Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Silenos turned into the wind, and Pym bellowed the orders to strike canvas. The ship glided idly, and the crew of thirty-two gathered on the main deck. The faces of the men staring up at the quarterdeck fixed on Jaki as Pym explained the bold offer to heal his festering wound. To the crew, Jaki looked too childlike for a healer, and at last one sailor shouted in Malay: "And what happens to the bugger if we risk squalls and men-of-war for Borneo and he can do no more for your headhole than a shadow puppet conjurer?"

  "Then we'll string him up like a puppet," Pym promised, "and you'll have your bonus from the captain's share of the booty for making this trip."

  Grumbles circulated about Pym's foolishness, but the crew was enticed by the generous bonus the captain had promised and they took off their hats and headscarfs to acknowledge their assent. When the entire ship's company stood bareheaded, Pym sent the men back to their stations and nodded to Jaki. In Spanish he said, "My men have agreed to help me." And he felt an icy twinge, a premonition of the rage he would suffer if, in the end, he had forsaken half his captain's share of the Japanese treasure, and Hsi Hang's gold to boot, for a foolish hope.

  Jaki met Pym's fear in the cold, black ember at the center of his eye, and he smiled placidly, the light in his own eyes holding their flame.

  *

  On the journey south, Jaki learned about his father's world. Pym showed him the ship's compass and its faithfulness to the invisible strength of the north. Only iron could break its spirit hold, and Jaki understood then how the Rain Wanderers and all the first tribes who eschewed metal and sustained themselves solely on the spirit powers of the earth had doomed themselves — and how those who picked up metal instantly lost their animal souls and became men possessed by the invisible spirit powers in metal.

  Even more inspiring for Jaki, Pym navigated by night. The captain pointed out the North Star low on the horizon and indicated the planets, the shards of the hawk's skull still whirling from the sun's blow at the beginning of time. Pym read the stars like ore in the mute depths of rock. Jaki remembered Jabalwan telling him about a sorcery of the night greater than bird omens and cloudreading. He listened attentively to all Pym had to say about the packs of stars, the twelve houses where they received the sun and the moon, and the beast shapes that wore the stars like ornaments in the black heavens.

  Pym assigned Jaki a small cabin in the aftercastle, a handsome chamber with a narrow bay window, Persian couch of lionhead armrests for a bed, and a three-legged stool of red lacquer from China. A crewman had died of fever there the previous year, and no one else would have the cabin, despite its comfort and wide view of the stern. Jaki accepted, fearless of the dead. The powers of the world had saved him from the cruelty of the living, and he was convinced that his fathers guided him.

  By day, he spent hours in the masts, reading clouds, hoping to learn more of his fathers. The clouds showed him a far country, a land not of longhouses but of tallhouses, lifting like trees against the sky. The people rode up and down in winched crates like the basket and pulley the cook used to haul vegetables from the draft-cooled aft hold. He could not believe what he envisioned, and soon he watched the clouds less and the men around him more.

  The crew marveled at Jaki's agility on the shrouds. His life in the guileful canopy of the forest had suited him well to moving nimbly among the rigging. Once the ship's veering balance became familiar, Jaki regularly crawled out on the topmast spars and executed the knots the crew taught him. His temerity won him the ship's respect. Even Saja relinquished his apprehensions about the sorcerer. Pym raged at the men not at all since they had plucked the blond savage from the Lanun, and Saja had no gashed scalps or split lips to stitch from the captain's blows.

  Blackheart, who had known Pym from his first years in Asia, delighted to see his captain's countenance brighten — yet he feared that when the yellow-haired heathen fled back into the jungle and did not return with his apocryphal cure, Pym's fury would be terrible and likely the destruction of them all. With concealed foreboding, Blackheart watched Jaki win the affection of the crew. His childlike interest in everything transformed mindless routines to the ardor of rituals. Pym chuckled to behold the swabbing of decks and plaiting of hemp glorified by the virtuous attention of the handsome youth everyone wanted to impress. In just a few days, he had become their witness from the primeval world, their jungle child hungry for what they knew so well that they had almost forgotten. And they were all fathers to him.

