Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  “Like a chief,” Matachanna finished drily. “Don’t plant seeds in your head that can never take root, Pocahontas.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know you can’t be a werowansqua. Your mother wasn’t born of a chief’s line.”

  Clouds closed over the swath of blue sky again. The light dulled on Opossu-no-quonuske’s cloak. Dimness closed over Pocahontas’s heart. What Matachanna said was true: only those born of royal women—the sisters or mothers of chiefs—could lead the Real People. Pocahontas’s mother had been only a pretty maiden whose youth and spirit captured Powhatan’s heart for one brief season. She was not related to even a minor tanx-werowance. She was a woman of no consequence. Her marriage to the mamanatowick, though happy by all accounts, had been a fleeting affair of the heart. It had brought no political alliance, forged no ties with a powerful family, and gained Powhatan nothing save for Pocahontas herself. And what good, after all, was a daughter who could never be given in chiefly marriage?

  Matachanna, on the other hand, came from the right sort of blood. Her mother was sister to the mother of a chief. Matachanna could be useful in marriage, and could expect to be given as a first or second wife to a great husband, a man of real power and influence. All the finest things in life would be hers: beads and pearls, dresses with fine pale fringe, the most fertile plots of land for her gardens, and more copper bells and charms, Pocahontas thought sourly, than Winganuske herself could ever desire. Under the right circumstances, Matachanna might even inherit a chiefdom—might one day become a werowansqua of the Real People. Pocahontas’s mouth turned down bitterly at the thought. She could not imagine a girl who desired prestige less than prim, quiet Matachanna—and yet one day it might be hers to inherit. Pocahontas, whose spirit was full of a chief’s natural charisma, whose mind was sharp and clever and perceptive, was doomed to a life of obscurity and servility.

  She watched with a dark frown as Winganuske greeted the werowansqua. The two great women exchanged gracious words, hooking their first fingers together in a solemn gesture of friendship. Pocahontas stamped her bare foot in the mud.

  “Look there—who’s that?” Matachanna seized Pocahontas’s hand. They stared together at the werowansqua’s canoe. A small figure, painted in scarlet puccoon from hairline to waist, was half-crouched in the canoe. The figure wobbled as the boat rocked. One of the warriors tossed his oar into the belly of the boat and held it steady so the little one could climb ashore. It was a girl, naked and slight, the sides of her scalp freshly shaven and her braid wrapped with several chains of pearls.

  “I never saw her,” Pocahontas said. “She was hiding behind Opossu-no-quonuske’s cloak.”

  “She must be one of our sisters.”

  Pocahontas squinted doubtfully at the red-painted figure. The girl might be the right age to be sent to Werowocomoco, if indeed she were one of the mamanatowick’s children. Though she seems a bit old for it, Pocahontas thought. Six winters is the usual age, but this girl has seen eight or nine.

  A wrinkled hand emerged from the werowansqua’s feather cloak. The little girl went obediently to Opossu-no-quonuske’s side and allowed her hair to be stroked. Pocahontas leaned toward the women, tugging against Matachanna’s restraining grip, but she could not hear their words over the buzz of conversation among the wives and the slap of water and scrape of stone against the hulls of arriving canoes.

  Winganuske turned on her heel. “Amonute!”

  Pocahontas flinched and made as if to duck behind Matachanna, but her sister stepped away. Winganuske’s piercing dark eyes found Pocahontas, traveling over her body. She eyed the neatness of her paint and braid, the straightness of her back, the loops of pearls at her neck. Pocahontas kept her hands still. She felt an urge to grab at her necklace, the way a priest clutches an amulet to ward away an ill spirit.

  “Come here, Amonute.”

  Pocahontas shuffled forward.

  “This one is a daughter of Powhatan,” Winganuske said to the werowansqua, “but her mother was just a village girl of the Pamunkey.”

  Opossu-no-quonuske stared down at Pocahontas, hard-eyed and assessing. “Mm,” the old woman grunted.

  Pocahontas watched the werowansqua’s face carefully. Its shape was so like her father’s: the square, heavy jaw; the strong nose; the intensity of the eyes. Heartened by the familiarity, she drew herself up and stared back, unblinking.

  Winganuske saw how Pocahontas puffed herself up, and cuffed her sharply on the back of the head. Copper bells rang loud in Pocahontas’s ear. “She can show your little one how to get along here in Werowocomoco, and since she is low-blooded, I can swear her to the task.”

