Jamestown (The Keepers of the Ring) (55 page)

Opechancanough picked up his war pipe.
“We will see when the time comes,” he said. “We wait only for a sign.”

At Jamestown, an Elizabeth City planter named Morgan loaded his canoes with trinkets for trade with the Indians and whistled sharply to the savage he
’d hired as a guide. The Indians knew the guide as Nemattanow, but Morgan had taken to calling the surly warrior by a simpler name. “Hurry up, Jack-of-the-Feathers,” he said, smiling as he settled into his canoe. “For that’s what I’ll call you from now on. You can’t be expecting me to learn all that Indian gibberish, can you?”

Morgan adjusted the angle of the jaunty cap he
’d recently purchased from a sea captain bartering a cargo of new fashions from England. Made of red velvet with an ostrich feather set at a debonair angle at the side, the cap was unusually warm and one of a kind. The other planters in Elizabeth City joked that they could see Morgan coming from a mile away when he wore that hat, and Morgan liked anything that set him apart from the others.

Leaving Jack to paddle expertly at the rear of the canoe, Morgan leaned back upon his sacks of goods and propped his feet upon a barrel.
They were moving into the chilly wind from the sea, and the Englishman hugged himself tightly into his fur coat. Glancing over his shoulder, he noticed that the stone-faced Indian at the back of the boat never even flinched in the cold, despite the fact that he wore only a pair of leather breeches and a deerskin draped around his shoulders.

“
Pick up the pace, Jack, or I’ll flog you after supper,” Morgan called carelessly as he pulled the cap forward over his eyes. “I want to make Elizabeth City afore dark.”

The silent knife bit into the plump planter
’s neck, and after a quivering moment Morgan lay dead in the boat, still reclining like a fool among his bags of treasure. Nemattanow sheathed his blade and sprang from the canoe into the shallows, pausing only for an instant. The red velvet cap gleamed in the fading light, and without thinking, the Indian lifted the hat from the dead man’s head and placed it upon his own.

Humming in satisfaction, Nemattanow pulled out his knife one last time, cut a long stroke across his own chest, and allowed the running river waters to wipe the blade clean before returning the knife to its leather sheaf.
Then he found the trail to the settlement at Elizabeth City and rehearsed the story he would tell.

John Crosby, Morgan
’s chief servant, saw the hat coming long before he recognized the man who wore it, and the hearth fire was burning brightly by the time Jack of the Feathers told his tale of woe to Morgan’s startled family. “We were set upon by alien warriors, probably Mohegan,” Jack told Morgan’s household. “The master is dead in the canoe, unless the savages have taken him away.”

Crosby told one of the younger boys to tend the fierce-looking slash across Jack
’s own chest, while he and several others lit torches and set out to the riverbank. Before dawn they had returned with their master’s pale body on a litter.

“
His throat was cut as neatly as if he’d been sleeping,” one man barked, flinging the words of accusation in Jack’s face. “If you were attacked by the Mohegan, why weren’t the goods stolen?”

“
There were no arrows,” another man pointed out. “Not a single arrow in the boat, in the master, or in the water.”

“
The canoe had snagged upon a limb,” Crosby explained, carefully observing the effects of these charges upon the Indian’s countenance. “Your story might have worked, Jack, but for that. Our master lay in the canoe as if someone cut his throat while he slept, and here you wear his hat. In sooth, you’ll have to come with us to Jamestown for questioning by the governor.”

Jack of the Feathers
’s eyes darted right and left, then he bolted forward in an attempt to run for his life. The servants charged him, his blade flashed from out of its sheath, and in the confusion a musket fired.

Crosby stepped back in alarm as the acrid cloud of smoke lifted.
Jack bled from a neat circular wound in his chest and managed three steps toward the door before collapsing in the keeping room of Morgan’s house. Since the doctor and the governor lay miles away in Jamestown, Crosby gave the order to load Jack of the Feathers into his late master’s canoe for transport upstream.

Jack died before reaching the fort.
John Crosby told the authorities about Morgan’s murder as calmly as he could, but the news of Nemattanow’s murderous treachery and subsequent death coincided with the wild ravings of Fallon Bailie, a man who had hitherto been a well-respected citizen of Jamestown. Bailie kept insisting that Opechancanough had determined and planned an attack to wipe the English from Virginia. No one believed his fantastic story, but now that Jack of the Feathers had been executed without a trial, the English waited with trepidation to see how the great chief might respond.

The English did not send runners to the chief, for news travelled like the wind and down the banks of the Powhatan and Pamunkey Rivers.
Within twelve hours the bad tidings had reached the great chief of the Powhatan, and Opechancanough listened to the account of Nemattanow’s death without comment. He had never been fond of that headstrong and murderous warrior, but the dark gods had been good to send Nemattanow into the other world at this time. It was the sign for which he had been waiting.

Opechancanough immediately dictated two messages.
The first, to be carried by the swiftest runners, was to the current governor of Jamestown, Sir Francis Wyatt. “Notify the governor,” Opechancanough said, nodding gravely at his messengers, “that Namattanow, being but one man, should be no occasion of a breech of the peace. Again I say that the sky should sooner fall than the peace be broken on my part, and I have given order to all my people to give no offense to the English.”

When the first runners had been dispatched, the great chief picked up the war pipe and lighted it from the sacred fire that burned in the center of the village.
“Send scouts to every village allied with the tribes of the Powhatan,” he said, his voice booming like thunder over the assembled crowd. “Tell the Chickahominies, the Powhatan, and those who have waited with us. At the eighth hour of the morning in three days time, we will attack the English throughout our land and spare not a man, woman, or child. We will arise as one man, slaughtering, burning, destroying all the works of English hands. The winged ships are forever bringing new people, and the time hath come to drive them forever from this place.”

