Raleigh's Page

by Alan Armstrong

  “‘He Who Sees Beyond,’” he replied. “He is my brother—Sky’s father.”

  The priests wore scraps of decorated hide and pouches of colored leather at the waist. Their faces were painted with a paste of red sumac and the blood-colored root, their chests and thighs daubed with yellow clay and dots of blue. One wore the wings of a bird over his ear; another had wrapped his head with a band of snake and weasel skins woven together and crowned with feathers.

  Mr. Harriot was unconscious. The priests pointed to show that his litter should be placed close to the fire.

  They motioned Tremayne and Andrew back as they closed in around the litter, swaying together and chanting over the body. He Who Sees Beyond waved a clutch of feathers and a writhing copper-headed snake. His deputy shook a carved stick topped with a small white skull. Sky joined the apprentices as they beat drums and shook rattles.

  As the chanting and dancing picked up, He Who Sees Beyond sprinkled water on Mr. Harriot. Then he laid flowers on him. The others did the same, until the Englishman’s body was covered with dried gray blossoms. They circled the fire, chanting louder and louder until they were all howling and dancing. They panted and sweated in the heat and effort. Their eyes were open wide, glazed, unseeing.

  As the fire went down, they slowed. Each in turn then emptied the contents of his pouch on the coals. A thick blue smoke rose, tobacco and some other herb Andrew had not smelled before.

  The priests fanned this smoke over Mr. Harriot’s body, moaning low together as if singing a lullaby. Some of the smoke drifted over Andrew. Suddenly he felt as if he were floating.

  When the fire was out, the priests carried the litter to the house of the dead and shoved it in.

  Andrew felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach.

  “Manteo!” he cried. “Is he dead?” The boy was weeping.

  “Wait!” said Manteo. He was like one in a trance.

  “Is he alive?”

  Manteo nodded slowly. The smoke had affected him too.

  “What did they smoke him with?”

  Manteo shook his head. “Go now,” he said. “Come tomorrow afternoon. I will watch him with Sky.”

  “What will Captain Lane do when he finds out?” Andrew asked as he and Tremayne rowed back to the fort together.

  “Depends on whether Mr. Harriot is alive or dead, doesn’t it?” Tremayne replied. “We’ve done what we could, and what we’ve done is right!”

  When they returned the next afternoon, Mr. Harriot was lying in the sun. He was still on the stretcher, but he was conscious. His fever had broken. Manteo and Sky sat beside him.

  Andrew whispered, “Thank you. Your people saved him.”

  Manteo nodded but said nothing.

  “What did they smoke him with?” Andrew asked again. “And the dried flowers they put over his body—what were they?”

  Manteo shook his head.

  “In the spring I’ll show you,” Sky promised later. “The flowers and the seeds they threw on the fire are from the same plant. It is the priest’s chant, though—their prayer—that gives it power.”

  “Why do you teach me these things when your uncle will not?” Andrew asked.

  “Because we are brothers. You teach me what you call your science; I teach you ours. We can do much together!”

  Mr. Harriot lay weak for days. He remembered nothing.

  The captain asked no questions. Somehow he’d got word. That night he read aloud to the company from Saint Mark about men casting out devils, speaking with new tongues, and taking up serpents.

  34

  CHRISTMAS REVELS AT FORT ROANOKE

  The winter moon was like a pearl in blue velvet, bright against soft, large and indistinct, charmed. The first dustings of snow revealed every path. Seeds, dried leaves, branches, and twigs appeared like sea wrack on the white crust. In the clear, slanted morning light, larch needles in bared places came up the color of old pottery. As the woods grew lighter without the leaves, the spruce, rhododendron, and pines glowed green. The hideout Andrew had built with Sky was visible to everyone now. The men said it was a bear’s nest.

  There was still some cricket song, some gold and yellow in the woods; then it was winter proper. Two weeks before Christmas, a major blowing storm broke off branches and left deep drifts.

