Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Lucinda's face narrowed with incredulity. "You are but three men in all. You cannot possibly seize an ocean-crossing vessel with two men, let alone manage it on the high seas."

  "Give me two days on the wharves and I will gather us a crew," he promised excitedly.

  "Pirates." Lucinda shook her head. "I did not come with you to live as a pirate."

  Jaki sat back into the large pillows strewn about the balcony. "The Spanish are pirates to the English. The English are pirates to the Dutch. The Dutch are pirates to the Portuguese. What does it matter? I say we take a Dutch vessel, sail it across the Bay of Bengal, and turn it over to the Portuguese in Goa as a war prize. Then we will be praised as heroes, not pirates, and we'll use our diamonds there to book passage to the New World."

  "No, Jaki." Lucinda locked her arms across her body, inflexible as an idol. "I left my father's world to be with you, because I thought you were a caring man. Not a man who cares for power, but for me and the children we would have together. I will work hard with you to earn that family and the home we want far from the conflicts of empire — but I will not pirate for it." She uncrossed her arms and reached for him. "True child, have you forgotten the days and nights we spent together, talking about what is important to us?"

  Her touch, firm and gentle, soothed the bruises of Jaki's long wandering. Her voice was so sure, her face the very shape of his desires, and in the fading light, with a halo of darkness about her luminant hair, she became the worshipful center of the world to him. Could their two bodies equal their dream? Everything he had learned about life from Mala, Jabalwan, and Pym bespoke violence. The Life is secret, he remembered, but what is known is violent. Or was that his fear speaking? He had thought he had left fear behind in Njurat. He looked again to his wife, her face a shadow now in the failing light. The shadow of departure. The thought chirped from the back of his skull, and he realized that he had not lost his fear. Not at all. His fear had stepped out of him and taken up residence in this woman. Fear gawked back at him from the loveliness of her small, lean body, her fragile hands and feet, her eyes like delicate mirrors. He was afraid for her.

  "Lucinda, listen to me. I am not a pirate, but I know of their ways. Once we are safe, I promise you ..."

  She stopped him by kneeling forward and placing two fingers on his lips. "Hush. No more suasion, Jaki. Remember you told me that in your tribe, when a man marries a woman among your people, he goes with her to her family and lives under her roof." She brushed her lips against his cheek, and her voice softened to a whisper. "You are married to me now. Live with me under my roof."

  Jaki took her in his arms then and lifted his face to the liquid fire of evening. She knew the slow scales of his soul. She knew him. When she rocked in his arms, her birdbright weight against his chest, he exhaled the unspent words of his will and smiled with sad comprehension into the gathering thickness of the night.

  *

  Her mistress alone in the world, with neither English-speaking domestics nor a patriarch to contour the day's duties, Maud eagerly busied herself with the coming nuptials. She fulfilled the myriad chores of arranging the wedding Lucinda dreamed aloud for her during the sweltering afternoons when they lay together in their jasmine-petaled baths.

  Over the next four days, canopies, tree-awnings, and pavilions appeared in the landscaped grounds behind the mansion. With the steward as escort and interpreter, Maud arranged for the head monk at Shwedagon to officiate, and then visited the monasteries and mosques in Dagon to hire drum players, chanters, and dervish dancers for the ceremony.

  The day before the wedding, Jaki chanced to meet a blind monger on the wharves who bought and sold goods that pirates had seized from merchant ships and could sell nowhere else. Jaki found in his bag of wares an English translation of the Bible bound in brown calfskin, which he bought and presented to Lucinda as a wedding gift. That night, he opened the Book to Isaiah and read to her: "As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall God rejoice over us."

  On the day of the wedding, it rained. Opalescent sheets of mist swirled across the sward, and heat fog crawled up from the river and smothered the grounds. Maud fretted and wanted to postpone the ceremony, but Lucinda and Jaki were undaunted. The monks assured them that the downpour portended a favorable union and, as if to prove it, marched into the torrent with upturned, beatific faces, raindrops sparking off their shaved heads, drums pulsing, and cymbals clanging. The curious guests watched from the verandah. As Lucinda had anticipated, the entire European population of the settlement had turned out, including Robert Fletcher, who had come, like the other factors, with his Burmese wife, children, and servants. Wawa pranced among them, tugging at skirts and plucking tidbits from the burdened banquet tables that had been moved inside.

