lives down there.

Luli startles violently as I touch her arm. I sign for her to be quiet, then beckon her after me down the slope. If this is what I think it is, we need to get out of sight, and fast. Luli follows me without a word. I know this slope; I've been here dozens of times before. Before long, a patch of jumbled stones looms from the near-darkness ahead, the gaps between them just large enough for us to squeeze through. We find a crevice in their midst and huddle into it together, shoulders brushing, just as the sea-goddess tails appear.

In twenty-one years, I've never seen more than two sea-goddess tails in one place. Let alone an entire shoal.

The water resonates with calls from every direction now, looping and braiding over one another until I can't actually tell how many there are. The first three silhouettes appear together. Two more are right behind them, and still more sing in the open water, a ways out from us yet. The first few cruise over the slopes of the island of the yellow fish. Their bodies, as thick as my torso is tall, loop back and forth with the grace of ribbon seaweed. None seem to mind that the others are there, though they don't get close to one another. More keep joining. There's at least seven on the slopes now, and that's less than half, if the songs are to judge.

I know this behavior from my time on Lix'i. It happened every evening on the reefs—the Lix'i Kels called it the shark patrol, but large fish and eels did it, too. These sea-goddess tails are hunting. I think they hunt by sight. I don't actually know; my people have as many rumors about them as actual tales, and they're the kind of rumors you can tell might have been made up to scare children. We don't see sea-goddess tails enough to actually tell.

The rocks beneath me tremble from these hunters' songs. They can't rely on stealth; they're announcing their presence to every living thing in the area. For a flash of a moment, I fear the songs stun prey or cast some other spell, but then I'd taste it in the water, or at least feel a precursor to the stunning. I sense neither. Luli is easing herself into a tighter corner of the rock crevice. That's smart, so I do, too. We're just in time.

A massive shadow cruises past. It takes all my reflexes not to flinch; if these things sense motion or vibrations in the water, we need to remain still as the stone. The sea-goddess tail doubles back, winding over this stretch of hillside. I hold my breath as a massive, scaled body glides overhead. It keeps going and going. Then it's gone, and I breathe out just as water puffs my tail. I nearly shoot up out of the crevice on reflex. The sea-goddess tail has looped around our hideout and is investigating the lower gaps in it. It can't fit. It's too big.

It doesn't need to fit. The next moment, a blast of water slams my fins from below. Two smaller fish whip past me, blown or fleeing out into the open water. Another sea-goddess tail whips by overhead. The fish vanish. A second water-blast tears through our hideout, scouring my body with grit and sand. It's so powerful, it lifts me a hand's length into the water. I grip the stones. Another fish flails by. This one escapes over the rocks. A gust of water indicates the sea-goddess tail has left to chase it.

I think I know now why the island of the yellow fish doesn't have yellow fish anymore.

There isn't enough food on this island to feed so many giant creatures. I don't know if there's enough food in the whole stone forest to do so; normally, the only thing that brings sea-goddess tails together is a gathering of fish or squid, and there's no gathering here. Are these predators congregating in the stone forest? Are they fleeing the open water? Sea-goddess tails fear nothing but Andalua... but just like that, another image plasters itself across my mind.