We swim on beside her, though we know that she won’t make it, that she will succumb, surrender herself to the waves and currents. It is a story we know well; agony’s song has been the same since life first began, when beasts and the world were one, when the mountains that watch over us had not yet been born.
The others will have to care for her calf as they continue their voyage south in search of sanctuary, just as those who swam before them did, millennium after millennium, when the estuary shifted mudflats and quicksands and they were queens; before the massacre, before the inferno.
We swim on with them, we have done since they fled their safe haven, lost in the plague of aquatic mastodons laying waste to all the world’s oceans. We follow the traces of their song amid the quaking of the ocean depths, the thundering of hulls and the thrumming of sonar.
We are travelling to where it all began, to the paradise waters where the first of us were born; we are following the roads of our ancestors, abandoned after the massacre, its memory etched into their lineage. Our voices rise into the night. We know the song and we know how it ends; we too sang it once. We know ours is another destiny, that in the beyond, too, an inferno is all that awaits.
*
We swim on towards you, bringing with us the body you have forgotten, the body into which you once sunk teeth of stone, of iron, of bronze and of steel, we bring it to lay at your feet.
We are reforging the links in the chain of death, piecing it back to its origin, when the defenceless ape emerged from the forests and fought with other beasts for its pound of flesh; and later, when it grew tired of waiting for gifts from the gods and hurled itself against the waves in a walnut shell, armed with rope and pointed iron, to kill the queen of the waves; and later still, when possessed by madness it felled the forests that had given it life and with them built ships to ride the untamed oceans.
We are following in the wake of that voyage the ape made in its madness, in an endless hunger for something more: light from the darkness, warmth from the cold, cold from the warmth. We swim on towards you, the last link in the chain, you, amassed in a dream of becoming orca and giant squid and eagle and lion and horse and dolphin and lord and god. All-being, all-possessing, all-inhabiting, all-seeing, all-devouring.
We bring to you the bodies of your victims, and you, with the madness of omnipotent gods, rulers of life and death, will try to save them.
*
We swim on beneath the waves, tongues of light in the darkness, united by death towards death against death. We travel in a time loop, a union of the dead and the dying and the still to die. We transform their last breath into wave and wind, into voices that cry out and find their way into sleep.
We have gathered the spirit of the last of them, the one you named Ilargi in your compulsion to name and to divide what was one. We left you her body on the sand, so she can bear witness to the story you refuse to hear. So she can shake you, stir you, rouse you.
We have gathered her spirit and she has joined our procession of shadows, fused into what can only be one and never divided: all the spirits of the shipwrecks, all the victims of that same madness, the innocent and the guilty, because the sea makes no distinction and in its wreckage we all perish.
Afterwards, more will come, there will be so many that you will no longer be able to name them. All the human and nonhuman souls fused into the same shadow, swimming on together. Their fury merges with our own and spurs us on. Their strength merges with our strength and we push you, urge you, agitate you, cry out to you.
Can’t you hear us?
*
We swim on towards you, negotiating the bloodied waters that birthed the lights of Europe, its riches and its madness. We are following the trail of the final line, descendants of a lucky few who escaped a tragic fate, when so many were rendered into the light of civilisation, fuel for the engine of its greatness.
We swim on together with the last survivors, towards the estuary, which lies amid mountains that century after century watched the txalupas and galleons of the new kingdom set sail. We ply the waters, vigilant, alert to the movement of the aquatic mastodons that speed across the surface, blinded by their own light.
We can hear agony’s song amid the thunder of the trawlers, freighters, oil and methane tankers, that hurry towards your homes with stuffed bellies. We follow in their luminous wake, alert to the invisible threads that weave the fine mesh holding your world together.
The mesh of light
that sustains you
and imprisons you.
*
We swim on, spurred by the song of a death born from the rocks.
We swim on, propelled by the ice’s dying rales and the earth’s choking scream.
We swim on towards the waters where they were born, before mankind.
We swim on, borne by the current of the memory of those who died to give them death.
We swim on towards the belly that birthed their madness and nourished it and made it strong, beautiful and desired.
We swim on towards the archer’s watchtower, towards the bow and the arm that draws the arrow back before it takes flight toward its prey. One archer after another after another. The same archer ruled by the same implacable force, the same arm grafted onto many different bodies.
We swim on with the shipwrecks that went searching for the shipwrecks they would become. We bring with us the stench of death in bodies infected with death.
We swim on, borne by the current of a longing for,
a memory of,
a sea without you.
*
We swim on as we swam on before, we swim on even after we arrive. We swim on transformed into the spirit of death, we swim on towards the impregnable palace garden and we swim on towards the oh so pregnable gardens of your homes. We swim on as viral images, infecting your dormant consciences; we take them hostage and we torture them until we wrench from them a war cry as they join our number.
We swim on from the chain’s beginning to its end, with the same speed as the melting ice, just as inexorable, just as urgent. We bring the shipwrecks with us. All the shipwrecks, human and nonhuman, they are the choir of shadows that surge from the eternal, untamed night.
We bring the corpses with us to lay at your feet, because they are yours, because they are a part of you; a mountain of landless bodies, and you, in your slumber, will join them too, when the luminous dream we fuelled no longer offers any refuge.
You.
Us.
