Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Jaki helped Lucinda to her feet, and she clung to him, her face a furrow of despair. "Jaki, we are so close."

  The hurt in her voice engulfed him, an icy fire of fear and rage— fear for the fragile being in his arms, the drum of her pregnancy vibrant against him. Gently, he said, "Go below," and he looked to Maud, who took Lucinda by the shoulders. Jaki turned away and shouted to strike Wyvern and reef the sheets; then, he told the pilot to turn and hold steady.

  Amaranth tacked into the wind and cut hard away from the island, bearing north into the high sea as Jaki stood entranced at the rail. How would Pym answer this storm? he asked himself, and the groaning timbers and whining spars replied. Silenos was a weapon; Amaranth a leaky slave ship exhausted from forty days at sea.

  No! he defied himself. How would Pym answer this storm with this vessel? Of course Silenos was a weapon: Pym had built her — murderous captain, pitiless Pym. Wyvern's devil would know how to break free of the storm's grip, and Jaki closed his eyes and looked for that ghost in him. Nothing. The light behind his eyes dulled to the color of old shoes. The spars coughed. He opened his eyes and squinted against daggers of glare from a rent in the stormclouds.

  In the next six hours, Jaki and his crew plied every swerve of the wind. They could not stay ahead of the storm, and finally the gale winds swept over them. "All we can do is batten down and ride with the great winds," Lucinda said when Jaki cursed their ill fortune. He had come to sit with her by the lashed window in the stateroom. He was surprised to find Lucinda seraphically calm and clear-headed. "We are far safer at sea than we would be on land. We are fortunate the storm caught us before we made landfall. Amaranth has carried us through one tempest. I dare say, she'll hold us through another. Let us trust in our fate," Lucinda said, crossing her hands over the child within her.

  Jaki stared numbly at her. The powers of the world had led him to this precarious crest, and now all his dizzied thoughts and molten feelings crammed into this one inexhaustible moment. Life is blind, Pym echoed from far away. Alone in a world of accidents, luck is a monster. Jaki kissed his wife and returned to his place on the rocking quarterdeck.

  *

  Lightning jagged overhead, thunder punctured the black afternoon, and Amaranth jumped with the impact of the shattered sky. The crew, who had worked fervidly to outpace the storm, fumbled, exhausted and scared, and when Jaki called, "All hands below! Mash wine for all who can stomach it! Today we dance in the jaws of the serpent!" a shout went up.

  A mountainous swell hammered the hull, cracking timber and setting the whole ship gonging. Jaki sent the pilot below and tied off the tiller. Whirlwind rain blinded him, and he crouched under its onslaught, bowing before its divinity and prayed. And his prayer vanished in the howling wind.

  "Fire!" A scream flashed from below, and Jaki eyed black smoke snarling from the prow. He cursed and had to lean into the wind to shoulder his way to the hold. Below deck, the crew jammed the companionways, frantic to staunch the leaks that gushed from the weakened hull and to reach the fire before it raged to the gundeck. Stinging smoke blurred the air, and Jaki covered his nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow and shoved forward.

  A shriek that burst hearing threw everyone to the planks, and the ship pitched to her side. With a thundercrack, the vessel righted herself, and a gargantuan shout of ripped wood from the depths of the ship announced that the mainmast had sheared away. The next instant, the main deck caved in under the debris of the fallen masts. Rafters collapsed from above, crushing four seamen.

  Jaki pushed to his feet, amazed to find himself alive. His breathing ached with the acid fumes of the hull's burning tar as he clambered over bodies and debris toward the aft and Lucinda. The captain's companionway received him, as yet undamaged, and he flew to the stateroom and crashed through the door to find Lucinda and Maud huddled in the bed, clutching each other. He joined them, shouting comfort they could not hear, and the three of them clung desperately together inside the maelstrom.

  *

  By dawn, the great winds had blown over, and the sun rose small and glassy. Amaranth hovered in the water, stern high, prow sunk to where her mainmast had been. Lucinda lay abed, wrung from the nightlong ordeal, and Jaki left her there with Maud while he went to survey the damage.