  Pocahontas looked up at Winganuske, mouth agape with disbelief, but Winganuske just stretched out a hand to the puccoon-covered girl. The girl came to her call, a placid pup, and tucked herself comfortably under the favorite wife’s arm.

  “Amonute, this is Nonoma, the granddaughter of Opossu-no-quonuske and daughter of Powhatan. She is high blood of the Appamattuck, and you must treat her kindly. Nonoma, this is Amonute, a common girl of the Pamunkey and daughter of Powhatan. I give her to you. She will be your handmaid, and will help you learn how we get along here in Werowocomoco.”

  Pocahontas gasped. Handmaid? She must follow this red-stained chit about the town, toting her meals and shaking out her sleeping mats? And what more? Would she be required to wash Nonoma’s high-blood hide at the morning bath, comb the tangles from her hair, chase the fleas from her bed with herb whisks in the middle of the night?

  “Take her, Amonute,” Winganuske said shortly.

  Pocahontas grabbed Nonoma’s hand and stomped back to Matachanna’s side. Her face burned hot with rage.

  Separated from her grandmother, Nonoma’s eyes welled with tears.

  “Don’t weep,” Pocahontas snapped.

  “Don’t be so cruel, Pocahontas.” Matachanna dabbed the tears from Nonoma’s eyes with her fingers, and then smudged the puccoon to cover their wet tracks. “You remember what it was like to leave your family and your village and come to Werowocomoco all alone. Poor Nonoma.”

  Pocahontas clicked her tongue in disgust. “How old are you?”

  “I’ve seen nine winters,” Nonoma said. Her voice was high and tremulous.

  “Nine! You should have come to Werowocomoco years ago!”

  Matachanna frowned. “Don’t make her feel badly, you nasty black crow. She didn’t choose when to come.”

  Pocahontas turned her back on the beaching canoes and led the way through the underbrush to the footpath. Nonoma followed closely. When they broke from the trees into the first great clearing, Pocahontas felt the new girl pause and stare at her first sight of the capital. Pocahontas had never been to Appamattuck-town, of course, but there was no doubt that Werowocomoco was far bigger than the village this red-painted whelp came from. In the five years since she had first arrived in her father’s capital, Pocahontas had come to think of Werowocomoco as her true home, even though her mother’s hearth was in Pamunkey territory, two days’ journey up the river.

  “It’s such a big town,” Nonoma said.

  “Of course it is. Would you have the mamanatowick live in a squalid little heap like Appamattuck?”

  “Appamattuck is not a squa . . . squal . . . what you say it is. It’s the loveliest town in all of Tsenacomoco.”

  Matachanna laid an arm around Nonoma’s shoulders. “Don’t mind Amonute,” she said. “Her tongue is sharp as a fish spear, I know, but she’s good inside, once you get to know her. She’s . . .”

  Matachanna’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Her warm, dark eyes wandered over Pocahontas’s face and fell upon her chest as if Matachanna saw through flesh and bones, into her heart. Pocahontas knew she was searching for the right word—the truest word to describe her, the mantle that clothed the spirit inside. Pocahontas watched with growing dismay as M
atachanna evaluated and discarded each possibility in turn. Earnest? No. Hard-working? Never. Loyal? Not even that.

  At last Matachanna found what she was looking for. “She makes good jests.”

  Nonoma sniffled and balled her fists. Pocahontas raised an eyebrow as the younger girl drew herself up, donning haughty confidence like a cloak of feathers to disguise her trembling fear.

  “Insulting Appamattuck-town is not a good jest,” Nonoma said loftily. “And I shall not put up with the envious hissing of a common-born flea.”

  Pocahontas lunged toward the girl, her fingers like claws, grasping for the pearl-wrapped braid.

  “No, no!” Matachanna stepped between them, flinging her hands out.

  Matachanna missed her grab for Pocahontas’s wrists, but Nonoma ducked away, and Pocahontas’s tingling fingers closed on empty air.

  “No fighting,” Matachanna shouted. “You are to be Nonoma’s handmaiden—you heard Winganuske’s command. You two must get along! You have no choice but to be friends.”

  “I never got a handmaiden,” Pocahontas said.

