(As the adult whales dived to the feeding grounds below, Bwgan invited their left-behind children to play. It never took much to get their attention; the children of whales were as curious about him as he was about them. They called to him (who are you?) and he responded (Bwci-bo!).
While he waited, Bwgan spilled himself into the sea, which was alive and full of feeling. He lounged in bright waters. All around him was fat contentment: the full bellies of the calves, their mamas having fed them before they dived; the twitching existence of fish; the sleepy drift of an albatross above.
The men in the boats were silent. They couldn’t see Bwgan’s magic-carried mind playing in the water. They didn’t know that he lolled about in otterlike satisfaction. All they knew of him was the meat he’d left on the ship—and that a part of him, outside of their understanding, called the calves to play.
(Who are you?)
The calves crept closer. Spooked by the shadows of the boats. But Bwgan tumbled about in the water with a cry of glee that all babies knew meant fun, and he told them his name (Bwci-bo!) again so that they’d know him.
Whales loved through touch. Mamas touched their babies all over and the babies touched them back. As the calves came to Bwgan, he reached for their rubbery sides to reassure them that all he wanted was to be known and loved, forgetting that only flesh could touch flesh, and he’d left his flesh behind—)
#
With his hand on his brother’s shoulder, Skua stood on the sunbeaten deck of The Ravening and watched the white glints of the whaleboats ahead. Sunlight played tricks on his eyes. Expecting whales, he thought every crest of foam was a spout, every curl of wave a fluke. His heart beat erratically: one moment with the strike of oars on the ocean, the chants of men, the vicious, craving lust of the hunt; the next, a withered beat of anxiety focused on the boy beneath his hand, who felt cold and far away.
Around him, the shipkeepers worked with the idle energy of men who knew the captain wasn’t aboard. They kept the ship steady. Skua kept Bwgan’s body steady, too. Sometimes he worried that if he didn’t hold his brother tight when Bwgan went into his fishy magic, Bwgan would forget to come back.
Bwgan, kneeling before his brother, didn’t move no matter how the sun beat on him. Skua saw himself in his brother’s image. His brown skin peeling where it was dry. His skin speckled with sores from their ship-poor diets. His wiry curls the colour of sodden logs left to tumble about, unbrushed, unwashed, unrestrained. And though his eyes were closed right now, they too were the same colour as Skua’s: hazel with flecks of gold.
All of it just as Skua had looked when he too had been eight. But Skua wasn’t eight anymore. He was fourteen. And fourteen on a starving diet had made a small man out of what should have still been a boy.
A tortoise slid past, heavy feet thumping on deck and neck craning this way and that. Skua ignored it. It was difficult to look at the tortoises—stolen by the dozens from their islands and now kept aboard as living meat for the sailors’ bellies—without feeling as though he could also see himself in their desperate, dragging movements.
The tortoise thumped away. Its feet beat a rhythm that was another way Skua’s heart sometimes sounded: trapped.
#
(The calves crept closer. Not all of Bwgan waited for them. There was a piece of him on the ship that kept him tethered so he couldn’t go where the whales called him. It meant he could only call them to him instead. But he yearned—oh he yearned!—for something more than just a call and response. He wanted more than life was giving him.
Sometimes, all he wanted was to wash away.)
#
The boatswain brought Skua a ladle of water, which Skua wet Bwgan’s lips with before drinking from himself.
“If the boy brings a good harvest, I’ll see you both get double rations,” said the boatswain. Skua’s mouth dried at the reminder of his brother’s usefulness. It came with a warning that Skua, small and weak, would never ride a whaleboat; it came with a slap on the back from the boatswain’s big rough hands that made Skua cringe with fright. It distracted him from thoughts of Bwgan growing up and away from him.
Skua had his ways of filling their bellies, too. Bwgan had magic to offer. All Skua had was himself.
The tortoise hadn’t gone far. All the crew said that tortoises didn’t need food nor water. That they’d live forever without either, up until they were killed for food. For the first time, Skua envied that. He wished he was free of hunger too.
The boatswain hadn’t kept his hand on Skua’s shoulder.
It took a long time for Skua to stop feeling his touch.
