Raleigh's Page (14 page)

The man who laughed caught the heavy end of the captain’s mace.

“Their name for him is ‘Big Thumps-a-Stick,’” Mr. Harriot whispered to Tremayne.

When they landed, Tremayne and Andrew walked with Mr. Harriot up to the fort.

“Manteo says game and fish grow scarce here in winter,” Mr. Harriot said. “We came as owners; we find ourselves guests. It will take all our science to stay fed. Our need for grain will soon outstrip theirs for copper pots.”

Salt was trotting beside Andrew. Suddenly he shot into the brush. He came back with a red squirrel.

“His science will feed him well enough,” said Tremayne with a laugh.

As Andrew reached to look at it, Salt snarled. He wagged his tail, but he would not let go. He ate it on the spot.

That afternoon, an Indian found in the fish traps a blue velvet jacket trimmed with silver lace. For days almost every tide brought in other English goods. Andrew was startled to encounter a warrior sitting on the shore in a long London coat with gold buttons. He was holding a book.

31

W
ASSADOR

The next morning, Andrew and Tremayne rowed out to the
Tyger
to see their patients. The broken leg they’d set was hot and inflamed, dark with a crust of dried pus where the bone had come out. They dosed the sailor with spirits and scraped the wound open to drain it.

“Skip all that!” the sailor growled as Andrew dug in his saddlebag for the herb his mother used for open wounds. “Wash it with salt water. That heals better than your blasted leaves!”

They dipped up bucketfuls of cold seawater and poured them over.

Mr. Harriot met them when they got back to the fort.

“The captain says we must go to Chief Pemisapan to learn about their mines of metal. We’ll row across after dinner.”

Andrew picked up his long package of hobbyhorses and filled a saddlebag with toys for the bright-eyed children he’d seen.

As they paddled across the channel, Mr. Harriot asked Wanchese if he knew of any mines around.

“No.”

“Any deep pits your people visit?”

“There is a cave on the mainland,” Wanchese replied. “It is a sacred place.”

“Is there metal in it?” Mr. Harriot asked.

“I’ve never been there. Only the priests go.”

“Is it far?”

“It is where the mountains begin. The priests go with no food. They chew a root. They are gone for days.”

“Is that the root your priests lay beside the dead priests and chiefs?” Andrew asked.

Wanchese shrugged. “I don’t know. I am not a priest.”

Mr. Harriot met Chief Pemisapan in his lodge.

“We have come to find the wassador,” he said. “Where does it come from?”

“A great distance,” the chief said.

“Does it come from the priests’ cave?” Mr. Harriot asked.

Pemisapan turned away. His guards motioned the visitors out.

As they walked back to the boats, Andrew handed out tops and toy animals to the children, who appeared like magic as soon as he opened his saddlebag. Their high chirping voices filled the air like music. Then he unwrapped the hobbyhorses.

The children went silent, staring. Andrew took one and pretended to ride it around the fire pit. The children didn’t move.

Sky had come up to watch. “Deer,” he called in Algonquin as he took one and galloped. “The English brings us deer.”

Slowly, one of the girls came forward and took one. She didn’t ride it, though; she carried it to her lodge. Others did the same.

“Manteo,” Andrew called. “May I bring Sky to the fort?”

Manteo looked at Mr. Harriot. The tall man nodded.

In the boat, Sky showed Andrew his bear claw gift, now bored and strung on a cord like his. “You’ll wear it?” he asked, pointing that Andrew should bend his head. Sky hung the claw around his neck. “Us,” he said, pointing first to himself, then at Andrew. “We.”

Mr. Harriot reported to Captain Lane on his useless meeting with Pemisapan.

“He’s hiding it!” the captain muttered. “The priests’ cave must be where it comes from. As soon as we have the fort in good order, we’ll go there.”

He noticed the claw around Andrew’s neck. He leaned forward, peering. “What heathenish thing are you wearing, boy?”

Andrew touched the claw. “A gift, sir, from one who studies their medicine,” he said in a strong voice.

“Some gift! Some medicine!” the captain harrumphed.

“It’s proof that we’re making friends here,” Mr. Harriot said quietly.

“Don’t get too friendly with them,” the captain grumbled. “Remember, they’re savages!”

Late that afternoon, while Captain Lane was clambering around the base of the fort checking foundations, a copperhead struck him deep in the calf just above his boot top. He fell hard, thrashing and bellowing.

Andrew came running. He’d heard about the copper-headed snakes.

“Their bite is deadly,” the exploring captains had reported. “We lost a man to snakebite—his face blotched purple as he died in agony.”

