Jamestown (The Keepers of the Ring) (11 page)

Gepanocon doubtless intended to hide the men again in the sacred caves, and Fallon knew the warriors did not have time to escort the Englishmen and return. The enemy warriors were just outside the front gate, and they would not wait for Gepanocon’s treasure to be hidden.

Fallon left the chief’s hut and ran to find Gilda and Noshi.

Serving as war chief for this battle, Opechancanough did not hesitate to attack Ritanoe. Usually he and his braves hid in the woods for hours to judge the strengths and weaknesses of an enemy camp, but Gepanocon had revealed all by opening his village to the traders. Opechancanough would not waste time at Ritanoe, for he wanted most of all to capture the Englishmen, and Gepanocon would surely try to hide them.

The old men and women of the village made a futile effort to close the tall gates of the palisade as the enemy streamed from the forest, but the walls were easily pushed aside. Inside the village, women and children screamed and ran from the huts that the Powhatan set ablaze.

Walking behind his warriors, Opechancanough searched for the clothed men and felt his anger rise as he stalked from hut to hut only to find frightened women and children. In one hut he found raw copper and tools to work it, but the grass mats spread upon the floor were empty. This maddening inability to find his quarry drove him past the point of endurance, and Opechancanough ordered that all in the village should be killed.

His warriors obediently pulled the women and children forward to meet the knife, but Opechancanough held up a hand. Standing among the knot of survivors was an unusual boy, with red hair and fair skin. He wore leather breeches and a full shirt, and Opechancanough felt his heart beat faster as he walked over for a closer look. Could this stripling be one of the survivors of Ocanahonan? Surely one so young could not be the source of Gepanocon’s copper weapons.

The boy stood with his hands on the heads of two dark-haired children, and as if by command, all three kept their heads lowered before him. “Look at me,” Opechancanough commanded, and only the older boy’s head rose. He glared defiantly at the war chief.

Opechancanough felt the corner of his mouth twitch in a half smile. The boy’s skin was pale and pink from the sun, his nose sprinkled with the brown spots common to the skin of the clothed people. His face was clear, and his body tall like a fast-growing weed, but the troubled blue eyes were those of a man who has seen thirty summers of sorrow.

Opechancanough put his hands under the chins of the two children and jerked their heads up. The little boy’s eyes were green and dark with fear, the little girl’s as blue as the sky at noonday. All three children were dressed in the linen clothes of the English, and each child’s forearms were tattooed with tribal markings and a small sign that made Opechancanough’s stomach tighten into a knot. The sign of the cross.

Opechancanough lifted his head to consider their fate. These were not children of Ritanoe. The two boys were marked with the sign of the Mangoak tribe; the girl, strangely enough, wore the symbol of the Powhatan. And though all three bore the sign of the cross, the younger ones could not possibly understand what it meant.

Opechancanough stepped away from the children and commanded one of his warriors to bind the youngsters together, for they would be captives for the chief of the Powhatan. The two young ones cried as the warrior bound their hands, and though the older boy said nothing, Opechancanough could feel those blue eyes burning through him no matter where he turned.

With fury lurking beneath his smile, Opechancanough ordered his men to fire the village.

Walking in the center of the long line of warriors, Opechancanough watched the children carefully. The older boy must have spoken to the younger ones, for the children remained silent on the journey back to Weromacomico, neither crying nor protesting their capture. Occasionally the little ones looked to the older boy for comfort, but the red-haired boy seemed to speak to them through his eyes. They followed their captors in blind faith as if they trusted their God to take care of them, and Opechancanough wondered if the young ones understood more than he had thought possible.

The children had earned his respect with their silence and fortitude, and he wondered what thoughts ran through their minds. Did they think they would be killed? If, as he suspected, they had lived at Ocanahonan, did they hold bitterness in their young hearts toward the Powhatan? If he untied the leather strips that held their hands, would he awaken in the night to find the older boy holding a knife to his heart?