  *

  Under the rolling stars, the pirate captain and the sorcerer spoke of life, mystery, and the silt of destinies. The large man's compressed voice, booming even in a whisper, mesmerized Jaki. "Hope is vain and reason a joke," he said. "The world is a lie — a great deception. Does not the earth look flat and the sun seem to rise and set?"

  "This is not so?" Jaki's weighing stare wobbled with bafflement. "My teacher could see the world's soul in the clouds, but he had no understanding beyond that. You read the stars."

  "I see the wind in the clouds," Pym replied, pleased for someone with whom to share his learning. "And I see the weather the wind carries. I know nothing of soul but its conspiracy with death. The soul flies and we die. If your teacher saw the world's soul in the clouds, he saw death riding high over our spinning rock." He lifted his flagon to his lips. "I will tell you a thing that will set your savage heart soaring. The world is not the stretched-out corpse of the hawk as your people believe. The stars are not the shattered orts of its skull. Each star is a sun." He swept his arm like a club across the glittering sky. "Countless suns. And all of them so far away they look like chips of glass." With an unsteady hand, he snapped open a panel in the gunnel where he stored the backstaff and removed his largest spyglass. He pointed to a large yellow star. "Look there, lad."

  Jaki held the tube to his eye. The yellow star gazed back at him like an amber eye, tiny pinpoints of light poised around it.

  "Jupiter," Pym said. "Another world. And with its own moons — a handful of them!"

  Wonder lapped in Jaki's chest, and he regaled Pym with questions about sky, stars, and planets. The boy's mind reeled before Pym's answers, and Jabalwan's voice whispered from deep within: The sky is deep. Deeper than the old mansnake could have guessed — or had he? The sky is deep. It carries everything. No matter where. Pym sucked on his rice wine and told the boy everything he knew of how the sun held the planets in sway, swinging them around itself while they spun like marbles through days and nights.

  "Now do you see the deception of our eyes?" Pym asked. "We cannot trust our senses. We cannot trust life itself. Does not the spider spin a web the color of air? Does not our lust promise us life even as the humors sour in our veins?"

  "Only God is good," Jaki quoted Scripture, gazing through the spyglass at the crushed light of stars.

  "God!" Pym's jaw snapped like an iron trap. "You speak of God? Do you think God has a place for you in His heaven?"

  Jaki put down the spyglass and regarded Pym with incredulity. "I am here."

  Pym hurled a laugh into the night. "You're here, because Silenos pulled you out of hell."

  "I am like you, captain. I am dust thrown into the wind. We do not have to call that God. It carries us anyway."

  Pym grumbled. "Carries us where? From the pain of birth, through sickness to death, with frequent portcalls at hunger. It's a journey I'd not have chosen to make."

  Jaki shrugged. "There is no true freedom in life."

  "Why not?" Pym swigged at the wine. "If God is good, why is life a torment?"

  "Life is secret."

  "No, jungle boy." He closed his eye and let the wine lug him toward sleep. "We are simply ignorant."

  *

  The smell of land reached Silenos before the islands hove into view. The sharkfin mountains of Celebes smoked with distance off the port-side, and a honey wind spilled down the cliffs of Borneo from starboard. Jaki stood on the crosstrees with one of the bat-faced sailors, scanning the coast with the spyglass for the white
rock of the Snakehunter's Grave. He recognized a black river and knew that they approached the beach where the Lanun had seized him.

  Jaki hollered his sighting, and Mister Blackheart steered Silenos through the reef gulch toward the narrow beach. Bringing his own spyglass to bear on the shaggy swamp trees, Pym searched for signs of people. He shouted orders to men in the rigging, and the sails were struck. The ship glided through the channel toward the green shallows, and Blackheart spun the wheel so she fell off from the wind and slowed. The anchor dropped with a bright splash.

  "Have the cannon primed," Pym ordered Blackheart. "By now the Dutch and the Spaniards both know we took the fat bird from the Japans, and they'll be coming up and down the strait looking for us."

  Blackheart signed for Pym to stay aboard and offered to go ashore himself.

  Pym shook his head and selected a musket from the quarterdeck's gun rack. "I'm a better shot than you, Blackheart. And if our blond heathen means to desert us, I want the satisfaction. Stay alert now."

