Thus did we come to dwell for a time amongst the mysterious Wejun tribesmen on an island in the river they called “The Sweet,” hard by the Gulf of Mexico and the shabby garrisons of Spanish Florida.
Uncle’s remorse over his part in the massacre of the Spaniards lasted many days. But eventually he returned to those labors that were his heart’s delight: botanizing and collecting specimens. He would have nothing to do with the military drills that the Wejuns sorely needed to acquaint them with the proper use of modern weaponry and to instill some discipline into their innocent ranks.
I put a crew of them to work erecting a palisade around the village. Their knowledge of fortification was scant, to say the least. The plan I devised was a four-square stockade with salient bastions at each angle, a scarp of earth on the outside wall, and a moat to be dug and flooded and filled with snapping alligators on all sides. It was an ambitious plan, but once I had talked them into it, they went to work with the verve of zealots. The project proceeded with deplorable slowness, their wooden tools often breaking. After a week, they had erected only five yards of stockade—but it was a very stout five yards, and I had high hopes that, given enough time, they would be the owners of a very secure habitation.
This labor went along under the supervision of Gaybob, as loyal and intelligent a deputy as any officer ever had. In the meantime, when not drilling my troops, I undertook to make all their portraits, an occupation that filled them with the utmost wonder and that inflated their already august esteem for me.
Their history was a murky business, a strange tangled web of folklore, superstition, and ignorance anchored in a gloomy corner of time’s immense labyrinth. You already know what England signified to them. They claimed to have drifted hither, since the days of their “great-grandfathers’ grandfathers” from a place vaguely “northeasteringly.” I concluded after pondering these things, and taking into account their manners of speech and dress, that they were descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke Island, in what is presently North Carolina.
This Roanoke Colony, as every schoolboy knows, was established in the year 1587 by the ambitious courtier under a patent granted by Queen Elizabeth.
The colony had consisted of 117 persons: 91 men, 17 women, and 9 children. A Captain John White was appointed governor. He abandoned his office soon after the colony’s initial establishment, in order to return to England on a mission of resupply. By then, however, all of England’s resources were directed toward the defeat of Spain’s Armada. It was four years before White could return to the scrubby island with his relief expedition. He discovered no traces of his comrades or kin. The little huts of the colonists stood abandoned, many of them containing still the articles of daily life in mute and enigmatic array, undisturbed! Wooden trenchers were set out as though for supper, cook-pots hung over cold ashes in the hearths, et cetera, as though the inhabitants had been neatly plucked off the face of the earth.
It is held that the colonists fled to a south-lying island, Croatan, and the protection of the friendly chieftain, Manteo and his kinsmen, but for what reason, nobody has been able to put forward. In any case, no trace of them was found amongst the Croatans either. Others believe that Spaniards massacred them and flung their bodies into the sea. Yet another legend exists to the effect that the colonists were abducted by hostile tribes inland.
Of these theories, none had much meaning to the Wejuns—though they were always avid to hear a good yarn. King Merkin, for one, recalled living in two earlier villages at a distant remove from their present Paradise, when he was a small child, but I gathered that the tribe’s manner of living had been no different then, and that the Stinkards—Indians—had sent them packing time and again.
Of the present tribe, none was named Raleigh or White. They possessed no surnames amongst them. There were 163 individuals in the tribe, all told. Besides those leading citizens with whom you have already made acquaintance, they went by the names of Tom, Dick, Fang, Gobo, Hotspur, Casper, Monger, Water, Karoo, Peaseblossom, Touchstone, Lionheart, Moonshine, Wart, Basilisco, Percy, Flute, Hal, Honeybreath, Hammerhead, Hawk, Handsaw, Bess, Catherine, Mary, Twitchgrass, Acorn, Goatsbeard, Sweetflag, Moth, Lark, Throstle, Thistle, Betony, Jack-snake, Jack-a-merry, Jack-a-bones, Cuckoobird, Eyebright, Foxbait, Hyssop, Mistletoe, Bugaboo, Bugbear, Bug, Pan, Pygmy, Pigmeat, Jollyroger, Jingletoes, Wintergreen, and Zeus.
