Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  They made love twice more between spent interludes, lying on their backs listening to the sounds of the forest. Then van Noot slept, exhausted, replete. Malawangkuchingang wiped herself with a fern bough, wrapped her sarong over her body, and stepped swiftly into the night.

  Batuh waited for her in the starlight. He took her face in his hands and kissed her eyes. That unlocked all her trepidations, and she clutched at him and sobbed.

  "You have done well, Bright Air," he said to her with the gentleness of a father. "You have done well indeed. And if you will do for me one more thing, one more brave thing, you will have proven yourself a chief's wife."

  *

  Malawangkuchingang did as Batuh told her and woke van Noot and returned with him to Zeerover. She made love to him in the rolling darkness of his cabin, and when he had fallen asleep once again, she put on her sarong and crept up the narrow companionway to the quarterdeck.

  The watch in the crosstrees and the drowsy man in his hammock at the bowsprit did not see her as she opened the scuttlebutt and filled a bucket with water. Limping with its weight, she found the stairs that led into the hold and lowered the bucket one step at a time while she followed after, down into the thick stink of the ship. On the gunnery deck, she had to pause until the dense darkness relented and she could discern the slung hammocks of the crewmen. All slept, and she slipped past the hulks of cannon to the center of the deck where Batuh had said she would find a large bin.

  She reached in and felt the metal hoop and wooden circle of a barrel top. The lid of each keg had a cork stopper like a big petrified mushroom. Her hands proved barely strong enough to uncork them, and when she had pulled the last one, the muscles in her arms twitched from the exertion. A scent like cold ash rose from the bin. Grunting, she lifted the bucket and slowly poured the water over the kegs, gritting back the hurt of her tired muscles.

  Done, she left the bucket inside the bin and closed the lid. Relief opened vividly in her, and she pranced up the companionway to the main deck and the guttering stars.

  "Mala." A heavy voice descended, and she stopped in midstep, her heart squeezing like a caught animal's. "Why are you on board?" the voice asked in Spanish.

  She looked up at the silhouette of the captain. "Tuan!"

  Dreams of diamonds buzzing with the yellow light of hornets had fidgeted him awake, and he had come topside to calm himself. Diamonds had drawn him to Borneo. Now he realized that the diamond-bright lymph of the Milky Way suggested what he truly desired — God's grace, not God's tears, no matter how valuable. In the pit of night, sick with loneliness, he had decided he would give the diamonds to his pilot, who had a wife and the hope of a family, and he would return to the Low Countries with his share of the bartered wealth and begin a new life. Diamonds, he had thought, only mime the soul's light. How much more valuable is the soul herself. He had been walking the quarterdeck, breathing the pure light of the spheres, thinking about the gems Batuh had paid him for the girl, when he startled to meet her rising from the hold.

  Malawangkuchingang scurried up the stairs to the quarterdeck and stood before the captain. Hatless, he took the guise of a wraith, his long hair floating in the steady breeze like seaweed. "I came aboard with the company man," she said, bowing her head, opening her hands innocently before her.

  "He asked you aboard?"

  "Yes."

  "The pilot tells me van Noot is enamored of you. I did not think you cared for him." Mala said nothing. "Where is he now?"

  "Asleep. I could not stay there anymore. It was too hot."

  "Then he will not mind if you come with me."

  She reached out and placed both of her hands on his chest and dared to raise her eyes. The captain looked solemn and white as a sleepy god.

  He took her hands in his and removed them from his chest. "I do not want you in that way." Her gaze fell. "You saved my life. The medicine came from the sorcerer, yes. But you — you were the dread and the rapture that led me from the dead. Come to my cabin. Let me read to you from the Book and tell you what I saw in you when I was with fever."

  Malawangkuchingang let herself be led through the captain's dim companionway to his stately cabin. He sat her in a lyre-back chair and opened the windows so that the ocean's breath swept into the corners of the room. On the bedstand, a glass bell the color of wind cupped an elegant flame, and by that light the captain opened his Bible and read to her in Latin the short passage about the names of the living being written in heaven. When he was done, he looked up. "What do you think that means?"

