by Linda Grant
The Captain and his men on board the boat were firing enthusiastically now, while the Indians returned their fire. Vines grabbed at J.J.’s ankles as he tore through the peas, the sweat pouring down his face in the still-warm July evening.
The shooting let up a little. Either the Indians were poor shots or else their guns were very inaccurate. With a semiautomatic, a U.S. Marine could have mowed them down in seconds.
Up to his ankles now in the warm water of the river, he had only a few yards more to go. Church, crouched low in the canoe, was yelling, “Good lad!” and extending a hand to help him into the canoe.
He’d made it! J.J. was just lifting up a foot to get into the canoe when something hard and fiery slammed into his back, and then he was falling into the water facedown, voices calling him and hands pulling at him, and then a great roaring darkness …
CHAPTER 26
Captain Roger Golding–Caleb Morgan Captain Golding’s sloop on the Sakonnet River, July 9, 1675
* * *
Since he’d put the piece of cloth soaked in herbs on his tongue just a few seconds ago, Caleb was experiencing the most peculiar sensations. His eyes were playing funny tricks on him, as though he were getting cataracts and couldn’t see properly, everything going dim.
Seconds later, he felt himself caught up by what felt like an invisible cloak of energy that wrapped itself about him and propelled him across the singing void, through universes of darkness, into another body.
It wasn’t what he’d expected, but then he hadn’t really known what to expect. He’d been prepared for failure but not for success.
It was a neat trick, a kind of immortality. He acknowledged to himself that he’d badly wanted, just once more, to feel the juices of a young man’s body running through his veins again, to feel muscles that worked smoothly and didn’t falter. When he was young, he had taken all that for granted: the splendid physical health and suppleness; the ability to stay up all night with scarcely any loss of energy; and the general feeling of well-being. Oh, he still had more stamina than many men half his age, but there was a difference now. Like a miser apportioning his gold, he was careful to expend only a rationed amount of his carefully hoarded energy. So he spent the small coin of his force, knowing that his reserve of strength was gradually dwindling until one day, bankrupted of that natural life force, death would claim him.
“Captain Golding, do you wish us to send the canoe to Mr. Church and his men?”
Dazzled by the glare of sunshine on the water, Caleb put a hand to his eyes. He was standing on a 50-foot sloop. Information from the captain’s mind told him that it had a shallow draft—easy to see that it had to be shallow in this river—and a hickory keel with a hull built of oak.
Indians were firing on his crew and the sloop. On the shore lay a small body of men, Englishmen, judging by their white shirts and light complexions, who looked in desperate trouble.
A shot came whistling by his ear and right through a sail. Too close by half!
A young sailor dressed in rough, stained trousers and a shirt rushed over to him. “Captain Golding, the men’s chances of surviving the Indian attack be small, sir, if we do not fetch them off.”
“Send the canoe,” commanded Caleb gruffly.
The sailor grinned and dashed away to carry out the order. More shots were being aimed their way, but most of them fell harmlessly short. The distance was too great.
Caleb could feel his spirits rising, the adrenaline flowing through his body, a young man’s body, strong and fit.
He drew in a lungful of air, fresh, and full of the woodsy scents of a forest that had stood untouched for centuries. The river was clear and looked clean enough to drink. Pollution wasn’t a problem here and wouldn’t be for another couple of centuries.
A heavy burst of firing, this time from the men around him, snared his attention. It took some time for the canoe to make the ten trips to get off the 20 men. There wasn’t much for him to do, just watch as the Englishmen took a run for the canoe while the soldiers on board kept the Indians busy by firing at them with those archaic weapons of theirs.
Only one man left. He seemed to be waiting for someone, a boy running through the water. The boy was yelling something. He’d just reached the canoe when he arched his back and fell into the water. The man—it had to be Church—was hauling his companion into the canoe and paddling like fury.
