She frowned with mock solemnity. "That's so very personal — Jaki." With one hand she opened his shirt and with the other traced the curves of his bare shoulder.
"Lucinda —" His hands opened helplessly in his lap. "What you are doing is dangerous."
She leaned close and giggled in his ear. "For whom?"
Jaki felt like he was breaking in two, and he lifted his hands and touched her dress lightly, fingers buzzing. She did not pull away as he had feared. Instead, she leaned into him, and his hands took her weight, surprised by her size. She was bigger than the paddy girls and the Macao odalisques yet as soft and with an unexpected smell of cool, rainwet fur.
Her hair tented their faces, and she stared down at him with the loveglow he had longed to see — and something more, an impish smile. She laughed at his astonishment, at the drunken tug of implication pulling his eyes wide. His naked innocence enamored her, and she wanted him to be the first to have what the sophisticated royals her father admired had failed to win. He lived the spirit of her childhood, sincere as a puppy, vulnerable to her every whim. She did not love him, not then as her face dipped to taste the mist of his breath. And when his arms drew her closer and their bodies met, love hid far away, overshadowed by passion, and she was glad when his breath came in gasps under her nibbling lips.
Jaki lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. They tugged at each other's clothes in an erotic game, until they tussled, jubilantly naked. For her, the ensuing strokes of touch and feel that sparked her wet inside and out culminated moments later in a tantrum of pleasure, leaving her gasping and exhilarated. For him, the slick complicity of their bodies became love itself, and he entered her slow and tense as a predator, stalking her heart, reading her eyes, her murmurs, and her cries for inspiration. Then the bewilderment of passion overcame him, and he succumbed. With lyrical rapacity, they grappled around the prism of their lovelock — slow-motion somersaulting, bellybouncing, backcrawling, spilling through each other, and bounding back in verging arcs, weightless as rainbows.
Jaki had not disappointed Lucinda in her passionate expectations, and that night they made love again while the maid slept restlessly on the trundle bed outside their veiled bower, dreaming of seastorms.
The next four days blazed with amorous adventures, each burning hotter than the last as the two lovers expended their desires with bright animal intensity. Lucinda feared that with the pleasure gained between them something would be lost — phlogiston, she called it, the fiery essence of their souls. Jaki listened patiently to her fears and allayed them with his forest tales of the inexhaustible love of the sky for the landlocked horizon and how their mythic hunger for each other culminated twice each day in the beauty of twilight.
Lucinda was intrigued by Jaki's jungle stories and he by her tales of Europe and the many ports she had visited with her father. Each day, they shared their worlds' enigmas and each night beneath the monsoon rains, a reconciliation of all differences and all mystery. At dawn, their bodies glazed with the shellac of their erotic abandon, they lay together and gazed serenely into each other's eyes, blue into blue, sharing their new-found intelligence about everything — trade and poetry, money and monarchy, God and free will — everything except the future.
Occasionally, Quarles' voice would bend through the creaking walls, and Jaki shivered to hear the iron in his commands, the cold timbre of the will that had maliciously infected Iduna and robbed Pym's tormented soul of its last light. "What is he like — your father?"
"He's a cursed man," she answered dully. She lay curled up with her back pressed against his torso, his hand under her cheek. The spoon of Jaki's warm nakedness absorbed the chill that descended when she thought of her father, and she found the vigilance to peer deeper at herself and to admit what she could not confide even to her maid: "I am his curse."
Jaki tightened about her, and she told him what she knew of Quarles' struggle from poverty on the sordid Chatham dockyards to his triumphant captaincy, the retrieval of his ancestral estate, and the crushing loss of his wife. "I was too young to remember her. But he did love her — and still does. She must have been a strong woman to command his devotion, to have even gotten his attention. My father has cared for no one and nothing else since but his ascendancy. I impede that. My mother left me in her place, and every day I have reminded him of her absence. That is why he has never remarried; he is still married, he thinks — to my fate. He reared me as he would a son, sparing me no learning but manual labor. And now that I know something of this sad world, he demands that I behave as if I were an empty-headed woman, eager for a husband and a household."
"What are you eager for?"
