yrae | The Storyteller: Scourge of the Leviathan (Reply)

Fourth Birthday

‘This is hot chocolate.’ Tu held up the silver tin and prised the lid off of it with a spoon.

Sen peered inside to see the dark, dusty brown powder. It didn’t look like much.

‘Or it will be,’ Tu shrugged, ‘sort of. You should really make it with milk, not water, but I couldn’t bring milk with me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it goes off very, very quickly. It turns sour and yucky.’

Sen scrunched up her nose.

‘So we’ll make it with water,’ Tu decided, and set the pot of water over the fire. She had brought wood with the chocolate, a big bundle of eucalyptus that she promised would be better for building a fire than building anything that would last.

‘I get a mug of it every time I’m in southern Kazin,’ Tu went on, sitting back to watch the water boil. ‘It’s beautifully rich and warming on a cold day. Sweet and earthy.’

‘It seems like you’re up there a lot,’ Sula noted.

Tu nodded, then shrugged. ‘They have the best products. Raykin has good steel, but it takes too long to get up-river and there’s not enough on the coast. Same for Llayad, great for luxury fabrics and their weird pickled and preserved foods, but they’re just not profitable to visit more than once every four or five years. Kazin is an easy profit.’

‘Easy?’ Sula pressed. ‘Where’s the adventure in easy?’

The captain laughed aloud and shook her head. ‘You’ve got me there! Fine, not an easy profit, but I’d rather a fast challenge than a boring river cruise.’

‘Is it ready?’ Sen interrupted. The water had started to fizz and bubble around the bottom and Sen was getting impatient.

Tu peered into the pot. ‘Close enough,’ she said, then picked up the tin to start spooning the brown powder into the water. ‘Don’t want to burn your tongue, do we?’

‘No,’ Sen agreed, shaking her head. She watched the water turn brown as Tu stirred the chocolate in, poking at where it bubbled and didn’t mix in on its own.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, poking at the drawing on Tu’s bicep. It had always been there, but nobody else in the village had a drawing on their skin. Tu had two. One was a half-circle of red underscored by black and red squiggly lines. It looked like a sunset. The other, the one Sen poked at, was an angular drawing in red that didn’t look like anything Sen recognised.

‘Ah,’ Tu said with a grin. ‘That’s a tattoo for the Ruby.’

‘Another indulgence from Kazin?’ Sula teased.

‘Yes,’ Tu said, like a teenager being told off by her parent. ‘I feel I’ve earned a few.’

‘How does it stay on?’ Sen asked. She had drawn on her skin with sticks of charcoal, but it always rubbed off. Even cuts on her skin healed so she couldn’t see them anymore, but Tu’s drawing never wore away.

‘The use a sharp needle.’ Tu lifted the pot and began carefully pouring the steaming brown liquid into five mugs she had brought, especially for the purpose. A full hot chocolate kit, she had called it. The mugs were all nestled in the sand so they wouldn’t fall over. ‘They dip the needle in ink then prick your skin with it, so the ink goes in under your skin.’

Sen stared with wide eyes at the tattoo. It was at least the size of Sen’s hand. ‘Ow!’ she said in sympathy, rubbing at her own arm. ‘I pricked my—pricked my finger with a needle. I pricked my finger once, with a needle. I was helping Sula, helping her make me new, new clothes. But I pricked my finger when I was getting the—getting the needles. I pricked it hard. It hurt a lot! Didn’t that hurt?’

‘Mhmm,’ Tu confirmed. ‘It certainly did, and it bled a lot, too. Then it hurt for weeks afterwards.’

‘So then. But… why did you—why get one?’

‘Because I can,’ Tu said with a grin, then put the pot down. ‘Now, be careful and wait a minute to pick it up, it’s very hot. I’d seen so many Kazinians with tattoos, some of them covered head to toe. They always tell a story, and you know how I love stories. I decided when I captained my first ship I’d get a tattoo to commemorate it. That was our first voyage. I got a tattoo for Horizons, and then later on one for Ruby, the ship I had been a crewmate on before Horizons.’

Sen was tracing the lines on the tattoos with one finger. ‘What about Tranquilo and Shōbōsho?’ she asked.

Tu shrugged, looking down at Sen’s little finger. ‘I didn’t love Tranquilo like I love Horizons. It was my home ship, but I didn’t have a great relationship with my family. Shōbōsho… I don’t need anymore pain associated with Shōbōsho.’

Sen gasped and snapped her hand away. ‘Leviathan!’ she remembered. Sula had told her about leviathans, how Tu had once mentioned one had wrecked her ship.

‘That’s the one,’ Tu said with a tight smile. She picked up the closest mug and blew on it, then handed it to Sen.

‘Careful,’ Sula told her. ‘Hold it with both hands and blow on it. It’s still very hot.’

Sen nodded and did as she was told, blowing on the steaming brown liquid to cool it down. Even the mug itself was still very warm, but not enough to burn her fingers. She wanted to taste it, but didn’t trust it on her tongue yet. She’d burned it once before and her mouth had hurt for days.

Tu passed the other mugs around to her hosts, giving Kaiji the same warning.

‘Tell the leviathan story!’ She could see Sula raising her eyebrows as a prompt. ‘Please?’ Sula nodded.

Tu grinned, a little reluctantly. ‘Well, since you asked so nicely.‘ She blew on her hot chocolate, took a sip and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Better with milk, but it’ll do the job.’ She rested back on one elbow to make herself comfortable. She frowned and looked at her young audience. ‘How to make this child friendly,’ she murmured through a sigh. ‘Everyone will tell you about the leviathan’s violence, that’s easy, but what I remember most strongly was the smell of it.’

