None of this Jaki witnessed, yet he believed there must be ghosts. Everyone but Lucinda believed. "You are a sorcerer," she told him after their second day alone on the anchored ship, where they had confronted nothing more ominous than scuttling rats. "Do whatever you must to clear the decks of ghosts before some warship finds us here." The next morning, Jaki stripped to a loincloth, smutched his body head to toe with soot and scarlet berry paste till he gleamed like a salamander. Then he took the canvas from the new medicine pouch he had fashioned of a crocodile skin, and carried it up the main mast. He rigged the rolled canvas to the yardarm with a pulley release, and when the first sea breeze rustled across the dull day, he snapped the sheet in the wind. Wyvern rippled into the morning like a mirage in the maritime gust, a hot-eyed viper pinioned to wings raggedly uplifted in a crest of black fire. The Africans moaned from the shore.
Jaki paced the decks, stopping every few steps to kneel and burn bark peelings laced with gunpowder. He did the work slowly and purposefully, reliving the jungle rituals he had performed with Jabalwan.
The exorcism continued all day into the night, as much for his own sanity as for the others. The sorcerer in him had been troubled since his opium night in the gardens of Mirzapur and even more so after Lucinda's miscarriage. Why has death taken on the weight of the day? Hard as he stared, he found nothing. The world smothered spirit in earthliness, as Pym had claimed till his end. All is emptiness. Life breeds life and nourishes death. No wisdom but power, lad. No power but dominion.
Step by step, throughout the slave ship with its fulsome stench, Jaki confronted ghosts and made peace with them and their despairs. By nightfall, when he ran up and down the companionways with a torch in each hand, chanting Rain Wanderer hunt songs at the top of his lungs, whatever spirits had haunted those planks had abandoned ship. At midnight, he climbed to the crosstrees with both torches in one hand and danced a circle-hop with the flames, frenzied in his alliance with the triumphant dead.
The tribesfolk onshore marched to the tenders and rowed out to the big ship in jubilant choruses. That night bucket crews drained the bilges, and the next day they purified the squalid decks with holystones and caustic water leeched from wood ash.
*
Finding a crew among the two hundred and forty-eight bewildered Africans posed a more formidable task than exorcising ghosts. Tribal loyalties and disputes had endured the Africans' months of slavery, and tribes and clans partitioned Amaranth among friends and enemies. Unanimous respect for their liberators, as well as the certainty that other slavers stalked the horizon, prevented outright battling. Jaki, who well remembered the ferocious competition for heads among the tribes of his childhood, defied his ignorance of the black people's languages and aggressively intervened in their quarrels, gesticulating passionately to communicate the grave danger of their ship alone at sea, prey to storms as well as slavers. Begrudgingly at first, and later with the fervor of a people allied against extinction, the squabbling tribes relinquished animosity in favor of Jaki's leadership and survival.
In those tumultuous first days, the horizon encircled the ship in a sky free of squalls, and Jaki and Kota worked diligently, training the most able tribesmen to catch the wind by working the sheets of canvas in synchrony. The Africans took easily to the shrouds and handled the spars with the graceful attentiveness of men familiar with the wiles of physical things. While the men learned to sail and to fire the cannon, Lucinda and Maud worked with the women, organizing them into foraging parties, cooks, clothes-makers, and caretakers of those broken from thirty-six days of confinement. By the time the carrack left the cove, the crowded ship sang with the boisterous hope of going home.
*
Jaki planned to seize a sturdy galleon, or a slow but capacious sailing barge, but two days north of the Portuguese fortress at Diu, Amaranth encountered a sleek, forty-gun Portuguese caravel manned with bellicose Persians. They tried to flee from the warship, and the fleet caravel cut off Amaranth’s sea approach and pinned her against the silt banks. The caravel would have blown the carrack to splinters then and there if they had been flying Wyvern. At the sight of the warship, Jaki had ordered the banner draped from the bowsprit, signaling surrender. He kept the gunports closed, ordered the armed crew below decks, and stood some of the Africans along the rail so the Persians could see their prize — a valuable slaver.
