Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Maud would not touch the papers, and Timotha took them from his hand. "You speak as though you were dead," Maud whispered bitterly.

  Timotha handed the papers to Maud, wagging her empty hands in the air as though the papers' mortal dust had smutted her fingers. "A rare traveler is he what knows where his journey has taken him."

  "Hush, Auntie," Maud scolded. Her blood, jumpy, itched at the tips of her body, and she spoke as though she had held her breath too long. "Captain Quarles is old and embittered. Of late he has found succor in God. He is best left believing you are dead."

  Jaki shook his head and looked away, across the field to the red and yellow trees champing in the wind. "No more talk of death." He held Lucinda high, and she reached for his hat and tugged at its brim, trying to grasp the cloudy rock tied to the hatband. "I am here to see Lucinda and remember our friendship, Maud. Come, let us walk." He took Maud's arm, glad for the strength he felt in her.

  They headed into the forest, Maud quiet, searching for hope, and Jaki and Timotha chatting about babies and the north woods and the watchful lives hidden in them.

  *

  Weariness claimed Quarles. Since sighting the British prize with his daughter's name on its prow, he had suffered the galling likelihood that Jaki Gefjon had returned. He tried to stave off his dark emotions with work, hauling more rocks to his jetty. His apprehensions persisted even after he had spent his strength. Now, as he drowsed on the straw tick in the cabin, a premonition stiffened in him. He sat up and stared through the window for the women and the child.

  They strolled far across the field toward the forest, with a stranger who looked to be, at that distance, a wealthy Dutchman. Quarles withdrew his spyglass from the battered sea chest beside his tick.

  The clipped beard and elegant clothing did not baffle him for an instant. The glass dropped from his stunned fingers. He reached for his musket, nauseated that his daughter's murderer lived — and prospered — and held in his arms the child that very devil had orphaned. Twice he tried to drop the gun and even shouted at his hand: "Evil begets evil!" The smiting hand would not let go. Hard-edged memories of his grief steadied him, and he checked that the gun was primed. His mind groped to explain this sudden horror as he lumbered from the cabin. He went to slay a ghost.

  Jaki spotted Quarles striding through the buffed grass, musket in hand. All calm vanished. This was not a man he remembered. He looked shriven, his stubbled cheeks starved, dressed in rags. Yet he strode with the gait of a man used to the weight of a sword

  Fear touched Jaki. He handed Lucinda to Maud and looked deeper into her brown-gold eyes. The child caught the fright in his suddenness and began to cry.

  "Take Lucinda into the trees," he pleaded, and when he sensed Maud's insistence to be near him stiffening through her, he looked to Timotha.

  She laid her hands on her niece's shoulders. "Come away now, Maud," she said firmly. "We must protect the child." And to Jaki she said in parting, arms crossed around Maud, "Life and death are not enemies but one friend."

  Jaki, breaking into feathers of sweat, stepped to meet William Quarles.

  Quarles raised his musket. He waited for Jaki to bolt. The pirate stood unmoving. This was the stillness his whole life had led him to.

  The baby's cry wobbled closer, and Jaki's peaceful death soured as he realized that Maud was dashing toward him, hurrying Quarles' shot. He imagined Maud colliding with him as the shot meant for him burst her life, or the child's, and a cold energy brushed through him from his feet to his scalp.

  The alarm on Jaki's face cast the signal Quarles had been waiting for — and the trigger surrendered to his caress. At that moment, Maud ran into the line of fire, and Quarles jerked back as the charge exploded.

  Jaki grabbed her, and she clutched the baby tighter to her chest under the jolting blast. The musketball whistled over their heads and into the forest. Maud crimped a scream. They stared into the gun-smoke. Quarles, stunned, stood unmoving, a shadow nesting in his grievous face.

  "Shame!" Timotha shouted at him, berating him loudly and repeatedly as she crossed the field, her cries competing with the baby's.

  "Wait with her," Jaki said quietly, and stepped toward Quarles.

  The sight of the pirate's face alight with relief rekindled Quarles' rage, and when the boy stepped close enough, he struck out with the musket.