Opechancanough understood bitterness. As his feet methodically fell into the steps of the warrior ahead of him, he slowly submerged himself into memory. On a summer’s day years ago, as an unnamed youth, he had been forced to hide his fear and swallow the desperation of loneliness. At sixteen, not much older than the boy who traveled with him now, he had seen two winged ships enter the great bay called Chesapeake. Unafraid and ignorant of such ships, he, his father the chief, and several warriors paddled out in their canoes to board the largest vessel. The Spanish Admiral aboard welcomed them, and, much taken with the youth, asked permission to take him across the great ocean so that the King of Spain might see him. In return the Admiral promised Opechancanough’s father much wealth and many garments.

The boy hid his fear as best he could when the ships sailed eastward, and by a tremendous effort he stopped the trembling of his knees when he was presented to Spain’s King Philip II as an Indian prince. The clothed men’s king, with pale skin, long, curling hair, and a drooping moustache, had been delighted with the boy in the same way the young Indian had been delighted when the children of his village presented him with a trained squirrel.

The young prince was powerless in the land of the clothed men. New sights, sounds, and smells assaulted him. Men and women in this strange land adorned themselves with an excess of clothing and perfume. Jewels dripped from their necks, their heads, their hands, and they wore more garments in one day than any Indian wore in a year. But they carried the long sticks of thunder, and unending swords that gleamed with silver sharper than a snake’s fangs. The youth did not dare displeasure his hosts.

He wanted to go home, but he was taken to Seville for instruction in both the Spanish language and religion. Under the stern Dominican friars he learned to speak the lilting tongue of the Spanish men. After five years, his teachers were not only reporting that the Indian possessed a powerful intellect, but that he was also “wily and crafty.”

Indeed, he had absorbed his lessons and stored them away for future use. A chameleon among the clothed people, he aped their tongue and their manners while pondering how he could escape to his father’s kingdom across the great ocean. From the Dominican fathers and later from the Jesuits, he learned an important lesson: what could not be won by force might be achieved by diplomacy. Patients and long-range planning, he came to realize, were tools of great significance.

And so, while in Spain, he made a profession of faith and, to all observers, became a devoted Christian. It was the only way to please the priests who labored over his mind and soul, and he reasoned it was the most likely way to win his release and effect his return back to the land the clothed men called America.

When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés crossed to Mexico in 1563, the young prince was allowed to go with him. King Philip had decreed that the Indian be allowed to return to his people, but when Menéndez tried to fulfill the king’s order, the Archbishop of Mexico, an insecure and ambitious man who feared that the Indian might relapse into his former devil worship, refused to give his permission. Frustrated, Menéndez compromised, and left the prince with the Dominicans of New Spain, where he stayed for three years.

The chameleon adapted again, and imitated this new group of monks as easily as he had the Spanish fathers in Seville. In time he became the protégé of Governor Don Luis de Velasco, who took a fatherly interest in the young Indian and gave the prince his own name: Don Luis.

Upon hearing that his wishes and vow had been thwarted, King Philip appointed Menéndez conqueror of Florida in 1565, and ordered the authorities of New Spain to remand Don Luis to Menéndez. The Archbishop and governor reluctantly complied, and Don Luis was sent off with fatherly embraces from the governor and dire warnings from the archbishop. From New Spain, Don Luis traveled to San Mateo in Florida, then two friars were commanded to escort the Indian to his own territory.

Captain Pedro de Coronas and thirty Spanish soldiers joined the two friars and sailed from Santa Elena for Don Luis’ homeland of the Chesapeake, but the ship missed the entrance to the bay and anchored far southward. A sudden storm forced the Portuguese pilot to consult the two friars as to their next course of action.

Like traitors, the two priests abandoned their task and told the pilot to sail for Spain. From where he stood in the bowels of the ship, Don Luis instinctively knew that he had been betrayed. The afternoon sun, which should have been in his face, lay at his back. The friars had kept him from his home once again, and rage bubbled in his soul like a living thing.