  Nonoma sniffed. “You’re not the blood of a werowance. If you’re to serve me, you must learn to keep your place.”

  Pocahontas stepped calmly toward the girl, her face still, emotionless, serene as Winganuske’s perfect mask. Her hands hung relaxed at her sides, but her palms burned with the flush of indignation. Nonoma peered up at Pocahontas, and a tentative smile appeared on the girl’s round face. It was a smile of satisfaction, a sudden realization that this Amonute, this wild Pamunkey commoner, this Mischief, could be controlled with a firm word from high-blood lips.

  “Well—” Nonoma began.

  She didn’t finish.

  Pocahontas spat full in her face. There was a moment of shock, a thrilling sensation of suspended breath and heartbeat as Nonoma’s eyes screwed tightly shut, as her mouth gaped round like the hollow in a tree when a dead branch falls away. Pocahontas watched her spittle run down Nonoma’s cheek, clearing a sticky path through the expensive puccoon.

  Then the moment passed, and Nonoma screamed as high and sharp as a hungry baby in a forgotten cradleboard. A roost of pigeons exploded out of the nearest tree, clattering through the branches.

  “Ama!” the girl bawled. But of course her mother was not in Werowocomoco. The sudden reality of her isolation struck Nonoma like the blow of a war club. She crumpled to the ground, burying her face in the soft dampness of half-decayed leaves.

  Pocahontas avoided Matachanna’s eyes. A vicious guilt gnawed at her heart, and she could not bear her sister’s reproachful stare now. The five years since she had arrived in the capital fell away from Pocahontas, peeling from her spirit like green husks stripped from an ear of corn. She was a child of six winters again, frightened and alone, thrust into a world that was much too large for her to ever find her place. She sank onto the loam beside Nonoma. The girl went on crying, keening her heartbreak to the uncaring woods. Clumsily, Pocahontas patted her back.

  “I’m sorry, Nonoma. Truly. It was wicked of me. I won’t do it again.”

  “Go away!”

  A few women emerged from the door of a nearby house to stare at the scene. Pocahontas looked to Matachanna, pleading with her eyes for help, but Matachanna folded her arms across her chest and scowled.

  “I won’t go away,” Pocahontas said. “I’m your handmaiden. So we must learn to get along. Here.” She pulled her braid over her shoulder. She had tied all her favorite ornaments into her hair in anticipation of the coming feast. She was loath to part with any of them; it was not every day a common girl was given a disc of polished copper or a tassel of purple beads.

  Her fingers landed on the most precious ornament of all: the dried foot of a kestrel, its delicate, jointed claws clutched tightly around a single sky-blue bead. Her uncle Opechancanough had given her the ornament last year, along with a message of love from her mother in Pamunkey-town. The blue bead was a true rarity. Her uncle said it had come from risky trade with the fearsome Massawomecks who lived beyond the rocky falls. The Massawomecks had obtained it from thick-bearded white men who hunted beaver and otter for their pelts—a strange, hairy-faced, strong-smelling tribe who called themselves the Frawh-say.

  Pocahontas hesitated. A treasure like the blue bead would never come again. She pressed the kestrel’s foot with her fingers, feeling the roughness of its skin, the neat, hard scales of its toes and sharpness of its claws. The bead was smooth and cool. She tugged it free of her braid.

  “Look, Nonoma. See what I have.”

  The girl raised her face from the loam. Bits of leaf stuck to the wet red mess on her cheek. Pocahontas pressed the ornament into Nonoma’s hand, then wiped the girl’s face with gentle fingers.

  Nonoma turned it over in her palm. She said nothing.

  “It’s yours.” She took the kestrel’s foot from Nonoma and tied it into the girl’s braid among the pearls and copper bangles.

  Pocahontas rose stiffly, and then offered her hand to pull Nonoma to her feet.

  “We must try to be friends,” Pocahontas said. She offered her first finger in truce. It wavered in the air between them while Nonoma sniffled. “I will teach you about Werowocomoco. But you cannot talk to me as if I’m dirt beneath your heel. Whatever you may think of my mother’s blood, Powhatan is my father, just as he is yours.”

  Nonoma hooked her finger with Pocahontas’s. “Very well.”