  A skiff was lowered, and Pym selected his two best gunmen to row, though Jaki assured him the marsh was empty. He could tell by the amble of the big-nosed monkeys and the birds' scrawling flights that no people lurked nearby. Jaki had put on his spirit father's shrunken head and insisted on bringing his long, speartipped blowgun. Pym kept it beside him, out of the boy's reach.

  As soon as the skiff bit into the mud shoal, Jaki leaped from the prow and splashed ashore. Pym cocked his flintlock as he rose to follow. There was no need for it. The boy threw himself to the sand and hugged the beach. He had never expected to see this land again. The forest aromas laved him, and he chanted a silent prayer of thanks to his guardian the Spider and another to his dead fathers.

  Pym uncocked his gun, shoved it back in his sash, and lifted Jaki by his shoulders. "Come on, happy colt. I'm a target for every flag in Asia. I can't be standing here while you blubber. Get me the medicine you promised."

  Jaki pointed into the forest and called out with a piping whistle. Pym clapped a hand over the boy's mouth and in a wink had the cocked flintlock pressed against his ear.

  "What treachery is this?" the pirate demanded.

  "No treachery," Jaki insisted. "I am calling my animal — Wawa. When the Lanun took me, he fled into the forest."

  "That was well over a week ago," Pym said. "No animal but a dog would linger here that long."

  "Wawa is not a dog. I don't know the name in Spanish for what animal Wawa is. He will come. He is my animal soul. He will not have gone far."

  "If this is a trick for calling the tribes down on us, you will die, Jaki Gefjon."

  Jaki twisted his shoulder loose from Pym's grip and strode into the jungle. Pym and his two apprehensive sailors followed.

  The languorous smell of the jungle enveloped them in its cool shadow. Looped lianas, pallid, fungal-gilled trees, and miasmic vapors opened like a grotto. Sultry odors blundered about them as they disturbed the leaf rot, and the muted music of bird and monkey jabber fell deeper into the lowering wilderness.

  Jaki cried again for Wawa, and Pym hissed at him to shut up. Jaki faced about and looked deep into the pirate's one eye. "You are in my forest now, Captain Pym. You may kill me here if you wish, and I will die happy. If you want healing, you must do as I say."

  Pym nodded and uncocked his flintlock.

  "Do you see these mushrooms?" Jaki picked a blue hair from a tree trunk. "Collect a handful of these and have your men do the same."

  Pym commanded his sailors and watched Jaki lope deeper into the jungle, flitting like a shade over the root burls. "Where are you going?" he shouted. The boy did not answer and in a moment had vanished in the steam of the jungle. His shrill whistle fluttered like a flag in the green darkness.

  While Pym busily collected the blue fungus, suppressing the dread that he had been duped, Jaki circled back to the beach and retrieved his blowgun. Back in the forest, he fashioned himself several darts from a thorn shrub and found the poison he needed in a Strychnos vine high in the canopy. Now Pym lived at his mercy.

  A chittering bark startled him, and he turned to face the silver-haloed black mask of Wawa. The gibbon tackled him, and they both toppled over in exuberance. "Find me the forest people," Jaki instructed Wawa. The gibbon would not leave his side, so they went together deeper into the forest until they found, on a nearby riverbank, a longhouse of Snake Walkers.

  The legend of Matubrembrem had reached these people, and they received him warmly, bowing to the golden head that hung from his neck. Jaki stripped off his vest and shirt and gave them to the headman in exchange for all the hide pouches of arrack he could carry. Back in the jungle, he collected the medicinal plants he needed, then ran to within a shout of where he had left the pirates. He used a Strychnos dart to kill a tapir that Wawa spotted from the canopy.

  Pym had returned to the skiff, berating his men for their cowardly unwillingness to go with him into the jungle to hunt down Jaki. When the boy appeared, laden with pouches and dragging the tapir by his vine-lashed spear, the captain fell silent. Wawa peeked timidly from behind the youth.

  On the walk to the beach, Jaki had tried to explain — as much to himself as to his beloved companion — why they must leave the forest: "Our time here is done, Wawa. A new world — the world of my fathers — has its claim on me now. Will you come?" At the Snakehunter's Grave, the gibbon timorously followed Jaki down the beach to the marsh shoals.