  "I do not know."

  He chuckled. "Neither did I. Until I was fevered and I saw you." The smile dimmed in his beard, and he grew somber with recollection. "I saw you as death. I saw you as a magnificent lioness of death. I had good reason then to believe that vision, naturally, for I was dying. That certainty wrenched me free of my most cherished illusion — that God abides our dreams, our ambitions — that through prayer, God helps us. I can tell you now, He does not. Through prayer, we help God by learning who we are, by learning our real names, which are written in the darkness from which all things have come." He shut the Bible. "Do you understand? I will be surprised if you do."

  "I understand that you have seen truth," she answered, her eyes lustrous, her head framed by dawn's fire in the windows. "Father told us often, the truth sets people free."

  "And so I am free. Until tonight, I was a slave of the company, seeking my fortune in these foreign lands — as if gold could free me from this world of suffering. The world goes on until God frees us from it. Gold is luxury, not freedom. A simple thought, it would seem, yet only now, tonight, as I contemplate my own death, is that simplicity so clearly true. And that truth has set me free at last. Free of my hunger for wealth. For the first time, I can go home. I can leave Asia poor of pocket and return to Europe rich in acceptance of all that may await me. You understand that, you who have been a slave. You know freedom."

  "There is a truth I must tell you." Malawangkuchingang spoke, her voice sounding far away. "At this moment, your life is forfeit. I have deceived the company man with his lust, and he has deceived you with your greed."

  Gefjon's benevolent face contracted. "What are you saying?"

  Terror whirled in her to see the sudden alertness in his face, and she forced herself to speak. "At this moment, your ship is surrounded by pirates, Tuan. God has favored Batuh."

  Gefjon leaped from his seat, seized the sword dangling from his chair, and hastened from the cabin. Malawangkuchingang took the Bible from the bed stand and hurried after him. They rushed faster along the cramped companionway when the alarm gonged wildly. Startled voices cried out. Gefjon kicked through the slatted doors and met the pilot scrambling across the quarterdeck toward him, kris blade in hand, face clenched with fury.

  "Lanun!" the pilot cursed. He pointed his knife seaward to where a flotilla of wind-slanted djong converged on Zeerover. Back-lit by dawn, the fleet massed black as a swarm.

  "Cannon!" Gefjon cried.

  The pilot took his arm and stopped him. "The powder's been doused. The cannon are useless."

  The first volley of arrows slashed over the decks, the alarm gong went silent, and the crewmen spurting up from the gunnery deck with krises and cutlasses dove for cover behind the longboats. An arrow stabbed into the plank between the captain and the pilot.

  "Hoist anchor!" Gefjon shouted. "Men to the sails!"

  The second volley from the closing djong felled the two men who scurried to the anchor winch.

  "Cut the anchor line!" Gefjon bawled, and an arrow sickled past his head.

  The pilot's stubbly face shone as he seized Gefjon by his elbow and turned him about. "Good-bye, cap'n. I will see you in heaven." With his free arm, he hugged Gefjon mightily, pushed away, and bolted down the stairs to the main deck, bellowing: "Cut the slimy line, you drunkards!"

  A plague of arrows swooped over the main deck. The pilot jerked sideways and stood pinned through his throat and chest to the miz
zenmast. The first djong thudded against the hull. Grapnel hooks crashed onto the main deck, and war shouts leaped to the yardarms.

  Gefjon unsheathed his sword and twirled about, slashing his blade in an arc to where Malawangkuchingang cowered against the companionway hatch. The point of the blade rested in the crook of her collarbones, and she stiffened. "You watered the gunpowder."

  "Yes."

  "Why? Why did you save me only to kill me?"

  "If you had died earlier, the others would have left. Batuh wants your treasure."

  "Treasure!" Gefjon cried out, and Mala's head banged backward against the hatch as the sword pricked her throat. "Is that my undoing? Greed!" His face went livid, but when he saw her clutching the Book to her breasts, he relented and stepped back. With a swipe of his arm, he drove the sword into the deck between them.

