Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Each day Quarles made some effort toward creating the pier he had envisioned on the riverbend. Without draft animals, his efforts to clear the embankment and drive posts accomplished little, and the approach of winter only drove him harder. With the first deep chill of October, Lucinda became ill, and Quarles' vision of a river estate withered like a mirage.

  From the first, the child had been hardy, eager to toddle, attentive to every seed tuft or leaf that the wind gifted her. Fever dulled her watchful stare. She wailed in spasms and whimpered day and night. Timotha bathed her in evergreen teas to cool the fever and Maud dribbled nettle extract into her broth, but nothing helped.

  "I am sore afraid," Maud whispered to her aunt, and Quarles' heart throttled to hear Timotha reply, " 'Tis the black fever, Maud, and there be nought to do but pray — pray God take her swiftly from her suffering."

  Quarles stumbled into the forest and collapsed on the sodden ground. Timotha's words came back on him: There be nought to do but pray. He prayed. Always before he had mocked faith, but now he prayed. Though his prayer felt wind blowing through a hole in a plank, he begged the unseen high one. Though he could find no more words than Spare this girl-child, Lord of Life, he worshiped until his breath thickened in his throat and he gagged on his faithlessness.

  That night, the fever broke. Chance fortune, Quarles told himself, and those words sounded hollow. His joy was too strong, and he danced with the baby in his arms. The next morning, he shaved his beard to signify his humility before the Lord, and he began to read his dead daughter's Bible. Maud and Timotha, prodigiously astonished, welcomed William Quarles’ eagerness to speak with them of God's providence, the corruption of life since the Fall, and their supreme fortune in having each other to share the work of redemption.

  From the Bible, Quarles learned the necessity of forgiveness, and he found a chapel for himself in the forest where he could purge his soul of its hatred and clear the way for God's intervention in his life. Kneeling under rays of sunlight and a canopy of leaves bright as stained glass, he forgave the Church of the Two Thieves for cheating him — and he thanked the Lord for his home in the mild haze of the marsh — and for the wild things that had given their lives to become food and clothing. At last he had the strength to forgive the pirate Trevor Pym for slaying Uncle Samuel and for depriving him of the privileged life that would have been his birthright. And he forgave Uncle Samuel for his dissipation of the family fortune and his desperate betrayal of Drake's fleet. And he forgave himself for his iron will that love could not bend, that had driven his daughter from him. The calm ferocity of his forbearance opened another chamber in his breast, and he breathed deeply and struggled to forgive Jaki Gefjon for his destruction of The Fateful Sisters.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tight until he found the stars' white fire glistening inside him. Aloud, he said, "I forgive you, Jaki Gefjon — I forgive you for taking my daughter from me." A sob wrenched him, and he doubled over.

  When the pain relented, he looked up. The air, dizzy with leaves unlatched by the wind, gripped him in its chill, lonelier and more alive than anyone on earth.

  *

  Quarles, on his hands and knees in the mud, wrestled a flat boulder into place at his rude tidewall. A blue-hulled frigate cruised up the Narrows. The beauty of the vessel lifted him to his feet, and he stood in the summery breeze that had surprised November and admired the fleet rake of the masts.

  He mounted the slick rocks of the jetty to better view the ship as she glided past. He noted her Dutch Company colors, though the wide cut of the courses and the slim strake seemed the latest British innovations. A prize, he realized, and a flinch of patriotic hurt troubled him despite his exile. He squinted to read her name and almost toppled from his perch to behold etched in floriate gold on her prow: Lucinda.

  He hailed, "Lucinda!" The frigate glided too far away, and his yell disappeared in the wind. A deckhand waved at him, and he knew what a pitiful sight he must look, grimed in mud atop his rockpile. He watched until the ship vanished around the bend that would take her to Fort Amsterdam. Was it sheer chance that the Dutch had given a British prize his dead daughter's name? Or had God moved to subject him to the ultimate test? Revenge had smashed Jaki Gefjon at sea — but Quarles had not seen the man's body. The seastorm had swept the debris into the shoals.

