Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  A terrified cry dropped from the crosstrees. "Ship aft!"

  Pym dropped Jaki and bounded to the sternpost. Full sails set, pearl bright in sunlight, The Fateful Sisters gleamed from around the Klang promontory, riding the same strong wind that had carried them past Black Light.

  "We're at hell's gate once more!" Pym cursed. "We'll need your sorcery again to outrun that devil hound."

  Jaki squinted up at the scimitar clouds, saw them blunted and blurring to windy vapors. His magic spent, he passed a woeful stare to Pym. The pirate captain nodded, patted the sorcerer's back. "You proved your worth," he said, tugging contemplatively at the gray bones in his mustache. "Now we'll test mine." He stepped to Blackheart's side. "Wean her from the coast slowly. We'll get fewer crosswinds in the open water. We need every knot now."

  Pym paced from the quarterdeck to the forecastle, studying the set of his canvas, quickly replacing rent sails and reading the wind precisely so he could order swift changes on the yards and catch the most speed. Silenos flew through the channel. Even so, by noon The Fateful Sisters closed to within cannon range. Through his spyglass, Pym could see Quarles in the forecastle staring at him. Pym waved. Quarles did not wave back.

  The first round from The Fateful Sisters' prow cannon splashed into Silenos' wake. Pym tried trailing gunpowder floaters, but Quarles would not be fooled twice by that. Marksmen on the prow detonated the kegs before they could reach their target. Silenos' stern cannon, firing into the wind, did not have the range of her pursuer's guns, and the shots fell short. Flight remained the only option, and with each hour, the enemy drew closer.

  Midafternoon carried The Fateful Sisters within cannon range, and the prow guns blazed, again and again. Thirty-pound iron balls smashed Silenos' stern castles, disabling her aft guns, shattering the cabin rafters, and collapsing the back ends of the two inner decks. Two shots punched holes at the water line, and the sea flashed in.

  The pirates staunched the flow with bolts of canvas. The gaping holes still bled water, and the bilges flooded. Pym rushed below deck to supervise the bailing, relieved to see that the tiller and rudder continued to function undamaged. The British ship's heavy firing had blunted the speed of her pursuit, and Silenos' crew could expect an hour's reprieve before the next assault. Jaki joined the bailing crew. They bucketed water out port hatches, melted tar and gobbed over the weeping canvas. The work nearly done, the crew rejoiced briefly before the thunder of cannon gloated. The hull above the bilges blasted inward, spraying whole timbers. The bulwarks shredded with a deafening roar, and brazen sunlight flooded in.

  A wave of doom rose up in Jaki. He scrambled over the debris and crushed bodies, ignoring the wails of the wounded to reach the gangway. He was determined to meet his death in the open.

  The quarterdeck had collapsed to shambles. The sternpost had cracked, most of the taffrail was missing, the rat god whetting stone lay in pebbles underfoot. Blackheart was gone. The planks before the helm had dropped away, and Pym stood there, steering with his legs spread wide on the beams that supported him. His face gleamed with tears. Wawa cowered beside the binnacle and scurried to Jaki's side when he stepped to the smashed quarterdeck.

  "Blackheart," Pym wept. "Cannonball took his head off!" Jaki saw the trail of blood across the tattered planks. "I threw his head after his body! I threw his head into the sea after his body!" He brushed tears from his face with the cuff of his red shirt. "I thought you were dead below. The last rounds caved in the castles. There must be carnage below."

  "There is." Jaki stared aft at their stalker, fallen back now after the fury of her last barrage, and wondered if Lucinda was aboard. "We're done, captain."

  Pym grimaced. "We're done when we're dead! Never forget that, lad, and you'll live until you die. Look at the men."

  Jaki saw the pirates hard at their stations, hanging in the shrouds, keeping the rigging tight.

  "I'll not give up my life— or theirs." Pym's one eye gleamed, wide and staring. "Quarles is death. And we might as well be a dying man in a sickbed fighting the croup. We'll hold on till it strangles us! By God, we'll hold!" He pointed west to the slouching body of Sumatra, where the sun barbed distant mountains. "In an hour we'll be running with the twilight. An hour more and it'll be night. Take the helm, boy. I'm going to shoot the sun."

  Jaki jumped astride the broken gap of the deck and seized the wheel while Pym got out his backstaff. Blotting tears from his eye, he sighted the sun in the backstaff's mirror and shouted the markings as though Blackheart were there to note them. Then he collapsed the staff and unfurled the charts.