And then there was Tansy, daughter of the recuperating King Merkin, a summer’s day of a girl, abloom like a yellow flower in the sweetness of young maidenhood, who in the Wejun manner entreated by affections as though to catch a husband.
She never tired of hearing me describe the marvels of our cities, and I never tired of watching her as she raptly sat and listened. Like country maidens everywhere, she dreamed of shining towns where handsome princes and their sweethearts lived in a dazzling whirl of romance.
“Speak again of this Governor’s Ball,” she begged me, and I would paint her a word-picture of the gala doings on a glittering winter’s night in Manhattan; the fine carriages drawing up before the old Federal Hall behind the teams of snorting, bobtailed geldings, the cream of New York society spilling out and pausing deliberately before the entrance to be oohed and aahed by the envious public; the rustling silk gowns, fur cloaks, and coiffures of the ladies; the handsome velvet coats and dashing military tunics of the men; the snow falling like silver confetti in the lamplight. Here now is Hamilton! Ah, Hamilton! His still-youthful face glows with intelligence, showing not the strains of factional strife. His political star has slipped from the sky’s zenith to the horizon, but waits there ready to rise again in glory. From the crowd a youth cries, “Huzzah, huzzah for Alec!” The New World Apollo doffs his fine hat and scans the noisy throng. “Columbia College cries huzzah for Hamilton!” I yell again. A smile of gratitude lights up his face, for wolves of faction jeer his every breath, and he salutes me, Sammy Walker! I am so dizzy with excitement I am like to swoon. He has looked into my eyes, recognized me! I am somebody now—!
“O, happy hour! Doth he have a lady?”
“Who? Me?”
“Not thee. This lion, Hamilton.”
“O, yes—”
“What is her costume, prithee tell.”
“Her hair is much bothered over, so as to look as though she just stepped out of a Grecian forest glade—”
“What is this ‘Grecian,” I would like to know?”
“An ancient land, whose arts and attainments long ago presaged our own.”
“Is’t far away as England’s starry glow?”
“A little farther. But I shall take you someday, if you would like to go.”
“O, no!”
“No? Tansy, you recoil as from a blow.”
“Nay, I may gleek upon occasion, sir. To fly across the vasty vaults on high, we needs be corpses, meaning we must die.”
“Pish. I could take you to England and Greece across the sea, and plunk you down again in Paradise as altogether well as when you left.”
“What is this ‘sea’? Is’t like the darkling sky?”
“Did you never see the sea?”
“No, an it pleases your mastership, not me.”
Of course, I was falling in love with her.
While I was busy falling in love and playing the role of Leader-of-Men, Uncle had botanized the island to his satisfaction and began pressing to depart these half-wild, poetical people, for he still intended to be at his hearthside on Christmas eve.
In order to do so, he desired to sail the sloop captured from the Spaniards to New Orleans, by means of coasting. We had reason to suppose that the Gulf of Mexico lay not more than a few leagues down the river, though the Wejuns had never ventured there in their little dugouts for fear of their enemies. I had as well some thoughts about bringing back home with us several members of the tribe, since we had no sloths to show for our pains and expense, for the fate of Raleigh’s colonists was one of the great romantic mysteries of America, and our discovery would certainly amaze the scientific community. My last and fondest hope was to include little Tansy in this party, but had broached the subject neither to her papa nor to Uncle.
Before I felt comfortable leaving, however, provision had to be made for their defense; thus the ultimately disastrous raid upon the Spanish garrison was conceived. For I believed that if the Gulf lay close at hand, there too would be found the military outpost from whence had come those Spaniards to their slaughter the day we were captured. It was my further opinion that said outpost would contain much in the way of arms and ammunition, and that it would be lightly defended, if at all. And so my boyish mind devised the naval adventure that would prove to be both our and the Wejuns’ undoing.
With twenty of the men aboard, we hoisted the ragtag sails and set off downstream in a fresh breeze. Not a league below the island, the river grew very wide. On either distant shore, the flat terrain was relieved only by the spiky knobs of palmettos. The sky took on a leaden, bellicose character.
After we had been under way a good while, I mustered the men aft and broke the news to them that Uncle and I would be departing their Paradise for our own country, and that we desired to recruit five good sailors of their number to help us sail the hulk to New Orleans. They responded with stunned silence. Off a reedy shoal to starboard, a rookery of snowy egrets rose as one in noisy, frightened flight.