  Lucinda wore a sheer yellow veil under a crown of wisteria and a pearl-studded gown of Chinese silk embroidered with silver-threaded designs of clouds and wind-vapors to honor her husband's vision. Within moments, the rain turned it opal, and it clung to her shiningly. Jaki stood resolute and drenched at the altar, water dripping from the fawn hat Lucinda had insisted he wear.

  The steward presented the bride, and Jaki stood with his arm about her in the rain while the Buddhist priest intoned sutras and Maud wept with ambivalence. Jaki placed the amber asphodel ring on Lucinda's finger and lifted her veil. As their eyes met, Jaki beheld his destiny with such sharp clarity that he might have been on a mountaintop at dawn, high above the dark world, afire with the first glimpse of the sun. He had survived the wilds of the night, and now his way opened clearly the whole long day of his life.

  Lucinda recognized the joy in her husband's gaze from every restless dream of love she had wandered since childhood. The dream was over now, and instead there existed a place to live where all the tasks of the future seemed possible.

  They kissed, a clangor erupted from the monks' orchestra, and Kota and Mang fired their flintlocks into the air. Dervish dancers spilled onto the sward, whirling with the torrent, and Jaki and Lucinda retreated to the house among them.

  On the verandah, Robert Fletcher greeted them, his face wrinkled in a forced smile. "Today will be a great disappointment to your father," he said, taking her hand, "but he will recognize your bravura with pride, I am sure. On his behalf, I offer you our traditional English blessing: Bread for life and pudding forever."

  Lucinda smiled coolly. "The only blessing I ask of you, Mister Fletcher, is that you convey to my father the happiness you see here."

  For a wedding gift, Jakob Boeck presented Lucinda with the manifest for her caravan and the overseer's papers that guaranteed her diplomatic passage through Burma and India. By accepting them, she signaled her readiness for the trek, and the Dutchman's round face radiated satisfaction as he kissed her hand and slapped Jaki's shoulder. "As we say in Burma, keep your gaze straight ahead and the demons will not catch you."

  Lucinda smiled, pleased to have her future in her hands, and Jaki glowed to see the woman he loved satisfied with all he had promised. They mingled merrily with their guests, and the festivities in the great house flourished long into the night under the applause of rain.

  *

  The manifest papers that Lucinda reviewed bore a bossed stamp dated Anno Domini 1627 May, and the hot, damp wind from the south attested that the monsoon season had begun. Jaki and Lucinda stood with Jakob Boeck on the wharf where the caravan gathered. Wawa pranced atop one of the bollards, squawking at crates of pigs destined for the bilge holds of the caravan vessels.

  The newlyweds appeared well dressed for their journey. Lucinda sported red leather boots laced to her knees and sailors’ trousers. She also wore a straw hat faced with sheer satin set over a turned-back lace cap which could be lowered to ward off mosquitoes. Standing there next to her husband, who had his bonebeaded medicine bag slung over his shoulder and leaned on his tall blowgun, she seemed ready to meet a caliph or trade with an aborigine.

  Four barges, with eyes painted on their hulls and smiles
of thick rope connecting them in a line stem to stern, waited in the cinnamon waters of the river. The broad decks carried bales, crates, animals, and pilgrims. A crew of Burmese porters secured guide ropes to the water buffalo on the shore, which would pull the barges upstream for the first leg of the journey.

  "As agreed," Boeck said, his spectacles pinching the tip of his pointy nose, "you are listed as the company's chief representative on this caravan, Mistress Gefjon. And you alone shall be responsible for trade negotiations at each market, so that at the caravan's final destination of Surat you will principally have determined the profit or loss of this venture. Barring natural disasters, this should be a most profitable enterprise. I am confident that with your diplomatic experience the trading will go exceedingly well." Peglike teeth glistened in a narrow smile. "As for the daily chores of the journey, the native crew and the foreman will attend to the particulars of moving the cargo. You need not concern yourself with that. The foreman is a company man who has made this journey before, and he will decide the order of march and the stopping places."

  "Subject, of course, to my best judgment," Lucinda said, "if I am to carry full responsibility for this venture."