#
((Who are you who are you who are you) the calves whispered, and each time Bwgan answered until they rose up as great grey shapes below. He admired their flippers and their lively eyes, the clever swoop of their dorsal fins, their subtle and unique markings. From further below came their mama’s startled song as she heard her calves’ excitement at a new friend. She too called for a response.
(Who are you?)
He did bad. He didn’t answer her.
He couldn’t stand it.
But even as he swept those bold calves up in his captivating, crooning magic, she came closer. And she did what no creature had done yet.
She asked (are you lost?)
He stopped.
Was he?
The calves didn’t understand that he could leave his flesh behind. To them, he was both there and not there. They tried to nuzzle at what couldn’t be touched. (Who are you?) they asked as they failed to find him, as they worried he was drowning, as they tried to lift him with them to the air above.
(I am alone) he sighed, the sigh falling down down down into the dark. The calves were beside him. Briefly, so briefly, he was warm and soft and not-alone too.
A shadow overhead.
To the surfacing calves, he once again gave them his name (Bwci-bo) which they didn’t know meant (bogeyman).)
#
Skua rubbed heat into Bwgan’s icy hands. The boy was like death, laid out on the swamped deck as lifeless as the butchered corpses around them. Every time, ever since the first, he’d come back from his magic like this, with his lips blued as though drowned, eyes wide and empty, mouth hung open on a broken hinge. And, every time, Skua gave him heat from his hands and air from his lungs, cradling him out of the muck as he whispered the only thing that ever got Bwgan breathing again.
“A welsoch chi y Bwci-bo,” Skua recited, each line ending on a strangled beat of his tired heart. “Y Bwci-bo, y Bwci-bo?”
The children’s nursery rhyme—the only one they knew—in a language they didn’t speak was a discordant backdrop to all else that happened around them. As Skua sang, the men stripped the whales. Hacked holes above the fin and inserted hooks to hang them high. The creak of wood and strained flesh singing, too. Skua asked, “Pwy wyt ti?” to no answer as the men attached tackles to flesh and began to peel it in dripping strips of blubber. Blood and oil soaked everything. Skua begged, “Pwy wyt ti?” as the men probed the entrails for rich ambergris. Bwgan didn’t move as someone cut open the decapitated head to scoop out the spermaceti cradled inside. And neither of them flinched as the smoke began to coil, flesh-fed and noxious, around the deck and the men, permeating everything with the death of whales.
“Pwy wyt ti?” croaked Skua.
He could barely breathe.
Finally, Bwgan sat up. His eyes open in a mask of gore. His little heart battering in his body, chest expanding as he took gulping breaths.
“Bwci-bo!” he cried, before rolling from Skua’s arms to vomit under the railing.
Skua waded through the blood to stand beside his brother. Vomit splattered the black sea below. It frothed and spat back at them. The bodies of the calves floated, opened by the harpoons; sharks feasted on the collateral damage of men’s hunting.
Bwgan stared at the calves’ bodies, tears cutting pale lines through his mask of red.
“Bwci-bo,” he whispered again, voice wrecked by smoke.
Skua did nothing. He just stood there, watching the frantic way a nearby tortoise licked blood from the decking.
#
(The calves’ mama still called them. Bwgan lay naked in their cabin with his head on the floor, listening to her desperate clicking echoing through the hull. Call, call, call, call.
No response.
If Bwgan could have spoken, he would have told her that he was sorry. That he never remembered when he was in the water what waited back in the flesh. That they made him do it; that they had a piece of him tucked away in his brother that meant he could never escape, not without first getting it back.
But Bwgan couldn’t speak to her when in his flesh. He could only listen to her call.
No response.)
#
They had the tiny cabin—more of a cupboard—to themselves because Bwgan made the men nervous, and Skua stayed where Bwgan was. Here, Skua stripped their whale-soaked clothes and tried his best to wash their bodies down with a tub of saltwater and a rough rag. But it seemed there wasn’t enough water in the world to clean them.
Bwgan didn’t speak. He didn’t, much, after a hunt. He just curled there, shivering, as Skua scrubbed his concave stomach and his stick-like arms and the scabby bits around his knees. If he cried, Skua ignored it. They were practiced in the aftermath.