“What say ye, men? Any volunteers? Hotspur? Gobbo? Flute?”
They glanced at each other without speaking, the wind tousling their sun-bleached locks.
“Art leaving Paradise forever, lordship?” Lovelace, my ensign, finally spoke up on behalf of the men.
“No, not forever,” I dissembled, knowing not what the future might hold.
“What shall become of us?” asked Bugbear plaintively, failing to complete his iamb.
“You shall be grandly equipped to defend yourselves, I promise. Now, which of you stout fellows will come with us?”
Again they glanced fearfully amongst themselves. No one stepped forward.
“You needn’t decide this minute,” said I, trying to put a good face on. “Think of it. For those who form our crew shall discover wonders beyond their wildest dreams. Very well, back to your posts.”
Their mood had turned as sullen as the sky. The breeze had become a hardy blow. The river was now several miles in width and brackish. The swells that dashed across our bow tasted of brine; the air was redolent of oysters and barnacles, the fecund life of an estuary. The Wejuns wore looks of apprehension upon their faces, for none had ever ventured so far from Paradise before.
About half past one o’clock, we spied the Spanish garrison, a small earthworks fortress thrown up on a miserable scrap of island where the river took a southwest bend to a larger bay beyond. It was situated to command a view of all traffic entering and leaving the river, and thus control it. We hove a mile off her with our bowsprit in the wind and sails reefed while I looked the fortress over through my glass.
Not a soul was visible on her ramparts, not so much as a sentry. The Spanish colors flapped emptily in the wind, the flag so old, tattered, and faded as to seem a very rag. At her wharf before her gate, a weathered dory rocked forlornly at its berth, the mast lashed fore to aft and riggings stowed. My heart raced: I had been right, the garrison was indeed unmanned.
“Up mainsail and bring her about, Mr. Lovelace!” I cried, and our canvas snapped smartly as it caught the wind.
Now we had upon this sloop a pair of swivel guns of very antique design, one each at port and starboard, and capable of firing a one-pound ball, a supply of which we had found on board. What Fort Paradise wanted, however, was real cannon, and these I spied upon the ramparts of the Spanish garrison, ripe for the taking! We bore down on it.
“Light a wick and prepare to fire the starboard swivel,” I commanded.
We closed in: a mile, three quarters, an half….
“Aim for the gate. All right, fire!”
Wick to touchhole. A flash and a loud crack! The ball sent a roostertail of sand flying into the air, having struck short of the mark.
“That’s the way, my boys. Hurrah!” I cried encouragement. This first volley provoked no return fire from the garrison—further evidence that it was, in fact, deserted. “Hard alee, my gallant fishes,” I ordered them. “Let’s try the portside gun.”
“Ready, sirrah!”
“Aim and fire!”
We came about and fired. To my delight and astonishment, the missile found the target. A cloud of dust and wooden splinters blew out of the fortress’s gateway.
“Huzzah!” the men cried.
We made two more passes before her, blasting the gate each time and reducing it to rubble. Finally, we made ready to land.
The wharf was in as poor repair as our boat, and the seas being squally, we tied up with considerable difficulty. Five men stayed aboard whilst the rest of us jumped off, rifles, pistols, and swords in hand. (Poor Costard fell through a rotted plank, breaking his ankle, and had to be carried back to the ship.) We crept toward the splintered gate. Not a single Spaniard appeared to offer resistance. We ran inside. I at once climbed a stone stairway up the ramparts.
“Cut down that flag,” I told my men, not realizing that I was committing an act of war upon a nation at peace with the United States.
Inside the garrison nothing stirred save a rotted canvas awning before what must have been the captain’s quarters, and which flapped gloomily in the breeze. The prospect into the broad bay southward showed a sky-scape of terrible roiling storm clouds the color of ash. Whitecaps were rolling out on the open water. The horizon line was obscured by a curtain of haze, possibly rain.
“Bugbear, Tom, Basilisco, stay here aloft as watches.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“The rest, with me.”
Three squat buildings stood within the fortress’s walls. They were not much grander than Wejun cottages and made of marly blocks of yellow-gray stone, very crumbly to the touch. The roofs were woven mats of palmetto leaves, weighted down with flat stones. Like everything Spanish, these dwellings were in a condition of the utmost shabbiness. We entered the first.
