Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Wawa," she breathed as if she might call him back. She knelt beside her husband then, and wept with him.

  *

  The Burmese crew fashioned several vests and a jerkin from the tiger skin, and with the claws and fangs they crafted an impressive necklace, which they stitched to the tiger's beard and presented to Lucinda. She wanted to give it to Jaki, and he insisted that she wear it. "If not for you, I would be with Wawa now," he told her as he fastened the necklace about her throat. "You were right about waiting. I will listen to you more carefully now."

  Jaki meant it. With the death of Wawa, whatever remained of his tribal soul had left him. Jabalwan's shattered blowgun fixed the final omen that he had broken with his life as Matubrembrem. He left the two halves of the blowgun stuck in the ground where Wawa had been killed. Looking back, he realized that the break with the dying tribes had been inbred in him, the legacy of his Dutch father. His life as a tribesman, which had begun to die when he lost Jabalwan, was truly finished now, and he resolved to go forward as Jaki Gefjon, his father's son.

  But his resolve wavered, thin as water. The emptiness that had filled him after he had fallen under the claws of the tiger persisted. He would be dead, except that his wife had saved him — and he felt now as if only his body remained. The blast of the flintlock that had smashed the tiger's brain seemed to have carried off his soul. And though he knew that his life as a tribesman was long gone, he could not find himself. His chest felt empty. Not even sadness flinched when he thought of Wawa or their years of wandering.

  For days, Jaki meandered listlessly with the caravan, oblivious to Lucinda's caresses and the teas Maud offered. The others ignored him, believing his power had gone over to his wife when she had slain the beast that had locked him in its wrath. How would Jabalwan counsel? he asked himself over and over. He prayed to the ancestors. He sacrificed betel nut to Wawa's spirit. He grieved alone in the dark jungle. He remained dead inside. Nothing proved effective and nothing got resolved. Ashamed of his dejection, he kept to himself, wandering far ahead of the caravan or, when the jungle closed in, keeping the company of the lead buffalo, where Dhup, the clumsy monk, stationed himself. With the monk, he felt at ease. Dhup, stumbling over every root, laughing at himself as he dodged dangling vines only to crash through thorn-brush, paid no heed to the sorcerer.

  At a bend in the river, Jaki found the death that had been stalking him since Lucinda had killed the tiger in his shadow. He had gone ahead of the caravan and had stopped to gather berries.

  The emptiness in Jaki decanted into the distant blue above the tangled trees and vines, and alertness filled him: someone stumbled through the forest on the bluff above the river. Before he could shout a warning, ferns rustled, an orange robe flapped like licks of flame, and Dhup careened into view. He had followed Jaki and had apparently lost his trail on the high ground. The next instant, his arms shot up for balance; he seized a creeper, which snapped in his grip, and then he plummeted over the brink, falling with a splash into the running water. He surfaced closer to Jaki, his face gaping with panic, one arm clutching at nothing. He disappeared.

  Jaki dropped his hat filled with berries, and dove into the hurrying river. The cold water moved strongly, enraptured with its own will. It hoisted Jaki free of his muscles and swept him away like a broken tree. By chance alone he collided with Dhup. Twisting and kicking to keep his head above the rushing water, Dhup seized Jaki by his arms, and the two men sank.

  Jaki struggled to break Dhup's frantic grip, freed one arm, broke the surface and sunk again when the monk desperately clutched him about the neck. The two rolled and tumbled, legs interlocking, faces mashed together. Most of Jaki's air gushed from him with crushing pain. Light wheeled, split into blue fire and a lopsided glance at the jungle wall, spidery clouds, stars exploding in his brain. He gasped, and Dhup pulled him down again. As they sank, Jaki wrenched his whole body, but Dhup had locked onto him. He relaxed, hoping they would rise again. And the blue shadow of the surface darkened as the current pulled them deeper.

  How stupid to die like this, Jaki thought, weighted down by someone else's fear. Better the tiger had taken him and spared his wife this unknowing. The light purpled, and a new silence filled his body. She would never know what had become of him.

