Before parting, Axo Ndjobo presented Jaki with a parchment sheet and a roll of black velvet. The velvet unwound, and Jaki upheld a polished gold dagger that tapered seamlessly from a serpent-coil haft with cross-folded wings.
The parchment, a page from a ship's log, listed booty from a vessel Ndjobo's crew had fleeced as she had cruised out of the Atlantic on her way home from the New World. At the head of the page, a floriate Spanish hand declared: Aztec treasure recovered from the wreck of the galleon Dona Luisa, discovered among the shoals of Cozumel in A.D. 1627. Jaki read aloud the underlined entry: "From the Isle of Sacrifices, a gold dagger, described in the log of the Dona Luisa, 20 December 1522, taken during an Indian religious ceremony where it had been used to cut the living hearts from the breasts of human sacrifices ..." Jaki's voice trailed off, and he lowered the parchment.
Lucinda frowned, and Maud stepped back aghast. Jaki felt the power of this gift. He thanked Ndjobo and held the dagger against his thudding heart. It seemed to him the claw of Wyvern, the portion of the world's evil that he had been born to carry. He understood the protest in Maud’s scowl, and he knew she would beg him to cast the evil instrument overboard. Yet he also knew he would not discard this frightful icon. This tooth from the Mother of Life, this token of the violence in the blood of every living thing, belonged with him, a soul-catcher. To discard it would put it back into the unknown, into the very hands of the jealous dead. Only by holding it, by cherishing it and using it, could he touch the hand that rose from the bottom of all things.
*
"Throw it overboard," Maud pleaded with Jaki the morning that they left Africa behind.
He disregarded her, staring ahead into a storm front, reading the surge of lowering clouds. "There's no way out of it but through," he muttered.
"Jaki, are you listening to me?" Maud put a hand on his shoulder. "That dagger you wear at your hip has the blood of human sacrifice on it. If you keep it, there will be more sacrifice."
Jaki nodded contemplatively. "You are right, young sister. But our destiny is sacrifice. A cruel word. Devotion means the same. We are devoted, all of us, to our journey, yes? If I throw this emblem of our sacrifice into the sea, the emblem becomes the sea. And that is boundless. At least this dagger fits my hand."
Maud bit her upper lip. "You are too cunning for me, Jaki. I am but a peasant girl who knows only what she has seen. Have you forgotten the baneful prophecy of the gypsy in Sarnath? Lucinda conceived and lost a child, as the gypsy augured. And still you carry the cursed diamond." She peered hard at him, not understanding how he could know so much of the hidden powers and yet act so heedlessly. "I fear all emblems of sacrifice. Jaki, throw the evil thing overboard before we share the fate of the Dona Luisa and the galleon that found her and dared to carry this cruel instrument. Let us trust in God instead."
"God —" Jaki huffed. "Maker of mosquitoes, sharks, and serpents. I do indeed trust in God, Maud. That is exactly why I wear the gold blade. Shall I spite God then and throw it away?"
A puzzled expression weighted Maud's features. "You are truly a sorcerer, Jaki Gefjon. I'll not argue with you anymore. I do believe you think the devil could be a friend."
She turned and padded away, leaving Jaki chilled with her apprehensions. In an angry flash, he drew the gold knife from the leather scabbard at his hip. Its edge caught the graying light and held it. The flexed coils of the hilt and the folded wings breathed stillness. As he had known from the moment he had touched it, the knife was more than itself: the spooled energies within untwined into the curved paths of his life, widening into the storm ahead and all the storms beyond. Maud's fear riled him — because she echoed his own most secret fear.
Since Njurat, when even skeptical Pym had glimpsed the secret order of the Life and been awed, Jaki had tried to live above his fear. That had almost killed him in Burma, when the tiger trapped him in his fearlessness. Even now, a year later, he still dreamed of Wawa, his truest friend, who would still be with him if he had not forgotten his fear.