It was dim inside, for no windows existed, only slots to fire out of in the event the ramparts were breached and the defenders fell back to their barracks. A barracks, incidentally, is what this hovel was—a foul little room hung with double tiers of rude rope hammocks. The rafters were festooned with oddments of their wardrobes, a shirt here, a stocking there. At the room’s center stood a round table made of a barrelhead and surrounded by packing crates: seats. A deck of cards was dealt to five vanished hands. I thought of those poor mutilated mother’s sons carved up in that little glade on Paradise Island. They had probably been called to arms hastily, I fancied, and left on their fatal sortie thinking they would return after slaughtering a few helpless Wejuns and finish their game. No such luck, thought I.
Tapers were found. My men marveled at the idea of running a wick through some solidified fat—the art of candle-making. It was quite new to them, being among hundreds of other skills lost to them over the generations. Some time was wasted here in plundering these common soldiers’ sea chests and meager belongings. They contained almost nothing of value beyond a few strings of rosary beads and a velvet cloak that must have been some poor fellow’s pride and joy.
The second building was evidently the officers’ quarters. One grim little room contained a crude plank bed. Standing in a niche carved into the soft building blocks was a painted statuette, about a foot high, of the holy virgin. The paint was peeling and the wood was cracked, denoting its many years of service. How pious these Spaniards were while they set about the task of systematically butchering two continents of primitive peoples. How such a man as this Spanish captain addressed his idol in the festering dark of the Floridian night and confessed his litany of foul deeds I was hard put to comprehend. More pathetic still, the bare little chamber evoked a character driven not by gold—for the prospect of fortune in this dreary Gulf Coast backwater must have been long extinguished—but a personality driven by a sense of duty. And what duty! To murder for the love of Christ?
The Wejuns evinced curiosity over the statue of the virgin. They had never seen such an one before and, of course, the entire grand fable of Christianity was a blank to them. For the time being I lacked the patience to explain.
“’Tis a likeness of his mother,” I told them. Thus, the object became at once an hundred times as abhorrent to them, and Wart, a wit amongst them, dashed it to pieces.
The third and final building we entered was a stout little edifice with an arched roof of that same jaundice-colored stone, set up against the earthen ramparts. This proved to be their storehouse and magazine, and it contained precisely what we had come in search of—guns, lead, and powder—plus something we had hoped not to find, viz., a live Spaniard. What is more, he was a Spaniard equipped with a lighted candle that, upon seeing us enter, he threatened to toss amongst the powder kegs. By means of mummery, he made his intentions very plain.
“Nunca hecho dañado a nadie!” he protested.
“Thou needy, hollow-eyed wretch,” Lovelace sneered at him. “Thou cur of curs, thou living dead man—”
“Or creature that doth bear the shape of man,” quoth Goatsbeard.
“Por favor! Por favor! No me matas! No me matas! No hecho nada! Por favor….”
“Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper is he,” said Karoo.
“Careful, my boys,” I warned them, “for villain that he may be, he has the means to blow us all to England, should he choose.” The men muttered restlessly behind me. “No sharp moves, my hearties. You, Fernando, Rodrigo, whatever your name is. Give me that taper. Do you understand? Hand it over.”
The terrified knave merely froze where he was, apparently deaf to the English language. His eyes were rheumy, cheeks gaunt, clothing and person filthy. He must have suffered considerable privation since the fatal departure of his brethren.
“The candle, sir,” I demanded, trying to be firm without frightening him to the commission of a rash act. Still, it was no use. After repeated entreaties, my patience began to wear thin. “The candle, I say!”
“Nunca hecho dañado a nadie!” he continued to gibber, his veiny red eyes darting from one face to another of us, his hand trembling with the brandished taper. A muffled cry could be heard outside.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“’Tis Bugbear, sir. ‘A sail! A sail!’ he cries.”
“A sail?” I said. “What colors?”
Another cry from without.
“A Spaniel sail, my lord, is what he says,” reported Hammerhead, nearest to the door.
“O, shit and damnation,” I exclaimed. “Quick, Rinaldo, the taper! Give it to me at once. Hand it over, I say!”