  "By Christ's lopped foreskin!" Pym bawled in English at the sight of the half-naked youth. He signed for his men to take the tapir, and he slogged scowling up the beach. "I was a hair's breadth from leaving this festering beach. Where were you so long?"

  Jaki grinned, revived by his foray into the jungle. "Getting your medicine, captain. Some meat, too. And some real rice wine." He held out a pouch and unstoppered it.

  Pym sniffed the wine, and his frown fell away. "Those mushrooms you wanted — have we scraped up enough for my cure?" He opened a pocket on his doublet and showed Jaki a gray wad.

  "Enough to kill a herd of boar," Jaki answered. "Now you can throw it away."

  "What?" Pym's eye squeezed angrily.

  "I had to keep you busy," Jaki explained and showed him the darker blue fungus he had gathered himself. "This will clear up the yellow blood in your missing eye." He took out a handful of white berries and round, silver-lipped leaves. "And these will keep your pain asleep long enough for the fungus to work. Lie back, and I will heal you."

  "In the skiff," Pym said. "I smell danger in the wind, and I want Silenos on the high seas where she can at least give a good fight." He bent to pet Wawa, and the gibbon snapped at him and hid behind Jaki. "You're not bringing this devil aboard."

  "This is Wawa," Jaki said. "He is my animal soul. I cannot go without him."

  Pym snarled at the gibbon and gestured gruffly for them to get aboard.

  On the ride back to the ship, Pym lay back, and Jaki squeezed the milky juices of the berries and leaves into the gaping socket. Immediately the captain's harrowing pain fled, and frosty brightness gilded the eye-rim of his skull. Jaki packed a mash of the fungus into the numbed socket. "We will do this every day for five days," Jaki said. "By the sixth day, you will suffer no more from this wound."

  *

  Two days later, off the cliffwalls of Mangkalihat where the Strait of Makassar opened into the Celebes Sea, Silenos confronted three Dutch warships, squatting like black demons on the sea's shining altar. They had been dispatched to hunt down the pirates who had disrupted the Dutch monopoly with the Japans. Jaki groaned, horrified that he had brought this doom upon his saviors. He knew that he almost certainly could have found the medicinal plants to heal Pym's lost eye in any nearby jungle, and he had insisted on returning to the Snakehunter's Grave only because he had wanted to retrieve Wawa. And Wawa hardly seemed grateful. The animal had become remorselessly seasick and lay swooning in Jaki's arms, eating nothing but fruit pulp and frequently vomiting that up. For his troubles they fa
ced their doom.

  Pym laughed at Jaki's consternation. The pirate held the pouch that contained the medicine Jaki had culled from the jungle. The sorcerer's fungal concoction had put an end to Pym's pain, and for the first time in eleven years he felt whole and clear-headed. "Woe to the Dutch to find me as I am now," he chortled in Spanish for Jaki's sake, seeing the anguish on his golden face. "Mister Blackheart, battle stations! And let's hear some fighting music!"

  Crewmen bustled over the decks, breaking out flintlocks and powderhorns. Port hatches clapped open loudly as cannon wheeled into firing position, and a driving rhythm throbbed from the afterdeck where a handful of men had clustered around kettledrums and beat them with human femur bones. Fife notes trilled, and the pirates' faces shone with wildness as they brandished their weapons. A steady chant swelled from the men, riding the crest of the martial music.

  "What are they saying?" Jaki asked, carrying Wawa onto the quarterdeck to be near Pym.

  "We are Death's children — and we grow strong — yes, we grow strong on Her bitter teats." A grisly laugh shook the pirate captain. "The Dutch fight us for their money." With a blunt finger he tapped the purple serpent branded on his forehead. "We fight for this. They're dead in the water — though they do not yet know it."

  "There are three of them!" Jaki piped. "They're bigger. And they're coming right at us!"

  "That they are, lad. Fools. Look there." He pointed into the sea, and Jaki spied kegs bobbing in the swells, swimming rapidly away from Silenos. "The strait current runs fast here where it empties into the sea. The Dutch favor us by running against it. So I sent some emissaries ahead as soon as I spotted them. The first should be arriving about now."