But I am right, he thought sourly, watching the men give way before him, some of them spitting into the mud as he passed. I am right to do as I do.
The sailors secured the Susan Constant against the flimsy dock, but Smith saw nothing of the ship, nothing of the men. He saw only his memories of Indian women—the poor women, faces tear-stained, crying for their lost stores, weeping for the extra labor of digging tuckahoe roots from hard winter ground; their babes with empty bellies in the long, cold nights. Smith had done this to them. He had taken their final winter stores and left them destitute, because he must—because he would not see the English starve.
For all those colonists who despised him, there were some who loved him. Not only had Smith found a way to feed the hungry mouths of Jamestown, but he had rid the fort of a curse that was nearly as bad as starvation.
Early in the summer, on returning from a trading expedition with the shallop brimming with corn and oysters, Smith had found the fort practically empty. The sounds of hammers and saws echoed through the wood, and the scruffy ship’s boys, small and bony as the corpses of birds, informed him in an excited clamor that President Ratcliffe had gone mad.
“Mad?”
“Aye, he’s taken to the woods, sir, told all the men to build him a palace, sir!”
“They’ve been at it for days. Ratcliffe’s orders!”
“No one’s been hunting, no fishing . . . not that they’re any good at fishing, sir.”
“Only there’s no food, John Smith! Did you bring food from the savages?”
“You mustn’t call them savages, lad.” Savage implied an animallike simplicity, a childish innocence, an ignorance of sophisticated ways. Opechancanough lacked nothing of sophistication, and although the girl, Pocahontas, might be innocent, she was brighter than a dozen Wingfields and half a brace of Ratcliffes.
Smith handed out strings of dried oysters among the boys and they wore them looped around their necks like beads, each boy chewing and sucking on the end of his fine prize. They led him through the forest to Ratcliffe’s palace.
A gentleman to the end, Ratcliffe sat in quiet dignity upon a rough-hewn stool, watching as the men of the fort labored over boards and beams, erecting the frame of a very large and very fine house in the middle of nowhere. Smith had stood silent among the milling boys, watching the men scuttle about their useless task, hunched, eyes shifting and downcast like whipped dogs. When one of them caught sight of Smith, he had thrown down his plane. John Smith, thank God. Do something.
He had done something indeed. Ratcliffe blustered and roared, and those flat, unfeeling eyes had filled finally with something—seething hate at the sight of Smith, come to put an end to the gentleman’s lofty palace. A fist to the jaw had silenced him, and Smith had marched the stuttering, raving president back to Jamestown in time to bundle him onto the Susan Constant before it cast off for England.
The ship had borne a load of ordinary dirt, useless ballast that some of the men, Ratcliffe especially, insisted contained flecks of gold, and would make all the shareholders of the Virginia Company wealthy beyond imagining. Smith was only grateful that the Susan Constant would return again, with its too-small hold packed with oats and barley. He had prayed it would arrive before winter set in.
“What would we do without you?” Scrivener had said when the door of the ship’s cabin closed on Ratcliffe’s indignant shouts.
“You might have thought of hitting him yourself.”
“But that was mutiny, you know.”
“Hang me, then,” Smith chuckled. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Now, in the pale sun of late September, the Susan Constant had returned, and Smith shook Captain Newport’s one remaining hand at the foot of the dock. No one had declared Smith president—not formally. But a general sense of inevitability had fallen over the colony. It was clear to all that John Smith’s first concern was for Jamestown, not for himself, and that alone set him apart from the presidents who had come before. It was good enough for now. Good enough, until a fresh gentleman comes along.
A line of new men filed up the dock, wide-eyed at the sight of the palisade and its watchtowers, at the pervasive dark mass of the forest pressing in on Jamestown. Amused, Smith watched them stagger and stare. Did I ever look so fresh and fearful?
