Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  Pocahontas watched as Kocoum dropped the flap into place and took up his accustomed station on Powhatan’s door. He nodded in a guarded but friendly way when she approached. He had been a fine protector during her work with the runaways, vigilant and with no shortage of hard looks for the white men, but never interfering with her duty. He had shown no interest in learning the tongue himself, and only shrugged when she tried to interest him in practicing the tassantassa words. But he had shown patience and respect for the importance of her task. Looking up at his still, observant face, Pocahontas thought perhaps Matachanna was wrong: she might have one friend in the world, this young warrior Kocoum.

  “Let me go inside,” she whispered.

  He tilted his head as though he could not hear her for all the singing and calling. But his eyes sparkled with that quiet, teasing amusement. Of course he knew what she wanted.

  “You know I can speak their tongue,” she said, louder this time, almost shouting. “My father will need me.”

  Kocoum smiled at her. It was a small smile, one corner of his mouth tipping up higher than the other. But he did not argue. He stepped aside and swung the door flap open.

  Down the great length of the house, the heart fire’s glow showed ruddy on the arch of the ceiling. The smell of tense excitement—men’s sweat, men’s eagerness—eclipsed the usual indoor odors of pine smoke and dried herbs. Somebody had brought a hand drum. The rhythm of it chattered in her bones and blood, shaking her like a priest’s turtle-shell rattle. She moved down the dark hall of the yehakin with care, trying to order her thoughts but failing to make any more sense of her own emotions than wonder and fear. Iing-land. Wool. Gun. The air was hot here; she loosed the tie of her cloak and let it fall away from her throat. Sweat stood out on her bare chest and back, glistening among her strands of white shell beads.

  The men took no notice of her, intent as they were on the tassantassa. They held him by his elbows in the light of the heart fire. He gazed about him with a strained air, clearly afraid but fighting to banish the fear from his face. He was brave, and intelligent; she could read that much in his sharp, darting eyes, in the dignified acceptance of what he assumed was his fate.

  Powhatan was on his feet, trembling slightly as he often did now, but draped in the majesty of his ceremonial robes. They trailed against the black earth, raising a wake of white ash in the close, vibrating air.

  “Bring the block,” Powhatan said, “and take from this man his life.”

  The tassantassa’s eyes widened, though he made no move to escape.

  He knows our tongue, Pocahontas thought with dull startlement, with a sudden feeling of fellowship.

  A great hewn stump was rolled into the circle of light. The men howled, wolflike, hungry for the climax of the ceremony. At the edge of the shivering light, Naukaquawis stood aloof amid the dancing and shouting, arms crossed casually, as confident and untouchable as the Okeus himself. The stump thudded against the earth. The men holding the tassantassa forced him to his knees, bending him double so that his shaggy head rested on the rough, splintered wood. Pocahontas saw the fire of fear kindle in his spirit; those strange blue eyes for one flashing moment betrayed his sorrow and defeat.

  The men raised their clubs high above their heads.

  There was a drawing in of breath, a sudden, expectant silence. Naukaquawis let his arms fall to his side, shifting his weight as if to dodge forward, but he seemed to move as slowly as a body under water, dragging and thick. Pocahontas moved, too, wondering at her own unexpected stride, emerging from between the men’s bodies like a dreamer treading an unreal, unseen path.

  The clubs reached the peak of their upward arcs and hung in the smoky air for an instant that lasted an eternity. Naukaquawis leaned, ready to make the saving leap, ready to account for the life of the tassantassa and take him for his own. But Pocahontas’s body was smaller, quicker, already crossing the ring of firelight. She was a fish dodging the net. She was a flicker of movement, a flash of white beads and sheen. She saw surprise in her brother’s eyes, then anger—and then she saw nothing.

  Her eyes closed.

  She folded atop the tassantassa like a dropped cloak, cradling his rough head in her slim brown arms. The clubs fell around her like hail, shuddering the ground where she and the white man crouched, the breeze of their movement stirring the fine hairs of her body.

  A stunned silence rocked the great house. The drum, like her heart, stopped beating.

