Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  *

  Pym withdrew entirely into a wrathful trance, and he became as mute as Blackheart except when barking navigational commands. He could not bear to be near the sorcerer for more than moments, for the blond youth's quiescence mixed poorly with the choler inflaming him.

  At last, Jaki left him alone and busied himself with shipboard chores as Silenos sailed north among the myriad islands of the Philippines to Manila, stopping frequently at brambly islets, searching for the rag-flags of marooned sailors. A handful of men joined the crew this way, although most were too weak or wild to be of any immediate use. Saja fortified the enfeebled with herbal tinctures and the cook plied them with broths. The dark souls Pym took aside, and his own redoubtable pain circumscribed their fates. Their shared wounds bound them tighter than brothers — and in the black throat of the ritual night when Wyvern unfurled and the new recruits stood trembling before the demon visage of the viper bird, they stared into its mad eyes and swore their oaths with the vehemence of saints.

  Shahawar Shirazi was one such recruit. Blackheart and Jaki had found him among the drunks under an abandoned pier at the far, garbage-strewn end of Manila harbor. The only sober one in a company of the blind, the lame, and the limbless, he wore his turban unraveled and knotted about his throat like a scarf. Attesting to his Muslim faith, a green band intertwined through his long black hair, which hung braided in a coil over his right shoulder. The loose trousers he wore had streaked gray with wear, and his sleeveless black cashmere waistcoat was tattered, its embroidery rubbed to etched lines. At his side lay a scimitar sheathed in a mold-chewed scabbard. When Jaki queried him in Spanish, he told them that he once had been a boatswain on the Nur-e Siyah, an Arabic name he translated as Black Light. At the sound of that name, Blackheart, aghast, lifted the man out of the vomit-splashed sand and took him at once to Silenos.

  From Pym, Jaki learned that Black Light, a formidable Muslim warship, served in the employ of the Bantam of Siam. Thrice before it had stalked Silenos among the mazy islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Pym's lighter ship had eluded the six-hundred-ton Black Light with its seventy-two big guns. Even so, the fear remained that one day the deadly ship would catch Silenos between shoals or in a cove. Whatever information they could squeeze out of the sailor about the Muslim warship or its fanatical warrior-captain Rajan Kobra could save their lives.

  Plied with rice broth, the Byzantine-faced youth told them his story. Rajan Kobra had been a stern captain, intolerant of counsel from those of lesser rank and a fanatical stalker of pirates, driving his crew relentlessly. Shirazi, an impolitic upstart with a sharp tongue, had demanded more pay and incited the crew to unrest with his accusation that the Bantam himself cheated them of their rightful wages. Kobra set the youth adrift on the open sea, and by Allah's grace alone, Shirazi had landed in Manila, where he had attempted to find employ aboard a galleon. The Spaniards had no use for a Muslim boatswain, and so he had languished among the wharf rats until the day that Blackheart and Jaki found him.

  Pym pummeled him with questions about Kobra and his Black Light, and Shirazi detailed the Muslim warship's patrol pattern in the Moluccas, the Banda, Flores, and Java seas, as well as the watering coves where it took provisions and was occasionally careened. Shirazi possessed vital information, too, about Rajan Kobra's faith in the holy calendar. Nur-e Siyah, he told them, had been named for a Sufi belief, which claimed that things could be known only through their opposites — being only through nonbeing, and celestial light only through the black shadow cast by the sun. Rajan himself had taken his name from a Muslim saint of centuries past, and his faith demanded pilgrimages to certain mosques in the Surabaja and Djambi regions that kept Black Light away from the sea lanes on specific weeks of the year. So pleased was he with this intelligence, Pym offered Shirazi employ aboard Silenos. Shirazi, intent on avenging himself against his erstwhile master, readily took the pirate's oath before Wyvern.

  Outfitted with a newly bolstered crew, Silenos sailed south through the Celebes Sea to the cloud-scutted Molucca Passage and the fabulously wealthy spice vessels. Although wealth had never been Pym's objective — and was less so now that he had lost his Perdita — he knew that the seizure of ships offered the only way to temper his crew for the eventual confrontation with the archfiend Quarles. In Manila, he traded a handful of diamonds for corned powder, shot, and the finest Swiss-machined flintlocks. For the first time, Silenos had enough handguns for each member of its crew to fight like a gentleman, including the cook and the surgeon. Each day, Pym held drills, emphasizing alacrity in reloading and accuracy in targeting, and in a few weeks, every crewman qualified as a crack shot.

