I want to get deep into the canyon before the sun climbs too high, so I grab my pack rod and saunter down the forest trail. My breath shortens as the trail rises steeply, and I labor in the loose shale, kicking switchbacks across a bare face of ground. Soon I am high above the river and I pause to inhale its scope, its sprawling rush downstream. A game trail cuts down to the river and I follow it. The path curls easily, winding through thickets of wild huckleberry, thimbleberry, elderberry. My nose is filled with the juice-scent of berry, and then I am standing on smooth stones, feeling the cool breath of the river again.

The rocks and boulders along the stream draw heat from the sunlight, and I splay myself across a big black slab and wonder how it got there. The chunk is enormous, gray-black, deep black where water has touched its belly, and rounded smooth where the river has hummed across the surface over the years. I close my eyes and run my palm down the rock’s side like the soft hip of a woman.

I am nearly asleep when fish begin to feed, their blips on the water light as raindrops. A few larger fish start to move, their surface eruptions hollow and thick, like logs thrown into deep pools. In moments I have a dry fly on and am casting to water, wading thigh-deep in the cool dark glass of the pool. Water swirls around my legs and tugs me gently downstream, beckoning me, but I shift my feet into the gravel below, anchoring. I continue to false cast, rhythmically swinging the fly like a lilting song in the air, the fly whipping as it passes before me, and back again, when two forms surface from the pool directly before me, precisely in the spot where I had meant to cast my fly.

The brown, slithery pelts of what look like seals have surfaced. Two river otters emerge in unison, their greased heads popping up as they paddle into a sitting position and pose, their eyes playful, looking directly at me while I continue my false casts. My casting assumes a pulse of its own, like a mantra above the otters’ heads. The otters spin, whip around, circle and then hold themselves steady in the current, always fixing a gaze on me, always moving in tandem with the cadence of synchronized swimmers. I marvel at these wondrous creatures as my forearm begins to tighten from the casting. Then slurp, they descend and disappear.

I comb the moving water above and below me. A dark brown form bobs in the whitewater below some rocks, but it is driftwood, not an otter. The otters do not re-surface, so I let my fly land finally in the eddy of a large flat boulder, which seems a likely place to hold fish. The fly meanders in a delicate circle, then flickers in some wash and I witness a sudden flash of color below the surface where the sun beats bold yellow and then the water breaks and a large trout strikes and I yank too quickly and my fly pops out of the water, flopping useless just in front of me.

There is a sudden flurry of movement and color in my periphery and as I recoil, drawing my hand up to the side of my head in defense, an osprey lights on a giant, burned out lightning snag that leans over the big pool in front of me. The bird settles itself comfortably atop the dead tree, and stares at me. I cannot make out the color of its eyes, but they are sharp, clever and ancient, and when the bird averts its gaze from me it fixes its vision on the river and I realize the osprey sees beyond my capacity to understand, sees nymphs emerging and the easy flutter of a cutthroat’s dorsal fin.

I have forgotten about casting and my fly pulls line aimlessly downstream. The sun enshrouds the bird in brilliant backlight, and I glimpse the silvery sheen of its feathers, the bleached-white breast pasted against the deep-green cedar background. Then, with no warning at all, the osprey leaps from the snag and dives toward the pool, just below the rocks where I had cast my fly, cleaving the surface like an arrowhead. There is a flush of feathers and liquid, an image like a snapshot, and then the quick and powerful beating of wings as the bird rises from the water, its talons clutching a magnificent cutthroat trout that quivers in the grasp. I see sturdy, sure wing beats around the downstream bend of the river, then nothing. Just the sound of water over rocks, and the sigh of wind through the cedar forest.

I reel in, put my rod away, and perch myself upon the granite slab. I will watch the water for awhile. I will be still and quiet and listen to the river as it sings down the canyon. I no longer feel compelled to fish, to do anything more than watch and listen to the river.

Sometimes the river is enough.

One spring morning when I was about thirteen my father walked me across our ranch, out through barbed-wire fences and irrigation ditches, to the heron rookery at Silver Creek. We hid beneath towering cottonwoods, watching the parent-birds sail from the nests, their arched necks dipping with flight, seeking food for their young. When they returned, craws tight with meal, we could hear the keen chirps of the chicks go quiet as the parents fed them. From my earth and sagebrush blind at the base of the tall cottonwoods the nests looked tiny and distant, just thatched saucer shapes against the skyline.

I told my father how high they appeared to me, and he paused, nodding. Then he said, “when she thinks they’re ready, the mother coaxes them out of the nest--with her beak.”

I pictured an innocent bird, frail and unsteady, plummeting to the ground beside me.

“What if they can’t fly?” I asked.

He grinned, as if he’d expected such a question.

“They either learn in a hurry, or they don’t,” he said, and he turned, hoofing back toward the log cabin.

At the time I wasn’t prepared to contemplate the rights of passage that parents impose upon their young, but in my later teens, at the onset of my father’s retirement, I was for a short time handed the reins to the ranch. I know now that the responsibility he offered was out of convenience for himself, but partly it was to test me, to see whether I would learn to fly or not.

Then, almost as if by design, my first tough ranch duties unfolded before me. Duties carried out by my hands, hands directed by the will of an owner, the will of a father.

We had a henhouse, a converted outbuilding set up on a knoll above the old farmhouse. Far enough to wake you in the morning on your way to get eggs, scuffing along the dirt road, slapping skeeters. One morning I pushed the pine door open and as light spilled across the floor I sensed the sharpness of skunk and saw the hens huddled in a corner. A little skunk appeared, an adolescent, with whiskers like a kitten’s and egg on its face.

“Get rid of it,” my father said on the phone. “He’ll eat every last egg.”

We didn’t really need the eggs, of course. My father was a retired physician now playing at rancher, and raising farm-fresh eggs was part of the game. It’s true that we grew barley which we sold to Coors (sometimes even for a small profit), and moving miles of pipe through the dank, mosquito-infested grain was one of my jobs, but I always understood that our lives and livelihoods did not depend on the ranch. Reluctantly, I knelt on the feather-strewn wood slats and investigated. I discovered a family of skunks under the floorboards, five or six at least.

If I even considered the idea of trying to relocate them, I quickly realized that was impractical. I was alone out there. I walked to the shed and saw the rusted iron muskrat traps hanging from sixteen-penny nails. I took one down, compressed the side springs, opened the jaws of the leg-hold trap and imagined the snap, then decided against it. What does one do with a trapped skunk spraying everywhere? Instead I grabbed the pellet rifle and headed back to the henhouse, pumping as I walked.

The little stinker was near the door, ducking underneath when the pellet struck him. He fell onto his hind legs and rolled over. The maimed animal clawed the dirt and I reloaded and pumped quickly, wanting to get it over with.

Cradling a skunk in a spade gives you time to see the beauty in the animal, white stripe painted down the back straight as a highway line. I walked to the clearing with my head low, wind brushing the skunk’s hair. Spooning it onto the dirt I couldn’t ignore the tiny black pads of its feet, the oily sheen of the coat in the morning light. The digging was easy and the hole kept growing and enlarging, becoming darker and deeper until I felt like I could have climbed in there myself.

One by one, five small skunks surfaced from beneath the henhouse. None ever sprayed me, though most squirted, their backs arched against the sting of the pellet. The hole I dug became a grave I marked with a railroad stake and a big flat piece of obsidian as black as a skunk’s coat.

It had to do with ownership. Or the idea of ownership, anyway. This was his ranch, and these were his hens, and pests like skunks broke down the order he believed he had imposed on the place. Never mind the skunks’ prior claim to the land: they weren’t supposed to be there in the henhouse and I was charged with ridding the ranch of them. The skunks were to my father the animal equivalent of a weed—something growing where you don’t want it. Such justifications didn’t make burying them any easier, didn’t ease the hurt of each shovelful of dirt tamped into the mound. For a long time, whenever I passed the skunk burial ground, I’d nose the wind and try to catch a whiff of them. I can still smell them now, sweet and acrid at once. Long afterwards, I remember my father stopping what he was doing and looking up sharply, arrested by a breeze that carried skunk-scent.

“Thought ya got those skunks,” was all he said.

*****

My father’s prize wasn’t the log cabin we’d built on the place, with its panoramic view of the Queen’s Crown to the east, Timmerman Hill to the west. It wasn’t the slough above the headgate, low, slow moving water where rainbows boiled in the evenings. It wasn’t even the duck blinds we’d made along Loving Creek, tule and tumbleweed hideouts we worked on when the first frost came. No, my father’s favorite pet was his trout pond.

He had developed it from a spring fed by an artesian well. Watercress mulched the ground in bunches at its headwaters; that’s how he got the idea. We were eating watercress salad one night, the crunchy greens topped with blood red Idaho beets, and he said, “I can build a pond below the spring.” So he did. Built it with backhoe and dragline and dozer. Had me rototill the berm, turning up the loamy soil until twilight intensified instinct--mallards calling in spirals; owls blinking in the willows; cranes and herons winging silhouettes against the sky. I’d stop tilling, plop down in the cool soil and just gaze in disbelief at where I was. Run the ripe ground through my fingers and listen to the talk of wild things.

So the berm was planted with groundcover that went wild, too, birdfoot trefoil and cisor milk vetch and showy locoweed. The stuff climbed the banks like vine and soon my father had dammed it and brought in a truckload of lunker trout and had them dumped in. We built an automatic feeder that sprayed food pellets in a fishy swath twice daily, causing a feeding frenzy that evoked Amazonian piranhas. These were actually Snake River hatchery trout and planting them was sanctioned by the Idaho Department of Fish & Game. My father liked to chum the big bruisers along the banks, tossing handfuls of the pellets like chicken feed and grinning as the hefty trout thrashed the surface, their silver sides flashing as they tore for the spoils. But it turned out he was also unintentionally chumming for herons.

“Come look at this,” my father said one morning as he walked me to the pond. Four large trout, each two boots or better in length, lay dead on the banks, flies swirling around their eyes and vents. Each fish had an identical tell-tale harpoon mark through its side. Blood had dried to scales where the great blue heron’s spear-like bill had stabbed the skin of the fish. The heron hadn’t eaten them. “Too big to swallow whole,” my father grumbled as he tossed the trout into the willows for coyotes, trout meant to be caught by our visiting ranch guests.

