Virgin Earth

April 1644, Virginia

John had hoped that he had been summoned to Opechancanough’s war council as a simple brave, companion to Attone. But as the days wore on at the town of Powhatan he found he was summoned every morning to speak with Opechancanough. At first the questions were pointed and direct. The fort at Jamestown: was it true that the town had grown so large that all the people could not fit inside the walls? Was it true also that the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair, that a proper watch was no longer kept, that the cannon were rusty?

John answered as truly as he knew, warning Opechancanough that he had been nothing more than a visitor passing through Jamestown, and not a resident who knew the town inside out. But as the questions went on Opechancanough revealed that he knew the answers as well as John. The wise old commander had many spies watching the fort. He was using John as a check against them, and they against him. He was testing John’s own ability to tell the truth, proving his loyalty to his adopted people.

Once he was satisfied that John would honestly tell him all that he knew, then the questions changed. He asked instead what hours the white men rose in the morning, what they drank for their breakfast, if they were all drunkards, half-drowned in fiery spirits by the time darkness fell. Did they have a special magic in their use of gunpowder, cannon, or flintlock, or could the Powhatan people seize these goods and turn them against their makers? Was the god of Englishmen attentive to them in this foreign land, or might He simply forget them if the real people rose up against them?

John struggled with the concepts of magic, warfare, and theology in a foreign language, and in a different way of thinking. Over and over again he found himself saying to the older man, “I am sorry, I don’t know,” and saw the dark brows snap together and the crumpled face darken with anger.

“I really don’t know,” John would say, hearing the nervousness in his own voice.

Over and over again Opechancanough would return to the English communications. If a settler discovered the uprising, how quickly could he take the news to Jamestown? Did the English have a method of sending signals in smoke? Or a code of drums?

“Smoke?” John asked disbelievingly. “No. Nor drums. Soldiers only drum the march forward or the retreat…”

Opechancanough spat derisively. “No. To send messages. Long messages.”

John shook his head in bewilderment. “Of course not. How could you do such a thing?”

Opechancanough’s dark smile gleamed. “Never mind. So if a man was warned and wanted to take the warning to Jamestown, he would have to go himself? By foot or canoe?”

“Yes,” John replied.

There was silence for a moment. “In the last war we were betrayed,” Opechancanough said thoughtfully. “It was a couple of our boys who had been treated kindly by their white master and could not bear to hurt him. They warned him. They had grown soft like white boys. They thought they would save him alone; but in warning him they betrayed every one of us. He ran to Jamestown and warned the fort so they were ready for us. And what of the boys who loved their master so much that they betrayed their own people and warned him?”

John waited.

“Shot by the white men,” Opechancanough said. “That is how the white men reward a faithful servant. We saw it done. And those of us who had fought, and those of us who had not, were all driven further and further away from our villages and watched our fields hoed for tobacco, nothing but tobacco, everywhere the plant for smoke and nothing for life.”

“When will the new war be?” John asked.

Opechancanough shrugged. “Soon.”

John woke in the night and lay still. Something had disturbed his sleep but he could not trace the noise or the movement or the sense which had woken him. Then he heard it again. From outside the house a twig cracked, and then the skins at the doorway parted and a low voice spoke briefly into the warm darkness: “It is now.”

Attone at John’s side was awake and standing. “Now!” he said, and his voice was filled with joy.

“What is now?” John asked, as if he did not know, as if he were not near to sinking down on the ground and weeping into the earth for his sense of dread and guilt.

“We are on the warpath,” Attone said gently. “It is now, my brother.”

Outside the tent the town was in alert silence. Men were stringing their bows and tightening their belts, checking the gleam of the blades of their knives. There was nothing to prepare, for the Powhatan were always ready for travel, for hunting, for war. John fell into line behind Attone and knew that his breath was sluggish and slow beside Attone’s light panting, knew his heart was not in this, knew also that there was no way forward and away from his allegiance to the Powhatan, and no way backward to the English.

At a signal from Opechancanough, seated on his throne, dark as a shadow in the moonlight, the men moved off, making as little noise as a herd of wolves, silent in their moccasins, their quivers held still at their sides, their bows strung over their shoulders. The moonlight touched each one like a benison, the white gleam falling on a feather plaited into dark hair, on a pale old scar on one high cheekbone, on a smile of excitement, on the gleam of burnished skin. John went silently in Attone’s steps, watching the pace of his moccasins, the movement of his haunches beneath the leather skirt, concentrating wholly on the moment of the journey so he could hide from himself the knowledge of the destination.

