Jaki ran down into the hold, following his cruel memories of captivity through the blood-puddled companionways to the gunnery deck. Dead men lay everywhere, and the gummy smell of spilled lives overlaid the sour stink of the ship.
Scattered among the big guns, Jaki found kegs of serpentine powder, and he rolled them into a stack above the narrow fire door that led down into the powder room. Through open gun hatches he could see sampans, swamp willow, and the thatched huts of Seletar, and he knew Serangoon Harbor opened not far ahead. He implanted two coils of fuse into an unstoppered powder keg and ran the fuse after him. Once out of the hold, he stood on the skylight and searched ahead for the harbor.
The cannon crew that Quarles had stationed at the harbor entrance fired a salute to Black Light, and the British sailors waved at the pirates, mistaking them for Kobra's crew. By the time the commander saw the Muslim captain's severed head gaping on the sternpost, the warship had already flown past him.
Jaki wanted to unfurl Wyvern, but the crowded harbor had already swung into view. There was little time to spare. He ignited the two fuse lines and dropped them into the hold. The wind blew briskly behind them, and the ship shot along the strait so fast that foam peeled from the prow in luminous wings.
The Fateful Sisters' lofty masts and glamorous white hull appeared ahead, still moored before the lion stele, still displaying Pym's hanged body. The decks bustled, busy with crewmen, who rushed to the rails to marvel at Black Light soaring into the harbor at fatal velocity. Men scampered in alarm, and the stern gunports clacked open.
"Drop the prau and abandon ship!" Jaki shouted, and the pirates swung down from the masts. Jaki signed for the helmsman to join his companions in the prau, and he took the whipstaff and cried for Wawa. The gibbon tumbled out of the shrouds and scampered to his side. Jaki threw his medicine bag into the prau and commanded Wawa to get in, but when the animal realized Jaki was not following, he refused to go. Finally Jaki signaled for the men to drop their line. He watched the skinny ship jettison away and put his full alertness into holding course straight for The Fateful Sisters.
The British warship opened fire. Black Light lurched as cannonballs bashed into the bow, her new forecastle splintering, shooting timber shards upward and ripping shrouds and canvas. The hurtling ship slowed. Jaki fought the whipstaff to keep the behemoth vessel from veering into the junks and sampans clustered along the banks. Spars screaming like a grieving beast, Black Light reeled forward.
Peering ahead, Jaki identified the tiny figure of Quarles on his quarterdeck. The captain held his spyglass to his eye and spotted Rajan Kobra's hacked-off head and below it the bold figure of Jaki Gefjon at the helm, his wild hair flying in the wind. "Abandon ship!" Quarles cried before the second round could be fired.
Jaki grinned to behold sailors spewing over the decks of his target. "Death to empire!" he shouted. He tore off his doublet and used the ripped fabric to tie the whipstaff to the binnacle, locking the rudder. And he grabbed Wawa and sprinted to the taffrail. With a last look at Pym's corpse dangling from the yardarm, he leaped with Wawa into the strait.
Jaki swam hard through the blue chop of the channel, Wawa clinging to his back. At the uproarious sound of the collision, he rolled over to witness Black Light smash into The Fateful Sisters' stern and glance along her port broadside, plowing timbers, planks, and rails ahead of her. The monstrous impact hove the British ship to its side and snapped her masts. Shouts reached across the harbor and the sky shook as the landing platform sundered under the force of the slammed vessels.
In the shock of silence that followed, screams flurried louder. Jaki backstroked to the mud beach and sat in a nest of kelp and driftwood with Wawa in his lap. The powder hold in Black Light ignited, and the two ships heaved into a fireball. Flames gushed through the roil of flying debris, and a moment later the powder hold of The Fateful Sisters detonated, blowing the levee and the lion stele into a gray cloud of rubble. The surge of blasted stone immolated the harbor, smashing lorchas, crushing junks with a colossal roar. When the haze cleared, Black Light existed no more. The Fateful Sisters blazed, a flame-gutted pyre, and Serangoon Harbor smoldered under a web of devastation, the main wharves collapsed, the levee broken, and numerous fires raging.
