"I have been duped!" Quarles shouted. "My Devon estate, fifty acres of cultivated land, three miles square of woodland and chase, taken from me in barter for this — this swamp! I am duped! The Thieves' Church has swindled me!"
"Aye, so they have," Timotha cackled, gawking about at the shaggy kingdom of swamp grass and reckless trees. "And what hope had you, a man of honor, in a church of thieves?"
Quarles glowered, but Timotha paid him no heed. She and Maud gazed in awe at the primeval beauty of the land. Streams shimmered unbound by banks over sandbars tufted with copses of willow and swales of reeds. On higher ground, trees loomed in melancholy grandeur like the ancient forests of Britain. No ax had ever sung in these jammed groves. Huge, fantastically contorted limbs meshed with the verdure of young boughs. Wanton grapevines coiled to the top of the tallest trees and swung in the breeze like the ragged shrouds of a ship. Everywhere giant wildwoods lifted from their roots in the marshy soil, and toppled trees lay in ruins under a profusion of flowers incandescent in the gloom. Spotted deer crouched among the thickets and waterfowl burst into flight at their approach.
In a glade on a high knoll overlooking the marsh and the river, Quarles and Maud set up camp, erecting a tent from waxed sail canvas. While Timotha built a fire and Maud milked the goats, Quarles took his musket and, muttering imprecations at the Thieves' Church, stalked off to hunt. Old meanings had lost their hold. Everything he had learned as a mariner and sea captain ill-suited this terrain. All his life he had struggled to survive — but never like this, gun in hand, not knowing where to begin in the trackless forest.
He paused and gazed down on the marsh and the slow swerve of the river. When the sour riverscent reached him, he began to see in his mind a harbor, right there in the tidewater at the edge of his land. His experience as a dockhand recognized the merit of the site — close enough to the fort for a ferry, yet far from the clutter of the narrows to anchor many more big ships than the fort could, without clogging the causeway. The fantasy flexed in his brain with such lucidity he forgot his despair and allowed himself to dream. If he did not build this harbor himself, some opportune Dutchman would.
He envisioned the work that lay ahead. If he could do it, perhaps he would return to where he had begun as a youth — an earthly price to pay for a man who had taken supreme vengeance into his own hands. He slapped the mosquitoes stinging his cheeks and thought of Jaki Gefjon, who had lived wild all his life. The pirate's ghost would get full satisfaction from the humbling years ahead, earning a life for the young Lucinda from this wilderness. And that thought eased him. He grimly saluted the riverbend, where the future gathered its tasks, and turned back into the forest.
*
Night. Darkness sleek and black as a beetle. Far away the blood beat — quiet as the pulse of a flame.
Jaki sat, propped by a staghorn of driftwood. Before him, phosphorescent waves sizzled across a pebbly beach. Beside him sprawled one of the Africans who had stood with him in the longboat when the cannon fired. He still hugged the plank that had carried him on the tide to this beach.
Jaki looked down at himself and ran his hands over the tattered flag of Wyvern, which barely covered his nakedness. He remembered the cannonshot striking the prow of the longboat and hurling him out of the stern and into the water as the hull burst over him. Flechettes of the exploded longboat had gashed him yet left him whole. Once again, the powers of the world had spared him. He lay back into the bramble of driftwood and stared into the shreds of stormcloud dissolving in the trade wind. Far out at sea, out over the Old World, the sun rose.
The African, too, intact, scathed by splinters yet whole, woke. He wept for those who would not wake and bowed in gratitude to the climbing sun. Together, Jaki and the African explored the islet. Great, muscular trees and clacking palms fringed the limestone scarp above the beach. Cactus and palmetto thronged on the coral marl of the white bluffs. And the emerald sounds of the long reef bobbed with seabirds.
Snagged among the driftwood, his medicine bag had ripped and emptied its herbs. Only the mountains' tears remained in the pouch, weighted with the heavy-heartedness of the first people. One had gone missing, claimed by the sea. Seven remained. Under the torn bag, snagged among knotted snakeskin, the gold ritual dagger, Chrysaor, pierced the earth.