"Something grand. I didn't know what — until now. The way I have been living cannot go on, because it is taking me helplessly to some man I cannot love and to an obedient, dreamless house where I cannot live." She sat up, eyes affright. "True child, I want to go with you."
Hope welled up in Jaki, but he dared not touch her until he knew she reached for him in love and not fear. "I will use my mountains' tears to build us a home far away from everything that wants us apart."
She fell into his arms, and he hugged dearly this woman who filled the emptiness his life had crossed.
*
From far back in the wilderness of dreams, on an unfound path out of the canyon of memory, Mala chanted lines from Psalm 19: Day to day pours forth speech — and night to night declares knowledge.
When dawn came and the roll of the ship steadied to the anchored rhythms of her new moorings, the lovers confronted their future. Love had found Lucinda sometime during the stormsea crossing, and all her playfulness had sharpened to rueful need for her caring, carnal, forest-scented man. She did not want him to go, though she knew her father would kill him if he stayed. Jaki swore to return to Singapore at the next new moon, after he had warned his comrades and they had made their way to safety.
"I will come back," he said with his face in the heady fragrance of her gold-shadowed hair, "and this time never leave again. I will bring my fortune with me and ask your father for your hand. We will leave Asia, and you will show me Europe. Perhaps the Alps will be our home — we will have a chateau by a lake and rear our children in happiness and teach them to cherish beauty and peace."
"You dream more than I can believe," she said sadly. "Yet I will wait for you to return." She kissed the amber ring to seal her promise, and they agreed to meet next under the dark of the moon behind the stone lion that gazed over the harbor of Singapore, the City of Lions.
He secured a rope to the window jamb and nimbly swung down to the stone slipway of the landing stage. He waved and in a moment vanished in the amulets of morning mist dangling over the harbor.
*
William Quarles left Mister Montague on the upper deck to oversee the last stage of the mooring and unfolded his spyglass. He surveyed the other ships in the port. Behind him, the dockcrew affixed gangways and noisily began unloading cargo. As the captain leaned on the taffrail and cocked his broad hat the better to use his glass, he glimpsed a blond youth swing from his daughter's castle window to the end of the mist-folded landing stage. Quarles would not have thought it possible unless he had seen it, for the leap demanded the precision of a panther to clear the distance from stern to sea wall without slamming into the cables. Eager to catch the youth's face, he swung the lens over the bloated images of barnacled stone walls, timber framing, and rusty winches and recognized the handsome Dutch pirate Lucinda had beguiled a year earlier in Macao. He rapped his spyglass on the rail, shattering it in a burst of fury, and shouted for his daughter.
Lucinda heard her father bellowing her name, and before she could reach the door, it slammed inward and he entered with a roar of indignation. He stopped at the edge of the bed, glaring at his daughter as he assessed her complicity. Then his chest collapsed in a moaning cry, and he slapped her hard, sending her reeling back into the pillows.
Quarles stood and waited for Lucinda to sit
up again. The maid crept toward the door, eyes averted. "Sit down, Maud," he commanded in a huge voice, and she fell into the nearest chair. His eyes never flinched from his daughter as she sat up and wiped the blood from her mouth, her eyes burrs of angry light. He had never hit her before, and he had just begun now. She saw that. Her insides crawled as she stared at her father and read his thoughts. She was his daughter, his girl-child. What mind she had, what will she flaunted, he had made — and now he would take that apart — as he should have long before.
"Who was the man in your cabin?" he asked through his teeth.
"The man I love!" she shouted, and he slapped her again. In a fury, he snapped a curtain rod from the bed's canopy, spilling drapes, then seized her arm, heaved her over, and slashed at her back with it.
Maud lunged from her chair, crying, "Stop! Stop it!"
Quarles turned on the maid and paused, satisfied to see abject fear warp her face. His anger had worked on her. Maud would tell him all she knew. "Go to my cabin," he ordered the maid, and she went to the door and waited, afraid he would attack her mistress again. But all violence had gone out of him. He stood over his daughter's sobbing body and silently cursed the day he had let cruel life seduce him with love.
