A reveler's scream lifted Lucinda from her brooding. Villagers in bright sarongs and headcloths crowded the black mudbanks of the Irrawaddy, waving ti leaves as the caravan buffalo slogged among them and the barges came aground on the sandbars. The crowd, alerted to the approach of the caravan days earlier by drum songs, swarmed about the barges and the lorcha, and laid planks of teak over the shallows so the travelers could come ashore.
Ganger Sint entered the village first, leading the crew to the feast hut erected among the ruins of an ancient temple. Lucinda, leading Jaki, Maud, and Wawa from the lorcha, stopped at the end of the teak walkway before a narrow, turbaned man with skin dark as the river mud, a bristly black beard, and black eyes wet with alertness. At the sight of Jaki's diamonds, he cried with wonder. He bowed to Jaki and greeted him in Dutch. Jaki shook his head, stepped back, and tilted his long staff toward Lucinda. She explained in garbled Dutch that she was the owner and presented him with the letter of passage Boeck had given her. The man studied the letter intently for several moments, then bowed extravagantly to Lucinda, making her understand that he was the local merchant responsible for outfitting the caravans that continued north from here by land. The merchant put both of his hands on his chest, bowed again, introducing himself, "Prah."
He lifted his whiskered chin toward the eager villagers who had gathered on the mudbank, and at his signal they swept through the water, clambered aboard the laden barges, and began unloading the bales of textiles and crates of hardware.
Prah led them into the village, a half circle of stilt-raised huts and mud streets lively with pigs, dogs, and children. Jaki reeled with memories of the many jungle villages he had visited in the forest. But the people here had not gathered reverentially to greet him. They gave their attention only to the cargo, which they carried to shore with all the respect due holy vessels.
European goods appeared everywhere. Colorful strips of linen dangled from nearby trees and shrubs, all of the huts had battered pots and chipped mirrors hanging in their windows, and the married women wore woolen shawls in the sullen heat. The young women gathered in the feast hut among the ruins, favoring the caravan crew. The old ones and the very young, who had not run down to the barges, gawked at the cargo with cheerful vacuousness. The grinning emptiness of their grimy faces shot an uncontrollable shiver through Jaki. Here he beheld the future of all villages — a merchant headman, their women given freely to strangers, and reverence only for things. Jaki's ribs ached with that thought, and he was glad when Lucinda took his hand.
They came to Prah's dwelling, a large bark-roofed hut, the doorway curtained with beads, windows screened with blue-dyed muslin. They removed their footwear before entering an interior carpeted in antelope hide. Incense twined from dragonhead censers set on cast-iron Chinese trivets, a Swiss pendule clock chittered softly atop a Dutch chest of drawers, and an agate vase of Persian design graced a corner shelf behind a lacquered chess table with pieces of green and white jade. Prah invited them to sit on a pallet of indigo cushions. He clapped his hands, and a dour Burmese woman entered with a tray of porcelain cups from Delft and a steaming blue kettle of Japanese ceramic.
While they sipped green tea, they discussed the conversion of the caravan from river to land, using a clay tablet to draw images of their trade goods. The bartering went slowly, less for lack of a common language than for Prah's dogged persistence on maximizing his profit. Lucinda, determined to take her caravan through Burma's jungles to the Manipur pass and into India with as little loss as possible, did not want to begin her land trek by squandering her goods on an avaricious village merchant. She scanned the European and Moghul artifacts in the hut, and when her eyes alighted on the ranks of chess pieces an idea flourished in her. She pointed to the chess table and motioned an opening move. Prah's eyes winced smaller, and he pursed his lips. He looked directly at Jaki's diamonds and back to Lucinda. She shook her head and removed a chamois satchel strung about her waist. She spilled her gems onto the pallet, and Prah fingered the brooches, rings, and hairpins and turned up his palm, wanting more. Lucinda shrugged, emptyhanded, and Prah looked over to where Maud knelt, feeding crackers to Wawa. Lucinda frowned, thought for a moment, then nodded. Prah stood up and went to the chess table.
"What are you doing?" Jaki asked as she moved to rise.
"I am going to play a game of chess for the elephants we need," she answered and looked to Maud. "Wish me luck. I have naught to play with but my trinkets — and you, Maud."
