A Different Flesh (2 page)

This one, though, stood its ground, baring broad, yellow teeth in a threatening grimace. Wingfield gestured again, more sharply, and hoped he seemed more confident than he felt. If his first shot missed, or even wounded but failed to kill, he would have to grab for his other gun while the sim charged—and pistol-range was not
that
much more than a stone's throw.

Then the bushes quivered on the far side of the clearing, and a second sim came out to stand behind its fellow. This one carried a large, sharp-edged rock ready to hurl. It shook its other fist at Wingfield, and shouted angrily.

It was the Englishman's turn to grind his teeth. If both sims rushed him, he would never have the chance to reload either a pistol or his crossbow. The odds of stopping them with just two shots were not worth betting his life on, not for a rabbit. And if they did kill him, they would not content themselves with the game he carried. They would eat him too.

Raising the pistol in a final warning, he drew back into the woods. The sims' mocking cries followed him. He hated the filthy animals … if they were animals. Close to a century had passed since the Spaniards brought the first pair back to Cadiz from their coastal fortress of Veracruz. Churchmen and scholars were still arguing furiously over whether sims were mere brute beasts or human beings.

At the moment, Wingfield was ready to hate them no matter what they were.

He found the tree where he had shot at the rabbit the sims were now doubtless gulping down raw. He managed to cut himself while he was digging out the crossbow bolt with his knife. That did nothing to improve his temper. Had he shot straight in the first place, he would not have put himself in the humiliating position of backing down from sims.

Thinking such dark thoughts, Wingfield turned back toward Jamestown. He scratched at his nose as he walked along, and felt skin peel under his nails. One more annoyance—he was too fair not to burn in this climate, but found wearing a hat equally intolerable.

On his way home, he knocked over a couple of quail and one of the native beasts that looked like giant, white-faced rats but tasted much better. That improved his mood, a little. He was still grumbling when Allan Cooper hailed him from the edge of the cleared ground.

Thinking of the guard's misery made him ashamed of his own bad temper. Cooper wore a gleaming back-and-breast with thick padding beneath; a heavy, plumed morion sat on his head. In that armor, he had to be steaming like a lobster boiled in its own shell. Yet he managed a cheery wave for Wingfield. “Good bag you have there,” he called.

“It should be better, by one hare,” Wingfield replied, pique flaring again. He explained how he had lost the beast to the sims.

“Aye, well, no help for such things sometimes, not two on one,” Cooper sighed, and Wingfield felt relief at having his judgment sustained by a professional soldier. The guard went on, “The thieving devils are robbing traps again, too. Henry Dale came in empty-handed this afternoon, swearing foul enough to damn himself on the spot.”

“If swearing damns a man, Henry was smelling brimstone long years ere this,” Wingfield observed.

Cooper laughed. “You speak naught but the truth there, though I don't blame him for his fury this time. Sims are worse than foxes ever were—foxes have no hands.” He hefted his matchlock musket. “Without guns, we'd never keep them from our own animals. And how often have they raided the henhouse?”

“Too many times.” Wingfield turned to a less gloomy subject. “How is Cecil?”

“Doing splendidly,” Cooper said, his voice full of pride. “The lad will be three months tomorrow.” Cecil Cooper was Jamestown's oldest child; the first ship carrying women had reached Virginia only a year before. Wingfield had a daughter, Joanna, only a few weeks younger than the guard's son.

He left Cooper and walked down the muddy path through the fields. Several rows of thatch-roofed cabins stood by the log stockade that mounted cannon. On the other side of the fortress were longer rows, of graves. More than half of the original three shiploads of colonists had died from starvation or disease. A couple of the newest burials were pathetically small: even back in England, so many infants did not live to grow up—and life was far harsher here.

But the marker that grieved Wingfield most was one of the oldest, the one showing where Captain John Smith lay. Always eager to explore, he had set about learning the countryside from the day the English landed—until the sims killed him, three months later. Without him, the settlement seemed to have a lesser sense of drive, of purpose.

