Jamestown (The Keepers of the Ring) (32 page)

But like a moth to a flame, his eyes kept darting back toward the girl he had renamed Kimi.
Strange that she, this child of English and Indian, should keep intruding into his life. Why hadn’t she died in that English city of disease like so many others?

He was certain he had been present on the night of her conception, for he himself had handed the English girl to his nephew as a prize.
And years later, when the toddling child had appeared before him in the village of Ritanoe, he had recognized the features of his family in her face as clearly as he read the stars. The Powhatan tattoo upon her arms was not necessary, for he had felt her kinship in his blood.

But even then she had smelled of God.
Often he had hidden in the woods to watch the girl playing with Pocahontas, and the child had sung songs in English, pretty, melodic, alien songs about God and his Son Jesus.

He had forced himself to put the child out of his mind, for Pocahontas adored her, and Powhatan would deny nothing to
his favorite daughter. Opechancanough went back to his tribe and planned for war with the clothed men, never thinking again of the strange blue-eyed child until the marriage of Pocahontas. When Powhatan had refused to attend the ceremony, Opechancanough had given the bride away himself. There he had seen the girl at Pocahontas’s side, still lovely, still blue-eyed, still shining like a child of the English God.

Though thoughts of her lingered just around the corners of his mind, he did not see her again until she appeared before Powhatan with news of
Pocahontas’s death. By the time he saw her sitting in ashes with the other tribal mourners, she was locked into his mind. For some shapeless reason he feared the balefire in those ice-blue eyes.

Until he talked with her by the river.
When her pain and anger surfaced, fear fell away like a discarded cloak from his shoulders. Would her love for the English God wither in the barrenness of suffering? He could not know so soon. But she was fifteen, more than an age to be married, and beautiful. Once she took off the paint of mourning, suitors would approach, but he would not agree to marry her to one of them until he knew she was completely loyal. After a year or two, if all went well.

He leaned toward his favorite wife.
“Do you see the girl at the fire, the one with the blue eyes?” he asked.

Her eyes sought the girl he spoke of, then she nodded.

“Spread the word to all who will hear. From this day she is called Kimi, and one year from tonight, she may marry any warrior who is willing to provide for her. I will act as her father.”

“
You are good, my husband,” his wife answered. Then she rose and hastened toward a group of women to spread the news, and Opechancanough dismissed the girl from his thoughts.

Twenty-six

T
he ten weeks aboard the
Mary Elizabeth
were among the most miserable Fallon had ever spent in his life. Once England slipped away from the stern, their belligerent captain emerged as a raging tyrant. The seamen on the upper deck were regularly flogged for insubordination or breaking the captain’s rules, and none of Fallon’s students dared to venture out of the crowded cabin on the second deck.

Restless with the natural exuberance and excitement of youth, the boys turned to mischief and pulled pranks upon each other.
Fallon found himself constantly required to intervene to prevent bullying and fighting. He was almost glad when the stress of shipboard life quelled their spirits after a week, but when the boys lay sick and vomiting from sea sickness, fever, and dysentery, he vastly preferred their bickering and complaining.

Nothing aboard ship was healthful or helpful.
Rations were very poor and very little, and hot meals were only served three times a week. The thick black water served up from leaky barrels hoisted from the lower orlop deck moved itself aright with worms, and though Fallon was as thirsty as a man who had walked across a desert, at first he could not bring himself to drink of it. But he thought of the boys who watched his example. If he did not drink, they would not. And if they did not, they would die.

Compelled by hunger, they gingerly nibbled at the rotten bread from the spoiled barrels below.
Filled with red worms and spiders’ nests, the petrified floury biscuits were handed round at every meal, and the boys listlessly gnawed on them as Fallon encouraged them to eat and keep up their strength. Added to the ship’s miserable meals and lack of fresh water were odors strong enough to knock a healthy man from his feet: the scent of dung-fires and cooking food, the ammoniac smell of animals, and the reek of human sewage. A stench of squalor and crawling things hung thick in the air, and Fallon constantly fought nausea despite his best intentions to set an example for the boys who clamored to go home.

Their clamoring turned frantic during the first storm at sea.
From his window, Fallon watched the waves roil with whitecaps until they rose up and snarled at the ship, then the wind freshened until the gray-green gloom of the ocean was assaulted by steel rods of rain which pelted the boys through the open windows. The air inside the ship, unnaturally hot and still, grew close as the sky darkened with boiling clouds and the frantic footsteps of the seaman thundered above their heads.

Every boy, even the bravest and loudest of them, clutched his neighbor for comfort and strength, and Fallon made his way to the corner where he had put the three weakest boys.
They lay still, their faces pale and pinched, as the waves rose like high mountains outside to tumble over the ship.

Inside the belly of the boat, men and animals alike were tossed from side to side by the storm.
Fallon found it impossible to walk, sit, or even lie still, and no matter how hard he tried to shelter his sick charges, he tumbled over them and they over him like rag dolls as the storm raged.

Water poured down upon them through the planking of the upper deck, and as the bilge pumps failed, the stench from the orlop deck rose steadily to assault them like a superhuman fist.
Cockroaches and rats, stirred up by the ship’s motion and the rolling water, scurried upward to find dry ground and safety.

