Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  And so it was that Pocahontas was at her father’s side when news arrived of Chawnzmit’s aggressions. She had joined with his wives in refreshing the mix-pot stew. They clustered about the large pot—copper, a prize won from the tassantassas in exchange for some corn, no doubt, or a basket of beans, goods Powhatan’s women would likely prefer this winter to the ostentatious gleam of trade copper. The stew retained the fishy scent of a season’s worth of oyster and sturgeon. The sweet, herbaceous tang of autumn’s deer fat still laced richly through the thick broth, and juicy kernels of corn bobbed to the surface as Pocahontas stirred. But the pot was more than half-empty, and they had nothing to renew it but thick slices of starchy tuckahoe, a handful of dried oysters, and a small measure of withered beans. By the end of the winter, the copper stewpot would be the most dismal place in all of Werowocomoco.

  The tuckahoe slices plopped drearily into the broth. Over the sound of her stirring, Pocahontas caught men’s voices raised in tense conversation. The sound came from just outside the door flap. She craned toward the sound, but Winganuske dealt a quick blow to Pocahontas’s ear.

  “Mind your task, Amonute.”

  Pale winter light flooded briefly into the hall as the door flap opened and then quickly closed. Pocahontas blinked into the returned darkness, unable to see the men striding down the length of Powhatan’s great house. She could hear their footsteps well enough: hard, direct, heavy with purpose.

  Winganuske made a fluttering sign with her hands; the women seized their food and tools and retreated to the bedsteads lining the room, where they sank silently into the shadows. Pocahontas hugged herself close to an upright beam and watched with shallow, careful breaths, cheek pressed against the smoke-blackened wood. Opechancanough strode past; the white feathers in his hair trailed behind him, bright in the dimness of the longhouse, like the tails of falling stars. A handful of men followed. One moved among the others, surrounded by them, with the dragging steps of a subdued prisoner.

  “What is this?” Powhatan’s voice rose above the sounds of the men, the rattle and click of bead and copper, of animals’ claws and arrows in quivers.

  “Word from the Appamattuck,” said Opechancanough. “Word of treason.” He pushed the subdued man forward.

  The Appamattuck was young, no older than Kocoum. Many of the tattoos that ran jagged along his arms and back were still unfinished. He bowed his head in the presence of the mamanatowick.

  “Speak,” said Powhatan.

  “Great Chief, I come to offer myself in place of my people.”

  “Offer yourself?”

  “Appamattuck knows the law. We know of the edict you issued in taquitock. We agreed to it in good faith.”

  The edict. The command not to feed the tassantassas, on pain of death. More than death: destruction of one’s whole tribe.

  “Opossu-no-quonuske knows her misstep was grave,” the young warrior went on, “but she had no choice but to give the tassantassas what they demanded. She begs humbly that you will spare the tribe, and take only her life and my own.”

  “She fed tassantassas?”

  “They came calling. We resisted, as you instructed us. We tried to drive them away with arrows. But they came in their large ship, the one with those guns they call cannon. They fired their great gun into our midst. Two men were killed, and a huge oak tree fell, scattering our warriors. In the confusion, while we regrouped, some of the tassantassas came ashore. They fell upon us while our ears still rang with the cannon’s thunder, and we could not hear their approach. I was taken, and two other men. And with us, three boys not old enough for the huskanaw.” The man paused. His head drooped for a moment, in shame or in careful thought, Pocahontas was not sure. At last he continued his story. “Their leader, the one called Chawnzmit, threatened us with guns. He demanded that we give up our winter stores. I looked into his eyes, and there was a desperate hunger there, something that went beyond winter privation. He was like a manitou prowling for the spirits of men, possessed by a need to devour. Nothing else mattered to him. He made torches with pine branches.” The young Appamattuck’s voice did not waver. “And he burned our skin. Mine, and the skins of the other grown men.”

  He turned slightly in the firelight. Pocahontas gasped aloud when she saw the livid wounds on the man’s chest, the raised blisters amid the charred and bleeding skin. The pain must have been all but unbearable, and yet this man delivered his story with dignity and control, as if the burns hurt no worse than his first tattoos.