  For Jaki, Shirazi proved the most interesting of the new recruits, for he alone on board regularly spoke to God. Though several Muslims served in the crew, their faith consisted of superstitious, talismanic efforts to protect themselves in battle and from illness. Shirazi prayed fervently each day in his cabana, his berth ringing with musical utterances.

  Hanging in slings over the side to caulk timbers, Jaki and Shirazi shared their visions of life. Shirazi spoke of alam al-mithal, the middle realm between mind and experience, ideal and real, God and the world. "We are like sparks," Shirazi said through fumes of bubbling tar, "sparks that leap between heaven and earth. Our lives are that brief, our illumination that little. That is why we must always do what we dream. How else can our lives matter?"

  The sorcerer described his vision under the strong eye. "I saw then, Shirazi, that the enemy of life is not death but indifference. Just as you say, we must do what we dream — despite the pain. Prayers and songs are well enough, but action is the highest good. Only by doing what we know is right are we the sparks of light you speak of. Otherwise we are little more than creatures."

  Shirazi listened to Jaki with a melancholy comprehension in his Arab eyes. "You speak like an imam, a man who has the fidelity of faith. I did not expect to find one such as you among pirates."

  "Are we simply pirates?" Jaki asked. "We are sparks of the divine, too."

  "Silenos plunders cargo ships. That hardly merits divine sanction."

  "Life plunders life." Jaki shrugged. "That is timelessly so. If God sanctions hawks, panthers, and wolves, why not us?"

  "We prey on ourselves."

  "Could that be because we are made in the likeness of God? We mime our creator, Who destroys Himself in all He creates."

  Shirazi nodded contemplatively. "Perhaps that is so. The Koran speaks of God's majesty, which sets being on fire. That majesty is the black light. All other lights illuminate, but the light closest to God, the black light, attacks, invades, annihilates." The Muslim's dark stare became more pensive. "You have given me much to consider, Gefjon."

  Jaki liked the clean-shaven, turbaned young man who spoke of angels and who looked like one, with eyes dark as pools of scribe's ink, graven cheeks, and flesh the color of desert sand, unstained by tattoos. The ports of Sangihe and Manado weclomed Silenos for her gold coin despite her recent renown as a pirate ship, Jaki and Shirazi sported together. They rented horses by the wharves, and Shirazi delighted at Jaki's clumsy efforts at riding on the beaches. They hunted with flintlocks and the blowgun in jungle fringes and frolicked in the tree canopy, bounding with Wawa among the branches and swinging on lianas over green pools. Shirazi became Jaki's first true friend. Under rustling stars, picking lice from each other's hair by firelight, they exchanged stories of their homelands and laughed at the follies of childhood. Jaki, impressed by the Muslim youth's devotion to his faith, frequently knelt with him before the God of mystery.

  Off Ternate, they showed courage together. Silenos maimed a Portuguese carrack and sunk her escort yachts, yet the cuirassiers aboard defended her cargo of pepper and cloves with their lives. Shirazi threw himself among the brawny Portuguese, his scimitar stealing lives through the narrowest chinks of armor. Time and again, only Jaki's swift intervention saved him from saber thrusts and blows of hatchets. Yet Shirazi's idle regard for his
own life and his grandiose and precise savagery broke the enemy's defenses, and the pirates took the carrack with only a few losses. The triumphant raiders carried the Muslim warrior aboard Silenos on their shoulders, and Pym rewarded him for his courage with a fang of diamond from the dragon's hoard.

  Twice more, Shirazi proved himself confident of heaven's embrace and threw himself into certain death only to emerge heroic thanks to the intercession of his comrades. The fourth time proved the last. Silenos had pursued a well-armed Spanish warship on the sea north of Seram. The man-of-war had many more guns than the pirates, but Silenos's smaller cannon, faster-burning corned powder, and bore-angled trunnions far outshot the Spaniards. With her broadside caved in and all decks ablaze, the warship struck her colors — yet Pym smelled treachery.