‘
Twas truly a scene from hell, Fallon thought as he swatted a roach from the face of a sick boy who lay next to him. In the white light from a flash of lightning, he saw Brody trying to comfort a pair of brothers. When Brody’s eyes met his own, Fallon knew that his brave, adventurous friend was as frightened as any boy. As frightened as Fallon.

Not knowing what else to do, Fallon opened his mouth and began to pray:
“Thou, O Lord, that stillest the raging of the sea, hear us and save us, that we perish not. O blessed Savior that didst save thy disciples ready to perish in a storm, hear us and save us, we beseech thee.”

The familiar prayer was from the Anglican prayer book,
and many boys looked up in the dim light of the hold and weakly gave the proper response: “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

Fallon inclined his head.
“Christ, have mercy upon us.”

As one, the boys answered:
“Lord, have mercy upon us.”

Fallon finished the prayer:
“God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, have mercy upon us, save us now and evermore. Amen.”

“
What are you thinking, Wart?”

The sea had calmed itself and the sun shone hot and bright at the window.
Wart had crawled into a far corner of the deck and sat with his arms wrapped around his knees. He lifted his head as Fallon approached, and gave his schoolmaster a shy smile. “Naught of import,” he whispered, propping his head on his knees.

Fallon sank down onto the floor beside the boy and shifted uncomfortably in his clothes.
Stiff from sea spray and simple dirt, his shirt felt like sandpaper against his skin and his breeches could have stood upright by themselves. Fallon tried not to think about his own discomfort, and Wart had always been able to take his mind from the maddening boredom of their claustrophobic quarters.

“
Surely you were thinking of something, for I saw a decided gleam in your eye,” Fallon answered, teasing. “What were you imagining? The forest? Indians?”

“
Nay,” Wart answered, an abashed expression on his face. “I was just wondering if ‘twould be possible . . .”

“
What?” Fallon gestured into the air. “You want to own your own ship someday?”

“
By heaven, nay,” Wart answered, laughing. “I’d be content never to sail again.”

“
What, then? Mayhap you dream of a tobacco plantation or a house in the woods with livestock of your own?”

“
Nay,” the boy answered again, but a trace of sadness tinged his voice. “I was just wondering if—mayhap . . .”

“
You can speak, Wart. I won’t laugh, no matter what y’are thinking.”

“
I was wondering if mayhap my new master and his wife will be a mother and father,” the boy said, lifting his head. The words began to rush like a waterfall. “It could happen; ‘twouldn’t be impossible that a man and woman might find fondness in their hearts for me if I work very hard and do very well. And I’d stay with them always, not just ‘till I’m twenty-one. I’d work for them, and bring my wife home to live there with them, and my children would call them Grandmamma and Grandpapa—”

He broke off and flushed.
“If they give me a proper bed in the house, I’ll know it could happen,” he said, resting his chin on his knees again.

Fallon did not answer, thinking of the miserable sack of straw he
’d slept on outside Delbert Crompton’s bedchamber. Indentured servants were rarely given proper beds in the master’s house, but he did not want to spoil Wart’s dreams of happiness. Besides, who could say what would happen to a boy as winsome as Wart? His dream of finding a family was no less impossible than Fallon’s.

“
In sooth, it could happen,” he said finally, rumpling the boy’s hair.

Though none were as frightening as the first, during their weeks aboard the
Mary Elizabeth
Fallon and his students endured many storms at sea. The boys came to weather the unruly wind and rain as well as the seamen above deck, but fear soon threatened from another quarter. After six weeks at sea, many of the boys sickened to the point of death. ‘Twas for this reason only that the captain allowed Fallon to rise from the second deck into the fresh air of open sky, and each time Fallon surfaced, the captain took a withered, pale body from his arms, wrapped it in old canvas, and allowed Fallon to quote the burial service from the
Book of Common Prayer
before dropping the pitiful bundle into the sea:

“We therefore commit this body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the Sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”
After reciting the prayer, Fallon released his bundle and with each splash, he mentally counted backward from one hundred. Ninety-nine boys remaining in his care . . . ninety-seven . . . ninety-six . . .

When the seaman in the crow
’s nest gave the jubilant call of “Land ho!,” eighty-eight boys remained alive.

Fallon and his students wept for joy at the first sight of
land. Crowded around the cannon ports, they watched as the shore revealed itself as solid and substantial. “Name of a name,” Brody breathed, his eyes lighting at the sight of tall trees on the horizon, “I’d give my soul to feel the ground under my feet this instant!”

“
Patience, my friend,” Fallon cautioned, unable to wrest his eyes from the window. “We will be out of this stinking tub soon enough.”

The ship left the ocean and entered the mouth of the Powhatan River (now called the James, Fallon reminded himself), eventually dropping anchor about fifty yards from the shore of the Jamestown peninsula.
As the sun set Fallon could see a many-sided fort upon the shore, with several rows of houses outside its stout walls. Plowed and cultivated fields lay like a patchwork quilt around the houses, and tendrils of smoke rose easily into the darkening sky to give evidence of the hospitality of English hearths.

“
I hear there are a few women here now,” Brody ventured, his eyes alight with hope. “And the prospect of more to come. Can you imagine yourself in one of those houses, Fallon, with a bonny wife to warm your nights?”

Fallon turned reluctantly away from the open window.
“Not for a long while, Brody. I have work to do before I can give thought to settling down.”

“
What work?” Brody demanded, following. “We could be married and still go out and search for gold.”