  Jaki snagged his gun wrist with a deft hand and twisted the gun loose. "You had your chance to kill me, Father," he whispered with effort. He bent Quarles' wrist until the older man sagged, and they knelt together in the grass. "Why did you spare me?"

  Tears sprung to Quarles' eyes. Jaki released his arm, and the old man continued to weep, shoulders shrugging, shaking loose the months of infuriated bewilderment that had followed Lucinda's death. He had lost himself then. He had thrown away honor, career, and fortune to retrieve Lucinda, and her death had snuffed the lamp in his chest. Thoroughly debased, he had intended to kill with vengeance an unarmed man. He covered his face with both hands, ashamed of the weakness of his body, the poverty of his soul. Always, he had served only himself. Madness glittered across his brain with the insight that he had misspent his whole life.

  "I aimed to kill," Quarles sobbed.

  Jaki's hands, firm as iron, gripped Quarles' arms. "Get up. We must talk."

  Maud and Timotha hunched around the baby, peering coldly at Quarles. The child watched him with her bright, attentive eyes. He turned away, hollowed, and with Jaki's arm across his shoulders slouched toward the forest.

  They sat down on a fallen tree out of sight of the clearing. Quarles clutched his hands between his knees and looked dully at the man he would have murdered. "What do you want of me, devil?"

  "I am no devil," Jaki said, straddling the log to face Quarles. "I am just a man." He pushed back the cuff of his left sleeve and showed the braid of Lucinda's hair on his wrist. "I am the husband of your daughter."

  Quarles violently shook his head. "You stole her."

  "You know better." Jaki pressed all his love for his wife into words. "Lucinda was too strong for anyone to steal. You know that."

  Quarles sat like stone. Slowly, he turned to look, as though for the first time, upon the man she had chosen.

  "Then you are my father," Jaki said, and searched for that recognition in Quarles' hooded eyes. When he did not see it, he went on. "I never had a father — because I kept looking for him in one man. And that man was dead. And he was not even my real father, who was also dead. Is death my father? I wondered about that, until now. You are my father, if anyone, because you are alive and we share a deep loss of shared blood."

  Quarles studied him with slow tortoise eyes, perceiving the grief turning in the boy like a soft river. He flinched inside, outraged that this stranger’s blood had mixed with his own, that this man of foreign blood dared to claim his suffering. He spoke monotonously. "I tried to kill you."

  "But you did not."

  "The woman interfered," Quarles groaned. "I aimed to kill."

  Jaki reached into his jacket to where he sheathed Chrysaor at his hip, and in one fluid stroke removed the gold dagger and laid it on the log between them.

  "Kill me, then," Jaki said. "I know from the root of my breath that I loved your daughter. Lucinda and I created a child between us, and that killed her. If I must die for that, then do it now."

  Quarles' little eyes tightened dangerously. "You think I would not." He seized the knife with his right hand, Jaki's hair with his left, and with black strength threw him to the ground and stabbed. Fury wild as it was hopeless thrust the blade into the lace at Jaki's throat and held the point to the ruby of blood shining there. Quarles pressed his face close to Jaki's. "You would let me kill you?" he panted, and jabbed deeper, flushed to see Jaki's eyes wince shut and his mouth despair.

  Jaki's suffering staggered Quarles' rage. He let the knife drop and hunkered in the auburn duff, horrified by what he had done.

  Jaki sat up, hand to his neck. The knife had l
anced his flesh but not punctured his throat. He picked up the dagger and sheathed it, then looked to Quarles, squatting in the leaf drift like a bewildered animal. They sat silently listening to crows caw while leaves fell around them nicked with sunlight.

  "I was wrong," Quarles said at last, wiping the numbness from his worn face. "Not about you." He passed him a harsh frown and looked away. "About myself. I thought I was better than this. But no one is spared, no one lifted above life's cruelties." He looked to Jaki, caught the wily understanding in his boyish features, and glimpsed the pain he must have endured. "This world is a shuckheap." He spit. "A shuckheap of all we've pared away to create our noble dreams. The dreams go on. Love. Sacrifice. God. They go on, all right, life after life. We—" He struck his chest fiercely. "We are what is left behind, left to plunder what remains when our dreams leave us." He rocked mournfully as a bear and stood up. "We are all pirates," he said with exasperation, and offered a thick hand to Jaki.

