The Deed

The burgher fell in love with the rotten log the instant he spied it, by the side of the forest path, sprawling wantonly across a tangle of ferns. Hours of slogging through the brackish wilderness behind his joyless companion, on half rations and no meat, had left the oversize administrator drained and weary; the log’s horizontal surface, framed to idyllic perfection by a green little clearing dotted with toadstools, exerted an almost magnetic influence on his heaving frame.

He gazed lewdly along the length of the fallen trunk as he approached, small eyes expertly locating a section where some internal erosion had gently collapsed the bark and formed a mossy natural saddle.
Merciful heaven,
he said to himself.
Sixty guilders for a pot of beer and an hour to sleep it off.
Measuring off the last few yards with heroic strides, he sat down heavily and pinned the precious satchel to his knees. The dying wood creaked in protest at his bulk.

Glancing up, he saw his subordinate stop without turning, contemptuously, at the far edge of the clearing, and the burgher discreetly tried to merge his wheezing with the whistling sea breeze that somehow penetrated to this spot deep in the island’s interior. An early frost hung heavy in the air, though October was still loosening summer leaves from gnarled branches, and even as the burgher wiped cold sweat from his brow with the back of a pudgy hand, he felt the onset of a too-familiar chill laying claim to the flesh of idle toes and fingers. Another merciless winter seemed imminent; it was as if the Creator himself could not abide this wretched hinterland without an annual furlough.

A few paces farther along the path, where the clearing dissolved seamlessly into forest, a young soldier stood impatiently, staring into the trees, having missed instantly the leaden crunch of his superior’s footfalls. He ran his slender fingers along the smooth breech of the gun slung over one shoulder, and cursed silently as he measured the shadows ahead.
The third rest in as many miles,
he mused.
It beggars description.
At this rate, he estimated, they would be lucky indeed to complete their mission in time to beat sunset back to the fort—and braving these northern reaches of the island alone at night was a fool’s gamble.

At the rickety Dutch barracks on the southern tip of the island, grandly called Fort Amsterdam, a rough consensus had formed among the grumbling soldiery as to the nature of this secretive mission. Though the soldier’s orders were straightforward enough—to see this politician safely to and from the Haansvoort house in the north—he thought he knew exactly what was sealed in the burgher’s mysterious leather bag, and the knowledge disturbed him to the edge of violence. Towing this bloated cow through the forest was vexing enough, but for such a cowardly purpose…

Turning at last, the soldier stared coldly back across the clearing, into the worried little pig eyes of the loathed politician. The burgher made a fat and easy target for his hostility, and though the soldier knew his audacity bordered on treason, he cared little whether his disgust could be read. An incautious bravado had slowly begun to take possession of him, out here in the wild, and he could feel his heart in his chest, pounding invincibly. The jungle was a pitiless equalizer, and they were far from the fort.

“’Tis no great hurry, Jacob,” the burgher suggested, shielding his eyes from an imaginary glare with one pink hand, and giving the log next to him a sensuous pat with the other. “Rest thou a bit.”

“I prefer to stand ready,” replied the soldier.

The burgher smiled nervously. “Certainly, certainly, always the warrior. But Jacob, the Manahata are peaceable. We
have
a treaty,” he encouraged, hoping to spin out a few precious minutes of respite with any sort of conversation.

The soldier unshouldered his musket and began to make a great display of checking the dryness of the powder. “I don’t share your trust of the savages,” he replied without looking up. “They are irrational, as like to turn on you as not, and treaties be damned. Also, these woods are full of bear, and panther, and all manner of unnameable beasts with which we have no treaties.” He glanced over with this, eager to see his words take their calculated effect, but the other’s face remained smoothly impassive.

“Tut-tut, Jacob,” said the burgher with professional breeziness. When the soldier returned to the powder horn, though, the administrator cast a wary eye into the woods that ringed the clearing. They were completely and irredeemably surrounded, he suddenly felt sure, and in the dark and shifting shadows he caught brief, inconclusive glimpses of slitted eyes and twitching whiskers, of velvet muscle hunched beneath dripping fangs.

A mild breeze swept across the path, combing the light grass gently westward and rustling up little whirlwinds of fallen leaves, as if setting the forest floor ablaze with its passing.

“Van Cleef,” said the soldier bluntly, “I have a right to know our purpose.”

The burgher kept his composure through no small effort of will. For not the first time, he wondered whether he ought to fear this man—whether the bonds of civility, strained by the Indian wars and the myriad other troubles at Fort Amsterdam, were yet strong enough to hold violent nature in check.

“Jacob,” he purred tentatively, controlling his emotion and quickly cobbling together a strategy, “do you have any food left in your bags there? A bit of that bread from this morning, perhaps? Anything?”

The soldier only stared.

“Well,” said Van Cleef, smiling. “
That’s
why we’re here. We have to secure provisions enough to see New Amsterdam through the winter and beyond. We
have
to. There’s no choice in it.”

The rumors at the fort thus half confirmed, the soldier met his superior’s eyes squarely. “At what cost?”

But Van Cleef shook his head. “That we may not discuss, I’m afraid, you and I.”

“Bah,” Jacob sneered. “The terms are well-enough known. This is madness.”

“You’ve seen the storehouses, Jacob,” said the burgher patiently. “Shall we eat the powder?”

“The savages have food to spare.”

“Which is why we are here.”

“But damn it—not to parley, and trade, and beg,” hissed the soldier, his increasing agitation animating his angular features.