Jaki stood up wearily and turned from the fiery havoc. Marsh bowers opened before him like a cave, vaulting depths rimed with trapped sunlight and the ore of homesickness. Wawa danced ahead, leading him past the watertrace into arrow grass, vinelap, the somber trees — leading him back to his first life, far away, at the river's edge of the heart.
Part Three:
Sleeping with Satan
Heaven and earth are not humane. They treat people like things.
— Dao De Jing, 5
Jaki lay down on the rootweave, his body and mind numb. Smudges of black smoke from the burning harbor unraveled in the sea wind. High above the char, clouds formed animal faces, looking down at him as if they watched to see which way he would now go.
Lucinda was far away and getting smaller. If he got up now and ran with all his might through the swamp to where his comrades waited with the prau, and if he used root magic to give himself strength to row through the marsh isles and through the night — he might catch her. The Dutch carrack carrying her to Bantam had left yesterday at dawn, a sag-bellied vessel that could not sail directly south through the shoals to Java. Yet even if he did find some way to get aboard the carrack without getting killed, would Lucinda want to see him? Remembering the anger in her face from the night before, he was not clear in his heart.
Wawa appeared nearby, clicked querulously and slinked closer. Jaki lay gazing upward, oblivious. His mind floated above his body, up through the treetops to the clouds. He wanted some sign from them of what to do next. The fury that had impelled him to destroy Black Light and The Fateful Sisters spent, he had broken into stillness. Pym, dead not even a day, was as far away as Mala or Jabalwan. A slow wheel turned in his chest as he thought of those well-known faces gone into rain. The dead return with the prophecies of the rain. Where was the prophecy in the clouds above him? The faces of the creatures surging in the clouds looked impassive as real animals, indifferent as the powers of the world. Distantly the sea shrugged, the wind muttered its prayers. Whatever he decided, the world would simply watch.
The gibbon's long fingers touched his face, and he blinked and turned to stare at the animal. Wawa wagged his head, motioning him to go deeper into the jungle, away from the tumult that had almost taken their lives in the strait. Jaki told him to sit and wait, and the gibbon, still skittish from the explosion, chattered nervously.
Jaki regarded the animal sharply for the first time in a very long time, and his annoyance faded. The gibbon had endured a great deal. He longed to return to the trees and drift through the speckled air among the branches. Wawa sat trembling softly in the shadows like a tribal woman who had lost a child.
In his mind Jaki followed Wawa into the forest to where blue-nosed deer pronked mulchy paths with their hoofs and sunlight sparked from shadows. That thought returned him to his body, number than ever. He knew he could never return to the land of his childhood. He had heard the prophecy of the devil's child at Njurat. When he appears, the bright anniversaries written on the clouds will be at their end. He was a devil's child. He was the end of revelation. In the medicine cloud, the Longhouse of Souls had emptied. He was the last of the sorcerers. If he returned to the jungle, he would return to death. He could live as Jabalwan had, treating the ill and injured, easing the dying. Yet for all he healed, his father's weapons would destroy more. Pym had revealed that inevitability. For all Matubrembrem could offer, he would be no more than a witness to the end of the tribes.
Jaki sagged. He could no more imagine his own future now than he could two years before when Jabalwan had died and he had wandered embittered among the tribes, dispensing words from his mother's Holy Book. Now the emptiness gathered even thicker, for he was truly alone, without even the tribes to receive
his pain.
He stared at the amber ring on his thumb. Lucinda offered his only future — if she would have him. The anger he had seen in her gnawed at him, and his hand flopped to his side. What I've hurt in her, he thought, I've hurt in myself. Then a new thought opened: Maybe that works the other way, as well. Maybe I'm only hurting myself and my denial is also hers.
That hope tingled through him, and he looked more closely at the amber ring. The gold light breathing there rayed all of life — even if that life was pain and the anger of the woman he loved. Yes! The enemy of life was not death but numbness. The vision he had suffered in Njurat lived in him. The emptiness that had stretched him out here — that was his enemy, and even Lucinda's wrath and rejection could not compare. He sat up.
Wawa muttered hopefully and stepped closer.
