On the hundredth day, they were down to hardtack.
On the hundred-and-tenth day, they drew half water.
On the hundred-and- twelfth day, the lookout swore he saw it, fell from the crow’s nest, and broke his neck. Fevered by lack of water, they decided.
On the hundred-and-fifteenth day, the new lookout called again.
“WHITE WHALE. STARBOARD. WHITE WHALE. STARBOARD. SHE’S BLOWING.”
And so she was. A proper giant flume of water and dead air, gasped up from lungs bigger than humans, baked and wrung out and flattened by hundreds of feet and hours underwater. And all of it spiralling out of the humped head and back of a beast that shone a sickly, murky white.
The captain walked on deck. Slowly, with care. Each beat of his peg-leg a steady drum, his eyes lighting up harder and fierier with every step.
“After it,” he said. And that was all the orders given, and that was all the orders needed. The sails flew, the men hauled, the boats launched, the harpoons flew, and the spray filled the air and the lungs and the hearts of bodies alive and dead as flukes hammered wood and metal bit blubber and in the end for all its size and all its fear and all its fury the metal won out and the great white-domed creature shuddered and dove for the final time, barrels and all, sinking like a stone and dropping out of sight and reach forever.
“It is done,” said the captain. Nobody countermanded him, nobody spoke of wastage and loss, nobody griped for a good kill lost to the depths. They rowed back to the ship in silence, they ate their evening meal in peace, and for the first time in forty years the captain went to his berth quietly, and spent the night in a sleep so thorough that he might have been a corpse or a newborn.
The past was, finally, past.
At least, until the dawn of the hundred-and-sixteenth-day, when the lookout called, checked himself, rechecked himself, then called.
“WHITE WHALE. STARBOARD. WHITE WHALE TO THE STARBOARD BOW.”
Which was a terrible way for the captain to wake, frankly.
***
It put up less of a fight this time, which may have been to be expected – and a good thing too, since they had fewer boats and fewer irons (and fewer men). But the hate was back in the heart and eyes and tongue of their captain, so they bent themselves to their tasks with a will – a fearful, trembling will, but a will nonetheless – and where there is a will there is a way, and so it was, and was, and was done.
This time they riddled the thing with barrels and took its heart at the surface, lances turning its death-plume bright red and speckling them all with rich, living blood. The captain’s boat was closest, and as he looked into the beast’s dying eyes the men all swore independently and secretly that he fare looked as though he’d been drinking from it. His beard was a hearty red that had never grown upon his face, even before age had grizzled him as pale as the whale’s hide.
They took it apart over days and nights, every piece of blubber, every jot of flesh, every dram of oil. The bones they could take they took aboard, and they burned them as if they were kindling, then coals – spreading them into the air as rankest soot. The captain stood closest to the flames and the wrinkles on his face smoothed; from the ashes or something deeper inside nobody could say.
At length there was no whale. At length there was no fire. And at length, once again, the ship did what it never was meant to do, and lay idle with the sweet tenderness of accomplishment and the anticipation of the future.
***
On the hundred-and-twenty-sixth day, the lookout shrieked and threw himself from the rigging into the waves, and sank without further incident. If his replacement hadn’t been clambering up the rigging at the moment he might never have been missed; as it was it was a mystery for only the handful of seconds it took for the man to scan the horizon.
“Whale,” he said, to himself, to double-check. “White whale. Port this time. But the white whale.”
Then he said it again. And again, but louder. And again, but rising into an ungodly shriek, and again, and again, until eight men were sent aloft to drag him down, two to each limb. He fought them not, but his fingers and toes were rigid with a tension from hell and needed to be pried loose each at once and all together.
The captain did not watch this. The captain gave no orders. But he watched the horizon with a face that didn’t belong to a human being or any living thing at all, and things proceeded as he wished.
The chase. The boats. The lance. The death. He held it himself this time, twisted it deep with muscles that shouldn’t have held the strength they did, mouth turning and working itself into strange shapes as the life eeled out of the beast’s core in shudders and convulsions. It died painfully and quickly, and he would not stop, did not stop, was still worrying and tearing at the body as the men harvested it and boiled it and butchered it. When they cut loose the last of the carcass to the sharks he seemed fane to dive after it, and his hands on the lancer were covered in more blood than just the whale’s.
***
On the hundred-and-thirty-eighth day, the lookout came down from the crow’s nest and spoke calmly to the first mate, who consulted with the second mate, who spoke to the third and fourth mates, and who knows what decisions would have been made if the captain hadn’t stirred himself to the deck and demanded answers from the lookout in person.
It was on the starboard, to stern.
***
On the hundred-and-fiftieth day (port, bow), the blades came out well before the boats were launched, and the guns, and the words.
The captain had no gun. He had no words. But he had something much worse inside of him, and that was enough to make it an indecisive affair where the crew took their sides by fear and fought for terror, and that was probably what set the ship ablaze. Nothing catches flame quite as nicely or quickly as fear.
One hundred miles away, just over a few horizons, there was a small island with a pleasantly swirling offshore current, good for plankton and small fish. And there the birds dove and swirled and spiralled and shat in brilliant white, upon sea and wave and the sun-dappled and dozing backs of any passing whales, who had learned centuries ago that this was a good place to daydream.
There would be fewer of them for a little while, but the past is a small and squalid place, and there are always plenty of futures to hope for.