  “Still we did not give in, mamanatowick, for what is pain, or even death, beside the Great Chief’s command? But when he threatened the boys with fire, Opossu-no-quonuske put a stop to it. She yielded half of Appamattuck’s stores to Chawnzmit, and made it clear to him that there was nothing more she could give, hoping the tassantassas would never trouble Appamattuck again. She is prepared, as am I, to die for Appamattuck’s crimes against you. But she asks that you spare the rest of the tribe.”

  A stifling, expectant silence fell down the length of the great house. Pocahontas could feel the women in the shadows trembling, sensed the burning in their chests as they held their breath.

  Powhatan’s dry, hollow voice cracked the silence. “Why do you offer yourself?”

  The young man stared down at his feet. He had to force the admission from his mouth. “I cried out when Chawnzmit burned me. Only once. Even the little boys did not cry when he turned on them with his burning torch. Take my life and spare my tribe, and I swear before the Okeus, I will die bravely.”

  Powhatan turned to his brother. Their eyes locked in a long stare. Powhatan’s face sagged with weariness while Opechancanough’s was tense with hatred.

  “Our own sister,” said the mamanatowick sadly.

  Opechancanough turned to his men. “Take this young warrior to my longhouse. Find some women to treat his burns. Feed him, too. I would speak to my brother alone.”

  When none remained in the longhouse but the mamanatowick’s hidden women, Opechancanough sighed and pressed his fists against red-rimmed eyes. “You cannot kill Opossu-no-quonuske.”

  “Of course not.”

  Pocahontas, arms wrapped tight around the beam, released her pent-up breath.

  “By rights, you should. You vowed you would destroy traitors completely. A mamanatowick who breaks his vows impresses no one, Wahunse-na-cawh.”

  The name struck Pocahontas like one of Winganuske’s blows. She flinched. All her life she had thought of her father as Powhatan; rarely had she heard his true name used, and never in such a brusque, scolding tone. She glanced away, so as not to witness her father’s shame.

  “I was hasty,” said the mamanatowick. “My anger had the better of me.”

  “The only thing to do now is to cleanse you of the vow. It is the only way you might save face with the werowances.”

  Powhatan’s bedstead creaked as he shifted in thought. “Yes. It would be just the thing to spare Opossu-no-quonuske. She only did what she thought she must to save her people from the tassantassas’ cruelty. I cannot fault her in that. But how will we keep the rest of the tribes from trading with Chawnzmit? I know he burned a longhouse at Nansemond not three days ago.”

  “But they drove him off. Nansemond did not give him so much as an ear of corn.”

  “And now this threatening of little boys. He grows ever more persistent.”

  “It’s a sign that he is desperate—his men must be close to starvation. We have almost won. We need only wait.”

  “And in the meantime, he will fire his cannon and torture children to obtain our food. By the Okeus, is there any way to defeat this demon?”

  “There must be. We will find a way. Let us think on it and pray about it. I will set the priests to work, conjuring the spirits day and night until we have our answer. But in the meantime, we must cleanse you of that vow. Let us do it now, before Opossu-no-quonuske take
s her own life in shame.”

  Powhatan nodded. His dark eyes wandered into an unseen distance, sorting through the frayed ends of memory. “I saw it done once, this cleansing. We need a few things: the sacred weed, of course . . . the temple will have a supply. A pure-white gourd for dipping water. And we need two girls who have not yet entered into a woman’s magic. They must make bread with their own hands, and carry it themselves to the temple.” He turned his head. The firelight deepened the lines of his face as he gazed into the shadowy place where Pocahontas clung to her post. “Amonute. I know you are there.”

  She stepped forward cautiously, limbs trembling.

  “Run to your longhouse and fetch one of your unblooded sisters. Make new bread, as quickly as you can. You are coming with me to the temple of Uttamussak.”