"Fear!" he barked at the smoky sky and the wind-bellied Wyvern. "I am not fear's puppet." He strode to the prow, swung his legs over the bulwark of the forecastle, and crawled out on the bowsprit as far as he dared go in the bucking sea. Clutching the spar with his knees, he pulled the silk cord from the grommets of his shirt and lashed the gold dagger to the bowsprit, point forward, stabbing the future. "Powers of the world!" he called as he knotted the cord. "All life is your sacrifice. The whole world is your altar. Stab this ship into the New World. Stab us across the sea and into the wild earth."
Lightning jagged ahead, and by the time Jaki crept backward to the forecastle, thunder rumbled over the ship. The storm raged less than an hour away, and he walked the length of the ship shouting orders to prepare for the approaching blow. At the stern, he gazed back from where they had come, at the sea flashing in gempoints of sunlight. The Old World lay three days behind, and the New World over thirty days ahead. His three ships spanking dauntlessly across the Atlantic trusted him — and he was determined not to let omens and portents obstruct them.
Lucinda agreed with her husband. As indifferent to the sacrificial gold dagger as she had been to the gypsy's frightful prophecy, she continued in a blithe mood. She named the knife Chrysaor, after the gold sword of Greek legend that Cronos wielded to shave time into months, days, and hours, and she referred to it as the ship's figurehead.
While the first storm of their Atlantic voyage rampaged about them, Maud and Lucinda reminisced below deck about their childhood travels together in the Mediterranean. Jaki and Kota mulled over maps of the Atlantic and the Caribbean taken from Spanish prizes, wishing they had not lost Pym's maps in Mandu. The chanting of the Africans swelled louder as the storm mounted. By nightfall even their stalwart spirits quailed under the monster winds. The tempest ripped away hatches and standing rigging. Loose planks pried loose. The tempest spun the ship like a toy. At the worst of it, Jaki folded up the maps and crouched in prayer with Kota on the floor of the stateroom while Maud moaned about God's disfavor and Lucinda battled seasickness. Fearing another miscarriage, Jaki and Kota lashed her bed to the walls to keep it from shaking too violently.
For two days they thrashed, and when the sky cleared, they had lost one boat. The companion ship that remained was missing two masts and her holds had been flooded, spoiling her provisions. She turned about to return to Africa, and Amaranth, battered but whole, went on alone, drifting slowly for another three days in desultory breezes. During that time, the crew repaired the hatches and the rigging and renewed their spirits with a drum-dance ceremony before Wyvern. They thanked the god of storms for delivering them sound from its fierce winds. The lull broke that night. Ripple breezes tugged at the flaccid canvas and by dawn freshened to a northeast trade that cracked the sails to full-bellied windnets and lurched the ship forward.
The black crew, some of them veterans from the African cruise, expertly snatched every available gust, and Amaranth flew swiftly, the gold-daggered bowsprit resolutely piercing the way. The tribesmen shared pride that Jaki had placed their leader's gift at the very prow of the ship. With their companions lost and fallen back, they resolved to see Chrysaor shoot across the sea and gouge the soil that their people had been enslaved to till.
But Kota agreed with Maud. From the day that the sorcerer affixed the ritual blade to the bowsprit, bad luck had dogged the ship. After the storm sheared away her companions, Amaranth's pummeled timbers began weeping seawater. Caulking leaks became a full-time job for three crewmen. On the rigging, a block split, disjointing a halyard and plunging a man to his death on the main deck. The blood that grimed the oak where his head shattered could not be cleansed though men scrubbed it with lye. Spiders appeared on all the decks and in all the cabins overnight, small, muscular red mites that dropped from the rafters and left blistery trails of scalp bites. Weevils materialized in the grain barrels. And fever flared through the crew.
Maud brewed febrifuge teas for the
sick to drink while she swabbed their bodies with brandy. Kota confronted Jaki, convinced the fever resulted from the cold fist of Death that held Chrysaor, the knife of sacrifices. "Why do the dying feel cold, lah?" he asked. They worked together in the ship's galley joining the crewmen Jaki had ordered to bucket the scuttlebutt's water from a barrel to a cauldron. The ports and hatches gaped wide, the air torrid with steam from two boiling kettles. "Their flesh burns to touch. What-is-evil sucks the heat from them."
"Yes, what-is-evil will kill us too if we drink this water."
"This water boiled ashore, lah? Same as always. Same as Africa. Same as India. Same as Pym."