The boatswain brought their double rations, along with fresh clothes. Clean clothes were a luxury. Skua presumed Bwgan had done better than the captain had dared dream. Three full grown female sperm whales. A fortune in oil. And all it had cost was two dead calves to lure the adults in.
The rations today were hardtack and tortoise meat, roasted hot. Another luxury. Still not enough for either of them. They were kept hungry to make sure they’d do as they were told. Skua gave it all to Bwgan even though he’d throw up every meal for days following a hunt. Skua had other means of getting fed; he knew all the ways that sailors hungered.
“Skua,” croaked Bwgan after the boatswain had left behind Bwgan’s meal and his own assurances that Bwgan had pleased them. “Can you tell me more about Y Bwci-Bo?”
He already knew all Skua was willing to tell. But Skua knew Bwgan wasn’t asking because he was curious. He was asking because it was the only good thing they had to share that wasn’t blood and muck and whale oil.
So Skua told him that Y Bwci-Bo was the rhyme that their parents had sung to them before they’d come to The Ravening, that they had loved it so much they’d named Bwgan for it, and that so long as both brothers remembered it neither of them could ever be lost. But Bwgan listened to the tale again, and he—
#
(imagined his own family calling him from the comforting dark of the ocean, and him carrying Skua to their arms as they rose to meet him. His family nuzzled against his body, which was real, which could feel, and he knew he was home when they didn’t ask who he was, and he didn’t have to answer Bwci-bo)
#
—never suspected it was all a lie. There was no before The Ravening. There was no family they’d been taken from. There was only the ship, the hunt, and the mockery of the men as they’d named Bwgan for a bogeyman and Skua for a starving, scavenger bird.
The door opened without a knock. The captain, looming large and fierce in the doorway. Bwgan ignored him; Skua trembled under his gaze.
“One more hunt and we’ll be full for oil,” said the captain, not to them. He never spoke directly to Bwgan. One might as well speak directly to a harpoon. “How long until that’s up again?”
“Not usually for at least a week,” came the boatswain’s voice from outside the cabin. “Maybe longer. The magic takes him apart a bit.”
The captain stared. Skua thought he could see whale oil in the sickly cast of the man’s shadow. “Then its brother will just have to put it back together quicker, won’t he?” said the captain, voice like oil too. Or like the permeating smoke. Just as hard to breathe through. “Isn’t that the point of you?”
With that, he closed the door. Shutting them into the dark.
Skua looked at his brother’s still form made thinner yet by the shadows which deepened hollows and sharpened angles both. Worries snarled thick as netting in his mind. Outside, the first mate questioned the weather. The captain questioned him. Things Skua didn’t care for because he had no control over either, only over whether he and his brother survived another day. Only over how he’d make sure that happened.
“Get up, Bwgan,” he said, his voice as sharp as the shriek of the bird he was named for. “You can rest after the next one.”
#
(But Bwgan didn’t want to go again. He still had bites chewed out of him. But no matter how he whined and complained, Skua kept pecking. He wouldn’t let Bwgan lie in his sadness. He pinched until Bwgan’s skin was as bruised as his sorry sorry mind. He dragged Bwgan out to the deck where the men and the tortoises were hungry, where oil still soaked into the wood.
It was a new morning. The whales had been turned into bits and put away. The whaleboats were ready and Skua was bitier than ever, pushing and shoving and slapping until Bwgan’s breakfast felt like it was going to come up and add to the oily deck.
Bwgan let himself be dragged to the spot where his flesh would kneel while the rest of him forgot it was chained—and spewed his mind out into the ocean ahead, leaving Skua behind with the meaty bits Bwgan didn’t want anymore.
He howled all his pain out into the water, which listened, and asked (who are you?))
#
The whaleboats were gone and the boatswain worried about the weather, still. Skua ignored his concerns. A bone-deep exhaustion set root inside him. Black spots danced around his eyes. When he scratched his lousy head, hair fell out. His gums tasted of blood. And his hand on his brother’s shoulder felt more like the only thing holding him up than it did him holding his brother.
Skua shuddered awake to realise he’d been standing there, lock-kneed, unmoving and insensible, while his brother magicked. The sky was black with clouds. The wind yowled. And the boatswain had come with a rope to secure them, which he never had before.