Jaki jerked the cursed knife free. As he raised it to hurl it into the green water, a sunburst smote him from the blade's mirror. That flash illuminated his darkest memories to a fierce recollection of life in defiance of death. Here was all the world's grief in one loathsome object. He lowered the knife and gazed into its gold surface.
The sober face that stared back revealed someone new. He recognized his mother in the spacious bonecurve between the vivid blue eyes, and he felt the oddity she had felt when she stared into his father's foreign face. He saw not his spirit father but the father of his flesh, the man who had been seized by irrepressible desire for her beyond all the disciplines of strangeness.
His hand opened, and he examined the pinioned serpent that formed the knife's hilt. The dragonhawk resembled Wyvern, the monstered fusion of life and death. The serpent tail encoiled everything close to the earth— the mineral madness of roots sprouting jungles, animals, and tribes, while the eagle head and winged claws lofted into the invisible. And he accepted that Wyvern cored his being. He had sensed it from the first, and now that certainty expanded painfully like a bubble in his heart. Mothered by the jungle, fathered by the wind, he existed as half serpent sorcerer and half raptor pirate — a child of lust and deception — the earth aching with the effort of heaven.
*
The barren islet supported a few mighty trees, blue turtles, and some crocodiles who sulked among lionheaded willows. On the north shore, Jaki and the African discovered the ruins of a tribal settlement — charred huts, shattered drying racks, wind-rubbed skeletons with bashed skulls, and a dented conquistador's helmet.
The African retreated to the forest to gather breadfruit, and Jaki sat among the skeletons and raised his face to the high cumulus. The garbage dumps of the future piled high there in the sky, the tribes foraging among them, big-bellied children aimlessly wandering through smoldering trash where rain forests had once stood. In the distance, the glass towers of the new cities shone, the sky-tall houses where the grandchildren of the conquerors lived. And beyond the spires loomed the horrible firecloud of death, an enormous evil tree of purple lightning and orange billowings. The melted child emerged, glossy with burns, its broken mouth bubbling with blisters. And Jaki did not look away. He watched the child curl into a mollusk of cinders, one hand reaching out for him — and in its crisp fingers, blackening in the heat, Chrysaor gleamed.
Jaki understood then the horrible vision that his terror had always deafened before. The conquered world, many children away, would immolate itself. The future enacted a colossal sacrifice — a ritual of destruction that would tear the world apart between the opposing gods of sky and earth. And he knew then why these visions had come to him and what they had been riddling: the future needed Wyvern, the god of both sky and earth. The heavenly god of the Book, whom Mala had loved, was not enough. That high god trampled the snake underfoot and subjugated the earth and her tribes. The future of humanity, if humankind hoped to survive at all, needed Wyvern, and it needed Jaki and mixed-breeds like him, who had learned from both the cunning mansnake who loved the earth and from the rapacious hawkman who loved high places.
The truth of these visions had come clear too late for Jaki. Under the weight of his mourning, he had no hope for the future. What difference could one soul make to the enormous suffering he had glimpsed? His own pain seemed more than he could bear, and he doubled up under the palms, eating nothing, drinking only the rain that fell over him in the green sunsets.
The African, angry that Jaki scorned the gift of life that the gods had freely given, did not want to die on this lonely atoll. He harassed the sorcerer until Jaki found living easier than dying. He began to eat again to a
ppease his tormentor, and as his strength returned he realized that the animal inside would not let him die. He would have to live with his grief, and he silenced the African by busying himself making stone axes and hacking at the powerful trees. He spent all of himself in his work, hoping to weary his sorrow. He grew stronger, and within a fortnight the two of them had built a crude vessel to bear them over the moon-drawn paths of the sea.
The catamaran that Jaki and the African lashed together from tamarind logs carried them south through the Antilles to Misteriosa Cays, a stammer of islands where they found a cove of blacks who had escaped from slavery in the Spanish Main. The African chose to stay among them with the Arawak Indians, who regarded the blacks as beloved of the night goddess and sacred.