  "Here we are off Tandjungbalai," he said, jabbing the chart. "Ahead are a bluff and a pride of reef islands. We'll reach there after dark and lose Quarles. Mark me, if this doesn't happen, my soul will stand for yours in hell."

  The sun sank, and night rains shrouded the stars. The Fateful Sisters fired her prow guns into the twilight. One shot crashed into the starboard rail and kicked out the poop deck's gunwale, carrying another seaman to his death. The other shots flew wild. By dark, the British vessel lagged behind the intrepid Silenos, and Pym ordered the day sails reefed and black canvas set, all in running sequence, losing little headway. With every light doused, Silenos sailed by soundings into the reef islands, and they watched The Fateful Sisters, with her sprigs of light blazing from her lantern-hung bowsprit and rails, float by within musket range. When her lights dimmed to sparks on the horizon, Silenos drifted out into the open water and then made sail northeast for Selangor, where Pym knew a sultan who, for diamonds and gold, would help him refit his vessel.

  Even with sturdy planks laid over the hole before the helm, no one would stand as helmsman where Blackheart had lost his head until Pym offered triple pay. Jaki accompanied Pym below deck to survey the damage. Saja, busy with the wounded, would work the night through, while the crew ceremoniously buried the dead at sea. Pym's cabin had collapsed to the deck below, and he and Jaki rummaged through the debris searching for an ivory map case that Pym insisted on finding. Shortly after midnight they located it among the stalks of Pym's crushed rosewood desk: a truncated tusk, big as a forearm and carved with human-faced Byzantine lions. Pym handed the carved tusk to Jaki. "This is yours now, sorcerer," he said in a voice slurred with fatigue and grief. "There are maps inside, drawn from my time in the New World, thirty years gone. They're yours, now that my time is done."

  "Done? I thought you weren't done until you were dead. You look hale enough to me."

  "Aye, but I've a foretaste of my doom," he answered. "Losing Blackheart took the wind out of me. Without my pneuma I won't be going much further, boy." Then briskly, "I'm resolved to it. Life has been abundant with me, and freer than anything except love could redeem." His face darkened. "I touched that love briefly with Perdita." He gazed round at the devastated cabin and met Jaki's rueful stare. "And that love touched me again with the naked world's beauty after you healed me of my headpain. When I thought I'd lost you in that storm, I grieved that I had ever raged at you. For you have shown me that love is its own truth." He paused. "The truth of love soaked me at Njurat when I met the very embodiment of Wyvern in your cursed mother of life. What a monster she is, eh? She woke me up to the truth. And yet I fell asleep on my bones after I lost Perdita. Only now do I see that to be truly awake is to be in pain — and pain makes us want to sleep. The mother of life loves us to death, doesn't she? You know that better than any man I've met. And that is why I'm giving you this —" He held out the ivory canister. "My charts of the Caribbean. They show in great detail its numerous islands, reefs, and seaways. When I'm gone, leave Asia. The likes of Quarles own this corner of the world now. Empire is voracious. You showed me that in the clouds. Don't let it devour you as it has me. Go to the New World, where there's room yet for unknown pirates to harry empire. And harry them fiercely, boy. Harry them in the name of the darkness that holds all light. Harry them for Wyvern, the mother of life."

  Jaki did not have the heart to inform Pym that
his pirating days, too, had come to an end. No rage burned in him like that which had fueled Pym's career. He yearned for love, for his love, Lucinda, whose ring he touched to his heart to remind him of life's inestimable promise. With his other hand, he took the tusk carved with the shape of lionmen.

  "Captain, you are alive," Jaki said with a force that echoed too loudly in the ruined cabin. "You will rebuild Silenos."

  Pym lifted a twisted piece of metal from his shattered chronometer and laughed mournfully. "Take my offering and leave me to grieve my quartermaster."

  Jaki carried the tusk of maps topside with him, and he and Wawa climbed into the crosstrees to relieve the watch there. He touched the amber ring to the tusk and tingled to feel two destinies exclusive of each other meeting in his lap. An Asian, he longed for Europe and for Lucinda and his children to live under the silver peaks of the Alps. The tusk, a tooth of the unknown, contained maps of mystery, and he almost threw it overboard. He did not want anything of the New World. He wanted life and love, a fate simple with self-indulgence. He wanted Lucinda. Yet he knew he could not have her now — his fate as a pirate had not quite finished.