“If the waves get up, I won’t have either of you washed overboard for want of a full oil hold,” said the boatswain, which was the nicest Skua had ever heard him. But he didn’t have the energy to reply. Bwgan was restless below his hand, fighting the rope, fighting Skua’s grip on him.
“Just this last one and we’ll be off home,” said the boatswain with a nervous look at the way Bwgan was twitching.
But they wouldn’t be, Skua knew. There was no home for them. Their home had been eaten and so had they. The Ravening was all that was left.
“What’s wrong with him, anyway?” asked the boatswain.
Skua replied, “He’s just hungry.”
#
(Bwgan howled and howled and howled, the calves swirling around him in a spiral of panic as they sought where he was hurting. But there was no specific part of Bwgan that ached; it was all of him, it was everything.
The calves didn’t know what he was, what he’d done. They came to Bwgan, who wept at their compassion. He didn’t want to see them torn up and burned away. They asked him to swim away from the hurt and he couldn’t, he couldn’t! But they didn’t understand when he begged them to go without him. Only became more and more upset as his magic gushed into the water around them, getting louder and louder with his howls until it seemed the whales’ stolen oil was spilling from his screaming mouth and his body was peeling its own great lumps of pilfered blubber to feed hungry sharks.
Above, the sky turning black. Storm clouds and The Ravening. Both lingered, frightening omens. Bwgan boiled in the water, less afraid of the ocean’s void below than he was the black above. The calves beside him were warm and alive. But the ship was smoke and dying.
And then—)
#
Something was different. Rain lashed the deck, lashed Skua, made puddles in the hollows of Bwgan’s upturned face. Skua clung to him as the ship heaved over growing waves. Frothy caps of foam and salt burst every time a wave broke against them instead of letting them ride it over. The wind screamed, bringing with it black clouds that turned the ocean a sickly grey. And Bwgan—he jerked and thrashed in Skua’s arms, his face always turned up towards those clouds but his body contorting below, as though desperate to crawl away. Skua held on so tight his nails made sharp, bloody lines in his brother’s skin. He wrapped himself around the smaller boy. Held his body as it fought the waves that rocked them, deaf, now, and blind to the storm that had landed solidly upon them.
If there were whales ahead, Skua wasn’t aware of them or the men that hunted them. All he knew was Bwgan. And he was terrified that all he knew was washing away without him.
#
(— a call, not his.
From the dark, a whisper (Bwci-bo).
A shadow growing larger, coming to meet the shadow above.
Bwgan lingered, caught in hope and matching terror. The calves needed to breathe. They began to surface. Towards the storm and the ship. Away from the whisper that sought them, that sought Bwgan.
The ocean called his name again. And under the shadows of the rising calves, sense boiled away by panic and pain, Bwgan did what he’d never done before.
(I’m Bwci-bo!) he cried outwards, to anyone listening: a response. (I’m the death of calves! And I want to be stopped!)
Into this scream, he poured everything: the stink of burning whale, the peeling flesh, the bobbing bodies of calves in bloodied seafoam; he poured in how it felt to call the calves, to play with them up until the harpoons split their skulls. He poured in all those individual creatures who he’d led to their deaths, each and every whale unique to him, each a living being that was dead because he, Bwgan, lived. And finally, finally, the whales saw him for what he was, and understood what a frightening thing a bogeyman could be.
The cry rippled outwards; the adults, too, began to rise. And Bwgan—desperate, furious, sickened, and afraid—fled before them.)
#
The first blow, when it arrived, came not from the storm above, but from the ocean below. A great crest beside The Ravening, first in the shape of a momentous wave, manifesting abruptly into that of a breaching sperm whale, Skua twisting around to stare at the creature as it loomed beside them. Frozen for a second, caught in the turbulent air. So close that droplets from its skin fell on Skua; so close that he could look it in the eye, which was blue.
No one made a sound. Even the storm seemed, briefly, to hold.
Then the whale came down. A sharp, shuddering blow portside that left the ship reeling. But as shortly as the creature slithered back into the frothy water beneath, another surfaced to strike the bow. The ship jerked as something huge struck it from below; there came the great and terrible sound of a wooden spine screaming as that blow came again and again and again.
Skua, too, screamed.