Stealthy and patient, herons possess a perfect design: keen eyesight, a long, spear-thrower neck, and a dagger-bill that skewers fish in a swift and fatal blur-stroke. Sometimes I’d see what looked like a tree stump and branches shifting slightly in the stream: a heron, fishing. Grey skeletons of birds, they stalk slowly, barely disturbing the water as they lift and place one stilt-like leg after another. Often they stand in place on one leg until a fish comes near. Then they dart, head and neck and bill in symphony, breaking the window of water like a diving kingfisher, faster than human eyes can see.

But this had to do with ownership. These were my father’s fish, and the sanctity of his pond was being violated by a predator. “The Browning’s in the gun case,” he said as he steered away, dust curling behind the Suburban. Never mind the potential fine, this was private property and we were protecting our crop. I grabbed shells and loaded as I walked, knowing I’d never get a jump shot. Herons are smart, and as wary as any bird.

The heron had been at the pond since daybreak. Before I got within a hundred yards the bird lifted, low at first, then clipping over the willows along the creek, sailing the meanders upstream to the big pond above the head-gate. I crept under some brush and hid and watched the bird curve an arc and boomerang back, looking like some immense pterodactyl in the distance, its head and neck folded back, feet trailing behind. Unbelievably, the heron came right toward me from the slough, just above the line of willows, came the way ducks do during season, and I held the Browning tight, not really thinking what I’d do until it happened.

It was a single shot, one barrel of the 12-gauge Browning reporting, and the instantaneous stoppage of wings, the awkward midair crumpling and the dull thud of the great bird’s brunt beyond the willow belt. Then all was silent on the stream except my breathing and the pulse in my temples. Wading the stream, I could smell the spent gunpowder, then caught the dry scent of sage.

The great blue heron lay stone dead. The yellow, foot-long bill had snapped on impact and now jutted at a fractured, unnatural angle. Bigger than I’d imagined, the bird sprawled a shotgun-length along the ground and I marveled at the blue-grey gloss of its feathers. My eyes moved up the neck, along the cinnamon-colored tendrils, to the head with its forked topknot. Set in the wide-open yellow eye was a dark and piercing pupil, wild and intelligent, and only moments before, alive. I knelt in the dirt next to the bird, then felt a rush of wind and looked away to see clouds forming in the east like clenched fists over the lava flows. I remained quiet, letting my body freeze to the spot, not moving for the longest time, staunch and silent as the heron would be, fishing a pond as if he owned it, searching for food to bring back to his young.

Eventually I stood and lifted the heron by the neck and carried it back to cabin, staying near the thick willows along the stream and scanning for any unwelcome visitors. I slid the big bird in a black plastic garbage bag and called my father.

“Skin it like a pheasant,” he said. “Use a lot of Borax and tack it out in the shed. I’ll use the feathers for tying steelhead flies.”

That afternoon, I did as he said, splaying the grey pelt out to cure on the table beneath the muskrat traps. I tossed the fishy entrails into the field for coyotes, the magnificent bird now carrion. Then I slathered on the Deet, sprayed my greasy Stetson with Muskol, pulled on my hipboots and headed out to move the pipe. As I walked along the irrigation canal to the first handline, I glimpsed something in my periphery and looked up to see the unmistakable slow and rhythmical wing beats of a great blue heron landing on the banks of our trout pond. The bird settled in to begin its evening fishing, and I turned away, turned back to my duty of watering barley we didn’t need, barley destined to become someone else’s beer.

* * *

As it’s hunting season now, and winter is on the way, I thought this one felt right. Enjoy, share, and as always, thanks for reading my work! I appreciate you.

The Setting of Wings

Winter had a grip on the valley. Ice cocoons encased the willow branches, and they bent over the creek from the weight. The wind blew so hard in the midmorning that snow drifts blocked the road between the new cabin and the old Worthington place, and we had to cross-country ski between the two houses. Tumbleweeds left etchings on the surface of the windpack as they skipped along, hopping the barbed-wire fences and leaving lines like strange hieroglyphics or the confused footprints of chickadees. During the days it might warm enough for ice-blocks to dislodge and float down Loving Creek, but when night fell the chunks would slow and bind to larger ice rafts and then freeze solid again as temperatures slid well below zero.

In the truncated light of those winter days I liked to recline in the reading chair of the solarium room, occasionally lifting my eyes from my book to look out the large picture windows that opened to the west and which would later, as they did every evening, let the brilliant skeins of sunset spill into the cabin like water through a culvert. I was looking for birds. During that caesura between late afternoon and early evening the skies would begin to fill, slowly at first, just dark flecks on the horizon, with the moving V’s of migratory waterfowl. By twilight you could see black spirals in all directions, funnels of birds curling their way into the open water that remained in the spring-fed creeks and ponds. When the sky came alive I would grab the down parka from the mudroom, thrust on gloves and hat and go stand on the snow-covered deck to witness this evening ritual, the birds returning from the grain fields far to the south.

On the deck the spectacle intensified, because now you could hear the controlled cacophony of their voices, the reedy keening of thousands and thousands of ducks and geese. If you watched closely, and listened, you would discover other birds, too. A singular heron might croak past overhead, the wary flap of its wings slow and skeptical. Usually a small group of Sandhill Cranes would shoot straight for the large slough above the headgate, landing as one great bird somewhere out in the shadowy grain stubble. But always the condensed, distilled voices and shapes of ducks and geese dominated the skyscape those winter afternoons and evenings, and they stay with me now. There are essences one never tires of, and for me it is watching and listening to birds in flight. I am arrested by the tension just before they land, the compression of speed and elevation and instinct all hurled into one definitive act. So calculated and committed, the birds have circled and considered, have surveyed the ground from every conceivable angle and have decided to light, to cease flying. They have put trust in their instinct and in the depth of their knowledge and have chosen this place over that. Perhaps never completely certain, at this particular instant, anyway, they trust themselves. And they drop from the sky to land.

Anyone who has ever sat in a duck blind and watched birds fly knows the thrill of the setting of wings. It looks predictable, but each time a duck or goose sets its wings to land there exist subtle differences. Once it might be a steady, sure braking when the bird pulls up with full flaps, and it is on the ground or water so fast you want to see it again to try to understand how it happened. Often the wing set has an air of style to it; you see this in mallards. They will set their wings quite early, the slope of their trajectory decided far from the intended landing pad, and as they descend and the wind starts to part and give from the forces of bone and feather the wing tips will vacillate, like the waving of a crop duster or a bush plane, and then there will be the cupped sound of wind in wings like exhalation, and the mallards land with a shudder on the water. But always, if you look closely, the setting of wings creates a distinct outline in the sky, the smooth soft curve in the bird’s silhouette sloped downward like a frown.

On one such mystical afternoon, before the frenzied flight happened, I was sitting on the deck, watching and waiting. The air was so cold you could hear it snap. I could nearly hear my breath crystallizing, and the feet of my deck chair squeaked in the dry snow at my slightest shifting. Then the outline of a singular Canada goose appeared on the horizon to the west, flapping in from some great distance beyond my ability to imagine. The goose flew too low for such a clear day, and I wondered about this. Hunting season was on, and at sunset the valley would be littered with the cough-reports of shotguns booming from river bend and slough. By late season the birds were usually quite wary, having been conditioned to come in higher on clear nights, but this bird seemed less concerned with the consequences of his flight than with the freedom and perfection of it. As I watched the honker drew closer and grew larger until it was upon me, flying right over my head, directly above the cabin, then making one huge parabola and turning back across the barley stubble and setting its wings with confidence and panache, landing on Loving Creek at the big bend below the headgate.

The eldest of three sons, I was the most accomplished hunter, but I had never shot a goose, while each of my brothers had. Having no goose notched into my mythical belt was no great assault on my machismo, but my brothers, younger and competitive, liked to lord it over me as a kind of trump card. They did have that on me. Shooting a goose is, in some families and in some places, like shooting a deer, it is a rite of passage that catapults you from stripling to seasoned in the time it takes to pull a trigger. You must be strong to finish the life of a wounded goose. You must be strong to sling the goose over your shoulder and carry the great bird home by the neck, its weight slapping against your hip as you trudge across the snowfield.

It wasn’t for lack of opportunity that I’d never shot a goose. On a few occasions clear, makeable shots presented themselves to me, but alone in the field or blind I had passed them up, whether by choice or something else I have yet been able to determine. Hunters sometimes describe “buck fever”—the inability to pull the trigger when they finally have their first buck in the cross hairs of their rifle—but what I experienced with geese was quite different, I think, in part because of the movement of the bird. You first make them out in the distance, the tell-tale V, and soon as your eyes strain they are growing in size, drawing nearer, moving toward your field, your set of decoys. As their image tightens, comes into focus, you become mesmerized, hypnotized by the slow, methodical, rhythmic cadence of their wing beats, and then they are upon you, the sharp sheen of black and white bursting forth from the sky, the wind screaming as it flees their wings. They sail over you, sail through your imagination as you lie stock-still in the snow, your mouth wide open, and they pass beyond you and are gone. When they disappear, you wonder what happened. Should you have shot? Why didn’t you shoot? How did the mantra of their flight make watching them enough? Back at the cabin, the standard question would come. “How’d ya do?” You reply, honestly: “No shot.”

I am not certain whether these histories influenced my decision to enter the house and grab the Browning 12-gauge side-by-side, but something moved me that day. Something about the solitary quality of this bird, its aura of nonchalance. I wouldn’t be lying in wait in the frozen palm of a grain field for this accidental bird, one of many in a group setting to land. I would be stalking this particular bird, just the two of us crystallized in time. Something stirred in me that day. Before I knew it the shells were in my parka pocket and I had skis on and was skiffing my way along the irrigation ditch that ran parallel to Loving Creek. I had marked the bird’s descent precisely, and as I strode along I transformed from birder to hunter, planning the stalk of my quarry. Where the irrigation canal angled up toward the big pond I would cut across the plowed field and head for the creek, my approach protected by the band of willows and cottonwoods that lined the stream. Then I would sneak in quietly and jump-shoot the goose.

