PoraBora

Chapter Seventy

Keasau sprinted through the water. Akoni held on, not sure why, or what he could do, but positive he should. Keasau didn't try to shake him off, and even pressed him up to the surface whenever Akoni needed air with his great back.

Oil followed them in enormity. Akoni knew they would have to find it and clean it with the soak ships, the best they could, but he didn't know where they were anymore, or where they were going.

Keasau needed his casing. Akoni wasn't sure why the creatures had covered it so completely in the cavern. He speculated that perhaps they were able to find some sort of chemical nutrient in the oil. Or perhaps, like him, they did it because they had to, because otherwise the ocean would have turned brown a long time ago.

Keasau dove and Akoni held on, working his ears, knowing he would have to let go and swim for the surface before Keasau got too deep. But he didn't want the god to leave him behind.

Akoni didn't have to let go. The oil surrounded him thickly. His ears never popped and his body never felt the pressure of the ocean change. He's protecting me, Akoni thought, humbled by Keasau's ability to do effortlessly what they had been trying to do for hundreds of years.

They reached the sea floor in minutes. Light was gone: there were no stars, no jellyfish, no fires. If there was any sea glow, it was too faint for Akoni's eyes to pick up. Keasau came to a rest, and Akoni wished he could see as well as the god.

There was a small light, distant above them, and Akoni wondered if it was one of the fish they had seen on their shores, brought up from the depths by a storm, alien, with teeth so long it couldn't close its mouth, a lantern hanging from the end of its head. And that had been the most regular, because they could still trace out the shape of a fish.

Akoni could hear something in the water, like a pipe or a draining oil well. He wished again he could see, knowing he was thousands of feet further than any man had ever been, could ever go.

Akoni took a breath when he realized Keasau's encasing of oil had provided a helmet of air. The oxygen wouldn't last forever, he knew, for there was no hose to a ship above with men taking turns to pump air back down.

The sound was, Akoni concluded, an underwater vent. A split in the earth, like a volcano, that spewed gasses into the ocean. Warmth spread into the water, and he wasn't sure if that supposed it was a type of oil, or if Keasau's own kept him safe from it. How little they knew of the sea floor, he thought, for all their technology. For all their curiosity. Surely there must have been some way to reach it, to light it and explore it, some way that didn't rely on Keasau.

If there was, he couldn't think of it.

Something moved, and he knew he only realized it because of how big it had to be to displace the water that pushed Akoni. He pulled himself into Keasau, sure it had to be a six-gilled shark or some other sea floor giant. He wished he could know, but he never saw it. Never touched it. Never heard it.

Akoni wasn't sure how long they remained there before his air began to thin and he felt a lightness in his head. He swam upwards, slowly, not sure how deep they were but knowing it was probably too deep for the number of breaths he could take. Very nearly, taking them would probably be worse than not.

Keasau was ever cognizant of his struggles, though, and he raced him to the surface, flipper pushing him upwards. He dropped Akoni once and had to swim back around to get him again, a slow process for eighty feet of whale, and Akoni gave up on making it to the surface conscious. Still, he trusted Keasau would get him there, and probably while he was still alive.

He woke up and breathed heavily by reflex. He'd been breathing already, of course, while passed out, but nothing filled his head more than gasping for air. Akoni sat up. He was on Keasau's back, and assuming he hadn't been out for more than twenty-four hours, which wouldn't have been sensible, it was the morning. Or near enough he counted it. The sky worked towards blue, and while there was no sign yet of the sun, subdued colors had returned, a grey-blue sea, his grey-brown skin, and, well, that was just as much oil, wasn't it?