#
(When the storm, and the whales, were gone, Bwgan and Skua remained. Bwgan didn’t know how. Just that strong arms had swept them from the deck and into the one remaining whaleboat. Details smeared by rain and terror. The boatswain thrusting something at Skua: a small barrel. The shock of the ship’s death. The silence that followed.
Bwgan held Skua’s head in his lap and whispered Y Bwci-Bo, comforting him as best he could while the whaleboat floated idly in the aftermath. Sometimes, wreckage from the ship passed by. A barrel here, a plank there.
When the whaler’s body passed by, Bwgan put his mouth over the rim of the whaleboat, teeth on the wood, and sucked on it as his eyes tracked the corpse’s passage. A shark worried at the bloated arm. Fish scattered about. It was face down. Impossible to tell who it was.
The wood of the whaleboat tasted like blood and salt. Bwgan thought of the tortoises.)
#
Skua did his best to save them in the time that followed. He used wood salvaged from the wreckage to build the sides of the whaleboat up, to spare them the constant drenching from the waves and the wind. He found nails in the small storage box all the whaleboats came with and made sure the boat was as watertight as he could make it. He strung a canvas up to shelter them from the sun, and considered rationing the water before he realised that they had enough that they’d starve to death well before they dehydrated.
But they had no food. And no tools to fish with.
Skua and Bwgan sat under a cloudless night sky, neither speaking. Their bellies were tight. The Ravening was gone. The ocean was flat and very beautiful. They were free. And they were going to die.
#
(Skua was crying. Skua had never cried before. Bwgan tried to sing Y Bwci-Bo to him but it only made Skua mad, turned him from the Bwgan-like creature he’d been since the storm and back into the meanest Skua of old. The pecking, bruising, biting brother who passed down every hit he got from the crew and the captain twofold onto his little brother, who’d only ever loved him.
Skua said, “You know we never had parents, don’t you? I learned that song from the men. And they only sang it because you scared them.”
“I know,” said Bwgan, who always had. “I know what a bogeyman is, Skua. I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t think…” But Skua didn’t finish the sentence. They sat apart from each other, or as apart as they could be in the small space that had become their world.
A bogeyman, Bwgan knew, was a stealer of children. A caller of calves.
“Can you do your magic now?” Skua whispered. Bwgan began to shake all over. “Call…something? For us to eat?”
But Bwgan knew he couldn’t. Something in him had broken when he’d showed the whales the horrors inside him. It had broken when those whales had risen from the depths to smash up the ship. All that was left, he suspected, was the piece of him that the captain had put away—and that was somewhere inside Skua where Bwgan couldn’t reach it.
Still, he asked, “There’s some hardtack left in the box. Do you want some?”
“No,” said Skua. “I’m not hungry.”)
#
Skua held to the one thing that had always gotten him through before: if Bwgan survived, it would all be okay. Even if it took a while.
#
(Bwgan watched as Skua melted into nothing. It seemed that Skua would become so skinny that Bwgan would be able to see the lumpy piece of Bwgan the captain had put into his brother. Bwgan might even be able to take it out and, somehow, find a way they could leave this place, swim away, find a home.
He touched his brother, nervously at first, then all over. Skua lay unmoving in the bottom of the whaleboat where rancid water put sores on their shrivelled toes. His eyes closed, bony chest only slightly moving. Bwgan touched each of Skua’s ribs and traced his fingers around the stranger that was being made of Skua’s shrivelled face.
“What are you doing?” Skua asked. His voice was a stranger too. His teeth and tongue too big for how small the rest of him was getting. Bwgan found he could imagine his brother’s skeleton without much trouble; there was so little between them now.
“Looking for the piece of me the cap’ put in you,” said Bwgan stubbornly. “If I get it out, I might fix what’s wrong with me. I might get us out of here.”
Skua laughed softly. “Ah Bwci-bo,” he whispered. “It’s not there. It’s here, where it’s always been.”
But he didn’t point anywhere. His hand didn’t move. He didn’t have the strength.)
#
#
(Bwgan sat there. In the windless, airless ocean. Silence above and below. All that broke that silence was his occasional whisper of “Bwci-bo,” to himself: a response searching for a call. But there came no call. Only the answer to an unasked question. And his own growing hunger.
Oh, he was hungry.)
