Then they were hanging in a watery twilight.  Jayne looked on the child beside him, hung in place easily, relaxed in the water, long hair haloing around his small yellow face.  In the dim deep ocean`s fuzz his odd-colored skin didn`t look so strange. 

Jayne nodded at the child.  Then he opened his mouth, let the water rush in, and began to sing the Hammerhand's song.

Whale-song.  A single, simple note, pulsed out loud and strong.

The child`s eyes flicked wide.  He stared at Jayne.  Jayne held his gaze, and the note rang out.  Then the child opened his mouth, let the water flow in, and began to sing too. 

He built a slow melody upwards from Jayne`s single note, Jayne staring in shock at the melodious whale-song notes pouring up from the boy's slim yellow throat.  He added harmonies and glissandos.  He tremeloed.  He layered and twisted and spun Jayne`s bass thrum into something vast and haunting that hung in the water, that rang out like the Grammaton, that swelled out around them like a blossoming salvo of color in the deep.

They sang together.

And the whales came.

First the smaller Pilots, long sleek eely lengths whirling the water around them, with Bride`s and Pygmy Rights in their wake.  Then a pod of Humpbacks, a pack of Left Blues, a sudden squall of scurrying black Mesoplodonts, then Brontochal Giants and Pterodal Fins and Greys and Bottlenoses and Toothed Lefts and Fanged Rights and Cuveir`s Beakeds and Sperms and Tramaleir`s Jogs and finally, booming into the symphony of wheeling whirling smaller whales like a slow grinding planet across the sky came a behemothic Ptarmigan, eclipsing all light and swelling the orchestra of song higher, and louder, and fuller.

Then silence. 

Jayne`s jaw was agog, slack, his lungs giving out, his vision graying in the black.

The whales formed into living walls around them, the almighty Ptarmigan at the head.  The cold water turned warm, and thick, and all was silence.

The child whale-sang into the void.

The Ptarmigan`s huge black eyes blinked slow, stared through the murk into Jayne, the boy.  Jayne felt his lungs crumpling, the chokes in his throat rising as his body fought for air.  Then the Ptarmigan`s drawbridge mouth opened, the baleen sieve was raised, and the influx of water pulled them inside.

      *