Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Vertigo seized Jaki, and he had to lie back into the fathomless funnel of gravity. The ground below them trembled — or his bones vibrated. He gazed about wildly. A smell of death troubled his nostrils, a broken stink. A hysterical struggle ensued between his pounding heart and his breathing. He could no longer tell if he drew breath or exhaled, and fear deepened in him.

  The pirates chattered with cold, clutching at one another and rocking. Pym had locked his face in his hands and shook with sobs. Jaki's muscles clenched and shivered, stropped with hot iciness. Ease! he called out to no one, and his body doubled up with extravagant pain. All of them curled up now, squeezed tightly into their suffering.

  Time spasmed. Seconds gonged for hours, blackening them with pain. Hours whirled off, billowy with colors. Jaki strained against the constricted straps of his muscles and straightened enough to see the others hunched over their suffering. Fumes of radiance wafted from their quaking bodies. He looked away and zoomed through foaming brilliance toward blankness, into the medicine cloud. That way is death, he realized, and pulled back. The nightmare face of the dragon loomed over him, and he turned away. The chamber exploded in a stormy racket of colors, spider spume, night-thick roaring, and the lonely splendor of his canceled life. Crystal air bled him, and he faced again the medicine cloud and within it the Longhouse of Souls. One-eyed Pym sat there, as he had in Jaki's earlier visions, but not so frightening now that Jaki knew the viper-browed pirate. In his vision, they squatted beside the cooking pot. The two other pirates lolled there, too. The souls of dead sorcerers drifted just visible through the wide windows, wandering into midnight mist.

  Jaki recognized Jabalwan. The sorcerer had his arm around a woman, urging her into the dark of the past. Her eyes glinted, her hair the ash of twilight, and her flesh so long dead it shone silver-black as the space between the horns of the moon. She had to be Mala — and she was nowhere ... The others, just glimpsed, had vanished. Jaki looked back to the cooking pot, age-old black with soot from a fire that had blazed unremittingly for centuries. The fire had gone out. Inside the pot glowed a lump of melted flesh. The glutinous lump stirred, and a troll's eyes opened painfully. Eat me, a tortured voice begged.

  Jaki pulled away from the nightmare and toppled out of the medicine cloud back into the dragon pit. He looked himself over, relieved to be awake. His hands had gone white, slack as dead meat. The skull face in the hatched egg beside him bayed with despair and shapeshifted in dazzling pastels to a murderous worm gnawing at his dead hands. The foul grub ravenously chewed at his ruined life, and he cried with torment.

  Ease, Matu. Jabalwan spoke, casual as moonlight. The prophecy is fulfilled. You have seen the end that is fire. The Longhouse of Souls is empty at last. Look at the mother. Look at her without desire or denial. Look at the face of life!

  The worm eating his hands had withered to a vanquished skeleton in an aura of sunlight. He rolled to his back and looked up at the mother of the earth. Terror staggered him. She lived, knotted with flesh, her long fangs beseeching blood, her sockets swiveling with gelled sight, and her head and limbs prosperous with movement. He slammed his head backward, trying to squirm away from her, and his fastest reflexes dwindled in her gargantuan presence. Her mad face dipped, fangs gnashing, and she grabbed one of the crewmen. Jaki shouted at the man writhing like a hawk-seized mouse.

  Jaki shouted again, trying to stir Pym and the other two, and his cry was ash. The cavern boomed so loudly with raucous noise, his yell had the beat of silence.

  Why don't you listen to me? Jabalwan pleaded. Look at the mother. Her beauty is terrible. She is Life's beauty — the left side of the blood — what gives when we take back — what remains when nothing is left — primitive magic — mother of us all — night crawler —beloved life and unsparing hunger that takes no for an answer. Look at her, little man, corpse-to-be, look at her and see the terrible beauty of all departure.

  He looked. With dreadful queasiness, he looked and beheld her squamous flesh peel away and the moist meat of her angry mouth melt like tallow in a glare of lightning that left behind only the scaffolding of bones. The beast's viciousness hung moistly in the spaces between the bones of the skeleton like dew mist, like a heat mirage. Don't you see? Jabalwan asked, derisively. Death wants to be alive! Jabalwan laughed, slowly, like a lament. The other side of life is not death but more life. And the enemy of life is not death but indifference. Go now, nameless one, back to the edge of pain and numbness and bring your life to the full.

