The Sot-Weed Factor (72 page)

So did he savor this reflection, and the spiritual peace from which it had originated, that for a considerable period he was oblivious to wind, weather, and the passage of time; had the tide swung the ship onto a sand bar, or the wind moved round the compass, the change would have escaped his notice. What aroused him, finally, was a sound from the marsh to larboard; he started, saw that the moon had risen a great way into the sky, and wondered whether to rouse the others. But when the sound came again his fears were allayed: it was a hooting chirrup as of doves or owls, some creature of the marsh as glad as he to see the storm pass over.

"Too-hoo!"
The call came a third time, louder and more clear, and
"Too-hoo!"
came a clear reply -- not from the adjacent marsh but from the deck immediately at Ebenezer's back. He thrilled with alarm, spun about to see what bird had perched on the vessel's rail, and was seized at once by the Negro crewmen, who had noiselessly unrolled themselves from the jibsail. One pinioned his arms and held fast his mouth before he was able to cry out; the other held a rigging-knife against his throat and called out over the side,
"Too-hoo! Too-hoo!" --
whereupon, as if materialized spontanetously in the reeds, three canoes slid out of hidden waterways nearby, and half a minute later, to the poet's expressible terror, a party of silent savages was swarming over the rail and creeping with great stealth towards the cabin.

W
hat with every
military advantage -- arms, numbers, and absolute surprise -- the strange war party of Indians was not long in attaining its objective, which seemed to be the capture of the sloop with all hands. Bertrand and the Captain were wakened with spearheads at their throats and brought forward, the former inarticulate with fright, the latter bellowing and sputtering -- first at his captors, then at Ebenezer for not sounding some alarm, and finally and most violently, when he grasped the situation, at the treacherous members of his crew.

"I'll see ye drawn to the scaffold and quartered!" he declared but the Negroes only smiled and turned their eyes as if embarrassed by his threats. The leader of the party spoke sharply in an incomprehensible tongue to one of his lieutenants, who relayed it in another, equally strange language to the Negro sailors, and was answered in the same manner; during their colloquy Ebenezer observed that, though the boarders were dressed almost identically in deerskin matchcoats and hats of beaver, racoon, or muskrat, nearly half their number were not Indians at all, but Negroes. The Captain remarked this fact as well and began at once to rail at them for fugitives and poltroons, but his audience gave no sign of understanding. Apparently satisfied that there were no more passengers aboard the sloop and no more vessels in the cove, the raiders then bound their captives at wrist and ankle, handed them bodily over the rail, and obliged them to lie face-down, one to a canoe, throughout a brief but circuitous passage into the marsh, which, like the earlier phases of the coup, was executed in total silence. Presently the canoes were secured to a clump of wax myrtles, the ropes around the prisoners' ankles were exchanged for a longer one that tethered them by the neck in a line, and the party proceeded on foot down a path as meandering as the waterway, and so narrow that even single file it was hard to avoid misstepping into the muck on either side.

"This is outrageous!" Ebenezer complained. "I never dreamed such things still happened in 1694, in the very bosom of the Province!"

"Nor I," the Captain replied, from his post in the van of the prisoners. "Nor e'er heard tell of an Indian town on Bloodsworth Island. I'Christ, 'tis naught but marsh from stem to stern, and not dry ground enough to stand on."

"God save us!" Bertrand groaned -- his first words since he'd fallen asleep some hours before. "They'll scalp our heads and burn us at the stake!"

"Whatever for?" the poet inquired. "We've done 'em no injury, that I can see."

" 'Tis e'er the salvages' wont," his valet insisted. "Ye've but to run afoul of one in your evening stroll, and
bang!
he'll skin your pate as ye'd skin a peach! Why, 'tis still the talk in Vansweringen's how a wench named Kersley was set upon by Indians in Charles County, year before last: she was crossing a field of sot-weed 'twixt her own house and her father's, with the sun still shining and a babe on her arm besides, but ere she reached her husband's door she had been scalped, stuck with a knife, and swived from whipple to Whitsuntide! And again, not far from Bohemia Manor --"

"Be still," the Captain snapped, "ere your own tales beshit ye."

" 'Tis all quite well for you to take your scalping without a word," Bertrand replied undaunted. " 'Twas you steered us hither in the first place --"

"I!
'Sblood and 'sbody, sir, 'tis thy good fortune the salvage hath belayed my two hands, else I'd have thy scalp myself!"

"Gentlemen!" Ebenezer interposed. "Our case is grave enough without such talk! 'Twas I that hired the passage; you may hold me answerable for everything if 'twill ease your minds to do so, though it strikes me we'd do better to give over wondering who got us into this pickle and bend our minds instead to getting out."