"That's why we are here now, captain. To be certain it is done right this time."
"Maybe not water. Maybe what-is-evil is what Maid Maud says. Lah. Chrysaor took lives for the gods. Made to take lives for spirits."
Jaki shook his head. "The gold dagger belongs to Wyvern now, not the Aztec gods. What-is-evil is polluted water."
Kota hummed pensively, stared at the flames kicking in the iron stove, and said, "What-is-evil is bad water. Lah. Captain must think of ship with heart and head. The heart of captain unhappy with sacrifice knife at bow."
Jaki peered down at Kota, eyebrows lifted. "Are you ordering me to remove the dagger?"
Kota shuffled uneasily. "No, sorcerer, not that. I am captain. I must think with heart and head. Captain must think of this."
"If boiling this water does not break the sickness onboard," Jaki declared, "I will cut loose that tragic knife and throw it in the sea."
Kota was not satisfied. He had listened to all the answers that Jaki and Lucinda had offered for the ill turns of fate: storm damage opened the leaks; their weeks at sea had been time enough for spiderlings to hatch; the bloodstained oak exposed a knot-whorl that the lye had scored. Still, he believed Maud. Chrysaor was unholy. Kota determined to remove the knife himself.
After the candles had been snuffed that night in the cabin of the sorcerer and his wife, and most of the crew slept, Kota removed his broad hat, put a knife between his teeth, climbed over the forecastle's bulwark, and crept out to where Chrysaor gleamed. Before he could cut free the sacred dagger, the ship jarred over a swell in an abrupt windshift, and he lost his grip. The watch in the crosstrees did not see him, and only the half-dozen sailors who bunked in the orlop cabins heard, in their sleep, his body slam against the hull before the sea dragged Kota into its blind depths. The next day, Jaki found Kota's hat in the forecastle and felt his blood go heavy as he understood what had happened.
For three days and nights, Jaki sat in the crosstrees with only a flagon of water, his gaze lost in the wool of the sea. He wore Kota's hat and tried to feel his friend's revulsion for the gold dagger so he would have the strength to complete what his companion had died to do. All he felt was fear seeking flesh, dread wanting a hand of its own. The ghostly feeling so very much reminded Jaki of Kota that at night he expected to see his ghost glaring at him from the shrouds. Instead, the stars glinted like cardamon seeds, moonshadows fluttered on the swells, and fear seemed to descend on him from the fog of the Milky Way. At dawn on the fourth day, he came down from the top, filled his flagon with wine, fit it into the plumed hat, and threw it overboard.
*
Revenge and her three prizes sailed north far from shore to avoid the pirate flotilla. Now that Quarles had secured a small fortune in booty, he was eager to find a friendly port where he could outfit his ship for the Atlantic crossing. The week before Christmas, he put into the Cape Verde Islands. His Union Jack squared away, he flew nonallied trade colors from the masts of his ship and his prizes. The Portuguese warmly received him and gladly exchanged his plunder of ivory, hides, and spices for bigger cannon and provisions. Among the adventurers in the blue-tiled seaport of Ribeira Grande, an expert crew readily assembled with the promise of pirate-stalking in the New World. Revenge was caulked, heavily armed, and provendered for a Christmas Day departure.
The night before he set out, Quarles received a visitor aboard ship: a richly dressed merchant with black flowing hair and a permanent frown knitting his thick eyebrows. "My name is unimportant," he said in heavily spiced English, "as we will never meet again." Quarles had granted the man permission to board, because he claimed to have news from the English factor in Asia who had championed him. Once alone with Quarles in the stateroom, the merchant removed his hat and said, "The English factor you served is dead, lost in his sleep on his way back to England. A happy death at his advanced age. The news ran ahead of you through the Red Sea."
Quarles regarded the foreigner through a narrow stare. "And you? You know of this because you share his faith?"
"Yes. The Church of the Two Thieves has charged me to convey this to you." He removed a thin envelope from his doublet and placed it on the captain's desk. Quarles picked it up and examined the insignia of the Dutch West India Company pressed into the sealing wax. The merchant continued, "The Thieves' Church has sold your English estate, as you requested, and converted its worth to land in the Dutch colony of New Holland. As we did not know where you would next appear, this is but a claim. Numerous copies have been distributed to our members in outposts where you were likely to seek haven. When you present this to the governor at Fort Amsterdam, you shall receive title grants to your new lands."