I paused a few hundred yards from Loving Creek to ease my breathing and load the Browning. I broke the gun and looked through the barrels; they were clean and blue-black and shiny against the skyline. Then I moved, slowly, my steps and breathing rhythmical as false-casts. When I got to the willow belt I snapped the gun shut and moved in behind a dense bunch of thicket and paused again, now feeling the pulse of my blood in my chest and head. Then ever so slowly I leaned out and peeked around so I could see the bank of the creek, the rolling snow drifts unfurling themselves to the smooth water of the bend.

And there swam the goose.

The Canada goose paddled calmly in the slack water of the curve, facing away from me, its gallant head bowed slightly. I watched the way it held itself steady, the way its movements sent small ripples along the water, like recurring dimples. A slight wind began to tighten my cheeks. I slowly removed the glove from my shooting hand and readied the gun across my chest. Two quick ski-steps and I was free of the brush and willows, standing in the open, ready to fire when the goose lifted from the water.

Sensing danger, the big bird turned and saw me and flapped all at once, its great wings slapping the water in departure. The bird elevated with surprising quickness for its size, and I pulled up just as fast, swinging my bead past the mottled, gray-white chest and back then along the craning black neck, finally settling my sights on the white necklace feathers slung across the bird’s face like a chin strap. The goose was in perfect range and I had it dead to rights and I clenched my cheek down tight on the gun stock and felt the cold trigger on the underside of my index finger and I let the bird keep flying. No resonating click came from the action of my index finger compressing the trigger. The sky congealed into a beautiful perfection.

I watched the bird’s flight through the lens of the gun barrel as if I were peering through field glasses, and I saw everything. The way the goose dropped scat in its leaving, how it gained altitude quickly and honked its frightened distress call, the awkward trailing of the feet. The goose headed straight for Sullivan’s pond on Silver Creek, then banked hard downstream and turned east, staying low, in the direction of Purdy’s place. I squinted to watch the flight, seeing the bird diminish in the fading light, its wings set, when it occurred.

One sharp shotgun blast echoed from the vicinity of Kilpatrick Bridge, barked and echoed and reverberated into my marrow, and the bird was yanked from the sky in a clumsy abridgment of flight and was gone. I heard a distant whistle and the muffled commands of a man to his dog. Then I, too, crumpled in the snow.

The sky began to fill with birds, and I observed them carefully, studying their dance. I listened to their cries, my head curled in the crook of my arm. Wind blew snow drifts around me and the sky went dark and I just lay there listening to the sounds of the evening calls, the wind shearing over and under the wings like sirens, the landing slaps as their feet broke the water of the pond and the big curve in the creek.

I remained there until all the birds had stopped talking, until a half moon rose up over Timmerman Hill and a coyote yelped from the barren, frozen fields, stayed until frost formed on my cheeks and earlobes. Then I gathered myself and slunk back silently to the cabin in the soft glow of the half-moon light, knowing that now, when someone asked me if I had ever killed a goose, I could answer, would have to answer, yes.

###

At last, on July 25, 15 87, the flagship Lion drew into view of Cape Hatteras, and Manteo heard cheers and hooting on the upper decks. He rose weakly and ascended the rickety stairs of the stock holds, surfacing into the glare. He squinted across the sun-cupped sea, caught the familiar crescent-shaped outer banks arcing like a sliver of a new moon in the distance.

The Lion and the pinnace drew into port at Hatarask, the southernmost tip of the middle banks. From here they would shuttle smaller groups of thirty or so in the pinnace, cutting through the narrows to Roanoke Island which lay in the sound beyond, since the large Lion displaced too much water for the inland shallows and would surely run aground. The smaller flyboat sailed easily into the bay.

John White took Eleanor, Ananias, and Manteo among the first group over, the pinnace running smoothly before an easy breeze and arriving off the north end of Roanoke Island. The flyboat rested at anchor, and Captain Spicer waved proudly from the main deck as colonists readied to disembark.

Manteo scoured the coastline, relishing the recognizable landmarks, the humped dunes at the shoreline, and the great forest thickets spreading out behind as far as he could see. He scanned for movement among the tree trunks, surveyed for signs of enemies, for the shapes of naked bodies the color of tree bark. His heart thrummed as he imagined Wanchese and his bestial horde storming from the forest.

Eleanor Dare edged beside him, her shoulder brushing his as the ship lurched to a stop. “It is wondrous, is it not, Manteo? You are home.” Manteo just rocked and shut his eyes, too overcome to speak and yet afraid of what his being home might mean for his people.

In deference to Manteo’s homecoming, John White offered that he be first to disembark. Manteo’s legs went queasy beneath him as he descended the gangway and stepped onto his land. He walked slowly down the beachhead, then knelt to take off his leather boots, feeling at last the coarse and gritty sand under his bare feet like some faraway childhood dream realized, the earth on which he stood again reminding him vaguely of what he remembered to be love.

Manteo watched White lead Ananias and Eleanor ashore, followed by others. The colonists milled about, relieved to reunite with their friends from the flyboat and anxious to hear their tales and to share their own, and to embark on their new life. Manteo knew that later he would help the new-come colonists erect barricades around a makeshift fort, and stockpile firewood and dig cellars to protect what stores remained. He knew with certainty that very soon—perhaps this night or the next, but soon—Wanchese would come with warriors. He knew, too, that immediately he must seek out his father and his priest, to tell them what he could of his condition, to see if they might help him. Perhaps the priest’s tribal remedies, coupled with Harriot’s methods, might save him, might save them all.

For Manteo of the Croatoans was finally home, charged now by his blood- patron Raleigh to sustain an English colony in this his birth land, and Manteo knew more than anything else that tonight he must feed upon a human being. A new world would begin—and these shores would never be the same.

End Part I

To be continued …

Manteo looked now at Eleanor, overcome to be alone with her once again, desirous to touch her more, yet fearful of what he might do.

“You left Durham House without saying goodbye,” he said. He forced himself to avert his gaze so as not to look upon her in the new way.

Eleanor turned slowly to him, her voice soft and muted by the shore breeze.

“I could not bear to say goodbye, Manteo. After those magical weeks. After all of it. We were wrong, we both know that. And Ananias had returned. He sent for me. I did my duty then,” she said, her words tinged with regret. “I do my duty now.”

Manteo turned to consider the loading progress and saw the long line of colonists rising two-abreast up the narrow gangways.

“Time for us to board,” he said, taking her arm again. “I shall see you to your father and Ananias, and then see you on the Lion once we launch.”

Raleigh, having bade adieus to everyone important and proffered all the necessary last instructions to White, now took Manteo aside, leading him to a narrow alleyway between Plymouth’s quayside Inn and tavern, where it was quiet and shielded from the sun. He reached into his satchel and produced a document, rolled and leather-bound, unfurling it against the wall of the Inn.

“This is my grand seal, my coat of arms and our contract of corporation, Manteo. Carry it with you and well remember it,” he commanded.

Manteo contemplated the symbols and the writing. There was a cloak enveloping the coat of arms, a regal roebuck in the upper left corner, with two foxes beneath, at bottom. Centered was the motto—in Latin words Manteo had learned from Harriot—Amore et Virtute. Around the seal was scribed, “Arms of Walter Raleigh Knight Lord and Governor of Virginia.”

Sir Walter Raleigh rolled the coat of arms, secured it with a leather thong, and handed it to Manteo. He gripped Manteo firmly by the shoulders, clasping one shoulder in each of his powerful palms, and stared intensely into Manteo’s eyes, suspending him in a trance.

“Remember, this seals our pact, Manteo, sworn to and steeped in blood. My blood runs through your veins now and will always, as does yours in mine. Go now; go as my brethren and my emissary, my voice and revenant presence in the New World. Go back to your home and do our work there. I will appear soon, though you will not know when. Sir Francis Drake has agreed to convey me and Constance de Beverley when next he voyages.”

Raleigh paused, his boots shuffling beneath him. He ran his fingers along the resplendent pheasant feather protruding from his hat. His eyes, close-knit and narrowed, darted back and forth.

“Know this, Manteo. You must propagate the colony as I have ordained, in good time. Should you fail me in any way … Dear me, I shudder even to think of it … well, I’ve arranged assurances. I should call it a kind of insurance. So do not for a moment even consider crossing me.”

Manteo inhaled and leaned in, piqued by Raleigh’s reference.

“What do you mean, insurance?” he asked.

“Simple, really. I have employed an attendant—something of a henchman, really—with directives from me, explicit instructions. Should you dally or soften, should you in any way alter or abort our plans, he is to take matters into his own hands. Quite literally. He has specific instructions to begin with our dear Eleanor Dare, carrying though she is her tender unborn. T’would be doubly piteous.”

Manteo stepped fast in defiance toward Raleigh, but the knight simply held outward his pale palm, arresting Manteo.

“Surely it will not come to anything so hawkish and barbaric as that, my young Manteo. We certainly would not wish that upon your conscience, now would we?”

“Eleanor is innocent,” said Manteo. “Leave her out of it, Sir Walter. I beg of you. You can count on me. I shall not fail.”

“Innocent? Do you really believe that, Manteo? That rings a bit naïve. As for Eleanor’s implication in all of this, her fate is up to you, I’m afraid. But come now, enough, the ships are soon away. I trust you will do what is right.”

Raleigh led Manteo to the gangplank and patted him on the back a final time.

“Amore et Virtute,” Raleigh called out as Manteo climbed the ramp, Raleigh’s voice pitched like the cawing of a raven. Manteo palmed the rickety rope rail until he ascended the main deck and then turned to look behind, to offer some sort of wave or gesture, but as he lifted his hand he saw that Sir Walter Raleigh had vanished.

Chapter Thirteen

The ships hoisted sails and launched from Plymouth Harbor. Excited and expectant colonists clung to the deck railings as gulls shrilled and whirled above. The children tossed pennies and farthings into the water below for good luck as their parents strained for a final glimpse of Plymouth town, its whitewashed shop fronts and cobbled streets diminishing as they sailed away. The winds whipped up and the triumvirate of ships coursed well into the sound with foresails luffing, and finally, there was only the crooked arm of the rugged English coastline visible astern, black rock faces scrubbed by pounding surf as they departed Land’s End and crossed the mouth of the English Channel.

