“We be Wejuns,” they simply stated.
They had no more idea of who they might really be than so many wild Shannoah. In fact, their self-knowledge was actually less than the red Indians’, all of whom have elaborate mythologies explaining their origins. These “Wejuns” knew only that they had come from somewhere “north and easteringly” at some time previously, precisely when, they knew not. They knew, however, that whatever they might be, they were not red-skinned savages—the “Stinkards” of their lore. I grasped, at length, that the “Spaniels” whom they accursed and reviled, and accused us of being, were nothing more or less than the Spanish, whose hard-bitten outposts must have stood in the vicinity, and who must have treated the Wejuns with their customary cruel barbarism in guarding the frontier of their threadbare empire.
Of our War of Independence, these Wejuns knew not a jot; of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, they were entirely ignorant; of history extant, from Homer to Bonaparte, they were as innocent as the birds of the air. While they indulged us in hearing about these things, it was with looks askance, as of the deepest dubiety. I think it was their way to simply enjoy a good yarn, whosoever the spinner, and so they let us prattle on about the wonders of civilization. And it was only when we ran out of wind that the old fellow asked us, “How came you two upon the King’s English?”
“What king?” I replied, trying to ascertain if they themselves knew—upon which utterance Yellowbeard cuffed me smartly on the head with his silver bracelet.
“Knowest not the King when seated ’fore it?” he admonished me and struck again.
“Thee art King?” Uncle professed surprise as well, but did not earn a slap, perhaps in deference to his age.
“Aye, I king Merkin of the Wejuns am.”
“King Merkin…?”
“Avert your eyes when you speak Merkin’s name,” Redbeard scolded us for this breech of protocol.
“And let us hear your own again, ye twain,” Yellowbeard said.
“William Walker.”
“And Samuel Walker.”
“Both walkers! Well, away from home ye’ve walk’d,” Merkin remarked drolly.
“William and Samuel, a Wejun ring do have.”
“And yours?” I asked the two attendants of Merkin.
“Here, Lovelace, Earl of Fishes, to my right,” the old man pointed with a gnarled finger, then to his other side, “and Robin, Duke of Owls, leftishly sits.”
“Your most obedient servants,” Uncle told them, bowing his head, and I did likewise. They seemed pleased to hear it.
These obeisances made, the three of them stared with satisfaction at the two of us, and I was about to request that they remove our rawhide hobbles when the crackle of gunfire rang out followed by the cries of “villain!” and “murder!” My heart sank as I imagined one of the tribesmen had foolishly slain his kinsman while playing with our firearms. But then another cry was heard, “What Spaniel treachery!” and I at once surmised that the Wejuns were at that moment in the toils of a surprise attack from their hated enemies. Our three auditors hurried outside, and we followed behind them.
Wejuns were scattering in all directions. At the far end of the village a cottage roared in flame, its thatched roof burning like bedstraw. I could feel the heat on my face at an hundred yards. To the side of the conflagration, sunlight glinted off the polished helmets and gorgets of a score of Spanish soldiers, firing with impunity upon the disorganized tribesmen. Several Wejuns already lay dying in the dust. A few reckless Wejun warriors charged their adversaries with spears and bows. One was struck in the head, his brains flying apart like the pulp of a shattered muskmelon. Another was gut-shot, then hacked to pieces by Spanish sabers as he sank to his knees. A ball whizzed by my ear.
Our rifles lay upon the ground, where they had been abandoned as useless. I hastened to fetch mine and at once charged it. Then, hardly considering the consequences of my action—for America was not at war with Spain—I took aim at a glinting helmet and fired. The Spaniard crumpled. The Wejuns at once looked to me in awe and supplication.
“For goodness’ sake, cut these hobbles off my ankles!” I beseeched them, and one of them did. “You,” I pointed to another. “Fetch the cask of powder that was in our pirogue.”
