Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  Powhatan raised his hands. The debate settled into murmurs, and then silence. “We have been at this discussion a long time. Let us eat now, and rest. Tonight we will have dancing and games. These tassantassas are not reason to miss a feast, eh? We will speak of this again in the morning, when our heads are steady.”

  The chiefs rose from their mats, stretching, and shaking cramps out of hard-muscled limbs.

  “You will remain with me a while, Opechancanough.”

  Opechancanough held his brother’s eyes for a long moment, tense with a roiling, choking anger whose exact source he could not name.

  At last he nodded.

  When the other chiefs had gone, Powhatan sent his women away, too. The brothers were alone with the heart fire. It had burned down to one charred log laced with the intricate white patterns of hot ash, its underside pulsing ember red with heat. Opechancanough stared at it. The hot air rose in ripples, distorting his vision.

  “You are so angry, Opechancanough.” There was sadness in Powhatan’s voice. Grief and resignation.

  “You aren’t angry enough.”

  “Your rage over your wife controls you. It clouds your judgment.”

  “The tassantassas have no respect for us. If they do not respect us, even as honorable enemies, then I shudder to think what they may do to us. Don’t you see what a threat these people are, Wahunse-na-cawh?” He used the old name, the name Powhatan had worn before he was Powhatan. He hoped the sound of it would recall to his brother those traits Powhatan had once possessed: the shrewd, quiet cunning, the assured bravery.

  “I ask you to consider,” Powhatan said slowly, almost gingerly, “whether you are seeing threats and disrespect where none are intended. Are your feelings over Tsena-no-ha’s betrayal unmanning you?”

  That unfamiliar hesitation in his words . . . How unlike you, Brother. Opechancanough wanted to lay a hand on the tattooed shoulder, transmit some strength into the old man’s spirit and bones. Instead he said quietly, “Don’t be insulting.”

  “I only ask you to consider what I say.”

  “If you won’t allow us to drive them out, then we must learn more about them. We must discover their weaknesses. The tassantassas have blue metal that shatters arrows; they have the great gun that booms like thunder—you heard Wowinchopunck. What is it? How is it used? Can it kill, or does it merely make a terrible sound? We must know these things, if we are to have any hope of keeping them under our control.”

  “You are right. We do need this knowledge, at least as badly as we need their trade goods. Listen: this is what we will do.”

  Opechancanough held his breath. He found himself praying, Please, please . . . He didn’t even know what it was he asked for, only that he begged the stern, silent god for something. He stared into his brother’s face, watching the old eyes flicker in thought, and in a rush the desperate pleading turned to a clear, emphatic wish: Let him present some real strategy. Let him be wise. Let him be the brilliant tactician he once was, the man who united the tribes. Let him not be a tired, frightened old man, Oh, great Okeus, please.

  Powhatan’s back straightened. His eyes sharpened to their old familiar keenness. “We will tell the Paspaheghs and the Quiyo-co-hannocks to increase their assaults on the tassantassas. They must keep the white men under great pressure, always on their guard, always afraid. And then you and I will go to them, and with a word I will stop the attacks, bring them the respite they will be hungry for. We will show them that Powhatan holds sway over all this land and can give them life or death at his whim. They will see that it is to their benefit to show us some respect, to work with us as partners, not to insult us and make enemies of the Real People.”

  It might work. It was the kind of plot that would never fool a tribe of the Real People, but these tassantassas might be susceptible to the deception. Perhaps the true Powhatan is not as long gone as I’d feared.

  Powhatan held out a finger. Opechancanough hooked it with his own, and for a moment they were youths again, smiling at one another over a basket full of stolen dumplings, happy in brotherly conspiracy.

  “Very well,” said Opechancanough. “Let it be so.”

  SMITH

  June 1607

  Smith’s arms trembled as he strained against the rope. The coarse fibers bit into his hands. The men hauled together, and the wall of the cabin inched upward, wavered, sagged back toward the ground.

  “Heave, men!”

