Jaki did not flinch. "Lucinda, I too am what he is. I cannot abandon him. Surely you understand that." Tears lit his eyes. "Faith is all I have of the Life. Without that, I would be a living corpse. Forever after, you would regret leaving the life of promise with your father for me."
She bit her lip not to weep. "You belittle me, Jaki."
"Lucinda —" Jaki's expression was frantic with caring. "After I have saved Pym, I will come for you. Nothing will stop me."
She shook her head. "Maud has betrayed me. If I go back now —" Her voice quavered. "I will never see you again. There is a Dutch carrack departing for Batavia with the dawn tide. Father has booked my passage. If we do not flee now, he will send me back to England."
"I will find you," he said with haunted resolve. Her expression told him she thought he was throwing his life away. He did not dare ask her to come with him. "I will find you wherever he sends you."
A whistle trilled from the path below.
Lucinda's hands fell away from Jaki, and the radiant persistence in her eyes dulled. "If you think so little of me that a pirate means more, then truly, I was mistaken to come here. What a fool you must think me." And she turned away abruptly and started down the path, toward Maud and the imperial blaze of The Fateful Sisters, hoping with every step that Jaki would rush after her and call her back.
Jaki stood in the threads of starlight and watched her silk-ruffled shape drift away from him, and could not move.
*
Turbaned and with his face smudged with bonechar, Jaki watched at dawn from a covert of indigo bales mounded along a pier as Lucinda and her maid, accompanied by an English guard, boarded a Dutch carrack. After crewmen carried aboard the lady’s coffers and chests, they hoisted the gangways and slipped the moorings, and the big Dutch ship eased away from the quay wall, riding the tide into the strait. Jaki's heart wheezed with helplessness.
Toward noon, he and the five faithful pirates mingled with the large crowd in the harbor plaza, watching as Pym, arms shackled behind, proceeded unbowed through a phalanx of musket-wielding British sailors to The Fateful Sisters. He appeared drunk, gustily singing a sea chanty as he strode through the jeering assemblage, the serpent brand on his brow glowing scarlet. Plume-capped sailors stood beside him on the main deck, while the Bantam of Siam and the sultans of Johore, Trengganu, Kelantan, Selangor, and Kedah sat in judgment on the quarterdeck in carved mahogany thrones.
The Bantam, thin and ashen as a wooden post, presided solemnly in his silk finery studded with rubies and emeralds, imposing as a pontiff. He serenely ignored Pym's noises. The sultans watched dispassionately, already thinking ahead to the feast to follow. Their oiled beards glinted in the sunlight, and their eyes batted drowsily, unaccustomed to noonfire. Hsi Hang stood in the gallery behind them, alongside Rajan Kobra, who grinned beatifically throughout the ceremony and laughed aloud when Pym doubled over and vomited. Three sailors lifted him and propped him to the mainmast by hooking his shackles to a cable truss.
Quarles paraded before the dignitaries and the gallery, his stout girth emphasized by the large ruff of his collar and his wide-hipped breeches. The flamboyant feather in his cocked hat shook as he recounted Pym's crimes, and his sunburned face grew hotter with his passionate declamation. Pym swayed with anger, his one eye now soberly fixed on his accusers.
Jaki pressed through the crowd until he was standing before the gangway guard. All morning he had surveyed the ship, seeking some way to extricate Pym. They had cruised past the warship in a prau, under the nose of Black Light with her new forecastle and Hsi Hang's opulent junks, but Quarles had posted musketmen on the seaward rails of his ship. Saja and the two crewmen captured with Pym had been tried and hanged from the bowsprit the previous day, and their bodies, tarred and stobbed upright on the levee, served warning to all pirates. The sight of the stiff, black-resined corpses assailed Jaki's hope. The ambition to sacrifice himself in a raging attack dulled at the sight of so many ready weapons. If there were some chance of killing Quarles and the Bantam he would have been able to muster the vitality for an assault. As it was, he could barely empower himself to watch.
Pym's time to speak came, and the guards unhooked him from the truss to stand between two sailors. With a defiant scowl he straightened, fierce and dignified, and steadied himself. He spoke in English though he knew that most of the heckling faces in the crowd would not understand him. Even so, none dared breech the last words of a condemned man, and only mewling seabirds violated the silence of the harbor.
