Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  John did not permit himself a grin of satisfaction. The fat had been leached off him during his hungry time in the woods and his stay in the Indian village had been hard work. He was always running errands from field to village, or helping the women with the heavy work of clearing the land. The food they gave him had built only muscle, and he knew that though he might be thirty-five this year he had never been healthier. He imagined that Attone would think that he would drop from the line of braves panting and gasping within the first ten minutes but he would be proved wrong.

  Ten minutes went by and John was gasping for breath and fighting the desire to drop out from the line. It was not that they moved so fast, John could easily have sprinted past them, it was the very steadiness of their pace which was so exhausting. It was not a run and it was not a walk, it was a walk on the balls of their feet, a fast walk which never quite broke into a run. It was hard on the calf muscles, it was hard on the arch of the instep. It was sweating agony on the lungs and the face and the chest and the whole racking frame of the Englishman as he tried first to run and then to walk and found himself forever out of stride.

  He would not give up. John thought that he might die on the trail behind the Powhatan braves, but he would not return to the village and say that he had not even sighted the deer he had promised to kill because he had been out of breath and too weary to walk to the woods.

  For another ten minutes, and another unbearable ten after that, the file of braves danced along the path, following in each other’s footsteps so precisely that anybody tracking them would think he was following only one man. Behind them came John, taking two steps to their one, then one and a half, then a little burst of a run, then back to a walk.

  Suddenly they halted. Attone’s fingers had spread slightly as he held his hand to his side. No other signal was needed. The fingers opened and closed twice: deer, a herd. Forefinger and little finger were raised: with a stag. Attone looked back down the line of the hunting party and slowly, one by one, all the half-shaven heads turned to look back at John. There was a polite smile on Attone’s face which was soon mirrored down the line. Here was the herd, here was a stag. It was John’s hunt. How did he propose they should go about killing one, or preferably three, deer?

  John looked around. Sometimes a hunting party would set fires in the forest and drive a herd of deer into an ambush. Even more skill was required for an individual hunter to stalk an animal. Attone was famous among the People for his gift of mimicry. He could throw a deerskin over his shoulders and strap a pair of horns to his head and get so close to an animal that he could stand alongside it and all but slide a hand over its shoulders and cut its throat as it grazed. John knew he could not emulate that expertise. It would have to be a drive and then a kill.

  They were near to an abandoned white settlement. Some time ago there had been a house by the river here, the deer were grazing on shoots of maize between the grass. There was a jumble of sawn timber where a house had once been and there was a landing stage where the tobacco ship would have moored. It had all gone to ruin years before. The landing stage had sunk on its wooden legs into the treacherous river mud and now made a slippery pier into the river. John looked at the lie of the land and thought, for no reason at all, of his father telling him of the causeway on the He de Rhé and how the French had chased the English soldiers over the island and to the wooden road across the mudflats and then picked them off as the tide swirled in.

  He nodded, affecting confidence, as if he had a plan, as if he had anything in his head more than a vision of something his father had done, whereas what he needed now, and so desperately, was something he himself could do.

  Attone smiled encouragingly, raised his eyebrows in a parody of interest and optimism.

  He waited.

  They all waited for John. It was his hunt. It was his herd of deer. They were his braves. How were they to dispose themselves?

  Feeling foolish but persisting despite his sense of complete incompetence, John pointed one man to the rear of the herd, another to the other side. He made a cupping shape with his hands: they were to surround the deer and drive them forwards. He pointed to the river, to the sunken pier. They were to drive the deer in that direction.

  Their faces as blank as impudent schoolboys, the men nodded. Yes indeed, if that was what John wanted. They would surround the deer. No-one warned John to check the direction of the wind, to think how the men would get into place in time, to disperse them in stages so that each would get to his place as the others were also ready. It was John’s hunt, he should fail in his own way, without the distraction of their help.

  He had beginner’s luck. Just as the men started to move into their places the rain started, heavy thick drops which laid the scent and hid the noise of the men moving through the woodland surrounding the clearing. And they were skilled hunters and could not restrain their skill. They could not move noisily or carelessly when they were encircling a herd of deer even if they wanted to, their training was too deeply engrained. They stepped lightly on dry twigs, they moved softly through crackling shrubs, they slid past thorns which would have caught in their buckskin clouts with the sharp noise of paper tearing. They might not care whether or not they helped John in his task; but they could not deny their own skill.

  In seconds the hunting team was cupped around the herd, ready for the signal to move forward. John held back, at the base of the cup, he hoped to see the herd driven before him and struggling in the mud, giving him the chance of a clear shot. He made the small gesture with his hand which meant ‘drive on’; and he had the pleasure of seeing all of them, even Attone, move co-operatively to his bidding.

  One, two, the deer’s heads went up, the does looking for their young. The stag snuffed the wind. He could smell nothing, the wind had veered with the rain. The only scent he got was the clear water smell of the river behind the herd. Uneasily he glanced around and then he turned his head and walked a little back the way they had come, to the river.