The stupid wretch merely shrank further back amongst the kegs, sniveling like a beggar. An alternative course of action was obviously in order.
“Lovelace—”
“Sirrah…?”
“Clear the men out of here.”
“But—”
“Please, do what I say. O, yes, take this,” I added, handing him my pistol. He took it, skeptically, and cleared the room. “Shut the door behind you.”
He reluctantly did so. Now we were alone in the gloomy storeroom: myself and the cowering Spanish serveling. I sat down upon a crate. His eyes, moist with terror, followed my every move.
“All right, then, Felipe,” I said quietly. “What are you going to do? Blow us all to kingdom come? Or surrender? Eh?”
“No comprendo,” he said with a gulp.
“You don’t comprendo? I see. Let me put it this way. We have come a long way to seize these munitions and we must needs be departing at once, without delay. Why not be a good fellow and hand me that candle, and then we shall all be happy.”
“Soy nada más que cocinero!”
“I’ll tell you what, Manuel. Why not just get on with the job, eh?” I stood up, seized a small powder keg, staved it in with my fish, and poured the contents all about his bare feet. “There you go. Well, Alphonso? What are you waiting for?”
The two of us stood face to face in that dreary room.
“Nunca quisé matar a nadie,” he said in a quavering voice, and then broke down in tears.
“A noble sentiment,” I said, not understanding him in the least. But as he stood there a’blubbering, I reached for the candle and snuffed the wick ‘twixt my thumb and forefinger. He surrendered without further struggle. “Come alone now, Enrique.”
I made for the door and threw it open.
“Hast scotched the rogue? Huzzah, my mighty lord!” said Lovelace, whose devotion was boundless.
“Let us say he has seen the better part of valor,” I replied. “Now mark you, Lovelace, he is a prisoner and I shall not see him abused. Come out, Diego,” I importuned him. “Come along now.”
But neither would he come out. Instead, to my horror he produced a long and glinting cook’s blade from the rear of his pantaloons, held it beneath his chin, and in a single deft stroke that evinced the deepest acquaintance with the butcher’s craft, slit his own throat from ear to ear.
“O, God….”
“Another sail! Of Spaniel colors, lord!” cried the vigilant Bugbear aloft the parapet. The Spaniard fell on the dirt floor of the magazine with a sickening thump, his fingers twitching and his life spilling out in crimson rivulets.
“We’ve not a moment to lose,” I said, trying to regain my composure. “Get all this onto the ship. Step lively, men!”
It was quite a haul: thirteen kegs of good dry black powder, twenty-four muskets, half a ton of lead in small bars, bullet molds, some small arms, several swords, two double-bitted axes, and a gentleman’s fowling piece. Also in the chamber were some carpenter’s tools, a box of assorted iron hardwares such as nails and hinges, two 30-foot lengths of small chain, and a keg of tacks. It took a quarter of an hour to get it all aboard. The Spanish ships, a pinnace and a larger brigantine, were approaching fast.
“Hurry, men!”
It was not possible to bring any of the cannon with us, and what a huge disappointment this was. But we simply did not have the time to get them aboard. Instead, I had the men scuttle them, dumping them over the ramparts and into the tidal muck below.
The wind had risen to near gale force. Big rolling waves crashed on the windward side of the island. It put me much in mind of the great hurricane of ’90 that roared out of the Atlantic and slammed into my dear Long Island. (I was very young then, but I remember the howling air being filled with improbable things: women’s caps, cornstalks, a rooster, loose shingles. During the height of the storm an iron crowbar was driven straight through the heart of a linden tree in the nearby hamlet of Huntington. It was a great curiosity of the district for years afterward.)
Loading the sloop was not easy, for she pitched this way and that way at her mooring, and we lost a few kegs when they rolled free of hands and shattered against the bulwarks. It was out of the question to stow them belowdecks, for the hold of this creaking old scow was ankle deep in bilgewater.
“Ready to cast off, Mr. Lovelace?” I shouted above the gale.
“Aye, sirrah, an it please you, anytime.”