Jaki held out his arm, and the gibbon leaped into his embrace. He whispered soothing noises, then, sighing, he said, "I cannot go with you back into the forest, Wawa. I know that was our life once. But now I belong in my father's world. And I am going back to it. Will you come?"
Wawa stared at him with black sequin eyes, not comprehending. When Jaki rose and took his first step toward the sea, Wawa squawked with disapproval. Then, reluctantly, the animal shuffled after.
*
As he made his way through the swamp, Jaki thought of how his father's head had saved his life under Rajan Kobra's sword, and vibrant clarity opened within him. His life to this moment seemed of a piece, whole. From here, he continued on his own. No ghosts glimmered among the skeletal marsh trees to warn or counsel him now. And the clouds drifting above the treetops were not animal faces anymore, just smoke. He had come this far by following others — neither betraying friends nor yielding to enemies. Now, for the first time, he had a goal and no teacher. The choice to be bold, to be happy, or alone, belonged to him. Disappointment and fulfillment mated noisily just ahead in the glare of the future. Here, on the marly path among mangrove and casuarina trees, where the air splintered with sunlight and breathed redolent with seasmoke, he felt almost drunkenly free. For the first time, he could choose his own way.
Free. He said the word to himself in the several languages he knew. Each sounded strange. "Am I free, Wawa?" he asked the gibbon. "Freedom must belong only to God, I think, because people and animals are too small for it. We live in our hearts, not our freedom. Do you see? The powers of the world have set me free today. And what do I want?" He held up his thumb, and sunlight murmured in the amber of his ring. "I want to tie myself to another's fate. I don't want to be alone with my freedom."
His decision to find Lucinda, no matter the consequence, filled the vacuum of his shock and grief at losing Pym, and he moved with unerring swiftness over the root-woven tidal flats. Minutes later, a cry from Wawa alerted him to men ahead. With relief, he came upon the last of the pirates from Silenos. The prau they had used to take Black Light reflected in the black water, tied off to a fallen tree. The two men lying inside it under a gray cowl of mosquitoes jumped with alarm when Jaki stepped out of the arrow grass, then lowered their flintlocks.
"You have come back, lah!" said Kota, a bow-legged stump of a man who had served on Silenos' gundeck as a powder-runner. Pym had saved him from a swamp-pit where he had been buried up to his chin and left for the mud-skippers to eat his eyes. His Celebes village had been sacked and destroyed by the Lanun, who feared to kill little people outright. White crescent scars pocked his face where the snakes had gnawed at him. Fanatically loyal to Pym, he had led the throat-cutting in the hold of Black Light. He regarded Jaki now with cautious relief.
"We knew you were alive," the other one said: Mang, a tall, humorless Javanese, hollow-cheeked as a monkey and sly-eyed as a gargoyle. Jaki respected the pirate’s cunning, equally able to read subtle wind-shifts and the thoughts in a man's face. His scalp scabrous, most of his hair had fallen out, and he wore a black headcloth knotted about a human fingerbone.
"Where are the others?" Jaki asked in Malay and looked in the prau, glad to find his medicine bag and blowgun there.
"We were mindful of your treasure, sorcerer," Mang said. "The other three agreed you died at Serangoon. They want the diamonds you have in that bag. Most clever to put Wyvern on top. No one would touch it when they see that." Three sets of wide-spaced footprints scuttled away downstream from the prau. "There was a small fight," Mang acknowledged.
"Why didn't you take the diamonds and go with the others?" Jaki inquired, lifting the medicine bag out of the prau. He knew from its heft that it had not been tampered with.
"I am a thief to my tribe," Mang answered. "Pym made me a sailor, taught me to read weather and catch the wind. He did that." The tall man knocked his knuckles against the hull of the prau, to ward off the influence of the dead man he praised.
"You are the captain's sorcerer," Kota added. "Great power, lah." He made two fists and held them to his temples. "We follow you."
Jaki assessed the men before him. They had clearly proven their loyalty; only their motives differed. Kota's slavish attentiveness reminded Jaki of the tribesfolk who had respected him and Jabalwan for their magic. Awe bound Kota.
Mang was more pragmatic. Pym had taught him the mysteries of the sea. Perhaps Jaki would teach him the mysteries of poisons and stalking that had so ably avenged Pym's death.