  Smith cursed, leaning against the impossible weight of the log wall, against the pain in his chafed, raw hands and the cramping in his legs. The wall made a valiant surge and came to rest upright against the posts with a solid smack that reverberated through the ground into Smith’s bones.

  The men were so exhausted they could not even muster a cheer. Smith dropped the rope and pressed his stinging palms against his thighs. His heart beat at an alarming pace, pounding in his neck and shaking his limbs. It strained against its cage, those weak and brittle bars, as if it might break free of him and rise into the sky on frantic, fluttering wings.

  The work crew passed a jug of water. It tasted bitter, sharp with salt. Smith rinsed his mouth and spat into the mud.

  From the direction of the supply tent, Thomas Savage pushed a barrow toward the drooping crew. Inside was a squat black cooking kettle, accompanied by a stack of wooden bowls. A wisp of steam trailed over the boy’s thin shoulder as he brought his barrow to a careful halt and began ladling up the midday meal.

  Smith stared into his bowl with leaden dismay. Porridge. Every meal was porridge, sometimes flavored with a few bones from a duck or a pigeon, when one could be shot. More often it was peppered with black flecks of weevil. The weevils were almost welcome. They crunched in the teeth, which added a dimension of excitement to meals that porridge could not otherwise aspire to.

  Smith raised a lump of the pale, pasty stuff on his eating knife. He shut his eyes tightly as he forced it down, longing for the taste of pork, roasted and charred, or stewed, or fried in its own sweet fat. It had been weeks since they’d butchered a hog. They had found the half-feral beasts on an island in the hot, languid south, where they had stopped to replenish the ships’ freshwater stores on the long way from England. They’d taken the hogs onboard and, when they made landfall in the New World, set them loose to fatten and breed.

  Were it not for the naturals, the hogs would have made a glorious store of meat. Nearly the moment the palisade was finished, though, the naturals had returned with their arrows and their knives of flint and bone. They shot whatever hogs they could find, leaving them to lie and rot in the sun. When the English ventured from their protective walls to retrieve the precious carcasses, the naturals shot at them as if they, too, were swine to be killed for sport. One man was even killed trying to fetch a plump fallen sow.

  As spring gave way to the hot blue haze of early summer, the grass around the palisade grew well above knee height: cover aplenty for the Indians. They slunk about unseen, and then rose up like devils out of Hell where a body least expected to find them, their skin shiny with the crimson and black greasepaint they favored. They drew their long bows with as little effort as a child might tug a sprouting weed from a flower bed. The English, weakening by the day on their rations of weevils and gruel, could scarcely swing a hand axe. Leaving the palisade—entering that treacherous tangle of grass—could be deadly. It was certainly foolish. The Indians had penned the English in like fattened lambs awaiting slaughter.

  Jamestown fare was poor for belly and spirit alike. A man could derive no strength from such conditions. Smith trembled constantly when he was not lying in his bedroll. His arms and legs moved too slowly; his steps were untrustworthy and his knees prone to buckling. After a day spent building and digging and trying in vain to bring down the waterfowl that sometimes passed overhead, by evening he was as weak and useless as a babe.

  At least—thank Christ for s
mall mercies, he reflected with cruel satisfaction—Smith was not the only one whose spirit and strength had drained away. The men of the colony often dropped into exhaustion or apathy after only a few hours’ work. The progress of erecting a respectable fort crept by at a lethargic pace. They needed solid buildings, watchtowers of sufficient height to spot the Indians at a distance, storerooms large and hopeful to receive the wealth of the supply ships that were coming from England, by God, any day—and yet their efforts flagged.

  They must continue to build, Smith knew. Proper roofs and walls would raise spirits, and cheer might be enough to combat the weakness that had crept into their bones, might be the lucky token they needed to formulate some counteroffensive that would free them from the terror of the Indians outside their gate. He scraped the last dregs of his porridge from the bowl with a dirty thumb. The gentlemen did the same, sucking their fingers. That would have filled Smith with wry amusement, had he any strength left for humor.