  Jaki reeled away from the huge skeleton and its skins of light. He drifted to his feet in a languor of shimmery music. The ground swayed with a grating roar, and dust and pebbles clinked from the high ceiling. Pym and the two other pirates curled on themselves like rocks, and he floated to them and shoved the captain over. Pym's eye blinked, tangled with tears, his face slack with deep sorrow. He had escaped the world and seen the unknown powers, secret and wild, wailings of wind looking for bodies in the stony dregs of the earth and finding people asleep behind their own faces, senile with greed, asleep before earth's savage beauty. And he saw himself, asleep behind his one eye, asleep in the infinite instant, a ghoul stitched with bitterness and cunning. "I cannot bear it!" he shouted. A vale of sorrowful echoes vaulted over them. "I am worm-dirt — and yet I live! I am death, and everything I touch dies."

  Jaki gawked at him.

  The jostling bedrock settled, and the air stilled to a cathedral-like calm. Pym's hands trembled over his body, amazed to feel himself whole. "The diamonds —" he rasped. "The diamonds are the price of our suffering. Jaki, we must find them."

  Clairvoyant awe passed between them, and Pym stared with dumb amazement at the dark cavern scribbled with musical sparks. The blue fire had shrunk to a slim shine in the gutter. The oil bowl felt empty of heat. Darkness glowed with the faintest luster and their bodies’ own psychic fire. Pym shook the man beside him. "Awake, dreamer!"

  The crewman jumped, then gazed about with electric clarity. "Captain! Oh, captain! I plumbed the fathoms of infinity! I flew to the angel spheres and witnessed with mine own eyes the switchback of heaven and hell!"

  "Aye — we were there with you." Pym shoved the fallen sailor, and the man rolled to his side and stared blindly at them.

  Jaki closed the pirate's eyes and stood up, gazing about for the warriors and soul-catchers. The air hummed with stillness. He stepped out of the pit, lit the resin candles, and motioned his companions toward the tight corridor that led to the cache of mountains' tears, as well as to the niche where his mother's head had been preserved.

  Pym and the sailors retrieved their weapons and crawled in, following Jaki. His body felt hollow, diffuse as smoke, and the strong eye brushed his vision with whisks of sharp color. When they arrived at the kettle chamber, he placed his candle in a socket, and the room broke into a puzzle of oily lights. Pym and the sailors shouldered up to him and gasped at the sight: a rock cauldron mounded with chunky diamonds. Giddy now, Pym grabbed a fistful and clinked them between his palms. Windy lights still swirled in his vision from the mushroom bread, and he had to hold one of the thumbsized diamonds to the flame to ascertain its reality.

  The nightmare that he had just endured of humanity asleep in its great moment of life faded before this radiance of incalculable wealth. The pirates stripped off their shirts and tied them into pouches; then, dragging their booty behind, they crawled back through the tight corridors to the dragon chamber.

  They could not tell what they saw from their dreaming in the wanly lit cavern. The mother of life gazed down, illuminated by a seraphic glow that made her jaws seem icicled and beautiful. "Life is secret," Jaki said to her loudly in the tribal tongue, "until each of us faces your fury and finds the courage to make truth out of fate."

  The earth shook again, vehemently, knocking the men off their feet and splitting the stone walls with jolting screams. Pym heaved himself upright on the rolling slabs, snagged Jaki by the wrist, and pulled him away from the pit as the walls e
rupted. Looking back, they witnessed the dragon mother knocked over and buried in a cascade of dust-streaming boulders.

  Blindly they ran through the shaking tunnel. Rock pillars shattered behind them with resounding force. The turbulent swell of dust stung flesh and snuffed out wicks. The haze finally relented in a bright crystal shaft, and they shoved out of the mountain into the blinding sun staggering like drunks. Pym knelt over his bundle of diamonds like a child, giggling with disbelief.

  Jaki searched the sky. Thunderclouds skewed overhead. Wawa barked shrilly from a fern tree and tumbled toward them in a terrified rush. Geysers of mud arced into the sky, stands of palm collapsed, and the whole grotto heaved. The gibbon charged down the mountainside, the men sprinting behind in headlong flight from the convulsed plateau.

