In the days that followed, Jaki devoted his full attention to the marvelously strange foods served in Iduna, the better to keep his mind distracted from his fatal attraction to Pym's wife. He found the jungle meats and fish familiar, but the frothy delight of the honey malt ale and the grape wine left him giddy and yearning for the embrace of the long-haired lady of the kingdom. He sampled bizarre vegetables from distant lands: cucumbers from northwest India, asparagus and cauliflower from Persia, wild peas, woody beets, turnips, and carrots from Flanders, tomatoes from the New World, haricot beans from Africa, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, and cherries planted in Gothland by Romans a century before Christ. When he could eat no more, he wandered the extensive lawns of the tiny kingdom and sometimes ran naked with Wawa through the jungle in an attempt to exhaust his crackling desire for the untouchable Perdita.
At the end of one of his furious runs, he burst through a wall of jasmine vines into a high field overlooking the mansion. Its lotus ponds and mirrored trees blazed with twilight. Perdita wandered out of the waist-high grass, having climbed the flagstone paths to sit in solitude with her desire for the azure-eyed boy. When she confronted him naked to the waist, aglow with sweat and clearly awed at the sight of her, the pull between them defeated all resistance.
They embraced and collapsed in the grass, only to have Wawa leap atop Jaki's back and screech loudly. Jaki flung himself away from Perdita in time to spot her eunuch escort climbing the flagstone path to the wild field. The sorcerer’s eyes lingered for a moment on the mistress of the estate, and then he turned and followed Wawa back into the jungle.
Jaki spent that night sitting in a tree, filled with darkness for betraying the man who had saved his life. Is passion always an accident? Had he not already seen that the truth of woman was death? Where have I been? I am numb to the Life. I am not a sorcerer anymore. Maybe I was never a sorcerer. I refused the strong eye at Njurat. Now I am blind. My belly is my face, and hunger is my only sight. "Jabalwan!" he called into the darkness, and a char of silence blackened the jungle. "Who am I?" The devil's son — with a belly for my face.
Buffeted by guilt, he thought of killing himself, and the same necessity that had made him offer his hand to the Spider years before commanded him to confront Pym and let the pirate captain do with him as he would. With the first ash of dawn, he walked out of the jungle and down the flagstone paths to the great house, Wawa trailing behind.
Pym waited for him, sitting on the white pillared porch in a giant fanback cane chair. Alone, his big cuffed boots propped on a dragon-carved taboret, he gripped in his big hands a cutlass. Jaki stood on the marble steps before him. "Captain, I have betrayed you," he said, somberly.
Pym's boots banged to the porch, and he lurched forward, swinging the cutlass in a hissing arc. The blade snicked the breath under Jaki's nostrils, and his whole body flinched yet did not move. Pym guffawed and thwacked the cutlass into the taboret so the haft stood straight up. The pirate's laughter expanded, voluble, and a tear silvered his eye. "Ah, Jaki," he said, cuffing the boy behind the neck and leading him onto the porch, "you really are a soul-catcher, aren't you? And you've plucked my soul from hell. If you had not come back to face me, you would have betrayed me."
"I have put my hands on your wife," Jaki blurted. "I have felt desire for her and would have —"
"Aye, but you didn't." Pym brushed the tear from his eye. "I understand lust, boy — and I abide it. That eunuch was not there by accident. I keep my one good eye on what is mine. My heartbreak is that she wanted you. With a heart as dark as mine, heartbreak is daybreak."
"I ... I don't understand."
"It's one of those things you must feel to understand," Pym answered wearily. "You have cured my eye and let me know my wife for the first time without physical pain. And you have stirred a passion in my wife that hurts me with this bodiless pain I will feel whenever I am with her … for the rest of my bloody life." A blur of anguish shadowed his face — and was gone, replaced by a hard grin. "Your courage in coming to confront me proves the pain is my own and not the treachery I maybe wish it was. That's why I laugh. The gods toy with us, boy, trading pain for pain."
"I will never touch her again," Jaki promised, his voice incandescent with sincerity. "I will become a eunuch."
Pym laughed. "Keep fondling other men's wives and indeed you will."
"I mean it. I will cut off my offending part."