Harriot had instructed Captain Fernandez to follow the known route south along the coast of Europe and North Africa to the Canary Islands, then west to the Caribbean, stopping over in the Spanish West Indies before laying course for the Florida coast, with a final northward push to Cape Hatteras. This route—some two months long—took advantage of the southerly trades and the North Atlantic’s aiding clockwise currents, and allowed for stops at the islands where they might resupply water and food stores. But there were dangers en route, including Spanish-held enemy waters and islands.

For the first week of the journey fair weather lulled the colonists into a state of tranquility. Although only Captain Fernandez and a few of his crew had bunks, clear skies allowed the rest of the passengers to sleep on the decks, spreading their beddings and pillows and reposing in the open air under the stars. The food stores were dry and plentiful, and the men built cook fires on sand and rock ballast in the forward section of the ship between decks, the smoke vented outside through a long metal pipe. They roasted fresh fish brought from Plymouth, and John White even slaughtered and butchered two Devonshire beeves in celebration of their departure, the hefty roasts feeding everyone aboard.

Everyone but Manteo.

Manteo stole away below decks each night to feed on the domestic stock. Raleigh had counseled him to avoid spending nights among the colonists, lest his craving overtake him and he blunder and sacrifice one or more of the planters along the journey, a mistake that would carry heavy consequences. “Though you will sorely want to, do not take any colonists during the crossing, not at any cost,” Raleigh warned him. “There would be the immediate problem of body disposal—and dead passengers will cause panic and hysteria on your ship in the middle of the Atlantic—a most unsavory business, mark me well.”

Instead, Raleigh instructed Manteo to feed each night on other living cargo, on the sheep and swine and fowl they had brought along. Animal blood was certainly not a permanent replacement for human blood, he explained. Manteo would weaken with the weeks, warned Raleigh, would grow sickly, but he could live one or two months on animal blood alone—though not much longer before he would have to return to humans. Manteo knew the trip would test the bounds of his willpower. So he sequestered himself below in the stock holds, a silent denizen of the ship’s dark innards.

The colonists’ enthusiasm was tempered just a week into their crossing as the Lion encountered rough seas and high winds off the coast of Portugal. Because of his daughter’s condition, White struck a deal with Fernandez to allow Eleanor a covered berth at the forecastle among the small and cloistered crew’s quarters, a concession the Portuguese captain made begrudgingly, hesitant to grant White’s family any special favors that might foment discontent among the others. The sage captain understood that any tensions on voyages this long could escalate into skirmishes—and even mutiny.

The three-ship armada remained within eyeshot until the eighth day, at the southernmost tip of the Portuguese coast. There, as evening approached, a squall roiled the waters off the Strait of Gibraltar into billowing and violent crests, and as darkness descended Fernandez sent a crewmate up the crow’s nest to survey the situation. The pinnace held near to leeward, but the flyboat floundered and then disappeared, lost from sight against the blackening horizon. Fernandez considered remaining in the area to seek the flyboat at daybreak, but the experienced mariner soon reconsidered—the conditions were too dangerous to attempt going shoreward for anchorage. He called White to his captain’s quarters to report the news and his decision.

“There is simply no safe moorage in the dark, Mr. White,” Fernandez stated flatly. “I have known this coastline since I was a boy, and we mustn’t remain here, nor venture inward, lest we shatter on the rocks. At any rate—the flyboat captain Edward Spicer is sound. He has the same maps and charts as we do, and he shall make his way.”

John White, hearing that they would abandon the flyboat—which harbored nearly one third of the colonists—became incensed. He gathered Ananais, Manteo, and the other assistants, apprising them of the situation and berating Fernandez for his decision. “Our admiral has lewdly forsaken the flyboat,” he yelled over the roar of wind and waves pounding the decks, “leaving her distressed in Gibraltar’s Straits. We shall sail on without her, hoping for a sighting in the day’s ahead. But I fear that we will never see our friends again, for captain Spicer has never been to Virginia, and I doubt that he will be able to find the place.”

That night Manteo slunk below decks to the stock holds, clinging tightly to the stairway railings as he descended, the Lion lurching and swaying. He worried that he would lose his discipline and take a human, creating as they sailed a macabre and ghastly ship of living dead. He pondered Wanchese, wondered how his own powers would ever be enough to combat him. He had no idea what foul monster Harriot had created, and he feared more than anything that in his absence Wanchese—whatever he now was—had been preying on the Croatoans, on his family.

Manteo propped himself against the mucid hull wall and listened to the screaming wind outside as seawater seeped and drained into pools on the hold floors. The sheep huddled in their enclosure, bleating fretfully at the ship’s rude pitching and yawing. He thought of Eleanor in her berth above, hoping that she was warm and dry and that she had not succumbed to seasickness as most of the other planters had. Manteo puzzled over Raleigh’s final words, wondering who this accomplice might be, this “henchman.” One of the crew, perhaps, or another colonist even, one Raleigh might have bribed or paid already. Once back home, Manteo must remain always wary, ever watchful over Eleanor.

He eyed the sheep weakly, trying to locate the same ewe upon which he had supped the previous three nights, rationing her. He had marked her by shearing tufts of her wool from her left haunch, and now he saw her, noted where blood had drained and dried, matted at her hindquarters.

Manteo rose from his crude pallet and approached the mill of sheep, kneeing his way through the confusion of animals that tromped and scuffled against the mucous floor, kicking up spatter of their leavings as he grabbed for the ewe and caught her in his grasp. He knelt slowly to the floor, the knees of his breeches soaking up vile bilge water and piss, and pressed her against the pen wall, clenching her tightly in his arms to calm her as the other sheep dodged and scattered.

With his sharp nails Manteo clipped away curls of greasy neck wool at the dewlap, paring his way to the jugular. He knew this sheep would not survive another letting, so he would drain her, butchering her or disposing of her afterwards. If there were any questions he would claim she perished from natural causes, which many did. Manteo snipped through the downy under fleece and arrived at her pink–white skin, smooth and moist and smelling of lanolin as he leant to cut and drink.

Her skin cleaved easily at his thumbnail, a bead of blood rising to the surface as he separated the folds and dug for the fibrous outer sheath of the life-vein. When he felt it between his thumb and finger Manteo curled one arm about the ewe in an embrace, steadying her for what came next. He cut her quickly, whispering in her ear to be calm, ensuring her that it would be over soon and then easing his mouth down upon her neck to the hot and oozy giving place. He felt her heartbeat fluttering against his chest as he drank, his face buried in a wet and fleecy flood.
Her blood tasted of grain and grass, of earthy spring alfalfa. Manteo tightened his hold as she contested, her bleats of protestation quieting as life slipped from her. Manteo looked up at her from his suckling and could see her black eye blank and drowsy, the lid drooping and then closing shut as the ewe slipped to her knees, her muscles slackening. At last she buckled altogether and Manteo eased her to her belly and lay curled with her, his mouth suctioned to the tender orifice at her neck, drawing until she gave no more. He pulled away and held the passed sheep in his arms, watching remnant blood curdle and then crust dry at the slit.

Sated, Manteo rose from the gummy floor, his clothes mired in excreta. Disgusted by his state, he found a barrel of fresh water and washed himself, then took again to his pallet where he lay and thought of Raleigh and his instructions. He remembered their last formal discussion in the turret room at Durham House. Manteo could still ear his voice echoing in his head, the knight’s oratory like the vaulted preaching of some maniacal minister of the dark.

“Fernandez will deposit you at Roanoke Island, Manteo, where you and White will make the fortress and the common houses. The Bay of Chesapeake, to the north, is a superior harbor, I know. But the Spaniards are aware of that as well, and will expect our settling there, rendering us vulnerable to attack.” Raleigh moved to the window, twirling his moustache in anticipation and forethought.

“You are to install the outpost at Roanoke, dealing first with Wanchese. You should have plenty of powder and weapons, and your growing revenance, to subdue him and bring him and the Secotans under your banners. Once Wanchese is conquered by your superiority—guns, steel, and revenance—you will set up a privateering base there, where my ships will lie in secret, launching pirating ventures, attacking Spanish treasure vessels returning northward to their mother-country Spain. Their holds are laden with gold and silver pilfered from the Incas of Peru, and from the highland Indian tribes of Colombia and Venezuela. We shall assault these ship lanes from our secret haunt, our colony hidden and protected, obscured from view by the barrier banks.” Raleigh had paused then, leering out his picture window rapt in thought, conjuring another world.

“But that is only the beginning, Manteo. My ambitions extend well past pirating, and here I need you most. One by one, a single victim at a time, you are to fertilize and propagate a revenant colony that I will come to lead, a revenant army bound by blood and solidarity of purpose: to fulfill my—I should say our—decree and prophecy, for you will be my second-in-command. My shipbuilders have nearly finished my magnificent Ark Royal, a non-pareil warship of one thousand tons, armed with hundreds of canon. She carries four hundred fighting men—a vessel built to deal death the likes of which the world has never seen. When our army and armada and cavalry have grown large enough—untold thousands strong of revenant footsoldiers and horsemen, for yes, I will carry on the Ark Royal hundreds of Iberian stallions—then shall I sever my ties from England, dislodge Spain from global dominance, and rise as rightful and immortal emperor of the New World.” With these last declarations, Raleigh’s voice had gone frenzied and tremulous, his finger rings slamming on the windowsill, his mandate and sermon concluded.

Manteo now sat aright, for though fresh sheep’s blood coursed through him and becalmed his body, his troubled mind raced with Raleigh’s words and he could not sleep, not this night or the next, and only fitfully during those many that followed. He blamed himself for his predicament, for allowing the white man’s drink to consume his wits that night in the tavern, and for being vulnerable enough to let Raleigh and Constance de Beverley prey upon him, violating him and changing him. His behavior was unworthy of a Croatoan warrior. Manteo slammed his forehead against the slimy interior of the hull, wishing he could somehow beat this atrocity, this gross and vile revenance from within, and he pounded his head against the ship’s futtock ribs until his forehead dripped sheep’s blood and a disfigured knob rose at his hairline. He sat away the nights, propped and disconsolate in that dank and stinking chamber, longing for the serene voice of his father telling him stories of the past, of the ancient times before the white people came.

