Alex had hardly slept watching for clouds and shooting stars and packing and repacking her knapsack. The only nonessential things in it were the last pages of Smith’s journal and her space rock. Chuck’s pack, though, was bulging with binoculars, tools, and spare radio parts, and then there was the Signal Corps radio itself. Ebbs objected to his bringing it. It was heavy and would take up a lot of space in the small cockpit, she said, but he wouldn’t go without it. “To be sailing just across from Wallops, where they’re doing all that rocket and radar work and not listen in? No, ma’am. I might pick up something really important.”
“Like what?” Alex asked.
“Like when they’re going to launch.”
They set off in fair weather on an easy breeze that sent the No Name skimming past farms fragrant with mowing and new-turned earth.
They rode along for a while, absorbing the quiet music of the boat cleaving water. “I didn’t want to tell you before,” Ebbs said, “but one reason I wanted you two along is so I wouldn’t run into ghosts and have to scare them off by myself. When a sailor named Joshua Slocum went sailing alone around the world a hundred years ago he met ghosts and had to talk all the time to get them to go away. He talked to himself until he ran out of things to say, then started singing. He sang himself hoarse. He got really scared when his voice gave out. I wanted you two along so I wouldn’t have to do all the talking to keep off the ghosts. Not that I believe in ghosts, but Slocum didn’t either. When you’re alone too much weird things happen. It’s in his book.”
Ebbs spotted a good mooring place. Alex set the anchors. After supper they sat silent, looking into the fire. Then Ebbs began to study the sky. Stars shone like dots and bands of Queen Anne’s lace in a deep slate field.
Suddenly something bright streaked overhead.
“A rocket!” Chuck exclaimed.
“Nope,” said Ebbs. “An opener for the Perseid meteor shower we get here late summer every year—just as Smith predicted. That was one of his powers that Powhatan pretended to find marvelous—Smith could make fires appear in the sky. But of course Powhatan knew to expect them.”
There were some last soft robin calls. The night air had taken on a sweet, damp pine fragrance. Sometimes a breeze drifted in off the river, a zephyr so different from the land breeze that Alex wondered how two such different bands of air could lie so close together. Now and then there were night bird calls, surprising but not startling. Even the plop of a large fish did not startle Alex now. From the other side of the river came the idle barking of a bored dog.
“You bring any Smith pages along?” Ebbs asked.
“Yup,” said Alex, unwrapping them from the wax paper at the bottom of her pack. She began reading aloud.
I could have gone on from adventure to adventure, a freebooting soldier-for-hire until I died forgotten in some unknown place, but I knew I was capable of better. But better what? I asked myself. Doing what? My gold afforded me a year living alone in a rough country hut, toughening my body and training myself for anything, reading Machiavelli on war and Marcus Aurelius and some other Romans again to learn what made for a good leader. I learned that what counts most is being absolute master of oneself, resolute, never wavering, never undecided, never without a Next. I read Caesar’s Gallic Wars and decided I’d be a writer too.
Shares in Virginia being offered for sale, I bought one and began to study Mr. Hariot’s book about Roanoke. His was the only text there was about life in Virginia, and it had pictures. I read it over and over and taught myself the few Algonquin words he gave. A week before my twenty-sixth birthday I sailed for America.
My companions—we were 105 in all—were all for finding gold. Talking with them I discovered they knew nothing about settling, building, farming, or defending themselves in a raw and hostile land. They said they’d pay somebody else to make their fortress and feed them—but what if there was no food to buy and no one to do that work? What use would their money be then? I knew a little about Virginia from Mr. Hariot’s book. They knew nothing.
Most of my fellows called themselves gentlemen. Despite my experience and captaincy they classed me with the few, twelve only, described as laborers.
I saw trouble coming in the leaders’ ignorance. I made so much trouble demanding plans and training that before we landed Captain Wingate had me locked in the brig as a traitor to be hung. My dog stayed close. But for his company I’d have gone mad. We spoke to each other. My jailors heard us talking together and thought me crazed.
I arrived at Virginia in the brig, my dainty gentlemen with their manicured hands intending to hang me, but then they opened the orders box we’d been sent out with and discovered I was supposed to be one of their Council. Me! A commoner of no breeding ranked with them!
They wouldn’t have it, never mind orders. They voted to keep me under guard while they set the lesser sorts to building the fort—but what did these goldsmiths, tailors, and perfumers know about fortress making? They built a bird’s nest of twigs and mud while our gentlemen scratched for gold, dug for gold, dreamed of gold, and lived off the ships’ stores.
Our commoners were as gold-smitten as the others, lazy except for mining and panning, and anyway they knew nothing about planting. For the moment grains of gold counted for more with them than grains of wheat. It was the fable out of Aesop: they were all singing crickets, but the song those crickets made was the dreary rattle of barren silt in their sluice pans.