  Crewmen scurried over the shattered deck, lifting wounded from smoking holds. The fire that had been creeping toward the powder hold had been smothered by the corpses the crew had stacked against the blazing timbers. Seawater stifled the flames in the mash of timbers belowdecks. Jaki watched the water spit through the buckled hull, and his heart jammed against his ribs. In hours, the ship would keel and sink.

  "We have to lighten the ship," he said in a foggy voice. He gestured to make his meaning clear, and the weary men set to work sifting through the ruins for what they could lift overboard. Jaki left them chanting a dolorous song for the dead and pressed back through the cluttered gangway toward the stateroom.

  Along the way, a dazed crewman stopped him and held up the gold dagger that had been lashed to the bowsprit. In the vapor-wrinkled shadows, the knife seemed lit from inside. The cord that had held it still knotted the haft. The sailor mumbled something in African, a few words in English, and Jaki understood that he had retrieved Chrysaor when the bowsprit had been kicked onto the foredeck. Jaki took the blade, nodded his thanks, and budged past the crewman. The cursed knife felt intensely heavy. He slipped it between his belt strap and hip and hurried on.

  The stern of the ship came through intact, as if protected by Wyvern, whose ensign still hung from the taffrail. Jaki estimated how much time the ship could remain afloat and how far they would have to drift to reach land. Maud stepped from the stateroom door and interrupted. She laid a shivering hand on his arm. "Lucinda's begun labor. The baby has dropped. It won't wait for landfall."

  He found Lucinda sitting up, clutching her distended belly, her face flushed and sparking sweat. When she saw him, her hands shot out for him.

  Maud hastily set to boiling water on the trivet stove they had carried into the stateroom days before. Jaki held Lucinda to him, and she bit the collar of his shirt, tearing the fabric. He stroked her head, then lay a strong hand on her belly. He felt the head of the baby low and silently prayed his thanks. "Luci, everything will be all right," he assured her. "I have seen babies birthed before. And ours is a healthy one. It has already turned to enter the world." He eased her to her back and brushed the hair from her glazed eyes. "We will work together now."

  The birthing went slowly. Hours passed in spasms as the ship shuddered and jolted in the becalmed sea, and Jaki left his wife only briefly to assure himself that the lightened wreck was not capsizing. Night fell, and still Lucinda's birthhold had not fully dilated, though her water had broken. Pain came to her in wracking waves, hour after hour, until her limbs felt made of glass. The walls lurched violently, and she yanked Jaki closer. "The ship," she rasped.

  "The flooding has stopped," he lied. "By dawn, we will sight land. Ease your mind."

  The ship bucked as rising water in the bilges shifted debris about, and Jaki stole time from Lucinda to go out on deck and order a tender prepared for her. Only two tenders had survived the attack, and there was no drinking water left and no edible food. But the flooding had slowed as the rubbish in the holds swelled against the buckled timbers.

  At midnight, the baby's head appeared. Jaki breathed easier, grateful for the hours he had spent listening to the tales the tribal mothers told of childbirth, for men were never allowed in the birthing hut. He remembered enough to keep the crowning head from rushing forward, and he coaxed Lucinda to breathe the head out. The wounded ship rocked viciously, and the shuddering headhold sucked the child into its grip in a drooze of blood. The skin of the taint had turned white with strain, about to rip. Jaki took the gold blade and lifted it to cut the blanched skin.

  Maud, who held Lucinda's legs, hissed and shook her head. "Not that knife," she mouthed.

  "It will give life th
is time," he said, and waited for the ship to steady. With his finger placed to protect the crowning head, he nicked the stretched skin at the height of a rush. The head emerged face down, and Lucinda shrieked. Jaki lifted the birthcord over the baby's top shoulder as its head turned to face its mother's blood-grimed thigh; then, with a gentle pull, he freed the lower shoulder. The ship shook again, and the child, purple in the shawl of its birthsac, skidded into his hands.

  Jaki cleared away the shiny membrane and held the child up for Lucinda to see — a girl, her face a slit-eyed scowl cheesy with afterbirth. She squirmed a long moment and sucked air, turning bluer, and abruptly shook out a scream. Maud offered a blanket, and Jaki laid her in it. With Chrysaor, he cut the umbilical cord.

  While Maud presented the baby to Lucinda, Jaki attended the stunned flesh of her birth channel. A gush of dark red blood accompanied the placenta that had slid out with the child, and he gingerly felt the contracted uteral wall and nudged it back in. The bleeding did not stop.