Still, it went on, as people and their works do. Several colonists swung the gates of the fortress open, so others could drive in the pigs, goats, and oxen for the night to protect them from the sims and other predators. The pigs and goats, which ate anything they came across, throve in this new land. The oxen had the same gaunt look as most of the colonists.

Wingfield's cabin was in the outer row, closest to the forest. Smoke rose from the chimney as he approached. The door stood open, to let in what air would come.

Hearing her husband's step, Anne Wingfield came out to greet him. He hugged her close, so glad she had chosen to spend her life with him. She had had her pick of suitors, as was true of all the women in Virginia; men outnumbered them four to one.

She exclaimed in pleasure at how much game he had brought home. Back in London, she would have been nothing special to look at: a rather husky, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, with strong features—if anything, handsome rather than pretty. On this side of the Atlantic, though, she was by definition a beauty.

“And how is Joanna?” Wingfield asked as his wife skinned and disjointed his two rabbits and tossed the meat into the stewpot. The rabbits shared it with a small piece of stale venison from a couple of days before and a mess of wild onions, beechnuts, mushrooms, and roots. The smell was heavenly.

“Asleep now,” Anne said, nodding toward the cradle, “but very well. She smiled at me again this morning.”

“Maybe next time she will do it in the night, so I may see it too.”

“I hope she will.”

While they waited for the rabbits to cook, they dealt with the rest of Wingfield's catch, cutting the meat into thin strips and setting them on racks over the fire to dry and smoke. After what seemed an eternity, Anne ladled the stew into wooden bowls. Wingfield licked his clean. Though matters were not so grim as they had been the first couple of dreadful winters, he was always hungry.

“I would have had another cony, but for the sims,” he said, and told Anne of the confrontation.

Her hand jumped to her mouth. “Those horrid beasts! They should all be hunted down and slain, ere they harm any more of our good Englishmen. What would I have done here, alone save only for Joanna, had they hurt you?”

“No need to fret over might-have-beens; I'm here and hale,” he reassured her, and got up and embraced her for good measure. “As for the sims, if they be men, slaying them out of hand so would burden us with a great weight of sin when we are called to the Almighty.”

“They are no creatures of His,” Anne returned, “but rather of the Devil, the best he could do toward making true humankind.”

“I've heard that argument before. To me it smacks of the Manichean heresy. Only God has the power to create, not Satan.”

“Then why did He shape such vile parodies of ourselves, His finest creatures? The sims know nothing of farming or weaving or any useful art. They cannot even set fires to cook the beasts they run down like dogs.”

“But they know fire, though I grant they cannot make it. Yet whenever lightning sets a blaze, some sim will play Prometheus and seize a burning brand. They keep the flames alive as long as they may, till they lose them from rain or sheer fecklessness.”

Anne set hands on hips, gave Wingfield a dangerous look. “When last we hashed this over, as I recollect, 'twas you who reckoned the sims animals and I the contrary. Why this reversal?”

“Why yours, save your concern for me?” he came back. “I thank you for't, but the topic's fit to take from either side. I tell you frankly, I cannot riddle it out in certain, but am changeable as a weathervane, ever thinking now one thing, now the other.”

“And I, and everyone,” Anne sighed. “But if they put you in danger, my heart cannot believe them true men, no matter what my head might say.”

He reached out to set his fingers gently on her arm. The tender gesture was spoiled when a mosquito spiraled down to land on the back of his hand. The swamps round Jamestown bred them in throngs worse than any he had known in England. He swatted at the bug, but it flew off before the deathblow landed.

Outside, someone struck up a tune on the mandolin, and someone else joined in with a drum. Voices soared in song. The settlers had only the amusements they could make for themselves. Wingfield looked out, saw a torchlit circle dance forming. He bobbed his head toward his wife. “Would it please you to join them?”

“Another time,” she said. “Joanna will be waking soon, and hungry. We could step outside and watch, though.” Wingfield agreed at once. Any excuse to get out of the hot, smelly cabin was a good one.

Suitors were buzzing as avidly as the mosquitoes round the few young women who had not yet chosen husbands. Some of those maids owned distinctly fragile reputations. With no others to choose from this side of the sea, they were courted nonetheless.