  Shirazi volunteered to lead a boarding party, and Pym agreed, loading the skiff with powder-keg floaters to be used in the event of duplicity. Jaki joined the half-dozen men who followed Shirazi, and they tacked for the wounded warship, shouting for the Spaniards to lay down their weapons. The captain appeared with his hands open before him and ordered a rope ladder lowered. Before clambering aboard, Jaki tied twine to the matchlock on one of the powder kegs and unraveled it behind him. Once aboard, they found themselves surrounded by armed Spaniards who intended to hold them hostage in return for their ship's freedom. The captain's steel-hard grin froze when Shirazi's scimitar flew. "Kill them!" he shouted. Jaki tugged on the twine, and the powder kegs exploded, rocking the boat and shattering the tiller. The musketmen's shots spoiled, the fight fell to swords.

  Shirazi, washed in gore, plunged into the thick of the enemy, drawing blows away from his companions. Jaki followed, a cutlass in each hand, leaping like a panther. He would not sacrifice another human for himself— and when the Muslim slipped on a pool of spilled bowels and lay face up waiting for the cold crash of his doom, Jaki beat off the frantic enemy.

  Silenos slammed into the man-of-war, and her pirate crew swarmed aboard. At the sight of Blackheart swinging a knife-barbed chain and the pirates firing flintlocks with withering accuracy, the Spaniards conceded, laying down their weapons, and Shirazi looked to Jaki with dismayed surprise at finding himself alive. "You look disappointed," Jaki said, helping him to his feet.

  "No greater glory awaits a man than to die in battle slaying the enemies of Allah," he answered glumly.

  "If you continue to fight so recklessly," Jaki warned, "you will not long be disappointed."

  Pym ordered the enemy survivors set ashore on Seram with provisions. After emptying their warship of its cargo of gold, camphor, and spice tonnage, they scuttled the vessel. That night Pym convened a council under the torchlit Wyvern. There he laid out Silenos' itinerary and his plan for exchanging their booty for gold. After raiding the southern Spice Isles of Timor, Flores, and Sumba, they would beat west and north to Johore. Pym knew the sultan of Selangor, who would trade them bullion for spices. By then the rainy season would again be upon them, and they would sit out the big storms in Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, living like shahs with their stupendous wealth. The crew accepted his plan by unanimous vote.

  Two nights later, in the wind-trammeled Timor Sea with a starless wall of storm rising in the south, a wave swept Shirazi overboard during the midnight watch. Jaki and two crewmen lowered a four-oar to retrieve him, for even though he drifted within range of thrown floaters, he seemed too confused to grab on to them and was soon carried into the darkness. The storm kicked the sea into phosphorescent peaks before the four-oar could release her ties, and the two crewmen scrambled back aboard and shouted for Jaki to follow. But the sorcerer would not abandon the man who spoke of angels, and he threw off the lines and rowed into the night.

  Silenos vanished from view, and the cries of the men came and went with the whirling wind. This may be my death, Jaki realized, facing into the black depth. In one sense, he felt almost grateful. Pym had become demonic and silent since losing Perdita, and Jaki's cloudreading had offered nothing less than cruelty: the future toppled into a chaos of broader and more devastating wars. And what were these wars deciding? All war is futile. Pirating is futile. There is no end to the violence and the madness. To give his life for another in this night storm seemed fitting for a slayer of men, a pirate, a sorcerer whose legacy was the mountains' tears.

  Shirazi's bobbing head appeared in the froth-gleaming sea, and Jaki broke off his death reverie and quickly extended an oar for him. The warrior grabbed it and climbed aboard, huffing brine. He clutched Jaki ferociously, his face an anguish in the wind. "You! Again you keep me in this world!"

  "Not for long, brother!" Jaki shouted and pointed to lightning above the whitecaps and the black sea.

  Jaki and Shirazi crouched in the battered boat while the night raged and earth spun. Gusts of rain flashed like steel in the glare, and white-crashing swells tossed them high against the maniac night. Their hearts strained to splitting, and they wept with visceral terror, clasping each other until they sank into pain-smothering comas.

  They woke in the sibilant dark to see the storm shredding to star vapors and a burgundy moon. "You were wrong, brother," Shirazi moaned. "We live."

  "Yes —" Jaki answered, sitting up into a great clot of pain, "but without the provisions for life. No water."