But he had learned patience from the Spanish monks, and he swallowed his grief and disguised his anger as the ship anchored at Cadiz. King Philip directed that Don Luis be placed with the Jesuits to help them prepare for their missionary work among the American savages, and he learned how to read, write, and speak not only Spanish, but Latin. During this time he also received the holy sacraments of the altar and confirmation in the Catholic faith.

Once he realized how highly the Spanish regarded their missionary work, he knew he had found a way home. Cloaking his features in piety and concern, he approached his Jesuit mentors in the autumn of 1567 with a dream to convert his parents, relatives, and countrymen to the faith of Jesus Christ. “I wish to baptize and make them Christians as I am,” he said, piously folding his hands in an attitude of prayer. “I have heard that a party of friars is about to depart for Florida, and would ask that priests be sent to my country to assist me in the work of conversion.” Menéndez was so delighted and relieved by the missionary scheme that he offered to supply a ship to carry a party to the Chesapeake.

Menéndez and Don Luis reached Havana in November 1568 and met with Father Juan Baptista de Segura. Over the objections of his brothers, Father Segura looked into the dead black of Don Luis’ eyes and offered to join the expedition as a guide and interpreter. After a delay of some months, the ship
left Santa Elena and arrived in Don Luis’ homeland on the tenth day of September 1570, nine years after he had been carried away.

Upon landing, Don Luis’s joy was immediately tempered. He remembered the region as fruitful and beautiful, but upon his return the land bore the marks of famine and disease. The natives they encountered on their inland trek seemed primitive, dirty, and sickly to Don Luis’ eyes. ‘Twas as if the entire realm had been cursed since his departure.

When at last he returned home to his own tribe, the simple Indians behaved as if he had come back from the dead. His father had died in his absence, and his younger brother, Wahunsonacock, now ruled the tribe as werowance,
the Powhatan
.

Don Luis stood in silence as Wahunsonacock knelt at his feet and offered to surrender authority to him. He declined the offer, mindful of the watchful eyes of the Spanish friars. He quickly stated that he had not returned to his father’s people out of a desire for earthly things, but to teach them the way to heaven that lay in the instruction in the religion of Christ the Lord.

His kinsmen listened with little enthusiasm and much suspicion, though the faces of the Spanish lit with delight. For a week Don Luis played the part of patient and benevolent missionary while he watched and waited for the right opportunity to avenge his blighted land and weakened people.

One night, in a deliberate, defiant choice, Don Luis stood in the glow of village campfire and chose three wives from the women of the tribe. He had lived among the sexless friars for too long, and believed his unnatural celibacy to be the reason why the land had ceased to be fertile. He was twenty-five years old, and should have already fathered many children. He took his wives to a village on the Pamunkey River, out of sight from the religious monks who had established in a small mission not far away.

After learning of his polygamy, his missionary companions were too shocked to reprimand him immediately. But days later, when Father Segura called him before the entire religious company and sanctimoniously rebuked him, Don Luis felt the stirring of angry pride from deep within him. “I renounce you,” he cried, casting his Spanish mantle aside. “I am no longer Don Luis, but Opechancanough of the Powhatan, or he-whose-soul-is-white. Do not send for me again, brothers, for I will never go willingly with you.”

He left the missionary compound and returned to his home on the Pamunkey, determined to abandon both the lifestyle and God of the Spanish. Four months later, Fathers Quirós and Segura visited the Indian village and tried to persuade their rebellious convert to return to the mission. Opechancanough berated them loudly, announced that he had sold his soul to the devil, and laughed as the holy fathers trembled before him. They fled the settlement in horror, and Opechancanough followed with a group of Powhatan warriors, determined to repay his past suffering with bloodshed.

Under a canopy of silent oaks on the trail, Opechancanough killed the missionary monks, burned their bodies, and scattered their clothing. Moving on to the mission, he identified himself as Don Luis and called a greeting. After being admitted through the gates, he and his warriors massacred the remainder of the Spaniards. In the quick skirmish fueled by murderous anger, Opechancanough received a cut across his left cheek, the only wound ever to mar his strong body. The cut eventually healed, leaving a smooth white scar, but the hate in Opechancanough’s heart did not.