Jaki leaned on the taffrail, bareheaded to display his Dutch hair. Grapnel hooks crashed to the decks, and the first wave of red-turbaned seamen leaped aboard, blades between their teeth, short-barrel muskets crossed in their sashes. Jaki drew his saber as if to surrender, waited until the planks slammed into place between the ships' rails, then shouted the order for the Africans to attack.
Deck hatches burst aside, and in moments the decks teemed with two hundred armed warriors. The Persians collapsed beneath the hacking African swords, and their shipmates tried to cut free and pull away to use their cannon. Jaki leaned hard on the whipstaff, tilting the bulky carrack into the outbound tide, and slammed the caravel. Kota, with a musket in each hand and a scimitar strapped to his back, led the Africans onto the Persian ship.
The Persians fought savagely, cutting down many warriors, and soon the decks gleamed, slippery with blood, and the companionways clogged with corpses. Without room to maneuver, the last Persians fought isolated and valiant duels until the Africans killed the last. With huge voices, the freed slaves declared their victory and stripped the Persian banners from the masts.
Jaki and Kota, on deck with the dancing warriors, did not understand the African chants. Later, when they had learned something of the tribal tongues, the cry would become familiar to them all, the Africans' song of triumph that defied death: "We dance in the jaws of the serpent!"
*
The Africans decided among themselves who would sail in the new vessel, and they deferred to Jaki for the selection of their captain. Several of the leaders among the Africans appeared worthy of captaincy. One reminded Jaki of Jabalwan — a man younger than most, yet one who had consistently looked after the weakest and who could not be bullied by the strongest and wiliest. The man had a weather of his own, appearing bored as any shaman, yet always involved, whether fighting the Persians or quietly mediating tribal squabbles. Tall as a spear, black as the night storm, with a face as bony and smooth as a fish skull, Axo Ndjobo’s name meant Bitten by the Stars. Once Jaki nominated him for the captaincy of the caravel, the great majority of the Africans voted exuberantly for him.
Kota wore a face dark as a bat's after that. He had worked hard training the Africans to handle the whipstaff and the rigging, and he had expected to serve as captain of the new ship. He had even troubled to dress for the role, in a large plumed hat cocked on one side, a red satin waistcoat, and a closed ruff about his throat pilfered from the caravel's wardrobe.
"You cannot captain the Africans," Jaki told him. "The tribespeople need their own leader."
"I know them," Kota insisted. "I show them how to steal wind, how to steer, and they obey. Lah. I am wise sailor."
"Yes," Jaki agreed, clapping an arm about the small man's thick shoulders and guiding him up the steps to the quarterdeck of Amaranth. "That's why I want you to captain this ship. The crew here is African as well, and they need a captain who is experienced."
Kota blinked like a turtle. "You are captain, lah?"
"No." Jaki jerked his thumb over the rail to where Lucinda and Maud could be seen fitting curtains to the open windows of the stern stateroom. "I am a man of my family. You are captain now. I will navigate. Lucinda will make a savvy quartermaster. And if we do our jobs right, the Africans in their own ship will learn enough by example not to get lost in the first high seas."
Kota swelled like a frog. For the first two days and nights of their thousand-mile journey across the Arabian Sea, he rode aboard the caravel, supervising the Africans. Eager learners, tempered in the forge of despair, they soon mastered the daily tasks. By the third blue day with the northeas
ter bucketing their sails and the sea parting before their bows, they had decided on a name for their ship. To a twelve-gun salute from Amaranth and a clamorous choral chant from the Africans, the freemen dubbed their caravel Children of the Serpent and branded the name on the bow in English.
"That’s a ghastly name," Lucinda said from the quarterdeck as smoke from the cannon salute rushed by like specters.