  "Love solves distance," Pym said to Jaki once Silenos had anchored in a cove in Selangor. A noon storm rolled fire and purple smoke over the seaward horizon, and green clouds hung above the jungle flats.

  Jaki, dressed in buckskin breeches and a blue billow-sleeved shirt without collar, wore at his hip Shirazi's scimitar and around his neck Pieter Gefjon's shrunken head. Hatless, his hair swept back and hung in lovelocks over his shoulders. With Wawa at his side and his blowgun leaning on his shoulder, he prepared to begin his journey south to meet Lucinda.

  Pym and Jaki stood together a last time on the quarterdeck. The wounded ship already under repair, the air rang with the sounds of hammering and sawing.

  "No matter we will never see each other again," Pym said, his one eye bright with sorrow. "I'll never see Perdita or Blackheart again either, and my parting with them was not so sweet as this. Love solves distance, lad. Whatever separates us, we share the love that healed the pain of my lost eye and that taught you all you know of the sea."

  "Will you come with me?" Jaki asked, gesturing to the blue-hulled skiff with furled sail bobbing alongside Silenos.

  "And spend the rest of my days landlocked while you sire your family?" He swept his arm at the shore. "This is as close to land as I shall ever be. If I'm lucky, I'll die at sea." He winked and took a swig to fortune. "One word of advice to the lovelorn, lad." He lifted the dangling shrunken head with his stubbed fingertips and shook his head. "I wouldn't be wearing this when I went calling on my ladylove were I you."

  Jaki chuckled politely. "I'm wearing it only to help me with our parting, captain — to remind me of where I came from, so I can see clearly where I'm going."

  "And where is that, Jaki Gefjon?" Pym asked, raising a hand to his face to wipe away rain and tears.

  "I was fathered by money," he answered, "and reared by a people who had no word for money. I grew up in the morning of the world. I grew up restrained by instincts, though my teacher tried to free me. Always I have wanted my place in the world. And my instincts were not enough to save me from the guns and the gunmen who wanted money. And so I met you — my last father."

  Pym nodded, the rattails of his hair gleaming with rain. "My fate is different from yours. I never knew the morning of the world. I was born to money and did not know its evil until it turned on me." A frown creased Pym's serpent-scarred brow, yet he smiled. "Let us say no more. The truth cannot be added to." He hugged Jaki. When they separated, he reached into his pocket and removed the black leather Bible cover pierced by the Lanun pirates' nailhole.

  "Keep that for me," Jaki said. "From here, by your training, I can leave the dark mine of my past and enter the light of the world, where I will find my own home."

  “Go then. And let this remind you ever more of heaven's evil joy." Pym opened a duffel bag beside him. Inside was the ship's flag, folded to a triangle, and a silk pouch big as a coconut. "Wyvern," the captain said, and passed the duffel to Jaki. "A Chinese artist stitched her for me three decades gone. I want you to have her. And the pouch, too. It has what's left of the mountains' tears. I owe you that for your magic. If you're going to take a wife and live in the world's wound, you'll need a fortune." He embraced Jaki again and pushed away. "Go now. We'll be together in our wanderings."

  Pym turned away and shouted commands to the men hoisting timber to the main deck. Jaki stared a last time at his broad back and wild silver hair and lowered himself into the waiting skiff. Wawa swung down after him, and they untied and set sail into the rain-glimmering afternoon. When he looked back, he saw Pym aboard an empty piragua with Saja and two crewmen, rowing to shore to secure more medical supplies and provisions. Jaki tacked into the wind and only then glimpsed the snout of a big ship rounding the jungle-strewn bluff of the cove. His heart lurched.

  The Fateful Sisters glided into view.

  Jaki turned and witnessed Pym pulling up to the beach as a bevy of armed men lurched from the shrubs at the edge of the sand. They seized the pirate captain before even a knife could flash, and Jaki could hear Pym's roar of protest. The captain threw a fist toward Silenos before three men subdued him and pinned his arms back. He struggled mightily, and Jaki knew they were going to shoot him. A flintlock rose and fell, glancing Pym’s head, and he went down.

  A signal fire glinted on the bluff overlooking the beach — and Jaki understood then that Pym had been betrayed by Selangor's sultan. The Fateful Sisters was too far away to see Pym, yet Jaki was certain Quarles had orchestrated this drama. Pym was a prisoner and Silenos the prize.

