Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Rain drenched Macao and soaked a gallimaufry of traders from every land. Turbaned, baggy-trousered Arabs, skullcapped Chinese, long-mustached Hindus, and cuirass-breasted Portuguese mingled in the boisterous wharfside markets. Bins of spices from the Moluccas and jugs of aromatic oils from Sumatra charged the humid air with rich fragrances, and pier stalls flashed with gold from Siam, silver from Burma, silks from Cathay, gems from India. In the winding alleys, swarthy men in travelworn apparel hawked the services of sybils, harlots of every race, young boys. Silenos' crew melted into the bazaar eager to exhaust the fortunes they had not spent during their eight days in Manila.

  Jaki accompanied Pym and Blackheart to pay tribute to the governor, so that he would allow them to conduct trade with the crown-sanctioned merchants who shipped the largest and most lucrative lading and did business only with heads of state. Iduna could not flourish on booty alone, and over the years Pym had established legitimate trade relations in port with many of the European companies he plundered at sea.

  The governor's palace gleamed, richer even than the opulent mansions and cathedral of Manila, though its construction was not yet complete. Sculptured trees circled a courtyard of black marble fountains, and soaring columns lifted a red onyx cornice on bronze triglyphs. Scaffolds latticed an unfinished wall, and granite blocks lay heaped in dwarf pyramids among milling workers.

  The cuirassiers guarding the one entrance to the palace crossed their halberds at the pirates' approach, and Pym presented a letter of introduction from Perdita. One of the guards disappeared and reappeared momentarily with a young bareheaded officer in cavalry uniform, who returned the letter wrist up as if holding something soiled. "The governor will not receive emissaries from jungle kingdoms unrecognized by Lisbon."

  The smoke in Pym's eye ignited. "Unrecognized? Iduna has conducted recognized trade with Spain and the Netherlands for over a decade now."

  "Perhaps," the officer said. "But you are not in the catalogue of kingdoms favored by Lisbon. Please, conduct your business in the market."

  "By God we will not!" Pym roared, and the officer stepped back and clamped his jaw. The guards pressed closer, and Pym said in a modulated voice, "I will speak with your superior officer."

  "I am Diogo Almeida de Cão, the commanding officer of the palace guard. My superior is the governor himself."

  "I will speak with the governor then, Diogo."

  The commander's nostrils flared at the affrontry of this foreigner addressing him by his Christian name. "Sir, I tell you, you will not." He put his hand on his sword.

  Pym and Blackheart stepped back, hands wide at their sides, and Jaki advanced, gripping the hilt of his rapier, heart pounding with excitement.

  Almeida faced him, ready to fend off an attack. Blackheart seized Jaki by his shoulders and pulled him away, grunting with alarm.

  "Take your mute and your blond clown away from this gate," Almeida ordered. "The governor is not looking for amusement from freaks today."

  Pym raised a conciliatory hand and smiled his humorless shark grin. "Please, commander, we have misunderstood each other. No harsh words need pass between us. We are both here to do honor to Macao's governor, you as his protector and myself as an emissary of a small yet wealthy kingdom eager to pay tribute. I come with a valuable gift that the governor would be disappointed to lose over a trifling misapprehension." He removed the leather satchel slung over his shoulder and opened it to reveal a jewelbox of white jade that seemed to glow in the dark bag. Pym lifted the lid of the box and removed a knuckle of ruby from the cluttered jewels. "Please accept this as our acknowledgment of your authority and allow us to present the rest of these precious gems to the governor."

  Almeida removed his hand from his sword hilt and, feigning indifference, accepted the large ruby. The gel of red light in the stone's heart cooled his anger. He looked to the guards. "Let them pass."

  Enormous mahogany doors opened to an inner court of gray sentry stones scribbled with vines. Most of the construction had been completed inside the unfinished walls, and they passed through tall archways with gold-sheeted intrados into a cedar-paneled hallway. "You realize, of course, you are a clown to provoke Almeida," Pym whispered sidelong to Jaki. "The Portuguese are devils with rapiers. He'd have cut all three of us down before we could say his name."

