Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

It’s surprising how much you can learn about archery on board a ship. Weeks of practice, never seeing an arrow, just perfecting the technique of the draw, the balance, the patience, the smooth drawing-back of the string and visualising the line from my hand to the target. I’m growing muscles on my arms that I’m sure weren’t there before.

I am learning this. Me. Taniel had never learned archery. She had meant to be a shaman. See under Things Not Going To Happen While I’m Around.

It feels good, to learn a skill for myself in this world. It’s something for me to own and not feel that I’ve stolen.

Satthei Fareis is hunting. We’ve split off from the rest of the marketeer flotilla for a few days in search of a catch. Freed from the constraint of the slowest craft in the flotilla we set all the sails and run for the feeding grounds.

The ship is leaning so hard before the wind that water is sleeting over the gunwale on the starboard hull. I’m utterly drenched in the starboard bow rigging with Sam and Deidas and our bows. The last three dolphins, our guides, are riding the wave, their dark speckled backs darting in and out of the water right underneath us. Sam has been learning archery alongside me these last eight months. In fact, she had a bit of a head start, while my hands were still healing. Deidas at first let it be known he was humouring her, indulging her, in including her in this training; but she’s kept pace, determined not to let the human side down, I think. She’s at least as good at this as I am, and by now even Deidas accepts this. He actually said it, at dinner only the previous evening. “I will not be embarrassed to call you my student.” Exceptional praise, from Deidas.

Sam looks back at me from her position just forward. Her hair is shorter now, and plastered in – ironically – elfin ringlets against her head by the spray. She grins manically. The sensation of speed is incredible.

“Keep your gaze on the quarry!” Deidas shouts at her, and she obeys.

The quarry is in sight now; a churning region of water under a huge flock of seabirds. They’re taking shifts diving into the water, closing their wings tight into their body just as they enter, and emerging a few seconds later with a fish in their beaks. We’re getting closer very quickly now at, surely now, the fastest speed a ship like this can travel.

“They’re being chased right out of the water!” Sam yells, exhilarated. I can barely hear her. Indeed, fish are literally leaping from the water to get away from what’s happening below the surface. At least once I see one of the birds just swoop down at the right time to pluck one out of the air.

The ones doing the chasing are the pod of dolphins that have herded and corralled this school of fish into a tightly-packed shimmering ball at the surface. We’re not stealing their catch; we’re sharing it. The guides riding our bow-wave have led us here for the purpose. We’ll be delivering our side of the arrangement later.

We’re curling in, to get a perfect tailwind into the maelstrom.

A Neri familyship like Satthei Fareis is not an inanimate craft crewed by individuals. It is a superorganism. At no time is this more apparent than when it is hunting. It moves on the water like nothing made by humans ever could, a top ocean predator in its own right. Any wooden craft made by humans would shatter under the stresses of the turns we’re making, and metal is too heavy. The amount of sail we’ve set in this wind would be suicidally reckless.

But Neri ships are grown, not made, and trained to their shape with exactitude. The root is in the stern and the bole forms the keel, and sturdy branches make the ribs and the masts, all the way to the bow. As they get older they often grow a second hull, like this one, and finally a third before senesence starts to set in. The skeleton of the ship is a huge single living tree. It’s immensely strong and flexible. Its living sap and its fruit has many uses on board. The skeleton is clad and decked with more conventional carpentry, although even there, the planks of the hull are Bonded to the branches and bole rather than anything so crass as being attached with nails. As the ship grows, the cladding is continually extended and replaced.

I think of the Satthei, shaping the ship-tree’s growth over the centuries, Binding herself to it in the process with dryadic devotion. She can never leave it alive. Trees die, eventually, so she has made a real sacrifice of her longevity to be a Satthei.

We are a sea monster. It’s very hard to imagine what in this world can take on a Neri ship in the open ocean, except another Neri ship, and that’s unheard of. Satthei Encelion must have been betrayed in port rather than boarded at sea.

We’re running right into the mass of fish. Suddenly we straighten. The seabirds scream and wheel up and out of the way all around us. The starboard side tips out of the water and I hear the ventral nets deploy below, between the hulls, with a huge whumph. “HOLD FAST!” Deidas yells. We’re already tethered to the bowsprit, but I embrace the rigging with both arms and hang on, my eyes squeezed shut. With a heavy crash and a thunk of pressure in my head, we’re underwater. A tumultuous mass of fish all around me, and a cacophany of dolphin sonar, and the sonic pulses they use to stun the fish hurt my ears, then we’re clear, and more than clear. The front of the ship is lifting clear out of the water. I open my eyes and look down at the rest of the ship behind me breaching like a whale fully half-way out of the waves.