  Dawn lit the horizon before Jaki had cleared away the clots of blood and staunched the bleeding from his small incision. Still, blood drained from higher, pulsing in bright spurts. Maud prepared a poultice of dried moss soaked in the broth of astringent herbs, and Jaki washed his hands and sat with his wife and daughter.

  The tiny, rose-pink creature gazed clear-eyed, glad for her mother's milk. Lucinda, shivering with aftertremors, smiled through her pain. The room had brightened with more than dawnlight. An astral radiance seemed to suffuse the air, the glow of her life touching the world. The pain had changed color as soon as the baby was born, and the glimmers of hurt in her body felt like wind-humming energy blowing outward from inside her.

  Jaki gave her a pain-stifling root to chew, and she worked it wearily with her teeth until its quieting power steadied her trembling. The hungry baby at her breast drew out all her longing with pure hunger for life — and the little human gave her the strength she needed to close her eyes and sleep.

  *

  Dripping pain into tarry darkness, she rose. Rainbow light uncurled, lifting her, and she began to drift beyond sleep. Toilings of fire wavered, unfocused, and — trembling like rain — she sped toward that mute enormity of radiance.

  I'm dying, she realized without fear or loneliness. Death is just as true child has said: a river that bears us away.

  As that thought unfolded, the blurry vista snapped to a lucid overview of the brightening sea. She stared at swells like sapphires and strings of sunlight pulled taut through iron cloudbanks. With a jolt of astonishment, she surveyed the wreck of Amaranth, floundering among the waves, miles of debris sprawled about her. She looked like a storm-torn tree adrift.

  Under sooty veils of dawn, a purple armada of islands rose from the horizon, the dreamy upsurge of the New World. Amaranth drifted only hours from landfall. She yearned to return and shout their triumph to Jaki and Maud, but the current carrying her rose higher into the fire-rinsed empyrean. The glim of dawn touched her with blue warmth that smelled of spring and everything hopeful.

  *

  She was cold and her sleepy eyes empty. Maud lifted the baby away. Jaki pressed his wet cheek to Lucinda's, his eyes squeezed shut.

  Later, the weary Africans watched as Jaki slammed ripped planks into a dirgeraft with a mallet. Maud looked on, too, with the infant in her arms, swaddled in a wool blanket though the blunt heat of day wrinkled the air on the horizon. He's mad, she thought, appalled by the ferocity of his banging. Twice already she had approached him for help with the hours-old child, and he had ignored her.

  The crewmen had found a she-goat with its head above water among the bobbing pens in the shattered animal hold, and Maud squeaked milk from its shrunken dugs and fed it to the baby; meanwhile, the sailors built a fire from broken timber on the sagging deck and roasted the drowned chickens, drinking the blood for want of fresh water. Jaki did not glance up from his wild pounding, even when they offered him food. Hands bloodied from splinters, he struggled to lift the raft over the side, angrily shoving away the men who gathered to help. Then, his strength spent, he curled up like a dried leaf. Quietly, some of the crew lashed the raft to the railing with a length of cut rigging, and it knocked dolorously against the hull.

  Jaki stood and disappeared into the stateroom, emerging with Lucinda's body in his arms. Her limbs had already stiffened, and he held her against him like a brace of sticks. Two men took her shoulders and ankles while Jaki lowered himself into the raft. The body handed down to him, he laid her on the warped planks and arranged her hair. He lifted her hand to remove the amber asphodel ring, but the scorching sun had already swelled the flesh about it. With the gold dagger from his hip, he cut a lock of her hair long enough to knot about his wrist. She looked lovely even in death, sugar-blond, proud-boned — and young, so much younger than she had seemed in life.

  Her childlike face, serene as a sleeper's, listened. "I was not worthy of you, Lucinda," he told her. "The powers of the world took you from me. And the rains will never bring you back." He lifted his pain to the gulls fluting above, and his heart clenched so tightly his ears ached. Gazing at her a last time, the beautiful woman of his father's people, the beautiful woman who had died for loving him, he sighed, "Forgive me, Lucinda. I never knew what I was doing. I never —" His tongue choked him. His knees unlocked, and he had to clutch at the mooring to keep from falling beside her. He hauled himself back aboard the drowning ship and cast off the line.