  The braves paused at John’s gesture and then, as he beckoned them, moved forward again. The herd knew that something was happening. They could see nothing in the sudden downpour of rain and hear nothing over the pitter-pat of fat raindrops on summer leaves, but they had a sense of uneasiness. They bunched closer together and followed the stag as he went, his heavy head swinging to one side and then the other, looking all about him, and led the way towards the river.

  John should have held back, but he could not. He made the gesture to ‘go forward’ and was saved from disaster only by the braves’ own skill. They could not have borne to have moved forward and stampeded the herd and lost them. Not if there had been a dozen Englishmen to humiliate. They could not have done it any more than John could have mown down a bed of budding tulips. Their skill asserted itself even over their desire for mischief. They disobeyed John’s hurried commands and fell back, waiting until the anxious heads dropped again to graze and the flickering ears ceased to swivel and flick.

  John gestured again: ‘go forward’! And now, slowly the braves moved a little closer as if their own looming presence alone could move the deer towards the river. They were right. The empathy between deer and Powhatan was such that the deer did not need to hear, did not need to see. The stag’s head was up again and he went determinedly down the path which the farmer had once trod from his maize field to his pier, and the does and fawns followed behind.

  John waved, ‘on, on’, and the deer went faster, and the hunters went faster behind them. Then, as if they could sense the excitement before they could even hear or smell or see, the deer knew they were being pursued; and they threw their heads back and their dark liquid eyes rolled, and they trotted and then they cantered, and then they flung themselves headlong down the little muddy single-file path to the deceptive safety of the pier as it stretched out into the river like an avenue to a haven.

  The braves broke into a run following them, each one fitting an arrow to his bow as he ran, a faultless smoot
h gesture, even while dancing around fallen trees, leaping logs. John fumbled for his arrow, dropped it in his haste, put his hand to his hip for another and found that his quiver had been torn from him as he ran. He was weaponless. He threw aside his bow in a burst of impatience but his feet pounded faster still.

  The deer were following a trail, the braves were filtering through thick forest but still they went as fast as the herd, they kept pace with them, they were the power behind the herd, driving it forwards, exactly to the place where John wanted them to go, to the wooden causeway, out into the river.

  ‘Yes!’ he cried. The braves broke from the trees in a perfect crescent, the herd a tossing tawny mass of horn and eyes and heads and thundering feet cupped inside the circle of running men. ‘Now!’ John yelled, a great passion for the deer and for the hunt rising up in him. He felt a great desire to kill a deer, thus owning it and this moment forever: the moment that John led his hunting party and took his deer.

  But just as that moment was there, just as the first deer leaped down to the causeway to the illusion of safety, and lost her footing at once on the slippery betraying timbers, and an arrow went zing through the air and pierced her pounding heart, just as the others were ready to follow her, one young buck jinked to the right, to the bank, to the clear run downriver to freedom, and another, seeing the sudden spurt of his pace, followed him, and Tradescant saw in that split second of time that his cup of braves was not holding, that his herd of deer would be lost, spilled like quicksilver out of an alchemist’s goblet, and would run away downriver.

  ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘No! My deer!’ And now he was not thinking of Suckahanna, nor of his pride, nor of the respect of Attone and the other braves. Now he was intent, determined that his plan should work, that his beautiful strategy should be beautifully performed and that no fleet, infuriating beast should spoil the perfection of the moment of the hunt. ‘No!’

  At once he was running in great jolting, ground-eating strides, running as he had never run before, to plug the gap in the line, to outpace the first hunter on the extreme right, to stop the deer escaping from his goblet, his beautiful, deer-filled goblet. Attone, his arrow on a string, heard the yell as the Englishman, his long hair flying behind him, took breakneck strides, great leaps down the hill, watched open-mouthed, even forgetting the imperative of the hunt, as the Englishman yelled, ‘No!’ and while yelling outpaced one, two and then three hunters, and flung himself towards the breach.

  John’s sudden eruption caused terror in the herd. Instead of slipping away through the gap they doubled back and met the upstream wing of the hunters. There was nowhere for them to go but out into the river, on the slippery causeway. One after another they leaped and scrabbled for it. Their sharp hooves could gain no purchase on the greasy, half-rotted wood, they fell, they pitched into the river, there was a hail of arrows.

  But John did not see any of this. All he saw was the gap in his plan, the breach in the perfection of his hunt, and a deer jinking and swerving to get past him. He ran, he ran towards it, his hands outstretched as if he would catch it by the throat. The deer caught sight of him and went for freedom, made a great leap down the steep bank to the river, splashed into the water, fought its way to the surface and laid its smooth head back so the wet, dark nose was able to pant, and it was able to swim, sharp legs flailing, to the centre of the river.

  John, unable to bear the sight of his prey escaping, let out a desperate ‘Hulloah!’ and flung himself, as if he thought he could fly, down the six-foot riverbank and into the water, on top of the deer, falling head first in a wild dive so there was a resounding crack as deer skull met John’s forehead, and while he was still blinded by the blow they plunged down into the depths of the river and rose up together, and even gazed into each other’s startled, desperate eyes. John felt his hands close around the deer’s throat before a sharp hoof struck him like a bullet in his chest and pushed him down below the water again.

