Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  This time they did not pause to collect their deer as they stormed toward the canoes. Smith cast about for some means of keeping them there, grasping for some small piece of knowledge he might salvage from the council’s blunder. He swung his fists at his sides as if he might beat back the devil of his own helplessness, and his hand struck the butt of his snaphaunce.

  “Wait,” Smith cried. Though the word meant nothing to them, the desperation in his tone caused a few of the Indians to turn.

  Smith drew his gun, held it casually across his chest, grinning through the tangle of his beard. The afternoon sun glinted on the wheel lock.

  The Indians hesitated.

  Smith aimed the gun down the length of the yard, sighted, and looked back to the naturals with an air of playful appeal.

  They took a few steps toward him, arguing among themselves.

  Smith beckoned to them, holding the lure of the gun in plain view, now and then sighting as if he might fire at some invisible target.

  Scrivener approached. His eyes were wide and fearful beneath the brim of his steel helmet; he must have donned the thing when he heard the lookout’s cry. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Bring me a leather breastplate,” Smith said. “Quickly.”

  “Smith . . .”

  “Do it.”

  While the Indians milled nearby, Smith propped the breastplate onto the highest rail of the fence. It was a well-made piece of armor, stiff and thick, near as hard as oak. By now the English had gathered, too, keeping well clear of the naturals, watching Smith’s show with wary curiosity.

  Smith measured forty paces from the target. At such a distance, the bullet from his gun might dent the breastplate but certainly would not penetrate it.

  He aimed with exaggerated care. The Indians held their breath as one body, leaning toward him, wide-eyed and eager.

  Smith allowed the moment to hang, savoring the wild thrill of anticipation. Then he dropped his arm, made a little bow with hand to heart, shaking his head in a self-deprecatory manner. Where are my manners? he seemed to say. He swept one arm toward the target. Please, you must fire first.

  Naukaquawis stepped forward immediately, the dark shaft of a fire-hardened arrow already nocked to his bow. He swaggered up to Smith’s side, spat a few words in his harsh tongue, and took great care in placing his feet precisely beside Smith’s. The youth drew his bow, which creaked under the strain. In the heartbeat during which he aimed, the lean, hard muscles of his chest and arms sprang into sudden detail, every sinew and fiber standing in relief through his coppery skin.

  The shaft thunked into the breastplate before Smith even realized Naukaquawis had fired. Smith blinked down the length of the yard. The arrow’s pale-brown fletching vibrated with the force of the impact. The leather vest was knocked so badly askew that it might have fallen to the ground but for the fact that the arrow had punched straight through the leather, embedding itself deeply into the post.

  The English raised their voices in a great roar of consternation.

  Smith held up his hands for silence. He swept the steel helmet from Scrivener’s brow, ignoring the man’s squawk of indignation. The helmet crowned the post where the thoroughly slain vest hung.

  Smith gestured again for Naukaquawis to take his aim. The lad was obviously pleased by the dismay his archery caused. He smirked as he pulled a new arrow from his quiver and nocked it to his string. He sighted down the shaft, his dark eyes sparking with confidence.

  Then the boy loosed, and it was Smith’s turn to smirk. Arrow met cold steel with a crack like lightning; a flurry of debris flashed into the air, feathers, wooden splinters, an arrowhead flipping end over end. The helmet remained resolutely in place.

  The English cheered.

  Naukaquawis shouted and clenched a fist in anger. His fellows clamored, stiff-backed and flushed.

  Smith pressed his hand to his heart, but the Indians jeered and turned their backs. As they fled in their canoes, Smith wrenched the arrow from the post and slid the breastplate from the shaft. The hole in the center was wide enough to slip his smallest finger through.

  “I can’t see that we’ve gained anything by your display, Smith.” Bartholomew Gosnold sipped spiced wine from a cracked porcelain cup, eschewing the clay jugs most of the men used. The light of the communal fire traced the cup’s bottom edge, rolling like a bead as Gosnold tilted the delicate thing in his large, square hand. The four walls of Jamestown’s first cabin loomed, still roofless, in the nighttime shadows beyond the fire.

  “Can you not?” How like you, Smith did not say.