“Speakest not in Wejun’s fair iambics?” he remarked disapprovingly.
“This is no time for poetry,” I told him. “Fetch the lead balls, too.”
“Thy servant …” he replied and hurried off.
“Thou apes! Thou cankerblossoms! Get thee gone!” old Merkin shook his fist at the distant invaders. A ball caught his leg and he collapsed in a heap of shiny black feathers. “O…!”
“Get him off the field!” I commanded two idle, horror-struck youths, who dragged him into a hug. “Bowmen, form a line. A line, I say!”
“Ball and powder, sire,” the Wejun I would know as Gaybob arrived back on the scene.
“Break the kegs! Bowmen, draw and fire!”
The bowmen fired a hail of arrows. One found its mark in a Spaniard’s neck and he fell. The Wejuns cheered.
“Well done,” I said. “Draw and fire again!”
The arrows kept the Spaniards from advancing. It was my impression amidst all the mayhem from their perpetual whipping boys, the Wejuns, that the first sign of order in the Wejun ranks confused and demoralized them.
“Have you any idea at all how to charge and fire a fuzee?” I asked Robin, Gaybob, Lovelace, and the others. They shook their heads, though a beardless lad younger than I mounted one of the pieces and pointed it at the enemy, making musket noises with his mouth.
“Kssh! Kssh!”
“That’s the idea,” I said. Uncle was already busy, ramming a ball home. “Form ranks behind the archers, ye fusileers!”
The bowmen kept up their rain of arrows. The Spaniards were pinned down beside the flaming cottage. A cinder, meanwhile, had leaped on the breeze to a cottage on their other flank. Their helmets glinted wavily through the heated air. All our pieces were now charged and passed down the line.
“Fire at will, men,” I said.
“No, not at me, pray, but at the Spaniels!” a fresh-faced boy cried.
“Art Will?” Uncle asked. The boy gulped and nodded.
“Fire at the Spaniels,” I corrected my order. “At your pleasure.”
They did. The rifles crackled and blue smoke wafted over our heads. Across the village one Spaniard dropped in the dust where he had crouched. Another one screamed and seized his throat. Bright blood squirted between his fingers. Their return of fire had practically ceased and they had begun creeping backward. Uncle and I charged the guns again and handed them around. Another fusillade and three more Spaniards dropped. The remaining enemy jumped to their feet and now retreated in earnest. Their attack was suddenly turned to a rout.
“O happy hour!” Robin cried, and the others whooped in glee.
“Run, cavaleros, run!” Gaybob shouted.
“To your father, Satan, hie ye, Spaniels vile!”
“And turn your tails in cowardly Spaniel style!”
“After them, men!” I said. The whole company charged as a unit, running through the heat and smoke down the length of the village, then out of it and into the oaken glades, where the Wejuns overtook the less fleet enemy and commenced a wholesale slaughter of them, swinging the butts of their empty rifles into the faces of the poor Spanish wretches, clubbing them, stabbing them with spears, slicing them open with their own sabers.
“Take prisoners!” I tried to command them, but my orders went unheeded amid the orgy of bloodshed and revenge. One poor devil, his face already a bloody pulp, begged on his knees to be spared—“A nombre de Dios, señors!”—but an instant later the bright steel blade of a Toledo sword appeared through the front of his tunic, and he fell forward in the leaves with a thud.
“Hostia … hostia … hostia…!” another one shrieked as three Wejuns rained blow after blow upon him. Uncle was some minutes in catching up with us in t
his glade of slaughter, but he too failed to stay the tribesmen’s wrathful butchery. I had never seen a group of people so intoxicated with bloodshed than the Wejuns on this day. By the time it was over, so many hacked pieces of human bodies lay scattered on the ground that one could only venture a guess at the precise number of enemy dead.