  The air took on a dry spice smell as the storm cleared and the sky turned rose. While the company shoveled, made snowmen, and tossed snowballs, Andrew helped the carpenters build simple two-man sleds—heavy crude planks with wooden runners. There was no steering them—you just aimed and went. The men trooped out to the gully to race, yelling and laughing as they shot down the steep that got slicker and slicker with every run until it was sheer ice and there were crashes and bruises. That night they all sang songs and danced jigs in front of the fort’s great stone fireplace. Firewood was one thing they had plenty of.

  Andrew wore Pena’s cap for America day and night now. Every time he put it on, his breath caught as he pictured his burly friend in the garden at Durham House.

  With the needle Mr. Harriot had given him, Sky stitched a cap like Andrew’s from the skins of rabbits they snared. They played hide-and-seek in the winter woods. Andrew gave Sky a mirror and taught him how to flash and signal in the bright cold light.

  No one dared grumble within earshot of Captain Lane, but he knew his people were dismayed that food was short and they’d not found gold. To keep order, he worked the explorers harder than ever gathering firewood, strengthening the fort, surveying, hunting. “Not so glum, my boys!” he said over and over. “Work cures all dismay.”

  The day of the snowstorm, he summoned Mr. Harriot.

  “You must plan our revels!” he announced. “We’ll be wanting skits and music. Work it up.”

  The carpenters built a makeshift stage in the great hall with a sign: “Fort Roanoke revels, 1585.” Chief Pemisapan and his dignitaries were invited. They came in full warrior regalia with gifts of tobacco. The English put on their fineries too, including the gentleman whose yellow silk suit got stained in the Tyger’s grounding. The Indians admired him most of all: “Yellow bird!” they said in their language, pointing and nodding as the firelight caught their oiled faces and made them gleam in a way that made some uneasy.

  To warm things up, the Englishmen sang patriotic songs and the Queen’s anthem, everyone playing and banging away on something—bagpipes, whistles, rattles, battle drums, bells, flutes, fiddles. Then it was time for the skit. They built the fire up to roaring and lit torches. The place went silent. The air was thick with blue tobacco smoke.

  To a merry march of bagpipes and fiddles, Sky flashed a mirror beam on a figure dressed like a young warrior creeping out from a dark corner toward someone dressed like Captain Lane, in armor and tin hat, with a heavy stick in one hand, a shovel in the other. As the warrior drew close, the captain banged his stick on the floor and waved the shovel. “Dig, boys, dig! Dig harder!” he yelled.

  The Indians in the audience nudged one another, pointing first at the warrior, then at the captain. “Big Thumps-a-Stick!” they muttered.

  Andrew played the Indian; Tremayne played Captain Lane. It took a while for the noisy captain to notice the boy. When at last he did, he thumped and stomped even harder.

  “What do you dig for?” the warrior asked.

  “Gold!” the captain thundered. “Grains of gold!”

  “You look hungry, sir. Do you eat those grains?”

  “Ignorance!” the captain spluttered.

  “We grow yellow grains you can eat!” the warrior announced. “Would you like me to show you?”

  The captain turned away, reciting Bible verses at the top of his voice.

  The Indian put up his hands and made a sad face as he turned away.

  The captain stood tall as he held out the shovel. “Not so glum, my boy! Work cures all dismay!”

  As the company roared its pleasure, the actors stood in the shadows.

  What would Captain Lane say? />
  Sky shined the mirror on the captain as he stepped forward, clapping and bowing to Andrew and Tremayne.

  “A dram of spirits for everyone in the house!” he ordered. The strong drink sent the Indians staggering as the explorers toasted the players, the captain, Sir Walter, and the Queen.

  On a signal from the captain, the English sang grace with more feeling than one might have expected from that rowdy crowd, then sat down to feast on bear meat none too fresh. They were merry, but their guts were as noisy and windy as the bagpipes.

  After the feast there were more jigs and reels, men dancing with men as their Indian guests looked on. When at last the company was tired and sweaty, there were carols, and Mr. Harriot read the Christmas story from Luke.