  Jaki looked at the hand — fingers bruised from work, palm open with hope — and he took hold and pulled himself to his feet. A light shot up in the bores of his eyes. He squeezed Quarles' hand and agreed: "Pirates."

  *

  After the first snowfall, Jaki stood at the edge of the field where Maud had thwarted Quarles' shot. Lucinda rode on her father's shoulders, bundled in goose-down pants and bodice, her alert face petaled by a red wool scarf pulled up as a hood. Neither of them had seen snow before, and they stared with wonder at the drifts saddling the open spaces, castellating the forest and tinkling like moondust in the tail of the wind.

  The morning had been still dark when Lucinda had awakened, crying to be held. Rather than waking the others, Jaki had bundled the child and taken her out under the starry sky. The horizon of sleeping trees shone silver in the pre-dawn. Jaki felt awed before the unearthly beauty of the snow, with the giddy weight of his daughter on his shoulders. He danced across the smooth expanse, reeling toward groves of walnut and mammoth chestnut. Billows of snowflakes fumed brightly around him in the dim light. Lucinda clung to his hair with her fisted mittens, squealing when Jaki's twirling dance kicked snow. Today, this enchanted day, marked her first year of life.

  Behind them, in the split-log cabin crowned in snow and icicles, windowlight sharpened like stars as lamps came on in the kitchen. The cabin was all that Jaki's crew had time to build before the snows began. Though hastily constructed, the log cottage served comfortably for their first winter in the New World: Maud and Timotha had dressed the five rooms with tapestries, lace curtains, and shining Dutch furniture. Quarles had carved Lucinda's cradle from the log where he had learned pity. And masons from the fort had built a hearth big enough to burn stumps. The seething blaze opened bright treasures of warmth and vision before which Jaki sat at night, feeling the tree deep inside his body putting forth new leaves.

  On the glade where Jaki danced, survey lines staked out a much grander house. The foundation marks lay hidden in the snow, rooting his dream in the cold earth. In spring, a home would rise here. Blown by time's winds, Jaki Gefjon and his family would sail the swells of winter and summer through the years, through the generations, into the glare of the future.

  That dawn, the future did not merit Jaki’s attention. His heart and mind followed his dance as it led him and Lucinda across the emptiness that held their future. Their laughter circled with the opal wind into the wilds, vanishing into clearings where not long ago tribesfolk in eagle masks and snakeband leggings had danced their stories.

  Jaki twirled to a stop at the edge of the glade among ricks of frozen ironweed. The cleared ground occupied a broad knoll above a tract of marshy sedge and forest that the Dutch called Breuckelen — Brook-land, which his English father pronounced Brooklyn. From the hillock, Jaki gazed on the firth where Quarles had designed a pier. The ice on the river gleamed in the gathering light, and the sea wall that Jaki and his men had built to extend the wharf glowed, banked with snow dunes.

  Above the estuary, violet light limned the western cliffs, and the night sunk into the creek beds under the forests. The sinking darkness drew Jaki after it. Watching it go, Jaki thinned out of his body, hearing the great trees around him creaking, smelling the sea and the earth in the cold, restless wind.

  Lucinda sat patiently on her father's shoulders. In the three months since he had returned for her, they had become close, and usually she tolerated his sudden still watchfulness, at least briefly. A watchful being herself, she quietly attended to the world's details, becoming her mother's image around her father's soul. But now the cold reached her, and she did not see the hope he saw in the gray horizon. She pulled at his long hair and fussed for him to move.

  Whatever omens unfolded in the sky, Jaki ignored them. He swung his daughter down from his shoulders and cradled her in his arms. The look of her pollen-bright face inspired magic in him, so that blood jumped to the roots of his hair when he held her. He wanted to teach her the crafty lore he had won as Matubrembrem, and he hungered to learn all she already knew of love. She was the Life, the eternal story the clouds are dreaming, and he told her that in his first language, the tongue of her tribal grandmother. "How Bright Air between the Palms would have treasured you," he said, wading back toward the cabin, smiling to see the serenity that seized her when he spoke the language of the shadow people.