  Pocahontas raised her head tentatively. Powhatan stared down at her, his brows high beneath red-and-black paint.

  “I claim this one’s life as my own.” She said the ritual words as easily as though she had practiced them alongside Naukaquawis. Her voice was as high as a bird-leg flute. It piped almost eerily in that place of men, moving between them, twisting into their startled thoughts as lithe as a green snake. “I account for him. Let him be my brother now; let his hearth be joined to mine.”

  Naukaquawis coughed out a startled grunt.

  Powhatan shook his head in wonder. Silver hair rippled, a wind on the river. “Daughter?”

  Pocahontas stared steadily up. Her eyes did not blink.

  Powhatan drew in a breath, and for a moment she feared he would condemn her, cast her out. Instead, the walls of his great house shook with his laughter.

  “By the Okeus,” he said, slapping his sagging belly through his ceremonial robe. The rows of shells stitched down the robe’s back rattled with his laugh. “If you want this man, Mischief, then you shall have him.”

  Naukaquawis gasped. “Father . . . !”

  “Fear not,” Powhatan said, waving his son to acquiescence. “You are werowance, with or without a white man at your heel. But after all, it was Pocahontas who saved this man and declared him her brother. Let it be as the Okeus wills it.”

  Naukaquawis lowered a terrible stare toward his common-born little sister, who still clutched the white man’s head in her arms.

  Powhatan bent, slowly, ponderously, to look the tassantassa in his dirt-smudged, hairy face. “Do you understand, Chawnzmit? You are my daughter’s now. You owe her your life.”

  THE SECOND NAME

  Pocahontas

  SMITH

  January 1608

  From the king’s long, smoke-dense house, Smith was marched back through the town, back through the crowing, howling, whirling mass of naturals. Their wild din rang in his ears, and yet it meant nothing, touched nothing of his thoughts or soul. He was drifting, lost in a deep mist of confusion and relief. He was aware of nothing save for the little girl who walked at his side. The hood of her ragged white cape was thrown back that all might see her face, round and beaming with triumph beneath a black bristle of short-cropped hair that framed her features, the long braid swinging from the back of her head. The thin legs, swaddled in doeskin leggings, stepped in a marching gait as bold as a soldier’s. She did not look up at him, her new prize, but he felt a proprietary assurance radiating from her like heat from a fire. At the fore of their little parade, Naukaquawis stalked in a sulk, and behind him moved Opechancanough, scowling likewise, his brow as dark and low as a thunderhead.

  They crossed the whole of the large village and moved down an avenue of oaks and chestnut trees, emerging in a large clearing. The din of the villagers still filled the forest, though it was a distant sound; here the men of the party and even the little strutting girl-child moved with reverence.

  A temple stood at the clearing’s center. He could identify their temples now on sight, the houses where their dark god dwelt in all his brutal, unseen power. Four tall posts representing the four directions of the winds stood at each corner, stripped of bark, pale as old bone. Each post was topped by a disc of hardwood carved into a unique, twisted face. These were the faces of the spirits that guarded this sacred place, forbidding with their sharp-toothed snarls and glaring borehole eyes. They were fierce as devi
ls, and watched Smith with unblinking stares as he approached.

  Outside the temple’s door stood a huge quartz crystal, at least two feet broad on each flat, smooth side, lying canted over with its pointed tip angled toward the east. He had never seen a gemstone so large or so flawless. Through its glassy body he could make out the sinuous curves of tattoos on the men’s bare legs. The sight of such a large and perfect object was faintly unsettling, filling him with a slow-creeping awe, a sense of being watched by something greater and more cunning and dangerous than the temple’s four guardians. Each natural in turn paused to pay respect to the stone, cupping hands against foreheads, making a slow falling gesture as if pouring out some viscous substance upon the altar of the stone. He cupped his hands and poured likewise, and the little girl turned her face up to his with a gleam of approval in her black eyes.