  Then the presents! A gold angel coin from Sir Walter for each of the men; a fine French knife for Sky—“So the next time you cut me, you won’t have to use an oyster shell,” the captain laughed. Andrew got the same. There were compasses for Wanchese and Manteo; for Tremayne and Mr. Harriot, Spanish pistols. There were knitted wool caps for the Indians, which they wouldn’t put on but held open like sacks, hoping for better. At last, to a skreel of bagpipes and rattle of battle drums, Mr. Harriot made Chief Pemisapan the gift of a spring clock. Its ticking and the moving hands enchanted the chief. The metal was alive!

  “You will thrive so long as the clock’s hands turn,” Mr. Harriot advised. “If they slow or stop, you must send to the fort.” Mr. Harriot kept the key.

  There was a surprise to conclude all. At Mr. Harriot’s directing, Sky had helped Tremayne and Andrew tie bags of gunpowder to the branches of a large tree opposite the gate. When all the explorers were gathered outside, bidding farewell to their guests, a snake of flame shot sizzling from the fort. With a roar, the tree appeared to rise up out of the ground, exploding in yellow, blue, and red flashes.

  The Indians and many of the English threw themselves on the ground in terror. They got up professing it a great joke.

  The day after Christmas, a party of warriors came to the fort with corn, venison, and fish, enough for one hundred four men. Chief Pemisapan’s clock had stopped.

  35

  FOR GOLD AND THE PACIFIC SEA

  It was late. Andrew rubbed his eyes. He’d been copying for an hour; his hand was stained and sore. He’d just written Mr. Harriot’s estimate of how much food they had left in the fort.

  Tremayne had been sitting with them, adding comments and corrections. Now he stood and stretched.

  “We send to the Indians every other day now,” he muttered. “Pemisapan gives as little as he can. Only for fear of our guns does he give anything.”

  Mr. Harriot nodded. “He’s had enough of us, burning glasses, copper pots, flaming trees, and clocks no matter. At this rate we’ll soon be eating what they need to plant in the spring.”

  Wanchese was listening. “Chief Pemisapan says it is strange,” he said, “that the white men’s god gives them pistols and spinning needles but lets them starve.”

  “Tell the chief our God provided him to care for us,” said Mr. Harriot, looking hard at Wanchese.

  The Indian looked away.

  Every morning now the captain would send a team of explorers fanning out through the forest to drive game toward the hunters. Others gathered crabs and forked for oysters.

  Sky showed Andrew how to gather small seeds from a dried plant that stuck up through the snow. It took all morning to gather a cupful, which they pounded into paste and baked into small cakes. Some days, that and a few oysters were all they ate.

  Manteo showed them how to make a bread of acorns pounded and shelled, with some of the bitterness leached out in salt water. Andrew could not eat it for the cramp it gave his guts, but Mr. Harriot declared it tastier than English bread.

  “We’ve learned to eat hunger,” Tremayne joked, but even as they grew gaunt, the greatest hunger among the explorers was still for gold. The hungriest of all was the captain.

  Ever since his first meeting with Chief Pemisapan, Captain Lane had made it clear he wanted wassador more than anything. The chief, for his part, soon realized he did not have enough saved corn to feed everyone through the winter and plant in the spring.

  Mr. Harriot was in charge of the next party that rowed across the channel to trade for food. When he was settled in the chief’s lodge, Pemisapan surprised him with news about a large village five days’ paddle to the north, near the great bay the Indians called Chesapeake.

  “We trade with their chief, Menatonon,” Pemisapan said. “Skins for metal. They will give your chief news of wassador.” Mr. Harriot pressed Pemisapan to say more. He wouldn’t. That day the explorers got less corn and moldier.

  Captain Lane clapped his hands when he heard about the village the wassador had come from. Mr. Harriot looked brighter than he had since his illness. They asked Manteo and Wanchese about it. Wanchese shook his head and said nothing.

  “It used to be they could send seven hundred warriors to battle,” Manteo reported. “Now I don’t know.”

  “Our guns would be nothing against so many,” the captain mused. “We must devise a trick. What can you tell me about their chief? You, Manteo, what do you know about him?”

  “He is weak in his limbs from fever,” Manteo replied. “His favorite son carries him.”

  “Ah,” said the captain, lowering his eyes as he nodded to himself.

  “Do you know about this tribe?” Andrew asked Sky later.

  “No. And I never heard where the metal came from. I thought it came from the god Okeus.”