We hove back out into the river, our mainsail full and hull singing. With the storm blowing directly out of the Gulf, we were able to run before the wind upriver, our tattered harlequin sail outspread and glorious. We had made less than a league from the Spanish fortress when those two sinister ships once again hove into view. The brigantine stopped on the lee side of the island, unwilling to hazard the shoals of the river with her deep draft. But to my alarm the pinnace beat forward on our wake, without a moment’s pause. The prospect of an actual engagement with a live enemy—not merely an idle cannonading upon a vacant fortress—turned my exhilaration to the darkest dread. For in the real world of modern naval combat we were as ill-equipped against this foe as an Egyptian dhow against one of Bonaparte’s men-of-war.
“Charge both swivel guns with a pound of nails,” I told my ensign, “and see that every free hand is ready with a musket.”
“Aye, sirrah, we’ll sting those Spaniel puppies!”
Though our sails could not have been more favorably full, it was equally so for the pinnace, and they soon commenced to close the gap between our running crafts. Through my glass I counted six cannon on her deck, of the six-pounder class. Also visible through the lens was the curious sight of the Spanish captain, gazing right back at me through his own glass.
Just as they inexorably closed on us, so too did the river narrow as we plied upstream with the gale to our backs. In a little while, they were an hundred yards off our stern, then seventy-five. Then they were right upon our stern, stealing our wind.
“A nombre del Rey, Carlos IV, halta!” cried the Spaniard captain through a leathern speaking cone. My knowledge of his language was, of course, nil, but anyone not an imbecile could tell that he wished us to come about and stand. When it was quite clear to him that we would not obey his order, he called a dozen crewmen forward with muskets bristling. Luckily for us, neither their port nor starboard cannon could be employed against us in the present disposition of things, nor had they any arms on deck like our swivels. My men, however, showed marked unease at the sight of the more disciplined Spanish sailors.
“Shoal ahead, sirrah!” cried Thistle, our lookout up on the masthead, and at once I sensed a remedy to our problem.
“What side?” I shouted aloft.
“I have forgotten myself which is which,” he cried down.
“Port to left, starboard to the right.”
“Then it’s starboard, an it please you, sir.”
Just so, for the pinnace was now drawing up upon our starboard. The enemy captain was yelling through his funnel, “Halta, tus perros sucios!”
“Up thy filthy arse, thou Spaniel whoreson!” Lovelace replied politely, doffing his cap. A volley of musket fire raked our deck as a blue pall of smoke swirled into our sail. “Why, bugger me! I am shot through and slain!” my devoted ensign uttered in a tone of complete astonishment before this Earl of Fishes corkscrewed to the deck, clutching his breast. Two of our men held him in their arms as his eyes went waxy. My terror was extreme, but there are times when even panic must take a back seat to vengeance.
“Starboard swivel—”
“Aye, sirrah!”
“Take goodly aim upon that Spanish churl and blast his head into the rigging!”
“With pleasure, my lord. Adieu thy lights, thou scum!”
He touched off the small cannon. Its charge of nails raked the enemy’s ranks and cut to ribbons several of them, including the captain, who dropped his speaking cone and reached for his face as though he had merely been stung by wasps. But it had been reduced to a pulp, like a squashed pomegranate, and he slumped over his own rail an instant later, as dead as my dear Lovelace. The Spanish crew fell into disarray at his loss, yowling and caterwauling, firing at random. Three others of my men lay sprawled upon our deck, dying or already dead, but the rest held to their posts, good sailors and better soldiers. Suddenly our sloop lurched. A deep groan shivered its timbers, and I realized our keel was scraping the top of that previously sighted shoal. The mast shuddered. My men glanced anxiously at one another. For a moment we hung suspended on the bar, listing badly to port. Several more powder kegs broke loose and tumbled overboard. Then a gust of wind welled behind us and the mast creaked as the big sail ballooned out and lifted us off the shoal. Another volley of vicious Spanish gunfire scoured our deck. My poor, loyal Karoo took a terrible wound to his jaw and spun around the deck like a rag doll dashed to the floor by an angry child. Water, Bugbear, and Hammerhead likewise fell. Our ranks were being decimated.