His people stood in silence, hanging upon his words, and a smile crawled to the chief
’s lips and curved itself like a snake. “The day I have chosen is one the English call ‘Good Friday,’ for it is the day they say their God died. It shall then be a good day indeed, for they can follow their God to death!”

Warriors cheered, and the frenzied dances of war began with the women and children while the young men sprinted through the gates of the palisade to spread the news.
Satisfied, Opechancanough folded his arms and looked over his city, where three hundred warriors would soon arm themselves for battle. There were a hundred such villages in the land of the Powhatan, and soon three thousand would march against the English. And as long as the English governor rested in the easy promise of peace, Opechancanough’s victory would be assured.

“
What say you now?” he asked the black sky of night, bitterly remembering the dark-clothed holy men who had stolen him from the land of his youth. “You, whom they call the true God, will you rise up against me? If you do, I will cut you down as easily as I killed the friars long ago.”

From the raging campfire boiling clouds of smoke lifted into the air to block the bright stars above.
Opechancanough threw back his head and let loose with a war cry that startled even his own people.

Forty-two

F
allon found the people of Jamestown more receptive to his warning of war after the incident with Jack of the Feathers, but within twenty-four hours the message of peace from Opechancanough had arrived. The same men who had grown pale under Fallon’s warning now laughed in his face. “The great chief is afraid of us,” they said, drinking freely in the taverns while they planned the large, widely-spaced plantations they would build on Indian land. “He cannot stop us now, and he will do naught to break the peace.”

Indians moved freely throughout Jamestown and seemed to share the English contempt for Fallon
’s message. On Wednesday night, the evening of the twentieth of March, he fell onto an empty straw mattress at Edith Rolfe’s house and groaned in exhaustion. He had much to tell Edith, Wart, and Brody about Gilda, but since arriving at the settlement he had spent all his time attempting to spread the warning to which no one would listen. Even Brody, who had never doubted Fallon before, turned an incredulous expression upon his friend and told him he’d been too long in the sun.

“
You need a rest,” Brody said, pinching Fallon’s arm as he lay on the mattress in the front chamber. “Look at you! I’faith, y’are skin and bones. I’m thinking you’ll need to stay here a while and let Mistress Rolfe fatten you up a wee bit.”

“
I can’t stay,” Fallon said, pushing himself into a sitting position. “I left Gilda in the woods. I have to go back for her.”

“
She’s alive?” Brody asked, his face lit with honest joy. “Name of a name, Fallon, I was afraid to ask, for she was half dead when we found her. In sooth, I thought you’d be dead of the pox, too—”

“
I didn’t get it,” Fallon said, looking at his hands as if he expected to see blisters there. “And Gilda recovered. God was good to me.” He looked up at Brody and searched his friend’s face. “Gilda and I are married, Brody. We pledged ourselves to one another.”

“
Go on!” Brody said, wonder in his voice. “You tamed that alley cat?”

Fallon grinned and raked his fingers through his hair.
“I didn’t tame her. She’s as feisty as ever, but I didn’t want to leave her and I’ve got to get back. But I had to warn you, Brody, about the Powhatan. They are coming. Mayhap not today, or tomorrow, but they’re going to come, no matter what Opechancanough says.”

“
We can fight off a hundred Indians,” Brody said, shrugging. “‘Twill be no trouble.”

“
Not a hundred,
thousands
,” Fallon insisted. “‘Tis a conspiracy of the first order.”

Brody broke out into a guffaw.
“Indians don’t cooperate, ‘tis not in their nature, haven’t you seen it? There are too many chiefs, each more proud than he hath a right to be—”

“
You wait and see,” Fallon answered, stretching out upon the mattress. His eyelids were heavy, and the grief of leaving Gilda throbbed dully in his heart. ‘Twas an effort to keep his mind from wandering into dark possibilities and thoughts of what could happen to her, but he’d go crazy if he allowed himself to think too much—

“
Just be ready,” he whispered, sinking slowly into sleep.

The Indians who visited Jamestown spoke baby English around their English friends and slipped into the quiet tones of Algonquin when alone.
Many lived permanently in Jamestown, and these were visited by the members of the woodland tribes in the early hours of Thursday morning. Even Chanco, the thirteen-year-old godson of Richard Pace, an English planter who lived across the river from the Jamestown settlement, received a visitor from his tribe. Chanco listened intently as the warrior instructed him to murder his master at eight o’clock on the morrow.

Chanco carried his terrible secret throughout the day and took it with him to bed that evening.
But as the heartfelt bedtime prayers of his kind master rang in his ears, Chanco rose from his mattress and woke Richard Pace.

Pace listened to the story, then threw on his clothes and
leapt into his boat, rowing like a madman across the chopping waters of the James. He pounded on the gate of the Jamestown fort until a sleepy guard admitted him. After hearing Pace’s rendition of Chanco’s testimony, the governor woke the militia and soldiers hastily distributed muskets from the armory. Soldiers ran quietly through the night to the nearby houses, waking the inhabitants and rousing them to action. Women and children hurried to the fort while their menfolks armed themselves with muskets, knifes, axes, and spades. Any boy old enough to fling a brickbat was encouraged to stand and help defend his home.

Fallon heard pounding on the door of Mistress Rolfe
’s house and instantly quit his sleep. He listened to the intense murmur of the messenger, then woke Edith, Wart, and Brody. The patients who were too weak to walk had to be carried to the fort, and Fallon pulled out the litters that would have to do double duty on this terrible night.

Through the remaining hours of darkness they worked, then Fallon left Wart and Edith at the fort as he and Brody slipped back to the house in the time of half light before sunrise.
They would defend the place as best they could, and carry the fight into the streets. But there would be no element of surprise to confound the English, for the citizens of Jamestown had at last decided to heed Fallon’s warning.