  Lucinda felt the love brighten in her father whenever he spoke to her in that rounder voice, and she lay quietly in his embrace listening. Since he had appeared, she had sensed a new security, and the fear that she had sometimes heard pummeling her mother's heart she heard no more.

  Yellow windowlight lay tall on the blue snow, and Jaki lowered Lucinda to the stamped trail so she could toddle alongside him to the cabin. The fragrance of breakfast unfolded in the downdraft from the chimney, and Lucinda tugged harder at Jaki's finger, wobbling to where Maud had appeared in the doorway. Maud swooped the child into her arms, smiled at Jaki, and began to brush the snow from Lucinda's hair. In the spring, Jaki would ask Maud to marry him. Lucinda's ghost had been counseling that since the crew completed the cabin and he had first glimpsed her among the torn veils of the hearthfire. In time, he had promised the ghost. In time, mystery closes all questions.

  When Maud had disappeared inside, Jaki turned and looked back toward the white field. For the first time in weeks, he felt expansive. Working with Quarles to build a dockyard in the wilderness had taxed all his resources and left little strength for trances. His had invested his entire fortune in the harbor, had spent all the gold converted from his diamonds to buy materiel and to pay laborers. He, Quarles, and the crewmen who had returned to Brooklyn after sheltering Lucinda at Fort Amsterdam for the winter had worked restlessly. They had dredged the marsh, poldered the estuary, and erected jetties to shape an anchorage on the Upper Bay. By spring, the harbor would be worthy of Lucinda and the big ships that would arrive from Europe and the Caribbean. Each day, he had given all of himself to a home in the New World.

  But today was his daughter's birthday — the anniversary of his wife's death — and the glory of the snowbound world loosened Jaki's daily concerns enough for him to think like a sorcerer again. The renewing wisdom came back on him strongest when he thought about child Lucinda and Maud, despite the suffering that had joined them, and he told himself in the language Mala would have understood: We cannot bear life without a mother. Does not all happiness remember this first and greatest intimacy? With the mother, inside her, life is whole and not even breathing is necessary. Pym was right, after all: the greatest tragedy is to be born, to be pushed out of the mother and to be cut from her. That is the first defeat. And that is how we live, by being defeated, by never again succeeding to the whole and accomplished life inside the mother. Yet we remember — and by that memory we endure. Our defeats are building a greater victory. Her love is all we need to go on.

  His thoughts sounded loud in the steep silence of the snowy world, and he quieted himself. He walked back into the open space where next w
inter his house would stand, and he bent down and picked up a handful of snow. His bare fingers burned as he held the white powder to his mouth and tasted its numb energy. Close up, he inspected the tiny palaces of ice, the halls of mirrors. Among the frozen lavings, he glimpsed faces thistly with colors — Mala, Jabalwan, Wawa, Pym, Lucinda — The dead return as prophecy with the rains, the sorcerers believed. He held the handful of frozen rain as though each flake held an instant of his life, and he scattered the powder over the field where he had been willing to die to find this life. The spontaneous rite inspired him to believe that the dead listened. He stared at the snowdust that clung to his hand, each mote a star stretched over nothing, vanishing in the dawn-pink of his palm. The dead had placed life firmly in his hands.

  Jaki blew a triumphant sigh, and the cloud of his breath vanished in the cold. Another day's work loomed ahead, and the winter morning's reveries scattered among practical thoughts of reviewing the sea wall for ice damage, cataloguing the new supplies purchased at Fort Amsterdam, and arranging a birthday celebration for Lucinda. He turned toward the cabin. Before leaving the field, he stooped and wiped snow from the sign he had posted on a stump before the glade. He revealed a ship's plank that he had scorched with the name of the house he would build here, the name of the serpent's flight, the signature of mystery, the sign of his dream:

  WYVERN 1630

  Author’s Afterword

  Thank you for reading this 21st century edition of Wyvern. Comments and critiques of my work are always welcome, and you can reach me at aaa@lava.net.

  Before I composed this novel in 1985-86, I wrote down my artistic ambition for the story: