Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  "He will learn nothing from me."

  "I know you will cleave to silence, my friend — but there is no silence Kobra cannot break. You must trust me. We will pretend you are my ally in treachery. Soon as I can, I will find a way to free you. I owe you that."

  "You owe me nothing, Shirazi." Jaki watched the green-sailed ship bearing down on them. "I have made my own fate. You must be true to yours."

  "Rest assured — I will be true. Allah is my witness."

  *

  Black Light plucked them from the sea, and Shirazi lay prostrate on the deck, praising Allah. Jaki had no strength to stand, and he too lay on the deck staring up at the turbaned, sun-tarnished men and the ship's rigging. The shadow of Pym's voice flitted in the wells of his ears as he studied the ship: Tight, clean planks buoy men's spirits; they're the face of the ship, more than the bowsprit or the hull, for the men see the planks day in and day out. The planks under him were grimy, splintered, and ill joisted, warped from strain. His gaze rested on the nearby sheaves, grooved wheels used in the blocks of the rigging that carried the great strains of the sails, and found them gray and cracked. The sheaves on most ships are made of oak, a sturdy wood — but on my ship the sheaves are carved from lignum vitae, living rock, the hardest wood in the world.

  Shirazi rose to his knees, speaking rapidly. Jaki looked up at a gnome of a man with a black mustache waxed to points that stabbed to the sides like a charred bone stuck through his nose. The man's face was cast iron, his jaw blue with stubble, cheeks carved like an icon's, eyes tiny black holes under a brilliant white turban. He grinned at something Shirazi said and showed sharp wolf's teeth.

  "I am Rajan Kobra," the iron-faced man said in densely accented Spanish. "You have cast your lot well with Shahawar Shirazi, young Dutchman. My men will take you below, refresh you. Tonight we feast and celebrate the doom of Wyvern."

  Turbaned sailors carried Jaki carried down a gangway that stank of bilge water, sweat, and unclean timber. They gave him tea in a flask and washed him in sour water on the lower gundeck. Crewmen stood around marveling at the gold curls of his hair and the curry brown of his flesh. The tea burned a dry path to his withered stomach, and he retched, washed his mouth out, and drank more gingerly.

  Where was Shirazi? Jaki worried that their stories would not match. He accepted the baggy gray trousers and sorrel blouse a crewman handed him and dressed. Dizzy and enfeebled from two days under the pitiless sun, he sagged beside the barrel of scummy water where he had bathed. The crewmen lifted him and placed him in one of the hammocks strung above the cannon trucks. Laying there, his body humming with refound life, he surveyed the ship as best he could. It was an ugly vessel, ill maintained and noisome — but then any ship would so appear after the immaculate and proud Silenos. New respect for Pym welled in him, and he determined more firmly not to betray the pirate captain. This resolution used the last of his strength, and he fell into a deep sleep.

  He woke to lantern light and a grisly, toothless crewman shaking him alert. Jaki’s unsteady legs barely carried his weight, and he followed the sailor to the poop deck and through the captain's companion to a spacious cabin. Well lit with ruby-glassed oil lamps and appointed with luxuriant cushions and carpets, the stateroom seemed a place remote from the sea. Silver inlaid the wood panels in poetic outlines of turrets, mosques, and arabesque loveknots, and the bay windows framed a stained glass mosaic of intricacies that caught light like burning blood.

  Rajan Kobra sat on a cushion under the windows, a sapphire gleaming like an eye on his turban. The satins and silks he wore breathed light. He gestured for Jaki to enter and sit before him and dismissed the toothless sailor. Alongside the tasseled cushion where Jaki sat lay a satinwood tray of silver plates heaped with dates, orange wedges, bananas, almonds, green nut paste. A gem-crusted chalice brimmed with wine. "Eat, drink!" Rajan Kobra commanded. "Shahawar has told me your story. I am honored to meet a man who has endured the travails of the jungle and the sea and not lost faith in the one God."

  Jaki ate heartily so he would not have to speak and gratefully packed his mouth with sweet fruits. His body buzzed with joy to break its fast, and he nodded his satisfaction.

  Rajan Kobra sat with hands folded in his lap, observing closely. "Why have you decided to abandon your pirate companions?"

  "Shirazi must have told you," Jaki answered.

  "Shahawar has told me much," Kobra agreed, his eyes like puncture wounds. "You will tell me as much."

  "I am with him because he has told me of alam al-mithal," he answered, emboldened by the burn of the wine. When he saw the Muslim captain's ominous eyes brighten, he added, "I am a man of spirit, a sorcerer among the jungle people who reared me. If I am to serve at sea, I would serve men who understand that we are all just sparks between heaven and earth."

  Rajan Kobra made a morose face. "What of the pirates you left? Have you no loyalty to them?"

  "We are all pirates before God," Jaki ventured and drank more wine. "My first loyalty is to God — and Shirazi convinced me that you are a God-minded captain."

  "Then you will tell me what you know of Wyvern?"

  "I will tell you everything," Jaki replied, feigning enthusiasm. "Her name is Silenos, and her captain is Trevor Pym, a traitor snakebranded by the British."

  Rajan Kobra's tiny eyes beaded with oil flame. "You will tell me her course plan."

  "The whim of her captain."

  The iron face shook no, and the eyes squinched smaller. "You have heard of strappado, Jaki Gefjon?"

  Jaki said nothing and did not drop his gaze.

  "If you lie to me, young half-breed, you will be tied by your limbs and dropped from the yardarm. The first drop will crack your joints. You will sing with pain. The second drop will rip your limbs from your body. But you will not die. Hot tar will stop your bleeding. And you will live aboard this ship in the bilges, a living stump in the pisswater of your enemies. We will keep you alive many years and you will pray to the one God to die — but without hands or legs, you can do nothing but wait for Allah's judgment." He leered with awful pleasure. "And now again — what is the course plan of Wyvern?"

  Jaki drained the goblet, sighed to remember the Spider, and faced Kobra with his blue eyes more luminous. "Among my people I am a sorcerer," he said, calmly, though his insides prickled with terror. "I am not afraid of pain, nor even a lifetime of it, if that is God's will. When I am convinced you are the God-minded captain Shirazi promised, I will tell you all I know."

  Rajan Kobra sat back, grinning mournfully. "The strappado will be prepared, Jaki Gefjon, and you will tell me what I need to know." He barked, and the cabin door flew open. Two muscle-packed sailors entered and hoisted Jaki away.

  They locked him in a tight, empty hold amidships on the lowest deck, where the sewer stink of the ship's bilges choked the air. There he sat for three days and nights, judging time by the chinked light that seeped through the ill-fitted planks. Scrap food that looked and smelled like garbage was tossed in to him, and he tried to catch it before it dropped to the excrement-puddled floor. When he could not escape into sleep, Jaki scythed hours with memories, pretending he dwellt again in the jungle canopy with Wawa and Jabalwan or in the mountains listening to streams racing among cliff boulders. He placed Lucinda's amber asphodel to his lips and crooned promises of fidelity. He remembered the black stagger of trees on the forest edge of the mountains and the wide world with its cowl of storms and starlight.

  The door whined and swung open, and Shirazi stooped over him. "Jaki — we must move quickly," he whispered, hushing his questions with a finger to the sorcerer's lips.

  Jaki could barely move and Shirazi had to help him up the gangway to the top deck. Shirazi had already lowered a skiff. He pointed starboard to a black shadow on the horizon. "Sumbawa," he said. "You can reach there before Kobra knows you are gone. But you must hurry. And when you make shore, you must go into the forest and hide, for they will surely search for you. My scimitar is in the skiff."
>
  "Come with me," Jaki urged.

  Shirazi shook his head. "I cannot. This minute I am to attend Kobra in his cabin, detailing Silenos' course plan. For three days, while he ripened you for torture, I have told him everything I know. But I have let him think I know more. If I go with you now, we will not even make it to shore. Please, leave now, while you can. I have made my peace with you."

  Jaki clamped his friend's hand between his own. "Thank you for the gift of life," he said, tears rising in him.

  "It is a fragile gift, Gefjon," Shirazi responded, helping him over the side and onto the rope ladder. "Just a spark."

  Jaki summoned all his strength to row the skiff away from Black Light toward the massed darkness of Sumbawa. The stars crashed above him like surf, and he fixed his attention on them not to feel the suffering of his muscles.