"Then it's your head you should cut off." Pym grabbed Jaki's testicles and squeezed them just hard enough to send a jolt of pain up his spine. "Desire can't be cut away, you fool. Life will kill all of us soon enough. Be patient."
Pym let Jaki go, and the boy dropped his gaze to the ground. "I am nothing but hunger."
"Of course. You are a man. We must find you a woman."
"I'm luckless with women."
"So it seems. Still, we dare not let your lack-luck thwart nature too long," Pym said. He sniffed the brightening air. "The rains will be here soon. There'll be no prey in the trade lanes, so we shall go touring. First, we shall cruise the islands, and you will learn English, by God. Then, with the storms at the height of their rage, we must test our cunning and heaven's favor on the high seas. I am resolved to introduce you to the great courts of Asia, where you can do to their women on land what we do to their ships at sea!"
*
Remorse smothered Jaki's passion for Perdita Iduna, and when they met in the mansion's dining hall during each day's boisterous feast, he did not meet her amber gaze. Yet he felt her stare even when alone in the suite Pym had set aside for him and Wawa. From the servants he learned that Perdita had been luminous with happiness since marrying Pym eleven years before and had only become languid since his own arrival. Her whole life had been devoted to the careful observance of her ancestral traditions, tribal rites expanded to accommodate the Christian faith of her Portuguese grandparents, and she had used her great wealth to educate the people of her parents' tribe. The tribesfolk, the citizens of Iduna, manned her trading ships and warehouses and rivaled the kingdoms of the Spice Islands in their contacts with the European capitals. Even the humblest family had forsaken their tribal ways and converted to Christianity. And now the whole kingdom prayed to the nailed god for Perdita's salvation, for they believed that her unholy desire for Jaki would provoke heaven's wrath and destroy their new-won affluence.
Pym, less irate than heaven, forgave his wife and blamed only himself for introducing her to the tall youth. Perdita was Pym's soul, and he understood the earthly temptations of a soul bound to so brutish a body as his. He forgave her and watched her more greedily thereafter.
The day that Silenos departed with Pym and Jaki aboard, the citizens crowded the wharves, waving frond crucifixes in the hot rain. Jaki stayed out of sight in his cabin and peeked through the bay window. He saw Perdita standing alone at the end of the longest pier, her coppery hair strung with rain, the gold ball earrings swinging as she waved goodbye.
*
Jaki assuaged his remorse by diligently attending to whatever task Pym demonstrated. In their first weeks at sea, roaming the watery maze among the jungle isles of the Philippines, Jaki learned the use of maps and the secret of Mercator sailing, which few navigators of the time had yet grasped. Though all sailors knew the world to be round, few knew exactly where they sailed on the sea even with an accurate map in their hands, because few had the mathematical skill to convert distance on a flat map to the course of a ship over the curved surface of the globe. Pym had mastered this, and he taught Jaki how to use a cross-staff to measure the altitude of a star from the instantaneous stillpoint at the crest of a swell and determine latitude. By day, they used the backstaff to avoid staring directly into the sun. They gauged distance by running a line knotted at regular intervals behind the ship from a spool while singing a well-timed chanty or marking time on an oval verge watch taken from a Dutch prize. Soon Jaki became proficient at multiplying the east-west distance they had run by the secant of the latitude to get
their change of longitude.
Pym prized his marine chronometer. While still a student at Oriel College in England, he had learned of a Flemish astronomer's discovery, a century earlier: Timed observations of heavenly bodies could provide a reference frame within which to determine longitude. The difficulty fixed on the fact that no timepiece offered both accuracy and durability aboard a ship at sea. Pym did not solve the mechanics of the problem until, in a sunstruck courtyard of a palace in Macao, he watched children playing with a gimbal ring on a Chinese toy: a yin-yang globe of carved ivory, attached to two bearings at right angles, connected by a ring so that the yin-yang remained horizontal no matter how it turned. He replaced the yin-yang globe with a clock mechanism and, by doing so, invented the world's first chronometer, a hundred and thirty years before it became commonplace.
