Blackheart took the cutlass from his bloody hand and held it high. The crew cheered and stepped over the sprawled bodies to gather around him, touching him for the vital mana of lost lives steaming invisibly off his shivering limbs. Pym had seen the whole slaughter from the quarterdeck, and he blessed the falling light that had masked the horror. His heart twanged like a harp, and he did not know if he should turn away or kneel in awe. He shouted for the gold to be brought aboard.
In the junk's hold, the crew found seven hundred pounds of gold, the largest prize Silenos had ever taken. The crew wanted to turn about and return to Iduna, but stormclouds blackened the east, and starcrofts still glimmered in the west. Pym ordered Wyvern struck and the Iduna flag raised, and Silenos returned to her course, running ahead of the gale winds.
Back on the big ship Jaki scrubbed the blood swarf from his body in the laundry cabin, donned sailor's trousers and a leather vest, and climbed up into the mainmast to stare at the axle of darkness turning the stars. The angry power that had blown him into a killing frenzy had passed entirely away, and he lay on the crosstrees feeling wispy and unreal under the starfoam.
The lavender fragrance of the goat tallow soap lilted off his scrubbed flesh, yet he still smelled the blood of the men he had killed. No, not I, he corrected himself. The animal you found in me, Jabalwan. That did the killing. The same animal with its face in my belly, its tongue in my loins, lapping at death in the scent of women. Its claws are in my feet, teacher, scratching for a place in the dance of the tribe. The dance I have no place in. Not in the tribe. For I am the devil's son. And not on the dancefloors in the great cities of my dead fathers, either. For I am a pirate. The Life is nameless, and yet It names me. Why can I not be as other men? He listened for Jabalwan, for some memory that would disdain his pity, and he heard nothing.
*
Pym became especially strict with his charge after the slaughter of the Mongols. The fury that had possessed the jungle boy had frightened Pym deeply enough to stir the pain of his oldest rage, the rage that had made him a pirate, and he resolved to share his story with this primeval witness. After a twilight carnival of rowdy feasting and drinking, Pym and Jaki sat together on the quarterdeck.
"A lie branded me a traitor," Pym told the boy. "And that lie is the world. That is why I wear no hat. I have no rank in the world. So I allow myself no disguise for the lie branded on my forehead. It is my distinction before God to prey on the world, to feast on the lie. All nations are pirates. I alone am truthful, because a lie made me so." He sucked a breath through flared nostrils and began to tell how, for eleven years, he had been bound in a Lucifer's harness of pain — an obedient dog of hell since the afternoon he lost his left eye in a knife duel with a Spaniard. "The Spaniard lost his life," Pym confessed with a growl, "and sometimes, boy, I envy him for it."
Pain had been Pym's saga all his adult life, and he often thought on his youth, forty years past, when living was ruly and poetry came to him without brandy. His family, he said, had a history old as fishes and loaves, a naval family who could trace their lineage back four hundred years to William of Wrotham, keeper of King John's ships. His father, a commander, died at sea in an engagement with the Spanish off the Azores when Pym was two, and afterward Pym had traveled with his merchant uncles, from Sweden's necklace inlets to the starfish sands of Greece and North Africa. Educated in the academies of diverse ports and then at Oriel College, lordly Oxford, he studied mathematics and architecture, read Petrarch's Latin for the pleasure of the sound, and composed cunning sonnets about youth's waste and the jealous undereye of death.
"Hah!" He grinned like a gnome. "My poems stirred passion in several courtly ladies, and I very nearly married and became a stanchion of the society I've spent the rest of my life defying. Imagine that — Lord Trevor Pym, shipbuilder for the realm. Ah, that was not to be."
In 1585, at the age of twenty, Pym received a Royal Navy commission that committed him to his humbling fate. He sailed that year for the Caribbean as a junior officer on one of a fleet of twenty-nine warships commanded by Sir Francis Drake.
The captain shook his head as though he could barely believe his own story. "Our mission was to raze the Spanish Main, no less, and it was during the sackings of San Domingo and Cartagena that I learned to kill. And I witnessed death astride whole towns. The stink of corpses became common as the briny smell of the sea. Heaps of bodies — the harbors clogged with gas-bloated bodies."