"Amen," the Captain grunted.

"Still and all," Bertrand said disconsolately, "I must hold Betsy Birdsall to some account, for had she not rescued me last March in such a deuced clever manner, I'd not be trussed up here like a trout on a gill string."

"Really!" the Captain cried. "Thou'rt unhinged!"

"Stay, prithee stay," Ebenezer pleaded. Since the Captain's first sharp words to Bertrand, the poet's brow had been knitting, and his admonitions were made distractedly. Now he asked the Captain, "Was't not the Straits of Limbo we entered yonder cove from, or did I mishear you?"

"That was my guess, sir," the older man said, "unless the tide fetched us down as low as Holland or Kedge's Straits, which I doubt."

"But if not, the name of the strait is Limbo? And is there a river mouth not far hence, with an Indian name?"

"A hatchful of 'em," the Captain replied, not greatly interested, "and they all have salvage names: Honga, Nanticoke, Wicomico, Manokin, Annamessex, Pocomoke --"

"Wicomico!
Aye, Wicomico -- 'tis the name Smith mentioned in his
Historie!"

The Captain muttered something exasperated, and to avoid being thought deranged by fear like his servant, Ebenezer explained in the simplest way possible what he had been grasping for since the first mention of
Limbo Straits
and had recalled only with the help of the word
beshit:
that Captain John Smith of Virginia, almost ninety years previously, had discovered those same straits during his voyage of exploration up the Chesapeake; had, like themselves, encountered a furious storm therein and suffered the additional discomforts of a diarrhetic company; had in consequence of his ordeal bestowed the name
Limbo
on the place; and finally had been made prisoner, with all his party, by a band of warlike Indians -- perhaps the grandfathers of their present captors!

"Ye don't tell me," the Captain said. Neither did Bertrand appear to be overwhelmed by the coincidence, for when to his single inquiry, "Prithee, what came of 'em?" his master confessed that he had not the slightest idea, the valet relapsed into gloom.

But once Ebenezer had wrested the
Secret Historie
from his memory he could not but marvel at the parallel between John Smith's experience and their own. Moreover, the existence of the
Historie
itself attested that Smith and at least some of his party had escaped or been freed by their captors. His reflections were interrupted at this point by their arrival at the Indians' town, an assemblage of mean little huts arranged in a thick circle upon an island of relatively high ground. There seemed to be well over a hundred in all, dome-shaped affairs of small logs and thatched twigs; surrounded as they were by the marsh, they resembled nothing so much as a colony of muskrat houses, the more since their occupants were cloaked and capped with fur. The citizenry appeared to be sleeping: except for a single hidden sentry who challenged their approach with a "Too-
hoo!"
from his post in a nearby brush clump, and was answered in kind, the town was as still as one deserted.

" 'Tis passing queer," the Captain grumbled. "Never saw an Indian town without a pack o' curs about."

But if the silence of the village was disconcerting, what broke it a few moments later was nothing less than extraordinary: they had passed through the ring of dwellings to a clearing or open court in the center of the town, and during a whispered colloquy between the leader and his black lieutenant there came from a hut not far away a sudden wailing that raised the poet's hackles. Through his fancy, in half a second, passed the various Indian cruelties he had learned of from Henry Burlingame: how they bit the nails from their victims' fingers, twisted the fingers themselves from the hands, drove skewers into the remaining stumps, pulled sinews from the arms, tore out the hair and beard, hung hot hatchets around the neck, and poured hot sand on scalped heads.

"Marry come up!" breathed the Captain, and Bertrand's teeth began to chatter. The wail changed pitch and tone and changed again a moment afterwards, and again, but not until the wailer drew fresh breath and recommenced did the prisoners grasp the nature of the sound.

"Dear God in Heav'n!" Ebenezer gasped. " 'Tis someone singing!"

And monstrous unlikelihood through it was, the prisoners recognized the sound to be in truth the voice of a singing man -- a tenor, to be exact. This in itself was wonder enough; far more incongruous was the fact that his words (viewed retrospectively from this understanding) were not in a savage tongue at all, but in clear King's English:
I. . . saw. . . my-y la-a-dy weep
was the line he'd sung, and, having drawn his breath, he continued:
And Sor-row proudt. . . to be advanced so. . .

"B'm'faith, 'tis another Englishman!"

"So much the worse for him," the Captain replied, "but no better for us."

"In those fair eyes,"
the singer went on,
"in those. . . fair eyes. . ."

"I wonder he hath the spirit to sing," Bertrand marveled, "or his jailer's leave."