  The sky seemed to shatter into whirlwind spouts of black rain. Njurat quivered and collapsed beneath a cloud of rocksoot and steam. Pelting hail flogged the pirates as they scrambled over the trembling earth, not stopping until the desert sands sprawled before them. When they turned about, Njurat no longer existed. An angry cloud of smoke breathed upon the mountain flank where it had stood.

  *

  The cold of the desert crossing debilitated the pirates, and once in the highlands they had to rest for three days. Numerous times their cumbersome loads almost toppled them into misty chasms as they picked their way down cliffsides. When they reached the jungle they limped onward, clumsy with weariness and easy prey for snakes and cats. Without alcohol, Pym had become trembly as a doddering old man, and the crewmen, maddened by too many days in the jungle, began seeing death omens. The cry of a snake from the verdurous shade convinced even Jaki that death stalked them. The startling destruction of Njurat had confirmed his role as the last sorcerer, and he suspected that even if he did escape the jungle, he would die.

  That very day, the forest relented, and the pirates crept into sight of the green bay and the bat's wing silhouette of Silenos. Pym splashed into the shallows in a burst of joy, hollering across the water. A skiff came for them rowed by Blackheart, and Pym kissed the startled quartermaster and rode to his ship standing, arms outstretched as though he could embrace the whole world with his new love.

  *

  No small boats came out to greet Silenos when she arrived on the river passage to Iduna, and Pym ordered the cannon readied for a fight, suspecting his homeport had been raided. The deserted wharves confirmed his dread. The big ships sat idle and empty. A charred hulk floated among them, black ribs stiff as the clench of a corpse. Wisps of smoke fumbled above the treeline, and the crew rowed to shore speechless, fearing the evil that had befallen their kingdom.

  The great house appeared forsaken, though all its treasures remained intact. Pym stalked among the grand rooms, calling for Perdita. On the giant silk-sheeted bed that he had shared with his wife, he found the gold ball earrings and under them a letter in her hand:

  "Beloved husband —

  "I know now I will never see you again. The angels have come for me. Only by their grace have I the strength to write you, that you may understand what terrible fate has befallen our kingdom.

  "A month ago, two ships came. One was the largest English man-of-war I have ever seen, the very destroyer of which you warned me months before, The Fateful Sisters."

  Pym had to lay the parchment on Perdita's dressing table and prop himself over it with both arms to continue reading:

  "We prepared for a fight, as you had exhorted me that this warship would attack us. But the English vessel wore her colors on her bowsprit, signaling peace. The ship she towed was nameless it seemed, her name burned off and the char painted over with the mysterious admonition from Daniel: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Her sails were black. The Fateful Sisters led her into harbor, and the English captain announced from his quarterdeck that the nameless ship's crew was ill and needed care. He refused to come ashore and accept our hospitality — and by that I should have suspected the grave extremis of the ill. The English captain declared that he had brought the ill to Iduna because no other kingdom would have them and they were doomed to die at sea. Iduna is the only Christian kingdom before Manila and unless we accepted the sick, they would die in transit.

  "You will be angry with me, my Trevor, I know, but the Lord has said that what we do for the least among us we do for Him. I accepted the ship of sickness. Before we could even begin removing the ill, The Fateful Sisters departed. We were appalled by what we found aboard the exiled vessel: a hundred souls, their flesh bloated and rent with festering wounds. Most could not speak, their tongues were that pus-riven. Those who could speak told us they had been a Danish merchant ship who had lost crew in a storm and taken on sailors in Halmahera — and there they contracted plague. No port would have them until The Fateful Sisters took them in tow and promised them sanctuary.

  "We tended them with all our skill and Christian care, yet within a week all were dead. Soon thereafter, our people began to fall ill. The illness spread rapidly. We had a continuous Mass read until the priests themselves were too ill to go on. We burned the dead. This last week there have been more corpses than people to manage the fires. Many have fled back into the jungle. I would have gone with them, just that I might see you again — but the illness is upon me. With my last strength and authority, I have arranged for a great fire to be prepared so that all the corpses, including my own, may be consumed and spare you our fate upon your return.