The Lion cut its way south for weeks, coursing like an immense albatross along the trade winds. The storms off Portugal had soaked most of the ship’s stores, and the vital hardtack biscuit—once so firm that Ananias had been forced to break it into pieces with a mallet—now grew moldy and crawled with white-bodied maggots, and these the famished planters picked around as they chewed the mealy biscuit. John White rationed the salt pork and dried codfish, divvying up meager meals the colonists washed down with beer, for the freshwater already ran dangerously low. Some of the members writhed about the top decks, their bellies distended and their gums bleeding from scurvy.

After weeks of such want Fernandez sighted land, and White brought Eleanor outside on deck so she could see the emerald-colored islands of the Caribbean, the shorelines chalky white under the sun, the waters so shockingly blue that Eleanor could not believe such a color existed, and John White could fabricate no color on his palette to replicate it. Three days after the initial land sighting Fernandez brought the Lion and the supporting pinnace to anchor at Santa Cruz in what he called the “Virgin Islands.” The flyboat had not been sighted and all now feared the worst.

They disembarked, elated to once again stretch their legs on terra firma. The children played in the sand and splashed gleefully in the turquoise shallows. John White cautioned the colonists to remain close to the harbor and to stay always in large groups, and among their families. He dispatched men to search for fresh fruit and fresh water, the fruit filled with vital water content and known to ward off scurvy.

Manteo felt sickly, blanched under the beating sun, and he pulled his hat tight as he went in search of water. Seeing a rivulet draining from an interior bluff, Manteo followed the seep more than a mile to some high rocks, wending his way up the mountain to a canopied glade. There he discovered a spring. Elated by the find but desperately weak from the climb and nearly delirious in the assailing sun, Manteo struggled down the ravine to report the spring to White—they would be able to fill all their empty barrels for the remainder of the journey. As Manteo came out of the drainage and broke through to the beachhead, he looked up and saw, amazingly, the masts of the flyboat on the horizon of the bay, its English banners snapping in the wind. The small ship lay at anchor, tucked between the Lion and the pinnace. As Manteo drew closer, he could see Captain Spicer conferring with Captain Fernandez, flanked by John White and Ananias.

Down the salt-white beach, walking together back towards the boats, were Eleanor and her attendant Agnes Wood. Agnes held a sprawling palm frond aloft above Eleanor’s head, shielding her from the oppressive sun.

Manteo used his strength to hurry to the harbor, arriving at the small conference just as Eleanor and Agnes strolled up. Manteo bade hello to Captain Spicer, assuring him how pleased he was that he had arrived and conveyed the colonists here safely.

“Harriot’s maps and charts saved us,” said Spicer, looking back at the flyboat. Many of its passengers were now making their way down from the ship to stroll along the beach. “But it was still a voyage long and difficult, and trying on us all.”

An uneasy silence passed through the group. John White shook his head, stirring the sand with a walking stick. “Their journey was not without some casualties, is what the captain means,” he said. Eleanor took her place next to Ananias while Agnes fanned her with the broad palm frond.

“What has happened?” asked Manteo

“We have not been so fortunate as you on the Lion,” said Spicer. “We lost a half-dozen colonists and two of my crew members during the crossing. Consumed by a fever of some kind, I’m afraid. Most unfortunate, but mercifully their suffering was brief. And we count our blessings that there were not more,” he concluded, “For we feared an onboard plague, which by the grace of God did not come to pass.”

“What has become of them?” Manteo asked. “Where are the bodies of the deceased?”

Captain Spicer sighed, exhausted from his trials. “The family members and relatives were racked with grief, despondent and wishing that their loved ones could be buried properly. But of course I was concerned about a spread of epidemic. We took care of the matter, interring their souls to the depths.”

Manteo’s eyes darted to the flyboat and he thought of Raleigh’s words on improper burial. He feared what heinous cargo her holds might now contain.

“I see,” said Manteo flatly.

There was a long silence. Manteo removed his hat and palmed a slick of sweat from his forehead, then donned the hat to shield away the blazing light that wilted him. At last Fernandez and Spizer called out to load as much water as they could from the spring Manteo had found and embark as soon as possible, once everyone had stretched themselves. The ships all still lacked salt and meat. Fernandez believed these could be had on the southern coast of the nearby island of Vieques, just a short sail along their way. Later, at the admiral’s urging, the reluctant colonists all embarked once more, the crews hoisting sails and setting out to sea. High onshore winds and the shallow rocky coastline kept Fernandez from landing where he wished to on Vieques, so he pushed on, keeping the pinnace and the flyboat both in sight.

The three ships made land at Caicos Island, where it was rumored that herds of sheep, abandoned by the Spanish, roamed free for the taking. Harriot’s mariner’s notes also made reference to two salt ponds here, and White sent Manteo and a handful of men with sacks in search of the much-needed mineral while he sketched island scenes.

That evening at sunset, under fair skies John White roasted guinea fowl on spits fired on the open deck. He brought his assistants and the families together for a modest feast of hen and piglet, then urged them to look over the Lion’s gunwales where sunset seemed to imbue the foamy shoreline with a ruby-colored glow, a phenomenon that Harriot’s notes called “bioluminescence.” White held Eleanor close as she witnessed the spectacle, this phosphorescent shimmer of light.

“Harriot writes that it is not the sun that creates the glowing color, but living sea plants beneath the water. He calls them ‘algae.’ It is indeed a wonder, is it not?” said White. Eleanor agreed, chewing languidly on a crispy hen leg. Governor White then addressed the group.

“I have it on Captain Fernandez’s authority,” he called out happily, “that we will soon reach the mainland Americas—in but a week or less.” Excited murmurs ran through the homesteaders, the families ready for this six-week ordeal to end. “Eat and drink heartily tonight—there will be plenty of beer after dinner. Rest during the remainder of the trip; all your strength will be needed when we reach our destination, for we must first build shelter and secure our food once there. Shore up your spirits now, for we have nigh arrived.”

But for his part, Manteo’s spirits had reached a low point. Since he could not dine on the meat he went instead below and drank from swine that night, the hog’s blood acerbic and distasteful, tinged with the scent of urine. His craving for human blood raged so strong now that he forced himself to remain below for days, lest temptation overpower him. During the interminable nights cockroaches scuttled over his face and neck as he tried to sleep, and rats chewed at his sleeves and cuffs as he lay nearly expired. He thought once or twice of taking a rat and draining it, but he dimly remembered Raleigh warning against the very thing, saying that rats might harbor the black plague, and he dare not infect the colony with that fatal pestilence. So instead Manteo batted the rats away when they tugged at him, and tossed fitfully, imagining the horrific brute creation that Wanchese had become.

On the longest night, when the craving ate at him so deeply that he started twice toward the crew’s cabins and was barely able to stop himself, he remembered the books Harriot had given him. Manteo shook himself upright and lit candles and pried open his crate, fondling his belongings. There were some trinkets brought back from England, a few gifts from the Queen—a hair comb inlaid with sapphires, a gilded candlestick, and a war sword bestowed on him by Raleigh, won he said from Spanish conquistadors, its blade of unbreakable Toledo steel. Beneath all this Manteo rooted for the books, and found at last the one he wished for—the one that Harriot had secreted to him on the eve of his departure. Manteo bent close, dipping his candle low so that he could see and read the cover as wax dripped and spattered onto it:

Apotropaics: Methods of Turning Evil Away. The book appeared ancient, its leather cover worn and fissured, and the book was sealed shut with a brass hasp. Manteo clutched the book to his chest, vowing to begin reading it this very night once he had regained some strength.

Plymouth Harbor, England—May 8, 1587

Manteo stood at the pier at Plymouth Harbor, watching pelicans soar the summer thermals as dockworkers carted crates and chests up the gangplanks to the flagship Lion. The Lion, a 120-ton mizzen captained by Simon Fernandez, groaned and creaked against its bollards and Manteo felt the rocking undulation of the dock underfoot as he watched the colonists’ personal belongings being hauled up the gangway and heaved aboard.

Manteo thought about his own journey here, how everything had altered that night in the tavern. How he had been changed, turned into something else, something other. Did some husk of his former self remain beneath this revenance? He longed to be back among his people the Croatoans, to smell pine forests and wade in the cold clean streams of home, yearned for the voices of his tribe and family as they sat around the fire telling stories. Wanted, more than almost anything, to laugh again. He wondered if there was a way to escape his condition, to reverse it or drive it away. Raleigh had scoffed and said there was not—that he should not even think of trying—but Raleigh knew not the power of the tribal ancients, their medicine and their spirit conjuring. Perhaps there was a way. He gazed at the boat that would convey him home and wondered how he would be received once there. Would they see the revenance within him? Could he hide it?

Moored astern the Lion were two lesser vessels—a mid-sized flyboat and a small pinnace. The 110 colonists would be distributed between the Lion and the flyboat, with the pinnace carrying most of the essential supplies: tools, kitchen pots and pans, beddings, ink, building materials, and caulking for repairing leaky hulls while in ports.

The colonists waited anxiously along the wharf, some huddled in tearful farewells to family members remaining in the mother country. Others—the single men, mostly—paced excitedly, eager and yet anxious to finally board the ships and embark on this experiment in the Americas. All told, some fourteen families would comprise the colony, including six married couples without children, four sets of fathers and sons whose wives and children intended to join them later, and seventeen women—seven of whom were servants.

And Manteo was going home.

Raleigh and Harriot stood apart from the main group, engaged in discourse, rolls of parchment and satchels of instruments passing between them. Raleigh looked up, and, spotting Manteo, waved him over, then returned to his conversation with Harriot.

For the bon voyage, Raleigh came bedecked in all his finery, his white silk shirt underlying a burgundy doublet spun with gold filigree and hundreds of pearls, its buttons of turquoise and rubies an overstated contrast to Harriot’s conservative black academician’s garb. Manteo listened to their conversation as he drew near.

“I am to meet with Simon Fernandez in a few minutes,” said Harriot, “to consider a few last details of the dangerous navigation into the banks.”

Raleigh nodded. “He has with him, I presume, your notes and calculations?”

“Yes,” affirmed Harriot, tapping the leather satchel. “I am also providing him with the most recent astrolabe and a recalculated table of the sun’s declination. He will be as prepared and well-equipped as any navigator on the high seas, I assure you.”