  Saline bitterness climbed his throat, a taste like blood, as he picked his way carefully down the rocks. He needed the scripture's nakedness, the truth stripped of his anguish and fragility, and he hurried toward the cabin over the scraggy bogland, waist-deep in rushes and marsh weeds.

  Maud, lugging home a bucket of stream water, watched Quarles scuttle out of the cabin, the Bible clasped to his breast. He disappeared into the forest. She looked to Timotha, who sat by the woodpile amusing the baby, and the old woman shrugged. In the last month, since Lucinda's recovery, the captain had been a different man entirely, reshaped by his new-found faith. He whistled jaunty tunes when he returned from the hunt, crawled laughing on the ground for hours with his grandchild, and read long passages from the Bible to the women while they quilted or shucked walnuts. He had found a poor peace in himself—that was how Timotha explained it to Maud. "A poor peace he's found counting his denials." And Maud felt pity for him each morning that he slogged out to the riverbank to drag rocks through through the mud and lever them into the breakwater.

  "How can he build an anchorage with his bare hands?" she asked her aunt on a drizzly morning when the slosh of the river plucked the rocks away from the jetty as fast as he stacked them. "What is to become of his dream?"

  "What becomes of all dreams," Timotha replied. "We reach for the moon if we have any dreams at all. The moon is a horn we blow with our last breath, and 'tis not till then we know the worth of our striving. Leave him to his dreams, wherever carry him."

  Quarles knelt among the trees and read, "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge ..." And the words wavered on the page in the powdery sunlight. "My name is Legion, for we are many." Images of Lucinda disfigured by death jammed his heart — eyelids charred black, the stink of her putrefaction — and he sat entranced in the tremulous light, no consolation rising from the open Book.

  *

  Lucinda arrived at Fort Amsterdam among the svelte breezes of a warm November morning. Jaki stood at the starboard rail, awed by this beauty that his wife had not lived to see. Gray cliffs paled the western bank above rubble of red sandstone and bosks of blue willow. To the east, autumn blotched the hills of Manhattan crimson and gold. Hunched below the soft hills, a rookery of docks moored trade ships along a shoreline of shabby warehouses. On the high ground, Fort Amsterdam brooded, a ponderous citadel of piked oak with tall garrets for keeping a seawatch over the sound. A bevy of dinghies met Lucinda and guided her to a slip where burly men in wool caps and wooden shoes waited to unload her cargo.

  Meticulously dressed in black and red and wearing his diamond-fronted hat, Jaki stepped down from the gangway to the larboard pier. He shivered though the air breathed clemently with the redolence of autumn. He had arrived in the afterworld of Lucinda's dreams, and he gazed about with wonder.

  Wooden shoes clopped loudly on the pier as the stevedores approached, and a stout man in elaborate ruff, slit jerkin, and knee-high boots hailed him. The man swept off his hat, and silver hair flared as he bowed. "I am Peter Minnewit," he announced smoothly in Spanish. "The fort's governor. Your ship's devices inform me the captain speaks Spanish. I had expected a swarthier man."

  "Spanish was my mother's tongue," replied Jaki, and he doffed his hat. "I am honored to find myself received by the governor."

  "You are kind to say so," Minnewit said, noting the chunk of rough diamond on Jaki's hatband. "This is a most humble colony, and we are rarely visited by a vessel as richly laded as yours. You carry tobacco?"

  "Three long hundredweights."

  The governor smiled lavishly. "Then your stay assuredly shall be a lucrative one. There's been a dearth of the divine weed
in our colony this season." He gestured toward the wharf road, where a coach awaited them. "Accompany me to my house that I may hear how you came to wear a Dutch name and visage and yet speak this foul language of our oppressors."

  In the coach, jouncing over the rutted road that climbed toward the fort, Jaki gripped the velvet squabs of his seat as much to bear the burden of his story as to steady himself. He began with the arrival in Borneo of Pieter Gefjon and Jan van Noot, as he had first heard the tale from Jabalwan. When he concluded his account in the governor's office beneath large windows of diamond-shaped leaded lights, the Dutchman said, "Your wife would be proud of what has become of your mountains' tears — and you." He pinched his dented chin, contemplating how best to act for this impressively wealthy yet hapless bastard son of the Lowlands. "Your daughter is with her grandfather in the marshland south of here. I shall dispatch a guard to retrieve her."