While Mr. Harriot and Tremayne fashioned a tourniquet to keep the poison from traveling up the captain’s body to his heart, Andrew went for Sky. “The captain!” he yelled. “A snake! You must save him! Please!” Together they rushed to where the captain writhed and groaned.

The Indian boy got close and looked at the wound, then he grabbed Andrew’s hand and ran for the woods. “White root!” he yelled. “We go for white root!” He found the plant, ripped it up, and raced back.

Andrew translated for him. “You two,” Sky ordered, pointing to Tremayne and Mr. Harriot, “sit on the captain’s back to keep him still for me to do my work.”

While the two men struggled to control the frantic captain, the Indian boy shut his eyes for an instant, chanted rapidly in a high singsong voice, then took a sharp-edged oyster shell from the pouch at his waist. He slashed a deep “X” over the bite with more force than Andrew imagined he had. Then he squeezed the wound hard to make it bleed and sucked it. He spat out the poisoned blood, sucked again and spat again, then chewed the white root and spat his chaw into the wound. He pointed that Andrew should tie a cloth to hold the medicine in place.

The captain’s leg turned black. The “X” Sky cut left a white scar, and where the tourniquet had cut into the captain’s thigh he was sore for months, but he recovered. The upshot was he never objected to Sky’s staying in the fort.

In the logbook he kept for Mr. Harriot, Andrew wrote down Sky’s description of the snakeroot and other medicine plants his friend pointed out.

“But the plant, the root—we use it with the prayer,” Sky explained. “That’s what gives it power. Each illness, each remedy, has its prayer.”

“Was that what you cried out before you cut Captain Lane?”

“Yes.”

“Can you teach me?” Andrew asked.

“Only the shaman—the chief priest,” Sky replied. “I am not allowed.”

Andrew wondered what Sir Walter would make of the idea that the shaman’s prayers gave power to their medicines.

Sky followed Mr. Harriot close as a shadow when he wasn’t with Andrew. He asked so many questions the tall man took to calling him Why. He was curious about everything—how magnets worked, why the English cleaned their teeth, what money was, why letters had sounds.

Of all the new strange things he saw, Sky asked for only one: a bright steel sewing needle from Mr. Harriot’s kit. He carefully worked it into the rawhide strip around his neck just above the bear claw so it gleamed like a bit of stitching.

He showed Andrew how to find nests to raid for eggs they ate raw on the spot, the juice of the plant to smear on himself for stings, and how to chew spruce gum to get a sweet taste in the mouth. They experimented making fires with the lenses. One afternoon, as they raced to see who could get a blaze going first, the wind picked up suddenly and sent their flames roaring toward the fort. They admitted nothing as they helped the men cut brush and clear a swath to contain the fire, but Andrew could tell Mr. Harriot knew.

Andrew and Sky drew pictures for each other to teach their words. Sky picked up English as fast as Andrew added to his Algonquin.

They built a secret perch of limbs fastened with treenails high in an oak tree hung with grapevines. The only way to it was up the vines. No one could see them, but they could see the fort and across the sound. One afternoon, to surprise his friend, Andrew carried up Mr. Harriot’s glass for looking at a distance. The Indian boy’s mouth fell open when he put the tube to his eye. He held his breath as he lowered it, looked out across the sound, then raised it again. “Oooh!” he exclaimed. “A priest’s eye!”

They made a game of swinging out on the vines over the red clay gully below—each daring the other to push off harder and swing higher, until Andrew crashed when the vine he swung on broke. He lay like dead until Sky revived him with the juice of skunkweed.

One hot, idle afternoon, Andrew asked Sky, “Do you do acting with masks?”

“The priests do,” said Sky, “to call for rain and healing and victory over our enemies. We have medicine masks, masks for war, masks for dancing.”

“Do you put on plays with them to entertain the people?”

“Sometimes, to show how stupid our enemies are and give courage to our warriors.”

“My favorite story is about a boy named Galahad,” said Andrew. “There’s a test. He does something no one else can do.”

“How?” Sky asked. “Was he the bravest?”

“No. He had the truest heart.”

Sky nodded. “Our warriors and apprentice priests face such a test going into manhood. I will face such a test.” He paused. He would not say more.

“Shall we make masks and act the story for the company?” Andrew asked.

“Yes.”

They spent days working out their parts and making the masks. Sky played Galahad. The explorers all knew the story and applauded. Mr. Harriot proposed they do it for the children in Pemisapan’s village.

“No,” said Sky. “It’s too much like the trial our young men go through. They will think we mock them.”

