A Rumbling Deep in the Bowels of the World
by Claude LalumièreIt is well known among humans that the gods love song, especially devotional songs dedicated to them. The whales, too, know this, which is why they sing so beautifully. They sing to their god, the giant and fearsome whale Leviathan.
They sing of heaven: a world of endless oceans teeming with fish and plankton, a world with no boats, no harpoons, no oil spills.
They sing to give their god strength.
Long ago, the gods of the humans listened to the prayers of their people, who yearned to dominate the Earth. So those gods fought with the gods of the other animals. They murdered the beautiful and mighty Njàbò, the primordial elephant. They slaughtered the warrior Hanuman, the monkey god, who was naive enough to trust them. They poisoned Artio, the bear goddess. Chibiabos, lord of wolves, was cornered, his throat slit. Apedemak, god-king of the lions, was butchered. And so it went with all the other animal deities.
Except Leviathan.
Leviathan could not be dispatched so easily. The gods of the humans sent their mightiest heroes, their most powerful deities, to slay the giant Leviathan. But they all failed in the face of Leviathan's awesome power and immense size. The most damaging wounds the gods inflicted upon Leviathan were to him less than insect bites to an elephant. Leviathan was so massive that even the tallest of the gods was less than a flea to him.
Even entire armies of gods could not seriously wound, let alone kill, the god of whales.
The humans sacrificed more animals to give their blood-hungry gods strength in their war against the god of whales.
In the end, it took the combined force of every human god to conquer the great Leviathan. Even so, they failed to kill the ancient beast-god. They chained Leviathan and buried him in the bowels of the world, below the surface at the bottom of the ocean. They fastened those chains with the immortal bones of the animal deities conquered and killed in their merciless campaign. They nailed the chains to the bedrock with more of those bones. Whenever Leviathan stirs or struggles, the Earth trembles, and that is the cause of earthquakes.
For millennia, the whales have been calling their god, imploring him to return, nourishing his spirit with song.
For millennia, deep in the bowels of the world, Leviathan has heard the musical prayers of his people; he has been struggling against his bonds, weakening their hold on him. He has noted the dwindling number of voices calling out in prayer to him. The urgency of his people's plight makes him intensify his efforts. The metal and bone of his bonds are bending ever more, the clasps and nails loosening and nearly tearing.
Soon, he will break free. He will rise and return to his people. He will wipe out their enemies and grant the whales the heaven they so desperately crave.
©Claude Lalumière
Claude Lalumière's fiction has appeared in Year's Best SF 12, Year's Best Fantasy 6, SciFiction, Interzone, On Spec, and others. He has edited eight anthologies, including Witpunk (with Marty Halpern), Island Dreams, Open Space, Lust for Life (with Elise Moser), and Tesseracts Twelve. His website is lostpages.net, and he blogs at lostpagesfoundpages.blogspot.com. Claude lives in Montreal.