Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Maud knew that Jaki wanted to die, indifferent to the child whose birth had killed his wife. She would not leave him alone. She needed his help with the infant. She had tethered the goat to the taffrail, under a rag of propped canvas, and had been feeding it moldy barley grit salvaged from the galley before it had flooded. Without water, the animal's milk had dried up, and the crew wanted to butcher it while it was still alive and uncongealed. They closed in to take the goat, and she rasped a cry for Jaki.

  He appeared at the steps of the tilted quarterdeck naked but for a scrap loincloth. His enraged face gaunt and wolf-eyed, he said nothing. And the crewmen crawled back to their shreds of shade.

  Jaki turned his stare on the baby in Maud's arms, disappointed she still lived and suffered, her wrinkled eyes goggling at the world. Maud pleaded with her eyes for him to approach, and he hobbled up the stairs. "She has not cried in a day," Jaki said, kneeling beside them.

  "She is too weak." Maud handed her fan to Jaki and let her arm flop to her side. "It is time you named her."

  Jaki feebly fanned his daughter, and she closed her eyes into the breeze. "She is dying, like all of us. Why burden her with a name? By nightfall she will be with her mother."

  Maud grasped his arm with harsh strength and startled Jaki. He looked into her scorched face and met a disdainful anger. "Where is your proud talk of the Life now, sorcerer?" Her lips quivered. "Name your child."

  He looked away across the still sea, and his face when he turned back had blurred, become drugged with desolation. "She shall be called Lucinda."

  "No." Maud's voice cracked. "You'll not name her after the dead."

  "Her name is Lucinda," Jaki said with finality. He touched the softness between Lucinda's eyes. "She is named by her father." He climbed to his feet and shuffled back down the stairs to the deathbed.

  *

  That very hour, a breeze stirred, flurrying the sea, and wuthering within minutes into rain-swirling wind. The crewmen pranced along the broken deck catching rain with their mouths and turning lopsided kegs upright to hold the fresh water. Men who had been too weary to stand danced, faces open to heaven. One of them jumped to stillness, both arms pointing to the horizon. "Sails!"

  Jaki staggered to the quarterdeck at the cry, spyglass in hand. The flash of rain had dimmed, and sunlight glimmered on the water. Sails climbed the horizon, the triple masts of a heavily gunned bark flying the red-and-white cross. "Warship," he declared. "English."

  "Will they see us?" Maud asked from behind him. "We must light a fire."

  Jaki slammed the glass closed against the rail and cast the tube into the sea. "They've already seen us. We are in their line. They will reach us in the hour."

  "Then, we are saved," Maud cried.

  "You are — and Lucinda," Jaki said and looked over the seventeen Africans lapping water from their palms. "They will find no freedom aboard that ship. And I will share Pym's fate — if they take me." He regarded the sullen clouds in the southeast. "Another bank of rain is closing. A storm. If we ride that surge, we may lose them in the longboat." He went to the taffrail and began unlashing the ensign banner that bore Wyvern.

  "What are you doing?" Maud asked hotly.

  "We will need a sail," he answered. "This will do."

  "A sail?" She frowned across the smashed carcass of the ship at the inundated debris and the longboat floating there. "You think to flee a three-master in that?"

  "It is ugly," he admitted, freeing the salt-chymed banner. "But it is handsomer than the scaffold. Stand back."

  The crewmen at his side helped him to draw in Wyvern, and he ordered the others to lug the tender over the side and to gather all the matchlocks.

  "Jaki." Maud held him in a woeful stare. "You will be run down and captured. You cannot escape."

  Jaki jerked a thumb at the sky. "The storm will cover us. And with this wind, we may yet reach the islands. I believe we are only leagues away. By dawn, we may well walk in the New World."

  Maud bit her lip to keep from answering him. He lived mad, greedy for death. She knew she could not dissuade him. The rain had refreshed the infant enough for her to whimper with hunger, and Maud sat down with her beside the binnacle and bared her breast. "There's nothing here for you, young creature," she said, gentling the anxious face. "But you will be safe soon." The child mouthed her halfheartedly and began to cry. "Good girl. You've fight left in you yet." Child of your parents, she thought.