  Behind him she saw the pirates, smudge-faced, viperish men, bounding onto the quarterdeck. Below, many of the crew had jumped overboard and thrashed or floated in the water, speared like fish. Two of the men prayed until pirates hacked them where they knelt. Jan van Noot's piteous wails echoed up the companionway from his cabin. The Lanun had found him. Malawangkuchingang trembled with despair.

  "My vision was right after all," Gefjon said, meeting her terror with grim bemusement. "You are death — and all I've mined from my grave is greed. Christians and savages, all mining that dark lode! As if we could take enough out of the earth for all we must put in."

  The pirates grabbed the captain, one snatching his hair in a clawed grip and jerking his head back. A blade flashed blue with dawnlight and in one stroke cut through Gefjon's neck. His body collapsed under a jet of blood, and a triumphant hand raised his staring head against the lustrous sky.

  Mala fell to her knees, squeezing the Book to her body. The head had been sheared off so quickly that his eyes gleamed, alert and certain, gazing down at her with borrowed light.

  *

  The mansnake Jabalwan waited among the scaly-leafed casuarina trees that grew in the swampy plains behind the shore. From there he could watch the Lanun plundering the ship without himself being seen. Dawn flamed above the delta islands, and figures scurried on the decks of the ship, spectral and shadowy. The pirates heaved overboard the headless bodies of the Dutch. Jubilant shouts crossed the bay and reached the soul-catcher like the squeaky sparks of bats. He lifted his stern face to the sky and intoned: "I watch the clouds in the hands of heaven, their backs to the earth. It is the clouds that carry away our spirits. It is the clouds that return prophecy with the rains. Their love is all I care for."

  Only when Batuh and his warriors returned in their dugouts from the ship, bearing the heads of the captain and crew, did Jabalwan lower his stare from heaven and cross the bridge of fallen trees to the beach. At the sight of him, the warriors shouted their reverence and raised their trophies. The slave-woman, Bright Air between the Palms, rode with them. She cowered beside Batuh in their dugout, and she did not budge when her chief leaped to shore and strode triumphantly toward the soul-taker.

  Batuh stopped before Jabalwan and presented the heads of the captain and the company man, holding one in each hand by their hair. The company man's face had locked in a grimace of horror, while the captain's features conveyed quiet, his bloodless flesh gleaming like the underlight in a river.

  Jabalwan took the captain's head and dismissed the Tree Haunters with his blessing. Batuh glowered, disappointed to lose such a powerful head, bright with glory and bearded like a golden orangutan — but with the other nine heads and all the forest tribes waiting to see how he would dispense the bounty among them, he did not protest. The tribes, proud of him, eagerly awaited his leadership. His legend already traveled among the drum songs as the bravest of jungle wanderers, trapper of devil gods, slayer of Dajang, the old chief, and ally of the pirates. In fact, he was no ally of the Lanun. They would have fought him for Zeerover's treasure. He wanted only the heads. He had also demanded the return of Malawangkuchingang.

  Mala's fingers gripping the side of the dugout felt like feathers. Her body shivered, a slip of smoke. She stared hard at Jabalwan and Batuh standing among the dunes, not wanting to close her eyes, because behind her lids she still held the captain's burst look, his whole life in his face. Inflamed as an orchid, the captain's shorn head stared from inside her and would watch her till her last day.

  *

  Batuh could see Mala’s distress. He believed the land would heal her, and he took her back with him to Long Apari. His ambition to unite the tribes had become more than a dream now that he had produced golden heads with the power to lure rice out of the mud and draw wild pigs into the forest clearings. He distributed the heads among the powerful families of the tribes that would agree to accept him as titular chief of the forest peoples. The Snake Walkers of the south and the Stilt Hunters, the Tree Haunters' archaic neighbors, swiftly agreed, and their families immediately set to arranging marriages among the confederated tribes. The other jungle tribes resisted, reluctant to accept a ruler who did not live in their own longhouses. They became Batuh's obsession, and he spent the first months of his return wooing them to relinquish their autonomy. Eventually, Batuh won the fealty of all the surrounding peoples except the most primitive and remote clan, the Rain Wanderers.

