Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Jaki smiled, the opium's peace softening his features and making him look younger, like a long-eyed child. Barefoot, he crossed the court and followed a path that wended among knobby trees to a garden maze of flowery shrubs.

  The garden formed a spiral, with rows of lemon trees enclosing a whorl of yew hedges. Evenly tapered cypresses rose like jets of black flame. Maroon clouds bulked above sprays of hibiscus hedges whose blossoms had wrinkled closed for the night. Far ahead in the dusk, the Ganges gleamed like a glass snake.

  Jaki sat on a stone bench at the center of the garden and watched the first hour of night eddying in the clouds. The reverie of the opium disembodied him, and he seemed to hover in the nightbreak. A cry came from the grove cypresses behind him, and he startled. He recognized the call: Wawa's alert for approaching men.

  Jaki dipped to his knees and peeked over the bench into the silver darkness. The serenity of fear held him breathless for a long spell while he listened with his bones for another cry. Wawa is dead, he heard Lucinda say crisply in his mind. Vanilla moonlight swirled among the trees, and moths floated like flakes of ash. Men approached. He watched their shadows gathering on the lane, smoky shapes in the moonmist, no more real than Wawa's cry.

  "Yes," Jaki hissed in English as he comprehended that the opium opened the light between worlds to the Longhouse of the Souls. The slender cypresses became the struts lifting the Longhouse above the jungle floor; the stars became lamps glimpsed through bamboo slats; the cauldron moon shone from the doorway in a ring of rainbow: it was the cooking fire at the center of the Longhouse, the glowing cooking pot with the melted child inside. He could see the fetal shadow of the child in the translucence of the pot, the markings of the moon.

  The mating of vision and actuality troubled him, and he stood and called upon all his reason to see clearly. The moon was the moon, the trees, trees. No one approached. Alone in the dark, he sat down.

  He heard Wawa's plaintive warning again. Jaki sat still. The dead moved in procession, filing from the Longhouse behind him into the luminous sky.

  The opium had opened his strong eye, and this time he did not resist. To his left he watched the lanky silhouette of Mang slump past, his hands to his tiger-clawed throat. The shade's face looked placid, intent on the gateway to the other world shining sullenly in the west.

  A growly laugh to his right announced Pym. The beads in his rattail hair sparking with last light, the pirate king stared at Jaki over his snap-necked shoulder, gazing directly backward like a broken puppet as he ambled into the twilight's kelp. "I am worm-dirt, I am. As you too shall be soon enough. Life breeds death. Mindless. Blind."

  Anguish clotted Jaki's cry. "Wait!"

  Pym laughed again. "It takes weight to wait, lad. Hah! Too late for that." The darkness absorbed him.

  "Your heart leaps as if it will live forever," a familiar voice called from behind. Jaki turned slowly, shaken from his vision of broken-necked Pym and confronted a melancholy young man with a strong nose and coiling black locks.

  "Shirazi," Jaki exhaled. "You find me a prisoner again."

  The youth paused in his walk and shook his head wistfully. "Is this what you dream?" he asked. "To become as your father? I knew you for a pirate out of the jungle. Why are you here in the heart of empire? Indeed you are a prisoner, Jaki. But not of the Subahdar. You are a prisoner of your own heart."

  Jaki moved to speak again, but Shirazi turned away and disappeared among the lace of shrubs.

  The sorcerer turned to see who passed next from the Longhouse of Souls. The square profile of Batuh flitted by. His eyes, daggerpoints of hostility, flashed for an instant when he spotted Jaki on his dash through the garden. Other slinky shadows flew by, men he had killed. Except for Batuh, none saw him, so desperate were they to flee the Longhouse.

  "Legion, is that not what the Book calls them that are unclean?" Jabalwan asked.

  Jaki walked on the balls of his feet toward the voice. Jabalwan and Mala stood hand in hand before the notched-log stairway of the Longhouse; they looked burnished in the moonlight, sweatslick.

  "Are you of the many, Matubrembrem?" Jabalwan asked. "Is that why we find the last of the sorcerers here among the unclean, the makers of war, the worshipers of gold?"

  "Teacher!" Jaki cried. "Mother!" The magic of their encounter stole his breath, and he had to draw deep to pull his thoughts together. "I am alone. I have no tribe. No people know me for their own. I must make my life from whatever I can find. I have chosen with my heart, Mother. Am I wrong?"