At last Captain Lane was ready to go to the priests’ cave. With supplies for a week and tools to gather samples of rock, the survey team paddled across the channel. Salt and Sky rode with Andrew in Tremayne’s boat.

Again Mr. Harriot asked Pemisapan about the cave.

“You cannot go there,” the chief said in his slow deep voice. “Only the priests.”

“We go as priests,” said Mr. Harriot quietly. “Summon yours. I will show you once more I am one of them.”

A priest of science,
Andrew thought.
A priest like Doctor Dee. Not a church priest.

When the chief’s priests came, Mr. Harriot took a packet of iron filings from his pocket and emptied it on the ground. As he waved his magnetized blade over the pieces of metal, he drew them up.

He then pulled out his compass and showed its blue needle pointing north. With his blade he made it point to him. As he backed away, it aimed north again.

The Indians stared like stones and said nothing.

Mr. Harriot put more iron filings on the ground and held out the compass to Chief Pemisapan. “Let your priests raise the grains and move the needle,” he said.

No one moved.

After a long silence, Pemisapan nodded. He motioned to two of his allegiance men. “Lead them to the priests’ cave,” he ordered.

As the company set out, Sky walked beside Andrew. One of the allegiance men stopped and ordered the Indian boy back.

“No,” said Manteo. “He is of my tribe, not yours. He goes with me.”

They marched all that day and much of the next. The land was smooth as it sloped upward through groves of trees and open meadows.

“This land will make wonderful farms,” Andrew told Mr. Harriot as he wrote in the journal that night.

“What do you mean?”

“It is smooth, there are no rocks, the loamy soil.”

Mr. Harriot looked up. “The soil?” he asked. “What’s special about the soil?”

“The black in it,” Andrew explained. “And its sweetness. The color shows its richness. I dug where we stopped for dinner—the black goes down more than a foot. The thick grasses show there’s limestone underneath. That makes it sweet.

“It’s like the long slope from Exeter down to Plymouth,” the boy continued. “It would take nothing to run cattle here. Pigs would grow fat in the woods.”

Mr. Harriot was a city man. Andrew was a farmer’s son. He showed Mr. Harriot Virginia through a farmer’s eyes.

The following day, Captain Lane was in good spirits as they approached the steep hills where the cave was.

“This is what we came for!” he exclaimed. “Gold!”

The path was well-worn, then rougher and rougher over broken stone. At last the allegiance men pointed out the cave’s opening between cracks of an overhanging ledge. Then they turned and left.

“What will we burn for light?” the captain asked.

Manteo pointed to a tall pine. “The hard pitch wood at the center burns long.”

The day was overcast. The burning glass wouldn’t work, so Manteo made fire the Indian way, twisting a dry stick into the slack cord of a short bow, then pushing one end of the stick into a shallow hole in a bit of dry wood with shavings piled around. As he sawed the bow back and forth, the stick spun and the rubbing end got hot. Soon the stuff around it was on fire.

They crawled into the cave on their bellies. It was dark and close. Andrew fought back his sick feeling about being in tight places. The farther in they went, the darker it got. Then there was a turn and the last daylight was gone! He forced himself to keep up.

The cave went deep, shafts dividing off like tree branches. The way was low and narrow. At every turning, Manteo kept to the left. They stooped and crawled. At some turnings the flares burned brighter and they breathed fresher air. It was damp. They stopped often to chip off pieces of rock.

Suddenly the tunnel opened out to where a man could almost stand. Cool air poured in, the torches flared. There were drawings of hunters, animals, and strange shapes like large insects scratched in the stone. The hunters carried spears and bows. The insects, large as men, held drums, rattles, and reed pipes. In the torches’ flickerings, the shapes glowed white and seemed to move, the hunters lunging toward their prey as the insect musicians played and danced.

They heard what sounded like organ music. Andrew looked at Sky. He gave a quick nod.

Mr. Harriot signaled that he heard it too. “The wind,” he said.

Manteo stared at the images like one in prayer. “The drawings are from long ago,” he said finally. “This big one is our god Okeus.” He pointed.

It was a large-headed figure with huge eyes and the features of man and woman. It looked like the idol he and Wanchese had prayed to on board the ship.

In front of the drawings there was a large earthenware dish filled with bones, seashells, and a few small pieces of copper bearing the image of Okeus.

Captain Lane kicked over the dish and picked out the pieces of copper.

“No!” Manteo exclaimed. “Those things were given to the god!”

“You do not give me orders!” the captain snarled as he pocketed the medals.

Andrew was ashamed. From what he’d heard, that was the way Spaniards behaved.