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My words will fly straight. It is all I can do. They will ask, who are you now? And I will say, I am a seeker of visions.… I am Lost Eyes .

PART I
    Macao

1
    March 1814
    Captain Morgan Penmerry bet everything he had on his cock. It was an Asil, that plucky breed of rooster with plumage the color of day-old blood. The gamecock weighed over five pounds and every ounce full of fight and fire. Its body was compact and powerful, hard as whalebone to the touch. The Asil’s beak was short and as nasty-looking as a dirk; its natural spurs had been trimmed to half an inch and a set of silver spurs—looking for all the world like miniature bayonets—were secured on its shanks. Morgan kept the gamecock hooded and his hand never ceased stroking its scimitarlike feathers.
    Morgan Penmerry was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested Cornishman, who at the age of eleven had stolen away on an American merchant vessel out from Bristol bound for Cape Cod. In twenty years he had risen from stowaway to captain of his own three-masted bark. A fur trader, he plied the waters of the Pacific and ranged from the west coast of the Americas to the trade ports of the Far East. Only a couple of weeks ago he had arrived in the Portuguese colony of Macao with a boatload of furs and a crew of rogues ready to unleash themselves upon the crowded thoroughfares, the gambling parlors, brothels, and rum houses in the city and in the surrounding emerald hills. Macao was a place to satiate every vice: There were more ways to hell than to heaven in the city at the mouth of the Pearl River. Whore cribs flourished in the cathedral shadows. Brawlers ranged the alleyways a stone’s throw from carefully tended Chinese gardens.
    Morgan brushed a strand of his chestnut-colored hair back from his brow and strode purposefully to the center of the dirt ring. The air in the fighting house was thick with the stench of blood and tobacco smoke, the pungent aroma of brewed tea and salted fish. Here men of means wagered on a blood sport and fondled their concubines and drowned themselves in rice wine.
    â€œCaptain, you gotta be crazy. You ain’t gonna put the Hotspur on the line?” Temperance Rawlins groaned. He was a lean, lanky New Englander, a Connecticut-born graybeard who had known Morgan since the captain’s stowaway days. Temp Rawlins’s bushy eyebrows arched up his broad, blank forehead. Only a few silvery wisps of hair clung to his skull.
    Despite Temp Rawlins’s towering presence and advanced years, it was Morgan Penmerry who carried the aura of command. He ran a hand through his bushy mane and swaggered past the crowd of Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Americans, and Russians who enjoyed the Cornishman’s showmanship. They greeted Morgan’s arrival in the ring with a chorus of epithets and good-natured challenges.
    Derision turned to cheers as he ordered Temp to place a sack on the ground; the Hotspur’s first mate dutifully obeyed.
    The fighting pit was a circular depression dug out of the earth. Its sides were graded and wooden benches surrounded the hard-packed earth of the pit itself. The three-foot-high stone wall circling the arena had been inlaid with shells and pictographs symbolizing bravery, stamina, and good fortune.
    Morgan winked at Temp and nodded to Chiang Lu, a silken-voiced middle-aged man, whose enthusiasm for the sport had prompted him to build the cock pit behind his personal residence on a hillside overlooking the Pearl River above the opulence and squalor that was Macao.
    Chiang Lu was particular about who climbed the steps to his hillside villa. Only aficionados of the fighting cocks and only men of wealth were invited to the pit. For now, Morgan Penmerry was a man of wealth. Should he lose, Chiang Lu’s servants would summarily escort him to the garden gate. At Chiang Lu’s a man’s fortunes rose and fell more swiftly than the tides.
    â€œA pretty sack, my honorable