Jaki lingered there three moons. The vision of the world's sacrificial death withered before the brutal grief of losing Lucinda. What could the future really come to for him without her? Mourning lay heavy as sludge in his lungs, and he could breathe clearly only in the jungle. The biting insects and the persistent malarial tremors that he refused to treat became the companions of his sorrow. His years at sea with Pym and Lucinda had softened him, and the ache of his bare feet among the root burls, thorns, and scorpions restored his primordial identity.
Finally, though, his grief abided no more faithfully than life. And one morning, what he witnessed flung him out of the jungle. In the stumbling water of a brook, Arawak maidens frolicked, bathing themselves for some dawn ritual. The girls stroked each other's breasts, their laughter flashing through the trees like startled birds. This playful eroticism surprised him, and his body ached with desire as if for the first time.
Jaki ran away, annoyed at the urgency of the life force in him, irate that he could feel any desire after the death of the woman he loved. He scolded himself for his infidelity, accusing himself of being no better a man than the salacious fop who had spawned him. In his dreams, the Arawak maidens visited him with the paddy girls of his adolescence, and when he woke he hungered more for the softness of a woman's embrace than for food. He had to admit then that if he was to prove himself better than his father, he could no longer hide from his fate in the jungle. Life would have its way with him — as always before.
Something strong carried the sun, the moon, and the stars through the sky — whatever Pym had said about the world spinning like a ball in the void, whatever Jabalwan had said about the firebird dancing its victory around the shattered body of the nighthawk. That powerful something was carrying him through his sorrow. He would not forget Lucinda. No matter how strong the desire for life grew in him, he would stay the course they had begun together in the Old World. And that course now opened into the New World, wider than grief and desire. It led to Lucinda’s only child, their exile from sorrow, who needed him to be the father he had quested all his life.
*
Jaki bathed in the brook where he had seen the maidens frolicking, cut the burrs from his hair with Chrysaor, and returned to the Arawak village where he and the African had first arrived. The tribesfolk happily outfitted the catamaran with a sail, glad to help the sad spiritman leave their island.
Jaki steered south, remembering from his maps that his father's people, the Dutch, had colonies on the northeast coast of South America. Five moons after Revenge had exploded the longboat from under him, Jaki surfed into the mouth of a river, following a Dutch brigantine that led him upstream to a log-walled fortress. Naked but for a loincloth, he arrived at Fort Kyk on the Essequibo River in Guiana on a luminous morning in July 1629.
Jaki, the color of brass, stepped from the catamaran onto wharves of lashed logs, where slaves unloaded from wagons and heaping barges bales of indigo and cotton. Jaki's blue eyes and sun-bleached hair admitted him to the fort, and he went directly to the largest building, a three-tiered mansion with Dutch gables and the tan and green company flag hanging limply before it. His Dutch, though meager, made clear his wish for an audience with the governor. The sunburned secretary laughed at the naked youth, until Jaki showed him the smallest of the diamonds, a cloudy chunk the size of a walnut.
The governor wore his wide ruff low around his neck in deference to the ponderous heat. He had scaly eyepouches like a lizard, and he spoke English and Spanish. With the precise eye for value and opportunity that had created the Dutch empire, he greeted Jaki with avuncular affection and a sincere interest in his story.
In his two years watching Lucinda bargain, Jaki had learned how to gauge the trustworthiness of men. Once convinced of the governor’s traditional European honor, whose greed could not be overestimated, he placed three of the seven mountains' tears on the polished rosewood table. The governor's face opened like a blossom.
"These are the woes of all the sorcerers who came before me," Jaki explained. "I have named them after my own sorrows."
He pushed the three across the table one at a time, and with each one he spoke a name, "Malawangkuchingang —Jabalwan — Wawa. With these I would buy a ship. A large, seaworthy vessel."
"Indeed," the governor agreed, holding the smoky gems to the light, reading the worth of several fully outfitted carracks in them. "These are gems of the first water. You will have your ship, Mister Gefjon."