Another hail of bullets, miraculously missing Church, whistled though the air. Caleb let out an involuntary sigh of relief. The captain’s memories told him how Church had settled on a farm in Little Compton, Rhode Island, and made friends of the Sakonnet Indians who lived near him and learned their techniques of warfare. His bravery and respect for Indians impressed the tribes and drew many to him, including Awashonks, the leader of the Sakonnets. When war came, he encouraged her not to join Philip in his war against the whites.
“Take up the lad first!” shouted Church.
When the boy was laid on the deck, it was obvious that he was quite dead.
“Poor Tom. He took the bullet meant for me. He is with our Lord now,” said Church, turning the boy over and reverently closing the eyes that were staring sightlessly into the darkening sky.
Caleb shook his head and shouted an order to take up the anchor and set sail.
Then, looking at the still form of the dead boy, he was torn by the unfairness of it all, that someone so young had to die, someone about the same age as J.J.
What was it the boy had yelled? “Jeremy, get me out of here!”
Caleb stared again at the corpse. He knew with a terrible certainty that the boy lying on his deck had to have been his young cousin.
But, damn it all, this wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen! No one had mentioned that in the course of attempting to change history you could get killed.
Caleb could feel a shrinking in his bones, as though he were becoming several sizes smaller and weaker. Face it, he told himself. I’ve been spoiled, gone soft, addicted to luxury. But I agreed to this adventure. Now I have to do whatever it takes!
Caleb straightened up and took deep breaths of the intoxicatingly fresh air. A recollection stirred in him of the time when his mother had taken him to visit an elderly aunt of hers. Lost in a labyrinth of dreams, the frail old lady sitting in her wheelchair had looked at him with faded blue eyes and patted his hand. She began whispering, so low that he had to bend to catch her words, “Caleb, bold one.”
He’d often thought of that encounter. Once again, he felt that fate had placed him in difficult circumstances where he had to live up to the expectation inherent in the meaning of his name. He hoped that he had carried out his part of the mission, which was to save Church’s life.
CHAPTER 27
Kiontawakon Seneca village, July 19, 1675
* * *
In preparation for this day, Kiontawakon had fasted and meditated. Now, sitting cross-legged with only the moon and a small fire for light, he closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and began taking slow, regular breaths. Years of practice allowed him to quickly enter a trance, which ushered him into that magical place that was his alone, a place of comfort and safety, where he could begin his scrying.
He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked into the bowl of water in front of him. A mist began forming over the surface, then condensed into an image, the face of the hated Englishman, Benjamin Church. The wily Church, who converted Indians to his religion and his cause and accepted them into his loyal band of followers, this man was by far the most dangerous of the white men, because he had that gift for making men, even the proudest of Indian warriors, love and follow him.
Why couldn’t the tribal chiefs see that this white man with his honeyed words would be the instrument to destroy the New England Indians? Once they were reduced to living in a few miserable villages, they would disappear. Once they were gone, how long would it take before the Iroquois League itself would be in deadly peril?
It should be cle
ar, even to an idiot, that Church must be destroyed, and soon.
After the festival of the ripening of strawberries had come news of the Wampanoag attack on Church and his men. Twenty white men had evaded a force of 300 warriors. Truly, Church must be a man favored by the spirits!
The chiefs in power over Church were not so wise. Metacom had slipped out of their grasp and put to the torch many of their towns. If Church could be stopped, the unwary English could be dispatched.
That meant that the Morgans who were helping Church had to be thwarted. Kiontawakon knew that words of reason would not be enough to persuade the Morgans to stop their meddling. Other means would be necessary. The Stone Person had told him that another Morgan beside the Jason spirit was about to interfere.
Ignoring the cool wind that blew off the lake, Kiontawakon began drumming softly, slipping as in a dream from the Middle World of ordinary reality into the Lower World, where he would ask—as he had many times before—the Great Horned Owl, his power animal, for help.