  All thoughts shrank to pain then. The last breath bubbled from him violently, hurt and jagged.

  Baffled noises erupted, and air scalded his lungs. His body bucked above the water like a breeching whale, throwing off the monk's death-hold, and with horrified strength thrashed for shore. His legs beat heavily, his arms shackled. He convulsed before realizing he was already ashore. The current had swept them downstream to a mudbank, where they both sprawled belly-down.

  Jaki lurched to his side, chest aching with his pounding breaths. Dhup crouched beside him, vomiting water. Slurred sensations sharpened: sunlight flitted like music in the shore trees, clouds drifted overhead, egrets plucked at their reflections. A laugh lanced him, and he flopped to his back and opened his arms to the world.

  *

  Jaki limped up the bank, arm in arm with Dhup. They staggered back to the caravan laughing at the conspiring shadows that kept tripping the monk, singing in Spanish about the beautiful river and they too ugly for the river to keep.

  Jaki resolved to fulfill the promise of his reprieved life, and he doffed all nostalgia for his earlier existence as a tribesman and embraced the spirit of his father. Ready now to devote himself to his wife as wholly as he had once served Jabalwan, he removed the diamonds from his hat and returned them to his medicine bag. Instead of scouting and foraging, he stayed by Lucinda's side and applied himself to dressing and behaving as a European. He spoke only in English, even to himself, forsaking the tribal voice he used to speak with the clouds. The clouds had nothing new to say: the tribes of the sky still wandered like cattle, reckless to the walls rising around them, heedless to the hawk-faced Europeans herding them in. Sitting atop their elephant mount, he queried his wife about England and the countries she had visited with her father. He wanted to cover his memories with a future.

  *

  The terrain seemed to match Jaki's ambition. The forest relented and became dry and flat. For several weeks they traveled a hard-packed trail among bronze tufts of sand grass and large, calm sheets of red rock. They journeyed across the desert lying between the riverbends. Where the river met the desert, fruit groves and quince arbors flourished in terraces above the rocks, irrigated by villagers who lived along the banks. The orchards had been cultivated centuries earlier as resting places for the caravans that crisscrossed on the plain from China, India, and Indonesia. At each village the natives welcomed the nomads with skins of rice wine, fruit brandies, and chilled fresh water.

  Traveling proceeded easily without the rains, the jungle terrors, and the menace of Ganger Sint. Lucinda began a journal, and at night the travelers played chess by firelight and listened to stories under the cool moon.

  Maud told a tale she had heard from her Aunt Timotha about the Barley King who ruled a village for a year and a day, denied nothing until the following spring, when a harvest scythe cut his throat and his ritual blood enriched the fields. Kota related frightful tales from his years as a pirate, and Jaki recounted the arrogant reign of Batuh and the final battle with the Rain Wanderers, when Jabalwan returned from the dead. But only when Lucinda spoke about her visits with her father to the ports of India did the fire-circle become truly animated.

  Jaki listened attentively, wanting to know what kingdom lay before them, and what he heard amazed him. The vast Moghul Empire ranged across all of India to the Persian mountains and the ocean that led to Africa. And the empire prospered extravagantly. Lucinda described marble palaces unrivaled anywhere in the world, and other travelers spoke of fountains of wine and groves hung with fruit carved from opium. Though Muslim, the emperor ruled as an alcoholic despot and a drug addict, who delighted to watch his enemies pulled apart by elephants.

  Dhup, too, ha
d a story, and it stayed with Jaki, though he heard it very late one night at the brink of sleep. Dhup had carried a curse. As a child he alone survived a plague that destroyed his mountain village. He wandered after that, and each village he visited soon succumbed to the plague, which never touched him. Abhorred among the hill tribes, the boy would have been killed on sight had not a Buddhist monastery granted him sanctuary. There, too, the plague struck, but the monks did not drive him out. Instead they appointed him minister to the stricken monks and taught him how to heal with teas and compotes made of moldy fruit. A few died, most survived, and Dhup applied the cure to himself. After that, no one became sick around him again.