  In the yehakin—the longhouse Pocahontas shared with her sisters and unmarried aunts, she and Matachanna painted designs of black and yellow onto Nonoma’s skin. They covered the places where spit and earth had rubbed the puccoon away while they taught Nonoma what she needed to know in her new life at Werowocomoco: when and where to bathe each morning, how to find the privy pits, which women made the finest corn flour and the sweetest dumplings. They told her where the best silk grass grew for weaving the softest basket straps, so soft they would never bite into her flesh no matter how heavy a burden she carried. They told her which old men in the village made good digging sticks, which grandmothers had the best remedies for cough and headache, and where to find soft moss for her belt to keep her bottom and thighs from chafing on hot summer days when she worked hard in the gardens.

  After a time, Nonoma began to yawn, and Matachanna eased her down onto a heap of deerskins and covered her with a light bark mat. She and Pocahontas slid out of the house; the door flap fell into place behind them without a sound. They had talked to Nonoma for a long time. The muggy hours of afternoon were gone. The air had the feeling of impending evening, a gathering coolness and dampness. From beyond the gardens came the piping of a tiny screech owl just emerging from its hidden roost to prepare for a sunset hunt.

  “You see?” said Matachanna. “She’s not so bad after all.”

  “I still don’t like being handmaiden to a high-blood sister.”

  “I know you don’t. It isn’t in your spirit to serve others. I don’t know what Winganuske was thinking, giving you of all people to Nonoma. But truly, Pocahontas, spitting on her . . .”

  “Listen!” The steady heartbeat of drums chanted through the woods. It was a sound lower than distant thunder, dark and compelling. “The last of the werowances has arrived. They’ll be in Father’s great house soon.”

  “And you,” said Matachanna firmly, “will be here with Nonoma until the feast begins.”

  “Oh, come now. She’s sleeping!”

  “What if she wakes? She’ll be frightened and alone. She needs you, Pocahontas.”

  “She has you.”

  “I wasn’t commanded to be her handmaiden.” Matachanna stared past Pocahontas’s shoulder toward the river. Toward the guests. “Besides . . .”

  “If Utta-ma-tomakkin has come, he will already be in the great house, and you won’t see him until the feast. So you might as well stay here with Nonoma until the dancing be
gins.”

  Matachanna blushed at the sound of the priest’s name. As a high-blood daughter of the mamanatowick, Matachanna would make a perfect wife for a man as powerful as Utta-ma-tomakkin. If only he could see how the girl followed his every movement with wide, shining eyes, as rapt as an infant staring at its mother. If he knew, he might sit with the mamanatowick to discuss a bride price for his prettiest and most dutiful daughter. Utta-ma-tomakkin, though, was a man of uncommon focus. He was as helpless to tear his attention from his divination bones and sacred pipe as Matachanna was to tear hers from the priest.

  “If you let me go,” Pocahontas said, “I will get into Father’s yehakin. And if I see Utta-ma-tomakkin, I’ll tell him you will dance for him tonight at the fire.”

  Matachanna gasped. “I never could! I would die of embarrassment. Anyhow, it’s unkind of you to leave your work for me to do. Nonoma is your duty. You think of no one but yourself!”

  “I think of you. I’ll carry a message to Utta-ma-tomakkin for you. What shall I tell him?”

  “You won’t even get into the great house—not for a meeting like this one. Father’s guards will never allow you inside.”

  Pocahontas narrowed her eyes to slits. “I have my ways. Well? Utta-ma-tomakkin waits!”

  Matachanna scowled. “I’ll stay with Nonoma. But you must be less selfish, Pocahontas. One day I’ll grow tired of you dropping your work into my basket, and all your smiles and jests and charming ways will no longer be enough to make me like you.” She did not wait for a reply, but ducked quickly back through the door and disappeared into the longhouse.

  Pocahontas set off through the woodland at a run, pounding down the well-worn paths that wended between gardens and the blackened fire pits where racks of fish stood drying in columns of smoke. The sun was low and red between the trees, and the air bit at her skin with springtime chill. She passed the dance circle and the sweat lodge, and flew by the clearing where the women of the town stacked baskets of food for the feast. The pale bark siding of Powhatan’s massive yehakin glowed a luminous crimson in the sunset. A single man ducked through the door flap; she caught the bright blur of a heavily painted apron before he vanished from sight. A werowance—the only one to be seen in the vicinity of the great house. All the chiefs must be inside already.