I can hear Sam whooping and hollering in sheer excitement. Fish in their thousands sleet back along the deck into the gaping dorsal nets. I can hear the larger ventral nets being hauled in fully-laden as the ship turns on its stern, all forward momentum absorbed, and crashes starboard-side down into the water. For a moment I’m underwater again, but then there’s sun and air and spray and salt in my mouth. I know behind me sails are being furled and booms are being swung with such speed and precision that it’s as if the sails are living appendages of the monster.

“Man, I am never getting tired of that!” Sam yells. Deidas laughs. The yell had been in English but the gist of it was plain enough.

“READY BOWS!” Deidas calls, clearly. That’s our job: Picking off the scattered remnants of the shoal. “Make your targets. Do not fire randomly. Do not hit a dolphin!” Sam and I laugh at that, and I hear some laughs from the young Neri on the portside rigging too.

Sam scrambles to the edge of the rigging and gets the first arrow off. Our arrows (which we make ourselves, as incentive against losing them overboard I think) are actually miniature harpoons, tethered with fine lines, like wires, to the reels mounted on the outer stay line of the bowsprit rigging. Sam is already drawing for her second shot by the time I get my first off, pulling the bow right back into a deep U shape. We keep firing until there are no more targets because we’ve swung across the field. The ship tips the other way and swings to port, to let the guys on the other side do some shooting, and we haul our lines back in. I can hear the swoosh-slish of their arrows. Meanwhile I know on deck the nets are being drawn up and emptied. I’m not under any illusions that we archers at the bow are significantly adding to the catch, but it’s fun, when from one week to the next there’s usually nothing much to do that is.

Likewise I’m sure trawling with a mile-long net is a more efficient way to catch fish than this, but as I’m sure any Neri would observe if they ever saw the technique: ‘where’s the fun in that?’ We have all the fish we need and more. More impressively, I know from the first time I watched this, before Sam and I were let up front to join the archers, there is almost no bycatch. The dolphins herd the school into a tight fishball so, when we scoop most of it up, there’s practically nothing else in the nets but the fish we want.

Half an hour later the wind has dropped and we’re in calm clean water a couple of miles away, repaying our side of the bargain to the dolphin pod. The side door has been lowered, as it was in Market, to make a platform level with the surface of the water. There dolphins approach in ones and twos for Fareis and the shaman to examine and, as far as possible, treat whatever illnesses or injuries they’ve picked up since the last time they encountered a Neri ship.

Fareis specifically asked me to help this time. Sam will be pissed off, as that means she’s up with the others processing the fish while I’m downstairs ‘playing with dolphins,’ as she’s bound to put it. I’m not sure what I can do to help, so I just stay nearby and do what the Satthei tells me. Right now this means kneeling naked by the head of the first one that came up and beached itself on the second lowest step of the opened door. It’s a young male. I’m just there to watch and to keep him calm and make sure he doesn’t get dried out while Fareis works. The dolphin has an infestation of a parasitical worm inside its ears. It will have been disrupting his sonar and making him increasingly disoriented until, eventually, he’d have got separated from the rest and got lost. Fareis is killing them and getting them out with a combination of some specialist tools including what looked like a long syringe containing something horrible, and some intercession from the Goddess I guess. It’s scary for the dolphin but he’s lying as still as possible to let Fareis get on with it, and I stroke and talk soothingly, and sing sometimes, and pour water over him, and try not to be completely grossed out by what Fareis is extracting from the side of the dolphin’s head. As she explains, the worms have formed a ball in an inner cavity. And they’re only coming out in pieces. It’s a long, difficult job even with the Goddess’s help.

Meanwhile the shaman and some other Neri are working through the other dolphins that come up with more easily-dealt-with infections and minor injuries, bad teeth, intestinal worms and so forth. They’re diagnosed by the Neri healers; as far as I can tell theres no actual language communication going on between the dolphins and the Neri. Rather, it has the feel of an ancient evolutionary partnership that both sides fulfil simply because they do, like cleaner fish at a coral reef.

The antiquity of this scene is further evoked by our nudity. All of us that are down here working with the dolphins are naked. It took me somewhat by surprise the first time, suddenly surrounded by somewhat sexless Neri bodies. Apparently it’s practical, to avoid the risk of damaging their delicate skin with a stray buckle or clasp, to be more hygeinic around potentially open wounds, to get out of the clothes that got soaked in the hunt so as to not get a chill, without getting even more clothes wet and salty in the process. I get a strong sense there’s a spiritual element to it as well, but no-one talks about it. It’s just what they do, because they always have.