‘The smell?’ Sen repeated.

Tu nodded, scrunching her nose up in memory. ‘It was horrible. But I’ll start at the beginning. I wasn’t in the crow’s nest for this one, thankfully, or I would have been even more horrified. All I knew was my crewmate yelling down from the mast in terror. There was a shadow under the water, he said, bigger than anything any of us had ever seen, so big he couldn’t tell how big it was. We all ran to the railing, and the sea looked darker than normal, only because we couldn’t see the edge of this shadow. I could see movement, though—a little line of white lights twisting like a serpent through the water. Then the sea started boiling, just like that pot of water was.’

Sen stared at her, open-mouthed, her mug of hot chocolate all but forgotten.

‘Waves and waves of bubbles washed against the hull, and oh, the smell! Like rotten eggs but a thousand times worse. I can’t even eat a fresh egg now, because it just reminds me of the leviathan. The lights and the shadow came to an end, and I saw the shape of its tail fin, fully the size of Shōbōsho and laid flat like a whale. And I could see it getting closer, and closer, then it washed up to the surface of the sea. The wave it made, from that one lazy action, raised a wave that rocked the ship like a wave in a storm.’

Sen drew her knees up to her chin and hugged them with her free arm, then took a careful sip from her mug. She was already too scared to properly taste it, but she did register the sweetness.

‘Is it yummy?’ Tu asked.

‘What?’ Sen blinked, startled by the change from Tu’s story-voice. ‘Oh. Yes.’ She drank a little more just to prove she liked it and hoping that would be enough to make Tu continue. ‘Were you scared?’ she whispered.

The sea captain gave a wide smile, and Sen felt a little better. If Tu wasn’t scared, then it couldn’t be so bad. ‘I was brave,’ she said. ‘You can only be brave when you’re scared. After that first tail flick, we all turned to the captain, who yelled at us all to man the harpoons—Shōbōsho was a hunter, so we had four on each side—but we untied the ropes from them. We had no interest in trying to catch the leviathan. We just wanted to show it we were a threat so maybe it would go and look for easier prey.

‘My job was to aim the harpoon, then my two crewmates would fire it. For the longest time we stood tense on the deck, watching the water. My shoulders hurt for the waiting. Then the shout came from the top of the crow’s nest again: it was coming back.’

Sen shivered and moved closer to Kaiji. Her friend hugged an arm around her, and Sen could feel that she was shivering, too.

‘Is this too scary for you?’ Tu asked, brow creased in concern.

Sen and Kaiji both vigorously shook their heads.

‘I’m brave, too!’ Sen declared. ‘I’m a big girl.’

‘Me, too!’ Kaiji agreed, but she didn’t release her hug.

Tu smiled proudly at them. ‘Good job, then.’ She dropped her face and voice back into the serious storyteller. ‘When the leviathan came back, it didn’t stay under the water. The sea bulged before its head came up, and up, and up, and still it went up. It towered over Shōbōsho, hideous and terrifying. It’s head alone was as big as the ship, long and gnarled, covered in barnacles and with great long horns like craggy rocks. It had whiskers like the tentacles of a giant squid, its eyes glowed white like the lights along its back and a great, cresting fan behind its head to make it look even bigger, as if it needed to!’

Sen was too scared to move. She already knew how this ended—with the Shōbōsho in splinters but Tu, somehow, still alive—and it made the listening even harder.

‘What did you do?’ Kaiji whispered.

‘Just what the captain told me. We waited for it to open its mouth, then we’d all fire at once at the back of its throat. I knew it wouldn’t work, even if all eight harpoons hit. It was so big it would be like—like mosquitoes stinging a shark. But what else could we do?

‘The leviathan opened its mouth, a huge gaping chasm of teeth and the stench, oh, the stench of rotten eggs and other dead things, enough to turn the stomach. The captain yelled for us to fire, and we all shot at once just as the leviathan lunged. I think maybe three harpoons hit it, none in the mouth. Whatever, it didn’t care. It dove straight for the ship. I ran straight for the opposite railing and dove over, into the stinking, boiling water. Shōbōsho exploded behind me.’ She lifted her left pant leg, revealing an ugly scar all from her knee right up her thigh. ‘That’s how I got this one, among others.’

‘But how did you escape the leviathan?’ Sula asked, as enthralled in the story as Sen.

‘I wonder that to this day,’ Tu replied with a disbelieving shake of her head. ‘I clung to a piece of wood, trying to keep as much of me out of the water as I could, but the leviathan was churning the sea like a storm. I kept getting dunked and knocked around while it was destroying my ship. I got smacked on the head—by a piece of wood or the leviathan itself, I don’t know—but it was hard enough to knock me out. I woke up on the deck of the Ruby.’ She rubbed at the tattoos on her arm. ‘Only four of us survived, and they all followed me to the Horizons. Kes is now my first mate.’

Sen broke off from Kaiji’s hug, dropped her hot chocolate and dove on Tu in a fierce hug. She felt Kaiji thump into her to do the same.

‘I’m happy the Ruby found you,’ Sen cried.

‘Me, too,’ Tu said softly, patting Sen’s head. ‘Me, too.’

STUFF

o These chapters seem to be getting longer. Hmm. Honestly that's why she got knocked out; thing's getting too long and I needed to end the chapter. I figure leviathans attack ships because they aren't too smart and they see the big ship and think WOO BIG MEAL then realise they're actually not edible, nose around for the little snacks of people it can be bothered finding, then a nice big great white shark or even a blue whale comes along and it gives up on the people.