Suddenly the pinnace struck the selfsame shoal we had just sailed free of. Her masts groaned and rigging shook. A thunderous crack resounded amidst the screams of her crew as her mainmast crashed to the deck, crushing several sailors. A cannon broke loose from its carriage, rolled across the deck, and crashed through a bulwark into the river. What with their deeper draft than ours, our enemy was hopelessly aground. We hove away from her, from the screams and imprecations of her stranded crew, and a shout of victory went up among my valiant men. It was only the second time in two centuries that they had beaten their arch-foe—but at what a cost I tremble to relate: five dead, including my ensign and first mate, and seven wounded, some horribly. What sort of victory, thought I, would this be for the Wejun wives?
The stranded pinnace soon disappeared from view. The euphoria amongst our crew was short-lived, however, for the roaring gale soon turned into a howling maelstrom. The sky grew as green as bilgewater. The trees along the banks bowed against the wind like mere reeds. Storm-blown leaves and branches littered the river, while along the shore many shallow-rooted giants toppled like tenpins. We raced forward, mainsail half-reefed to keep our mast from breaking, and jibs furled. The wounded we comforted as best we could, which is to say, not very well. For we had nothing aboard to avail their relief save assurances that they would recover from their wounds and live, even when it was an arrant lie. Then, at last, we sighted Paradise—the Wejun isle, that is, not the place where the God of Love doth dwell.
We lost our mast in the attempt to jibe at the sheltered cove below the village proper. Our boom swung ’round and down she came, just like that, killing poor Touchstone as it fell.
“Drop anchor, men! Get the wounded off her first!”
I was yet up to my chest in the lagoon when one of the villagers staggered out of the path through the woods, wobbled in place for a moment, and shouted above the wind, “Hell is empty! And all the devils are here!”
Following this pronouncement, he fell face forward in the sand, disclosing an Indian war axe buried in the center of his back.
We glanced dumbly at each other—after the terror of our chase it seemed a sort of ghoulish prank. Moreover, the victim in question, one Jack-a-merry by name, had a reputation as a joker. But it did not take us long to apprehend that he was quite authentically dead.
“Stinkards!” wailed the men in despair and struggled for shore.
“Fuzees! Fuzees!” the crew shouted desperately at others yet aboard the dismasted sloop. These now grabbed as many muskets as they could seize, jumped ship, and slugged through the murky water toward the beach.
“Hold ’em high!” I admonished them. “You’ll wet the flashpans!”
The muskets were passed all ’round. Cries, shrieks, and screams were audible from the village amid the howling blasts of the storm—the pathetic outcry of their wives, children, loved ones. These appeals shattered whatever military discipline they had lately learned, and all broke ranks for the village, some trying to load their weapons on the run, others brandishing them aloft by the barrels like clubs, and emitting the yelps of savages.
“Stop, men! I implore you! Form ranks!” I shouted after them, but it was no use. I charged a pistol and a musket and followed close behind.
The scene that greeted me was truly the end of the world, the end of the Wejun’s sweet little portion of time and place called Paradise. Every cottage stood aflame, roaring in the wind. Bodies lay everywhere, men and women, young and old alike, little boys and girls shot with so many arrows they looked like porcupines, many with limbs cut off, some yet groaning in their death throes. By the time we arrived upon the scene, the enemy had eloped out the other end of the village. Now, only a few sporadic gunshots sounded over the taunting yells of the retreating savages in the far distance.
Uncle I located amid a patch of pink hollyhocks in what had formerly been the garden of the Duke of Owls. He lay in a heap, his head in a pool of bright and viscous blood. I thought him dead for certain, and the tears streamed down my cheeks ’till I saw his leg twitch. At once I dropped beside him and rolled him up upon my lap.
“O, Uncle!”
His face was a purplish mass where some savage had struck him four-square with a club. His nose was clearly broken and askew, his front teeth cracked in half, lips bruised like berries. I placed my hand behind his head, trying to hold it up, but recoiled as I felt a warm, sticky wound. His head lolled to one side. The brutes had scalped that side of his head, peeling off the skin from above the ear to the bald margin near the top of his head. His eyes opened; he tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Sssshhh. Don’t move. Be still,” I said, and searched the rest of his person for wounds, but there were no others. He must have been struck down in the first wave of the invasion, deprived of the scalp, and been left bleeding and forgotten in the chest-high flowers.