"Bantam, sultans, self-appointed and majestically self-righteous judges, listen well to the one you drive ahead of you into oblivion. You accuse me of treason and piracy. I plead innocent to both. As to the count of treason, I did indeed kill Samuel Quarles. I admit it with the averred freedom of a man facing his death. But I was never the traitor. Samuel Quarles betrayed Drake's fleet to the Spanish, and it was God's curse upon me to witness it and slay him for his betrayal. This fact is known to be true by Samuel Quarles’ vainglorious nephew. And this I declare before God and all His fallen angels." Pym's thick features trembled with the passion of his veracity, and he looked in turn at each of the sultans and the Bantam, meeting their stares with his arrant eye.
"Now that you greedy minions of empire are to murder me, I admit I harried you under the flag of the monster Wyvern. ‘Twas I who hampered your rape of Asia — in vengeance, you bloodfat devils. Never in greed. In vengeance only did I war with you, because you are evil and no one stands against you. You are evil, for you and your kings walk on the backs of people. You trample them naked into the earth for your greater stature. Your allegiance is not to God but to gold. The curse of your plundering is on your heads and the heads of your children." He shook his shackles at the gathered throng, then saw the laughter in their faces and dropped his arms. "There is no true freedom in life," he said less forcefully. "All of us are chained to mystery and misery. And all of you are going where I lead."
"But not as quickly!" Quarles called out. "Or as vilely!"
Pym ignored his captor's taunts and turned to the mainmast. His hands unbound, he climbed the shrouds to the crosstrees, where a sailor bound his wrists again. The crewman placed a rope about the avowed pirate’s neck as Pym stared up into the soaring cloudflow. The moment the noose tightened, he threw himself into the air. His body fell a short distance and jerked to a frantic spasm at the end of the taut rope.
A cheer went up from the crowd, and William Quarles faced the Bantam with an exultant expression. Most of the gallery guests stirred, eager for the banquet, but the Bantam and Hsi Hang remained seated and watched with glowing faces while the pirate captain danced his death jig.
Jaki did not blink until Pym's soul had finally wrenched free of his body. Then he closed his eyes and watched the bloodlight behind his lids scrawl its immemorial and indecipherable promises.
*
Once the hanging was over and the festivities in the palace of Serangoon began, Black Light dropped her lines and slipped out of the harbor.
Jaki and his five men followed in their prau, unnoticed among the armada of junks, carracks, and sampans crowding the inlet.
Black Light traveled west, along the broad Johore Strait. Jaki surmised that she meant to follow the inland strait to take on fresh water and meat before launching into the ocean. A strategy unfolded in him, shaped by his hot grief as he watched Black Light drift slowly along the jungle shoreline.
Relinquishing the prow to one of the crewmen, he joined at the oars with lusty fervor, driven by rage. The prau skimmed close to the mud-banks opposite the Muslim man-of-war. At the riverbend it quickly overtook the big ship and flew ahead.
Jaki, furious that death had robbed him again, knew from grim experience that he could not relent to fury. The men who had killed Pym would kill him too easily if he gave free rein to his feelings and attacked like a rabid animal. Only a sorcerer's trance could give him the necessary calm to stalk men, and he breathed from his pith to draw his
violence deeper and steady his exertion. His face went deathly white, and his stare hardened. He relented reflexively to the centuries of murder that informed all vengeance, relented to his need to catch Pym's soul. The men, seeing his paleness, thought simply that his grief consumed him. But when they witnessed the inhuman strength in his muscles as they rowed over the shallows, they gawked, confounded.
He stopped rowing, and the others bent to their strokes while the soul-taker sat lifeless, listening to the jungle shore with his whole body. A chill seeped out of his heart, stilling his anger. He felt the half-hinged breezes swinging from the forest wall, heard the coughs of the trees, smelled the incense from algal pools — and knew just where to stop the skiff.
Jaki ordered the men to take the prau farther up the strait until they disappeared around a bend. Before they left, he took the shrunken head from his duffel bag and looped its twine around his neck. "Wait for me under cover," he commanded the pirates. "I will meet you at nightfall."
"Where are you going?" one of the men asked suspiciously.