The victors knelt on the ground or leaned against trees, panting for breath in exhaustion. A spirit-sapping sun blazed down from above. Flies began to drone over the bloodstained ground, their buzzing the only sounds heard besides labored breathing. Then, one by one, the men staggered over to where Uncle and I stood, dropped their weapons, and knelt in fealty to us.
Uncle turned from the tribesmen, not scornfully, but as a man who cannot bear the truth of a horror he has taken part in. His back humped in sorrow and regret, he walked alone back toward the village. It was the first time since our War of Independence that Uncle had taken up arms in order to deprive other men of their existence, and I believe it went somewhat hard on him.
They wanted to feed the Spaniards to the alligators. I insisted that, whatever their crimes, they be buried like Christians. Of course, not only did the Wejuns lack any notion whatever as to what constituted a Christian, but they insisted that to bury the butchered wretches on their island would serve only to install a gang of evil spirits in their home. By their lights I could see they had a point, and since I was not about to take up the role of missionary and catechize them all, I decided to let them have their way. And, at the tail of the island, across from the swamp where a squadron of alligators dwelt, we found the boat that the Spaniards had landed in—a weather-beaten, leaky, shallow-draught river sloop, obviously decades in service without an overhaul, whose tattered sails were patched with as many fragments of cloth as a Bennington quilt. Yet, at the first sight of her, my heart’s sails filled with the wind of hope, for we now had a way to make the Gulf!
The Wejuns were some hours at the job of disposing of the enemy, for there was much plunder upon their persons that they wanted, in the way of helmets, daggers, gorgets, rings, and even purses of money, though the Wejun’s concept of currency was less than a child’s—in their aboriginized scheme of things, the purses were leathern bags containing magical tokens, like a Shannoah medicine pouch. One other piece of nastiness turned up: I saw several of the men taking scalps from the dead, even from disembodied heads. No doubt this was a custom they had adopted from their adversaries in the generations since they had reverted to a state of near-savagery, but I demanded that they stop it at once.
“You will not give these wretches a decent human burial because you are afraid they will haunt you, and yet you intend to keep disgusting scraps of their persons as trophies?” I remonstrated with them. “Odious! Odious and insupportable!”
The Wejuns glanced down at their bloodied hands.
“I tell you these scalps will bring you more misery than an hundred Spanish corpses buried on your island!”
One after another they dropped the filthy prizes in the dust, or cast them away like an housewife shaking off a spider in the garden.
“And if you have any more of these noisome things at home, you must get rid of them.”
“Beshrew us, an’ it please your mastership,” Robin said, and they did as I commanded.
When the terrible business of the bodies was concluded, we boarded the Spanish sloop. The Wejuns had never traveled on a craft this size equipped with sail, plain dugouts serving their ordinary needs.
“Have you never thought of venturing forth from this wilderness?” I inquired of the men.
“Sail? From Paradise?”
“From our only home?”
“Do you know that I could myself sail you to England in a ship not much larger than this sloop?”
“Thanks, i’faith, but alive I’d rather stay,” Gaybob said, “than fly a corpse up England’s starry way.”
“You don’t seem to understand. England is a real place in this world, a living piece of sod upon this very planet.”
“Hast been there?” Gaybob asked, tongue in cheek, whilst the others tried to stifle their laughter. “Hast lain thine eyes on its shores?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Because thou hast not yet become a corpse,” Gaybob said, and the company now shook unabashedly with mirth.
I could see there was little point in pursuing the matter. If they wanted to believe that England was heaven and not a part of the earth, it was well enough with me.
Having served them already that day as field general, I now found myself in the office of commodore, and being some sort of Englishmen, however degenerate, they proved to be natural-born sailors. All took the vastest delight in plying up and down the river, the wind our bounden slave. Of course, they did not understand such mysteries as how a sailing ship moves forward in a close reach—i.e., almost in the teeth of the wind—but they soon developed an instinctual grasp of the technique if not of the principle.