  Jaki smiled to see the factor's pout fall back into his beard when Lucinda refused to relent. "Of course," he conceded. "But you would be wise to do as he says. He knows the route and the dangers. Trust him."

  Boeck waved to a knot of men loading the lorcha that would house the Gefjons on the river journey, and a large man with a hooked jaw and a chest as deeply keeled as a bull's strode toward them. He wore a short-waisted doublet, brown sailor's trousers that fell to his knees, shoes laced tight to his ankles, an earring in his left ear, and a flat hat, with greasy blond hair wisping from underneath. Pockmarks dented his shaven face, and his ash-colored eyes smiled, long and devilish like a mule's with its ears laid back. "This is Ganger Sint," said Boeck.

  The burly man looked at them as if from a distance, with merry eyes in an impassive face. He neither bowed nor offered his hand, and Lucinda's gaze slipped off him and back to Boeck. Jaki, leaning casually on his long blowgun, idled his stare on the man and observed the relics of uninformed jungle travel: bleached patches on his shins above his boots where leeches and swamp fungus had scarred him, a disfigured forearm with the distinctive twin blotches of glossy flesh from snakebite, and the piss-bright yellow in the whites of his eyes attesting to fevers.

  "I will do all I can to make this journey comfortable for you," Sint said in raspy English. "Are you ready to go aboard? We should be on our way."

  Boeck watched from the wharf as the lorcha shoved off and Ganger Sint bellowed for the caravan to begin. The drivers ashore snapped their whips, and the buffalo strained against their ties, nudging the line of barges against the stream.

  *

  The river journey had been timed to carry them upriver before the monsoons flooded the banks, clogging the shoals with forest debris and making barge travel impossible. For these first ten days of the journey, until the barges reached the unbreachable mud flats of Prome, there was little for Lucinda or Jaki to do but sit in the bow of the lorcha and watch the river slip by. The air huffed damp, algal smells, the wauk of monkeys from the trees, and the bleating of animals on the barges behind them. Occasionally the wind shifted and advanced the stink of the penned animals and the sweet taint of opium that the crew and some of the pilgrims smoked.

  Jaki opened the Bible that he had given Lucinda and tested his reading skills, pulsing with nostalgia as he waded through the Book's familiar stories.

  Lucinda reviewed the maps Boeck had given her with the manifest papers and consulted with Ganger Sint about the pace of the caravan. Already the drivers were pushing the buffalo hard, and she wondered if they could relax the pace for the sake of the beasts.

  "Not possible, ma'am," Sint answered. "We must reach Prome before the heavy rains or we lose most of our cargo, ya?"

  "But after that," she said, running her finger along the sketchy route on the map, "perhaps we could take this leg slower. Mynheer Boeck must have etched this passage too hastily. Thirty miles a day seems far too strenuous."

  Ganger Sint placed a blunt finger on the map where she had been pointing and said, "This is Mon territory, ma'am. We linger there we meet the natives. That is most dangerous. At the best expensive, for their tolls are steep. The rains will come on strong by then. Maybe the Mon stay dry at home while we move through their territory."

  "But can the crew and the animals keep such a pace?"

  "Leave that to me, ma'am. I leave to you a trade strategy for Prome. We must quit our barges there for pack animals. And those merchants are tough as rhino hide. They know we must quit the barges."

  When Sint had left them alone, Jaki said, "Why don't you take a tender back to the barges and review the crew? See what they think about the Mon and thirty-mile days."

  Lucinda wrinkled her nose. "My father taught me otherwise. Command is jeopardized when officers mingle with the crew."

  Jaki considered this, then said, "Well, I'm not an officer for the company. I'll go and let you know how the crew and passengers feel about the pace."

  "I wish you wouldn't," Lucinda said. "That's Mister Sint's job."

  "Do you trust him then?"

  "Why ever not?"

  "Well, he's a company man. He's here to do Boeck's bidding, not tend to the crew."

  Lucinda's face clouded. "Only pirates rule by majority, Jaki. We are not going to do things Pym's way on this caravan. This caravan runs under our risk, our authority. Let Ganger Sint do his job, and we shall do ours."