Maud's face jumped. "Lucinda, you wouldn't!"
"It seems you are all I have that he's interested in," she said. She tried putting the curl of a laugh in her voice to ease the fear in her maid, and that sounded so callous she quickly added: "There is no risk at all. You know I won't lose. I've been playing with Father since I was nine. There's no risk."
"Here — take one of the diamonds," Jaki said, urgently. "That's what he really wants."
"Certainly not," Lucinda said, firmly. "I'll not have you buying what I need. I can succeed with what is already mine."
Maud took Lucinda's hands as she stood up. "Please, my lady, I beseech you, do not gamble with me."
"Maud." Lucinda squeezed her hands. "I am not gambling. I would never gamble with you, Mousie. But you must help me now. I need a lure — and he finds you attractive. Nothing will come of it. You are bait."
"Oh, my lady, I could not bear to be with him." Maud fisted her hands over her stomach to suppress a chill of nausea. "Must it be this way?"
"I need to do this on my own," Lucinda said. "This is my caravan. I'll not use Jaki's diamonds when he himself did not want this trek. You are all I have. Won't you help me?"
"I am afraid."
"Trust me."
Lucinda sat down at the chess table opposite Prah and chose the right hand of the two fists he held before her. It held the green piece and gave Prah the first move. The game went swiftly. Prah, a skilled player, opened with a horse attack that took the center, while Lucinda countered with a phalanx of pawns on the queen's side, hoping to pin the knights. But Prah's knights furnished a diversion for his real attack, a sliding bishop coordinated with a rook that trapped Lucinda's king.
Lucinda sat back, her heart buzzing in her chest to have been duped so easily.
Maud wept, and Jaki tore off a diamond from his vest and clacked it onto the chess table. "Play again."
Prah shook his head, his keen eyes gauging the intensity of Maud's discomfort and Jaki's responsiveness to it. Jaki tore off a second diamond and a third and dropped them onto the table. Prah smiled.
Maud and Jaki hunched beside Lucinda, as she drew green again.
Out came Prah's slashing horse attack, only this time Lucinda made no attempt to block him. Instead she retreated, moving her pieces to the side, and with each setback, Maud stifled a cry. She could not bear any longer to watch Prah's grin glisten brighter with each advance, and she shut her eyes. The movement of the pieces clicked in her mind like divinatory bones casting her fate. When she dared to peek again, the merchant’s smile had slipped away. His chessmen cluttered the center, getting in each other's way. They had become targets for Lucinda's surrounding army.
Jaki could tell from the pile of captured pieces before Lucinda that she had the advantage, and he observed her interested calm, her willingness to sacrifice pieces now that she had her enemy trapped. She had treated Maud with as much serenity, trading her like a chess piece for the elephants she needed to find her way to India. Anger mixed with his love for her, and he felt a chill enter his passion. The numb touch at the center of his chest throbbed, reminiscent of the bitter love he had felt for Jabalwan, forever his teacher, his doorway to life in the wilderness, forever the murderer of his mother.
"Mate!" Lucinda called. She picked up the diamonds and handed them to Jaki. Maud hugged her and sobbed, and she stroked her maid's hair.
Prah still stared at the board, his lips moving behind his beard. At last he looked up. "You have won," he said in D
utch, slowly enough for her to understand, "as I won the last game. Let us play a decisive third."
Lucinda shook her head. "No more games," she said in a mix of English and Dutch. "I took the risk with my maid and my husband's diamonds, and I have won."
Prah stood up abruptly. "You must play me another game!"
"We will have our elephants now, if you please," Lucinda said, rising.
Prah shouted something none of them understood, and two men with faces hidden by the ravelings of white turbans entered from the back door with drawn blades. Maud screamed, and Jaki jumped forward and whirled his blowgun.
The intruders dropped their weapons, and Prah's wrathful face slackened. In the front doorway, Kota and Mang stood with cocked flintlocks.
*
Noon heat stifled the village, and the work of loading the elephants went slowly. Ganger Sint staggered drunkenly from the feast hut to the grassy field where the villagers loaded the elephants and buffalo with the caravan's goods. He had to trouble his besotted brain to count the beasts; there seemed too many of them. Prah stood on the verandah of his hut, and Sint swaggered over to him and sprawled on the steps. He questioned the merchant about the many elephants. "You dolt!" Sint roared when he heard what had happened. "You should have skinned her — not played games! She's a woman!" He reeled to his feet and swayed. "You could have skinned them and ended this whole farce right here."