But the sorcerer was gone.
Wawa rushed ahead, and the gibbon's cries assured Jaki that no large animals or men approached. He moved among the trees, searching the leaf litter intently. Here and there he stopped and collected small plants, pink flames that licked the crevices of silvered deadwood. The solitude of the jungle and its familiar scents eased his grief. He felt Jabalwan nearby, in the minty sighs of the ripe earth. The invisible presence guided him, and he followed his hunches through the forest wrack, picking more of the poisonous pink plants — starwort, famous among sorcerers for its tasteless toxicity and delayed action. When he had a handful of the deadly blossoms, he paused to gather a tuft of twistbane, then hurried back to the creek glade.
Jaki knelt over a clear freshwater pool where the creek emptied before silting into brackish shallows. After pounding the starwort and twistbane to a paste on the pool rocks, he stirred the mixture lightly into the water without disturbing the algal lace. He finished as the warship floated into view, and with one backward step he vanished into the tall grass along the creek.
Black Light did not stop at the firth as the soul-catcher had been sure it would. It drifted up the strait, and Jaki cursed himself. His intuition had been so certain that its failure ached in him like a bad heart. "Damned fool," he berated himself.
Wawa barked, signaling that the big ship had slowed, and Jaki popped up. The jungle tangle ahead and the sight of stormclouds gathering with the dusk had prompted Rajan Kobra to reconsider the creek glade he had just passed, and he ordered his ship hard about. Jaki watched with relief as the restored black angel figurehead hovered over the channel. Weightless with expectation, he slipped deeper into the grass and observed the lowering of the warship's gig. The men who came ashore unloaded muskets, longbows, spears, and buckets. While the officers stamped into the forest to hunt in the falling light, the oarsmen tasted the water of the pool and, finding it satisfactory, filled their buckets and began loading water into the large barrel in the gig's midship.
Musketfire splotched the jungle silence, and the hunting party returned with a tusked boar railed on their spears. They loaded the game, splashed a couple more bucketfuls of pool water in the transport barrel, and shoved off.
Jaki clutched the shrunken head hanging beside his heart and raised it to the humming mist where the dead loomed, watching. "May this justice be done," he whispered, and lifted his face toward the clear oil of night spreading across the sky. In the last light, he foraged for more poison plants: Strychnos berries and strangle vine. He packed the pockets of his doublet with pigment roots and dye leaves, then returned to the pirates huddled in their prau at the water's edge. He told them of Black Light's deadly water and promised them a great slaughter at dawn. That night, they lay silent in their mourning and fingered their weapons, remembering Pym.
When the first blister of dawn appeared, Jaki took out the pigment roots and dye leaves and painted his and the pirates' faces in predatory warstreaks. Their cutlasses and sabers he edged with Strychnos resin and strangle vine sap. Then the pirates sculled into the strait and drifted to Black Light. By now almost everyone on board would have drunk the lethal water, yet the warship still looked formidable. The watch sat in the crosstrees and forecastle, and lanterns blazed on the rails. Jaki ordered his men to ready their flintlocks and he unraveled a loop-ended rope. He snagged the nub on the main deck's railpost, the rope snapped tautly, and Wawa and Jaki led the climb up the beveled hull to the deck.
The watch in the crosstrees stirred but did not notice them as they rolled onto the ship. Wawa scampered up into the shrouds to the mainmast and charily approached the watch. The man lifted an arm at the approaching beast, then withered. Wawa poked at him and leaped away. The sailor did not budge. The forecastle watch had slumped backward against the bobstay pinion, unconscious. The quarterdeck watch sprawled before the whipstaff, his tongue swollen in a blue bulge between his teeth. Jaki guided the pirates to the gundeck, where the crew slept. Many were dead. Some who had not drunk the water slumbered, and the pirates swiftly cut their throats — until a restless sleeper awoke and shouted an alarm.
A dozen men stirred from their hammocks, and the flintlocks cut half of them down. The sluggish ones posed no threat for the savagely painted warriors, and while the pirates hacked at the impaired crew, Jaki ran for the officers' quarters.
Three officers staggered into the companionway and confronted him. "Shahawar Shirazi sends me for your lives!" Jaki shouted.