  “Now the naturals are angrier than ever.”

  The colony had made good use of the deer the Indians left behind, gathering around the fire pit to roast and carve it. After days of gruel and dried apples, the smell of char and fat had been as sweet as the perfumes of Eden. Now, twenty or so men lounged on rough benches hewn out of logs, quiet with satiety and exhaustion.

  The ship’s boy, Thomas Savage, moved in and out of the firelight like a small, pale wraith, silently gathering up bowls and knives. The boy dragged a finger through the grease at the bottom of a bowl and licked it. He watched Smith, expectant, waiting for a sharp reply to Gosnold’s taunt.

  Deliberately, and with great effort, Smith spoke in a neutral, almost friendly tone. “We know now that their weapons are far superior to ours.”

  “Superior!” Gosnold fairly barked he word. “We have guns, Smith. A well-aimed lead ball could tear the bow arm off an Indian. What have they got but clubs and a few sharpened sticks?”

  Heat rose to Smith’s face, and he abandoned his pretense of neutrality. “Aye, a lead ball could do the trick at near enough range. And while you’re reloading and readying your matchlock, those Indians who haven’t moved out of range will feather you with a half-dozen arrows apiece. Their accuracy is better, they’re much quicker to fire, and we’ve found out that their sharpened sticks can pierce leather armor.”

  Gosnold sniffed. “But not steel.”

  “Am I to understand you’ll be sleeping and pissing in steel from now on?”

  “Smith isn’t wrong,” said Matthew Scrivener. “We know more about the Indians now than we knew yesterday. It was of value to us.”

  “Well, what are we to do with the information?” Gosnold asked.

  “We ought to do as I suggested on our first day in the New World,” Smith said. “Build a palisade around the fort. It would be much better protection against those arrows than whatever you call the useless contraption we’ve currently got.”

  “It is called,” Wingfield said with great dignity, “a fence. And your suggestion remains as ridiculous now as it was on our arrival. We can win their friendship if we don’t take pains to humiliate them, as you’ve done. Building a palisade would take five times the effort we’ve already expended on the fence.”

  “If we’d put forth that effort from the start, we’d have a fifth of our palisade already,” said Smith.

  A few of the men nearby muttered agreement. Wingfield squinted into the darkness as if to pick out the faces of the dissenters.

  “Let us be honest with one another,” Smith said.

  Wingfield smiled wryly. “Indeed, let’s.”

  “The only reason you refuse to build a palisade is because it was my idea. Had any other man suggested it, the palisade would be standing by now, and we would be sheltered. God alone knows how many Indians are out there in the darkness at this very moment.”

  Thomas Savage dropped a bowl with a clatter. Several of the men jumped.

  Smith raised his voice. “The truth is, Wingfield, that you are envious of me.”

  Wingfield hooted. It took Smith a moment to realize the sound was laughter. It was the first time he had ever heard Wingfield laugh. “Envious? Of you?”

  Smith squared his shoulders. “Of my aut
hority.”

  More voices rose in laughter. “What authority?” somebody called from the darkness. “You are no gentleman, Smith.”

  Stiff-backed, Smith rose from his log bench. He turned his back on the colonists with a smooth, deliberate coolness. He walked into the darkness toward his tent as though he feared nothing, certainly not the jeers of senseless men. But until he reached the concealment of his cold, damp quarters, his body was rigid as stone. He half expected the keen-eyed stare of Naukaquawis sparking like embers in the dark, and the sudden punch of an arrow through his gut.

  He ducked into his tent and rolled himself in his blankets. Just as his body heat was beginning to beat back the worst of the chill, filling his bedroll with a wan, uncertain warmth, the image of the hole in the leather breastplate came to Smith’s tired mind. He fought the vision away, but it persisted, until finally Smith cursed and slid from his bedroll. The wet chill assaulted his skin; he shivered violently as he bent to the box that contained all his worldly possessions. He found his steel helmet easily enough and set it beside his blankets. He tossed aside his leather breastplate in disgust. His cold, stiff fingers brushed the unmistakable roughness of chain mail and Smith pulled the shirt from his box and laid it out on the ground. It needed cleaning and oiling; he could smell the tang of rust. But in a pinch, it would do.

