Serpent Never Sleeps (12 page)

He came to a halt in front of the stockade. Through the gate, which hung loose on its hinges, stumbled a grizzled old woman, leading a child. Behind her stood a cluster of silent figures. The woman wanted to know if the ships had brought food.

Sir Thomas, though shocked by the desolation that lay around him, by the starving woman and the silent figures, said in a hearty voice, "Two shiploads, good lady. Fish, eggs, turtle meat, strings of smoked birds. We'll spread a grand feast for you ere the sun goes down."

"Now would be the better," the old woman said. "A little now. Some of us will not be here when the sun goes down."

"So now it is," Sir Thomas said in the same hearty voice, and sent a bevy of guards headlong to the ships.

The child wandered over and grasped the hem of my skirt. She had blue eyes and corn-colored hair that needed combing.

"What name do you have?" I asked her.

"Humility," she said. "And my mother's name is Humility, too."

"It's a pretty name. How nice. Where is your mother?"

"In heaven," the child said. "My father is in heaven, too. I will see them soon."

Our people crowded around the ruined gate and stared at those inside. Emma Swinton, holding the red parasol saved from the wreck, came up with a quiet tread to where I stood.

"It's not safe for the child to pull at your skirt," Swinton said. "She has dirty hands and soiled feet. She may have the plague, for all we know."

At these words, Humility backed away. I picked her up. She was all bones, light as a starving sparrow.

Emma Swinton snapped the parasol shut and made a sign with it.

I had seen the sign before. The first time on the day we left Plymouth. Once again on the day before we were struck by the violent storm. It was made then with a finger. Now it was made with the red parasol, as her eyes rested gently upon the child.

Our people gazed at the ruined fort and the tumbled barricade and the starving. They must have wished, all of them except our leaders and the Reverend Bucke, that they were back in the soft airs of Bermuda, among the palm trees and the blue water and bounteous shoals of food, just for the taking.
Their groans were tight-lipped and silent, but I heard them nonetheless.

Barrels of smoked pork were trundled up the hill. Governor Gates had them opened for all to see, but the starving people hung back.

"Step up, my friends," he said in his stentorian voice. "There are more barrels of pork, barrels of fish, and birds laid down in fat awaiting you."

The starving people just stared at the tempting food, too weak to move.

A man standing beside the governor said, "It's been a terrible time. We've had scarce a handful of corn each day. This, for weeks now. The smell of food, the mere sight of it, must make them ill as it does me. Bear with us, I pray you. We'll soon get our stomachs back."

The man, I learned, was Sir George Percy. He had been president of the colony since the day Captain Smith was badly burned in a fire and forced to return to England.

The colony had fared well under Smith's guidance. This I remembered from what was said about him at the countess of Foxcroft's masque. He had frowned on laziness. Those who did not work did not eat. Those who disobeyed orders were punished. He went boldly among the Indians, often alone, threatening them if himself threatened, carrying out his threats if need be.

But no more than sixty of the some five hundred
settlers had survived the past six months. "A deathly winter," Sir George Percy said as he stood gazing at the food spread out upon the grass, still unable to touch it.

"We called it 'the Starving Time.' We ventured outside the fort only to bury our dead, but only at night in shallow graves, for the earth was frozen and we feared death from savage arrows. Inside the fort stalked famine and pestilence. Huts of the dead and pickets from the stockade were burned for firewood. So great was the famine that an Indian we managed to slay was consumed. One amongst our starving slew his wife and was secretly eating her when discovered. Truly, a Starving Time. My friends, if you had not come at this fateful hour, we all would have been dead within the week."

Percy grasped the hilt of his sword to salute Governor Gates but lacked the strength to take it from the scabbard.

Little of the food we brought was eaten that day, and those who did eat it fell ill.

Three died in the night; one of them was the grizzled old woman who had befriended the child. I held Humility close while the grave was dug. Afterward I gathered her clothes—a pair of red striped hose that needed mending—and got permission from Captain Newport to take her aboard the
Deliverance.