Jaki reached into his pouch and held up a rough, round diamond. "Pym's Lost Eye," he called it, and smiled wanly. "For this I ask the funds to recruit an able crew."
"Done," the governor said, plucking the gem from Jaki's fingers. Its weight startled him. He decided that he would pay for the crew from his own coffers, for this incomparably valuable gem would accompany him on his triumphant return to Amsterdam.
"I have other diamonds," Jaki announced. "And they will be yours, once I have a ship and crew and the necessary papers to assert my rights as the ship's owner and master."
The governor smiled at Jaki's caution. "You have learned well from your English wife, Jaki Gefjon." After instructing the secretary to draft the papers, the governor escorted Jaki to the wharves.
The vessel that Jaki had purchased sat high in the water, the smallest but most modern merchant ship in the harbor, taken as a prize from the British six months earlier, a twenty-four-gun frigate. Jaki named her Lucinda. He arranged to have the whipstaff replaced with a wheel and to paint the hull dolphin blue, the color of the horizon. While that work got underway, the governor sent a dispatch at Jaki's request to all the Dutch ports in the Caribbean, inquiring about Revenge. A month later, with Lucinda fully outfitted and ready to sail, Jaki knew that William Quarles had claimed the infant and taken her with him, north to the new colonies in the primeval forests of America.
Holding in his hands the authorized ownership documents for Lucinda, Jaki met the governor in his office and produced two more diamonds. They clacked loudly on the rosewood desktop, the largest gems: one square as a boottip, the other long as a goblet's stem. Sparks flashed in the governor's eyes. Pieter Gefjon’s Faith, he called the square one, and the long one he dubbed Jan van Noot's Penis. "With Gefjon's, full provisions for my crew and sufficient cargo to earn our welcome in ports of trade. That is what my spirit father would have wanted." At the governor's nod, he handed over Pieter Gefjon's gem. "For the second, I want gold."
*
The September day Lucinda sailed from Fort Kyk, her holds bulged to capacity with indigo, tobacco, and cocoa from the jungle plantations of Guiana — and furniture and Delft tile from Europe. Captain Jaki Gefjon held bills of trade for a dozen ports on his cruise through the islands and up the Atlantic coast to the Dutch settlement of Fort Amsterdam. Twenty-two years after he had lost his head, Pieter Gefjon's ambition for the wealth of diamonds and precious cargo came to full fruition with his namesake, half a world from where his blood had spilled.
Another ghost more apparently materialized on that late summer voyage. At Fort Kyk, Jaki had commissioned a tailor, bootmaker, and barber, and he stood on the bridge of his frigate in pythonskin boots cupped low on the calf, white mariner's trousers, and black jacket trimmed in scarlet with the sec
ret designs of the Rain Wanderers. He avoided ruff yet wore lace and falling bands at his stiff collar. On his head, he fitted a black brimmed hat cocked and plumed with blue parrot feathers. At the front of the hat, he attached the last of the mountains' tears, the diamond that had belonged to Lucinda and that Maud believed bewitched, the one he had titled The Gypsy's Curse. With his coifed hair and the frosty beard he had grown since his wife's death trimmed to the clean edge of his jaw, he embodied the very apparition of Jan van Noot.
*
The Dutch cartographers marked the river the Mauritius, but Quarles insisted that it should be named after its English discoverer, and he called it the Hudson. In the five months since Quarles and the two women had arrived on this wild shore, they had lived off the abundant land. Maud and Timotha fed the baby goat milk, tuber mush, and berry pulp. Quarles, an excellent shot, provided meat, and the women dressed the skins of the animals he hunted. Once a month he carried to Fort Amsterdam the buckskins and hare pelts they did not need and traded them for more shot and powder.
They had done little to improve the land, because survival alone required their full efforts. Still, Quarles and Maud together had managed to clear the knoll overlooking the river, fell trees, roll logs, and construct a crude cabin with a roof of waxed canvas and rush reeds and a hearth of river slate and rocks. The effort had almost broken them, and they ached continually in every joint.
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