  Sleep was a very long time in coming. Even Constantinople wasn’t enough to take him away from the hard, unfriendly bed. Antonia’s voice crying out in ecstasy could not drown out the jeers of the men in the firelight. You are no gentleman. When at last he fell into a shallow, fitful slumber, he dreamed of Antonia with a razor in her hand, shaving away all the lovely, dark hair from one side of her scalp. Smith caught the locks as they fell, thick black coils that turned to snakes in his hands. They writhed in slow loops and struck him with their fangs. The venom coursed cold through his flesh, burning along his veins.

  The chill woke him. In the throes of his nightmare he had kicked the bedroll apart, and now he was wracked with cold. He groped for the ends of the blankets. A faint sound halted his movement, a whisper so slight he was not at all certain he’d heard anything. Smith froze like a rabbit in the brush, listening, splayed helpless on his back in the impenetrable darkness of the tent. His pulse beat furiously in his tight, dry throat; serpents writhed in his gut.

  The whisper came again. And in another moment he heard a crackling: the sudden rush of flames. A man screamed in terror. A chorus of voices answered in piercing, yowling whoops, crying in frantic excitement, baying like hounds on the scent.

  Smith rolled to his knees, seized the mail shirt, and jerked it over his head. The cold of it was a fire on his skin. He crammed the helmet onto his head, realized it was backward, and righted it with a calm so at odds to his panic that it startled him. He found his snaphaunce in the darkness and eased it into his palm.

  He crept carefully from the tent, staying low. The yard was in chaos. Men staggered from their tents, some of them reflecting starlight from steel, others armored with nothing more substantial than leather, or, more foolish still, their own skins. A nearby man raised the long, lean arm of a matchlock and aimed. Smith heard the iron click of the serpentine and tensed for the blast of the gun, but none came. The man cursed extravagantly; the wick of his match had snuffed itself out in the damp night. He ducked behind his tent to relight the wick just as the pale streak of an arrow hissed by, burying itself in the mud.

  The peaked roof of a tent smoldered and one wall of the cabin was ablaze. As Smith watched, a thin line of fire spread around the perimeter of the camp: the naturals had set the fence alight.

  A pack of great, lean Indians went loping by. Smith pressed himself into the mud, hardly daring to breathe, still as a stone in the deep-indigo shadow of his tent. When the Indians had passed, Smith steadied his snaphaunce and fired after them. A gust of sparks hissed from the wheel lock. An instant later the gun kicked in Smith’s hand. The pop of the lead ball cracked into the night. Smith blinked, blinded by the flare of sparks. He could not tell whether his bullet had found its mark.

  From somewhere in the darkness he heard English voices cursing, and then screaming. Smith edged from tent to tent, making his way toward the river. He sprinted past the cabin, choking on the thick smoke, his eyes hot and streaming with tears. Beyond stood the supply tent. A row of barrels crouched sepia red in the light of the burning building. Smith made straight for them, never slowing. He hoisted his gun high as he planted his free hand atop one keg, hurled his body up and over, and landed hard on the other side. The whistle and impact of arrows on wood reverberated along the ranks of barrels.

  “Master Smith!”

  The ship’s boy, Thomas Savage, huddled against one keg, pressing his thin, frail body against the slats as if he might find some admittance and conceal himself within it.

  Smith reloaded his gun, and then peered cautiously through a gap in their wall of flour and beans. The fierce orange light was sliced by flickering shadows. The flash of strong running legs. The fluidity of a body pausing, raising a bow, drawing. Smith poked the muzzle of his gun through the gap but could not find a clear enough view to justify a shot.

  The glow of the flames illuminated the bellies of the three ships anchored in the river. The ships were not far. Perhaps . . .

  He caught sight of one of the little rowing skiffs resting on the muddy shore.

  “Thomas, listen well. Get out to that skiff and row for the Discovery.”

  “I?” the boy squeaked.

  Smith eyed the lad’s skinny arms, the pigeon breast showing through the wool of his sleep shirt. “You’ll have to do; there’s nobody else.”