Newport tugged at the sleeve pinned over the stump of his missing arm. “I’ve brought plenty of food, Smith: grain, oil, flour, some salt pork.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“Let us watch our fires this time, eh?” He laughed, a rhythmic rasp like a saw pulled slow through timber.
“And the bushels of earth—what came of those?”
Newport grunted sourly. “Nothing. Not a blasted thing. The king put all the men he had to analyzing the samples: scholars, chemists, even alchemists. The bits that shone were . . . something else. I cannot recall the name now.”
“Not gold.”
“Aye, not gold, nor silver. There is naught in the earth here to make a man rich.”
“As I told you—as I told Ratcliffe and Wingfield long ago. If there were gold here, the naturals would be wearing it in their hair instead of shells and copper. Even the copper they get in trade; they don’t dig it from the ground.”
“The naturals will be wearing gold soon. Or one of them will, at any rate.”
Newport called for a particular case from the hold of the ship. When it arrived, he lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside, a crown lay on a cushion of red velvet. Each pointed ray that lifted from the circlet bore a faceted jewel.
Smith glanced warily at Newport. The captain gave a hearty laugh.
He lifted the crown, testing its weight in his hands. The feel was all wrong for solid gold. Leafed copper, Smith guessed. The gems set into the metal were cloudy just below their glittering surface sheen. Glass.
“As the Virginia Company plans to stay for a spell,” Newport said, “King James will make this Powhatan a tributary. Let the savage keep his kingdom and his throne made of sticks and bones.”
Smith dropped the crown back into its crate. “A tributary? In Christ’s name, what does King James hope to gain from this?”
“Loyalty. Cooperation.”
“The Virginia Company has gone as mad as Ratcliffe.”
“Many great men have made a substantial investment in this colony, John Smith. It’s clear the samples we sent contained no gold. You claim there is no passage to the Indies—no passage on this river, at any rate. What, then, is our purpose?”
“I wish I knew.”
“The king wishes he knew, as well. If you want to keep a name for yourself in London, you will find some use for this land.”
“I had no name in London to start,” Smith interjected, but Newport sailed on.
“A gold mine, a passage, silver . . . something of value, Smith, something worth investing in. The shareholders are growing impatient.”
“Not half as impatient as I, I promise you.”
“Finding the worth of this worthless mud pit will take time. If we make Powhatan a tributary, he will owe King James his loyalty.”
“And you think he will see it that way? You don’t know the man. I do. This business with the crown—it’s folly, Newport. It will gain us nothing, and could lose us all.”
“Powhatan will be grateful for the guidance of King James.”
“Guidance!”
“They are savages, Smith. They need us to . . .”
“Need us? That garden, there, beyond the palisade . . . that was built by a handful of little girls. These people live off such gardens, feed whole cities from plots of land smaller than that one, and yet we could not make it yield enough to feed us for a fortnight! Tell me again how they need us.”
Newport glanced at the garden, at its tattered cornstalks trembling in the breeze and spent leaves hanging in yellow f
olds. He turned back to Smith with a frown. “Powhatan will be crowned. This is the order of the Virginia Company—it is the order of your sovereign. Find a way to do it, Smith. The investors will hear no excuses, and neither will King James.”
It was a brave group of men who agreed to accompany Smith upriver to Werowocomoco; all the English knew that Smith’s trading expeditions had soured the naturals considerably. Hands tightened on the handles of guns, and helmets slid firmly into place as the shallop rounded the final bend before Werowocomoco.
But the town was remarkably quiet. No figures stirred in the wide lanes, fringed with brush shot golden and red with the coming autumn. The furrowed, muddy shore where the naturals landed their canoes was deserted. A few pale puffs of smoke rose from an arched roof here and there, and in the distance, from the direction of the cornfields, Smith heard a child laughing.
“Gone?” Scrivener asked, pawing anxiously at his gun.
“No. Not all of them,” said Smith.
“Do they see us?”
“Of a certainty.”
They dropped anchor. The shallop drifted in the current to the end of its chain, and then hung quivering in the water.