They were to split into two main parties. One was to travel by canoe downriver to Jamestown, taking advantage of the night to move swiftly and to form a pincer around the town by dawn. The other was to go by land either side of the river, and at every house and cabin, every grand, ambitious building and hopeful shack, they were to go in and kill every man, woman and child in the place, leaving none to escape, and none to take the news downriver.

John was in the land party, Attone with him. He thought that Opechancanough was testing his loyalty to the Powhatan by putting him in the group that would kill so early and so immediately – and not against the fighting men at the fort, but against the vulnerable, sleeping men and women with their children bundled up in the same bed beside them. But then he realized that Opechancanough had placed him where, if he were faithless, he could do no damage. He was at the rear, he could not dash ahead and warn Jamestown. All he could do was botch a few killings upriver and get himself shot.

They came upon a little house near dawn. It was set back from the river on a rise of ground, just as John had built his own house, just as Bertram Hobert had built his. Before it was a little cottage garden, neglected and overgrown, and between it and the river were long fields of tobacco, the plants set in straight rows and growing well. A little quay stretched out into the river for loading the tobacco to sail downriver to Jamestown. No light shone in the window and only a wisp of smoke showed that someone had banked the fire in overnight so that it would be hot to cook the morning breakfast.

It was the smell of woodsmoke clean on the air, unmixed with any other scent, that threw John backward; he physically recoiled and collided with the man trotting behind him. It was such an English smell. Woodsmoke for the Powhatan was the scent of the interior of their huts, mingled with the smell of cooking, of children, of people sitting around. The smell of smoke from a sooty chimney was the smell of an English homestead.

The man behind shoved John abruptly in the back but did not utter a single sound. John touched Attone’s shoulder. “I cannot do it,” he said.

Attone turned and his glance was as cold as the blade of a knife on bare skin. “What?”

“I cannot do it. I cannot go in and kill my people.”

“Do you want me to kill you now?”

Dumbly John shook his head.

“The others will kill you if I do not.”

John leaned forward as if he would take Attone in his arms and lie his unhappy face against the man’s shoulder. “They must then. Because I cannot do it.”

“Will you wait here while we do it?”

John nodded.

“And not cry out, nor run off?”

John nodded again.

“My brother will stand guard,” Attone said simply to the others. “Follow me.”

The men trotted past John without a glance at him. He leaned back against a tree, a useless guard, a faithless friend, a broken warrior, and a shamed husband.

They were quick and clean. There was one surprised cry and no more, and in moments they came back, Attone wiping his shell-bladed knife on a piece of European muslin. “Go on,” he said briskly to the others.

They nodded and turned to the trail again. One man had something in his hand. Attone reached out and smacked it down. A stone bottle fell to the ground and rolled away. Attone kicked it with his foot so that it spun round and round, spilling out the raw spirit and making the air stink. Then he turned to John.

“Can you find your way back to Suckahanna at the village?”

“Yes.”

“Then go back there. Wait till the men return.”

“She won’t have me,” John said certainly.

“No,” Attone said. “We none of us will want you, Eagle.” He paused as a thought struck him. “What was your name? Before you were my brother the Eagle?”

“I was John Tradescant,” John said, the name unfamiliar on his tongue.

“Then you will have to be him again,” Attone said flatly. “Now go to Suckahanna before someone kills you.”

“I am sorry-” John started.

“Go to Suckahanna before I kill you myself,” Attone said abruptly, and disappeared into the darkness.

The village was guarded by Attone’s son, who recognized John’s footfall and called into the gray dawn: “Is that you, Eagle?”

“No,” John said. His voice was flat and weary. “You must call me John.”

“Is my father with you? Are the braves coming home?”

“They are at war,” John said. “I am alone.”

The boy checked his loving run forward into John’s arms and suddenly looked at him as if a terrible fear was invading him, as if his trust and certainty in John was suddenly unreliable. “You are not with the men?”

“I could not do it,” John said simply. He had thought that the worst thing would have been to tell Suckahanna; but the bright gaze of her son was hard to meet. The light went slowly out of the boy’s face.

“I don’t understand,” he said plaintively, willing it to be difficult, too complex for his understanding, tempting John to create another explanation.

“I could not kill an Englishman,” John said heavily. “I thought I could do it, but when it came to it, I could not. I left my home in England because I could not choose sides and kill Englishmen, and now I am here, in this new land, and I still cannot choose sides and kill.”