  Inside the temple, he was confronted by a conjuring priest, who chanted beneath his hanging shroud of weasel tails and tassels of snakeskin. The rattles crashed like hard rain. Smith’s nostrils burned on the pungent smell of the broad-leafed, purple-flowering weed the naturals smoked with great relish. The priest blew a stream of white smoke into his face, and he closed his eyes against the enchantment. He seemed to reel where he sat, though he knew his body held quite still. Sounds bled one into another and ran over his body like oil, slippery and rich, a warm throb of sensation that stirred him, blood and soul, with every bright clash of copper bells or wail of the spinning priests.

  “He calls you,” said a voice near him, “tanx-werowance.”

  With sluggish surprise, he realized the words were spoken in English. The voice was high, a sparrow’s call, the child’s voice. He looked at his new mistress with open amazement. Her smooth coppery brow knitted in thought. Her mouth moved silently as she worked out a suitable translation; the dark eyes skated to the side, searching for words in the blackness of the temple’s interior.

  “Tanx-werowance,” she said again, and then, in rough-accented but perfect English, “very small king.”

  Smith nodded carefully. His head wobbled.

  “My brother, Naukaquawis, will be your werowance. Naukaquawis is that one.” She nodded toward the young man. “Do you understand?”

  The ceremony continued. Chanting, the priests brought various strange, musty-smelling objects from the temple’s western wall. A rattle shook before Smith’s slow-blinking eyes—a blur of turtle shell, a din of thunder. The skin of a great maneless lion passed over his face. It smelled of mildew and animal rage, the claws that still curved from its splayed tawny paws scratching lightly at his cheek. Next a heavy bear’s pelt was draped over his shoulders. It weighed him down, pulling him toward the earth with an insistent, dragging gravity.

  A mask shimmered and slid through the dark air before him, two small round eyes like bullet holes staring unblinking into his own, the mouth a stern circle through which no light came. The sight of it, its sinister, gliding movement, filled him with rising dread. It pronounced words over him that fell like ringing axe-blows against his ears. He could not make out their meaning. Dark slashes across the cheeks, harrow lines, claw lines.

  He was made to smoke the pipe, drawing on the stinging smoke until his head filled with dancing light and unsettling visions, and his throat opened in an animalistic howl. At last they presented a basin of cold water. He dipped his hands with some relief, sensing the end of the ceremony, and a bundle of soft feathers was passed over his knuckles, over fingers that felt much too long and fragile, too sensitive. The feathers lifted droplets of water from his skin.

  By the fall of night he was vibrating with exhaustion and the potency of the weed. He found himself, to his confusion and gratitude, standing upon a low shelf of riverbank, blue dark in the twilight, saying his farewells to Naukaquawis and Opechancanough, both of whom stared with eyes as deep and joyless as the eyes of the priest’s mask. Three men took up the paddles of a canoe. Smith climbed into it, felt it rock him like a babe in a cradle. He pressed his knees fearfully into the hard sides of the dugout and was glad to note how painfully the wood bit into his flesh. He could trust his senses again. The fresh air seemed to do him good.

  The girl Pocahontas leaped into the dugout as well, folding herself on a bark-strip mat with her white cloak for blanket. Long before they reached Jamestown, standing like a harsh black stone against the night, the fur and feathers of her cape moved with the steady rhythm of her breath. In sleep all the pride and challenge drained from her face, and in a world that was sharp and bruising, full of lightless eyes and raking claws, she was soft as a curl of smoke.

  It was the girl who bade him farewell on the shore of Jamestown. The night was velvet black, covered in clouds that promised more snow. Somebody shouted a challenge from the fort’s wall. A puff of white vapor rose from the girl’s mouth. “I will come back, tanx-werowance,” she promised. “We will speak.”

  And then she was gone, a smudge of pale gray receding upriver. As he stood watching on the shore, the dim distance closed around the canoe, leaving nothing behind but the gentle chatter of water against its hull and the quiet splash of paddles in the darkness.