“I’ll go ashore myself,” Smith said.
“No—you ought to take at least a few men with you.”
Smith looked around. The party shuffled and coughed. He thought he heard someone whisper, “Classen.”
“Listen,” he said. “I suspect most of their men are gone—hunting or on some mission of war. If there were any quantity of men here, they’d be firing their bows at us already. Now I’ll go ashore, and any man who wishes may accompany me. I shan’t force any of you. Stay here if you like.”
In the end more than half the men crowded into the landing boat. It was a tight enough fit that rowing was difficult, and whenever a nervous man twitched, the boat rocked and the shallow draft welcomed a spill of water over the side. Their boots were sodden by the time they landed at Werowocomoco.
Evening was fast advancing, the sky tinted with shades of rose-gold. A final steadfast flight of gnats whirled in defiance of the coming chill, shimmering in a sideways shaft of light that cut brightly through the forest, blinding the eyes. Smith raised an arm to shade his vision. The brush nearby crackled.
The men gasped and Smith heard the softly metallic clatter of guns pulled from belts, smelled the sulfur trace of burning matchcords in the sudden disturbance of the air. In one moment of frenzied despair, he feared that he had been wrong, had read the signs all wrong, Opechancanough had lured and deceived him at last; the forest was alive with Indians, rising from the black shadows like vengeful gods.
“Wingapoh, Chawnzmit.”
“Pocahontas.”
Scrivener turned in a cautious circle, his firearm extended, and then, satisfied that the forest was empty, he shoved it hard back into his belt. “Almighty preserving Christ. It’s only the princess.”
She stood in the shaft of sunset light, her slender brown body wreathed in a halo of fire. The brilliance of it bent and distorted around her, and all Smith could make out was the outline of her form, breaking and rippling as she moved like a heat mirage on a far horizon. He squinted, blinking back tears at the brightness of her.
She stepped from the light and onto the forest trail. A leather cap was tied with a knotted lace beneath her chin, and from her crown rose a rack of deer antlers, stained red as blood by precious puccoon. Face and shoulders, arms and legs, were red, too, save for the places where a violent ochre, lemon bright, streaked through. A line of black paint crossed her flat chest, and another divided her face from hairline to chin, so that each wide, slanted eye seemed to peer at him from around a dark corner. In the division of her face, he saw two princesses, each watching his party, poised and silent, perfect in symmetry. Over her paints she had dusted that native glimmering mineral, the one Ratcliffe and his supporters had mistaken for gold dust. She shifted. It was a tiny gesture, a casual turn of the head, a half shrug, and she sparkled as she moved, the metallic flecks dancing on her skin like stars reflected in water. Quietly, the men exclaimed. Smith had never seen her like this—none of them had. Their princess, the angel sent by an orderly God, stood before them a wild and beautiful heathen.
She blinked up at Smith through her red-and-black mask. “Why have you come? To take our food, as you took the food of other towns?” English words. She wanted all the men to understand.
“No. We come bringing gifts to your father.”
“He is away.”
“Where has he gone?”
She lowered her antlers, slashed them like a buck in an autumn thicket. “Uttamussak.”
He recalled the name. The most sacred temple in all the Great Chief’s territory. “And when will he return?”
She shrugged, a childish gesture. Her painted skin shimmered and shone. “When he is done praying. When the Okeus speaks.”
Smith asked in her own tongue, “Where are all the men?”
“Hunting.”
“Who guards the women?”
“Men.”
“You are being evasive.”
She smiled at him. The dimple in her chin showed clear and deep in the line of black paint.
“Are we in danger, Pocahontas?”
Again she lowered the antlers. “Perhaps you are in danger,” she said in English. Behind Smith on the trail, the men crowded together uneasily. But she looked up laughing, shaking her head as if at the folly of a small child. When she said his name, her voice was fond and happy.