  "The Book says in Ecclesiastes, 'The hearts of men are full of evil,' " Mala said, " 'and madness is in their hearts while they live — and after that, they go to the dead.' "

  "Mother, do not speak against me," Jaki pleaded. "My heart is true. I love Lucinda. I love the child she carries that is mine." He looked to Jabalwan. "Teacher, the Mother of Life blessed me Herself in the last hour of Njurat. She told me to go into the world and make my life full. A sorcerer is only half of what I am. I have a father. It is his spirit I must live now." He peered sadly at the ghosts. "Am I wrong?"

  Jabalwan led Mala aside, and they began to pare into mist. Jabalwan gestured toward the Longhouse before they vanished. "Go then to your father, and see why you are named child of the devil."

  Wiping away tears, Jaki gazed up at the Longhouse of the Dead. His father, visible through the doorway, knelt over the lunar cooking pot. A bareheaded, golden-haired ghost with skin pale as starlight, he dressed as a Dutchman of his age and station, with flare-topped boots, knee breeches of shimmery satin, longcoat with brocaded buttonholes and tucked-back tail so his sword could hang free. His hands reached into the cooking pot.

  "Father!" Jaki called, but the ghost did not respond. "Pieter Gefjon —I am here, your son, Jaki."

  The ghost looked over his shoulder, annoyed. His bold face of tufted eyebrows, beard streaked back from years of facing into the wind, softened at the sight of Jaki: the stern features softened to the point of love.

  "Father, I need your help. I —" Jaki stepped closer. "I want your blessing. How else can I find my way through your world?"

  Pieter Gefjon rose to one knee and lifted his hands from the cooking pot. He held the melted child. Its gluey features fixed a stare of outraged horror. Captain Gefjon twisted off one of its sticky arms and ate the glutinous flesh.

  Jaki squeezed his eyes shut and sank to the ground. When he looked again, he made himself see cypress trees and the moon. He closed his strong eye and sat, cold inside, watching clouds snaring the stars.

  *

  The road from the port city of Surat wound clumsily among river gorges where autumn rains lunged from the mountains toward the sea. William Quarles, still thin and trembly from the malaria that had wasted him four months earlier, rode a sable mare, her mane braided with red ribbons. Moghul guides — black-robed men with scimitars and turbans wrapped about spiked helmets — picked their way carefully over shale ledges on jittery steeds. Behind, a wagon narrow as a coffin trundled, lugged by a one-eyed mule. Stacked with the horns and heads of slaughtered goats, the wagon displayed garish designs signifying the demoness Durga, the black Kali, empress of all mortal horrors. A dozen Hindu pilgrims, priests, pujaries and pandit-ji in ceremonial robes, followed. None of the Rajput bandits who haunted these steep trails would raid an offering to the black Kali, so the one hundred and fifteen flintlocks in the wagon traveled safe — so long as the one-eyed mule did not misstep and plunge into the roaring canyon.

  One of the guides shouted and pointed to a blue-white rag tumbling through the bramble of overhanging clifftrees. Closer, Quarles made out a pigeon. It alighted among the goats' heads, pecked at a skull, and hopped to the driver's shoulder so he could remove the coil of parchment wrapped about its leg. The Moghul nearest Quarles dismounted and dashed to the wagon. He retrieved the ribbon of parchment, glanced at it, and passed it to Quarles. The message was written in English and signed by the local official that the Thieves' Church had contacted amo
ng the Moghuls. All prior communications had come by word of mouth through emissaries in Surat, because the official, a subahdar, high-ranking enough to represent princes, rarely committed anything to writing. This missive indicated that Quarles had entered the demesne where the Subahdar felt confident of his power. He read, "Esteemed Captain — your daughter is safe and in my protection. I write to warn you that she remains enamored of her pirate consort and, with furious pride, bears the pirate's child. Care and pity is much upon you. Minister of your will, I await your renewed judgment of our prior arrangement. What reckoning for the pirate? By the glory of Allah — Hadi Fath Izar."

  The Moghul who had passed him the note waited attentively, an inkstone, quill, and small writing board in hand, ready to return the pigeon to the sky with the Englishman's message. Quarles peered down through a tumult of pines into the water rush and felt his soul rise into his throat. The thought of Lucinda with child — with the heathen-pirate's child — almost toppled him from his mount, and he clutched the pommel with all his might.