  The palisade surrounding Jamestown was a great triangle enclosing a trampled morass of yard. Spindly scaffolds, the beginnings of watchtowers, rose at each corner. Men in steel breastplates and helmets wedged themselves atop each scaffold, backs or legs braced against the rough bark of the palisade wall, roasting in their armor.

  One of the lookouts gave a shout and gestured urgently toward the river.

  Smith, Scrivener, and Wingfield dropped their bowls and rushed to the scaffold. Smith pulled himself carefully up the framework, the thin poles vibrating and wavering beneath his weight. He raised his unprotected head clear of the wall and wrapped one arm about a scaffold pole while his free hand rested on the comforting, solid coolness of his gun.

  A single canoe slipped toward the bank. It moved with a sinister grace, low and swift and certain, like the temperamental brown snakes that often crossed inland tracts of brackish water. Three men rode in the craft, though only two manned the paddles. As Smith watched, his mind moving slowly, fogged by exhaustion and hunger, the canoe beached and its passengers disembarked. The man who had not paddled wore a mantle of white so pure it stung Smith’s eyes in the midday sun.

  “What is it?” Wingfield called.

  “A party of naturals. They look important.”

  “Important?”

  “One of their kings, unless I miss my guess.”

  “Come for some royal sport,” Scrivener muttered, “shooting at tethered goats.”

  “I don’t see any bows,” said Smith.

  One of the men made a broad gesture, sweeping his arm in a great arc, bringing hand to heart. “Wingapoh,” the man called.

  Smith held very still on his rickety perch.

  The Indians turned to one another, made a brief conference. Then the man tried again: the wide swing of the arm, the hand on the breast. “Wingapoh!”

  “What are they saying?” Wingfield whispered it, as if the Indians would understand his words if they heard.

  “Their word for peace.”

  “It can’t be,” said Scrivener. “They have proven their intentions; they mean us no goodwill. You misunderstand, Smith.”

  The Indian made his gesture again. “Wingapoh!” The man had the familiar lankiness and youthful arrogance Smith had seen before.

  “I recognize that one—the one calling out to us. He’s the one who shot at your helmet, Scrivener.”

  “Excellent,” said Scrivener. “No doubt he’s come back to finish the job, this time with something that will punch through steel.”

  Wingfield’s face was flushed red as an apple; he stared up at Smith with a curious intensity in his pale eyes. “If you are certain they mean peace, then you ought to go out to them.”

  “That’s madness,” Scrivener said quietly. “He’ll be killed, and we cannot spare a single man. You know that.”

  From his superior perch, Smith watched Wingfield steadily for a long moment. His attempt to pin mutiny on Smith had failed and now the great dandy thought to send him into the enemy’s hands to be brought down like a squealing pig. Smith imagined the man’s satisfaction, watching through a chink in the wall as Smith buckled, feathered like a half-plucked goose, all his certainty and power draining away with his life’s blood into the grass while the Indians and Wingfield alike danced over his corpse, each on their respective sides of the palisade.

  Naukaquawis called again into the tense quiet.

  Not today, Smith promised Wingfield silently.

  He was certain the Indians’ word meant peace. And though they were violent and terrible, though they were fitter by far than any Englishman and more cunning than foxes, Smith detected in the Indians a certain forceful earnestness, a code of honor that bound them and held them fast. If they came under the banner of peace, they would not violate that sacred oath.

  He prayed to Christ he was right.

  Smith loosed one arm tentatively from the scaffolding. It wobbled beneath him as he made an arc through the air and brought his hand to his heart.

  “Wingapoh.”

  The palisade gate screeched on its wooden hinge. Smith felt the anxious, coil-tight rustle of armed men at his back, smelled the fresh sulfur of gunpowder and singed-air heat of lit matches. The men were ready to fire should any of the naturals attempt to enter the fort, but Smith stepped through the gate and it swung shut behind him, closing with a clatter as the stout lock bars fell back into place. He would face the three naturals alone, with only his snaphaunce for protection—the gun and his steel, which suddenly felt thin as parchment.