  Jaki and the Africans secured a makeshift mast to the longboat's thwarts with fish netting for rope. It took them all of an hour to fasten it properly and to pulley-rig their banner. By then, the English warship cut across the wind directly toward them.

  Amaranth sat so low in the water that the tender glided easily through the blasted gap of the prow. Jaki marshaled the six men who chose to flee. The others waited grimly, some too weak to face a sea journey in a storm-driven longboat, others who loved life more than they feared slavery. While the others gathered what remained of the rain spill, Jaki climbed to the quarterdeck and knelt beside Maud and the wailing Lucinda. "I will cherish you in my memory, young sister."

  "And your daughter?" she asked, her eyes playing angrily over his face.

  Jaki put his thumb to the baby's crying mouth. Animated, she displayed the wide facebones of his forest ancestors. "You have earned her life. She is your daughter now."

  "Stay," Maud begged, clutching him with one hand at the back of his neck.

  "And be hanged?" He leaned into her grasp and kissed her cheek. "No, it is better that Lucinda's father run and hide. I will seek you out when I am free."

  "How? The world is vast."

  He smiled plaintively and stood up. "I am a Rain Wanderer." And then he was gone, limping down the steps and curling over the rail and into the masted longboat. As he stood in the stern and waved to her, she recognized the cold glow on his face and the pale aura of death that had passed to him from his wife — and she did not wave back.

  *

  Wyvern caught the gusty rain and carried Jaki and his comrades away. Across Jaki's naked chest, a snakeskin strap hung the medicine bag he had made in Africa, and in his right fist Chrysaor caught sunlight. Maud stood up to follow the longboat's glide into the distance. For a while, she believed the English galleon would ignore the fleeing boat — the bark was furling her sheets and turning to come alongside the wreck. Maud waved to the mariners on the ship's poop deck, one of them studying her with a telescope, and she held the baby up for them to see.

  Quarles recognized Maud and ordered Revenge to drop anchor beside Amaranth. His heart thrashed at the sight of the infant. Since finding his daughter's corpse the day before, he had been tortured with memories of her as a child — a princess of life. He was the first to board the sinking pirate vessel, hurrying down the grappling net, saber in hand.

  At the sight of him, Maud almost dropped to her knees. "God in Heaven," she whimpered. "Captain Quarles!"

  Quarles bolstered her with one arm, attentive to the terror and the weakness in her face. "Bear up, Maid Rufoote," he urged, and his voice startled her alert. "I'm not going to harm you." He stared down at the ruddy infant and a luminous strength swelled in him. "Is this Lucinda's child?"

  "Yes," Maud whispered. "But she — she ..."

  "I know my daughter is dead," said he. "We buried her yesterday at sea. Where is the heathen who murdered her?" His ferocious gaze tightened, and she quailed. "Water," he yelled, and knelt with her into her faint, supporting the baby with his swordarm. "Bring water!"

  The infant spluttered a cry, alarmed by Quarles' shouts, and he dropped his saber and lifted her frail weight. The pink buds of her fists shook, and her eyes squeezed tight with the vigor of her cry. "There, child," he muttered, and put a thumb to her chin. "You're with your grandfather now. Your suffering is at its end. No harm shall come to you so long as I live."

  A crewman passed a flagon to him, and he unstoppered it and tried unsuccessfully to tip water to the baby's lips. Then
he splashed water over Maud's face, and she blinked and roused. "Drink, Maid Rufoote. Not too deeply. Good. Now help me with this child. I fear she's fevered."

  Maud sat up groggily and took the flagon. With her finger over the spout she dribbled water to the infant's lips while Quarles held her. In a moment the child quieted and looked up at the bearded face above her. "She's weak. She needs milk."

  "We've goats aboard," Quarles said. "There will be milk for her." He gazed down, and a trembling of love surprised him, trespassing the solitude of his grief and anger. "How old is she now?"

  "This is her third day in the world."

  "And is she named?"

  Maud met Quarles' keen stare. "She's named for her mother."

  Quarles swallowed and half nodded. "So be it. Take her aboard." He signed for the sailors who had been watching, handed Maud the infant, and the seamen escorted her up the grappling net. Quarles looked after them until they departed the wreck.