  Jaki cried out in a wrack of fury and futility. He wanted to turn about and fall on the men who had seized the pirate. Yet even in his rage, he knew that was certain death and would accomplish nothing. He saw the desperate men on the decks of Silenos, waiting for their ship to be taken. Four-oars lowered, some of the crew prepared to flee, while on the shore, British soldiers piled into piraguas to give chase. She won't be taken! Jaki brought his skiff about and aimed her for the pirate ship.

  Riding the wind, Jaki reached Silenos and tied off as the British piraguas shoved into the bay. He clambered up a rope the crewmen lowered, Wawa on his shoulders, and shouted orders for the men to gather the wounded and abandon ship. Then he had five of the gunners follow him below and help him stoke the cannon. "Wait until you're certain of blowing them to hell," he commanded, and grabbed a long coil of fuse. He hurried below deck to the powder room. Frantically, he crawled in headfirst and was halfway through when the ship's cannon boomed and the timbers shook.

  In the dark of the powder room he unstoppered a keg, knotted the end of the fuse, and thumbed it into the keg's opening. When he reached the gundeck, the fuse stringing behind him, the gunners had already fled. Through the ports he spotted debris from the several piraguas that had been blown apart. Several more yet closed in. He took one of the smoldering cannon tapers the gunners had left behind and lit the fuse.

  Cannon thunder rolled across the cove from The Fateful Sisters as Quarles tried to disable Silenos' guns and prevent her crew from escaping. The gunmen in the skiff argued about leaving Jaki behind until he appeared at the rail. He swung into the boat on the loose rope, and Wawa skirled down after him.

  The Fateful Sisters fired her broadsides, and the two escaping four-oars that carried the wounded blasted into flying shards. Jaki unfurled the skiff's sail, and as they luffed from Silenos, more shot struck the pirate ship, collapsing her masts, shearing her bowsprit, and crushing her quarterdeck. The British piraguas reached Silenos, and the men climbed aboard and raised the Union Jack on the poop deck.

  A gargantuan explosion tore through Silenos and lifted the ship off the water in a fireblown cloud. The blast spun flaming timbers into the sky, and the gray waters of the cove heaved upward tattered with fiery groats. Smoke-streaming chunks of the smashed ship crashed into the bay, splashing wate
r over the skiff. The crewmen ducked into the bilges, and Jaki stood, staring hard at the glut of fumes and rubbish spluttering in the chewed water where Silenos had floated.

  He took the tiller and steered the skiff among the debris. A bright wind slashed from a radiant break in the storm banks, and the small boat sliced through the flogging rain toward the iron horizon of the sea.

  *

  The explosion of Silenos rattled the timbers of The Fateful Sisters, and Lucinda's seventeen winters rose up in her all at once. She had been sitting curled in her bed for days, thriving on the pain from the cut flesh of her lashed back while The Fateful Sisters pursued Silenos. Her father, who had never taken her on a military expedition before, insisted she attend the chase and destruction of her pirate-lover's ship. At the clangor of bells and whistles that called the crew to their battle stations, she had curled under the bedsheets, trembling with each cannonblast as if struck. When the explosion that shattered Silenos shivered the planks of her cabin, she rushed to the box windows. Smoke rolled by like fog, and a damp gust speckled her with the acrid char of gunpowder. Leaning out the window, she could see nothing but two four-oars and a blue skiff sliding through the rain toward the sea.

  The timbers shook again as the two trailing four-oars flew apart like smashed jugs. Lucinda turned away, aghast at the sight of scattered, torn bodies.

  Maud cried, "I see him!" She pointed through the open window. "There — standing in the sailboat."

  Lucinda looked again, her hand cupped against the wet wind, and recognized the blond figure of Jaki Gefjon. Quarles saw him, too, through his spyglass from the upper deck. The skiff glided beyond range, too spry to pursue along this lacy coast. Small difference, Quarles told himself, knowing that the new moon would deliver him the hopeful defiler of his daughter. From Maud he had extracted the time and place of the lovers' next meeting and, with a welting blow across her face to allay Lucinda's suspicions, had sworn the maid to silence. For now, Quarles would content himself with the capture of Asia's premiere plunderer. He ordered Lucinda on deck for the arrival of the prisoners. He wanted her to see her handsome pet's cohorts.