The boy’s eyes scanned his face. “I thought you were a brave,” he said reproachfully.

John shook his head. “No. It seems I cannot be.”

“But you are my father’s friend!”

“Not anymore.”

“And Suckahanna loves you!”

A movement behind him made him turn. Suckahanna was standing there, watching John. The man and the boy turned and faced her, waiting for her judgment.

“So you have decided at last,” she said calmly. “You are an Englishman after all.”

Slowly John dropped to his knees, both his knees, in the gesture he had only ever used before to the greatest queen in Europe, and then unwillingly. “I am,” he said. “I did not know it until the moment when I could not shed their blood. I am sorry, Suckahanna.”

She looked at him and through him, as if she understood everything about him, and for a moment John thought that he would be forgiven, and that the steady, constant love between them could overcome even this. But then she turned away and snapped her fingers for her boy and walked, light-footed, down the street in the dawn light. She did not look back at him. He knew she would never look at him with love again.

The braves came home jubilant. The first wave of the attack on the isolated houses along the riverside had gone perfectly. The attack on Jamestown had hit the sleeping town and taken it unawares. As many as five hundred colonists had been killed, but as soon as the alarm was given the Indian army had fallen back. Although the fort was taken unawares, the town was now so spread out, and the houses so defended with shutters and stout doors, that no single battle could complete the war. The braves had fallen back to regroup, to heal the wounds and bury the dead, and then they would push forward again.

Meanwhile in Jamestown the governor was mustering all the able-bodied men and hunting dogs to counterattack. He had promised the colonists a fight to the death, a solution once and for all.

“We have to move,” Attone said as soon as all the men had returned. “Deeper into the forest, perhaps across the river and into the wet creeks. Once the village is safely hidden we can come out again and fight.”

The women went to the houses at once to start packing. “And the crops in the fields?” Suckahanna asked him.

He made a gesture which told her that they were lost. “Perhaps later. Perhaps we can come back,” he said.

They exchanged a sharp, hard look. He took in the hardness of the lines around her mouth and John, hovering helplessly behind her.

“You are hurt,” she said.

“Just bruised. You?”

She turned away. “Just bruised.”

They traveled all day. Once, when they paused, they heard a hunting horn and the baying of a dog. It was the governor Sir William Berkeley’s hounds on the track, hunting Indians would be the colonists’ great sport this season.

They crossed the river at once, the children riding on the shoulders of the men, the women wading through chest-high, rapid-flowing water without a whisper of complaint, and crossed it again, then Attone led them on at a steady run.

John was in the rear, helping the old men and women keep up, carrying burdens for them. Suckahanna had told no one of what had passed between her and her husband, but she did not need to speak. Everyone could see that the Eagle was not at the side of his friend, not at the side of his wife. Everyone could see that he was a dead man to Attone, to Suckahanna, as surely as if he had gone into Jamestown and fought like a brave and died like a hero. So they let him carry their goods or hold them steady in the river as if he were a rock or a tree, or something of use. But they did not speak to him, nor smile at him, nor even look into his eyes.

All day they traveled as Attone led them closer to the sea, where the mosquitoes rose in clouds from the sodden grass and reeds and the trees bowed down low over dark, silty, salty water. At night they found some ground only a little higher than the tidewash. “Here,” Attone said. “Make shelters but no fires.”

An old woman died in the night, and they piled a heap of stones over her face.

“We move on,” Attone said.

All day they traveled at that punishing pace. An old man and an old woman stopped at the side of the trail and said they would go no further. Attone left them with a bow and arrow to do what damage they could to the pursuers, and with a tiny sliver of sharpened bark to open their veins rather than be captured. None of them stopped to say goodbye. The safety of the People was greater than the farewells of individuals. Attone wanted to get the People away.

On the third day they reached a small hill deep inside the swamp and Attone gave the order that they could rest. There was nothing to eat except some dried flour which they mixed cold with the marshy water. Attone sent out scouts, empty bellied, to go down the trail and see if they were followed. When they returned and said that the trails were safe he sent them out again. Only when the third party had come back on the fifth day did he say that the women could light fires and start to collect food and the men could go hunting.

“What happens now?” John asked one of the old women.

“We live here,” she said.

“In the middle of a foul swamp?”

She gave him a look which told him as clearly as words that she despised his weakness. “In the middle of a foul swamp,” she said.