But as the fire burned down, no answers came. Never had the shaman dared to impose his will on the spirits but tonight, as he felt the power of those dark, primitive forces he had consulted earlier flooding through him, he sent his consciousness in search of his power animal. Finding it, the shaman thrust his will into the bird, directing its path into a great, swooping rush toward his enemy.
CHAPTER 28
Captain Prentice–Dan Morgan The Great Swamp Fight, December 19, 1675
* * *
Dan squinted at the ground covered by a powdering of fresh snow sparkling with a jewel-like brilliance in the sunshine. Letting his horse pick his own way over the rugged terrain, he shivered and hunched down farther into his inadequate coat. And he’d thought Minneapolis a deep freeze in the winter. Oh, for a down-filled parka and warm boots!
He’d spent the last week being alternately terrified and outraged, although there were times when he acknowledged to himself that it was better than the life he’d been leading for the past six months. However, any romantic illusions he might have had about serving in a colonial army had been quickly dispelled when he’d landed in the body of Captain Prentice. For a 55-year-old man, the guy was in great shape, lean and hard-muscled.
The Captain’s memories kept welling up like some damn stream of consciousness thing: memories of fighting under Cromwell in the English Civil War, then coming to Massachusetts Colony with his wife and daughter (the Two Graces he called them for they were both named Grace) and trying to build a life in this new country where everything was unfamiliar.
Later, at the start of King Philip’s War, Prentice had been appointed Captain of the Horse after a plea from the colonists for protection from Metacom’s forces, who were burning their homes and killing settlers. This came in June of 1675 after one of the colonists in Swansea had shot and wounded an Indian who had been shooting his cattle and trying to burgle his house. When Prentice and his men had hurried to Swansea, they’d been ambushed. After a brief shoot-out, the Indians had disappeared.
Since then, Captain Prentice had been chasing the Indians without much luck. The enemy knew how to slip away over trails that led to their hiding places in forests and swamps. With the guns that they had bought from the English, they were deadly and experienced fighters.
How ironic was it that he should find himself in December of 1675 in charge of a troop of cavalry! For starters, he’d hated horseback riding ever since a horse had thrown him when he was a kid. His latest experiences hadn’t changed his mind. His mount, a rangy coal-black mare, seemed to know that he wasn’t really her master and was becoming a damn nuisance, even trying to buck him off. His men were starting to make sniggering comments about the situation. Still, it was probably better than walking like most of the other poor guys. Each foot soldier lugged a heavy musket and carried a snapsack, which consisted of six feet of fuse, a leather belt holding a dozen or more boxes of powder, a bag of bullets, and a horn of priming powder.
He’d have felt a lot better, too, about going into hostile Indian territory if he had a decent gun, like his .30-30 Winchester that he used to take out hunting, not this poor excuse for a weapon, which misfired occasionally and took forever to load.
However, nothing seemed to bother their leader Church, who was a strange mixture of piousness and toughness and a natural at guerrilla warfare.
Dan remembered how, only a day after arriving in the captain’s body, he’d found himself agreeing to go with Church. Their leader hadn’t any trouble finding men to go with him. They seemed to think he led a charmed life and were willing to follow him anywhere. So Dan had moved out quietly that night with the rest of the troops marching at wide intervals while scouts looking for Indians fanned out on both sides and in front.
They’d been about an hour marching with only a crescent moon to light the way over narrow frozen trails, through woods blanketed with snow, when they’d come to a steep embankment. His mare pulled up of her own accord and whinnied as she stamped her feet. He watched as the other riders, slipping and sliding as they went, carefully edged their mounts down the slope. Then it was his turn; only his mount didn’t want to move. There was one way to fix that.
Amazing what a taste of his spurs could do. His mare began moving smartly down the incline, avoiding the small bushes looking stark and bare of leaves.