"Do you know what this is?" Jaki held up his thumb ring.
They both nodded. They had been aboard at Macao when he had dueled the Portuguese and won, and they knew the ring had come from Quarles' daughter.
"I would have that woman for my wife," Jaki told them.
Kota grinned with approval, and Mang frowned doubtfully. "We saw that woman leave yesterday," he said. "A Dutch carrack took that woman downriver past Changi. She has gone far to sea now."
"The carrack is bound for Bantam," Jaki replied. "She has to run east first to clear the delta isles. If we leave now and bear due south through the marsh, we can meet her as she pulls around."
"No prau can run that hard," Mang said with finality.
Jaki met his narrow stare. "This prau runs with the spirits." He dropped his medicine bag in the bilges.
*
Maud rose from sleep to a smell like the threshold of a stable. Groping toward the lantern with drowsy fingers, she touched fur, and her eyes snapped open before a bestial black face. She screamed. The animal flashed fangs, then bounded into the dark.
Lucinda peered groggily at her maid. "Maud, what is wrong?"
"My lady!" Maud gasped, leaping to her knees in her bed. "An incubus braced against me! I saw its devil face!"
Lucinda fumbled for the flintstriker on her bedstand to light a candle. The striker was not there, and she sat up straighter.
A spark jumped in the dark, and a yellow flame lifted into gummy radiance. Maud screamed again.
"Hush, Maud," Lucinda said, with awed breath. "It's Mister Gefjon."
Jaki placed the lit candle on the bedstand and knelt beside it. His face lit up, an angel's shadow, weary with wanting, eyes bright with zeal, wet and star-webbed from looking too long into the wind. A fever glaze glistened on his brow. "I traveled hard to find you."
A knock thudded dully on the door.
"Maud's screams have alerted the guard," Lucinda whispered. She lifted the covers and Jaki got into the bed, whistling gently for Wawa. Lucinda crept out and drew the curtain tight before going to the door. "It's all right," she said to the burly English ship's mate. "My maid has suffered a nightmare."
The mate stuck his head in the cabin and stared at Maud. "Nothing to be afeared of, ladies," he said, and pushed the door open. "I'm here to see no harm befalls you." He eyed the open window. "But I can't help if you be leaving windows open and letting the flux in." He strode into the cabin, went to the window, and pulled it closed.
Water splattered the sill and the floor. The mate touched and tasted it. "Seawater," he muttered, and looked inquisitively at Lucinda. "What's this?"
Lucinda stared at him, dumbst
ruck.
"Seawater, you oaf," Maud blurted. "My lady lowered a rag with her sash and soaked it to soothe the heat from my nightmare. I would not have her waste our drinking water on that. With you asleep, we'd have to fetch our own fresh water and face the Dutch in the night."
The mate guffawed. "We've a treaty with the Dutch now — and you, a captain's daughter, unaware? We are allies."
"Even so," Lucinda piped up. "Only four years ago they massacred our factors in Amboina. We have not forgotten that savagery and never shall. We want little to do with them, thank you. Now, if you will leave us alone, please, we will return to our sleep."
"Do," he said with an amused smile. "And should your pretty maid chance to have any more night fevers, have her knock on my door and I'll soothe her myself."
When he departed, Lucinda pushed her nightstand against the door and opened the bed curtains. Jaki smiled at Maud. "Thank you," he whispered.
"Do not flatter yourself that I lied for you," Maud said, indignant. "I am my lady's maid."
"I well remember," Jaki said, dropping his smile. "Two nights ago you would have had me strung up alongside my captain to serve your lady."
"To spare me my father's wrath," Lucinda said. "I've come to think she was right. Now get out of my bed."
Jaki let Wawa go, and the gibbon scurried up the bed curtain to the top of the canopy. Jaki took Lucinda's hands.
"How did you find us?" she asked, deliberately removing her hands from his grip, though her eyes remained large with amazement.
"A prau carried me through the shoals with two shipmates. They're alongside now in the dark. They're cutting ahead through the shoals and will meet us in less than an hour. We must leave here quickly."
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