Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  The pirate's jaw jogged loose, and the crew edged closer. "A naked jungle boy mangling Castilian!" he exclaimed in gruff Spanish, a laugh of surprise breaking across his face. He was by nature a suspicious being — Matu could see that from the squint lines around his narrow eye. Matu also observed the night gathered in that eye, a soul used to staring at hardship. Suffering eked from his gaze. Yet deep in the graven lines of his harsh face nested a wondering expression, and Matu thought he heard a tinge of awe in his voice as he said, "Welcome aboard Silenos, young warrior. What will you be called?"

  Matu understood the question, but he could not bring his tribal name into Spanish, so he reverted to the name Mala had given him from her ill-fated encounter with the Dutch. "I am called Jaki."

  "Ah, as it says here in your family tree," the pirate said, running a thick finger over the faded writing in the Book's cover. "Your grandfather's name, aye? But your own birth is not recorded here."

  Jaki's expression went sullen. "I am the son of nobody," he replied. "I had many fathers but belong to none."

  The sly gray eye crinkled compassionately for a moment before it hardened again. "You will be Jaki Gefjon then," he said. "A Dutch lad — and with native blood in your face, I can see. How old are you?"

  "I am in my sixteenth year."

  "And how came you to this misfortune?"

  "I was taken from my land by the Lanun," he answered softly.

  "What happened to your parents?" the hulking man asked.

  Jaki could not bring forward the words of his story. The ugly man slapped him brusquely on the shoulder again. "There will be time enough later for singing our strange tales. Your wound needs a clean dressing from the look and stink of it. And if you want, we will find you some sailor's clothes." He returned the Bible cover.

  "Forgive me," Jaki said, inhaling the soft energies of the sea. "If the ship is called Silenos," he asked, "then are you Wyvern?"

  The man threw back his head with a laugh and punched his hand in salute to the mainmast, to the frayed flag stretched as a topsail, bearing the image of a two-legged serpent with wings. "That is our Wyvern, boy. A creature of dreams come to feed in the real world. And how have you heard of our beast?"

  "The pirates cried that name when they first saw this ship."

  He slapped both of his hands on his chest with satisfaction. "I'm gratified that even the Lanun have learned to fear Wyvern," he said proudly, wholly liking this white savage — "though they're not our usual prey. We don't stalk the djong pirates, but when we meet them, we help ourselves to their cargo and ease them from this tormented world." He waved to the shattered junk, which sunk from sight. "They're empty men, naked souls, better off without this world oppressing them — or them oppressing earth's innocents like yourself." He fixed his eye on Jaki. "My name is Trevor Pym," he said slowly, "designer and builder of Silenos, erstwhile privateer with Sir Francis Drake, with whom I raided the Spanish cities of the New World and thus acquired some facility with this tongue."

  "Are you also the captain?" Jaki asked.

  Pym turned to the attentive crew and bawled in Malay, "Am I the captain?"

  The men shouted their affirmation, throwing caps in the air and whistling. Though wearing storm-beaten faces of malefic scars, tattoos, and beards spiked with boneneedles, they dressed cleanly in long gray trousers and full linen shirts. Most of them were barefoot, but some wore leather shoes frilled with rosettes.

  "It appears I am still captain of this ship," Pym said and put an arm around a fire-faced man with red curls and full beard who stood at his side. "This is Mister Blackheart, the ship's quartermaster and my missing eye. He runs the ship whilst I spend my time visiting with the spirits." He raised the crocodile-skin flagon from under his doublet and took a draft.

  Mister Blackheart nodded his sunburned face and grinned through his dense, bristly beard. He and the captain seemed to be the only blue-eyed monkeyfaces among the crew, the rest looking much like the Lanun except healthier and better dressed.

  "Mister Blackheart is the only other European aboard," Pym said. "I don't usually abide Europeans. Or any who truckle to kings and queens. We're equals aboard Silenos. You'll hear all about that later. For now you should know that Mister Blackheart is not your usual European. He's a Scot and a defender of his Orkney home against James — the king who decided all Scots should serve him. The king's men slaughtered his family, and our Mister Blackheart lost his eloquence for stirring up rebellion against kings."

  Pym signed, and Mister Blackheart opened his mouth and revealed a blackened stump of a tongue.