“Oh, my dear, what would you have me do?” cried a roguish youngster named Caleb Lucas to a girl who, smiling, had turned her back on him. “Go off to the woods and marry a sim?” Laughter rose, hearty from the men who heard him, half-horrified squeals from the women.

“Allan Cooper says the Spaniards do that, or anyway cohabit,” Wingfield told Anne. Spain held a string of outposts down to Magellan's Strait and then up the western coast of South America, to serve her galleons plying the rich trade with the Indies.

“Have they not read Deuteronomy?” Anne exclaimed, her lip curling in disgust. Then curiosity got the better of her and she whispered, “Can there be issue from such unions?”

“In truth, I don't know. As Allan says, who's to tell the difference betwixt the get of a Spanish sire and that of a sim?” Anne blinked, then burst into giggles at the bawdy slander against England's longtime foe.

Before long, both she and her husband were yawning. The unremitting labor of building the colony left scant energy for leisure or anything else. Still, Wingfield hesitated before he blew out the last lamp in the cabin. He glanced toward Anne, and saw an answering flush rise from her throat to her cheeks. She was recovered now from the ordeal of childbirth. Perhaps tonight they might start a son.…

He was about to take Anne in his arms when Joanna let out a yowl. He stopped short. His wife started to laugh. She bared a breast. “Let me feed her quickly, and put her back to sleep. Then, why, we shall see what we shall see.”

“Indeed we shall.” Wingfield lay down on the lumpy straw-stuffed bed to wait. He knew at once he had made a mistake, but fell asleep before he could do anything about it.

Anne stuck out her tongue at him when the sun woke him the next morning. She skipped back when he reached for her. “This even,” she promised. “We have too much to do of the day to waste it lying abed.”

He grimaced. “You have a hateful way of being right.” He scrambled into trousers and boots, set a plumed hat on his head to shield him from the sun. The plume was a bright pheasant's feather from England, now sadly battered. Soon he would have to replace it with a duller turkey tail-feather.

He was finishing a bowl of last night's stew, strong but still eatable, when someone knocked on the cabin door. “There, you see?” Anne said.

“Hush.”

He opened the door. Henry Dale came in. He was a short, fussy man whose ruddy complexion and tightly held jaw gave clues to his temper. After dipping his head to Anne, he said, “Edward, what say we set a few snares, today—mayhap, if fortune favors us, in spots where no knavish sims will come on them to go a-poaching.”

“Good enough. Allan Cooper told me how you were robbed yesterday.”

Anne's presence plainly was the only thing keeping Dale from exploding with fury. He limited himself to a single strangled, “Aye.” After a few moments, he went on, “Shall we be about it, then?”

Wingfield checked his pistols, tucked a bundle of crossbow bolts into his beltpouch, nodded. After a too-brief embrace with his wife, he followed Dale out into the bright morning.

Colonists were already weeding, hoeing, watering in the fields. Caleb Lucas shooed a goat away from the fresh, green stalks of wheat, speeding it on with a kick that brought an indignant bleat from the beast. “And the very same to you,” Lucas called after it. “Damned impudent beast, you can find victuals anywhere, so why thieve your betters' meals?”

“Belike the foolish creature thinks itself a sim,” Dale grunted, watching the goat scurry for the edge of the woods, where it began browsing on shoots. “It lacks the accursed losels' effrontery, though, for it will not turn on its natural masters. The sims, now, those whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-ear'd stinkards—”

Without pausing but to draw breath, he continued in that vein until he and Wingfield were surrounded by forest. As had Anne's remarks the night before, his diatribe roused Wingfield's contentious nature.

“Were they such base animals as you claim,” he said, “the sims would long since have exterminated one another, and not been here for us to find on our landing.”

Dale gave him a look filled with dislike. “For all we know, they well-nigh did. 'Twas not on us they began their habits anthropophagous.”

“If they were eating each other, Henry, and you style them ‘anthropophagous,' does that not make men of them?” Wingfield asked mildly. His companion spluttered and turned even redder than usual.