  A wash of wan, cold light woke him a few hours later. Smith moved carefully on his narrow, hard bed, feeling each muscle of his body complain in turn. The outer edges of his kneecaps throbbed where they had pressed against the inner curve of the canoe. His bladder was painfully full; he eased himself upright, shivering against the dull winter cold, stared around the dim interior of his tiny cabin. It was small enough that he might touch the walls if he flung out his arms. The floor was hard earth, rimmed with frost around the edges where the previous day’s dampness had seeped inside. He stared at the white lace along the floor. The holes in its patterns brought to mind the fearful mask that had stared at him in the temple’s shuddering firelight. He remembered the feel of the words the priest had spoken over him, the guttural shout, the grating pronouncement. But he could not recall the words themselves.

  Smith moved carefully toward his door, shaking the tension and cold from his body as he went. He pushed it open slowly. It came up against some obstacle and stopped.

  “Ah,” said a man’s voice. “He’s awake.”

  “Oh, aye?” Another.

  “Go and get Ratcliffe.”

  Smith pushed harder against the door; the man blocking it stepped aside. It was William Baker, a stout and rather good man, one of the men he had taken along on his ill-fated expedition to the Apocants. Had that been weeks ago? It seemed years. He had spent so long among the naturals as their captive, paraded in fear and failure through village after village, before at last that strange ritual at the feet of their great king, the little girl saving him to keep as her pet. Weeks only?

  “What’s all this, then?” he asked of Baker.

  The man shuffled his feet. His breath had frosted in his beard. “Truth is, John Smith, you’re to stand trial.”

  “Trial?” After all he had been through! God in Heaven, was it not enough?

  “For the deaths of Thomas Emry, Jehu Robinson, and George Classen.”

  It was unfortunate, what had become of Thomas and Jehu. They were both good men, worthy and of use to the colony. A shame that they were felled by Indian arrows, but it was a fate that had befallen plenty of men since they had landed in the New World.

  “George Classen? What happened to him?”

  Baker dropped his head. Beneath his dense shrubbery of dark beard, he looked distinctly green. “After you and the others left with that savage, rowing upstream in the canoe, we stayed aboard like you ordered and waited for your return. But by midmorning the next day, we still hadn’t seen or heard from you. Some of the men said you were betrayed by the savage and butchered. They said we ought to take the shallop back home to Jamestown, report to Ratcliffe that the expedition had failed.”

  Smith scowled.

  “But then,” Baker went on, “some
ladies came out onto the shore. Indian ladies, you see.”

  “I haven’t seen many other types of lady since we landed,” said Smith.

  “They sort of . . . beckoned to us.” Baker lifted his arms, held them out as if beseeching an embrace. “Their skin was all washed of paint, smooth-like. And they stood there without nothing on top, not even paint, so we could see it all, if you take my meaning.”

  “Aye, go on.”

  “Well, Classen said to hell with it all, to hell with the expedition and the fort and the rest. He wanted them ladies. We could all see that. I and a couple of others tried to hold him back, but a few of the men japed with him and encouraged him to have at it. He put the landing boat over the side and rowed himself ashore, laughing and carrying on the whole way, making sport of it.”

  Baker fell silent. An icy fist clutched at Smith’s middle. He remembered the scent of the lion’s pelt, that clever, slinking musk in the darkness.

  “Well,” Baker said haltingly, “when he came ashore the ladies surrounded him, started stripping off his clothes, and a few of the men still on the shallop was hooting and hollering at him. And then over the sounds of their voices I heard a different sound, a kind of wild shriek, and . . . and men poured out of the bushes. Savage men, you see. They had bows and axes and them terrible clubs with the hard flat ends. They caught Classen up between them, and the women built up a fire right there on the shore while the men tied him to a kind of . . . a kind of rack.” Baker drifted into silence. He swallowed hard.

  “Go on,” Smith said cautiously.

  “They started . . . removing bits of him, John Smith. They’d take off a finger or a toe, and Classen watched—we all watched—as they tossed these pieces into the fire. He screamed and screamed—Christ preserve me, it was worse than a pig at butchering time. Soon they was taking off strips of skin, from his arms and legs and face. After a time he lost consciousness, and then they . . .”