  "Cut out for rousing his fellow Scots against foreign rule." Pym shook his head at such barbarity. "He hates kings worse than I. Ah, but I'm chewing wind. You need to clean up and rest. And I can see all this means little to a heathen lad like you."

  "Kings are no different from you or me," Jaki said quietly. "I know, for I have slain the king of my people's enemy."

  Pym pulled down the corners of his mouth and nodded as if impressed. "Is that so? Well, then, we've new stories to hear and new ears for our stories, Mister Blackheart. Take him below deck, patch his head, and find him some suitable attire. We'll hear his story after he's dressed and eaten." Pym took a long swig, winked his eye at Jaki, and stalked off to survey the plunder.

  The quartermaster led Jaki across a deck blond with cleanliness and down a tight stairway that smelled like the inside of a tree. Jaki ran his fingers over the satin of varnished wood, amazed at how the light seemed to seep from the grain like sap. The roll of the big ship was gentler than the junk, and he adjusted his gait to it.

  The sight of twenty-two cannon along the gunnery deck, their sturdy carriages strapped with elephantine ropes, filled Jaki with incomprehensible ardor. The inheld might of the guns' black metal impressed him. Never had he seen so much iron. Mister Blackheart had to lead him away by the hand.

  The ship's surgeon swabbed Jaki's head wound with brandy as the boy ogled saws and scalpels, phials and clear glass jars of herbal tinctures.

  The surgeon gestured to himself, a tiny Malay in a green turban, white pongee shirt, loose black trousers, and rush sandals. "Saja, call me," he said. He fingered the amulet Jaki wore and spoke in a crude imitation of a forest dialect, "From jungle sorcerer, lah? This headstyle ancient. Long time not seen. Who give this?"

  "My teacher," Jaki replied, exuberant at the sound of his own language even though garbled. "It's the head of my spirit father, and my teacher took great care to prepare it in the correct way."

  Saja's thin eyebrows shot up to hear the tribal tongue spoken lucidly by a European. "Teacher, lah? Headtaker, lah?"

  "No, not a headtaker. My teacher was a soul-catcher. He trained me as a sorcerer."

  Saja released the small head as though he held a live coal. "You soul-catcher?" Disbelief sharpened to startlement as confirmation shone in the boy's blue stare. Saja backed away quickly, bumping into the cutting table on his way out the door.

  Mister Blackheart tilted his head with bewilderment and signed for Jaki to follow. They walked through narrow gangways lit by skylights to the stern of the deck beneath the gunners, where they came upon a small laundry chamber. Jaki scrubbed himself with a cake of pumice and lavender and rinsed off with a pail of warm fresh water lowered through a hatch from the galley above.

  At the sight of Jaki's circumcision scar, Mister Blackheart grimaced and chopped his hand across his groin like a knife.

  Jaki laughed, for the first time in the three moons since Jabalwan had died. The laugh cut through the callous pain of his grief, and his senses brightened. "I did it for a woman," he said in Spanish. "And it was not worth it."

  Mister Blackheart understood. Shrugging with laughter, he led naked Jaki down another stairway to the fourth and lowest deck, where they entered a dark chamber big as a longhouse. The quartermaster opened port hatches, and azure sunlight showed crates heaped with bolts of silk in brilliant junglebird colors. Red, blue, and black leather chests trim
med in brass and stacked atop each other in packed ranks filled the length of the deck. Amidships, in the crystal shine from the great skylight at the top of the cargo well three decks up, a shroud bulked. The sea breeze from the open ports flipped the corner of the tarpaulin and revealed a large pile of smudged metal bars. "Silver," Jaki breathed, softly, as if in a holy chamber. He lifted his face toward the high skylight and the scaffolding two stories up that served as catwalks across the cargo well for the men on the gunnery deck. The maritime glow and the broad roll of the ship brought the Book's Jonah to mind, and he quoted aloud: "For thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas."

  Mister Blackheart considered him for an instant, nodded thoughtfully, and guided Jaki through the capacious storeroom past casks and crates to the draft-cooled stern. Ambrosial fragrances beckoned from large open bins of fruit and vegetables. Behind a paper screen racks of clothing swayed. Mister Blackheart riffled through kimonos, gowns, vestments, and court finery and selected a fawn-skin vest, brown trousers with black stitching on the outer seams, and a blue zibeline shirt with cartridge pleating.