  Attone, far from letting fly with his arrow at the disappearing head, far from picking off the deer which were slithering and plunging off the causeway, found that he was screaming with laughter at the sight of the Englishman, the despised, over-anxious, women-guarded Englishman howling like a spirit from the dark world, bounding as if he could outrun a deer, and then diving head first into a shallow river. A man so filled with blood lust, so insane with desire, that he could come nose to nose in deep water with a deer and still close his hands around its throat.

  Attone gripped a tree for support and called in English: ‘Englishman! Englishman! Are you dead? Or just mad?’

  Tradescant, surfacing and realising suddenly that he was in cold, weedy water, that he had neither bow nor arrow nor kill, but instead a sensation very like a broken rib and a hoof-shaped bruise over his heart, and a cracked head for his pains, heard also the irresistible laughter of a Powhatan engulfed by amusement, and started to laugh too. He paddled like a weak dog to the water’s edge and then found he was laughing too much to climb up the bank. It was absurdly high and he recalled that he had dived off the top of it and actually landed head first on the deer. The thought made him collapse in laughter again, and the sight of Attone holding out his hand, his brown face creased in helpless laughter, redoubled Tradescant’s own amusement.

  He gripped Attone’s hand but it was too much for both of them and their grip slipped as their helpless giggles weakened them so that all Attone could do was fall back on the soft grass of the riverbank and give himself up to it, while Tradescant lay back in the river and howled like a dog at the thought of his hunt and his madness and his incompetence.

  When Suckahanna saw the men coming back to camp she went out slowly to greet them; she was proud, and this was a difficult matter for any woman. Her husband was the finest hunter among the people but she was proposing to leave him for an Englishman who had been seen by everyone as incapable of even shooting a pigeon with one of the white man’s infallible guns.

  First she saw the kill. Six of the hunters carried in three deer lashed by their feet to pruned branches. It was a kill that any hunting party would have been proud to bring home, enough to feed the village and leave surplus meat for salting down. Suckahanna breathed in sharply and drew herself a little higher. She would not be seen by anyone running up to the braves and asking them who had done the kill. But three deer was a successful hunt; three deer was undeniable evidence that the braves on the hunt had done well.

  Then she saw John. At first she thought he must be wounded, grievously wounded, for the man who was supporting him was her own husband, Attone. She started to run towards him, but then she checked herself after two paces. There was something odd about the way they walked together, it was not the stumble of a sick man and the load-bearing stride of his helper. They were clinging together as if they were both dizzy, as if they were both drunk. She watched, then she put her hand up to shade her eyes from the evening sun. She heard their voices, they were not talking to each other in low, anxious tones, like men helping one another home, nor exchanging the odd satisfied word, like men returning sated from the hunt. They were saying one word and then another and then they would do a little wandering detour in a circle, like drunkards, legless with laughter.

  Suckahanna stepped sharply back into the doorway of her house and dropped the curtain of skins to hide herself. In the darkness she turned and lifted the side of the skin so she could peep out. The men carrying the deer were staking them out for cleaning and skinning, but Attone and John were not going to set to work. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they headed for the sweat lodge with most of the braves, and even as they went Suckahanna could still hear that sudden explosion of giggling.

  ‘Dived in!’ she heard, and then a crow of laughter from Tradescant: ‘But what you don’t know is that I fell on its head!’ That was too much for Attone, his knees simply gave way beneath him.

  ‘I saw you. You had no arrows?’

  ‘Why does he need arrows? If he is going to fall on deer to
kill them?’

  There was another scream and all the braves flung their arms around each other’s shoulders and swayed together, their feet pounding to their bellowing laugh.

  A woman came to Suckahanna’s doorway. Suckahanna pushed back the deerskin and came outside.

  ‘What are the men doing tonight?’ the woman asked.

  Suckahanna shrugged with a smile which said at once, ‘Men!’ and said, ‘How I love him!’ and said, ‘How impossible he is!’

  ‘How should I know?’ she asked.

  The half-sacred silence of the sweat lodge calmed them and the exhaustion of the day took its toll. They sat against the walls illuminated by the glowing coals, eyes shut, soaking up the healing heat, sweating out the aches and pains. Every now and then one of the braves would grimace and giggle and then there would be a little ripple of laughter.

  They stayed in the heat for a long time until their sinuses were hot and dry, until the very bones of their faces were filled with heat. John could feel the bruise on his head swelling like a maggot and the hoof print on his chest growing dark and tender. He did not care. He cared for nothing but the deep, sensual pleasure of this heat and rest.

  After a long, long while, Attone rose to his feet and stretched himself like a cat, every vertebra in his backbone extending. He put out a peremptory hand to John and spoke in Powhatan. ‘Come, my brother.’

  John looked up, saw the proffered hand and reached up his own to clasp it. Attone pulled him to his feet and for a moment the men stood side by side, hand-clasped, looking deep into each other’s eyes with a measuring, honest look of respect and affection.

  Attone led the way out of the sweat lodge. ‘I have a name for you, your tribal name,’ Attone said. ‘You cannot be John Tradescant any more. You are a brave now.’

  John took in the full meaning. So he was accepted. ‘What shall my name be?’ he asked.

  ‘Eagle,’ Attone announced.