By late afternoon they had mastered the subtle arts of coming about, of tacking a course, of reaching, and of running before the wind and reefing sail. There were moments when, given their queer costumes and mannerisms, the near-derelict condition of the boat, and our tropical wilderness setting, I fancied myself one of the explorers of centuries gone by, a Francis Drake, say, discovering these fabulous New World shores for the first time, and feeling all the wonder and the glory that must have been his.
We sailed around the island several times, to the crew’s delight. When the heat of the day was at its most extreme and oppressive, a storm quickly gathered, and we brought the boat into the lagoon hard by the village where the Wejuns kept their dugouts and dried their nets, and here we moored her. There is nothing like a successful military adventure to set a fellow’s keel straight, and nothing to swell one’s head like the whiff of power.
15
Thus did we come to dwell for a time amongst the mysterious Wejun tribesmen on an island in the river they called “The Sweet,” hard by the Gulf of Mexico and the shabby garrisons of Spanish Florida.
Uncle’s remorse over his part in the massacre of the Spaniards lasted many days. But eventually he returned to those labors that were his heart’s delight: botanizing and collecting specimens. He would have nothing to do with the military drills that the Wejuns sorely needed to acquaint them with the proper use of modern weaponry and to instill some discipline into their innocent ranks.
I put a crew of them to work erecting a palisade around the village. Their knowledge of fortification was scant, to say the least. The plan I devised was a four-square stockade with salient bastions at each angle, a scarp of earth on the outside wall, and a moat to be dug and flooded and filled with snapping alligators on all sides. It was an ambitious plan, but once I had talked them into it, they went to work with the verve of zealots. The project proceeded with deplorable slowness, their wooden tools often breaking. After a week, they had erected only five yards of stockade—but it was a very stout five yards, and I had high hopes that, given enough time, they would be the owners of a very secure habitation.
This labor went along under the supervision of Gaybob, as loyal and intelligent a deputy as any officer ever had. In the meantime, when not drilling my troops, I undertook to make all their portraits, an occupation that filled them with the utmost wonder and that inflated their already august esteem for me.
Their history was a murky business, a strange tangled web of folklore, superstition, and ignorance anchored in a gloomy corner of time’s immense labyrinth. You already know what England signified to them. They claimed to have drifted hither, since the days of their “great-grandfathers’ grandfathers” from a place vaguely “northeasteringly.” I concluded after pondering these things, and taking into account their manners of speech and dress, that they were descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke Island, in what is presently North Carolina.
This Roanoke Colony, as every schoolboy knows, was established in the year 1587 by the ambitious c
ourtier under a patent granted by Queen Elizabeth.
The colony had consisted of 117 persons: 91 men, 17 women, and 9 children. A Captain John White was appointed governor. He abandoned his office soon after the colony’s initial establishment, in order to return to England on a mission of resupply. By then, however, all of England’s resources were directed toward the defeat of Spain’s Armada. It was four years before White could return to the scrubby island with his relief expedition. He discovered no traces of his comrades or kin. The little huts of the colonists stood abandoned, many of them containing still the articles of daily life in mute and enigmatic array, undisturbed! Wooden trenchers were set out as though for supper, cook-pots hung over cold ashes in the hearths, et cetera, as though the inhabitants had been neatly plucked off the face of the earth.
It is held that the colonists fled to a south-lying island, Croatan, and the protection of the friendly chieftain, Manteo and his kinsmen, but for what reason, nobody has been able to put forward. In any case, no trace of them was found amongst the Croatans either. Others believe that Spaniards massacred them and flung their bodies into the sea. Yet another legend exists to the effect that the colonists were abducted by hostile tribes inland.
Of these theories, none had much meaning to the Wejuns—though they were always avid to hear a good yarn. King Merkin, for one, recalled living in two earlier villages at a distant remove from their present Paradise, when he was a small child, but I gathered that the tribe’s manner of living had been no different then, and that the Stinkards—Indians—had sent them packing time and again.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 31