#
#
((He looked for the piece. If he could only find it, he could untether himself, swim away. Away from the harpoons and the oil and the sun and Skua’s silence. Bwgan delved deep. Through the thin blubber and the bones as weak as rotten wood. Blood and oil soaked everything. The stink of smoke made him cough despite the absence of fire. Hysterical with fear, Bwgan chanted Y Bwci-Bo, but it was only half a song, it was only half of him, and in the end he was screaming it and choking on the smoke and he still couldn’t find the piece—
He figured it out. Only because his chest ached from screaming. The piece of Bwgan that had tied him to The Ravening must be in the place where Bwgan had hurt Skua the most, just like Skua was hurting Bwgan now.
He cradled the piece in his oily hands. It felt cold and far away. It didn’t beat at all.))
#
#
(((He ate.)))
#
#
((((All he was, all he’d learned, was hunger. Reunited with the piece of him he’d been missing, the hunger spoke with his magic and his mouth; it called. Fish came. He ate them. Birds came. He ate them too. His magic was unfurling like stripped whale blubber, out of control, a thing beyond him. He tried to eat the sun but couldn’t reach it, so instead he ate the wind that came too close to his dissipating self. Then he ate the canvas and the nails and the boat and all those scattered bones too, his hunger too great to stop, his greed splitting open the world. In the water, the sharks heard his hunger screaming and they recognised it and so they came too, to his mouth, to his stomach. Fat with grief and guilt. And he was sinking. The water wasn’t strong enough to hold something as hungry as he’d become. The world hadn’t been built for something this ravenous.
Bwgan screamed because he was still so so so hungry even though he’d eaten all of his world and then some. He screamed because (who are you) with everything he ate, his perception of the world expanded even though that world had become one thing less; he was overwhelmed with the feeling of being tiny in a seething world; of realising that he could eat forever and still be starving.
He could see the great bloodied bites he’d taken from the universe, everything he’d taken away that couldn’t be put back—like Skua, and all those whale calves and their mamas and aunties too, and the sun which he must have swallowed after all because it was dark and getting darker.
Still, he sank.
Still, he ate.
And, still, he was hungry.
(I know you)
He was in the abyss. He ate the flashing fish and the giant squids. He ate the shrieking dark, though there was always more to fill the gaps he left. Briefly, warmly, there was a whale beside him, huge and soft and real. She nuzzled him and he howled because grief was terrible and it was all he’d ever known.
(Swim up. Come on. Come with me.)
But he couldn’t. He knew her too. She was the mama whose babies he’d called away. He knew he was her summoning dark; he was the monster she was afraid of.
(Just swim up.)
She touched him and he touched her back. And just as Bwgan had bared his whole self to the whales the night of the storm, so too did she bare herself to him now, in this brief, haunting moment of calm in the middle of ceaseless eating. There was no hatred in her. No anger burned hot enough to smash up a ship, to starve a brother. She knew him as just another calf, crying for his mama. She’d come to him as exactly that, her and her family, smashing the ship which they saw as the source of calf snatching. And him, Bwgan, just another calf snatched away.
(Swim up) she whispered. (Come with me.)
She wasn’t afraid of him at all, Bwgan realised. Even though she could see what he was inside. But he wouldn’t go with her, couldn’t risk trusting her with the piece of himself he’d found inside Skua. A hunger like his wouldn’t be stopped. And he refused to call another whale.))))
#
#
(((((Soon, the whale left him, too, disappearing upwards as she rose to breathe. And though he was sorry that he’d left her an eaten world, emptier than it might have been if he’d never been born, he was glad she’d survived to swim away.
Soon, he came to the seafloor where the bodies of the whale calves were stacked upon each other in a mound as big as a mountain, captured in immortality in the dark as a memorial to all the discarded flesh that greed had made of the world. And now he, too, would stay down here where there were no more brothers to call “Pwy wyt ti?” (who are you), and there were no brothers left to answer (I am what you made of me.))))))
Based in Scotland, Charlie Winter is an academic by day and, by night, still an academic but much more distractible about it. When not performing the inexplicable rituals of academia, he writes fantasy fiction celebrating everyday magic, eco-optimism, and queer identities, out of which he has three short fiction publications.