  The bread was still warm from the fire. She had packed it into a silk-grass pouch, which she hung from one shoulder. Beneath her white cloak, the pouch’s woven strap itched against her bare chest, but Pocahontas did not dare scratch her skin. She and Matachanna sat silent and stiff in the center of Powhatan’s largest canoe. They clutched one another’s hands. Pocahontas knew her palm must be as clammy as Matachanna’s, but she did not pull her fingers from her sister’s grasp to dry and warm them. Behind them, in the rear of the dugout, four strong warriors paddled in time. The boat surged downriver with every stroke, speeding toward the sacred grounds of Uttamussak. In the bow of the canoe, Powhatan huddled beneath a great wolfskin cape, the hood pulled up to cover his long silver hair. He sat with his back to the girls, facing out upon the world, quiet and immovable as an ancient mountain. The pointed, smoke-brown ears of his wolfskin cloak twitched now and then as he jerked his head to peer at the river’s banks.

  As they traveled, now and then Opechancanough’s canoe would leap ahead, his warriors straining at their paddles in silent intensity, backs and arms taut with power and rage. Then Opechancanough would glance toward Powhatan perched like an ancient eagle on a broken roost, and his paddles would slow, and his dugout would fall back once more.

  Pocahontas noted the spirit posts well before the canoes angled toward the riverbank. Here and there amid the trees, a trunk stood pale and cracked, stripped of its bark and lopped off at the height of a man’s head. The spirit masks held aloft on the posts leered through popanow’s dark tangle of branches. The sharp teeth of a wolf flashed as they passed, the furrowed flesh of a cougar’s snarl, the forbidding visage of a bear. More faces watched her, faces she could not identify: the precise black holes of manitou’s eyes, the lolling tongues of demons. She gripped Matachanna’s hand more tightly, watching wide-eyed and helpless as the terrible faces emerged and receded from the brush like storm fronts rising and falling, inevitable, a force beyond any man’s control.

  Most terrifying of all, though, were the faces of men. The man posts were more numerous as they pulled close to the low shelf of riverbank where they would land the canoes, and the closer they came to Uttamussak, the fiercer the faces grew. The hard wood of the masks seemed to writhe, roiling with emotion as the water above a fish weir ripples with the thrashing of the creatures trapped below. Anger twisted the mouths of the masks; hatred burned like black fires in their empty eyes. They were shouting, calling for blood, straining at their white posts to leap into the forest on their strange, long-limbed spirit bodies and dance destruction throughout the land of Tsenacomoco.

  Powhatan’s canoe turned for the shore. They beached with a hollow scrape of dugout on mud and stone, a vibration that echoed in Pocahontas’s bones. She was stiff and reluctant as she climbed from the canoe and made her way onto the shore. Matachanna regained her hand, and they stood together, staring at the trail that reached back into the damp winter forest with suspicion. The man posts lined each side of the trail, seething out at the river—toward them—in silent rage.

  “Uttamussak is where your handsome priest lives,” Pocahontas whispered, no hint of teasing in her voice now. “Are you sure you wish to marry him, and join him at such a hearth?”

  Matachanna said nothing. Pocahontas heard her sister swallow a hard lump in her throat.

  When all the men came ashore and the canoes had been pulled well out of the reach of the river’s high tide, they formed a silent procession to the temple. Pocahontas clutched her bag of fresh bread close to her chest. Beside her, Matachanna held the pure-white dipping gourd in trembling hands. It was they who would have to lead the party to the temple, so all the manitou would know that the men came in the spirit of purity, untainted by any magic and as free of guile as innocent girls.

  “We must be brave,” Matachanna said softly, “as brave as boys at their huskanaw.”

  Pocahontas nodded, but as they stepped onto the trail she felt the masks turn on their posts to stare at her, look through her flesh and bones to her weak, quaking spirit. She summoned the courage to glance back, and saw only the backs of the posts, not the black pits of their eyes, not their faces snarling down at her. A small relief. She sighed and cradled the bread against her body.

  After what seemed an endless walk through the forest of masks, they emerged into a clearing. An undisturbed skin of snow lay over the ground, sparkling in the sun, icy hard after many days and nights of thawing and refreezing. A lone, dark trail cut across the snow like a knife slash through buckskin. It led in a perfect line to the door of the temple.