  "You mean, you will do yours. I'm not in command here. Boeck believes me a pirate still. My name is not written on those papers we carry. And he calls you yet by your father's name. I travel on this caravan only because you do. Let me mingle with the others."

  "Jaki-"

  "I'll wear my hat," he said, with a wink, consoling her and taking the fawn hat from the belaying pin where it had hung most of the journey. At first he had protested Lucinda's insistence that he not walk about bareheaded like a beggar. Even peasants wore hats of some sort, she had argued, to which Jaki countered with Pym's rebuttal that hats belittled men. The pirate regarded hats as emblems of rank and the dominion of men over men. Doffing them displayed an enlightened liberation from imperial rule. "Anarchy," she had moaned. Jaki knew she had never seen the barracoons in the swamps of Bandjermasin, where the Dutch penned their tribal fieldworkers at night. Her father had not shown her the Portuguese chain gangs that continuously dredged the harbor in Macao, nor had she ever been a prisoner aboard a Lanun galley, reduced to a thing for the lusts of men with hats. So when Jaki had replied that he infinitely preferred anarchy to the subjugation of other men, she had looked at him with total incomprehension, mortified to have such a shamelessly bareheaded husband.

  Jaki took Wawa with him in the tender, and they floated downstream from the lorcha to the first barge, where Kota and Mang had a canopy for shade and lounged with their new Burmese wives. Jaki had expected them to go their own way in Dagon, crazed with the bags of gold traded for their diamonds. At the wedding, shrewd-eyed Mang, dressed as richly as a merchant from Venice, had approached a group of importers and, with a few whispers, exchanged his gold for their spices, textiles, and hardware. Kota followed suit shortly thereafter, having intended all along to follow Jaki wherever he went. Now the two of them sat like pashas, hauling their goods north to trade at a steep gain in the isolated and gold-rich northern cities.

  "From lawless pirates to respectable merchants, eh?" Jaki teased them after tying off the tender and climbing a rope ladder aboard. In their pink satin vests and feathered hats, the grim-faced men looked no less dangerous. Lifelong hardship had impressed their features with a wildness that their newly coifed beards could not hide.

  They chatted while Wawa plucked dates from bunches that hung on the canopy poles, delighting the women. None of the Burmese and few of the pilgrims had ever seen a silver-fu
rred gibbon, and soon a small crowd had gathered around the canopy. Wawa did tricks, affording Jaki the opportunity to mingle with the travelers and gauge their temper. He met monks and nuns, tinkers, soldiers whose Portuguese muskets were all that remained of their tribes and their causes, grain traders, sojourning prostitutes, thieves in the guise of jugglers, animal herders taking their fattened beasts along as provisions for the caravan and to trade upcountry for coin.

  The spicy stink of their gathered bodies drove Jaki to the stern. There the caravan crew — mostly slaves, indentured criminals, and war prizes — poled the river mud, dislodging the flotsam that tangled between the barges. Jaki took up an unused shaft and helped them for a spell, until they became curious and began talking to him. In a Malay patois, he began to explain who he was, but they already knew. His destruction of the big ships in Serangoon had made him famous among the tribal seamen, and they wanted to know why he was not with his European wife in the luxury lorcha.

  "We not the same as you," a blister-mouthed tribesman said, indicating Jaki's fine clothes.

  "No, we are different in some ways," Jaki said, and reached into his medicine bag. He took out a small tortoiseshell packed with a mash of tubers and leaves that he had concocted at stops along their skiff journey up the Malaysian coast, and he smeared it on the tribesman's blistered leg. "Yet — we are the same. We are both from tribes. Only with others who know tribal ways am I at ease."

  Days would pass before this man would trust him, though each day, he allowed Jaki to treat his sores. In time, word circulated that the pirate of Serangoon was also a healer and, what was more, a tribesman. Jaki visited each of the barges and befriended the crewmen he met by sitting with them and sharing their meals of fish and rice chaff. Occasionally, he brought them vegetables from the lorcha. At twilight, with the barges lashed to trees on the shore, he joined in the storytelling. And the crew respected him all the better for not fearing Ganger Sint. Everyone knew that the big Dutchman had killed defiant crewmen on other caravans. He was quick to use his switch. His size and reputation intimidated the tribespeople, and when he passed, a breathless silence muted the crew.