Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  “This man means no harm. Nor do his people.” Utta-ma-tomakkin pronounced the judgment in short, clipped tones. “He stays. He lives.”

  Opechancanough blinked, gaped, and shut his mouth again quickly. It can’t be so. None of these tassantassas displayed so much as basic courtesy. Their hostility was plain for even a blind man to see. And this Chawnzmit, brave though he was, held more arrogance in one sly, blue glance than Utta-ma-tomakkin could ever hope to dole out in a lifetime of serving the god. Arrogance was not a habit of the benign. Chawnzmit and his kind meant nothing but harm. Opechancanough was certain.

  Utta-ma-tomakkin turned to regard Opechancanough. “You have heard the god’s word, werowance.”

  Opechancanough bowed his head in the smallest and most grudging nod. “And what does my brother wish for me to do with my captive?”

  “Take him to Werowocomoco.”

  Indeed I will. Opechancanough would cast this pale creature at Powhatan’s very feet, and pray that the mamanatowick would come to his senses. Conjuring or no, the fire in this tassantassa’s eyes smoldered with danger, with a fierce cunning that must be snuffed like an errant spark before it caught the whole world ablaze.

  Okeus, Opechancanough prayed, still feeling the thrum of the rattle in his veins, make my brother see the truth of it. Make him kill this man. Kill him, and then fall on the rest of his kind, and wipe their stain from the land.

  POCAHONTAS

  Season of Popanow

  She ran from the cache pits, panting under the weight of a basket heaped with shelled corn. The grains shifted in the basket like flowing water, hissing like rain. She ran to the smokehouses, shouting for more sturgeon and bass. She ran for nuts, for fresh hare, for stacks of turtle-shell bowls. She ran, crossing and recrossing the length of Werowocomoco, and her legs burned with the effort as her spirit burned with excitement.

  Crisp winter air bit at her nostrils, clamoring with scents from dozens of cook fires: the warm, meaty earthiness of the summer’s beans growing plump in boiling water; corn dumplings, sticky and sweet; dried fish yielding their salty oils as they were shredded by the busy fingers of so many women. Sun-dried mulberries added their pleasant tartness to the flat, bland smell of roasted squash, and from a distant fire there drifted the enticing seared-fat aroma of spitted venison, the last of the hunters’ fresh meat.

  Pocahontas lifted the flat stone from her house’s cache and lowered herself into the chest-deep pit. The earth inside was fiercely cold, the walls tattooed with white twists of frost. She puffed, enjoying the sensation of the cold working its way beneath her cloak and leggings to soothe skin flushed from running. As she caught her breath, she peeked beneath the tight lids of baskets and clay jars until she found the store of pale groundnuts, wound into neat coils and still connected by their fibrous root strings. She grunted as she lifted the jar from the pit, and then lifted herself out, frozen soil biting into her hands. Time enough to mind her scrapes later. Powhatan had called for a great feast, and the flurry and joy of its preparation was not something she wanted to miss, even for a moment.

  “Amonute!” Matachanna called. She straightened her back, still kneeling beside her troublesome cook fire; it lifted a banner of white smoke and the pale-yellow flames staggered. “Be quick with those groundnuts!”

  Pocahontas hoisted the heavy jar to one hip and ran.

  At the fire, she crawled on hands and knees with Matachanna, giggling and shrieking as they blew strong gusts of breath into the coals. Fountains of ash floated on the breeze.

  “I swear, there is more ash in the sky than in all the fire pits in Werowocomoco.” Koleopatchika, a young sister of Powhatan and the girls’ favorite unmarried aunt, sauntered out of their shared longhouse, a string of dried fish looped around one shoulder. She laughed over the mess of ash in the yard. She was still young enough to find humor in their struggle to keep the fire alight. She dropped the rope of fish atop the jar of groundnuts and sank to her knees with the girls, adding her breath to the fire. At last a strong flame took hold of the winter-damp wood, and a healthy fire began to crackle.

  Koleopatchika maneuvered her large stewpot into the fire pit. She produced knives from her supply basket, and soon all three huddled around the pot, slicing groundnuts into the water, chopping the dried fish into bite-size chunks.