Quarles queried the merchant thoroughly, but the man had no further information about Quarles' status in England or the property he had acquired in the New World. When alone again, he examined the claim delicately as though it were a poison-ink letter. The paper represented the end of his ancestral ties to Britain. Father beyond father had fulfilled their fates in England — and before the Normans, in France, back into the smoke of time. The old way ended here. No— the ruthless truth asserted itself in him with angry vigor — his legacy had ended cruelly in Serangoon Harbor when The Fateful Sisters burned.
The malarial twitch in his fingers sharpened, and he tucked the claim into Lucinda's Bible. A life awaited him in the New World. And mad as she was, Lucinda carried his only prayer for a future there.
*
As if Kota's death had somehow appeased the dark gods, the misfortunes aboard Amaranth relented. The timbers stopped leaking, trays of fuming olibanum smoked out the spider nests, the fevers vanished, and the cook sifted the weevils from the grains and cooked them in a gruel with quince pulp that the Africans found sumptuous.
Lucinda's pregnancy bloomed prodigiously into its eighth month, and Jaki joked about a stowaway. Maud cared for the expectant mother attentively, insisting that she rest and dosing her with balm of Gilead and Java plum tea at every meal. The baby stirred actively, rolling in Lucinda's belly like the sea that carried them, and Lucinda knew greater happiness than ever before. By day, Jaki propped her before the open stern windows, Maud bundled her in quilts, and she watched the opals of the sea change colors. At night, when the stirrings of the baby roused her, she listened to the soughing of nearby porpoises and occasionally the sigh of a whale as it blew.
Running log lines behind the ship, Jaki estimated that crossed a hundred and twenty-five miles a day. Their latitude, if the shots of the midday sun from the crest of swells were accurate, put them directly on a line with the Antilles, nameless islands on the captured maps arcing south from Porto Rico to the Spanish Main, Tierra Firme, and El Dorado. Three weeks after New Year and two days before the maps promised the chain islands, mewing sea birds whirled about the masts and the loamy scent of land haunted the ship. Antlers of driftwood scraped the hull, and the first tarpon bit at the fishing lines, silver-plated and big as armored men.
Lucinda would not stay in the stateroom, and Jaki assembled a cot for her on the quarterdeck so they could sight the New World together. The western clouds skulked close to the horizon, streaming off island peaks beyond the horizon, lighting up at sunset in green rays and violet ribbons. A winter storm mounted, and winds shifted to the west and blew against them, forcing them to tack. During the night, the stars vanish
ed, and the sea rose to steep swells.
The next day, with the ship kicking like a stallion on the storm crests, the watch in the foremast top cried "Island!" and claimed the pouch of gold Lucinda had tied to the ship's bell for the first to sight land. She made an entry in the log: "Saturday 22 January 1629, forty-two days after leaving the Whydah coast, Hevioso has sighted an island at" —
"Time?" she asked Jaki, and he snapped open an oval pocket watch from where it hung on the side of the binnacle.
"Twenty minutes past the ninth hour."
She filled in the time and their approximate position from the previous day's speed calculations and the last sunshot before the sky clouded over: "9:20 A.M., N11°15' W62°23'. We have crossed three thousand four hundred and eighty-six miles of ocean to enter the New World with the New Year."
Lucinda wrote with bravura to counter her fear of the stiff wind blowing them aslant their sighting. A wave crashed into the hull with a roar, knocking the logbook from her hand and spilling the ink phial. Through the spyglass Jaki could see the island's treeline bowing before the westerly blow. He slammed the glass shut against his palm. "Get below decks, Luci. Maud, help Lucinda."
Lucinda's face looked green in the shadow of her floppy hat. "What are you going to do?"
"We'll reverse," Jaki replied. "We have to run before the storm or it will shatter us." He looked up at Wyvern, its million-year fury blazing in the stormlight. "Full about on this tack," he told the pilot. "Let the wind carry us."
Wyvern Page 53