  "Too much water, I think." Shirazi scanned the horizon and saw no shadow of a ship.

  Through their nightlong drift, they sat silent, each lost in the certainty of the slow death to come. At dawn, Shirazi said his prayers and held up his scimitar. "At your word, my weapon will cut you free."

  Jaki shook his head. "That is not the way of my people."

  "Nor of mine. Only Allah may kill us. And for that, He has a plenitude of ways. Sad for us He has chosen one of His longer paths."

  The sun came hard across the world, hot and relentless. The men sat with their faces down, turned away from the fired sky, shoulders draped with their long hair. Occasionally they looked up and searched the circling horizon. Remnant stormclouds lay on the north all day like scraps of iron. The rest of the sky was cloudless, a clear eye, perfect in its emptiness. Shirazi said his prayers at each of the sun's stations. Toward evening, the friends lay face up on the thwarts and slept.

  With dawn, the wind rose. The world was the horizon, lordly and full of light, the flawless edge between heaven and earth. Shirazi broke the silence with his prayers, then said, "On the big ship, we spoke casually of alam al-mithal, the middle realm." He picked at the gray splinters of the gunwale. "Now that is all. That is all there is."

  Neither of them looked up anymore to search the mute horizon.The four-oar lifted and fell on wide, gliding swells. Shirazi mumbled his prayers. Chilled in the parching sun, eyes bloody red, cracked lips scaled with salt, they lay mute. Shadows thrived in the air, heat shimmers gleaming off the sunstruck water. "Angels," Shirazi muttered. "Angels come ...” A lone cloud wandered the hard line of the sky. "Angels, here—"

  "Be still, Shirazi."

  "No, I must tell you, Gefjon. I must say it —"

  But he said nothing more that day. The sun fell, the wind banks in the western sky blazed briefly, and the sky filled with wild stars. Jaki touched his brow with the cool amber of Lucinda's ring, remembering her.

  Both men slept through the night and dawn. When they woke, the sky already flared white with sunfire. Jaki pulled himself upright, turned his face into the breeze musing from the west, and spied a dark shadow on the leaden water. "Shirazi!" he croaked.

  The Muslim stirred and raised his head. When he sighted the ship on the horizon, he moaned.

  "Silenos!" Jaki cried.

  Shirazi laid a cold hand on his arm. "No, brother. You see with your heart. Look closely."

  Jaki squinted into the hard glare and observed a larger vessel than Silenos, one with green sails and the figurehead of a black angel with spread wings.

  "Nur-e Siyah," Shirazi breathed. "Black Light."

  Jaki sagged back into the bilges.

  "As All
ah is my master, now you must hear me," Shirazi spoke, leaning close, his black hair dangling like eels. "I have betrayed my oath before the winged snake. I have betrayed Captain Pym. And I have betrayed you, whom I call brother."

  Jaki shifted so he could stare into the man's dark eyes. "What are you saying?"

  "I am saying that I am a spy. I am a Muslim warrior, a servant of Black Light and of her captain Rajan Kobra. When the Bantam of Siam learned from the British pirate hunter, Quarles, that Trevor Pym of Iduna marauded as Wyvern, he crafted a plan. Quarles knew that Wyvern would need new pirates. So, the Bantam ordered Rajan Kobra to place men in key ports, in the hope that one or more of us would be recruited. I alone succeeded."

  Jaki sat up, incredulous.

  Shirazi's lips stuck to his dry teeth, and he rasped with belabored breath: "I was to learn all I could, then at the right time and place jump ship and return to Black Light, whose whereabouts I have always known. But the mission did not sit well in my heart." He gasped, and breath caught in his dry lungs. "I expected to spy on pirates, not men who speak of alam al-mithal. To spare myself the indignity of betraying men I admire, I tried time and again to die for Silenos in battle. And you — you kept saving me."

  Jaki sank on himself with comprehension. "Why did you not stay aboard — stay with us?"

  "I could not betray my first fealty," Shirazi answered, his hand falling away from Jaki's arm. "Again I tried to defeat myself. I jumped ship before the tempest, believing that would kill me before Black Light could find me. And again you saved me."

  "Now Silenos is lost."

  "Rajan Kobra is a hard captain," Shirazi replied, darkly. "He will not care that you speak of angels. He will do all he can to make you talk of Wyvern."