  Jaki nodded absently, dazzled by the frescoed ceiling of a marble chamber that led to the governor's office. Pym, hatless, his branded forehead covered in his formal black headband, signed for the two men to remove their hats before he lifted the lionmouth knocker on the giant carved doors. He announced himself to the satin-clad servant as the ambassador from Iduna and handed him the intricately carved jade jewelbox. The servant opened the delicate box, glimpsed fiery chunks of gems within, bowed, and closed the door. Moments later, he returned with an engraved invitation to the governor's court ball two evenings hence.

  "That's all?" Jaki asked indignantly. "A box of jewels for an invitation to a dance?"

  "I want trade rights in Macao, lad, not some noise from a man no better than God's most common clay but that he's a king's cousin's nephew's son-in-law. Come, we've better things to do than to stand here dignifying this temple to greed. There's drinking and whoring to be done!"

  Pym and Blackheart led Jaki among Macao's wynds and alleys, buying provisions for Silenos and haunting the wine cellars, where they listened to sailors' tales of ocean crossings, the African slave trade, wars in Europe, and frightful reports of pirates plundering Asia's seven seas. That night, they visited an elegant palm-groved bordello with tapestried floors, mirrored walls, and silk-cushioned beds. Jaki's desire annealed with fright in the presence of the sophisticated and richly garbed women who laughed at his wide-eyed amazement and obvious inexperience. Like the paddy girls of the jungle, these Asian and Portuguese odalisques enthusiastically intended on pleasuring him, for Pym had paid handsomely for the boy’s special consideration. Jaki's apprehensions fell away with his clothes.

  Afterward, relieved of desire's burden, empty as a dream, he sat under a palm in the palazzo and thought back on the many women who had granted him respite from lust. The simple satisfactions he had known with the jungle women were, even in distant reflection, more precious to him than the ribald games he had played this night with the malleable bodies of these pleasure-wise prostitutes. He had been just another man here, humbled by his own passion.

  Nostalgia wheezed in him. He had wandered far from his life as a sorcerer, and drifting further. He realized that the course he had chosen would never return him again to the immortalities of the jungle. Perdita Iduna had shown him that: the animal with its face in his belly had almost devoured her and him — and Pym with them. Desire by itself was demonic.

  Stung by this new clarity, Jaki swore that the next time sweat stuck him to a woman, love would be the weld.

  *

  The day of the court ball, the crew of Silenos watched with awe from their vessel, anchored at the mouth of the bay, as the largest man-of-war they had ever seen glided into the harbor. Three gundecks bristled with cannon — a hundred guns, most of them fifty-pounders. The hull was painted white, its strake long and clean of barnacles. The bitts on the rail gleamed: polished brass bright as sundrops, and the stern rounded gracefully to window galleries without a wisp of baroque molding or gilt.

  "It's the devil's own," Pym muttered as he studied the sleek lines and trim rigging of the ship. On its topmast, a flag of conquest snapped in the wet wind, the red cross of England's St. George laid atop the white cross of Scotland's St. Andrew — the Union Jack. "A floating fortress with the speed of a barracuda and bearing the flag I loathe more than any other." Pym's eye squinted with rage as he read aloud the name on her bow: ''The Fateful Sisters."

  The rest of that day, Pym sat in his seachair, drinking Lisbon wine and staring at the huge ship where she had moored at the sea wall. He studied her for any sign of weakness and sulking darker as her strengths became more obvious. He railed to Jaki.
"No other ship in Asia had a jib sail but Silenos. And we took that sail off our bowsprit before entering harbors so others wouldn't guess its advantage. Now look at The Fateful Sisters with her jib in full view. Soon every warship will have that edge. And look there!" He pointed to the rope attached from the bowsprit to the hull. "She's got a bobstay. She's done away with her gammoning just as we have. God rot her! I'd not want to cross her at sea."