"Fa," Kota answered. "Their magic, lah. From fa they learn everything. They know this world sit on a serpent. The serpent live in the sea and hold up all land, all mountain, all jungle. When serpent hungry, it eat iron, shit gold. When restless, it move and earth shake. These people — lah." He held a satin-sleeved arm toward the caravel. "Far from home, far from gods. Only serpent under sea to carry them, carry them back. Yes, children of the serpent."
"Fa," Maud said aloud, waving to the impassioned Africans on the caravel and on the decks below. "We must learn their magic, Jaki."
Lucinda smiled wryly. "On the contrary, it is our magic the Africans had best learn — if they are to find their way home and never again into slavery."
*
The wanderer's life Maud had dreaded had been grander than she could ever have guessed, desperate moments withal. And the pirate she had loathed a year before had won her heart. Jaki was the first to treat her as a lady. That had been a happy novelty initially, and their friendship had deepened during their months together, studying herbs and roots, exploring markets, tending the ills of the caravan while Lucinda bartered with local merchants. With great reluctance, Maud admitted to herself that she had grown to love Jaki. His furzy scent left her breathless when he leaned close to show her the seeds in the clenched fist of a bud, or took her hands in his to guide her fingers as she learned the secrets of knots.
She never showed him her feelings. Not even Lucinda knew. Maud's busy days and easy laughter hid her ardor, and she watched Jaki with a hopefulness he did not see.
Jaki, rapt with the responsibilities of life at sea, failed to notice Maud's growing affection for him. He spent hours alone in the crosstrees observing his ships and the dazzling solemnity of the clouds. Sweetly drunk on the sparkling days and star-whorled nights, he greeted everyone on the crowded ship with smiles.
Lucinda became familiar with a side of her husband she had never met before. Euphoric just sitting on the planks in a circle of Africans, he studied their language and customs. He happily moved among chores all day, washing clothes by towing them astern, fishing with a trailing line, mending sails, marking the sun with Lucinda's help, and frequently disappearing up the mainmast to the top basket on the crosstrees. At night, he slept deeply in his hammock beside Lucinda's in the cramped stateroom, and she watched him by slanted moonlight, his hair like a rhyme of her own, his mother's bones pressing against the animal tenderness of his face.
Time alone with him was not possible on the decks, or even in sleep, since crewmen filled every habitable niche. On a sparkling morning four days out into the Arabian Sea, Lucinda watched as Jaki clambered up the shrouds to relieve the watch in the crosstrees, and her blood shimmered. Her father had always forbidden her to climb the rigging, and she had never once had any desire to mount a rope ladder on a rolling ship, until now. The crosstrees offered the only place on board where she could be alone with Jaki.
Elated with her own ardor and resolve, she returned to the stateroom and donned a pair of Jaki's tar-speckled canvas pants. She pulled a blue full-sleeved blouse over her head, and with a strand of jute tied her sun-bleached hair in a topknot. At the port chainwale she removed her sandals, stepped to the rail that lashed the the standing rigging, and gazed up at the mainmast tottering against the towering clouds.
Fear thrilled through her as she followed the ascent with her eyes. She took hold of the prickly shroud and stepped to the ratline. Churning clouds swelled across the sky, and she had to seize the stiff rope with the very iron in her blood to stave off vertigo.
The shrouds leaned in toward the mast, and the climbing went easier than she had guessed. She mounted the first flight from the deck to the yard of the lower topsail quickly, not looking down or up, keeping her stare fixed on the rungs of twisted hemp. Her hands, toughened from a year of managing elephants, camels, and mules, behaved without complaint, but her feet winced on the coarse ratlines, and her shoulder bones strained in their sockets with a searing ache.
On the yard top, where the first flight of shrouds converged to a slatted platform and the next flight of rigging began, she thought of going back down. Then she spotted the Africans gawking at her from the tops of the fore- and mizzenmasts. And there was Kota on the quarterdeck. He had not seen her yet and directed the pilot in the binnacle. He would call her down if he spotted her, and she took hold of the shrouds and started up the second flight.