  A sob rose in his chest, but he would not utter it. He had endured every suffering voicelessly: poverty, the death of his wife, the destructtion of his ship, his daughter's disappearance, the jungle's brutality. He would not weep now.

  On the back of the parchment strip, he wrote, "Noble Subahdar, stay constant to our strategy. Kali herself conveys the instruments of your prince's victory. Spare the pirate that he may face my heart’s reckoning. Your servant, William Quarles."

  *

  Jaki's hands tingled with restlessness. In the four months since he had lost Wawa and left the pieces of Jabalwan's broken blowgun stuck in the jungle floor, he had taught himself to play chess, to work the reins of a horse, to appraise grades of goat fur, even to write a few words of English. For four months, his hands had been busy, and now they quivered to hold again the familiar weapon and to stroke his faithful jungle friend.

  After Jaki's opium visit to the Longhouse of the Dead, he began again to use his hands as he had in the wilds of his childhood. At first, his fingers felt content to work plant fiber into lacy knots and to carve soft reed wood into tiny mouth whistles. As the journey through the Moghul Empire carried him farther from Mirzapur without diminishing the fright of his opium vision, he realized that his hands hummed not merely with nostalgia but with sorcery. They cunningly shaped a weapon. The hollow and bore-grooved reed, tiny enough to fit behind his teeth, became not the musical toy he had supposed but a miniature blowgun, no bigger than what remained of his animal soul.

  Surreptitiously, Jaki set to work preparing a dart for his minuscule weapon. He quietly gathered poisonous berries and leaves and stewed them under campfire rocks to gooey venom. Night after night, the gum thickened blackly, and yet he continued to cook it, until the resin had concentrated as viscously as the opium that had led him to the Longhouse of the Dead.

  *

  "Sunday 31 January 1628," Lucinda wrote in her rice paper journal. She sat under the canopy of her tent, facing the tiny valley of Saugor and beyond, on the next rise, the grim fortress wall behind which the whole town had gathered to greet the Subahdar's party. Raucous cries, pipe music, and the occasional trumpet of an elephant drifted through pine and sal trees.

  Subahdar Hadi trotted into the camp's grove accompanied by two officers. Maud stood up from the racks of plants she placed out to dry, and Kota appeared in the doorway of his tent, bare chested and sleepy eyed. The Subahdar ignored them as he dismounted. He bowed to Lucinda, and she closed her journal and rose to greet him. "Please, do not stand for me. Surely we are old acquaintances by now. Our shared journey has made us brethren. Sit, sit."

  "Why are you not in the fortress to receive the welcome of this city's people?" she asked, settling back on her cushioned mat. "My husband left for there with his monk friend an hour ago."

  "I am on my way," he replied, sitting cross-legged before her. "First I had to meet with my scouts. And though you are a woman, I will speak with you as openly as I would a man, if that pleases you. We are far from Agra, dear Lucinda, and this territory is overseen by Rajputs, Hindus. My scouts have ascertained that they are hospitable to their Muslim lords, but I needed to ascertain this. You see, I must go ahead to Mandu this very day. You and your husband will follow. I have received assurances that the Rajputs will not interfere in your passage. Nevertheless, you shall be accompanied by my guards."

  "What is your urgency in reaching Mandu, Subahdar?"

  Hadi clasped his hands and lowered his head. "As I have told you, I am the tender of the tents for the unlucky Shahryar, who has been replaced as Moghul this very month by his brother, Shah Jahan. Prince Dawar Bakhsh, who will be your host in Mandu, is, like myself, an ally of Shahryar. We are to meet within the week with emissaries from our new lord, the Moghul Shah Jahan. I cannot expect you in your condition to travel that swiftly to Mandu, so I will go on ahead of you."

  "Are you in disfavor, Subahdar?" she asked with a frown of ingenuous concern.

  Hadi dismissed her apprehension with a smile. "Lady, this is not England, where misplaced loyalty can cost one's head. The great weakness of our empire is that the right of succession is not clearly defined in our laws. England is ruled by primogeniture. Our warrior tradition leaves the sons and even the nephews of the dead Moghul to contest among themselves for rule. I served the old Moghul well. And I am a Muslim in a Hindu country. My life and service are too valuable to be sacrificed for political reasons alone. The prince and I are to meet with our new lord's emissaries that we might swear our allegiance to Shah Jahan. By the time you arrive in Mandu, the transition to the new order shall be complete."