  “At last,” Pocahontas said, “we will learn the secret of Koleopatchika’s famous groundnut stew.”

  Koleopatchika put on a face of stern mystery. “The secret is that I make it, child. The spirits have given me a great gift. My groundnut magic can never be replicated by any other hand.”

  “All the men swear their hearts to you when they get the smallest taste of your stew.”

  She gave her nieces a sly wink. “Men have been known to call my stewpot the most delicious and satisfying in all of Tsenacomoco.”

  A deep pink flush crept over Matachanna’s face.

  “Oh,” Koleopatchika said, half-teasing, half-apologetic. “But you are both too young to understand my jests.”

  “I’m not,” Matachanna said stoutly. “I caught the jest. It just . . . startled me, that’s all.”

  Koleopatchika’s smile twinkled like a row of stars. “You are growing up, aren’t you? I suppose it happens to all of us, sooner or later. It’s almost time for you to begin thinking about a husband.”

  “She’s already thought about it,” Pocahontas said, “endlessly, and in great detail.”

  Matachanna gave her an ugly grimace. “Say his name, and I will jab you with this knife. I’ll stick you so hard, you’ll yelp like a kicked dog.”

  “Who is he?” Koleopatchika hacked at an especially tough groundnut. “Don’t be shy. Cooking time is gossip time. You must share.”

  Matachanna turned her gaze downward, hiding her soft, dark eyes behind thick lashes. But Pocahontas could stand the secrecy no longer. “It’s Utta-ma-tomakkin!” she burst out.

  “Oh, a fine choice, Matachanna. Handsome and touched by the Okeus. And he’ll soon be very wealthy, I assume, with the way my brother favors him.”

  Matachanna glanced up. “Powhatan favors him?”

  “Well, I heard that the mamanatowick sent Utta-ma-tomakkin all the way to Pamunkey, to conjure the captive white man. Surely that means Powhatan trusts your priest.”

  “He is not my priest,” Matachanna muttered.

  Koleopatchika grinned comfortably. “One day.”

  “Pass the fish to me, Aunt,” said Pocahontas. “I imagine we’ll see Utta-ma-tomakkin today, when the party arrives from Pamunkey. And then we can watch the spring flowers bloom in Matachanna’s eyes as she gazes at her handsome priest.”

  Matachanna gave her a flat stare, full of sharp and painful promise.

  Men’s boastful shouts rose from a nearby lane, a sound like a pack of wolves yipping and tussling around a fresh kill. Pocahontas looked up in time to see her half brother Naukaquawis pass by. He grinned as he moved, pleased with his own strength, with his very maleness. A handful of warriors crowed and shoved and laughed in his wake, but Naukaquawis strode ahead of them, apart from them, moving like a thunderhead on a brisk wind, towering with the force of his own spirit. She watched him pass with the sour taste of envy stinging her throat.

  Koleopatchika cast an appreciative eye at Naukaquawis’s broad back. “Or perhaps instead of a priest, our Matachanna would prefer a werowance.”

  “Naukaquawis? No!”

  “Why not? It’s not as if your mother and his are related, so there is nothing scandalous in it. And he’s handsome. He will make a very fine husband someday. Someday soon.”

  Pocahontas looked at her aunt sharply, keen as a kestrel staring after a mouse. “What do you mean?”

  “My brother has great esteem for Naukaquawis—maybe greater esteem than for Matachanna’s priest.”

  “Don’t be coy,” Pocahontas insisted. “Co
oking is for gossip. Share.” A knotted string tightened around her heart.

  “Naukaquawis is to come into his chiefdom tonight. Powhatan will announce which territory will be his, but his first great act as werowance will be to take the tassantassa as his own.”

  “What?”

  The entire town of Werowocomoco knew that tonight Opechancanough would present his captive to the mamanatowick. What purpose such a display would serve was not yet clear. Speculation ran between the yards and cook fires, fast and wild as a river in flood. Rumor of the white man’s fate bubbled nearly as hot as the stews that boiled for the evening feast. Most thought the white man would be killed. Some thought he would be set free, made to run back to his fort and chased by men with clubs—a sort of huskanaw, the details of which grew stranger and more unlikely as the tale spread.