Some instinct made him look up. Silhouetted against the moon, a Great Horned Owl was diving straight for him. His mare must have sensed something, too, because she neighed in panic and tried to turn sideways. Then Dan was falling, and tufted talons like steel spikes were slashing at his coat. For an instant of time, in the owl’s huge black eyes rimmed in gold, Dan thought he detected a human presence. Throwing up his arms, he lashed out at the bird. Suddenly, as if released from a spell, the owl flapped its enormous wings and sailed off soundlessly into the night.
“Stupid bird! Did you see how it spooked my horse and tried to peck out my eyes?”
“Yes, ’twas passing strange, Captain Prentice. Are you hurt?” Bending over him was Church himself, wearing a concerned expression on his face.
Swallowing his anger—you had to be careful about cussing around Puritans—Dan said, “I guess I’ll live.” He scrambled awkwardly to his feet and dusted the snow off his pants and jacket.
“Your mittens,” said Church, handing him a pair of red mittens that had fallen on the ground.
“You keep them. I’ve got another pair.”
“I give you thanks,” said Church, stuffing them into the pocket of his pants.
“I wonder what got into that damn bird. I’ve never seen anything like it, an owl diving at a man like that.”
An Indian listening to their conversation—one of the praying Indians converted to Christianity—shook his head and said, “Bird was sent by spirit to kill you.”
As if things weren’t bad enough already!
Half an hour later they surprised an Indian encampment. After a brisk but short fight, they killed some and took another 18 of them prisoner.
The general had been pleased with Church’s success and sent two young Native American boys as a present to Boston.
Sanctimonious hypocrites. They could quote Scripture by the hour, but didn’t mind cheating the natives out of their lands and making slaves of them. He could appreciate how the Indians must have felt being turfed out of their homes. He remembered how he’d felt when a judge had awarded his ex-wife their house.
He had to admire these early Americans who had worked so hard to make homes in the wilderness. No wonder they were plenty upset when Metacom’s forces burned their homes and their crops.
General Sherman would similarly slash and burn his way through the South in the Civil War. Of course, if he and the other Morgans didn’t stabilize the window that Jeremy had talked about, there would be no Civil War.
This brought him to the point: what was he supposed to be doing here? Jeremy had said that they had to stop the Indians from wiping out the colonies,
but his chief concern had been to keep his butt from getting shot off and that same butt firmly in the saddle. It seemed a crazy way to run things, not to tell him what he was supposed to do.
Dan wondered anxiously where the kids were. Laney and J.J. were normal teenagers, competent in their own surroundings, with parents to watch out for them, but would they be able to handle other times and places where they’d be on their own and expected to act like adults? He’d kept his eyes open for both of them, but it was going to be next to impossible to find any of the Morgans because they were probably in different time frames. Elsewhen, Jeremy had called it.
Now, December of 1675 as near as he could figure and a few days after he’d been attacked by the owl, they were on the move again, two companies from Plymouth, six from Massachusetts, five from Connecticut, and some men from Rhode Island. All in all, about 1,000 men.
They’d captured a friendly Indian named Peter, who had told the militia where the Narragansetts, who had allied themselves with Metacom and his Wampanoags, had been hiding—in a swamp, inside a bloody big fort.
Dan had hardly slept that night, sleeping on the ground on a thin blanket. In the morning when they got up at dawn, they had only a little water and hardly any food to eat.
It was about to get worse: the wind picked up, becoming a blizzard. For eight hours his horse struggled through three feet of snow in the frozen hell. The one good thing about the day was that the cold had frozen the swamp solid so that they didn’t have to worry about becoming bogged down in the quagmire.
They knew they were close to the fort when Narragansett sentries began firing on them.
Finally they saw the fort, built on about five acres on an island in the middle of the swamp. The fort was built out of logs surrounded by a hedge close to 16 feet thick. As if this wasn’t enough protection, a moat surrounded the fort. Indians in the four watch towers at the corners of the fort began firing as soon as they saw the militia. There seemed to be only one way into the fort, over a large log that crossed the moat. That would give the Indians a fine opportunity to pick them off one by one.
