Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  "It's not right you be among us like this," Ganger Sint told Jaki when the pirate helped pole a barge around a bend of stunted rain trees. The turbulent river lashed the air with rainbows, and the tropic sun shattered into fire among the crowns of higher, solitary trees.

  "These people are my friends," Jaki answered, concentrating on his shaft pronging the mud, not looking at the large man.

  "It's not right your wife be alone so often," Sint added, stepping closer.

  Jaki lifted his shaft, laid it on the gunwale, and turned to face Ganger Sint's cold stare. "My wife's maid attends her. And I'm with her at night. Why should it concern you?"

  "I don't like other men doing my work."

  Jaki lifted the shaft and prodded it toward the foreman. "You pole, then."

  Sint slapped the shaft aside. "I manage the men. You stay out of my way. And keep your bag of tricks to yourself. If these heathen see diamonds, they will cut your throat for sure."

  *

  The wind shifted that evening, and the air went sweet and hot. A squall crashed over the forest and kicked the river into a choppy froth. Wawa cowered between Jaki's legs when he rowed the tender from the barges back to the lorcha at sunfall. As he tied off to the lorcha's stern, a mournful groan jumped across the slashing wind, and Wawa screamed. Out of the swirling rain, the lorcha's aft mast came crashing down toward Jaki. He hurled himself overboard, and the tender burst apart as the lorcha’s mast bashed into it. Spinning chunks of timber whirred around him, and he dunked himself. When he came up, Wawa splashed toward him, clinging to his fawn hat, and he grabbed the animal and clutched at the lorcha's hull.

  Overhead, Ganger Sint's harsh face appeared. He peered down into the shattered tender, which wallowed in the chop. From where he bent over the taffrail, he could not see Jaki and Wawa bobbing beside the hull. With a hooked pole, he reached overboard and snagged Jaki's medicine bag.

  Jaki shoved out from the hull and grabbed the pole, almost ripping it from Sint's hand. For a moment they faced off, and Jaki felt the other man brace his grip as if to ram him with the staff. Instead, he hauled back, pulling Jaki closer to the lorcha. A moment later he threw down a coil of rope. Wawa scampered up it first, and Jaki followed.

  "Stiff wind," Ganger Sint said, his black hat slung over his shoulder by its strap and his wispy hair flaring in the blow. "You're in God's shadow to surive that."

  Jaki grabbed the medicine bag away from Sint and shoved past him. At the post of the fallen mast he stooped and examined the deck. The iron pegs that held the mast brace lay scattered on deck.

  "Sint tried to kill me," he told Lucinda, alone together in their cabin. "The mast pegs were taken out."

  "And how do you know it was Sint who did that?" she said, rubbing him down with a towel. "The wind's been jarring this mast all day and no one's examined it since we came aboard that I know of."

  Jaki shook his head. "The wind wouldn't have tugged all those pegs out."

  Lucinda said nothing, but Jaki could read the uncertainty in her silence.

  "Why was Sint aboard?" he asked. "He's supposed to be on the barges, minding the crew."

  She glared at him. "You were there on the barges — and no one was here when the wind picked up. He came to secure the lorcha."

  "He came to take those pegs out and club me when I came aside."

  "Mast pegs rock out of their cradles when they're not tended," Lucinda said with annoyance. "You're blaming Sint because you haven't been watching after our lorcha and that almost cost you your life."

  "Do you really think that?" Jaki's nostrils flared. "If Sint had come aboard to secure the lorcha, why didn't he see the pegs then?"

  "He has been busy wrapping canvas and battening portholes. It was not his responsibility anyway — it is yours."

  Jaki swallowed his anger. "Earlier today he told me to be careful about showing the diamonds in my medicine bag. I never told him I had diamonds in there. How does he know?"

  "Boeck must have told him."

  "Yes." Jaki nodded with satisfaction and finished drying himself. "That's what I figure. No one else knows. And if I had died tonight, those diamonds would be on their way back to Dagon in Sint's pouch — and he'd have taken you with them."

