*
Quarles waited until night, until The Fateful Sisters was running south through the black strait and Pym's cries had withered to silence, before he collected a skin of brandy and climbed down to the orlop deck to see his prisoners. He had stowed the three pirate crewmen below in the stinking heat of the bilges. Pym he locked in a bamboo cage above them, on the lowest deck, and though the cage was too small for him to stand or stretch out, and no hatches vented the fecal stink from the surrounding animal pens, he was less likely to contract the hemorrhaging sickness that sometimes killed people bitten by rats. Quarles did not want to lose the murderer of his uncle to simple happenstance, no matter how grim. The elusive pirate king had been captured by William Quarles and so would be dispatched by him. The public execution of the legendary Wyvern carried the prestige of a political coup for the British presence in Asia.
Quarles thumped the bamboo bars with his boot, and Pym roused from his stupor. His one eye peered from under a heavy lid and closed as nausea ascended in him. He curled tighter on himself. Quarles unstoppered the brandy and swigged from the skin. The ruby fragrance opened Pym's eye, and he watched Quarles in the lantern light, savoring the bouquet. "Pomace brandy," Quarles said, squatting and offering the skin. "Crushed grapes, captain. From Europe. Veneto."
Pym rose to a crouch, ugly with hate. "Your Uncle Samuel betrayed the fleet," he snarled. "Not I!"
"I know," Quarles said. "I have seen my uncle's letters to the Spanish governor. He sold the fleet's schedule, it seems. Yet, he was not betraying his country so much as defending his faith."
"Bah!" Pym recoiled from the proffered drink and squeezed his trembling hands between his knees.
"My uncle was not naturally a treacherous man. It would appear that he was led to his misfortune by a secret society that employs deceitful and immoral means toward noble achievements. The Church of the Two Thieves —"
"Papist shrews!" Pym cried. "They've been threading their intrigues in Europe for centuries."
"And you were one of their victims." Quarles sloshed the liquor. "Drink with me to the innocence of your youth, Captain Pym, which so utterly denied me the innocence of mine."
Pym fought back the thirsting chills tremoring his muscles, and scrutinized his captor. Under the curve of his flat-crowned hat, Quarles' stocky face glowed with malice. His coifed beard could not hide his smirk. Yet, he said without disdain, "We share a suffering, you and I. We were both challenged by fate, captain. Misfortune branded you a traitor. And I was condemned to a life of poverty at the dockyard. Neither of us deserved our fates. You became a pirate. I became equally hard, and perhaps as predatory. But I chose to serve and not defy. Now, sir, I have a captaincy, a beautiful daughter, and the respect of my peers. While you —" He swilled the brandy in a gulping gasp. "You will hang within the week from the yardarm of this ship — hang by your neck, an ignominious reward for forty years of piracy."
Pym loomed against the bars. "To that, I will drink." He reached from the cage.
Quarles placed the skin on the deck, two inches from Pym's groping hand. He stood up and smilelessly watched Pym strain for the brandy. "We are the two thieves, Captain Pym. Your pirates loved you and were faithful to death. Not one surrendered. Yet the world despises you. My crew fear me. My own daughter loathes me. And I am respected in every port and honored in England. We are thieves, the two of us, for we have stolen our lives from fate and made our own destinies."
Pym's reach shrank, and he withdrew his arm with a disgusted snort. "You killed my wife."
"You had a wife?" Quarles' face inflated with surprise, and he squatted again. "You startle me, Pym. I did not realize you were capable of fidelity to anyone but yourself. Then, indeed, a wife is one's self." He removed a wooden cannikin from his pocket, poured brandy into it, and placed it beside the cage where Pym could reach it. "I assure you, my action at Iduna was entirely tactical. Your wife's death is unfortunate, a casualty of my strategy to flush you out. I would have met you honorably at sea, but you avoided me. I, too, have lost a wife to plague. I understand your pain. Drink up, Pym — you will be with her again soon enough. Or do you not believe in the afterlife?"
Pym dashed the brandy down before his trembling hands could spill a drop. Festina lente, Trevor! he admonished himself for his thirst. He closed his eyes and pressed his head back against the cage, grateful for the stinging relief of the liquor sharpening his blood.