  The Indians stood some twenty or thirty paces away, immobile and fierce-eyed. All about them the waist-high grass moved in waves of shifting silver. Smith stepped into the grass. It hissed against his breeches, sliding like a woman’s touch over the lower rim of his breastplate while seed heads caught and broke off in the joints of his mail shirt. He had the sensation of wading into deep, murky water, the ripple of skin creep, the brief clutch of nausea when one realizes that anything—anything—might be hiding below the surface, waiting to reach out and seize one’s leg with sharp teeth or a strong, cold hand. He recalled with a thump of blunt, heavy panic what another slave had told him in the Turk’s field as they labored with their scythes. There were tigers in the slave’s homeland, cats the size of ponies. They sprang from the cover of tall grass to take victims in their jaws, biting the back of the neck, carrying grown men away into the shadows of the jungle. The men dragged like knotted rags.

  Smith raised a hand to the nape of his neck. His own touch was cold with fear.

  And yet he crossed the ground to the Indians alive and unharmed. Even his breeches remained dry. He counted that a victory.

  Smith nodded a cautious, straight-faced greeting to Naukaquawis. The youth’s arms were crossed over his chest; the hint of an ink-black tattoo, a sinuous curve, showed on one arm where a patch of red paint had rubbed away. Naukaquawis solemnly returned the nod.

  Beside him stood a very tall man with a stern, almost bitter mien. The face was sharp with a strong, aquiline nose, and thin lips tightly pressed. The man’s eyes were deep-set and dark, and carried in them the spark of a hot fire, a force of charisma and potency that Smith imagined he could feel emanating from the tall man’s presence, a physical vibration like the stamp of a great horse’s hoof shuddering through the earth. The tall one was nearing old age but had not yet reached it. His face was lined, the cheeks barely hinting at a jowliness to come, but the man’s body was as hard and capable as that of his young companion’s. The braid knotted at his left side was adorned with a collection of feathers. They twirled and fluttered in the wind, a counterpoint to the man’s stillness that might have been comical if not for his predatory air.

  The third man was the one Smith judged to be their king. He was old; silver hair fell loose across the overlapping feathers of a white cloak. Above a face like well-worn leather, deep-creased and burnished with time, rose a bristling c
rown of deer’s hair dyed red. It was like the crown the other Indian king had sported when Smith had goaded his men into the shooting match, but its bristles were darkened with age, and seemed to convey a more regal air. Even had the old man not been wearing a crown, Smith would have known him for a king. Despite his advanced age, he carried himself with a particular brand of dignity. His eyes were pink-rimmed and rheumy, but his unblinking gaze was thoughtful, possessed of a quiet self-assurance found only in the most natural of leaders.

  “Wingapoh,” Smith said again.

  The king began speaking in a resonant voice, as deep and hollow as the sound of a large drum. Smith, of course, could not follow his words, but the tone of voice was not threatening. It was both confident and explanatory, the tone a parent takes when instructing a child. The king indicated the tall, sober man, and through gestures and tone Smith gathered that he was a person near to the chief’s heart—a brother or a close associate. Naukaquawis, Smith learned to no small surprise, was the king’s son.

  Smith tried his gesture as before, tapping his chest, giving his name. He correctly named Naukaquawis, and indicated with smiles and nods that he and the young man had met before. Better to leave out, Smith thought, the fact that I very nearly shot him the night of the attack.

  The king tried his name, and to Smith’s carefully concealed amusement, gave it in the same harsh burr as his son had done. “Chawnzmit.” Then he offered up his own name with a hand to his heart. “Wahunse-na-cawh.”

  The tall, sour one flashed a quick glare at his king, placed a protective hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Powhatan,” he insisted.

  Smith took it to be a title of respect. He bowed his head slightly and repeated, “Powhatan.”