  Jaki took the clothes with vague arms, amazed to feel the soft fabrics. He held the trousers to his waist and trembled like a deer. These were his father's garments, he thought, and by wearing them he put on his father's soul. The sepulchral shadows of the low-ceilinged deck swerved with sealight and breezes. Presences circled him. Mystery had turned its circle again, and he looked to the quartermaster with his heart's blood in his face.

  Mister Blackheart helped Jaki dress, providing a green satin pouch for the shrunken head and the Book's cover, and then led him through the timber-scented corridors and upstairs to the galley. Slabs of spiced meat, chains of garlic, and hands of gingerroot hung from the rafters. A tureen of boiling soup sat on an iron stove with lionpaw legs. Beside it, a long-haired Chinese chopped vegetables. He scooped cooked rice into a wooden bowl and ladled hot fish broth over it. Blackheart left to take the wheel while the pilot plotted the day's course. Jaki ate voraciously. He left the galley satisfied with the soup's promise and eager to defy fatigue and get back above deck to learn more about his generous hosts.

  He stopped in the empty companionway. Shafts of serene blue light stood beneath the hatches like pale tree trunks. Alone for the first time since the Lanun had captured him, he put down his green pouch and knelt. He thanked God for his deliverance from the Lanun, and he listened to the faint voices of his blood. "Jaki," Mala called, and he looked behind him at empty sunlight. The immediacy of her voice had set his heart hopping. He listened again and heard the sea hugging the ship, foreign voices scooting through hatchways, and wind walking like an old man. He was no longer Matu. She knew that, and she had just told him she knew. Jaki had put on his father's clothes.

  On this boat, in this boat's world, Mala had life. The sound of Spanish had pulled him swiftly into her shadow, and he grasped that she was not near at all. She was far, far away in the green forest where the rains rose at night, and he was now a ghost to that world. He had died to his mother's forest and been reborn in his father's womb. The strangeness of it broke over him like a stream, tasting of the weariness of the mountains.

  His fingertips brushed the soft fabric of his new clothes. He closed his eyes and spoke to the invisible. "I am alive in the afterworld, Mother! And you are dead in the forest. Speak well of me to my spirit father and do not forget me to my seed father, though he did not earn your love in this life. I am in their world now, at the mercy of their powers. And they are strange. My fathers are men of the horizon. Their father is the wind. They are as ugly as I. I am afraid among them — and I miss the forest. The forest is your mother as you are mine. I hope that I will see her again and meet you in the trees and rivers, touch you in the still waters and the long grass and know that I am safe and have never been away from you."

  He opened his eyes. Men watched him from the corridor. Solitude was a ghost of the forest. He bowed to the crewmen, picked up his green pouch, and climbed the narrow stairs into the light.

  *

  Pym stood on the quarterdeck sighting the sun with a backstaff, and Mister Blackheart held the big wheel. Jaki lingered on the top step, watching the large man with his back to the sun holding the brass contraption with its flashing shard of mirror at the far end. The quartermaster stepped from the wheel, and his hand scrawled busily to record the captain's words. Jaki blinked, as intrigued to see a man writing as by the odd apparatus.

  Pym lowered the backstaff. "Those clothes suit you," he said. "You look like a lad from the island where I grew up." Pym nodded at the congruity of the clothes and the youth's devil-handsome face. Yet something seemed amiss, an odd center of gravity to the boy, a wolf-slouch that made him look ready at each instant to pounce or flee. "Come here, lad. You don't need permission to walk the quarterdeck on this ship." He fit the backstaff into a cabinet built for it in the gunnel. Above the cabinet a strap held a whetting stone carved in the shape of a giant rat's skull. Pym rubbed it affectionately as he rose. "You and anyone else in this crew can go wherever they like on Silenos, including my cabin."

  Jaki stepped onto the quarterdeck and scanned the giant ship. The rake-masted vessel had refitted her sails, and the black canvas had been replaced by smokegray sheets that caught the wind and skimmed them swiftly over the sparkling sea. Men dangled from the shrouds tightening the rigging, and Jaki's soul rode with them up into the mango clouds.

  "The surgeon tells me that you're a sorcerer," Pym said. "Is that so?"

  Jaki looked to the captain with the glare of the masts still in his eyes. "Yes."