"I am amused by the cover of a Bible I took from the pocket of your coat," Quarles said, holding the leaves open to reveal the handwriting of the Gefjon patriarchs. "Who is this Jaki Gefjon whose family tree you carry?"
Pym squinted. "Is the boy alive?"
"And wooing my daughter." Quarles' tight smile glinted like metal behind his whiskers. "He thinks he has escaped. I have trapped him with his heart."
"Homo homini lupus," the pirate said in a burning whisper.
"Yes, man is a wolf unto man," Quarles agreed. "That is what converts us to evil."
Pym conceded with a fatigued nod.
Quarles, relishing his victory, read aloud Pieter Gefjon's Latin inscription. "What do you make of that, docent, now that you are facing the lion of the final moment yourself?"
"Do you pretend or are you truly ignorant of the Doctrine of Signatures, the alchemists’ primer? The depths that death guards are the correspondences. We cannot see our relation to the all until we die. And so fools like you are doomed to live partial lives and believe heroes villains and true villains heroes."
A laugh huffed from Quarles' belly. "You think too much of yourself, pirate."
"I do. I am myself an alchemist. I read the manuscripts at Oriel, and I learned to live their truths so that life's pain would not reduce me to the benighted varlet it has made of you. I worked my ship as an alembic, converting the dross of empire's outcasts to the gold of self-strong men. That's Trevor Pym's work — dared because I could accept myself for what fate made me."
Quarles' smile brightened to have guessed this about his enemy. "You delude yourself."
"Perhaps. This much I know: The man whose tree you hold is a true alchemical spirit, Mercurius himself, the son of darkness."
"You weary me, Pym. The boy is a heathen. I will snare him as I have snared you."
Pym shook his head and steered a finger through the bars to touch the Bible cover at the blank space where Jaki's name was absent. "Fear him."
Quarles' smile blinked out, and he slapped the cover shut and pocketed it. "He will be joining you in hell. You do believe in hell? Look around you, Pym. This is heaven."
Pym leaned back and shut his eye. "You killed my wife," he said with eerie gentleness. "Your vengeance against me was perfected then, William Quarles. What you do to me here is a favor — and the death you promise a boon."
Quarles rose, empty in his bones, disappointed by Pym's sudden composure. He kicked the skin of brandy close enough for the pirate to reach and turned away.
"William," Pym called when Quarles reached the companion ladder. "When I'm clothed in seaweed, with fish for eyes, I will be as a king. But you will never be more than what you are now." He tipped the skin and poured the liquor straight down his throat. "Mark me," he gasped.
*
Jaki stood in a cage of rain on a pier in Serangoon Harbor. Singapore ranged before him like a constellation that had smashed into a swamp. Torchlights from the bamboo-walled settlements of Changi, Serangoon, Seletar, Siglap, and Bedok glimmered among the black shadows of mangrove belts and marsh copses. The lion stele in the Strait of Johore, where the harbor widened to deepwater wharves, glared in the lanternglow from The Fateful Sisters. Armed men patrolled the decks and the wharf around the warship.
Beyond the stele ranged ancient flowering trees, terraced hanging gardens, and the lion plaza where Jaki was to meet Lucinda at the new moon in two more days. Now his attention turned to the stone garrison inside the bamboo wall of Changi. There, Pym waited in his cage. Jaki and the twenty surviving crewmen of S
ilenos had followed The Fateful Sisters south from Selangor in the skiff and whatever canoes, prau, they could buy or steal from the swamp tribes. The big ship had quickly vanished ahead, and the five-day pursuit had wrung Jaki with the apprehension that Quarles intended to take his prisoner to the British settlement at Surabaja across the Java Sea, inaccessible to the fragile prau. He was relieved when they reached Singapore and found The Fateful Sisters at anchor.