  "Thank you," Jaki said. "I must go alone."

  The governor shook his head. "You think that is wise? The English are a bellicose lot. And Captain Quarles struck me as particularly pugnacious. He will most certainly try to kill you."

  "I must give him that chance."

  "Why?" Minnewit boomed with incomprehension. "Leave the dead to bury the dead. Claim your daughter and grace her with the benefit of your mountains' tears. That is what both your fathers — what any sensible Dutchman — would do."

  "I am also my mother's son, governor. I am a sorcerer. I fear life and its imperishable mystery more than I fear death."

  "Bah. Your grief has addled you. All men fear death. You have wealth now. Do not squander your life for the satisfaction of some brutal Englishman. Listen to me, Jaki Gefjon, and live. Do not deny your daughter her father."

  "With your help, sir, she will not be denied her fortune." Jaki withdrew a folded sheet of paper. "Here is a copy of a testament I drafted aboard ship. Will you execute it if I do not return?"

  Minnewit accepted the paper with a scowl. "You war on yourself, young man," he scolded. "You can only win this fight by losing. I do not understand how any man with health and wealth, sorcerer or not, can choose death over life. Yet I respect your long suffering, son of our fathers, and I will protect your survivor."

  *

  Jaki left the governor's house determined to meet his fate that day, while the winds blew warm and the clouds shone so deeply pearl. Outside, he paused and stared up at the large stone and timber house with its hipped roof and eave cornices, and he discerned in that cumbrous structure how impossible it was for the governor to understand him. The governor's house had been constructed to endure, like the ambitions of Jaki's fathers, which had reached greedily into faraway territories, wanting to claim the whole world for their homeland. Yet within him persisted something homeless that he had inherited from his mother, something the Rain Wanderers had sought on their unmarked roads in the jungle.

  How strange it must have seemed to his fathers to see longhouses built for a season and then returned to the jungle. How strange for them to discover kingdoms without borders, land without owners. His life opened like that, a longhouse built to house his love. His love for his wife owned him. That had been Jabalwan's despair of him, that he could never live as implacably as a true sorcerer. He could not marry the sky and her clouds, for he belonged, from the first, to a woman. And now that she was gone, his life belonged to the wilds. How could he have explained to the governor his vision in Njurat, when he realized that life's enemy is not death but indifference? Since losing Lucinda, he had become indifferent. Only Quarles could cure him of that.

  *

  A ferry carried Jaki south across the Narrows to the marshland. Strange birds cawed from the fire-colored woods. Jaki lifted his face into the sun and scanned the cliffs on the far shore, sheer palisades that towered over the river like the broken wall of the planet, the end of all maps. He knew then that he had reached the destination of his journey. The dreams of his fathers had found their way to earth in him, and now all that remained was the last mystery.

  Death's perfected landscape lay all about him, weirder than any of the strong eye's visions. Twilight bloomed in the trees, though the sun still climbed toward noon. Clouds of fuchsia and orange leaves clumped like cumulus for as far as he could see, wisping even from the rock wall of the bold cliffs. Through this spectral landscape, he stayed calm, alert to the unfamiliar beauty around him. The future browsed nearby, waiting for him like a change of horse.

  Jaki, certain that Quarles would kill him on sight, did not want to die until he had seen his child. He could not serenely confront his fate until he had entrusted to Maud the ship's papers and the stamped trade bills from his journey north. When he spotted smoke blurring into the riverwind, he had the ferryman pole to shore, and he disembarked and sent the ferry back. He followed the river edge until he reached a crude tidewall and heard remote voices. He walked up the bank and into the forest's whiskery light.

  From the woods, he looked over the humble camp perched on the river bluff. The paltry cabin saddened him, the gaps between the unhewed logs stuffed with dried mud and grass, the sagging roof of reeds, the rubble chimney oozing smoke. Maud appeared from the far side of the cabin, dressed in a clever patchwork of rags and fawnskin, her hair mussy. She carried Lucinda in a pouch on her back. At the sight of his child, Jaki dizzied with longing and could not comprehend how he had ever been separated from her. He wanted to burst out of the covert and claim her, yet he stayed his tense muscles and dared himself to watch, like a sorcerer.