Raleigh seemed pleased. “Very well then. I will meet you back here after the ships have sailed—we shall return together to London. Manteo and I, as well, have some last details about which we must parlay before he boards the Lion. It is best we have our only two interpreters aboard separate ships, lest some sea disaster takes them both at once. That would be most unfortunate.”

Harriot turned and embraced Manteo, clutching him as an English father would his only son. “You have learned much, Manteo,” he said, his voice quavering, “and faster than I imagined. You are impressive—I thank you for all that you have taught me, as well.” With this last endearment, Harriot leaned in close and whispered into Manteo’s ear: “I trust you have those books I gave you, to keep up with your studies … ”

“Best not tarry then,” Raleigh interrupted, seeing the queue of passengers forming along the quay and the impatient colonists readying to board. Manteo thanked Harriot, assuring him he had the books in his baggage.

Harriot then bowed and departed and Manteo watched him go.

“Your are not one for sentimentality, are you?” Raleigh noted as he watched Harriot leave. “Good for you; that is for the best, in farewells as in poetry.” He toed the boardwalk, tracing curved etchings on the sand-covered wood, and ran his fingers along his sword’s finely worked gold hilt. Raleigh was about to speak when John White and his daughter Eleanor approached, walking at the head of the line. Beyond them, Manteo saw Ananias goading a small herd of sheep and swine up the gangway onto the Lion, switching their flanks with a cane.

“Ah,” said Raleigh warmly as he took White’s hand and they exchanged bows, “my favorite painter, planter, and governor. All is in order then?

John White straightened and held erect his posture, casting a formal countenance before the Knight Sir Walter Raleigh, for White understood the protocols of English court.

“Absolutely, Sir Walter. Last week in London everything was finalized. I selected the dozen colony assistants, including, of course, at your suggestion, Manteo here. I informed the other planters of the final terms of your contract—500 acres of Virginia land per individual—everyone has agreed to your most generous offer. We are all ecstatic to embark on this great venture.”

Harbor seals barked from the beach beneath the pier, prompting a smile and a laugh from Eleanor and then Manteo, who had stood staring at one another during the men’s exchange.

“Oh my, please forgive me, I forget myself. Discussing business without proper salutations,” said Raleigh, bowing in deference to Eleanor, then motioning for Manteo to do the same. “Dear Eleanor, you look well—and again I extend my continued condolences for the loss of your mother, may she rest in peace. I was only glad that we could accommodate you at Durham House during your convalescence—though I wish your stay had been longer than two weeks.”

Eleanor straightened her bonnet, tucking a strand of stray hair back behind her ear after finishing her curtsey. “I thank you good sir, again, for your kindnesses during that difficult time. Your hospitality was indeed a Godsend. We still miss mother so, to this day, as of course we always will. But I have honored her final wishes that I start a family of my own, and as you know she supported our journey to the New World—she would have been with us if only … ”

Eleanor’s voice trailed off then as she looked across Plymouth Sound, then back at Manteo.

John White leaned to comfort her, shouldering her close. “The loss of Mrs. White has been difficult for all of us,” he said with paternal gravity, “but we shore ourselves up by thinking with great hope of the future, the joys of beginning anew.”

Raleigh reached into his breast pocket and produced a thick envelope, bound with crimson ribbon. “If you will pardon us, Eleanor, I have some last minute instructions for your father—Manteo, would you indulge a short stroll with Eleanor before you and I conclude our own dealings and bid our farewells? A loosening of the legs before the long days afloat will do you both good.”

“As you wish, Sir Walter,” said Manteo, taking Eleanor’s arm over his, “we shall return shortly.”

They strolled wordlessly along the wharf, Manteo feeling anemic and peaked in the rising summer sun, yet there charged within him a sparkling queasiness at her touch. He stopped at a railing and paused, eyeing the rock jetty extending from the shore into the foamy bight. Manteo turned and regarded Eleanor carefully, noting the healthful glow in her high cheekbones the fullness of her hips, her body blooming ripe with child. Silence hovered between them. He worried that she knew.

“It has been too long since we have seen each other,” Manteo offered finally, surprised by his nervousness and clinging firmly to her hand and forearm. “But Sir Walter and Thomas Harriot have kept me constantly occupied.” He stopped there, unsure of his words.

“Nearly six months to the day since the funeral,” responded Eleanor, sliding her arm from Manteo’s and then tapping her delicate fingers along the wooden wharf railing. “You were so dear during those weeks afterwards, such a kind and thoughtful listener.” Eleanor smiled wide, lulled by memory. “And your English was so amusing then, it made me chuckle through my tears.” She stopped short, leaning back to regard Manteo and feeling in his forearm a strength she had forgotten. “You seem older somehow, Manteo, though you look younger. Different.” She paused to observe him carefully. “I have missed you beyond words.”

Manteo remembered their first meeting vividly, for it had been under the circumstances of her mother’s funeral north of London in Smithfield, where she was entombed beneath the White’s parish church. Manteo had been fascinated by the ceremony, so different from those of his own people. Raleigh had taken him there to show respect to John White, for White had already volunteered to lead the Virginia colony, and he and Raleigh had become close during their initial planning and negotiations.

Mrs. White had been afflicted with consumption and her suffering was long and anguished. The only good to come from her protracted illness was that it allowed her to intimate her wishes that the family proceed with their plans in America, and it gave Ananias ample time to fabricate a coffin of the finest walnut, lined with lead, its lid bearing a lovely cursive epitaph.

At the church, Manteo watched the bearers place the coffin in the entrance to the chancel, surrounding the coffin with votive candles. With the mourners assembled, the priest ascended to his stall. Robed in his funerary vestments, he sang psalms and vespers in Latin, and Manteo’s mind wandered to the funerals he remembered as a boy, especially those venerating the tribe’s chiefs which were formal and involved, including the preservation and mummification of the bodies. His father would hold him close to show him how he would one day be buried. Manteo had watched the elaborate procedure as the skin of the dead chief was cut with a hunting knife, peeled back and the flesh inside removed, then sun-dried and placed in the mats laid at the dead man’s feet. The skeleton was covered carefully with tanned leather and the cadaver’s skin replaced. The chief was laid atop a platform in a stilted ossuary temple, with a ceremonial fire burning before him, and a painted wooden idol of Kiwasa propped to stand guard and protect him in the afterlife.

The hush inside the church following the prayers shook Manteo back to the present. He listened to the sniffles of the family, the low wailing of the women as the coffin was carried away, taken below the church to the White family’s personal vault.

Afterwards, outside the church in the courtyard, Raleigh informed Manteo that they would be hosting a guest—Eleanor Dare—for a few weeks. Ananias Dare was employed on a bricklaying job that took him to a village outside the city, and he would be away for a time. John White had immediate business as well, needing to travel the area recruiting planters for the colonizing venture, so Raleigh had insisted, under these tragic circumstances, to accommodate the young newlywed Eleanor for as long as she required. John White and Ananias Dare wished not to impose but Raleigh would not be refused. Eleanor arrived at Durham House by carriage the day following the funeral.

Though Manteo had hardly noticed Eleanor at the funeral, he felt her presence at Durham House in her first days there. She remained mostly cloistered in mourning for the initial days, rarely leaving her rooms down the corridor from Manteo’s and attended always by Raleigh’s doting maidservants. Manteo in the beginning observed her only in passing, and those times he averted his eyes from her out of respect for her recent loss. But by the third day Eleanor had cast aside her mourning dress as well as her aggrieved countenance, and she appeared at breakfast a new woman, her visage serene if not cheerful, her voice and manners temperate and steady. When their eyes connected for the first time that morning, they remained locked in a mutual gaze, neither wishing to look away, and Manteo felt immediately as if he had known Eleanor for a long time.

Manteo had spent time with plenty of Raleigh’s women, but all of them seemed aloof, focused only on the Knight Raleigh, bent on winning him and improving their own station. Eleanor Dare was different, at ease and self-assured, with kindly oval eyes that caught the window light and glinted like river crystals when she smiled. She seemed intent, too, on learning everything she could about Manteo’s home where they would be going: the daily life of his people, their customs and rituals, the kinds of food they ate and crops they grew and how these were prepared. And though she initially laughed at and sometimes joked with Manteo about his English usage—mimicking and making fun of his pronunciation—this she did with a playfulness that put Manteo at ease, disarmed him. Eleanor Dare, he knew, possessed no meanness in her. She was different than Croatoan women, more worldly and inquisitive, quicker to smile and to laugh.

That first week with Eleanor had been something like a dream, an intoxicating sort of courtship. Raleigh was away in the northern vales on an extended stag hunt, and Manteo each day rose early, studied with Harriot on his language lessons until midday, then spent the rest of the day—right up through dinner and then into the evening—with Eleanor. Though it was winter, dank and bitter cold with dense fog enshrouding the city, they strolled the Durham House grounds and beyond, taking in “The Walks” near Gray’s Inn, passing between one hundred towering elms aligned in long straight courses, a lovely corridor of trees. Sometimes they took short carriage rides about The Strand and through the markets, peat fires smoldering in bins to warm the merchants. They boated on the Thames, and even took in a play at the Theater, Manteo amazed by the elaborate stage and costumes. Once Harriot took them to see the Earl of Leicester’s stables and his prized Iberian stallions, allowing Manteo to ride one of them within a fenced paddock, his first ride aback such an animal.

When Manteo asked about her husband Ananias, Eleanor explained their relationship with a surprising candor and pragmatism. “Mother wished to see me married before she perished,” she explained, “and there was Ananias, doting and persistent, constant as a sheep dog. The union was quickly arranged.” She paused, lost for a moment in recollection, her lips pursed tightly at the edges. “He is a good man, a hard worker, but his work takes him often away, leaving me alone. And he talks only of his building, of tools and bricks. Father thinks him somehow … ‘Beneath our station.’” That was all she said, turning her attentions back to Manteo, whose dark allure intrigued her more than anyone she had ever known or seen. She found exhilarating the copper color of his skin, his war-hardened frame whose touch thieved her breath like a too-tight corset, the mystery and even danger behind his black eyes.