  The temple itself waited like a ghost crouched on a precipice, pale, softly breathing, watching the life that moved below with a knowing, cruelly distant smile.

  Pocahontas hesitated. The men milled anxiously on the trail behind her. The door flap of the temple opened and a figure emerged, familiar even across the brightness of the snow-white clearing, even through the paint on his face.

  Matachanna gave a small squeak of surprise and relief. “Utta-ma-tomakkin!” She led the way across the narrow path through the snowfield.

  With regal stillness, Utta-ma-tomakkin watched the party’s approach. His ceremonial robe, a long, trailing cloak of buckskin painted black as old coals, gathered in soft folds about his feet, as stark against the snow as a bird traversing a clear sky. A row of white-shell beaded spirals crossed his back from shoulder to shoulder. In the center of his cloak, the sacred cross of the four winds blazed in pearls dyed with puccoon, while beneath the cross the cougar and the deer reared in their delicate balance, life and death confronting one another across an expanse of ashy blackness.

  A flat black stone stood outside the temple, not as fine as the great quartz crystal of Werowocomoco’s temple, but still emanating an air of majesty. The girls bowed at the altar stone, hands to foreheads. Utta-ma-tomakkin produced a rattle from beneath his cloak, two halves of turtle shell so aged by the smoke of the temple that they were nearly as black as the cloak itself. Pocahontas held herself tense and still as the rattle shook its bright thunder before her face. It passed over her shoulders, her heart, her belly, and her back, hissing and chanting, unhooking the claws of unseen, malevolent spirits from her skin. Matachanna, too, was cleansed by the sound. Then Utta-ma-tomakkin reached once more beneath his cloak. His fist emerged, closed, and approached Pocahontas’s face. Just in time she saw the white powder trickling from his hand, and she squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath. The priest’s breath puffed against her skin. A cold sensation prickled along her forehead and cheeks. She blinked the powder from her eyes and watched as Utta-ma-tomakkin blew the white clay onto Matachanna. Matachanna gasped; her face was entirely coated in white, the powder building tiny ridges along her eyelids as she squinted in startlement.

  “You are cleansed,” Utta-ma-tomakkin pronounced in his smooth, resonant voice, “and the spirits approve. You do not come to this place wreathed in woman’s magic. You do not come cloaked in guile. You come in purity, seeking purity. Enter.”

  A high, desperate voice cracked across the snowfield. It took Pocahontas a heartbeat, a terrible, slow stretch of time, to realize
that the words were English.

  “Naturals! They must have food!”

  She spun in the doorway of the temple, the ends of her ragged white cloak lifting and flying. Opechancanough barked a command, and the warriors’ bows rose, arrows whipped from quivers like blackbirds rising startled from a garden. Five tassantassas staggered from the woods. They were thin, gaunt with hunger. Their legs moved slowly as they stumbled on the crust of snow. One held a torch aloft, which burned with a sickly yellow flame. For a moment she wondered why he carried a torch during the day. Then, as she watched wide-eyed, one of the tassantassas lifted his long gun and held a trailing bit of pale sinew to the torch. Matchlock. She remembered the word. The burning sinew would light the powder within the gun’s black, cold body, and soon the lead balls would fly, deadly and fast.

  She seized Matachanna’s hand.

  “Into the temple,” Utta-ma-tomakkin said. He pushed Matachanna through the door and Pocahontas, clinging to her arm, staggered after. As the tassantassas advanced in a wary crouch, guns at the ready, Pocahontas saw Powhatan fling aside his wolfskin robe. He drew a war club from the belt of his winter tunic, and for one moment, her father was not a staggering old bull, but faced his enemies as tall and strong as a buck in the first vigorous blush of autumn.

  Then the temple’s door flap swung closed, smothering the girls in thick, smoky darkness.

  “What is it?” Matachanna said. Her words came fast and panicky. “What do they want? Why are they here?”

  “Runaways. They left the fort seeking food. They have none. I’m sure of it.” Pocahontas squeezed the strap of her bread bag in one trembling fist.

  The men shouted at one another across the field, Real Tongue and English words mingling in one roar of anger and fear.