This is really too much,
worried the burgher, struggling to steady his voice. “What would you have us do, Jacob—massacre them for their grain? We have scarce enough men to hold the walls as it is. We dare not risk another war.”

He watched as Jacob grunted and looked away again, into the shivering gray branches. A squirrel crabbed sideways into view around the trunk of an enormous maple, then started at something and scampered up into the canopy. The burgher realized his pulse was racing, and squeezed his hands together.

“But…
him,
” said the soldier, squinting in disgust.

The burgher feigned nonchalance with a shrug. “Who else can entreat with the savages?” he asked rhetorically. “They practically revere him.” He considered this for a moment. “He holds the keys to Pharoah’s larders.”

“God gave man dominion over the earth and everything in it,” Jacob countered as his passion, defeated, began to cool into sullen resentment. “This is unnatural. If the savages will not give us what we require, then we will take it by force.”

“Perhaps,” allowed the burgher with a condescending smile. “But not today.” He moved as if to rise, but at the shifting of his weight, the log cracked ominously, then caved in all at once. With an involuntary little cry and a loud crash, the burgher landed hard on his back in a cloud of dust and pulp.

“Spawn of Satan!” he sputtered, enraged, heaving himself to his feet with surprising agility and furiously plucking the satchel from the crumbled wreckage.

The soldier prudently turned to check the dryness of the powder again, his sides shaking.
Oh, praise God I didn’t miss that,
he thought merrily. Later that evening, among his fellows in the barracks, it would be the soldier himself tumbling backward off a bench with a womanly screech, stuffed pillows bursting out of his shirt, to the unrestrained mirth of drunken cohorts. For now, though, he bit his tongue as Van Cleef slapped dust from his voluminous breeches and grimly resumed the silent march. The soldier’s spirits were quite renewed, though a dark foreboding kept his eye sharp.

For the burgher, red-faced and seething, bruised dignity scarcely scratched the surface of what ailed him. A terror had begun to clutch at his heart in recent months. Never in his life had he felt so helpless, at the mercy of every New World beast and savage hungry with the onset of winter, his only protection a handful of such ragged men as this. The very island itself seemed carnivorous; for not the first time since coming to this wretched colony, the old Walloon conjured up a pleasant image of himself curled by the little fire in his study back at Hoorn, sipping Madeira and contentedly burping up the ghost of a succulent feast. Then something small and restless rustled in the brush, and the burgher, suddenly afraid his man would outdistance him and leave him to the wilderness, clutched the satchel to his heaving breast and forced his aching legs to hurry.

And all around them, the primeval forest pounded with life. Fox scared up pheasant; rabbit and whitetail bounded along on invisible errands; insects buzzed and seagulls cried into the wind that swept the island and rained gold and ruby leaves upon the ferns and wild blackberry and meshed pine needles of the underbrush. The air seethed with the earthy smells of moss and mushroom, of violets and cattails and rough animal musk. Above it all, immeasurably ancient stands of elm, beech, and birch, raised interlaced fingers in a sheltering canopy the midday sun could penetrate only in patches. It was breathtakingly beautiful and subtly terrifying, an untamed and chaotic land bristling with treacherous landfalls and dark predators, a place of raw wonders and terrors that had never known the stabilizing force of civilization.

Nahoti heard the cloddish white men crashing through the woods long before they appeared in the little window over her cooking table; she watched with unblinking eyes as they parted the forest wall at the edge of her clearing and made their way toward the house. The skinny one, the one with the gun, she did not think she had seen before, but she recognized the other only too well. Dropping the curtain, she stepped away from the window and closed her eyes.

He smelled like meat, she remembered. He had come with two others, and they had met with her husband for hours, talking and smoking while the sun blazed across the sky, while she milled around outside, idly pulling weeds and drawing little circles in the dirt. Pieter later tried to assure her that the strangers’ visit was actually a great blessing, but Nahoti’s heart would not give her peace, because she knew an awful truth her husband refused to believe: These men wanted him dead. Her husband’s refusal to entertain her fears, and his continued dealings with these men over all her protestations, filled her with an emptiness that shook her faith in their marriage to its core.

Ever since she had left her people to live with this white man in his square little house, Nahoti had felt isolated. She was the daughter of the chief of the Manahata, and a woman of standing by birth. But Pieter was considered a virtual god by her people, for his healing potions and his quick fluency with their language, and from the moment her father had offered her to Pieter in marriage, she found to her dismay that the women of her village would no longer meet her eye. Their adulation left her so uncomfortable that she could no longer bear their company; for almost a year now, Nahoti had washed her and her husband’s clothes at a distant bend in the river, at odd hours when she could be assured of solitude.

Pieter, though, was a refugee as well. He’d long ago forsaken his own people to live among the Manahata, and though the gulf between himself and Nahoti was vast, the couple quickly found themselves bound by exile and mutual curiosity. From the outset, their investigations into each other’s culture became inextricably twined with discovering one another as individuals, and as man and woman, and they explored each other’s minds and hearts insatiably. With Pieter, Nahoti had found a love beyond imagining.

Three quick raps on the door resounded hollowly through the little one-room house, each one a sharp reminder that Pieter was out in the woods somewhere, hunting, and not expected back. A wave of supernatural dread washed over her. She quickly wiped her hands on her apron and draped the cheesecloth back over two little seedcakes she’d been preparing for supper. As she crossed toward the door, it creaked open of its own accord, spilling a sheaf of sunlight onto the packed-earth floor.