  “Oh, tell us what you know,” Matachanna pleaded. Apparently even prim and quiet Matachanna was not immune to the lure of gossip about the captive tassantassa.

  Koleopatchika gave a tiny, triumphant smile. She seemed to savor her gossip magic nearly as much as her groundnut magic. “Well, I only heard that Naukaquawis is to adopt the white man. The captive will be brought before Powhatan, who will sentence the man to death.”

  “Death? But why?” Pocahontas asked.

  “Don’t fret. At the last moment, Naukaquawis will save the tassantassa. He will claim responsibility for the man’s life, and take him as a member of his own family.”

  “How? Does the Okeus permit such a thing?” Pocahontas had never heard of such a ritual. She gave her aunt a skeptical look as she worked over the stew.

  “It’s all worked out with the priest. ‘I claim this man’s life as my own,’ Naukaquawis is to say. ‘I account for him. Let him be called my brother; let his hearth be joined to my own.’ I overheard Naukaquawis practicing the correct words.” She glanced about the yard of their longhouse, as if they might be surrounded by spying gossips, though the women and children who passed were intent on their own chores. “Or . . . somebody overheard. In any case, the white man, who rules his own kind, will be made tanx-werowance to Naukaquawis, since he will owe his life to the one who saves him. Thus Naukaquawis will have reign over the tassantassas, as simple as that. It’s a very fine opportunity Powhatan presents to Naukaquawis. The mamanatowick shows that young man true favor. He’ll be an important chief one day, mark my words. Are you still so certain you wish to spurn him, Matachanna?”

  Before she could stop herself, before she even knew what she was doing, Pocahontas lurched to her feet. Her knife slipped from her fingers and rang on the edge of the pot. Koleopatchika exclaimed as it fell into the stew with a plunk. She seized a ladle and began fishing for it, hissing curses in Pocahontas’s direction, but Pocahontas had already turned away. Her feet carried her blindly down the path, stumbling in the direction from which Naukaquawis had come. She was dimly aware of Matachanna calling “Amonute!” but the sound was far and thin, muted by the roaring in Pocahontas’s ears. The slick black limbs of the winter-bare forest had closed over her head by the time Matachanna caught up with her.

  Her sister pulled her into a tight embrace. Pocahontas felt sobs welling in her chest, a thick, choking pressure, but she could do nothing more than press her face against Matachanna’s cloak. Tears did not even come to her eyes. She merely stood silent, clutching at her own ragged, wracked spirit as Matachanna murmured against her hair.

  “Your desire has never left you, has it, Amonute?”

  Pocahontas shook her head. She did not need to ask what desire her sister spoke of. It was influence, power, mattering, being. The word sifted light and pale as ash through her spirit. Werowansqua.

  “The tassantassas were mine,” she said at last. Her voice was small and choked in her throat, and she hated herself for sounding so young and female, so common. “They were my work, my special work, my duty.”

  “You learned their tongue, and it set you apart from the rest of us.” The gentle understanding in Matachanna’s eyes was a pain and a relief too strong to bear.

  Pocahontas covered her face with trembling hands. “What was all my work for, learning their tongue, their ways, if Naukaquawis is to rule over the white chief? Now it will all be his, all the honor, all the influence with our father . . .”

  “Oh, but Amonute . . . my Pocahontas. You didn’t truly think you could have ruled, did you?” Matachanna’s words were soft as smoke, and like smoke they burned Pocahontas’s eyes. Matachanna wrapped the edge of her cloak around the both of them and pulled Pocahontas tight to her warm body. She smelled of familiarity and comfort, the pine resin and fur of their longhouse, the ground-ochre bitterness of pigmented oil. “Sister, what good could you do the Real People as a werowansqua?”

  Pocahontas bit her lip. She wanted to bar her words, lock them away in her throat, but they fought their way out. “Why must I do the Real People good? Why can’t I want it just for myself?”

  Matachanna sighed.

  “It’s easy for you, Matachanna.” Pocahontas tore herself away, out from under her sister’s cloak. “It’s easy for you to scorn me for the things I want.”

  “I don’t scorn you, Amonute.”

  “You will never want for anything—you, of the high blood!”