  The British warship posted guards on the sea wall beside their gangway and would answer no questions for the curious sailors whom Pym had sent to find out who captained the modern vessel. Through his spyglass, he studied the British crew as they hurried about the business of unloading the holds and lading provisions. The mate, long-skulled and with a beard like a slap of tar across his jaw, supervised the hoisting of horses and cattle from between decks. The captain, in full-rosetted breeches, pinked doublet, and ruff, stood at the poop's gunwale, peering back at him through a telescope. Pym did not recognize the square, barley-bearded captain watching him, but he knew the crewmen of his ship — the ruddy faces and fair hair of Devon sailors; the angular features of Yorkshire men; the squat, dark men from Wales. Each face dug a splinter in Pym's heart, stabbing him with forty-year-old memories of his exile. He passed the spyglass to Blackheart and reached under his seachair for his flagon.

  *

  Aboard The Fateful Sisters, the captain held his telescope so fiercely its leather casing crackled in his grip and he had to lower the instrument and stare for a moment into the barbs of sunlight on the bay to steady himself. The sight of the one-eyed pirate in the luminous grip of the telescope's lens — his viper brand hidden by a black headcloth, his rattail beard gleaming with the wine that spilled from his upturned flagon — filled him with rage, and he held to the ship's rail as if buffeted by a stormwind.

  The mate saw him and strode to the quarterdeck. "Sir — is something amiss?"

  The captain turned a harrowed look on his mate. "Attend to the lading, Mister Montague," he said with a twisted voice that sent the mate hurrying away.

  From his earliest years, Captain William Quarles had hated Trevor Pym. He had been five years old in 1586 when Pym murdered his uncle Samuel Quarles at Antro Cay and deprived his family of the wealth that his noble uncle aspired to secure for them in his New World adventure with the Spanish. Misfortune under Queen Elizabeth had withered the Quarleses' family fortune, and Uncle Samuel had been striving to reestablish their prosperity when Pym slew him. All his life, William Quarles had struggled to regain the stature that Pym had snatched from his family, and now that he faced the devil himself, he could barely restrain his wrath. He would not allow Pym or his own fury to befoul his hard-won career — and though he craved to storm Silenos immediately and seize the villain, he restrained himself. Pym, a traitor to England, enjoyed protection in a Portuguese port, and Quarles needed proof of Pym’s piracy before he could break the man — otherwise, he would be charged as a brigand himself and outlawed from these waters, where he had come to establish diplomatic ties and trade agreements.

  He searched the length of the pirate's ship for any sign of the notorious standard that haunted Asia's sea lanes. Wyvern was nowhere in sight, unless the ship herself was regarded with a wary eye. Only then did the monster become apparent: the raked masts were her wings, the slender hull empty of ornament and curved for speed was her serpent glide. Her talons were well hidden behind closed gunports, and gammon nets draped several others as though the hatches hid not cannon but davits for craning cargo. She rode nosedown in the water, bespeaking an unusual keel, and Quarles noted her wheel where the whipstaff should have been. This was no ordinary merchant ship, though she wore her colors on her foremast as a ship of trade. That she would pretend that she was not a fighting vessel convinced Quarles that he had indeed found the dread Wyvern, and he scrutinized her for weaknesses.

  Below him, through a bay gallery, another spyglass watched Silenos. From The Fateful Sisters's stern window, sixteen-year-old Maud Rufoote scanned the big ship sitting in the bay. She giggled at the sight of half-naked men holystoning the decks and repairing the rigging. A pretty, chestnut-haired maid with capable hands, she met the world with a lively freckled face. "Look, Luci," she called to her mistress, "there's one without ears!"

  Lucinda Quarles, the captain's daughter, lay curled in her canopied bed, dolorously turning the pages of a thin volume of verse. With a wince of her blue eyes, she dismissed her maid's appeal. The telescope was a toy that had ceased to amuse her years before. And though no older than her maid, she could read — and the scenes she found in her father's library engaged her more vividly than anything she had seen through the lens.

  Maud, a country girl nostalgic for the croft in Devon where she had grown up, became giddy at every port of call. She delighted in the telescope's reach that lifted her from the ship's confinement without incurring the prodigious anger of her mistress's father, a severe man who never indulged his servants. "This crew looks healthier than most we've seen in Asia," she said. "But there's one with a snake tattooed down his back. And that one has a ring in his nose and one in each nipple! Oh, Luci, come see."