Jaki had moored the pirates' prau in the cane brush around Changi, and after leashing Wawa, he and the others had come to the unlit pier before the garrison to barter for Pym's life. Now he stood in the rain, his men hidden in the swamp behind him, and shouted his ransom offer to the guard. His promise of diamonds brought several turbaned soldiers to the garret, and they beckoned him closer. Instinct prickled in him, and he decided not to budge. Instead he threw one of the diamonds to the guards, and they disappeared with it. Minutes later, the gate of the settlement swung open, and a band of mounted warriors charged out, parangs whirling. The guards reappeared on the garret, and their arquebuses flared in the dark. A ball swiped past Jaki's ear, and he drew his scimitar and threw his body into his war cry. The pirates crouching in the cane brakes fired their flintlocks, and the charging horsemen dropped from their saddles.
The pirates broke cover, charging the open gate. Seizing the reins of a frenzied horse, Jaki pulled the animal around and sent it flying back into the settlement, the pirates rushing behind it. The arquebuses again spit fire from the garrets, killing the horse and tearing the ear off a pirate. Three of the pirates took aim and felled the garret guards.
Inside the settlement, Jaki led his men to the garrison. Pym appeared in a barred window of a tower overlooking the front courtyard, his silver hair shining in the dark, and the men cheered for him. Hoof-thunder rumbled, and more horsemen galloped from the stables behind the garrison, a squad of turbaned guards charging behind them.
"Fall back to the prau!" Jaki yelled, and they scrambled for the gates. Musketfire dropped three of the men, and four more toppled under the hooves of horsemen. At the gates, the pirates turned and emptied their flintlocks. Their long practice with the weapons made each shot count, and the pursuit faltered, allowing Jaki and the others to escape into the rainy marsh.
Cowering in the muddy fields, they watched the gates close and the guards double on the garret. There would be no rescue for Pym, and when the pirates realized that, they decided to go their own way. "The captain is not dead until he's dead," Jaki told the men passionately, and they did not dispute him. They simply turned away silently and disappeared into the many doors of the night. Only five wild faces remained, staring at him like rays from the center of darkness.
*
The six of them haunted the marsh around Changi, searching for a way in, scurrying low in the tule grass until they discovered holes in the bamboo fence big enough for them to crawl through. Once inside, they stood stymied by the garrison's stone walls and Muslim guards. Repeatedly, they overheard guards explaining to inquisitive citizens that the hanging waited on the Bantam of Siam and a delegation of local sultans to arrive and witness the superiority of the British in protecting the Bantam's interests. Two days later, by the night of the new moon, the crewmen had not succeeded in getting any closer to their captain, and Jaki decided to meet Lucinda as he had promised.
That night the rains abated, and aisles of stars ran to infinity. Making his way toward the lion plaza through the hanging gardens of Serangoon that walled the harbor, Jaki flushed with heartglow. Memories of the days and nights he had spent with Lucinda aboard The Fateful Sisters bightened his grief over Pym's capture, and he continued to hope that he would find a way to free his captain.
Thinking now of Pym, he remembered the captain's warning from days before, not to trust the seed of his enemy. He wanted the satisfaction of meeting that warning fairly, and he approached the plaza cautiously, avoiding the cobbled walkways. He wore black breeches and doublet plaza and a black headcloth to hide well in the shadows of the torchlit plaza. Monkeys chittered noisily in the branches above, and as he sidled through the wrangle of jasmine and mimosa shrubs, he spied figures in the adjacent trees. His heartbeat smudged when he discerned crouching men, long-trousered monkeyfaces with drawn sabers. They had not yet seen him, and he approached closer and recognized them as English sailors. He whirled silently into the deeper darkness, stung that Pym had been right.
Once hidden in the shadows, Jaki looked for Quarles, his mind racing with thoughts of capturing him and bartering him for Pym. He did not find the British captain among the lurking men. Instead, on the winding path that climbed up from the harbor to the lion plaza, he spotted Lucinda and her maid on their way to meet him. That baffled him. Why would they endanger themselves — unless they were unaware of the ambush? But, then, who had betrayed him?
Dashing through the aqueous shadows of starlight, he followed the paths along tiers of sandalwood and kumquat trees toward the women. Their pastel gowns glowed like specters in the dark. From his vantage, he could see that they approached unaccompanied by guards, and he waited until they reached a bend in the path where the sailors in the trees could not see them. He wanted to observe the women's faces clearly. When he stepped onto the path before them, he removed his headband to assure that they recognized him.