  Arriving at the black beach, he breathed the island's blossom wind with his whole body. Using Shirazi's scimitar for support, he climbed out of the skiff and collapsed under a palm. At dawn he watched Black Light sweep past the coast. When the watch spotted the skiff, the crew threw anchor and a longboat arrowed for shore.

  Jaki thrashed into the jungle, sucking the sweet air of the forest with desperate lungs. He waited in a tall tree, letting the pain of his abused muscles twist silently, while Muslim sailors beat the brush of the shore until the biting insects became unbearable. When they left, they took the skiff with them.

  Jaki stayed in the high tree, watching as Black Light swung about to depart. Hanging from the bowsprit dangled the limbless corpse of Shahawar Shirazi.

  *

  The world-wanderer who arrived in Jakarta with the first monsoons looked barbaric, his hair tied back with eelskin bands, long body naked but for a rag loincloth. His sun-grained flesh roughened by many winds appeared carved of wood. A scimitar hung from his side, strapped to his lean hips with snake sinew.

  "Mister Gefjon!" a woman's voice belled in the rainy air.

  Jaki looked about at the cluttered harbor. Sampans, lorchas, and junks crowded the mist-blown quay, and smells of cooking fires mingled with the stench of low tide. Over the last moon, he had journeyed seven hundred and fifty miles across the swamp isles of Raba and Lombok, over the cliff ledges of Bali, and through the jungles of Java. After swimming the narrow channels between the swamp isles, he had stolen a canoe on Lombok and sailed west, following the cloudpath streaming from the mountains of the Sunda Islands. His relentless journey delivered him to Johore in time to warn Silenos that Rajan Kobra knew where she hid. Caught in the narrow Strait of Malacca, the pirates could not elude Black Light. Jaki had ignored his exhaustion in order to reach Johore in time, and for days he had been hearing shadowy voices among the silver wands of rain, seeing angel choirs in the swirls of sun that broke through the storm banks. Not until the woman's voice called him a second time did he truly believe he had heard her.

  Jaki stared hard in the direction of the voice along a wharf where several Dutch carracks moored. Beyond them, the giant masts and white hull of an immense warship reared. He had been looking for the harbormaster's building, hoping to find work aboard any ship bound for Johore or its main port of Singapore. Now, peering through the gusty tail of the wind, he shivered to identify the big ship towering at the dock: The Fateful Sisters.

  "Mister Gefjon!" The voice flitted through the blinking rain.

  And he saw her — in a brag of lantern light at the stern castle window, he saw her, Lucinda Quarles. She waved her spyglass, and he raised his left hand in a fist so that the thumb ring he had made from her brooch showed.

  Lucinda had her maid distract the quarterdeck watch while she lowered a rope that she had tied off to the window jamb. Jaki slipped into the harbor's black water, seized the rope, and pulled himself into her cabin.

  Lucinda stepped back with her hands to her mouth, startled and amused by Jaki's naked, gleaming strength.

  "You look like you crawled across Asia on your belly," she said, her nose wrinkled. "When I saw you through the spyglass, I thought I recognized you. But, Mister Gefjon, you look different without your clothes."

  "I hope I am not offending you, Mistress Lucinda," he said, his heart bouncing. Seeing her this close, his eyes ached for some sign of love in her shell-bright face. Instead, she watched him with a blend of curiosity and remoteness. Her pale hair looked longer than he remembered and fell in heartbreakers, long lazy curls, over her shoulders. "You've been an inch behind my eyes since I saw you last in Macao — a year ago."

  "A year? Yes. I suppose it has been that long," she said, stepping closer. He was muscular, even more so than she recalled, and she looked for the shoulder and chest wounds from his duel with the Portuguese officer. Her curiosity dilated to an unexpected wonder, and the veil of remoteness fell away. He watched her with zealous intensity that spun her blood harder through her veins. "I will confess," she said in a fearful voice, "there have been times in that year when I've wondered if I would ever see you again."

  "Our journeys have crossed," he said ardently, and her breath fluttered. "But only briefly. I must leave here at once. I have been separated from my captain, and I must find him."

  "Where are you going?" she asked, paler.

  "Johore."

  Her face lit. "But we sail for there tonight. We will reach Singapore within four days and five nights."