The officers did not understand him, though they recognized Shirazi's name as they attacked. In the narrow companionway Jaki screamed his war cry and parried the blow of the first assailant so ferociously he fell back into the other two, throwing them off balance. The sorcerer chopped at them remorselessly, and their blood sprayed. With the scream of the third cut loose from his life, Jaki bounded over their corpses and climbed the gangway to the weather deck and the captain's cabin.
The door swung wide and showed an empty chamber. A wash of ice wind spilled over his scalp, and Jaki looked up to the quarterdeck in time to see Rajan Kobra pointing two flintlocks at his head. He dove into the cabin as one gun discharged, smashing the plank of the threshold.
Jaki whirled back out the door, and Rajan Kobra fixed him in his gunsite, his black eyes bright nails of murderous intent. A shriek from above startled them both, and Wawa flew out of the shrouds and collided with the captain. The flintlock went off, and the ball shot into the green dawn. Jaki sprang up the stairs to the quarterdeck, blade high.
Kobra's squint went wide as Jaki rushed closer. "You! The aborigine!" He waved his scimitar.
The two paced each other, circling, their scimitars wavering, searching for an opening to strike. With a side-slashing blow, the Muslim warrior charged, and their swords clanged. Jaki, shoved back by the power of the strike, felt fear burst through him. Kobra was maniacal, and the force of his horror matched Jaki's anger. Their weapons clashed in brattling frenzy, Jaki falling back, Wawa screeching.
The sorcerer cat-footed sideways, breaking the captain's lunging advance. But the reprieve he had expected did not follow: Kobra, trained in the treacheries of the scimitar, pivoted agilely, feinted, double-feinted in a blur, and thrust for Jaki's heart. Outwitted, Jaki stepped falsely and lurched about as Kobra's blade snaked toward him. The tip grazed his left shoulder and snicked for his throat.
Frantic to retreat, Jaki staggered, and the edge nicked his ear and scored him across the back. He whipped around and blocked a slicing maneuver that would have cut his throat. The block locked their swords, and they pressed against each other. Kobra's fist banged into Jaki's temple and dropped him to the deck, stunned. The Muslim howled victoriously and drove down with his scimitar. The blade jolted as it pierced flesh.
Rajan Kobra viciously swirled the blade so it would cut vitally inside his enemy's chest — and only then did he see that his sword had struck not Jaki but the shrunken head.
&nb
sp; Before his startled adversary could leap back, Jaki swiped his scimitar at the Muslim's gaping face, and the razored tip slashed his throat. Blood sheeted over Jaki, and Rajan Kobra heaved backward. Jaki rose and lopped off his enemy's head. He removed the turban, tied the long hair to the unwound headcloth, and used the cloth to secure the severed head to the sternpost.
The slaughter below decks had ended, and the handful of pirates, flushed with killing, appeared on the main deck. At the sight of Rajan Kobra's grimacing head and Jaki splashed with his blood, they cheered and raised their swords to him.
Jaki silenced them with crimson hands uplifted. "We insult our captain, rejoicing while his body hangs in Serangoon Harbor. Weigh anchor and set the mainsail. We will give Trevor Pym a burial that befits a pirate king!"
Jaki steered the huge ship into the seabound current. Once under sail and flying downwind toward Singapore, he turned the whipstaff over to a crewman and took the quarterdeck.
The shrunken head of Pieter Gefjon had been gashed open by Rajan Kobra's sword, and the fine sand in it had bled away. The head dangled shapelessly, just a scrap of skin and knotted hair, its features indistinguishable. Jaki removed it from around his neck and tied it to the sternpost above Kobra's head. His dead father had saved his life, and the spirit in the head had gone, taking the threat of his enemy with it. Jaki lowered a bucket overboard and drew up seawater to wash the blood and war paint from his hands and face. As he had once put on the clothes of his father, he now had to shed himself, he realized, and looked up at the hank of hair and the shred of skin that had once held his father's spirit. Shed his very self and be renewed.
Wawa, who had climbed into the crosstrees, shouted at the sight of the first lorchas, and Jaki yelled to the men. "Keep to the deep water! Unfurl all the sail you can! And steer this ship straight for Captain Pym!"
Wyvern Page 33