On Raleigh’s return he hosted banquets nearly every night, and though he was aware of appearances—Eleanor being newly wed—he always seated Manteo and Eleanor in close proximity, conscious of their intimacy. Those evenings were filled with great cheer and music and laughter—and of course, with Raleigh’s wondrous storytelling—sometimes lasting well into the night, when finally the guests would leave and the residents would trundle—or stagger—off to bed. More than once Manteo and Eleanor lingered and entwined in the long, darkened hallway, exchanging hushed whispers and caresses, the light from the corridor candles melding them into a single shadow thrown like an inflamed apparition against the stone wall.

Then one day, as abruptly as Eleanor Dare had arrived, she was gone.

Early on the morning of May 11, 1926, Italian airship pilot Umberto Nobile was at the hangar at Kings Bay, Spitsbergen (halfway between northern Norway and the North Pole), anxiously shouting final instructions to his engineers and mechanics. Nobile was frayed, his eyes bloodshot; he had been up all night readying the Norge, a state-of-the-art dirigible purchased by legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen from Benito Mussolini’s fascist military regime. It was a spectacular flying machine, 350-feet long and capable of speeds up to 75 mph and able to remain aloft for 70-80 hours.

Now everything was set for the dangerous and unprecedented transpolar flight. Nobile informed Roald Amundsen and American polar explorer and financier Lincoln Ellsworth that they should depart as soon as the winds died down.

(American Lincoln Ellsworth on left, Roald Amundsen on right)

The international flight crew arrived just after 7:00 A.M. There were sixteen in all—eight Norwegians (including Amundsen), six Italians (including Nobile), one Swede, and the lone American, Ellsworth. Amundsen and Ellsworth, co-leaders of the expedition, had no responsibilities in flying the dirigible. Their role, as Amundsen put it, was that of explorers, “watching the terrain below, studying its geographical character, and especially keeping an alert eye out for any signs of a possible Arctic continent.” Nobile, as airship commander, managed the team of engine mechanics: navigators for steering; helmsmen running the elevators; and riggers checking the valves, ballonets, and the gas envelope in the complex operation of the twenty-ton Norge. It took a dozen skilled men to control and maneuver the behemoth machine. Mechanics rode in enclosures to maintain the three 250 horsepower engines capable of propelling the airship at a proper cruising speed of fifty-to-sixty mph for the proposed 2500-mile flight from Spitsbergen, over the North Pole, and on to Alaska.

That was the plan, anyway.

Nobile directed everyone to climb aboard. Amundsen was the last to arrive. He had been at the manager’s office reading weather reports from Alaska, which predicted “violent sleet storms and turbulence along the entire coast.” It would be at least two days before they arrived there, and Amundsen agreed with Nobile that they should take off, and deal with the Alaskan weather when (or if) they got there.

Norwegian Bernt Balchen, one of Amundsen’s ground crew who had been helping load the last of the emergency gear, watched Amundsen carefully as he arrived at the Norge, seeming to understand the import of the moment. Would this be the White Eagle of Norway’s final polar exploration? Would Amundsen find a great land mass, this rumored place called Crocker Land that Robert Peary claimed to have spotted back in 1906? Balchen recorded his thoughts as his hero and countryman climbed into the gondola:

Amundsen is the last to reach the Norge … with a roll of charts under his arm, like a scientist quietly entering his laboratory. He wears a light windbreaker, a blue flying helmet, and his familiar canvas-topped mukluks, stuffed with a fine Lapland hay called Senne grass. He pauses at the foot of the steps, and the meteorologist hands him a final weather reading. He studies it and lifts his carved face for a moment to the sky, weighing his decision. It is a face that lived a thousand years ago and will live a thousand years from now.

When Amundsen had taken his place in a chair by the large window spanning the front of the control gondola, Nobile gave the order to guide the Norge, at last, backwards from the hangar. Once aloft, Nobile hovered for a few minutes one hundred feet above a snowfield near the shore, checking weight and balance, then ordered the engines started and the tethers released. Everyone in Kings Bay stared in awe at its whiteish underbelly and silvery sides suspended above the shimmering Arctic waters and glittering glaciers. They were witnessing a true engineering marvel: the pressurized envelope was taut and sleek, reinforced with metal frames at the nose and tail, with a flexible tubular metal keel connecting the two.

As the airship rose, the ground crew waved and cheered. Nobile called for more speed and the Norge climbed to 1200-feet, staying over the Kings Fjord to avoid the mountains looming on all sides. Auks and gulls flew from the high cliff walls, startled from their rookeries by the strange flying machine. As Nobile steered the dirigible toward the open northwest mouth of the bay at 50 miles per hour, Amundsen and Ellsworth looked out to see American aviator Richard Byrd and his co-pilot Floyd Bennett flying alongside them in the Josephine Ford airplane, then racing past, escorting them for an hour or so until they reached the polar ice pack. Finally, dipping their wings in a farewell salute, they sped back towards Kings Bay.

As Norge cruised north, everyone aboard was busy. Amundsen, seated next to oval-framed pictures he had hung of King Haakon and Queen Maud, took notes in his expedition diary, marking the time, the temperature, and the geographical features below. Ellsworth observed and took notes too, sometimes getting up from his folding camp stool to stretch his legs and converse with Norwegian Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, who was making calculations at a table with his maps, sextant and other navigational instruments. Nobile’s station was portside of the control car, where he monitored all aspects of the airship and periodically left his post to consult with the engine mechanics and riggers.

The mechanics stayed in their housing compartments with the engines at the rear of the Norge, while the riggers moved about the internal network of gangways and catwalks checking the ballonets and valves inside the massive envelope. One rigger’s job was particularly daunting: he had to periodically inspect the gas valves at the very top of the airship, and to report on any ice forming outside the envelope. Nobile commented on the dangerous task: “He had to go through a small window in the bow of the ship, climb up a steep steel ladder on the outside, and, in an icy wind blowing nearly fifty miles an hour, crawl along the top of the ship, from bow to stern, for a length of 70 to 80 yards, clinging with one hand to the guide rope that had been fixed there.”

As they navigated along Spitsbergen’s northern coast, the wireless operator sent messages of their location and progress, and the Norwegian journalist on board filed reports which were sent out. The stories ran in newspapers around the world, and as might have been predicted, both the Italian press and the Norwegian press used the moment for national pride. The Italians were brazen to the point of fault. The front-page headline of the May 11 issue of Il Piccolo read as follows: “Under an Italian flag, in the spirit of fascism, Norge sails into the polar sky.” In truth, at that exact moment it was the Norwegian flag snapping at the tail of the Norge in the sub-zero air. And inside the airship, the international team was flying in the spirit of cooperation and shared vision, not fascism. But the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Transpolar Flight had become a deeply political and nationalistic symbol for Italy and Norway, as well as a sensational story selling hundreds of thousands of papers across the globe.

As the Norge whirred north, Amundsen and Ellsworth noticed ice forming on the celluloid windows, completely obscuring their vision: “All the metal parts of the ship were covered in ice … and on the exterior of the control cabin.” This was dangerous; not only did the ice make the airship too heavy, but shards could potentially fly off and tear the envelope or damage the propellers—or both. Either could prove fatal. Nobile ordered a fast ascent to 3000 feet above the fog, where the ice gradually dissipated.

At just past midnight, with the sun visible beyond the horizon due north, Ellsworth realized it was May 12—his 46th birthday. Lincoln Ellsworth was certainly the first person to celebrate his birthday in a dirigible near the North Pole.

An hour later—sixteen and a half hours out of Kings Bay—Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile all noticed Riiser-Larsen kneeling and peering intently out his window, “bent over the sextant in his hands.” Nobile descended through a hole in the clouds, dropping to just 750-feet above the pack to get Riiser-Larsen a clear shot of the sun. The two other navigators were also engaged checking and rechecking their position based on the magnetic compass, prior radio bearings, and their own sextant observations.

The cabin drew eerily quiet, with only low, constant humming of the engines outside. Everyone knew what was happening and no one spoke. Nobile brought the Norge down to 600-feet, and then Riiser-Larsen, pressing his eye to his sextant, saw the image of the sun covering the bubble. “Here we are!” he exclaimed. Nobile descended lower still, then had the engines throttled down. “Ready the flags!” he and Riiser-Larsen yelled in unison. It was now 1:30 A.M. on May 12, 1926.

The silent dirigible, running at a slow idle, hovered there, just above the icy surface at 90° N, an unfixed, ever moving place of immense significance. Amundsen and Ellsworth went to the gondola window with their flags (Ellsworth’s had been given to him in a ceremony by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge). The riggers and engineers—everyone on board—came forward and removed their hats. The flags had been affixed to heavy metal vanes to ensure they stuck in the ice. Amundsen dropped the Norwegian flag, then Ellsworth tossed his American flag. Nobile appeared, having removed the large Italian flag from the casket he had promised Mussolini to protect it in. Nobile let it go, and soon all three metal stakes were impaled in the ice next to one another, their multi-colored banners waving in the Arctic wind.

They had achieved the seemingly impossible: the first fully documented flight to the North Pole. And in the process, Roald Amundsen had cemented himself as the greatest explorer in polar history: first to the South Pole, first to navigate the Northwest Passage, and now first to certifiably (claims by Americans Frederick Cook, Robert Peary and Richard Byrd were all unsubstantiated) reach the North Pole.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Excerpted and edited from Buddy Levy’s book Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

Story also available on the web at the History Reader: https://www.thehistoryreader.com/historical-figures/the-100th-anniversary-of-the-norges-flight-over-the-north-pole/

Chapter Ten

Manteo halted abruptly as he and Raleigh passed through the Durham House courtyard. The sun declined over the Thames, smearing the sky in hues of bruised pomegranate and mulberry. A hunger he had never known burned in his belly and radiated through his limbs.

“And what if I choose to defy this revenance?” he asked Raleigh with surprising defiance. “What then?”

Raleigh scoffed, his black boot tapping impatiently on the courtyard stone.

“Impossible. It has never happened yet, anyway, not in the history of revenance. Soon your craving will override every single one of your desires, will become as natural to you as the need for sleep, or for shelter, or procreation. Your yearning will be instinctive and carnal. No amount of reason or willpower can contain or subdue it. You’ll see soon enough. But come, let us take in the dying sun from the bridge.”