  "Evil climbs down from heaven," Dhup told Jaki, "just as blessings do. Only the arrogant think they are evil — or good."

  "You speak like a teacher of mine," Jaki said.

  "Perhaps I have had the same teacher."

  Jaki felt excitement kindle. Though the clumsiness of this man had almost drowned him, it had also returned him more fully to life. Perhaps he too was a sorcerer. "Why does heaven send evil?" he asked.

  "Who knows the truth? We simply name evil."

  Jake nodded. "How does one know good from evil?"

  Dhup's grin widened to a smile full of crooked teeth. He reached out and, with a blunt finger that felt surprisingly like steel, touched the down between Jaki's eyes. "That is all one really knows." His smile dropped away, and he withdrew his hand. "But one knows it only for oneself." He bowed and lay down in the dirt beside the spent fire to sleep.

  *

  "Monday 12 October 1627." Lucinda began a new leaf of rice paper in her leather-bound log. The brown ink set like dried blood.

  "We traveled nineteen miles today and camped at a caravansary on the crest of the Imphal pass. To the north, majestic ice mountains watch us, and the nights are cold. We are glad now for the yak-fur blankets got so cheaply in the sweltering lowlands.

  "From this promontory, we have enjoyed our first glimpse of India far below. Gossip of war among the Moghuls disturbs the merchants, but there is no turning back for us. Boeck would only too gladly despoil us of our profits while declaring our contract moot for not attaining our agreed objective at Surat.

  "I, too, am disturbed, though not by the Moghuls' strife. I have visited India before, with Father, and the sight of that enormous and splenetic country reminds me of him and my fright of his rage. The very virtues I admired in him when I was a child — his will, his imposing physical presence and command of men, his great stamina — are my bane now, even now almost six months since fleeing him.

  "This half year has been the happiest of my life, for I have never before known freedom and love — yet my joy is tainted by woeful memory of what Father called love — his dismal strictures imposed by violent threat. I have no doubt that he pursues me and if he finds me will exert all his mad strength to bend me to his command. I fear that not even brave Jaki with all his primordial powers could withstand the fury of this vehement man whose ship he destroyed and daughter he stole. How righteous Father's wrath must seem to him. Lord forfend I ever face that bitter man again.

  "Jaki, ever diligent to make of himself a gentleman in the European manner, reads a page or more of the Bible every day. Or when he reads not, he sets the book in the sunlight, sits before it, and watches it as if it were an animal. I have learned not to inquire too searchingly of his motives, as he is wont to much metaphysical discourse. That, I know, is his legacy as a sorcerer of his tribe, yet I find his talks about the sad stories in the passage of the clouds tiring. Again today, he told me how books are a wall that turns us from the open God-given world to the confines of the man-made. My reply that God has given us dominion and that the wall of books is our rampart against chaos befuddled him. How strange for me to discover, Jaki has no notion of chaos. As if the world, with all its misery, were not to be perfected! Sometimes I do believe he would be happier with his tribe if only he had not been burdened with Dutch paternity. Yet he is earnest to be his own father, to parent himself as a European, and he continues to obey me most excellently, as though I were his docent. I pray daily that I not misguide this innocent, sincere man.

  "Maud was with great mirth today to see the last of Burma, which she liked not. She well remembers India and the lavish opulence of the princes who feted us when we visited with Father. I share her hope that the journey henceforth shall offer more comforts."

  Lucinda laid down her stylus. Nearby, bareheaded Jaki sat on a flat ledge of rusty rock, scowling at the open Book. Maud worked serenely with several of the merchants' dusky wives, boiling lentils and barley in a kettle for that evening's meal, giggling at some bawdy story they shared. The caravan's pavilions fluttered in the breeze, and a flute ditty traipsed from the camp on a whiff of opium.

  On a lower slope where a grove of silver pine and mountain sedges provided fodder, the elephants cluttered like boulders. Snow pigeons plummeted in white bursts from the sun and flocked in wide circles over the steep hillsides and farm terraces. Silver peaks burned across the northern brim of the world, and beneath them the cluttered valleys and long plains of India shimmered with forest haze, river glints, and the purple smoke of horizons. Lucinda breathed the resin smells rising from the lustrous land and smiled with the peace of a faithful pilgrim.