Her feet stinging, she paused on the platform above the upper topsail and watched clouds boiling gently. Booming shouts hurtled from below. Kota had spied her. Mustering her strength, she pulled herself up the last flight, twenty-five ratlines to the round wicker-rope basket on the traverse beams of the crosstrees.
Jaki, who had been lying on his back staring into heaven, sat up when the shroud ties creaked with someone's approach. He peered over the brim, and Lucinda laughed to see him leap to his feet with alarm. "What are you doing?" he cried, looping his arm under her shoulders and helping her into the basket.
"I want to be with you," she answered, her voice vibrating with the rush of the ship. She looked out to see Children of the Serpent rocking to starboard and the following sea laced with scud, chop lifting the flat sterns high and quickly dropping them again, surging the ships forward. The power of the wind and the hurrying current exhilarated her, and she hugged Jaki. "It's beautiful." She waved to Kota, who stood hands on hips at the binnacle, a red petal among the brown leaves of Africans.
Jaki shook his head, smiling with delight and admiration. "I would never have hoped to be here with you. I've never seen you on the shrouds."
She chuckled hopelessly. "This is my first time. Father forbade it. I don't see why. It's not so very difficult."
Jaki held her at arm's length and regarded her in her oversized garments with vibrant attentiveness and a crooked smile. "You look splendid, wife."
She pulled him to her, and they swayed for a moment overlooking a world of crestspray and raffish sunlight. The gravity of their embrace drew them to their knees, and the whole world lifted above them to a crown of ransacked clouds.
Their passion for each other had been stymied for weeks since Lucinda's miscarriage on the Narbada, and they gazed at each other now with interminable desire. Slowly, in expectant anxiety, they took off each other's clothes so that they knelt naked on their shucked garments under the bright smoke of the sky.
Jaki's breath sharpened to see again the pale, curved grandeur of his wife's nakedness, and he lowered his face to her breasts and breathed her soft warmth. Her fingertips trailed the carved lines of his chest and the cobbled curve of his belly. He rolled atop her and let her hands fit him to her slick heat. The roll of the ship joined them with a slippery, glittering pang, and their bodies arched, his head thrown back, her legs lifted to the snug poise of their embrace.
Delirious with joy, they bucked with the waves until they sagged together in a vast chill grace. For a long spell, they lay listening to the wind ruffling the sails and sloughing over the crosstrees heathery with silence.
Lucinda rolled to her back and looked up into the clouds. "What do you see up there?" she asked.
"Wind and storm," he mumbled.
"I want to see what you see."
"Your father must have shown you the weather."
"You see more than the weather or you wouldn't stare so long."
"Dhup would say we see the sky, and it is clear until our seeing makes it cloudy."
"And what do you say?"
She felt him tighten, and he said, "I do not understand what I see."
She kissed his fingers and measure
d him with a passionate stare. "What do you think you see?"
After a long silence, he said, "The story of the world." He sat up and brushed his hair back with both hands. The carefree childlight had gone from his face. "We are living a great change. It is the end of the ancient ways that go back to the beginning of time. The end for them —" He lifted his chin to point through the wicker basket to where Children of the Serpent paced them. "As it is the end for my people."
Lucinda sat up into a frown. Jaki's touch on her cheek was so gentle, when he stopped it ached. "What is ahead for us, sorcerer — in the story of the world?"
"A home," he answered at once. "Pym used to say that the hearth is the only true altar. Among his beloved Greeks, the hearth was the one god without a form, for she is the home, our place on the earth. The cooking pot and its fire. Every tribe worships there."
The shadow did not depart her face, and her loveliness was not diminished by it. When she reached for him, he pulled her so close their bones knocked. "Hold me, Jaki. I am afraid. We have defied so many powers to be together. What will become of us? Like these ships — or those clouds — we go where the fateful winds take us."
Wyvern Page 51