  Maud strolled with an old woman who wore a brown sack dress, and they carried a bucket between them, on their way to the stream that Jaki heard in the distance. As they passed, he stepped from his hiding place and walked up behind them soundlessly, keeping his eyes on his watchful daughter, who had turned in her seat and laughed at him as if with sudden recall.

  Her perfect face shone from somewhere inside, radiant with innocence. She thrived, the uncrowned queen of life, sovereign of freedom, not yet enslaved by dreams. In her smile he glimpsed the shameless future that did not need him. He had returned to award her the legacy of his long journey — though now he began to see that this only advanced his willful dream. She did not need that. She abided free of grief, free of any attachments but the animal simplicities that would sustain her even after the longing came on, the invisible pain of loss that had no home in the body.

  Maud glanced over her shoulder at the laughing baby and found herself staring, instead, at a resplendent man in the aboriginal forest. She did not recognize him. He smiled when he met the unknowing in her face, and Maud's astonished expression melted in a hot blush. "Jaki —"

  Jaki nodded, arms open. Maud collapsed into his strength. He held her, then stepped back, still clutching her strong hands, and admired the courage in her calluses, the miles in her summer-colored face. "You have lived, strong and brave," he told her, and kissed her begrimed fingers.

  Timotha looked on coolly. She had imagined from Maud's stories of Jaki a larger, craggier man. Under the black wing of his hat, his twenty-year-old face looked boyish and lucid.

  "The child is well?" he inquired, and when she nodded, he asked, "You?"

  "Yes," she answered, still overcome with surprise. "I saw you struck with cannon. The whole longboat shattered to splinters before the storm."

  "God spared me."

  "Aye, God," Timotha said, and compressed a laugh to a grunt. "God carries our fortunes and our dead."

  "My aunt," Maud introduced her, unstrapping the infant from her back. "Timotha Firth."

  Jaki held his cooing daughter in his arms, and he kissed the child and quieted her with a blue feather from his hat. He faced the old woman and the years of hardship in her weary flesh folded like honey, her swollen eyelids, and her upper lip glinting like the hairs on a horse chestnut. In his arms he held a life's beginning and before him stood life’s furthest reach. Baby and crone, clinging like leaves to the tree of generation, completing themselves in each other. He co
uld see that truth in the crone's sunken face when she caught the baby's eye and something thriving and eternal passed between them. That perception swelled his heart with caring, and he stepped closer, laying a hand on the old woman's arm. "Thank you for helping my child."

  She nodded, unexpectedly moved by the timbre of his voice.

  "I thank you," the old woman replied, and put a raspy hand on his. "Your daughter is a beautiful creature, sir — the world's promise — aye, and a love that heals the passing of a used-up woman like me."

  Maud took his arm. "Captain Quarles —" She spoke her fear. "Does Captain Quarles know you are alive?"

  Jaki shook his head impassively.

  "Then we must flee at once, before he sees you." Maud pulled on his arm to guide him toward the trees, but he would not move.

  "I owe a debt to William Quarles," Jaki said dryly. "And I am going to find him after you and I have spoken."

  "It will be murder," Timotha quacked.

  "If that is in him."

  "It is, Jaki," Maud warned. Her face opened with fear. "He keeps a primed musket in his sea chest and he is a fine shot. These months of hunting have only sharpened his eye."

  "The Quarles men have always been excellent shots," Timotha agreed, rubbing her jowls. "But they ill choose their targets. Unhappy targets."

  Jaki shaded Maud's frown by leaning the brim of his hat on her head and peering playfully into her eyes. "I have come here to face Lucinda's father." He smiled at the double meaning and lifted the baby between them. "Before I do, I need to see Lucinda and know she is loved. And I see that." He nestled the child in one arm and with his free hand removed a packet of papers from inside his jacket. "These are for her. Her legacy. I have named you to the Dutch Company as her financial guardian."