  *

  "The jungle will defeat you," Jakob Boeck warned. He stood with William Quarles and Robert Fletcher on a stone levee along the swollen Irrawaddy. The raft that the Englishmen had outfitted to take them upriver to Prome bobbed gently at its moorings. The three men wore ruffed collars, slit-seamed sleeves, satin breeches, garter bows, polished boots, and feathered hats. The coach that had carried them to the river's edge waited on the wharf road, a brown silhouette against Dagon's diadem of torchlight. "Last night I received word from Prome that the foreman I had sent with your daughter's caravan was killed by a tiger. The merchants who found his grave turned back."

  "We will not turn back," Quarles asserted, staring down the portly, sharp-nosed ambassador. "And if anyone should have been dissuaded by you from this perilous journey that, sir, should have been my daughter. I will not forget that you, Mister Boeck, sent her forth into the wilderness."

  "Captain Quarles, please." Boeck placed his hand on Quarles' arm and was startled to feel the iron of it. "Your daughter is determined to escape you. If I had not helped her, she would have gone to the Portuguese. The pirate has diamonds. He would have bought passage out of Asia. She spoke of going to the New World. They would have eluded you entirely. Now, at least, you know they are on the spice trails in Burma. Let me send a message ahead to my contact in India. Why risk your lives in the jungle when you can await their arrival in Surat?"

  Fletcher nodded his agreement. He viewed this entire escapade with foreboding, yet duty and the hope of promotion obliged him to accompany Quarles. "Sir," he ventured hopefully, "the factor's counsel is sage. I have been to Prome. It is a primitive place. And beyond it, the so-called spice trails vanish in dense jungle before attaining the high country to the north. With that heathen pirate born to the jungle guiding the caravan, we are unlikely to overtake them."

  Quarles turned his back on the two men and stared hard at the silks of sunrise unraveling over the river. Boeck's words had stung him with a truth that had long burned but had yet to pierce his heart: Lucinda fled from him. He had driven her away with — what? Wanting her to marry a gentleman? Wanting fortune for her? Outrage at her betrayal boiled, and he groped for understanding. He had struck her, as any good father would when his child strays toward danger. Yet he had protected her and sustained her in all her life’s fit dreams. More. He had educated her. He had made her worthy of nobility. In his mind, his love prospered beyond reproach, and that fired his determination. He would not let her go. She was his daughter, flushed from his own body. No pirate would take her from him.

  On the slave barge in the Moluccas, when he had believed her dead or a jungle princess, he had attempted simply to surrender h
is life to a greater cause. For him, it had been empire, the expansion of civilization against the chaos of jungles, plagues, and pirates. Now, what cause elevated purpose higher than love for his own flesh and blood? Empire did not need him. Destiny would carry empire forward. His daughter, stubborn child-woman, ensorceled by a pirate and her own misguided willfulness, suffered now in some remote jungle hellscape. She needed him. Who would save her from herself if he did not?

  Quarles turned about decisively. "Mister Fletcher, board the raft and see that the crew understand their duties. Mister Boeck, I will return with my daughter."

  *

  Jaki, devoted to his wife, longed to live his destiny through her, because he believed she opened a portal to the world of his fathers. Eager to leave behind his history of grief and attain the status of a European, he obeyed her even when she contradicted his experience. Though Pym had taught him the advantages of democratic rule, he submitted without reservation to his wife's insistence on managing the caravan by her authority. At smaller caravansaries, where the mules brayed angrily because they disliked the smell of camels, Lucinda turned out into the night camels and merchants who had journeyed with them from Dagon. Even though the mule owners had only recently joined the caravan, they had offered Lucinda better trade rates, and she was an aggressive and opportunistic negotiator.

  By the time the caravan had wended among the spice villages and silk hamlets of Manipur and had entered India through the craggy Imphal pass, two elephants and three mules carried their profits alone.