*
For days, Jaki wandered the marshy coast of Johore in a skiff that he had purchased with a few gold coins Lucinda had given him. Anxious to find Silenos as quickly as possible, he was also grateful for each hiatus in his search that allowed him to contemplate the enormous joy he had found with Lucinda. This woman would be his wife. She would mother his children and anchor him in creation's sea-lash of light and darkness.
Under a green twilight off a cove beyond Malacca, a horde of sampans swept out of the shadows and surrounded Jaki's skiff. He stood with scimitar brandished, peering anxiously for firearms among his enemy, and shouting his war cry.
A familiar guttural laugh came in return.
"Blackheart!" Jaki yelled, lowering his scimitar.
"You will die bravely, Jaki Gefjon." Pym's voice hammered from behind him, and he jumped about to confront the big pirate bounding from a sampan into the skiff, almost knocking Jaki from his feet. "I could use a man like you."
They embraced like bears, the stink of brandy on Pym perfume to Jaki. Blackheart grunted and steadied the skiff with his booted foot.
"My only prayer in thirty years," Pym grumbled, "followed the four-oar you threw into the storm."
"It gave protection, captain," Jaki answered in a rush. "And it carried me with Shirazi to Black Light, where I learned his true identity. A spy." Pym's mirth brittled. "Rajan Kobra knows we are here and plans to pincer us in the strait with The Fateful Sisters."
Pym clasped Jaki's shoulder, absorbing this irony. "So the very trap you warned me about on Silenos you've returned to prize me from." He pursed his dark lips, and the bonechips dangling at the ends of his mustache clicked together. "I treated you poorly in our last days together, Jaki — and I've been in anguish over that since. If Silenos carries us to freedom, I will reward you for your intelligence — and to redeem my bad faith." He looked over Jaki's shoulder. "Mister Blackheart, to the ship. We sail tonight."
Blackheart swung his hands before him, indicating that the ship still lay ashore, careened.
"I am not checked!" Pym rumbled. "We'll right the ship by torchlight. Triple pay in gold for the men who work. We won't be gutted belly up by muck-blooded Quarles or the Bantam's Muslim stooge. We're away before dawn!"
The sampans turned back into the cove and towed the skiff to a covert where Silenos waited, beached and turned on her side. By torchglow, Jaki could see that most of the barnacles had been scraped from her bottom, and the hull was partially tarred and caulked. "Devil take it, we've another two days' work here," Pym said. "But we can't wait now. You must tell me the rest. Come to the watchtower."
Wawa waited there, peeling limes for Pym, and at the sight of Jaki, he ran to him squawking. Once the animal had finally gentled, the sorcerer related his story while the captain oversaw the righting of the ship. "Love is the deadliest trap," Pym warned disapprovingly when he heard about Lucinda and their four days and nights of romance aboard The Fateful Sisters. "Look what became of my Perdita — another victim of love. If I had relinquished her to the Spanish officer who first asked for her hand, I'd have my left eye still wed to my right and she would be a duchess in Manila. What a cursed fool I was to think I could make a life for her." His ugly face shook with remorse. "And you're a fool, too, if you think that beast Quarles will give his beauty to the likes of you. You're a pirate and a half-breed. No English gentleman would consent to have you for a son."
"Then Lucinda and I will steal away."
"Hah! He'll track you to the ends of the world," he said. His words brought a small smile to Jaki's lips. "You think I jest. I do not. Quarles is here in Asia because I am. He has come here to avenge the death of his uncle, that faithless dog Samuel Quarles, whom he and the rest of England still believe to be a hero. How much more passionately would he act to recover his daughter, eh?" He saw the smile slip from Jaki's face. "Listen to me, young lover, and trust not your heart to the seed of your enemy. Asia abounds in beautiful women. You'll sate your soul in Jakarta, Macao, Manila."
"I will see her again at the dark of the moon in the City of Lions."
"Aye." Pym sighed, seeing determination in the blond youth before him. "You will see her again — if we survive her daddy's cunning and might. And when you do, Jaki boy, hark to this — do not expose yourself. Not at first. Listen to an old snake who knows his way among the hawks. Test your love, and if she's true, then I say, damn creation that made men sinners, and go with her. But test her first. Mark me, now."