As I glanced at the ruined fort, the roofless church, the tumbled barricade, I stopped as though smitten
by a club. My dearest wish was to return to England, to the position with Queen Anne that the king had promised me.

I had learned in my brief time at Jamestown more of what I had learned from Captain John Smith at Foxcroft. Princess Pocahontas had not only saved his life, but she also had saved the first colonists. But when, desperately ill, he had gone back to England without saying good-bye to her, she had not set foot in Jamestown again.

Chief Powhatan, her father, was the ruler of a vast part of Virginia and twenty-eight different tribes. An emperor, a despot, he ruled the confederacy with a spear and a war club. When his daughter stopped her visits to Jamestown and the governors of the colony treated him arrogantly, he had sworn to sink every English ship on the James River and leave the settlement in ashes.

He adored his daughter and was said to indulge her slightest whim. Since the colony had survived during the time she had visited it and brought food, and since she was responsible for his grudging good will, it was clear to me that the princess must be found and persuaded to make friends with the colony once again. And I must undertake it.

It was a wild idea. It would help Jamestown. Selfishly, somehow it would help me get back to England. I went with the idea to Admiral Somers, who looked upon the scheme with a dubious eye. But Governor Gates, who didn't much care whether I
lived or perished, and William Strachey, who thought the same, believed it might succeed.

The next day I was sent off with a flourish of trumpets, ten stout soldiers, and an old Indian, Mary Soltax, to serve as an interpreter. It was thought that Pocahontas would most likely be found far up the Pamunkey River in a village called Werowocómoco, where the most important temple in all of her father's vast domain was located.

"If the princess is not there," Governor Gates said as I settled myself on the barge, "they will know where she is." He raised his sword in salute. "Fare thee well," he shouted. "We await your safe return. We will remember you in our daily prayers."

Prayers? I did not seek his prayers. Safe? It had never crossed my mind that I would not be safe. The serpent ring, its thrice-wound coils, its jeweled, half-closed eyes that never shut, was tight upon my finger.

The third day of our voyage by oar and sail, following a map Captain Smith had made years before, we came to the Pamunkey River. From here after a day's travel, still following the captain's map, we sighted a village that we took to be Werowocómoco.

Before we could land, a fleet of canoes filled with painted warriors came out to meet us. They surrounded the barge, screeched in high-pitched voices, and brandished clubs. But when they saw that two of our party were women, their deportment changed. Smiling, chattering like magpies, they escorted us onward. Since our barge grounded before we had gone far, two of the warriors carried Mary Soltax and me ashore.

Speaking in the Algonquian dialect, Mary told their leader, a muscular young man shining with bear grease, why we had come. Of what she said, I understood only two words: Powhatan and Pocahontas.

Forthwith, we were led through a stretch of sandy ooze and up a hillside to the village—a crooked street of huts and, at the end of the street, a long house. Our
soldiers refused to give up their weapons but were made to lie down among a stand of trees, while we were shown to a place where fires burned and women were cooking. No men were in sight, albeit dozens of boys silently watched us from various outposts.

We sat for a time unattended, then three tall fellows painted half-black, half-red, with white eyes and red strokes on their cheeks, came and danced. They wore robes made of blackish snakes stuffed with moss, the tails tied together in tassels.

They danced for a long time, shouting invocations in hellish voices. I had the impression that we were being purified, made fit to converse with the great werowance, Chief Powhatan.

Presently we were led into a templelike hut, fashioned of tree boles and woven reeds, and seated upon mats. We were brought water to wash our hands and turkey-feather towels to wipe them.

Afterward we were served bowls of thick gruel. I ate mine and found it wholesome, but Mary Soltax, thinking no doubt that the mush might be poisoned, only made a show of eating.

From the far end of the temple came the sound of rattles. To their accompaniment a large figure, undoubtedly Chief Powhatan, surrounded by a phalanx of half-naked warriors, made his way to a throne covered with hides. A girl who had followed him arranged herself at his feet.