  "Why are you speaking such nonsense?" Lucinda's cheeks smudged red with anger. "I am an owner on this caravan. I have Boeck's papers to prove it. He would not renege."

  Disbelief sharpened Jaki's features. "Do you think that once I'm out of the way Boeck would hesitate to seize you and make a favorable deal for himself with your father?"

  Lucinda's jaw set. "You're wrong, Jaki Gefjon. You think all men are pirates, because that's all you've known. Boeck is a factor and a gentleman. I have his word in writing."

  "You're a woman, Lucinda. His word to you means nothing to him."

  "You are speaking like a heathen."

  "That's what I am, then. But I am not easy prey for Ganger Sint. Not anymore."

  "What are you going to do?"

  Jaki dumped the contents of his medicine bag onto the floor and separated out the diamonds. There were eleven of them. "Tomorrow everyone will know I have these diamonds. And they will know they are mine and what they mean to me."

  "Why? Why make a spectacle of yourself before these primitives?"

  "Once they see these, they cannot be stolen without everyone knowing they are stolen."

  Lucinda stared at her husband, flushed with withheld anger. Jaki's eyes shone brightly. He seemed so intent on being right. "In many ways, Jaki Gefjon, you are a child."

  Jaki stiffened. He gathered his diamonds, snakeskins, twigs, roots, berries, and leaves, and dumped them back in his bag. Without looking at Lucinda, he put on his trousers. Then he grabbed hat and vest, slung his bag and shirt over his shoulder, and walked to the door where his blowgun had been leaning since they had first boarded the lorcha.

  "Where are you going?" she asked.

  "Let me be," he said without looking back. He took his blowgun and closed the door after him.

  He strode angily through the warm rain to the stern hatch, checked to see that the anchor was secure, and glanced about for Ganger Sint. No one remained on deck. Again he looked at the mast-mounting, bent down and picked up the dislodged iron pegs. The wind could have knocked the mast out of its support, but he did not think so. He lifted the stern hatch and went below deck.

  All the port and larboard hatches stood open, and raindrops flecked the air. Still, mustiness hung in the lanternglow, a stink of cooking fires, sweat, and rotting timber. The smell of people. It had been the same in the longhouses, and it made him yearn for the marl scent of the jungle, the gloat of rain in the canopy, the opal mists leaking from trees and glowing like starlight. How far away that life seemed now.

  The Burmese crew sat and sprawled about an iron stove where a black pot bubbled with monkey stew. Ganger Sint lay in a hammock, his hands behind his head, his boots flopped on the ground beneath him. The crew and the foreman watched Jaki as he stood under the deck brace where the mast had lifted out. If the wind had shook the mast free, the brace would be loose, too. He prodded the brace with his blowgun. The wooden strut creaked as it shook.

  Jaki looked at Ganger Sint, who watched him with sleepy eyes. Am I wrong about this monkeyface? he asked himself, and the hostile shadow in the Dutchman's eyes answered him — or was that, too, an illusion? Jaki walked past Sint and through a tight companionway to the forward cabin where the provisions were kept.

  Maud sat there on a crate with Wawa. She had dried the gibbon off with a corner of spare canvas, and she fed the animal coconut milk and yellow plums. "Are you all right?" she asked. "Wawa is still scared."

  "Wawa is happiest in the jungle." Jaki laid down his blowgun and medicine bag and put on his shirt. "Have you seen the stitching kit?" he asked.

  Maud removed a leather bag from beside a stack of canvas bolts and handed it to him. Jaki sat on a coil of rope, placed his hat and black vest before him, and removed a needl
e and a spool of black thread from the stitching kit. Slowly, with great care, he took out his mountains' tears and, by the wan light of the oil lamp hung from a rafter, began to stitch them over the buttons on his vest.

  Maud left him there with Wawa and returned to the forecastle cabin. She found Lucinda weeping into her pillow and coaxed her to sit up. "Why does he go his own way?" Lucinda sobbed. "Why did he marry me if he isn't going to stay by me?"

  "He is a man of the wilderness," Maud said, wiping the tears from her face.