With one hand, Prah shoved Sint backward, and the inebriated foreman tumbled down the stairs and landed on his back in the mud. Prah signaled his two men, and they dragged Sint out into the field among the milling workers. Jaki approached and bent over the unconscious man. "Strap him to a buffalo," he told Kota. "We can't wait for him."
Mang spat. "Leave him here. His shadow we do not need over us."
"He’s a company man. He will come after us," Jaki said. "I'd rather see him than be looking for him."
Jaki walked back toward the elephants. Lucinda engaged the mahout, who carefully demonstrated to her how he used his hook to bring an elephant to its knees so it could be mounted. Jaki had seen these huge creatures in Bandjermasin, where the Dutch used them as stevedores. Sad giants, the color of the thunderclouds above, they dispersed fact, everything he thought he knew about animals. They embodied the power in grace, the creaturely spirit.
Inspired by these majestic creatures, Jaki lifted his attention to the sky to read the future. The luminously dark clouds startled him with a vivid panorama of the tribes. Of course, he chided himself, where would they have gone? Blowing backward from the future, a horde of people slouched nearer, their possessions strewn behind, visages haggard with famine.
He dropped his gaze back to earth. The pilgrims loitering at the cavernous mouth of the rain forest and the merchants gathered by their beasts waiting for the order of march contemplated the shadowy gateway, each appealing to his own god for aid — and no one doubted they would need supernatural help on the journey ahead. The calls of wild animals wounded the deep silence of the forest, and the tenebrous light squeaking through dense trees defied the sense of sight so invaluable on river and sea. The jungle offered only shadows. Jungle travel relied on the lowest senses, scent, taste, and touch. Jaki had to steel himself to return to the blindness of the jungle, and a smile hovered up in him as he recalled his clumsy first moons following Jabalwan, when the sorcerer blindfolded him and Wawa's voice became his eyes. He whistled for the gibbon.
The rains began as the caravan entered the jungle. The incantatory rhythms of raindrops sifting through the canopy became the chant of the journey, a melancholy cadence that matched the wistful spirit of the elephants. Lucinda and Maud rode in a canopied litter atop the lead elephant with the mahout and his wife. The children and some pilgrims traveled in a buffalo-driven cart behind the lead elephant, and the merchants with their cargo-laden beasts marched after them. Kota and Mang alternated as rear guard. Jaki took point, sending Wawa ahead yet continually urging him to stay close. This forest screamed unlike any jungle they had known in Borneo. Here unfamiliar plants mingled with eerie calls of strange creatures, and the mood of the wilderness felt tense.
Toward nightfall, in the commotion of setting up the caravan’s first camp, the whistle came from Mang that Ganger Sint had awoken. Unstrapped from the back of a buffalo, he staggered around, astonished to find himself in the gloom.
He squinted through the ache between his eyes, seeking the owner, Lucinda Gefjon, and when he found her sitting by the fire with her maid and the mahout's wife, he saw her as if for the first time: a lovely woman, all right, with fair hair and face as downy gold as any in Holland. He had thought her a tawdry runaway until now. In the dozen times he had passed through Prome, no one had gotten so much as a bowl of beetle-leg soup from Prah without paying handsomely. And she had gotten elephants! And paid nothing! He wanted to speak with her, to express his respect. Already, he knew the outcome of that. She was an English captain's daughter, a willful lass who had taken a fierce and pretty-faced half-breed for a husband. Like all the good things of this world, she lived in a world beyond him.
He knew then that killing her insolent pirate husband would not be enough. She would have to suffer by his own hand to redeem the sense of loss she called up in him. He squatted at the fire of the Burmese crew and surreptitiously observed Lucinda as she ate. The pan-fried bread, leeks, and snakemeat prepared by the mahout sated her. Jaki entered the firelight with his two pirate thugs, and they sat among the women. In Jaki's hand the three gems he had torn from his vest glinted. Sint watched astounded as the young pirate handed a diamond to each of his men and one to the maid.
Maud took the diamond with astonishment. "Mister Gefjon, why are you giving me this?"