By the light of a fire blazing in front of the throne, I saw that the emperor was an elderly man with a
small, gray beard and a grim countenance. He wore a mantle of raccoon skins, their ringed tails cascading down his front. His neck was looped with chains of gleaming pearls.

The girl's face was turned away from me, yet I felt, from the tilt of her head, the chain of jeweled seashells around her neck, that she was the princess Pocahontas.

I had come only to speak to her, but realizing that first I must address her father, I got to my feet and pulled Mary, the interpreter, up beside me, instructing her to say that I was immensely honored to be in the presence of Chief Powhatan, werowance of all the waters.

Mary took her time and stretched out my few words into a lengthy greeting of some sort. To which the chief replied with a wave of his hand and silence.

His gaze was fixed upon a statue standing near me. The Reverend Bucke had one like it, which he once used in a sermon to warn the settlers of what barbarians they had to deal with. It was a statue of Okeus, the most powerful of the Powhatan gods, a wooden crosspiece as tall as a man, padded out with moss, hung with pearls, the body painted black and the mossy face the color of white flesh.

The chieftain said a few words which Mary Soltax did not catch but which caused howls of laughter from the phalanx of warriors ranged at his back. His heavy gaze shifted from the effigy to a large rough stone that stood between him and the fire. Was this the altar that
Captain Smith had told me about, upon which his head had been held while a warrior crouched above him with a knotted club?

I trembled, but not from fear of my life, only from the fear that Powhatan would never allow his daughter to speak. He was in a sullen mood. Was he thinking back to the time when she had defied him and thrown herself upon the outstretched body of John Smith? Possibly I should address him and not Pocahontas.

She had been listening to his every word. Now she had turned and was studying me through a curtain of black hair that nearly hid her face.

"White girl," she said suddenly and to my great surprise, speaking English words haltingly but in a clear, low-pitched voice. "You have come to take me away. You wish that I will come to Jamestown now, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, soon."

She tossed back the black curtain of hair. Her eyes, which were set deep and far apart, aslant at the corners, blazed.

"You will ask me this," she said, "because you are starving over there in that place. And I will not go there because you do not wish me, Pocahontas. All you wish is a large canoe heaped with corn so you can eat and not die."

The emperor broke in to grumble a few words and a string of names, which Soltax interpreted. "He says that the white men want corn. Corn and also the land he rules from Werowocómoco to the Chickahominy, to Nansemonds, to the cypress groves of Uttamussack.
All of it the white man wants and which the white man shall not have."

The emperor's eyes shifted back and forth between the altar and the statue of Okeus, the god of evil who brought sickness, ruined the ripening corn, stirred up wars, and ravaged the land with storms. A god who must be constantly appeased lest he destroy the world itself. It was from the god's savage demands that John Smith had been saved.

Pocahontas was still looking at me, her head half-turned, but in her gaze I saw a faraway look, as if she were thinking of a different time.

"Before I came to your country," I said, "I talked to Captain Smith."

The faraway look disappeared, albeit there was no other sign that the name meant anything to her.

"You will remember him?"

She nodded.

"He spoke affectionately of you. He called you his beautiful little princess."

"I was a child then."

In the firelight, her skin had had the brightness of burnished copper. I saw it change and take on a deeper hue.

"The captain told me how you had saved his life."

Her eyes changed. They glowed. They glistened like living coals.

"And more, you had saved the lives of many in Jamestown who were starving. I came to ask you to come to Jamestown again as you used to do. Then
your father will look upon us more kindly. Then we will have more food to eat. Then we will not live every day fearful of being attacked. And you will not be fearful of us."

As I said these words I was aware that her father was right, that the colonists meant to take over his land. It would disappear, piece by piece, stream by stream, river by river, from the sea to the mountains and beyond. Still, I had come here to help Jamestown and in so doing to help especially my chances of returning to England.

Chief Powhatan listened, though he understood nothing of what we had said. He scratched his scanty beard and was silent, more sullen than ever. He had never once looked at me and didn't now. His gaze was set fast upon his daughter.