The havoc of war seemed to him a wanton disputation of the Great Chain of Being and of all the noble ideals he had adopted at Oriel, and he became surly with disillusionment and doubt. Soon the exultant crew and the glory-swollen officers ostracized him, and thereafter he fulfilled his nautical duties silently and mechanically. Years later he would realize that this silence of horror had been his first act as a pirate.
A short time later, Samuel Quarles, one of the captains of the fleet, selected Pym to accompany him ashore at Antro Cay on an eccentric search for a blue rose reputed to grow on the sand shelves of the Caribe. Anchored outside Antro Cay, Quarles carefully recorded in his logbook a single perfidious sentence, which sealed Pym's fate as an outcast forever: Mister Pym, he wrote, has insisted on manning the tender into Antro Cay.
"Insisted! Never!" Rage clawed the pirate's ghastly face. "I avoided that man, because he was imperious. He ordered me to take him ashore."
In truth, the search for the blue rose had been a hoax, and Quarles' lie about Pym a treacherous and greedy plan: Quarles, a prodigal heir, had whittled away his ancestral fortune and gone deep into debt to finance his captaincy in Drake's fleet. His magisterial airs and personal bravura had disguised his plight, even to his superiors. No one suspected the man’s desperation or venality, which had prompted him to sell the fleet's schedule to the Spanish. A chest of Incan gold promised him by the governor of Cartagena in remuneration for his treason lay in a tide pool cave on Antro Cay. (This Pym learned later from the Spanish governor himself.) Quarles chose Pym to row him there, because Pym had a reputation as a morose lad and openly disaffected: an easy and credible scapegoat for the betrayal.
He planned to shoot Pym as he lugged the chest from the cave. When the Spanish had finished ravaging the English fleet, they would return for him with a galleon to convey him to Europe. He intended to make his way back to England quietly. With his Incan gold secretly secured in his coffers, he could easily spin an adventurous tale of Pym's duplicity and his own miraculous, God-given survival. As it happened, the Spanish attacked prematurely, while Pym still labored in the cave grotto struggling with the chest. Cannon thunder drew him out in time to find Quarles sending mirrorflash signals to the galleons. Outraged at the obvious betrayal, he attacked his captain and they locked in a grim struggle. Only Quarles was armed, and Pym lost the top of his right ear in wresting the cutlass from the traitor.
The pirate fingered the remnant of his ear. "The pain made me crazy, and I drove the blade into the captain's heart."
A skiff of armed English crewmen had sailed for the cay to retrieve Quarles when the first Spanish warships rose on the horizon, and their arrival fixed Pym's destiny in hell when the crew witnessed him slay the captain. Hauled back to the besieged ship despite his protests, Pym waited in shackles until after the Spanish assault had been repelled. The fleet captains tried and condemned him to death for treachery and murder. The chest of Inca gold, which allegedly bribed Quarles, remained hidden in the tide pool, never seen by the naval court. The tide had rushed in at that hour, and the court-martial would not wait for fear of another Spanish attack. A special iron kept on the gundeck to intimidate cowards pulsed red in a lead-smelting oven before it branded Pym’s brow with the snake sign of perfidy.
As he stood on the arm of the mainmast, a rope about his throat, his brow blistered like tar, the feared second assault came. A fleet of warships swooped out from behind the surrounding reef islands. Spaniards overran Pym’s ship and carried him aboard the admiral's galleon a hero.
Abandoned eventually by the Spanish in Hispaniola, Pym wandered into the forest and became a mountain bandit. He robbed wealthy estates until the day he stole a slave ship in Isabella Harbor. After training the slaves as sailors, he began pirating under a flag emblazoned with the coiled serpent of his shame.
With the booty he accrued raiding Dutch, French, and Spanish cargo vessels, Pym designed and built for himself his own ship, the fleetest and most maneuverable warship in the Caribbean. At first he called it Sin and carved on the bowsprit lines he bastardized from Spenser's Hymns.