  Matachanna frowned darkly; a furious bird’s-foot track appeared on her pretty brow. “You will never want for anything, either, Sister. You don’t want for anything now, except that which will gratify your own spirit.”

  Pocahontas stamped in wordless fury. The frozen earth was so hard that a painful jolt traveled up her leg.

  “The truth is,” Matachanna said with careful dignity, “you are selfish and ungrateful.”

  “Ungrateful? And what have I to be grateful for? Tell me that! Should I bow in gratitude for the privilege of learning how to cook groundnut stew to feed my high-blood kin, while you have the leisure of choosing between a priest and a werowance for a husband?”

  She whirled and sped through the forest, down the narrow path that would lead her, she knew, to her father’s great house. Her cloak billowed as she went; cold air closed around her body like a hunter’s snare and she gathered its folds in her shaking hands. The cloak was old, one of Koleopatchika’s castoffs. Rows of winter weasel skins alternated with the feathers of snow geese, ragged and frayed.

  Matachanna’s voice chased after her, high and strained with regret. “I’m sorry, Amonute. Come back. Pocahontas!”

  But Pocahontas ignored her sister’s cries and pushed through the stiff, grasping underbrush. It had snowed a few days prior, a light dusting that had since turned to a thin, sharp crust of rippled ice. It cracked and broke beneath her moccasins, hindering her speed. She released her grip on the front of her cloak, and it spread behind her, white as an egret’s wings. Branches tipped with ice clawed at her arms and left trails of burning cold along her skin.

  From the direction of the town, women’s voices rose in a warbling cry. Distance and the frozen maze of the forest fractured and distorted the sound. She halted and turned toward the cries. The voices seemed to rise and fall in time with her panting breath. Somewhere near the river, a drum pulsed.

  Pocahontas altered her course. She pressed through a bank of dense brush and found herself in a cornfield. The few stalks that had not been pulled up and burned lay half-fallen, weighted by rain and ice, aslant against the earth. A few of their morose brown leaves stirred in a silent breeze. The dark, bare ground of the field itself was patched black and white by its broken crust of snow. The thin long legs of a crow tower were silvered on one side with ice. The platform was empty. The tower’s silence stabbed at Pocahontas’s spirit, filling her with a welling poignancy. She was stripped now even of her one useful task. She stood still a moment, and then suddenly ran through the cornfield, the cold air raising tears in her eyes, her feet moving with the furious, helpless, ashamed pounding of her heart.


  Beyond the field she found a path that wound its way between houses toward Werowocomoco’s broad central lane. Women and children ducked through the doors of longhouses, pouring onto the path, raising their voices in the wavering victory cry. Below the high ululations, the deeper, more sonorous rumble of men’s voices stirred, more a physical sensation than a sound, and one fraught with a tight, dangerous coil of excitement. Now she could see the central lane, now the great gray plume of smoke from the communal fire. The Real People thronged the lane, bumping one another like canoes set adrift in a narrow stream. The dark tips of bows rose above the heads of the crowd as it moved in rank down the lane toward the mamanatowick’s great house.

  Pocahontas wedged herself into the crowd, jostled by crying women, pushing children, and old men calling out good-natured curses and laughing taunts. She could not squeeze through to the front. Instead, she slipped sideways, dodging bodies, moving parallel to the parade of bows. Now and then two cloak-wrapped backs parted and she caught fleeting glimpses of the procession: the chest-out strut of a painted warrior; Opechancanough’s scowl in rapid, flashing profile; the flicker of a downcast pair of pale-blue eyes and a thick beard, tawny as squirrel skin.

  At last she fought her way to the front of the chanting crowd, just as the procession reached Powhatan’s residence, breaking from the crush of bodies in time to see the stooped back of the tassantassa disappear through the low, rectangular door. He wore the thick, strong-smelling cloth his kind was fond of: wool. She’d learned the word from the two runaways, but they had been spirited away, well guarded by her father’s men in a tiny village far to the northwest, where their kind would never find them. It had been nearly a month since she had seen them last, and without any means of practicing their language she feared she would lose it. But as she watched the tassantassa vanish into the darkness of the great house, the strange, flowing, water-song cadences of their tongue filled her mind. Wool, she recited in the isolated quiet of her own thoughts. Boot, Iing-land, ship, gun.