  “But they’ll shoot me, Master Smith!”

  “I’ll keep them off you.” Smith showed him the gun.

  A scream ripped the night. Thomas gasped.

  “We must stop them, boy. The sailors still aboard the ship can do it. But you must carry them a message from me. Brace up; if I see any Indian aim a bow your way, I’ll shoot him. Now here is what you’re to tell the sailors.”

  In a moment more, Thomas Savage was skittering through the darkness, half-crouched, his spindle legs carrying him across the open ground and to the skiff as quick as a loosed colt. Smith glanced around for Indians, and then watched as the boy threw his weight against the skiff. It held fast in the mud. He jerked again, and it slid toward the river with agonizing slowness. Smith heard a whoop from nearby, and trained his gun in the direction of the sound, ready to fire should he catch sight of an Indian. Thomas was ankle deep in the river now, the skiff rising free of the mud, skimming along the surface. The boy leaped into the boat and ran out the oars. His thin arms looked frail in the moonlight, but he rowed for the Discovery with all his strength.

  Smith heard the harsh, strange tongue of the Indians, shouting from the direction of the burning cabin. He peered through his gap and found his target standing in perfect range, framed by the sides of the barrels, backlit by the blaze. There was something familiar about the whiplike strength of the limbs, the arrogant square of the shoulders. Naukaquawis. If he fired now, the naturals would be upon him before he could reload. He must wait until he had no choice: shoot or die. Smith gritted his teeth as Naukaquawis swaggered away.

  He spared another glance at the ships. The skiff had reached them and Thomas was bobbing in the little boat, cupping his hands at his mouth, shouting. The sailors burst into action. Smith saw the tiny red eye of a lit match twinkle at the Discovery’s rail. Thomas Savage ducked into the hull of the skiff, clapping his hands to his ears, and Smith dropped to his belly in the cold slime.

  The terrible, hollow roar of the cannon shook the earth. An instant later it rebounded from the opposite shore. Another blast followed seconds after.

  The naturals set up a high-pitched cry of alarm. There were a few shouted words in their language and the thud of a final arrow smacked into the keg near S
mith’s head. Then the camp was quiet, save for the crackle and snap of the flames.

  Smith held very still while the distant echo of cannon fire died, a spreading sonic ripple like the rings that expand and fade when a stone is tossed into a pond. He heard nothing but the sound of burning, not even the voices of frightened Englishmen. He raised his head, then his trembling shoulders above the tops of the barrels. The flames from the cabin twisted in a cold wind, tugging toward the woodland where the naturals had retreated. The forest was still.

  Smith slipped around the edge of the barrels. He walked into the firelight, tense and afraid, expecting arrows that never came. After several long moments, furtive movement came from tents and thickets, from stacks of felled logs. By Christ, somebody muttered in the darkness.

  Smith watched the men emerge from hiding like mice venturing from their holes.

  “At first light,” he shouted, “we cut trees for a palisade. Does any man say nay?”

  Not even Wingfield protested.

  OPECHANCANOUGH

  Season of Cohattayough

  The journey from Pamunkey-town was long, and Opechancanough had made the trek twice in half a moon. Nevertheless, he paddled his canoe with dogged focus, driving his men on with shouts and chants when their strength flagged. This time the Pamunkeys would be first to respond to Powhatan’s summons. And Opechancanough would be first to know how the meeting with the tassantassas had gone. As his canoe cut the broad silver waters of the Pamunkey River, his river, he pictured the wealth that would come to the Real People through the tassantassas’ hands: the precious copper, the hard iron, and, best of all, the guns that would subdue their enemies and expand the boundary of Tsenacomoco—the Tidewater—well beyond the natural barrier of the fall line.

  The falls were impassable to canoes, of course. The few times the Real People had carried their canoes overland, beyond the froth and noise of the rocky falls, they had met disaster. The Massawomecks and Monacans who dwelt in that wilderness had canoes made of light birch bark, far faster and more maneuverable than the cumbersome dugouts of the Real People. But with guns, the Real People would not need canoes at all. Their enemies beyond the fall line would drop like leaves in autumn. New territories would be ripe for the harvest.