For a few weeks the Natives were glad enough to trade their corn for our copper goods and edge tools, but our President managed this business badly, paying too much for too little and so spoiling the market to the point our grocers grew insolent and demanded guns for grain.
When things became dire enough I was released and sent out to get food because I knew something of the Natives’ tongue. I went several days upriver to where our needs and profligacy were not so well known. When my offers to trade glass beads for corn did not prevail I let fly with my muskets, going for broke as was my manner always, we few collectors greatly outnumbered in everything excepting my leader courage. My men said I seemed in myself the glaring force of a thousand.
I got us a boatload of corn, but on returning I found our fort attacked, seventeen hurt, a boy slain, and only a cannon blast from one of our ships sending the Natives off.
Finally seeing me as the one who best knew the business of providing and defending, the people turned to me for fort building and defense. Right away I set them to training at arms, baking bricks, grinding shells to make mortar—at least such as could. So many were ill! Within days of my taking command scarce ten could stand, such extreme weakness and sickness oppressed us.
Then treachery: while I was off on another food-gathering trip, our gentlemen commandeered the one remaining seagoing vessel. They were about to turn tail and run themselves back to England with the last of our supplies when I surprised them.
They were more and better armed, but they knew I meant it when I yelled, ‘Stay or sink.’ Wingate’s face I well remember, ferret-eyed when he saw me, his mouth curling ugly, and he was never a pretty man. He knew I’d kill him if I had excuse even if it meant my own death, and now was opportunity. I made my face show my joyful determination. They came cringing back to be kept by the heels and sent as prisoners to England, and so it fell to me to lead all.
From that day on my rule was no work, no food—gentleman and commoner alike. No more gold hunting, not that there was ever much found there. Now we panned for food in plain dirt, dug it, grubbed it, hoed it—every man a farmer and none excused.
Spirits improved. Nothing cures despair like work. Giving them purpose, I gave them hope. Without hope there can be no endeavor. That much I got from my Romans, that and what some took for ruthlessness. In easy times some kindness will do, but hard times demand iron rule, and our times were hard indeed. We were starving.
I went on another mission after food. The Natives surprised the party I’d left behind with the small boat and killed two. Alone and twenty miles inland I was beset by two hundred. Two of them I slew, but I got shot deep in the thigh and had many other arrows stuck in. At last, trapped in a swamp, they took me prisoner and tied me to a tree.
I knew enough of their language to demand that I, a chief, be brought to theirs. I would not treat with any lesser man, though they might kill me if they would. When their Chief came to me I signaled I had a great matter to discuss with him but would not do so bound.
Untied, I showed him what I had in my pocket wrapped in an oiled cloth: a round ivory compass. I demonstrated the roundness of the Earth and how the sun chased night round about the world continually. He took this for great magic and led me to the center of Powhatan’s village through a file of armed men, their torsos and faces streaked red and black. They all made grim to terrify me, but they couldn’t: I put my Turks’ heads in my mind and began a roaring chant to unsettle them.
When I came before Powhatan it was cold. I was still wearing what they’d pulled me from the swamp in. He was sitting before a fire, upon a seat like a bed covered with a great robe made of deer and raccoon skins and decorated with rare shells he’d traded for.
Powhatan was holding the ivory globe compass. I gave him to understand I could show him stranger things still—that I could even make fires in the sky, for it had turned clear and it was the time of the meteor shower. What finally clinched it was my taking back that globe, juggling it with four or five pebbles I picked up, then sneaking it onto his shoulder without his seeing.
He gasped. He was a child for magic. My tricks for Powhatan astonished the great chief into admiration, or so I thought until he called for water to wash his hands and feathers to dry them and then had two great stones brought before him.
They dragged me to the stones and laid my head between them. They were standing over me with their clubs raised to beat out my brains when a slight girl just coming into womanhood rushed forward and took my head in her hands. Her hands were warm and light.
I didn’t know it then, but it was a test. The girl was Pocahontas, Powhatan’s dearest daughter. He never intended to kill me: he would adopt me to command my magic. The next moment he had me wrapped in his great robe adorned with the shells and pronounced me a werowance: his son. It was my twenty-seventh birthday.
I went back to Jamestown with provisions and carried on there, steadily planting and tilling to provide a sufficiency, guiding and building until a new group of colonists arrived. Men too ignorant to be grateful found my rule harsh and pushed me aside. Then, by accident or treachery, a coal fell on the bag of gunpowder I carried at my side. It exploded and burned. I suffered a terrible hurt that destroyed my manhood. Maimed and limping, out of favor and sick at heart, I returned to England on the ship that had carried out the newcomers. I was twenty-nine.
Alex stopped reading.
“He was here,” Ebbs said, her voice heavy with emotion. “On this bank. It gives me gooseflesh to think of it. Smith, here. But enough. Turn in.”