This latter, at least, it seemed he did not have after all, for in the course of his next asseveration --
"Where all perfections keep. . ."
-- he broke into an unmelodious cursing, the substance of which was that if the so-and-so salvages couldn't let a poor condemned so-and-so sing a so-and-so song without poking their pigstickers into his so-and-so B-flat, they had better cut his so-and-so throat that instant, and be damned to them.

"I swear," Ebenezer said, "I have heard that voice before!"

"Haply 'tis the ghost of your Captain What-ye-may-call-him," the Captain suggested sourly.

"Nay, i'God --" If he had intended to say more, he was prevented from doing so by the Indians, who, their parley finished, gave a jerk on the neck-tether and led the prisoners toward the very hut which held the disgruntled tenor. At its entrance they were unstrung and refettered individually as for the canoe-passage; throughout the operation Ebenezer squinted his face and shook his head incredulously, and when upon another armed Indian's emerging from the hut the tenor at once began his song afresh, the poet moaned again "I'God!" and trembled all over.

Two men then laid hold of Bertrand, who stood nearest the entrance to the hut, forced him to his knees, and with the assistance of a spearpoint obliged him to crawl through the little doorway, whinnying protests and pleas for clemency. The Captain too, now that imprisonment was at hand, let go a fresh torrent of threats and mariner's oaths, to no avail: down upon his knees he went, and through the dark hole after Bertrand.

"I say!" the original tenant complained, breaking off his song at the ruckus. "This
is
too much! What is't now? 'Sheart! Did I hear an honest English curse there? Hallo, another!" Ebenezer's turn had come to scramble after. "D'ye mean we've enough for four-man shove-ha'penny? Who might you gentlemen be, to come calling so late in the day?"

"A pair of travelers and an innocent shipmaster," the Captain answered, "blown hither by the storm and betrayed by two black devils of a crew!"

"Ah, there's your crime," the other prisoner said. The hut was dark, so that although in its small interior the Englishmen lay like logs in a woodbox, they could not see their companions even faintly. Their jailer, after receiving instructions from the Indian leader, remained on guard outside, and the raiding party dispersed.

"What crime?" the Captain protested. "I've ne'er laid an angry hand on the rascals since the day I bought "em!"

" 'Tis enough ye bought 'em," replied the tenor. "More than enough.
I
ne'er bought or sold a black man in my life, nor harmed a red -- how could I, i'faith, that's but a runaway redemptioner myself? -- but 'twas enough I matched the color of them that did."

"What is this talk of slaves and colors?" Bertrand demanded. "D'ye mean they'll scalp poor hapless servingmen like myself?"

"Worse, friend."

"What could be worse?" the valet cried.

"By'r voice I'd judge ye sing a faltering bass," the other declared. "But if they do the trick they've set their minds to, well all be warbling descants within the week."

Of the three new prisoners only Ebenezer grasped the meaning of this prediction; yet though horrified by it, he was too disconcerted, even confounded, by his prior astonishment to interpret the figures for his comparisons. Their host, however, the invisible tenor, did so at once in plainest literal English, to the consternation of Bertrand and the Captain.

"I've not been in this wretched province many months," said he, "but I know well the Governor hath enemies on every side -- Jacobites and John Coode Protestants within, Andros to the south, and the Frenchman to the north -- so that he lives in daily fear of insurrection or invasion. Yet his greatest peril is one he little dreams of: the complete extermination of every white-skinned human being in Maryland!"

"Fogh!" cried the Captain. "They're but one town against a province!"

"Far from it," the tenor replied. "Few white men know this town exists, but it hath lain hid here many a year; 'tis the headquarters, as I gather, for a host of mutinous salvage chiefs, and a haven for runaway Negroes. All the disaffected leaders are smuggling in this week for a general council of war, and ourselves, gentlemen, will be eunuched and burnt for their amusement."

At this news Bertrand set up such a howling that their guard thrust in his head, jabbed randomly in the dark with the butt end of his spear, and muttered threats. The tenor replied with cheerful curses and remarked, when the guard withdrew, "I say, there were three of ye came in, but I've heard only two speak out thus far: is the other wight sick, or fallen a-swoon, or what?"

" 'Tis not fright holds my tongue, John McEvoy," the poet said with difficulty. " 'Tis shock and shame!"

The other prisoner gasped. "Nay, i'faith! 'Tis past belief!
Ah! Ah!
Too good! Ah, marry, too wondrous good! Tell me 'tis not really Eben Cooke I hear!"

"It is," Ebenezer admitted, and McEvoy's wild laughter brought new threats from the guard.

"Oh! Ah!
Too good! The famous virgin poet and reformer o' London whores! 'Twill be a joy to see you roasting by my side.
Aha! Oh! Oh!"