"Will you call me by my Christian name?" Jaki asked.
"Jaki," Maud said, peeking at him submissively. "I cannot take riches from you."
"I am giving this to you for your long service." Jaki nodded to his two men, acknowledging their grateful grins. "Now, like Kota and Mang, you are free. You have something of your own. Stay with us as long as you will. Go when you please."
Maud looked to Lucinda, who reluctantly nodded. "I lost you today, Maud." The humility in her voice surprised the maid. "Without Jaki, I'd have lost you forever. Take the diamond. And when we reach Surat, return to England if you wish. You may live as a lady now – and marry well. You may have your own dynasty. Go, Mousie, with my blessing."
"Not until you teach me chess," Maud said, "and I can best you."
Lucinda passed a sore look at her husband, and he handed her his hat with its band of seven diamonds. "I'll keep the one on my vest," he told her. "The rest are yours. Take them now if you wish."
She tossed the hat back to him, and Sint could read the pique in her set jaw. Jaki had seen the dimple that appeared in her chin before, on the Irrawaddy, when she had called him a child for displaying his diamonds, and he was not surprised when she said tightly, "Sometimes you make me feel so cold inside, as if you'd never shown me your heart, as if I were indeed sleeping with a pagan soul, with Satan, and love counted for nothing. I did not marry you for your diamonds, silly. Go ahead and give them all away. Make our servants as wealthy as we. I will love you still." She said that with a defiant blush that made Jaki reach out and trace the hurt dent of her chin. His gentle touch broke the spell of scorn she felt for his childlike magnanimity, and she looked deep into his eyes, admiring the animal quiet and freedom of him. "You love me best when you try to understand my heart," she said. "And now I feel I must try to understand yours."
Ganger Sint did not understand the friendship he spied. Nor did he comprehend the love that would take a desirable woman like Lucinda from a comfortable life of influence and place her here in the mud and mosquitoes. Death he knew far better than love, and his memory was long. He remembered the Spanish burning his village in Holland, his father thrown headfirst into the well, his mother screaming as the armored men in dark beards dragged her into the barn. Sint was nine, big for his
age, big enough to be brained and gutted by the invaders if they had caught him, yet small enough to have stayed hidden under the burning house until the last moment. In the black smoke that stampeded the town, the enemy never saw him, and by the time he had shouted into the well and heard nothing but his own screams coming back, and by the time he had crawled weeping to the barn, the flames rose high and the Spanish had moved on. He had found his mother, naked, her blue bowels in her lap.
He had toured hell that winter and saw enough of war and famine and plague to forget boyhood. In the spring he joined a Dutch brigade for food, not vengeance. The army fed him, clothed him, trained him to kill — and he knew a grim satisfaction as close to happiness as he would ever get. When the company needed soldiers to project and protect their interests in Asia, he volunteered, wanting to get as far away as possible from winter and the well and the barn.
Sint withheld his loathing from Jaki and his company, and over the following days he kept his distance, marching to the rear, yet close enough to see all he wanted of his prey. Watching Jaki striding with ease through the green shadows, reassuring his wife and her maid at the raucous cries of birds and monkeys, Sint experienced a wrath he had felt before only in battle.
Jaki suffered Ganger Sint's attentiveness. The man's belligerence pressed on him, silent but palpable, and several times Jaki had considered stabbing him with a poison thorn while he slept. Only the fear of losing his wife's respect restrained him. Lucinda had agreed to do her best to bring the caravan into India safely, and the loss of the head foreman would cost her too much face. So Jaki decided to avoid killing him as long as he could. By day, he had Kota and Mang watch Sint and alert Jaki to the foreman's movements with whistle signals.
Jaki could tell by Lucinda's subtle remoteness that the diamonds he had given away in Prome still annoyed her. Maud sensed this and tried several times to return the gem. Jaki would not take it back, and Lucinda insisted Maud keep it. At night when Jaki and Lucinda lay alone in their tent of broad leaves, the rain chattering around them, they knew happiness, and she told him she did not care what he did with his diamonds. Inside that yes, however, he heard no, restrained and far away. He knew she withheld her disapproval, restraining her education of him, until they had found their way clear of the jungle. Grateful for that, he did not press her.
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