  "Maud, I'm reading," Lucinda protested, then said in a stronger voice: " 'Long since I see my joys come to their evening—' "

  "Sidney," Maud recognized with a groan, not budging from the eyepiece. "That's too sad. Don't read Sidney to me now. We've just made port. Are you going to pine for your lost love the entire tour?"

  A year earlier, in Rome, Lucinda had fallen in love with her Latin tutor, a young poet with a starved face and enormous eyes. Before her love could be reciprocated, the admiralty had awared her father command of The Fateful Sisters. Fully aware of her nascent passion, he ordered her to accompany him on this mission to Asia. The three year tour would return her to Europe at marriageable age for a gentleman of her father's choosing. That prospect had galled her for the entire yearlong voyage, and she took an adolescent's perverse pleasure in heightening her misery by reading melancholy passages from the poets.

  "Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning:

  Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests,

  And make me wish my self laid under mountains."

  Maud removed a hand from the spyglass to wave that morbid thought away. "Laid, yes, but not under a mountain, Luci, please. You promised we wouldn't die virgins." She beckoned Lucinda and steadied the telescope with both hands. "Come look at the Asians — one of them's playing a fiddle. And there by the binnacle! A European — with one eye and a knotted beard. He's ugly as a troll, but he looks English. And there's another, this one with red hair and a face like a boot. Oh, you must see."

  "What's the ship's name?" Lucinda asked without looking up.

  Maud swept the spyglass to the prow and read, "Silenos — what an odd name."

  "Latin, Mousie — The Man in the Moon," Lucinda translated.

  Sweat stung Maud's sight, and she wiped the eyepiece on her sleeve. "This heat is hateful. Why weren't you more melancholy in Italy? He would have left us in the care of some great house and we wouldn't be shriveling now like hags under this vile sun."

  "You know better, Maud. Father doesn't care how I feel. He keeps me near because I am his and he cannot bear to relinquish anything that is his."

  "Luci!" Maud shrieked. "Another European — and a handsome one, this one is. His hair is fair as yours or more. Beardless — he's a boy, yet he has the limbs of a man. And his face — fine and strong as any statue's in Rome. You must look for yourself, Lucinda."

  Maud placed the telescope on the sill and hurried to her mistress. "Forget your poems and your lost love and come look."

  "I'm coming," groused Lucinda, climbing out of bed.

  Lucinda lifted her white gown to sit on the sill and picked up the telescope, and Maud pointed her toward the foremast topgallant shrouds. The beat of her heart deepened. He was all that Maud had said, his lanky arms and legs naked and solar dusted, his hair, white as a star, fall
ing long over thick, seaburned shoulders. He was the most complete being she had ever seen. His features becalmed as marble seemed magnificently empty of the malice and harshness that stared from the faces of other men. Even intent on his work, he looked free as the tumultuous clouds behind him, unhaunted by human feelings. That could not be true, she realized, and she yearned at once to know what emotions stirred the heart of such a man.

  "Sad to think he's a pirate." Maud disrupted her reverie. "I pray your father won't have us watch his hanging."

  Lucinda lowered the telescope and frowned at her maid. "Better you had left me with my poems than steepen my melancholy with such an apparition." She retreated to her bed and picked up her book again. What she had seen through the telescope itched at the soles of her feet and sizzled through her legs like brightenings of music. She watched Maud resume her post in the window gallery, telescope to her eye, and she breathed deeply to fill herself with strength against the shiverings from her vision.

  Silly girl, she berated herself. Only a child falls in love with an image. She knew that she really did not love the stranger she had glimpsed through the lens, but love itself. For the last year, she had loved love — and that had put her at terrible odds with her father. He wanted her to marry a gentleman of means, and she wanted love. A dim smile lit her face at the idea of what her father would think of her falling in love with a pirate. That smile quickly faded, and she resolved to put the handsome sailor out of her mind. He was a pirate — her father's prey.

  *

  That night, rains lashed the bay city, and sturdy footmen carried Pym, Blackheart, and Jaki in palanquins to the governor's palace.