  Lucinda nodded. "Forgive me for pressing my curiosity on you."

  Hadi smiled warmly. "Your curiosity is natural. It affords me the chance to express my curiosity in return. May I ask you about your husband?"

  Lucinda blinked with surprise. "What of him, Subahdar?"

  "He is not nearly as couth as you, Mistress Gefjon. Rather, there is something of the animal in him. I do not understand why one as cultured as you would give your life to such a man."

  "What you call animal, Subahdar, I consider human nature untrammeled by the arbitrary conventions of society." She felt the heat of her opinion rising in her, and she cut herself short.

  "Is that why you are fleeing to the New World to have your child?" he inquired, holding her defiant stare with a lazy gaze. "To escape convention?"

  "For a woman, convention restrains as a prison does. I would have no freedom in my father's world, so I am forced to seek a world of my own. A free world. Jaki is the only man I have met who understands freedom."

  "Perhaps because he has no tradition."

  "What tradition he had was destroyed by traders, men who have no respect but for their own profits."

  Hadi tugged at the pearl in his right ear and monitored Lucinda's expression, reading her anger and seeing within it a willfulness he marveled at. "Are all the women of England as forthright and strong-minded as you?"

  "You mean as arrogant?" She grinned and shook her head. "I must credit my father that I possess any mind at all. He reared me as a son and kept me at his side, instead of entrusting me to a convent or a governess' care. I am peculiar among my people, and it is a better fate for me that I never return to England."

  "What manner of life will you have in the wilderness?"

  "Whatever we can make of it," she answered, pausing slyly, "rather than what is made of us."

  "Then I wish you well," the Subahdar said quietly. Though his face betrayed no emotion, he imagined her haughty expression when he returned her to her father in Mandu. The Koran, clear about the place of women, proclaimed such a one as this an abomination, a heresy.

  Lucinda watched the Subahdar and his men gallop away toward the fortress. She turned back to her journal and wrote: "The Subahdar himself goes ahead of us to Mandu to make peace with the new Moghul. Truly we are blessed to have him as our protector in this calamitous land."

>   *

  The journey southwest to Mandu proceeded in serene beauty. The Vindhya Mountains, blunt cliffs and pinnacles of green amber, separated the great plains of sal forest and the Ganges basin on the north from the Deccan, the teeming, primeval territory to the south. The bunched mountains, barriers of empire, marked the frontier beyond which Moghul domination did not extend. "Even in ancient times," Dhup informed Jaki, "the Vindhya stopped the Aryan invaders from the north who brought with them Sanskrit and the mysteries of the wind."

  Jaki wanted only to flee with Lucinda to those green-gold mountains and beyond, eluding the grasp of the Subahdar. With Kota thrashing a decoy trail, he could get Lucinda and Maud deep into the forest with little or nothing for the soldiers to follow. Somehow, he knew with conviction, they would make their way successfully to the coast and commandeer a vessel. But Lucinda would give no thought to escape. "What are we fleeing?" she asked with sincere bafflement. "The Subahdar has given us a fortune in trade bills. When we cashier these in Surat, we will buy two ships and still have wealth left from the rajahs with whom we've yet to trade."

  "Wealth," Jaki sighed. They sat together on a flat boulder, bare feet dangling in a roadside stream. Every five miles, almost on each hour, the carriage carrying Lucinda and the Muslim officers' wives stopped on orders from the Subahdar's surgeon, solicitous of Lucinda's pregnancy. The dozen guards the Subahdar had commanded to escort the Englishwoman tended to all her needs. Sharbat, a green lemon drink, refreshed the travelers and fried mango, saffron rice, jellied fruits, and assorted cooked meats from the villages nourished them. "With this wealth, has Hadi bought us, then?"

  "Of course," Lucinda answered. "We are conducting business under papers from the Netherlands. Their East India Company has already made a small fortune by dint of our effort. Why should we not profit ourselves and our children? I am quite pleased by the Subahdar's generosity. He has not once done us an unkindness. If we flee from him, as you wish, then we also flee from our fortune. As well as forsaking all the treasures earned these last eight months, we may very well fall afoul of brigands without the protection of these soldiers."