Running a finger over the serpent-coil burned into his flesh, Pym recited:
"I down descended, like a most demiss
And abject thrall, in flesh's attire,
That I might pay sin's deadly hire
And myself restore unto that happy state,
In which I stood before my hapless fate:
In flesh at first the guilt was committed;
Therefore in flesh it must be satisfied!
"And so it has been." Pym's eyes widened, and a smile shot from under his braided mustache.
In 1596, Drake returned, and Pym, after a decade of exile, had his revenge off Porto Bello. There he attacked Drake's fleet in Sin, gad-flying the English ships until they gave him chase. His trim ship held back enough to let the English believe they gained, and he lured them into a pincered cove of gun-mounted cliffs, a Spanish trap in which Drake was killed.
After that, Pym's skill as a buccaneer was touted in all the European capitals, and the English crown, while publically identifying dysentery as the cause of Drake’s death, privately offered an additional and prodigious reward for the pirate’s head. The Caribbean became dangerously small for him, and he followed the southern routes through the storm-lashed Straits of Magellan and across the chartless South Pacific to the Spice Islands. On the long sea crossing, short of provisions and hallucinating from hunger, he envisaged his snake emblem sprout legs and wings. Thus the womb of madness conceived Wyvern.
For seventeen years, Pym met little resistance as he plundered the great merchant ships that Europe sent to Asia to enrich her kings, queens, and companies. He never abandoned his nostalgia for the practical sciences he had learned in his college days, and his ship and crew prospered into the most able under sail. Pym culled all his mathematical and design skills and applied them to perfecting a peerless man-of-war.
While other ships had clinker-built hulls laden with ornate carvings, carvel-seamed Wyvern presented a smooth line, sleek as a shark and painted to blend with the horizon. She had black sails for night running, and blue and cloudgray for day camouflage. Outfitted with one of the first steering wheels in the hemisphere, Wyvern easily outmaneuvered whipstaff ships, which had to be steered by altering the trim of their sails. Wyvern also had a rounded stern and a flanged keel — revolutionary in the age of the flat-sterned galleons — which made it agile enough to zip in and out of rocky coves and reef barriers. No ship could catch her when she fled. And when she pounced, none could elude her. Wyvern’s twenty-two short-barreled cannon burned corned powder, which flared faster and more evenly than the serpentine powder used by almost all other long-cannon ships. And Pym had trained his gunners to shoot thirty-pound balls so accurately that enemy gundecks blew apart without damaging the cargo holds.
Pride owled his eye. "Wyvern is devilish with tricks. But her greatest weapon is her maps. Her maps, sorcerer — accurate and as new as science can fashion them. You see, knowing precisely where we are at all times, we have supremacy over our hunters and our prey. Wyvern's infamy wins her numerous prizes without a fight. And that leaves us more time for this." He lifted his crocodile-skin flagon and drank deeply, then continued his story.
Pym's success had been spoiled eleven years ago, in 1613, when, already famous and immensely wealthy, he had lost his left eye during a brief skirmish with a Spaniard. The hurt wore him like a skin, and he drank to elude his wound. During this dissolute time, he renamed his ship Silenos, after the lewd and drunken satyr of Greek myth.
"Why did you fight the Spaniard?" Jaki asked.
Pym smiled. "We fought over a woman, over the incomparably beautiful Perdita Iduna, the fifteen-year-old virgin daughter of the warlord of Eloilo in the Philippines."
The warlord had been an aborigine with Portuguese blood eager to win the favor of the powerful Spaniards in his island kingdom of Panay. He would gladly have given his daughter to the Spanish officer who had asked for her hand in marriage if Pym had not offered him the fortune of a prince — a casque big as a boar's head filled with pearls and gold. The warlord took the treasure, and Pym wed the girl in a Panay ritual.
During the ceremony, the Spanish officer arrived with a squad of armed soldiers. Pym's pirate crew faced them down, and to avoid a blood bath, Pym agreed to duel the officer for the hand of the girl.