  On Valentine’s Day in wet snow, Tremayne, Mr. Harriot, and Andrew mustered with the captain and a small company to go to Chief Menatonon’s village.

  Andrew whispered to Mr. Harriot, “Can Sky come along?”

  “No!” said Mr. Harriot, making a grim face. “But for Sir Walter’s order, the captain would leave you behind too.”

  Sky knew without being told. He was not around when Andrew went to say goodbye. He’d gone back to his home island.

  As they proceeded up the river valley, Mr. Harriot measured how fast the water fell. “This will be a good place for mills,” he observed, sketching a map. “Close to meadows where we can grow grain and not far from the sound for shipping.”

  As the company approached Chief Menatonon’s village, Captain Lane sent Wanchese ahead with two soldiers to arrange a parley.

  “Tell him I come to speak.”

  Word came back that the English were welcome. Chief Menatonon would meet Captain Lane in front of his lodge.

  The captain wore his heavy cape with large pockets. Mr. Harriot and Andrew walked just behind him to translate.

  The chief sat propped on a litter. Although it was raw and blowing rain, all he wore was a patch at his waist and a deerskin about his shoulders. His legs and arms were withered.

  His allegiance men and favorite son stood beside him. As Captain Lane’s party approached, Menatonon’s people came out from their lodges. They showed no fear.

  Captain Lane walked up slowly, holding his hands out, palms up.

  Menatonon nodded slightly.

  “Give him our greeting,” the captain ordered Mr. Harriot. Captain Lane slipped his hands into his pockets as if they were cold.

  Mr. Harriot had just started his speech of greeting when the captain drew a pistol from his cloak and fired it into the ground before the chief’s litter. The shot sent up clods of mud and dirt. As the Indians fell back yelling, the captain drew another pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Menatonon’s head.

  “Mr. Harriot!” he snarled. “Tell his men I’ll shoot him if they attack.”

  Andrew stood frightened, trying to understand. Then his face began to burn.

  Before Mr. Harriot could speak, Menatonon signaled his men to stand back. He was calm, almost amused by the trick. He tilted his head a little as if to ask, “What do you want?”

  The captain summoned his soldiers to bind the crippled man’s hands.

&nb
sp; Andrew shrank away from the captain. He looked at Mr. Harriot. The tall man was pale, his mouth tight with anger. We are just like Spaniards, Andrew thought.

  “Wanchese,” the captain ordered. “Ask him where the wassador is.”

  There was a pause. Chief Menatonon seemed bewildered, unable to understand the question. At last he replied, “There is a great river to the north. Where it falls out of the mountains, men take grains of metal from the sand.”

  The captain held up one of the medals he’d taken from the sacred cave. “Is the metal like this?” he asked, thrusting it in the chief’s face.

  Menatonon stared. “Where did you get that?” he whispered.

  “Why? What is it?” Mr. Harriot asked.

  “The image of our god Okeus. Only the chief priest has such a thing.”

  “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” Captain Lane demanded.

  “Skip all that!” the captain ordered when Mr. Harriot told him. “Wanchese,” he said, motioning Mr. Harriot aside, “ask him if the grains they find where the water falls out of the mountain are hard or soft.”

  The chief was calm. He closed his eyes as if dozing. Andrew’s face was still hot with shame.

  “Well?” the captain barked, stamping his foot.

  “Soft.”

  The captain narrowed his eyes and nodded. “So! Perhaps we’ll find gold there.

  “And beyond the headwaters of that river, is there a great sea? Ask him that, Wanchese!”

  “Over the smoke-colored mountains, much water” was the reply.

  “The Pacific!” the captain cried. “We’ve discovered a passage to the East—a way to China!” He couldn’t contain himself. “How far is it to the headwaters?” he spluttered. “Ask him that, Wanchese: how far is it to the headwaters of that river?”

  The captain was pacing about, impatient with how long it took Wanchese to ask his questions and how slow the drowsy chief was to answer.

  Andrew was afraid of what the captain would do. The man seemed crazed. The boy held his breath as he watched the captain feel for the pistol.

  Wanchese could not seem to make the chief understand.