The noble Duke of Owls was not so lucky. Robin lay beside his wife and little boy in the dusty footpath beyond his garden, the three in loving last embrace, their mingled lifebloods oozing into the porous earth. The wind moaned in the surrounding forest like the dead of the ages. I cried and vomicked all at once, and then the rain came.
It fell as if the brooding skies themselves were sickened with remorse, great lashing sheets of water that sent plumes of steam from the burning cottages and washed clean the blood-streaked corpses of the dead.
I lay Uncle back amidst the flowers and commenced my search for Tansy. I had turned over several bodies when the remnant of my valiant crew emerged from the woods with a prisoner in tow, a topknotted, copper-skinned savage bedizened from ankle to crown in an elaborate scheme of swirled tattoos. I hastened toward them in the stinging rain. Two of the men, Tom and Basilisco, were sharpening stakes, very businesslike.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
They did not reply, but merely glowered at me. Soon, the stakes were ready. Monger flung the captive to the muddy ground. Three more Wejuns fell upon him, holding down his arms with their knees. The prisoner behaved with the utmost stoicism until they commenced driving the long stakes through his wrists and feet, and then he screamed and writhed like any poor wight.
“Stop that! Stop it, I say!” I shouted, but they would no longer obey. I had the eerie feeling for an instant that I myself were dead and didn’t know it, for that is how they responded to my commands. When the prisoner was fully immobilized upon the ground, the men all drew their knives and fell upon him like a pack of ghouls, cutting pieces out of his living flesh and eating them before his eyes. I railed at them to cease, to no avail. Rather, they glared up at me, blood dripping from their mouths as if relishing my horror of their evil act as much as they enjoyed the vengeful abomination in and of itself. They consumed the poor wretch methodically, from the limbs inward, and concluded by slitting through his breastbone, removing the still-beating heart, and passing it ’round for bites, like schoolboys sharing an apple. They had only just finished when Merkin limped forth in the torrential rain. He carried Tansy in his arms, her body naked, the broken arrows yet protruding from her ribs, and he lay her at my feet.
“Go,” he said in his brittle voice, the cold rain dripping off his beaked nose, the wings of his feathered helmet broken and askew. “Go, thou bringer of death.”
“I … I cannot leave you now—”
“Go!” he shouted, seizing a rapier from one of the others and holding the tip before my face. “Iambics fail me now. Go!” he shouted, “Go! Away at once!”
“But my Uncle … he—”
“Toads, beetles, bats light on you! Go, I say!”
“But what will you do. Where will you go—?”
“Live. Wander. Elsewhere. Further. Go! Else thy heart become my supper, go! In England’s name: get thee gone and go!”
I backed away from them. What a terrible portrait they made, the dozen survivors huddled in the lashing wind and rain, a mutilated savage at their feet, a murdered angel of a maiden before him, and the broken old King surrounded by everything he had ruled and loved, turned to a wilderness of death and ashes. I returned to Uncle in the hollyhocks.
“Come, dear fellow,” I said, kneeling beside him.
He opened his eyes and blinked in the deluge.
“Mmmpphh—”
“Don’t try to speak. Here. Can you put your arm about my neck? That’s a good fellow. See if you can stand now.”
I helped him up, placed his arm about my waist, and helped him hobble forward. In the meantime, the Wejuns advanced as a group. They formed a kind of cordon behind us and drove us back down the path to the lagoon where we had left the sloop. It too was now destroyed. The wind had driven it from the cove and stranded it on a shoal downstream, its broken mast stuck crazily in the submerged sand bar like an old fence post, the hull awrap with riggings, and the patchwork mainsail draped over the stern like a beggar’s shroud. The Wejuns, led now by Monger, prodded us with their swords to the water’s edge. The storm had whipped the lagoon to a froth. The air was filled with flying leaves and twigs. Tree limbs crashed in the verdure around us.
“I’m afraid we must depart Paradise without delay,” I explained to Uncle. He nodded his head to indicate that he understood, and we hobbled into the water. “Hold fast to my shirt,” I said. We waded into the river.
My mind next went blank of all concerns save one: make the opposite shore. Not storm, not crocodile, not weariness of limb or weariness of living’s ceaseless horrors might oppose that necessity. And by the all-perceiving, all-indifferent God of nature—or possibly despite him—we crawled upon that reeking opposite shore, and lived!