The pirate captain kept the chronometer in his cabin, a perpetually accessible, doorless stateroom with mullioned windows on three sides and map easels, a globe, and a mounted telescope arranged on a Persian carpet. Here Jaki received most of his European education, in navigation and English, history and courtly manners. Free of his oppressive pain, Pym delighted in reviewing the knowledge that he had ignored for over a decade, and he sumptuously recounted what he knew.
Jaki learned the history of the Greeks and the Romans and the empires that followed, cut from the cloth of conquest by Charlemagne, the Saracens, and the feudal kings. History came slowly to the jungle youth, and Pym found it easier to teach him folk songs and popular dances. To the amusement of the captain and his mate, Jaki became adept at court dances — the gavotte, the quick-tempoed courante, the stately allemande — all of which Jaki practiced with Blackheart while the ship musicians played jaunty tunes and sailors cavorted with each other in high-spirited imitation.
Under her silver-gold banner, Silenos called at Manila to trade surplus goods from her Dutch prizes for Spanish bullion. The red-tile-roofed city was the first true port Jaki had seen since Jabalwan had led him to the outskirts of Bandjermasin. He reviewed the galleon-crowded harbor with awe: the stone-walled settlement with its three-storied buildings, a massive cathedral like a mountain with many eyes, horse-drawn carriages, and plumed cuirassiers with bright metal shirts.
At a court function to which Jaki and Pym received invitations as emissaries of Iduna, they mingled with dignitaries from many nations. Jaki's striking good looks attracted the attention of the court ladies. During the dances, Pym gloated to see the Spaniards' eyes flashing as the eager youth made advances with women that these aristocrats had been endeavoring for weeks to meet. Once, out of his ignorance of court protocol, Jaki almost provoked a sword duel with a jealous officer, and only Pym's intervention and apologies spared the boy. Though Pym had covered his serpent brand with a black headcloth and had replaced his red, gem-studded eyepatch with a simple gray one, he still presented an imposing figure, and a few mollifying words from him served to put off the challenge Jaki had inadvertently inspired.
During the seven hundred and fifty-mile voyage from Manila to Macao across the China Sea, Pym supplemented his navigation, language, and history lessons with an introduction to sword technique. "The most important thing to know about sword fighting," he told Jaki as he handed him a rapier, "is to avoid it. Fighting for honor is an alp of stupidity. In a close fight on a ship, there is no formality, and a flintlock or a cutlass will serve you best. If by some miscalculation you find yourself in a formal duel, you must obey the rules, for if you do not, then even if you win you will lose. The second and the witnesses will seize you, and you will be summarily executed. Always avoid fighting for honor. Or learn to do it very well."
From the mizzenmast, Pym dangled a coconut on a rope, and Jaki practiced jabbing it while it swung and the deck rolled under him. When he had become expert at thrusting, Pym demonstrated what he knew of parrying and feinting within a narrow compass. Jaki's speed astonished Pym. The boy had the reflexes of a mongoose in a cobra's shadow. The rapier, a chrome blur in his hand, intuited blocks and attacks before Pym could voice them. The crew shouted encouragement as his silver flash of steel weaseled through the captain's strenuous defenses and tapped his heart. Swift as he was, Jaki succumbed time and again to feints that confused his toetip reflexes, and Pym concentrated on teaching the boy to slow down and think.
Jaki's lessons were interrupted late one afternoon by the sighting of a large junk. Pym fixed his telescope on it, and his hulking body quivered with delight. "Hsi Hang!" he shouted, and the crew cheered in anticipation. "Hard a-port your helm, Mister Blackheart! Break out Wyvern! Ready cannon!"
Pym handed Jaki his rapier. "Get below deck, lad."
"What's happening?"
"Hsi Hang, that shifty seasnake, is running his gold junks to Singapore and Jakarta against the monsoons, thinking we're landlocked somewhere. Who knows how many boats he's sneaked past us already? If you hadn't grabbed my wife, we might have missed even this one." He stung Jaki's cheek with a friendly slap. "Now get below till this is over."
"Let me help."
"No," Pym said adamantly. "Hsi Hang outfits his gold junks with opium-crazed Mongols. They fight like rabid wolves. There'll be no quarter. Get below."
Jaki seized Pym's black doublet. "This is my life now. I've taken the oath before Wyvern. I must see the worst of it."