  Lucinda's heart pounded with the hope of an adventure. The two years that she had lived aboard The Fateful Sisters had been miserable. Since poisoning the pirate kingdom of Iduna, almost a year ago, her father had become obsessed with clearing the sea lanes of pirates, and he had methodically crisscrossed Asia's seven seas seizing unmarked vessels and destroying them when they would not yield. Recent sightings of Wyvern had inflamed her father's mania, and he devoted all his time to charting patrols and coordinating tactics with merchants and trade officials in the numerous ports that received him.

  At each port, he presented Lucinda at court functions and expected her to perform her role as loving daughter and marriageable maiden. But she had met no one worthy of her love, and her memory of the bold Dutch pirate had burned brighter with every ball. Lucinda loathed the men who courted her, ambitious for the rich captain's only daughter. She saw through their syrupy flattery, fully aware that her life as the wife of an important man would be as confining and unsatisfying as her existence aboard her father's ship. Her memory of the few luminous minutes she had spent with Jaki Gefjon became monumental for their sincerity.

  She had been sitting despondently at the window in her stateroom when she spied him on the docks of Jakarta. Ethereal passion swelled in her. Now, facing into his lovestrong stare, she recognized the prodigious moment that could begin a new life. "Please," she urged, "travel with us."

  "How can I?" he asked, incredulous. "Your father knows I'm a pirate. He would hang me."

  "If he knew you were aboard," she said, a giddy impulse mounting swiftly to resolve. "But why does he have to know? This is my private cabin. You will stay here with me."

  "Lady, I cannot!" He looked haplessly about at the handsomely furnished cabin. In one corner stood a bed with a canopy and a velvet curtain. Beneath a lace-fringed porthole sat a scarlet-lacquered writing table, a majolica vase with fresh maidenhair, and two cushion-seated wing chairs. A cane-slatted door left slightly ajar revealed a copper-fitted latrine and a high-backed enamel tub. "If your father found me here your honor would be wholly compromised."

  "My father never enters my cabin," she answered, holding his gaze, her insides burnished with the boldness of her intent. "Even when The Fateful Sisters sails to fight and I'm left ashore, this cabin is locked. It is kept for me alone."

  "Your maid —" he began.

  She hushed him with a finger to his lips. "Don't fret over Maud. She is my dearest friend and would not betray me for her own life. You must get to Johore, and this is the fastest ship in Asia. Stay with me — and let us not be strangers anymore."

  Jaki listened for premonitory voices,
heard only the tide slapping and his heart yearning — and he accepted. Lucinda was seventeen now, not much younger than Jaki, and the novelty of his manhood, the smell of him like a breath of split wood, confounded all caution. She decided then that she would make him her lover. He was her handsome plaything, obviously smitten with her and far more innocent and interesting than any of the jaded suitors at the many courts she had visited. She bathed him in lilac water and had her maid alter breeches and a blouse from her father's wardrobe. She cut Jaki's long hair in the French vogue with lengthy, uneven curls and a bow of blue ribbon knotted to the longest lock.

  By nightfall, when The Fateful Sisters slipped its moorings, he had been renewed: bathed, coifed, dressed, and well fed on braised fish, dumplings, mustard cabbage, and ale.

  Maud departed above deck to get some air for an imaginary headache, and Lucinda blew out the flame on one of the two lanterns chained to the rafters. Determined to divest herself of her virginity that night, she left the writing table cluttered with the dishes and mugs from their meal and led Jaki by the hand to the wing chairs.

  Lucinda twined her fingers in the long locks of his sun-bleached hair, unhurried and playful, and asked about his dangerous journey among the islands. Words evaded him under her touch, but he strenuously tried to recount the voyage until he recognized the puckish glint in her merry eyes. "Lady, you mock me," he blurted.

  She laughed at his surprise. "I am playing with you, Mister Gefjon. Do you object?"

  He took her hand from his face. "I'd rather move your heart than amuse it," he said.

  "So serious." She arranged his hair so that his lovelock fell over his shoulder. "Your life has been too hard, Mister Gefjon. You have never learned to play?"

  "If we are just going to play," he replied in a whisper that faltered as her hand trailed across his shoulder to the warm flesh at the open throat of his shirt, "won't you at least call me Jaki?"