  "He was so reasonable before. Why does he insist now on loitering with the foul-smelling crew?"

  "Let us sleep now," Maud counseled. "Jaki will come around. He is a man of the wilds, very much like my Aunt Timotha's kin, with their straw poppets for inducing the grain to grow. They have their own wisdom, which seems foolishness to us. He is your husband now. And he does love you. In his way. You must trust him."

  Maud blew out the lamp. In the rain-drumming dark, the future seemed strange and uncaring. "We will make it to the New World, Maud," Lucinda said, her voice stronger for her uncertainty. "And by the time we get there, Jaki shall be a man of grace and authority and not wildness anymore."

  "Yes," Maud said, afraid that it would be so. "His English is very good already. And he goes everywhere with a hat now."

  *

  Jaki appeared on deck the following dawn in a black vest with four big diamond buttons and a fawn hat with seven diamonds circling the brim. The crew gathered, agog at the sight of uncut gems of such size, and Ganger Sint put his hands on his hips and ground his teeth to watch Jaki displaying the diamonds the foreman already considered his own. Boeck had told him about the jewels and declared that a list and description of each of them had been deposited in a company vault. Sint believed that was a lie, for the factor had refused to tell him how many diamonds Jaki possessed. Sint had decided to take all but three for himself, and he had worked out an elaborate plan to return to Europe with them and sell them to the highest bidder outside the company. Now that the whole crew knew about them, though, an accident befalling Jaki was no longer sufficient. He would have to murder him away from all others during the jungle crossing after Prome, where he could claim the diamonds had been lost. That posed a more troublesome challenge, yet it pleased Sint, for then he would have the pleasure of killing the arrogant pirate with his own hands.

  Only two days out of Prome, the crew decided not to repair the stern mast of the lorcha but tug the vessel behind the last barge. Jaki visited each of the barges, telling the story of his mountains' tears to anyone who would listen. Mang and Kota, impressed with his bravura, accompanied him during his storytelling, burnishing their renown as the Pirates of Serangoon.

  Disenchanted with Jaki, Lucinda sulked. No mood fit perfectly — not anger or even regret. She loved him for his daring, and yet feared his bravado. She desired his strong embrace, and still doubted his constancy. She wanted him yet could not quell her ideals to take him as he was.

  The night before reaching Prome, he returned to her cabin. Without her, he felt like a child without parents. He had slept alone two nights in the provision hold and had used the darkness and solitude to ponder how he had found his way to her and what she really meant to him. Was it simply her beauty that had attracted him? Was that all she was to him? But that was so much. Her beauty was like the high plateaus of Borneo, vistas wider than a lifetime, distances holy with woodlands, crags, weather, and the sea. To enter into that beauty, to walk down into the vista and become a part of it, was no easy thing. He resolved to return more sincerely to his journey with her and entered her cabin like a thief returning with what he had stolen.

  Lucinda reviewed the manifest by lamplight, shaping a trading strategy for the next day's bargaining in the marketplace of Prome. Maud sat beside her, sewing, and when Jaki entered she rose and excused herself.

  "I have come to apologize," Jaki began.

  Lucinda straightened. "Apologize for what?"

  Jaki closed the door and took off his hat. In the lamp-glow, the diamonds on his hat and vest burned darkly from within. "For these," he said, indicating the diamonds.

  "They're your gems. If you want to wear them provocatively, you should."

  "I defied you," he said. "I followed my instincts instead."

  "Perhaps that is not a bad thing," she replied, and stood up.

  He forced himself to speak distinctly. "Whatever separates us is wrong."

  She recognized the strength he had exerted to find those words, and a profound sympathy for him swept through her. She reached out, and he pulled her against him, clutching her hair. "Stay with me," she muttered into his chest. "There is no peace without you. Stay with me, true child."

  Always, he wanted to promise, and held her tighter. Always, he wanted to say, and the fear in that word made his heart feel like a fruit splitting to seed.