She explained as they walked toward the town. Most of the men who had not accompanied Powhatan to the great temple had left to hunt. So many of the surrounding towns had traded away all their surplus goods, even though her father had instructed them not to—and here she paused to cut a stare at Smith—that Werowocomoco received little in tribute, and expected a lean winter. The men thought to bring in meat early, so that it might be dried and laid away even before the traditional hunt began. Some men remained, and knew of Chawnzmit’s coming. “But as your men looked frightened and weak, and hesitant to leave the ship, they decided you were not worth shooting full of arrows.”
“I am grateful.”
She turned to him with a serious glower. “My uncle Opechancanough would sooner see you dead, no matter how many arrows were wasted.”
“I know.”
“You are lucky that Powhatan still rules here. We were ordered not to go to Jamestown, but my father did not say you couldn’t come to his capital and give him gifts.”
They reached the center of the town. A few young men positioned drums around the huge fire pit. They looked in the direction of the English with sharp, defiant stares.
Smith caught Pocahontas by her thin elbow. “Tell me, little sister. Are we safe?”
“Yes,” she said. “I swear it. Opechancanough does not hold all of Tsenacomoco in his sway. Not yet. My father still hopes for your guns, Chawnzmit, even if it is a secret hope. Tonight, at least, you are safe. Until Powhatan says otherwise.” She pressed a hand to her heart.
The sky burst into color and flame, painting wisps of cloud with the blood of the dying sun. The drums spoke, a sudden roar of tight hide and thunder, and the fire in the pit leaped high. A piercing racket—the high, ululating wail of women—erupted from among the houses. They came to the fire in one great rush. They were painted as men going to war: red and black, sharp lines to ward off the deadliest spirits, those who brought ill luck and sudden cowardice. Slender bodies twisted, bending at the curve of hip; breasts swayed in paint of ochre and puccoon, ash-white and fawn-spotted, bouncing under chains of copper and bead as they stamped. High-stepping knees kicked decorated aprons high, exposing in the flash of fringe and firelight the dark joining of their thighs. The women of Werowocomoco screamed and turned, chanted and whirled. Antlers grew from heads, bears’ teeth weighted braids of
black hair that lifted from painted skin as bodies spun. They mimed the swing of a war club, the firing of a bow. They mimed prey falling, men falling.
The Englishmen pressed close to Smith, fearful and fascinated. The light, pliant bodies spiraled from the ring of light into the growing dusk. In the half darkness their hands brushed pale skin, clutched for a moment and released, whirled away. A smear of puccoon traced across the back of Smith’s hand, dark as a spill of wine. He licked it away. It tasted of earth and sage, bestial musk and the bright waters of a mineral spring.
A small hand slipped into his own, tugging and insistent. Pocahontas stared up at him from her pagan mask. A careless hand had smeared the perfect line of black; the dark paint tracked across her cheek like smoke from a distant fire. “Dance,” she commanded, and caught in the net of drumbeat and fire, he followed her into the ring.
The bodies flowed around him, moved with him, passed him skin to skin. He heated with a lust he had not felt since Constantinople; through the smoke of the fire and the pounding of the drum he caught the secretive note of rosemary on the wind. The other men joined in, hooting, jigging gracelessly, and he watched with bemused wonder as the painted women wreathed them in caresses. He felt those same hands on his own skin. His soul seemed to pull free of his body, hanging in the air in a haze of blue-white smoke.
But always, as he danced, as he sang wordlessly, as he caught a woman’s wrist and held it, feeling the graceful bird-leg bones turn slowly in his palm before he released her, he was aware of a small but stately presence. Pocahontas. She bore her antlers proudly, crowned in a rack of blood and firelight. She stepped endlessly around the perimeter of the fire ring. She paced, surveying the dance and his part in it, watching with approval. Her eyes were always on John Smith, and they glittered with amused satisfaction. As the night wore on, as one by one the men were towed, staggering, from the circle by laughing women, as they faded into the animal cries of the forest, her face darted from light to shadow. The tips of the antlers glowed.
Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony Page 24