  "Though I have been unfaithful to you in my heart, that was entirely my sin, my weakness for a boy of supernatural beauty. Forgive me and do not punish yourself. You have always been love itself to me, my husband, my soul. Your disbelief in the afterlife assures me that my suffering will soon end. And if you are wrong, then I will prepare your way back to me with my love.

  "The angels remind me ..."

  The letter ended there, in a fit of illegible handwriting. Pym flew down the stairs, face constricted. Jaki, who had been waiting on the porch, moved to follow, and Blackheart stopped him and shook his head.

  Perdita had been burned with the other corpses in a large pyre above the swan linns. Pym sat in the ashes and wept. A full day and a night he sat there while Blackheart and Jaki watched from the great house and the crew waited in Silenos, afraid to stay ashore.

  Pym’s vision in the dragon pit returned with renewed clarity, and he understood now that he had always been asleep when with Perdita, that only pain offered wakefulness, and now that she was ash, he would never sleep again. On the second day, he rose and went straight into the house. He built a bonfire around the bed, and without taking a single item from the house, he left with Blackheart and Jaki and did not look back.

  *

  Aboard Silenos, Jaki and Blackheart watched the burning pyre of Iduna rise in coiling black billows. Pym ordered the ships in the harbor sunk. He watched from the quarterdeck as the cannon punched in the empty vessels' hulls below the water line. After all the ships had disappeared in frothy gurges, he turned the cannon on the harbor and blasted the wharves. With Iduna utterly devastated, he ordered Silenos to sea and retired below deck.

  Jaki carried his pouch of diamonds to the captain's stateroom and spilled half of them on his rosewood tabletop. Then he turned and handed Blackheart the rest of the precious stones. Blackheart hefted the bag with surprise, clicking the gems, and Pym's somber eye fixed Jaki. "What is this?"

  "Diamonds," Jaki answered with flat sincerity.

  "I know that," Pym gruffed. "Why are you giving them to us?"

  "I have no need for them," he said, speaking truthfully, for he had no use for the dragon's pelf, these mountains' tears that had been wept for the dumb immensity of the past. "The greatest wealth for me is to have lived the strong eye — the mother of life's initiation. Now I am truly a sorcerer as my teacher was before me."

  Pym dismissed the diamonds with a scowl. "We achieved brotherhood on Macao — I don't want your bloody diamonds. I have my own — and I also paid for them with that cursed strong eye. That nig
htmare under the living bones of Wyvern still pollutes my sleep, mercy knows."

  "It is what pollutes your waking that concerns me, captain."

  Pym ground his teeth audibly and waited for Jaki to go on.

  "The soul of Perdita haunts you," Jaki said, "and demands the blood of revenge. My diamonds will help you get the men you need. "

  "Aye, you are a true sorcerer, Jaki Gefjon — to know my own soul fled with Perdita's and both walk homeless, disembodied, until we catch the cursed soul of William Quarles and damn him to hell!"

  Blackheart heaped the diamonds Jaki had given him atop those on the table. He bowed to Jaki, touched his heart with his fist, and opened his hand before Pym.

  "I understand, sir," Jaki said, "that the heart you have given your captain will serve him better than diamonds." He looked to Pym. "It is true — your enemy's doom is more strongly sealed with Blackheart's devotion than these rocks we lost lives to take. We are all of us committed to the destruction of our common enemy.”

  "I sense you have more to say!" Pym snarled.

  "The Bible declares that there is a time for everything. And is not now the time to grieve, to bury the dead, to cleanse our souls with silent prayer and God's grace? No one understands the fury of loss better than I. It blinds worse than fear. You will spell your own doom, captain — become prey to every trap — if you do not release Perdita's soul. These diamonds buy time to mourn."

  Pym lifted his flagon and splashed brandy over the jewels. "Fah! This grog is all I need to ease the loss of my dear wife. How often has it stilled the grief of the treachery that branded me for the murder of that true traitor, Samuel Quarles! How often has it stilled my grief at the murder and plunder my hand has been forced to — evils for which I once had no heart and no stomach, until they were burned into my flesh!" He hung his head. "And how often has it helped me forget Perdita's passion for you — adulterer!" He dropped back into his seat, drank deeply, and waved Jaki away.