The officer was a wizard with a knife, but Pym willingly took ferocious cuts as he pressed his massive size close enough to overpower the officer and thrust his blade through his Spanish ruff and into his throat. One of the cuts Pym took spilled his left eye down his face. He had Saja fire the wound with gunpowder and pack the socket with a wad of brandy-soaked silk, and then he went ahead with the wedding.
Pym never regretted losing his eye for Perdita Iduna. The ideal wife for a pirate, she attracted men with her narrow body and her heathery scent — yet passionately loyal, forgiving Pym his long absences. She even claimed pride in his violent defiance of empires. And he spent all his wealth on her, building her an opulent estate in Panay and surrounding her with servants and luxuries. She bore him two sons and a daughter. All died in childbirth, almost taking her into the afterworld with them. Pym cursed each one of them. He had not married her for children, and to protect her life he had had Saja remove his testicles. The pirate captain cast them in gold, and after that, Perdita Iduna wore them as earrings.
The dismayed look on Jaki's face brought a laugh from the pirate. "Now you know why she was never without her earrings. Marring my body means nothing to me. I've never been a handsome body; I'll not be a handsome corpse. As well as missing this eye and the top of my right ear, I've lost joints of fingers on both hands. And this —" He tapped a stubbed finger to the livid scar of the snake. "Long before the Spaniard marred me, I was a ghastly-looking lad, and I regret the loss of my eye only because of the maddening pain that harpied me since my wedding day. Wine and murder were all that afforded relief — until you healed me, sorcerer." He stood up and leaned over Jaki. "You healed me — and now all my pain is exiled to my soul."
Jaki watched the pirate captain stomp drunkenly down the forecastle steps and across the main deck to his cabin. The sorcerer could not yet give himself to sleep.
The captain's cruel story circled back on Jaki like a nagging song, and he could not ease his mind. All evil from forgetfulness, Jabalwan had taught. Pym was the evil of the world's fear and forgetfulness, and yet he had saved Jaki's life. Like Mala and Jabalwan before him, he was the new life of pain for Matubrembrem, the Spider in the world's web — who would either kill him with his teaching or, in an agony of change, empower him to live as a sorcerer in his fathers' realm.
His very life was at stake; even so, these thoughts left Jaki cold. Indifferent to Pym's rage against the world, he felt just as indifferent to his own life as a sorcerer. All ambitions — all wants — were lies before the truth of death. He wanted only to live the life of the animal with its face in his belly, and that simply because he found himself alive. From here, life led
everywhere — and so nowhere.
Jaki gazed up at stars and listened to the deep-chested ship striving through the water. The passion and deep nobility of life grew from suffering. No matter the hurt he felt for all he had lost to death, he would endure as Pym endured and as Jabalwan had. The edgeless mystery demanded that of all life.
Jabalwan's soft laugh echoed from the repose of memory: Shut up and get some sleep, Matu. The truth will still be there when you wake up. A soul-catcher is the living pain of the world.
*
The morning that Macao's bay came into view, Pym presented Jaki with a sword belt of Moroccan leather and a serpent-hilted rapier. "Eighteen years ago I took this off a Spanish man-of-war in the Banda Sea," Pym told him, "and I've never had to use it in a duel since. I hope you are as wise with it."
Jaki received the weapon with cold fingers, feeling the death in it. The leather belt was stained a dark blue, like the sea far from land, and constellated with tiny silver studs. The weight of the sword at his hip dropped his gravity's center deeper into his pelvis, and he had to practice moving with it, promenading up and down the decks. The crew laughed, thinking him vain, and he ignored them. The days he had spent shod in Manila had been uncomfortable, because he still had not grown accustomed to the profuse clothing these people wore. His movements had been hampered, and that was dangerous. Yet even after leaving Manila, he had insisted on wearing the shoes Pym had given him. Slowly, the leather had surrendered to his splay-toed gait, and he had learned to move gracefully with those odd encumberments. Adjusting to the sword actually came easier than feeling the deck through shoe leather, and when Silenos docked in the palmetto-frilled bay among numerous galleons, junks, warships, and yachts, Jaki carried his weapon with ease.
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