Pym concentrated on readying his warship for the sea and left Jaki to steep in his heart's madness. At dawn Silenos glided from the cove and beat north along the coast to where the strait widened at Klang. There they sighted Black Light, bearing down on them full speed.
Jaki stirred from his brooding and stood beside Pym at the binnacle. Blackheart handled the helm, and he grunted a nervous request for orders.
"Keep our sails full, Mister Blackheart," Pym commanded. "Point the ship right at Black Light. And don't veer a whisker."
"Captain," Jaki said in a voice shadowed with apprehension, "when I was aboard that ship, I saw her cannon."
"Aye, you've told me. Fifty-pounders, most of them."
"Yes!" Jaki swelled with fright. "Shouldn't we turn to lee and tack back down the coast?"
"And have a six-hundred-ton man-of-war chewing at our rudder?" Pym shook his head and grinned with a devil's bravura. "We've the wind to our backs and the best helmsman in Asia at the wheel — the only wheel in this match. We'll run straight for Rajan Kobra and pray he veers. Then, if we're lucky, we'll swing with her prow, empty our broadsides into her nose, and scamper past her and into the open sea."
"Kobra's as cruel as he is determined," Jaki said, hearing the sails crackle with wind as the ship heeled over and gathered speed. "His is the bigger ship. He'll ram us for sure. And if we swerve before he does, his giant guns will blow us to splinters."
Pym slapped Jaki on the back. "Your encouragement is my strength, boy!" He bent over the voice tube beside the sternpost. "Battle stations all! Prepare cannon!" He looked to Jaki with his hardset shark's grin. "You're a sorcerer. I've seen your devil's ilk with my own eyes and eaten your unholy mushroom bread. Beseech the spirit powers to help us, sorcerer. Place a curse on Black Light and you can have your mountains' tears back."
They sailed to their doom, Jaki feared. Close enough now to see the Muslim sailors in the shrouds adjusting canvas to sidle Black Light directly into line with Silenos. All his efforts to find Pym and warn him had been in vain. He would never see Lucinda again. Rage mingled with despair, and a deathly calm saturated him: the quiescence the Spider had imparted to him. He gazed up at feathery cirrus, expecting to see the sky's sorrow, the soot of the future. Instead, he eyed scimitars full of si
lver speed, streaked with noon. The sky arrayed an army of wind angels. The sight of it numbed him to his bones, and the calm of stymied rage and despair in him expanded to hold the whole sky. Jaki became suddenly a chord of sunlight above the stunned animal of his body. And he prayed: Powers of the world — protect my long journey. Cast aside my enemies and carry me free of their malignant will. As I have served you with my very life, so carry my life now in your shadow, free of the might and shrewdness of my enemies. Let your will be accomplished — powers of the world!
The fervor of his prayer returned him to his body, and the numbness of the trance whisked away, leaving him prickly with alertness.
The wind stiffened behind Silenos, and the rush of their flight tasseled seaspray and bleared their eyes. At the same instant, the backwash off the mountains dampened, and Black Light's canvas went slack.
"Steady so, Blackheart!" Pym clacked open his spyglass, scrutinized the Muslim bow for prow cannon, and found them above the winged angel figurehead: thirty-pounders, but their range would not match Silenos' precision-bored guns. He observed the Muslim crew scrambling among the shrouds, unfurling the studding sails to tack and bring the big cannon to bear. The sudden gust of wind behind Silenos carried the pirate ship into firing range first, and Pym shouted the commands gleefully. "Left handsomely, Blackheart!" The ship slashed to port, and he stepped to the voice tube. "Mark and fire!"
Silenos' broadside sheared Black Light's foremast, bashed in her angel figurehead, and exploded the powder of her prow guns, kicking the forecastle into the sky in a gush of timber and flames.
The fight was over. Blackheart steered Silenos out of range of Black Light's guns, and Pym fired a mock salute to the crippled ship as they flew by. He lifted Jaki off his feet in an enormous embrace, Wawa clinging to the sorcerer's legs.
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