  Pym weighed this disclosure. "You speak with the dead?"

  "Yes."

  The captain's eyes screwed up intently. "What do they say to you?"

  "They don't talk back."

  Pym and Mister Blackheart laughed in unison, and when they caught the puzzlement on Jaki's face, they laughed louder. Pym brushed a tear from his eye. "Excuse us, lad. We're laughing with relief. Saja says you commune with the dead — and the last thing we want on this ship is ghosts wandering the decks. We've enough trouble with the living."

  The quartermaster signed to Pym, and the captain said, "Mister Blackheart wants to know what kind of sorcerer you are."

  Jaki pondered a response and finally said, "I was learning to catch souls before my teacher was killed."

  "Souls, eh? And what do you do with them after you catch them?"

  "I put them back in their bodies."

  "Ah, then you're telling us you're a surgeon."

  Jaki recalled the blades and saws on the wall of Saja's cabin and looked skeptical. "I am trained to heal wounds and fevers."

  Pym winked slyly at the quartermaster. "And what do you think you can do for this wound?" He flipped up the gem-studded patch over his dead eye and revealed a socket of mangled flesh, syrupy with pus. The grin under Pym's mustache stalled when the youth did not blanch and look away.

  Jaki stepped closer. He had seen eye wounds before, and he could tell from the red membrane filming the bone and the blisters of festering sores that the captain endured continual pain. "You are suffering," he said with concern and touched the captain's stubbly cheek to turn his head so that light fell into the back of the bone cave. A yolk of abscess smeared the socket's lining. "This could easily fever and kill you."

  "I wash it with brine every day," Pym said, angrily, "though it burns like a peephole to hell. Let it kill me, I say. It's taken long enough. Eleven damned years now."

  "I cannot return your eye," Jaki told him. "I can clean the infection and stop the pain."

  "Can you now?" Pym asked, and lowered the patch to keep the stinging sea breeze out. He lifted his flagon and sucked deeply at the coconut ferment. "I'd be indebted to you, lad, if what you say is true. Any number of leeches and ship's surgeons have plied their tricks on that hole. Some have numbed it. Always it gets worse again."

  "I can help you," Jaki said with certainty. His stare had something un
spoken in it. "The pain and decay will go away and not return. But I must go into the jungle to get the plants I need."

  Pym's face clouded suspiciously, and he stepped back. "We're twenty miles north of Celebes. We can stop there."

  "I don't know Celebes," Jaki said. "I know I can help you only if you return me to the beach where the Lanun abducted me."

  "And where might that be, young sorcerer?"

  "The Snakehunter's Grave."

  Pym looked to Mister Blackheart, and the quartermaster's hands shaped signs in the air. The captain's face hardened. "That's Borneo. We're over two hundred miles from there. I'll not backtrack that far now." He leaned closer to Jaki, a shadow in his gray eye. "You've seen our treasure. Silk, silver, rich clothing, artwork — the cargo of a thousand-ton Dutch carrack we took in the Java Sea on its way to Batavia from the Japans. I want that booty on land before a storm or the Spanish take it from me. The journey you're asking us to make will add four days sailing."

  The quartermaster signed, and Pym nodded grumpily. "Yes, yes. We can put our treasures ashore and then find your Snakehunter's Grave — if we want to miss harrying Hsi Hang's gold flotilla north in the China Sea. He sails only once every four years. That's too much to give up even for an eye. And after that voyage, it'll be monsoon time, and we'll be landlocked for months." He rubbed his chin and cocked a furry eyebrow at Jaki. "You wouldn't be lying to me now, would you? That might enrage me, and then I would be using your bones for fishhooks. You understand?"

  "I am not lying. Unless we dry up the yellow blood eating its way to your brain, you will die."

  The pain behind Pym's eye socket winced, and he looked to Blackheart. The quartermaster kept his hands on the wheel and gaze on the sea. Pym thought of the booty in the ship's hold. He carried these riches to his wife, Perdita Iduna. When she received his treasure, he would lose all his pain in her joy.

  He looked up, resolved to take Silenos to Perdita — until he met the sorcerer's ingenuous stare. He lunged to his feet. "Hard aweather, Mister Blackheart," he ordered, slapping the pate of the ratskull whetting stone. "I'll put our case to the men."