  *

  When rain lowered over the sea like a harp into the hands of the wind, Quarles believed his daughter dead. And on days when from the gunwale of his ship staves of sunlight glowed in the depths of jungle islands, he knew for a certainty that the heathen pirate had stolen her away into the wilderness, where she lived as a forest princess. His only family. she was all that his suffering could ever redeem. And she was dead, or worse — lost.

  He did not grieve her absence any more than he had mourned when her mother had died in his arms. He had spent all his lamentations as a child in Chatham bemoaning the trials of austerity, and he had no grief left in him, only defiance. How did one defy the plague that hides in smoke or the pirates that the jungle births? He had decided that ignorance, not God, had snatched from him his wife and daughter. Already in the capitals of Europe a better understanding of humors and flux routed the plague. Though he had killed the pirate king Trevor Pym, and other civilized captains employed the latest developments in marine warfare to flush out pirate nests throughout Asia, the jungle remained wild. Someday, not in his lifetime but in a future he cherished, empire would tame the jungle and exterminate pirates. To that goal, he devoted his life.

  For the first months after the loss of his daughter, his devotion to empire had him captaining slave barges. The company had found work for him transporting savages from the entrepot at Surabaja to the Dutch and English agrarian colonies in the Spice Islands. Many of the local natives in the Moluccas had been decimated by European diseases or were too truculent to apply themselves to field work, so manual labor had to be imported from Africa, where slavery had long been a practice among the tribes. Quarles' spirit of stern command well suited him for this work, and he applied himself vigorously to satisfying the company's commission.

  But on drear days and when in sight of the jungle, his memories of Lucinda troubled him. Then he would sit alone in his cabin and remove from his sea chest the Bible cover of Jaki Gefjon's that he had taken from Pym. It was the only trace he had of the enemy who had stolen his daughter. He wondered where its pages had gone, why it had a nailhole through its spine, and what the enigmatic phrases meant in the space where Jaki's name belonged. That the pirate had desecrated the Book seemed obvious to him, and though Quarles had abandoned all faith early in life and privately scoffed at religion, he swore to the God of the abused Book that he would avenge the Lord if only the villain and the women he had kidnaped were delivered into his hands. It was the most ardent prayer of his life.

  After his third voyage, on his return to Surabaja, a letter packet awaited him at the trademaster's station sealed with the stamp of the English factor at Jakarta. Inside were two papers. The first informed him that his daughter, her maid, and the pirate Jaki Gefjon had been seen by Robert Fletcher in Dagon. The second presented an Admiralty order commanding him to return to England to account personally for the loss of The Fateful Sisters.

  *

  Prome, a cluttered river village of frond-roofed huts, bunched beneath the enormous wall of a rain forest. From a distance, the air around it looked greasy with the smoke of cooking fires a
nd the miasmic mists of the jungle. On either side of the river, shambling vegetation clothed mountain ranges, steep, verdant crags towering into the sky like a dream's minarets. To the west, the cliffwall threaded waterfalls, a pillar of wonder, while the fang-shaped palisade of the east seemed a pillar of horror and the trash-heap village squatting beneath it an unclean offering.

  Jaki stared at the abrupt chasms, and a chill snaked through him. Here loomed a gateway to the netherworld. The forest path guarded by these towers opened upon the threshold of his life, the deceptive borderland between past and future. The light of the jungle is deadlier than darkness. Jabalwan spoke with the slim voice of memory, and Jaki gripped his blowgun more strongly.

  Lucinda saw the apprehension in Jaki's tense jaw, and she felt a moment of uneasiness about insisting that he journey on this caravan. The sorcerers' prophecy had said his future lay outside the jungle. She knew he would have been happier at sea, in the world of his spirit father and of everything new and European. He was still becoming European — that was her promise for his fulfillment, the best that she could offer him. But fate decreed they return to the jungle first. Lucinda promised herself she would be more tolerant of his primitive ways until the forest fell behind them. The cultivated kingdom of India would provide a better place to continue the refinement of her husband. For now she would strive simply to keep him close and as untroubled as possible in the shadow of his jungle past.