  As Batuh prepared a war party from among the allied tribes, hoping to intimidate the aboriginal Rain Wanderers into submission, Malawangkuchingang swelled with child. Since their return together to Long Apari, she had been his only wife, not so much out of affection, for she behaved less affectionately than he remembered, but because his preparations for war had left him no time for his usual lasciviousness. Her impending motherhood infused him with pride. Though Mala was quieter and more withdrawn than when they had first been lovers, he cared for her. She had been his true friend and teacher, daring him with her counsel of love to be loved.

  In his language, the word for love meant trickle of water. Not the gush of the flood or the loneliness of clouds, those longhouses of nothingness, carrying their rains far away, merely a trickle, enough to refresh. He had never thought of love as more than that nurturing trickle. She had made him see that what was small was great. Alone in the jungle during his exile, alone with the monkeyfaced men in their sour-aired wharf city, he had remembered her transcendent, inescapable faith in life's trickle, and he had found strength. Now she would be the mother of his child; she would give him a son to inherit the kingdom he had carved with his trickle of life.

  *

  Mala's pregnancy teemed with premonitions. Shortly after her belly began to distend, a prodigious horde of dragonflies hatched in the surrounding creeks, and Long Apari flashed and clicked with so many of these iridescent insect eaters that for the first time in tribal memory meat could be hung from the trees to dry and not a fly would touch it. The pigs penned nearest Mala's end of the longhouse had litters of eight to ten instead of the usual four to six. The paddies facing her verandah grew plush with rice even though the land was shaded and unfertilized. The elders wanted to carry Mala through their fields and into their pigpens. Batuh would not allow it. He knew the omens presaged the birth of a mighty spirit, and he would not risk losing his heir to a slip in the mud or a bellicose pig. He forbade anyone to approach his wife closer than arm's length, and he arranged for musicians and storytellers to amuse her during her lonely days while he trained his army.

  Dreams of a clear light blowing like rain soaked Mala's nights, and by day the watertrace of dreams stained her sight so that colors seemed stronger, shadows gluey, and the crosswinds over the rice paddies blurry with half-seen shapes. The angels that Father Isidro, the priest of her childhood, had told her tended his earthly gardens had come to watch over her unborn. In secret, she studied the Bible that she had taken from Pieter Gefjon. When she could get away from the musicians and storytellers, she spent her days alone in the forest with the Book, reading, watching the bees lug their amber cargo, praying for the dead captain whose life she had saved only to bet
ray. In the pollen-drenched air under the blossoming trees, she sat so long and so still entranced by prayer that the bees tangled themselves in her hair and slumbered there. Later, when she made love to Batuh, the bees stung his hands, and his fingers swelled like gourds so that he could not even draw a bowstring or hold an ax. For the rest of her pregnancy, he refused to touch her. The old women of the tribe, who had kept account of all Batuh's amorous conquests from his first adolescent blunderings, recognized the spirit work that denied him his wife,

  In deep daylight, under the blue flame of noon, Mala gave birth to a boy-child. Through her protracted and difficult labor, the midwives chanted and sang to keep her alert. At the crest of her birthing, with her lungs scorched from withheld screams, a baby's cry jumped, and the songs stopped. No joyous cry from the midwives joined the infant's wailing, and Mala defied her exhaustion to sit up and see what had gone wrong. Grimed with afterbirth, wrung from her effort, she reached for the hands that had comforted her in labor, wanting them to support her effort to rise, to see her baby. They had gone. The infant lay at her breast with its cord still uncut, and the midwives who had attended Mala stepped hurriedly from the longhouse, stumbling over each other, hands over their eyes.

  Batuh, who had been waiting with his brothers on the verandah, gawked with bafflement at the midwives' hasty retreat and commanded them to return and help his wife. No one would obey. When the eldest midwife had safely reached the bottom of the notched log that served as a stairway, she looked up at Batuh and put her hands under her withered breasts to ward off evil. She grinned a toothless smile with scarlet, betel-stained gums, leering at the great man's misfortune. "The child is a demon," she said, then turned and scurried off.