The sea, busy moving sand as always, had uncovered an ancient wreck. There was a colony in Virginia by then, but the Mayflower had not yet crossed the Atlantic with its Pilgrims, and the wreck we looked upon was old. Only a few gray ribs protruded from the sand. Perhaps only an abandoned ship that washed up here, perhaps some early venture. Not enough showed itself to explain its construction but my father examined it curiously. When I asked whose ship it might have been, he shrugged. “It is a construction I find strange,” he said, “but I know so little of such things.”
He kicked one of the timbers, as one will. “Solid,” he said, “and built for the deep sea. This was no coasting craft.”
Keokotah knew nothing of ships and the sea, and of all this speculation I said nothing. I knew too little myself, just enough to tantalize me and make me long to know more. Yet when I thought back to my opportunities I knew that few boys had grown up exposed to more than I.
My father’s men had been soldiers, sailors, and wanderers. Sakim had been a seaman aboard a ship with my father, a prisoner taken at sea as my father had been, and several of his men had been soldiers who had fought in foreign wars.
Soldiering was an honorable trade, and many of England’s men had fought on the continent or in Mediterranean lands. Each had stories to tell and we boys were avid listeners. Yet I had learned more because I was not the hunter and fisherman the others were.
After Keokotah had fallen asleep I lay long awake remembering my mother. A thought took me: she was in England … suppose she, too, had died and I did not know? But then I would never know now if she were alive or dead.
I thought of Brian and Noelle. I had been closer to them than the older boys had.
How different their lives would be! In the England I had never seen they would live, grow, become educated. I longed for them then, and longed for my mother, too. But my star hung over the western mountains and I knew it.
What would I find there? What, besides a Natchee princess or priestess, or whatever she was? But I had nothing to do with her, only to find her and tell her the Great Sun was dying and she was needed. Remembering Ni’kwana, however, I began to wonder whether he really wished her to return or not. I think he feared Kapata and his ambition. But if she did not return, what life would there be for her? Where could such a one find happiness in our wild western world?
My mind was busy with that when my lids closed. How long they had been closed—it seemed but an instant—I do not know, but suddenly they were wide open, staring.
Something had moved in the forest! Some sound, some vague whispering of movement against leaves.
I put out a hand and touched Keokotah. The hand I touched held a knife.
SEVEN
Ghostlike, I slid from under my blanket and into the trees. As always, I had chosen my retreat before lying down. Often it is too late when the moment comes, and I wished to make no sound to give away my position. There was no need to worry about Keokotah. He had known nothing else since childhood and knew well what must be done.
We waited then. I knew not where Keokotah was, nor did the red coals give any light. Our blankets looked heaped as though we still slept. That, too, was an immediate reaction to attack.
There was no moon, only stars and scattered clouds above the trees. I heard no sound, but there would be none. These Indians knew what they did. The sound that had awakened me might have been a natural sound of the forest or an attacker, momentarily clumsy.
There would be no chance to use my bow in a first attack. Later—if I survived.
A wind stirred. Often Indians chose such moments in which to move, covered by the wind sounds. I waited, knife in hand. A low wind sifted through the leaves. I felt body warmth near to me, and when I looked to my right a faint gleam from a metallic armlet told me an Indian lay beside me, not two feet away!
My knife was ready, gripped in my right hand. He was lying parallel to me, and to stab he must rise up and strike with his right hand. I had known perhaps a thousand Indians and none had been left-handed. When he raised up to strike I would stab him, and it would be only an instant before he was aware of me.
He must have been a young Indian with not too many warpaths behind him, for he had eyes only for his chosen point of attack. He raised up to his knees, spear poised to throw into my heaped-up blankets. My blade cut sharply back and up, the point going in below the middle of his rib cage, driving to the hilt.
His eyes met mine in a moment of awful awareness. His spear was thrown as he took the blade. He realized death in that instant and I put my hand against his shoulder and drew back my knife. He started to cry out, but could not. His hand went back for a tomahawk at his belt but there was no strength in his fingers. He fell forward, made an effort to rise, then moved no more.
The fire blazed up from a handful of leaves and sticks thrown upon it. An Indian lay dead near the fire. Nothing else moved. Wind stirred the leaves again, and the blaze dipped in obedience to the moving air. And then there was a long silence, while the fire crackled.
A hand reached from the brush toward the fallen Indian’s foot, but before I could rise to bring my bow into position an arrow drove through the air. The hand tightened convulsively into a fist and was withdrawn. And that was all.
When morning came the two dead Indians lay where they had fallen. The warrior who had taken Keokotah’s arrow was gone, the arrow with him.
He looked at my Indian with approval and then gestured at the scalp. “You no want?”
“No. It is not my custom.”
He did not hesitate, but took the scalp for himself as he had the other.
“What if they come again?”
“Their medicine bad. They go home now. He”—Keokotah indicated the Indian he had killed—”was chief. He dead. He medicine no good. Maybe pick another chief, maybe stay home. Two men die, medicine no good.”
“How many were there, I wonder?”
He shrugged. “Maybe six, maybe eight. No more.”
They were of a tribe strange to us both, but there were many such, some even now disappearing. There were Indians my father had met when first he landed in Carolina who were no more. Wars with other tribes, diseases … who knew what had happened to them?
Keokotah stooped and cut the string that held a medallion on the Indian’s throat. He held it out to me.
It was a Roman coin. A silver coin of about the size of a nine-penny piece, dated in the third year of Antoninus Pius. The date and other inscriptions were much worn, so that I could not be sure but I figured the date to be about 137 after Christ.
This was not the first Roman coin we Sacketts had come upon, for once before an Indian had traded us another coin dated only a few years earlier than the one I now had. The dates of both were close enough that they could have been carried by one man or one group of men.
The coin did not surprise me. For every documented voyage there must have been a thousand of which no record was kept. What reason had the average ship’s master or merchant for keeping records, especially when they might betray his sources of raw material or trade?
Our travel was no longer swift, for if my people were to relocate so far from known sources of material they must find new sources. They would have to make their own gunpowder, which we had done for much of the time, but they would need lead, also, or copper, from which we had occasionally made bullets.
Keokotah was sullen. He spoke little and I began to realize he did not wish to go to the cave. Moreover, when he did speak he often spoke of his own village, and I realized I might lose my companion. His own village lay not many days travel away to the north, and he had long been gone.
At night I now built a small, separate fire, and over this I muttered prayers and recited doggerel learned from my parents. To Keokotah I was making medicine, preparing for entering the cave of the shadows. All this was pure mumbo-jumbo but I liked Keokotah and did not wish him to believe I made light of his fears. “Bad,” I said to him, “much bad! Bad spirits!”