"You may die," Pym snarled, "or, worse, be maimed. I won't be watching for you."
Jaki contained his excitement with cunning. "We're dust in the wind, Captain Pym."
Pym's grin shot straight back. "Then you're more a pirate than I. For the gore of it then, put those toys away and get yourself a flintlock and a cutlass. And stay close to Blackheart."
Jaki locked Wawa in his cabin and rushed up to the quarterdeck in time to see Wyvern unfurled on the topmast. Its nightmare shape riffled with wind, and it gaped with damned eyes, mad with the world's anguish, tar-winged, viper coiling to barbed legs and talon-loaded claws. The sight of it turned his stomach, and he wanted to go below deck again and hide with Wawa. Only the Spider held him fast beneath that banner of life's enemy. The nightmare was outbound, and his fate stayed here on the quarterdeck, in the fumaroles of the dying sun.
The gun rack empty, only a bone-handled cutlass leaned against the sternpost behind the wheel where the quartermaster steered. Blackheart read his look and nodded. The mute's face scowled, intent, and Jaki felt a cold rush as he passed him. Death's shadow. He picked up the cutlass and faced into the red skein of the western horizon.
Silenos ran parallel to the junk, and it tilted sharply as its cannon boomed and gunsmoke snapped into the wind. The junk's lugsails blew away, and its cannon spit flame and puffed. The dark water splashed white alongside the pirate ship, and the scud of the impacting shot misted over the decks. The second volley's roar cut through the echo of the first shots, and the junk's gundecks flew into the air like a swarming hive.
Silenos veered sharply and cut across the wind to intercept her prey. Spars grinding, sails crackling, she descended on the smaller ship like a cat. Jaki stood at the rail with Pym and glared down upon the infuriated Mongols waving their parangs and muskets. At Pym's sign, Silenos turned and fired a third volley from very close. Powdersmoke rose with the pitch of the ship, violet in the gloaming, and when the ship rocked back the junk's gunwales had sheared away. The shattered decks sagged, and the Mongols skeltered in a panic. With the tiller snapped, the junk trolled.
Blackheart swung Silenos into the junk before the damaged ship could whirl about and bring its intact cannon to bear. A loud thump shook the big ship's timbers, and Pym howled, "Board!"
Grapnel hooks flew from the main deck and hooked the junk's shattered rails. Pym retreated to the wheel, and Blackheart took his cutlass and signed for Jaki to follow him. He dashed down the stairs to the main deck, Jaki close behind. The sorcerer leaped over the rail where a rope had been tied off and shimmied down to the battered deck of the junk. A musketball intended for Jaki splintered the rail as he leaped over it, and
he landed in a crouch behind Blackheart.
The quartermaster had drawn his flintlock and peered through the mêlée for a target. Men locked in sword-clashing conflicts on all sides. A pack of Mongols erupted from a gangway, and Blackheart fired into them. One fell, tripping two others. Jaki came face to face with a snarling warrior. Backhanded he struck with his cutlass and felt the man's skull crack like wood under his blow. When you must kill, he heard Jabalwan's voice amidst the screams and battered echoes of clashing metal, let the animal in you do the killing.
"Jabalwan!" Jaki shouted, hacking at the men scrambling to strike at him. His blade swooped through a sponge of flesh, and hot blood slapped his face. "Jabalwan!" his lungs squeezed painfully, hysterical with the memory of his teacher's corpse slumped on the blood-daubed earth. Gaumy with gore, he swung at clenched faces and upraised weapons, cutting a path through the angry men stabbing at him. Lopped limbs flew aside, terror sirened around him, and he ran forward with a murderer's strength, sobbing now for the breath cut from his teacher.
Blackheart fell back, shocked by the man-eating fury beside him. Spools of blood spun in living coils and headless men fell away from the crazed killer. The sorcerer shouted something Blackheart could not understand. The Mongols doubtless knew the demon, and those kill-crazed warriors turned and fled across the splintered deck. Most of the slaying already done, the pirate crew squatted among the corpses and watched in cold fascination as the death-hungry boy cut a meatroad across the deck. At the far rail he turned, mired in blood, his body heaving in great sobs.
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