  *

  Revenge weathered the western gale with no serious losses and damage only to her standing rigging. William Quarles stood in the forecastle lee, tasting the wind and watching the dark towers of cloud circle the horizon. The air smelled green with land, yet the gray horizon remained empty and haunted with flashes of lightning. Another strong blow gathered, and he cursed Jaki Gefjon for daring to sail into the jaws of winter.

  From the logs of Jaki's ships that Quarles had taken off Africa, he knew the name of his prey: Amaranth. Had the pirate made landfall before these storms flung open the gates of hell? Quarles opened his telescope and scanned the horizon under the storm crests. Through the lens he spotted driftwood on the bruised swells and called a pikeman. For two days they had tracked vegetation kicked out to sea by winter storms. The condition of the woodmeat suggested how long it had been drifting and how far from land.

  "Captain!" the pikeman shouted with surprise as he hauled in the debris. "Flotsam!"

  Quarles examined a plank that the pikeman had retrieved. The tar-stained grain and numerous teredo wormholes indicated timber from below a ship's water line. His years of dockyard work helped him to identify the plank as a garboard strake, which meant the vessel it had come from had almost certainly sunk.

  A cry from the top alerted him to a small craft on the horizon. Through his telescope he fixed on a crude raft rocking in the stormswell. Revenge steered for it, and when she pulled near, grapnel lines secured the raft and pulled it alongside. Quarles peered down, and a powerless cry claimed him — a blind roar — at the sight of Lucinda's corpse, her winsome face mottled as the moon.

  "Oh, foul murderer!" He heaved himself over the rail and skirled down the grapnel line. With her stiff body in his arms and the corruption of her, he shook on his bones and almost blacked out.

  The crew of Revenge gazed helplessly at each other. The religious crossed themselves, and many looked away.

  Quarles lowered the corpse and stood dismayed over it, sobbing. Eighteen years earlier, his wife had lain dead in his arms, cold as a mirror, and he had not wept, he had not shed a tear — he had not yet learned how. Lucinda had taught him how to weep in Mandu, when he believed he had stolen her back from the pirate. Now the tears flowed freely, for he could never steal her away from this pirate.

  Quarles removed his hat and laid it over her ghastly face. Then he bellowed for chain and the colors. He weighted her rigid legs with the shackles and draped her in the Union Jack. Then he went to his stateroom and returned with Lucinda's Bibl
e, journal, and tiger's beard. He wrapped the journal in the tiger pelt and dropped it at the foot of her draped body. He opened the Bible to the Psalms, and in a voice like grinding stones, he read: "The cords of death encompassed me, the torrents of perdition assailed me. In my distress I called upon the Lord — and my cry reached his ears."

  He pocketed his daughter's Bible and removed the timeworn Bible cover inscribed with Pieter Gefjon's family tree. He cast it into the raft. "You shall sleep with your lover," he whispered as a promise. "You shall sleep with him under the windings of the sea."

  Without taking his eyes from the deathraft, he nodded to the men holding the ropes. The grapnel lines pulled, the raft tilted, and Lucinda's body plunged into the deep.

  *

  Clouds quilted the sky, ruffled by a high wind, though the sea curved still as a mirror. On the wreck of Amaranth, two becalmed days after Lucinda's death, most of the wounded had died, too, and been jettisoned. The sunstroked survivors quivered like rodents in the florid heat.

  The prow of the ship submerged, the castle of grand bay windows and the neck of the rudder lifted high with the air trapped in the holds. As the air leaked away, the ship eased stem-first into the depths. The oak deck stern of the mainmast rode inches from the sea, a jagged float of lumber glinting with salt crystals, too hot to touch. The tattered canvas from the mizzenmast had been cut down and stretched on stalks of split wood to cast shade. Seventeen crewmen lay stupefied in the flimsy shadows.

  The stateroom, even with all the windows open, trapped air like an oven — and that was where Jaki lay, on the cot where Lucinda had died. In the smothering heat, awash in sweat, craven with heartache, he thought of his wife and the times they had made love in this cot, straddling each other as if they could have ridden their bodies through this violent and random world. And the heat baked those thoughts until they became calcined and crumbly. Then there was nothing. The dust of his body baked in the stiff bed.