  The ominous sky rattled with lightning, and the rain stiffened. Quarles had his men hurry the Africans aboard Revenge. He stood on the sinking deck, rain veiling from the brim of his hat, and swept his far gaze over the frothing sea. Among feathery crests, he picked out the distant sail of the longboat he had seen cast off as Revenge approached. Amaranth groaned mightily and wobbled. He banged his boot against her gunwale, cursed the very wood, and abandoned the wreck.

  He ordered the Africans dropped into the animal hold and had food and water lowered to them. The boatswain ushered Maud and the baby below deck to the surgeon's cabin. And Quarles hollered commands to set Revenge in pursuit of the longboat.

  *

  Jaki grimly observed the warship sliding after them. Where was the torrent? To the east, mauve clouds released rain in opalescent auroras, sheeting the galleon. "Fight or surrender?" he asked aloud, facing the six men in the longboat.

  They scowled back at him with unanimous defiance and raised their matchlocks. "Death before slavery!" they shouted. "We dance in the jaws of the serpent!"

  "Hold your fire, then," Jaki commanded, "until each shot will take a slaver with us to the afterworld. Prime your guns, men. Today is the end of our suffering."

  The galleon sliced toward them with stormclouds in the following sea. The rising wind on the port beams carried pinpoints of warm rain and veils of cold spray. A plover appeared overhead, and the Africans whooped with joy for the omen. The sea bird tilted into the wind and flew ahead of the longboat as if showing the way.

  "Land!" the crewman in the prow yelled, and all hands looked away from the pursuing galleon to the western horizon, where purple smoke edged the horizon.

  The British ship gained swiftly, and the men in the longboat could see sailors with muskets at the gunwale sighting them. Jaki stepped to the stern and pointed Chrysaor at the galleon. Lucinda hovered a heartbeat away.

  "Jaki Gefjon!" a gruff voice rode the high wind. "Drop your sail! Come about!"

  Jaki straitened to hear his name, and the cold thought pierced him that the British man-of-war fronted William Quarles. He cupped a hand to shield his eyes from the scudding spray. At the forecastle rail a burly man in a white-plumed hat fixed a spyglass to his eye.

  "Ready on Wyvern," Jaki called. He watched the warship bear down on them and Lucinda's father come clearly into view, the strength of his hatred apparent even at this distance. "They're going to ram us if we hold." Jaki swelled before the swoop of death, eager for it, feeling it in the motion of waves and wind, shoreless, infinite.

  "Broach to! Drop your sail! Or we will run you down!" Quarles shouted.

  The wind steepened, and the warship's bow foamed closer, its name visible, laid in scarlet on the bow: Revenge. "Tack alee!" Jaki cried. The sailors reefed Wyvern, pulled the hoist line to leeward, and dropped the banner into the wind in time to cut out of the galleon's direct path.

  Musketmen rushed to the rail of Revenge as the longboat slid past. The smoke of their gunfire leaped forward with the wet wind, and the tillerman sitting below Jaki fell from the longboat before he could fire his matchlock. Jaki dropped into his place, and the Africans fired. Two of the matchlocks clicked uselessly in the rain; three flared loudly. Two musketmen on the galleon snapped away before their comrades' second round crackled. Musketballs punched through Wyvern and crashed into the trammeled spar that served as a mast. One struck a sailor in his thigh, and he fell with a scream.

  Jaki hooked his leg over the tiller, hoisted the fallen matchlock, and squeezed the trigger. One of the musketmen dropped. Jaki flung the matchlock aside and steered across the wind behind the big ship. A squeal of ripping wood leaped from the damaged mast. The pole snapped, dropping Wyvern onto the prow.

  From the porthole in the surgeon's cabin, Maud watched musketballs crash into the longboat, and she spun aside with a cry. Staggering with the ship's roll, she clutched the frightened baby to her and barged for the door.

  On deck, sailors bustled through the rain to bring Revenge about. Quarles, striding along the main deck and exhorting his men, frenzied, frantic to destroy the longboat. When he spied Maud and the child, he hollered, "Get below!"

  "No!" she screamed. "You are killing the father of your grandchild!"

  "He is a murderer!" Quarles shouted back. "He slayed my daughter, my only child."

  "No! Lucinda loved him. She died loving him. You must not kill him."