"Jaki!" Lucinda called with jubilant surprise, and he knew at once she had not betrayed him. She rushed to him, and his blood spun swiftly. "You came back. I knew you would."
He pulled her closer, then jolted away and drew a loaded flintlock from under his doublet. He aimed it at the maid slipping away, edging around a myrtle tree. "Stop or I will slay you, betrayer."
The maid's eyes went round and pleading. "Don't kill me! I beg you, sir! I only did what was best for my mistress."
Lucinda looked at the frightened maid without understanding and turned her perplexity on Jaki. He told her about the sailors hidden in the trees ahead.
"I had to tell him, my lady!" Maud sobbed. "But I told him nothing of the passage from Jakarta. He thinks your swain came aboard as we docked."
"Why, Maud?"
"Had I a choice, my lady? If Mister Gefjon had met you only at dockside, it must have been to arrange a meeting. Why else would he stay so short a time? And I could not say you had refused, for you yourself declared to your father that this is the man you love. If I had lied, we would be found out and worse off."
"Nothing would be worse for me than to lose this man." She clutched at Jaki, who had lowered his flintlock and was staring into the jasmine shadows for movement.
"Please, my lady, forgive me." Maud's face crumpled, and tears flicked. "I could not bear to see him beating you."
Lucinda put her arms about her, and Maud pressed her face to her mistress' shoulder. "I should have known," Lucinda said. "We've sneaked off ship many a time, but this was the easiest. Father arranged for the watch to shift early, did he not?"
Maud nodded. "He wanted you to see your swain captured."
Jaki touched Lucinda's arm. "If your father knows you left ship, he will have sent a guard behind to meet with those ahead. We must leave the path quickly."
"You will stay here, Maud," Lucinda ordered. "If you love me truly, then watch the path faithfully and use our whistle should anyone approach."
Maud nodded and peered into the black flutters of shrubbery. "Come back for me, Luci," she called in an anxious whisper as Lucinda and Jaki stepped into darkness. Jaki took Lucinda's hand and guided her through hedges of mimosa to the top ledge of the garden, high above the big ships, lorchas, and sampans in their halos of lanternlight on the black water. "Until tonight, I did not know if you would be here," Jaki breathed, embracing her. She flinched, and he saw the welt on her shoulder where her gown had slipped. "You’ve been beaten."
"It is nothing," she said, fiercely.
"This is what Maud meant," Jaki said with anguish. "Your father truly beat you."
"He is my father. He loves me with an iron he
art." In the dark, her golden hair blazed with starfire, her eyes shone, bright pieces of the night. She smelled like wind in a meadow, and her bones felt light and fragile as glass.
"Then you will come away with me?" he asked, caressing her cheek.
"I've already arranged for our passage on a Swedish frigate to Surabaja. From there we can ship to Europe. I will sell my gems, and we shall find a place to live."
"But look! You won't have to sell your gems." Jaki drew a pouch out of his pocket and opened it to show a cluster of uncut diamonds, each big as a man's thumb. "This is only a few of what I have — my tribe's legacy. The want of money will never own us."
They kissed, and the taste of her mouth was the consolation he had yearned for since the green days of his jungle childhood. "Then quickly, get the rest of your treasure now, my love," she said. "The carrack sails at dawn."
Jaki slumped, his breath drooped drowsily in his lungs. "I cannot," he replied almost inaudibly. "I must stay and save my captain."
"Pym?" she asked in a blare of disbelief. "Father will hang that rogue tomorrow at noon. Dignitaries have arrived from all over Asia to see it. You can do nothing."
"I have no choice in this, I swear it," he replied thinly, afraid to break the spell of their pledge. "I must try. I've told you how he has cared for me."
Lucinda shook her head. "I know he has earned your love — but he is yet a pirate. Don't you see?" She gave him a wide-eyed, imploring look. "You will be captured and hanged beside him."
"Then that is my fate."
"No! No talk of fates!" Her jaw was set, her face rigid. "We are not children anymore. Our fates are in our own hands now. I beg you, before God, do not leave me, not for this brigand."
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