  Quarles' face warped with rage. He waved at a seaman. "Take her below and lock her in the surgeon's cabin. Be quick."

  The fleeing longboat used this brief respite to pull farther into shallow water, and Quarles realized as he turned upon them again that pursuit risked grounding the deep-drafted galleon. The storm sky clouded the water, disguising sandbars and coral shoals, and he ran to the pilot and ordered the big ship to pull away. "Port cannon!" he bellowed to his officers. "Blast that longboat to hell!"

  Revenge sheered off, and her gunports clacked open. Jaki knew the fight was over. He abandoned the tiller, cut the rigging from the canvas with his gold dagger, and muscled the cracked mast overboard. The Africans huddled, oars up, staring dolefully across the swells at the warship's cannon.

  Jaki lifted Wyvern and wrapped the sheet about him so that the viper-hawk's visage gloated from his chest. Over it he hung his medicine bag by its strap. He turned to the cowering men and raised his knife. "We dance in the jaws of the serpent."

  The men mumbled the chant hollowly, and Jaki faced the line of gunmen, the wet fingers of the dead on him.

  The cannon kicked fire and blusterous smoke, and the siren cries of metal hurtling through the rain's iridescence lifted the Africans to their feet. The impact heaved the sea into the sky and scribbled the stormy air with burst timber, orts of flesh, and a spray of blood.

  *

  When the cannon smoke cleared, only shards of the longboat remained, tossed by the swells. William Quarles exulted.

  Revenge rode the gale winds through the Antilles and arrived in the Dutch colony on Santa Cruz two days later. The crew, who had signed aboard in Ribeira Grande for passage to the New World and plunder, protested that their captain had no further intention of stalking prizes. He planned instead to winter in the Caribbean and sail north in the spring to the distant Dutch colony of New Holland. They demanded payment, and Quarles, having no other sizable assets, relinquished command of Revenge to the crew, who elected their own captain and sailed at once to despoil the Spanish silver flota off Cuba.

  Santa Cruz hosted a Dutch colony, a small European village of gabled chalets with rubble walls in pastel colors and yards crowded with Ixora shrubs and zinnia hedges. The populace earned their livelihood managing sugar cane fields, and little work could be found for an exiled British captain. Quarles banged a hut together from weathered ship's lumber and used his meager funds to provide for himself, his granddaughter, and their somnolent maid.

  Maud rarely spoke with Quarles. She had witnessed the destruction of the longboat from the surgeon's porthole — torn bodies tossed into the air, t
he broken vessel and its passengers scattered like rubbish into the storm — and she tried hard to forget. She busied herself tending the infant and fishing on the sparkling cape. She longed to return to England and her Aunt Timotha, but Quarles could not manage the child without her. Finally, in an attempt to appease her, he sent for the old woman through the Dutch governor of Santa Cruz. In the spring, with the remainder of his gold, he bought passage for himself, Maud, and the child on a Dutch frigate bound for New Holland. When they arrived in Fort Amsterdam in May, Aunt Timotha awaited them on the wharf.

  Craggy as a pine cone, ruddy and alert, Timotha Firth embraced her niece, the first true joy Maud knew since leaving Africa. She bounced in the old woman's embrace, and Timotha lay hands the color of musty wheat on the baby's head and sang a blessing in the old tongue. Her gap-toothed smile warmed even Quarles. Without title or fortune, their lot looked bleak, and that grieved him for the sake of the little girl. Yet when he saw again the crone from his childhood, an inexplicable hope opened in him.

  That confidence did not last the day. Fort Amsterdam intruded on wilderness, a stockaded hamlet with rutted dirt roads still muddy from spring rains. The ditches outside the barricades festered with mounded refuse, offal from the butchers, gurry from the wharves, and ordure from the chamber pots of the town. Flies swarmed. The Dutch stared suspiciously at the rattily dressed English and their three goats, and the governor had them wait among the stinging flies an hour before he reviewed Quarles' claim. The governor’s secretary presented a standard provisional deed requiring Quarles to develop his property within a year or forfeit it. Within minutes of signing the document, the governor’s men dispatched the English downriver in a dinghy. The ferryman carried them past lush meadowland and walnut groves and deposited them with their goats and two crates of worldly possessions on the banks of a marshland.