They walked east down The Strand, Raleigh narrating as they went, his voice rhythmic and assuring. Manteo felt sick and weak and confused, following the Queen’s knight like an acquiescent automaton. His rational mind told him to bolt, to flee this rogue being, but he found he could do nothing but follow along and listen attentively, even reverently, the way a Croatoan boy would his father or tribal elder.

They left The Strand and passed onto a smaller lane running along the river, the ground moistened from an afternoon thundershower. Raleigh paused and pointed toward St. Paul’s Cathedral, its once-great spire charred and crumbling, now undergirded with scaffolding and pulleys for the work of restoration.

“You see, Manteo, where lightning rent the spire asunder in 1561. It burned for days. But we English will restore and renew it, mark my words. How we cling to the glories of our past, often ignoring the grand potential of the future lying right there before us. But I see the grand design of the future—I see it in you, and in my colony.”

Manteo felt an overwhelming longing for his homeland, for the touch and voices of his own people. But he simply nodded.

“When the lightning struck,” Raleigh continued, “the Protestants and the Catholics took it as a sign of God’s wrath against the others’ actions.” He laughed, cocking his head to the side. “That’s absurd, of course. For how can they both be right? I believe—and my good Harriot concurs—that the lightning was not an act of God but a simple act of nature—though we should not say so publicly, lest we lose our heads for treason. Queen and crown do not suffer atheism lightly, I’m afraid, and we intellectuals are often accused of it, whether rightly or wrongly.”

With that Raleigh drew up his cloak and strode off again, zigzagging down a few narrow lanes and turning onto Thames Street, passing Dow Gate and other smaller streets until they veered south onto Fish Street, near the entrance to London Bridge. Though the Fish Street markets were now shut for the day, the air as they passed the Fishmonger stalls rose rank and briny, the tubs and crates full of entrails and offal emitting a foul pungency.

They ascended and emerged onto the bridge, gaining them a view of the Tower of London just downstream on the northern bank of the river. The setting sun fired the Tower’s battlements and moat in blazes of light. Raleigh shielded his eyes, squinting.
“There is much I need to tell you, Manteo, and scarcely enough time before you go. You see now how as the daylight recedes, your strength returns?”

Manteo saw that it was so. His weakness was diminishing.

“We do not fully understand it, but as revenants our strength and powers seem to falter in direct sunlight, the way one is sapped on a hot summer day. As time goes on, you’ll find that while you can still move about in broad daylight, you will not feel so inclined. You’ll seek the cooling comfort of shade, finding solace and strength in dark and shadowed places. It is an inconvenient fact you will learn to deal with—but you will also come to relish the onset of the dusk and the dawning of the night, to use your improved senses when the sun goes down. You will see and hear and smell things you never thought possible—you will be able to detect the footfalls of a man a mile off, or ferret out the lifeblood of a young maiden or lad. It will be at once a burden and a gift.”

Manteo moved toward the bridge’s stone railing at the northernmost arch and peered into the water below, his mind and body overwhelmed with disbelief—at what had happened to him and at what he was becoming. Moonrise glazed the river. Manteo listened to the murky flow beneath the bridge, heard the water churning through the massive waterwheels of the corn grinding mills. He had paused here before and marveled at how these English had harnessed the river’s flow for power and thought this might be useful back home, but now he only stared and listened, his mind spellbound by the sound of the turning wheels and entranced by Raleigh’s voice.

“And then, of course, there is the hunger.”

Manteo held onto the railing with both hands, his fingertips tingling hot. Inside him a yearning stirred, bone deep and ancient, instinctive. A small flock of swans rafted in a quiet eddy alongshore, their languid movements graceful, their white feathers shining like evening stars against the blackening riverbank.

“I feel it,” said Manteo, turning to look into Raleigh’s eyes. “As you said I would.”

Raleigh stepped nearer and placed his hand on Manteo’s shoulder. The pressure was at once powerful and calming, the touch that of a brother or confidant, but one with a strength that could do harm.

“Soon the hunger will encompass your very being, Manteo, and your primary desire will be to feed. You will be—to use a comparison from your homeland—like a bear come out of hibernation, wildly alert and racked with famine. Every single living thing you encounter you will look upon as food. At first, you will have the single-mindedness of a predator, but over time you will learn to refine your quarry and carefully select your prey.”

The flotilla of swans moved upriver now, and Manteo watched them the way he watched flocks of ducks and geese on the choppy water of the sound at home, as a hunter.

Manteo remembered his first kill, a skillful shot straight into the chest of a large black and white goose, how he waded shoulder-deep for the flapping, spinning bird, dragged it ashore by the arrow and then rung its neck as his father directed him, blood running hot from the great bird’s beak and down over his hands. His father with his hunting knife vented the bird as they knelt in the tidewater marsh, instructing Manteo to reach deep within the animal’s steaming core to remove its organs. They shared raw the tender liver and chewy, bulbous kidney, the taste nutty and sweet and good. His father had dabbed his finger in warm goose blood, smearing two stripes beneath Manteo’s eyes to show the tribe his success on their return. It was a proud day.

Raleigh’s voice broke through the dusk, through the memory, as he pointed to the swans.

“Like nearly everything in England, those birds are the Queen’s. She has them plucked to fill the down beddings in the royal household. Hunting or harassing the birds is illegal, enough to send one to the Tower. Ah, Elizabeth’s rules, her laws,” Raleigh begrudged, “If only she knew the stricture under which we revenants labor,” he said, “her majesty might more appreciate my sacrifices.”

Raleigh walked on again, drawing Manteo along as if they were tethered together. Light from the drained sun and the rising moon converged in weird confluence, a band of luminescent gray. Manteo felt Raleigh stop and he looked up to see the gatehouse and drawbridge tower, around which rose many wooden pikes. Atop these high stakes were skewered the severed heads of executed traitors, some thirty or forty all in a row, public reminders to all who crossed the bridge what fate awaited crimes against the crown. The flesh of these unfortunates moldered, necrotic. Wheeling scavenger kites lit upon the faces, pecking savagely at their eye sockets and nose holes.

“That’s no way to go,” remarked Raleigh. “A grim demise, assured. Especially for us. For beheading, Manteo, is among the few ways that a revenant can be killed. I discovered that, of course, when I lopped off the head of my maker the soldier, long ago in France. It proved a valuable lesson. But now, let us traverse the bridge, for your time is nigh.”

They passed beneath the sodden traitor’s heads, moving noiselessly along the bridge to near its midpoint. All along both sides were the fair and beautiful houses of rich merchants and wealthy citizens, mercers and haberdashers whose fancy shops sat on the ground floor, their lavish living quarters perched above like aeries overlooking the river Thames. Lantern’s flared as maidservants hung them on the balconies and in the doorways of the four-storey buildings.

Then in an instant Raleigh pulled Manteo into the black shadows beneath a shopfront awning, tugging excitedly at Manteo’s cloak.

“There,” he whispered. “Up ahead, you see?”

Manteo strained his eyes, saw a small form moving beyond in the growing darkness.

“He’s perfect,” said Raleigh as they flew along the bridge, hunched low and lurking soundlessly. “An orphan boy no doubt, hired for pence to dump the slops of the privy pots.”

And so he was. As they drew closer they saw the boy labor down an alleyway between two grand buildings, burdened by two brimming thunder mugs. The boy went behind the mansion and Raleigh and Manteo stalked silently at a distance, slinking through moon shadow. They paused in a doorway, watching the boy at his task. Manteo felt his breathing quicken, his head light and tingly with want, his mouth filled with a craving like a need for salt.

The boy stopped at the jakes used by the servants, set down one pot and hoisted the other, dumping its contents into a funneled trough affixed to the bridge railing. The excrement drained in a slow sludge through the wooden sluice box, spattering into the black water below and effusing the air with a foul stink. He dumped the second chamber pot, then hefted each by their curved handles and started back up the alley toward the front of the mansion.

Moonbeams illuminated the young boy, and Manteo heard Raleigh’s directive in his ear: “Take him.”

Manteo was overcome with new instinct. In a blur he was upon the boy, drawing him up beneath his armpits and hefting him from the ground as if in embrace, the clay chamber pots shattering on the cobblestone as the boy dropped them and clawed for release. Manteo’s arms coiled around him tightly, squeezing him of his air like a constrictor. The boy wriggled feebly, tried to cry out but there was none to hear him, only the roar of the river through the turbines beneath the bridge and the turbid suck of the Thames against stone pilings.

For a moment Manteo ceased, appalled by his circumstance and wishing he could stop. He had killed in battle before. But that had honor, death as a result of war waged by men as men, for the survival of his tribe. As Manteo held this innocent child aloft, he understood that this too was for survival, but survival of another kind, brutish and bestial.

Manteo was surprised by the unnatural speed of what happened next. He spun the gasping boy, then clasped his hand about the boy’s neck and levered tight, his fingers bearing down with the force of a fishhawk’s talons. He paused to look at the boy slack and defeated in his hands: he was beautiful, his skin smooth and lithe and lucent, white-pink as the inside of a conch shell. Manteo perceived in this moment that the boy was blameless, wishing only to return tonight to some garret where he might take solace in the warmth of a coal fire. But longing now fired through Manteo’s core, undeniable and irresistible.

Manteo eased his grip upon the youngster, still believing he could stop himself. He would let him go, let the boy live. He would turn from this terrible congress and leap from the bridge and float downstream, carried away from Raleigh and this horror by the powerful current of the Thames.

But then Raleigh was behind him; he felt the knight’s breath at his neck, his firmness pressing against his backside.

“Take him now,” came his hoarse whisper, “You must.”

Manteo, using his body to pinion the young lad hard against the railing, lifted his hands before him and observed them now, hands that could carve the tools of war from stick or stone, hands that dug furrows into the black earth to sow corn crops in the spring. Hands that could either give life or take it away. He felt an excruciating tearing at his finger and thumb tips, saw his nails elongate into claws, their tips sharp as arrowheads, and he knew what he must do.

He gazed upon the cream-colored skin of the boy, the delicate blue veins pulsing at the throat. The veins made Mateo ache and there arose within him the truest hunger, pure and inviolate, a perfect primitive longing.

He slashed open the neck, gouging deep with his razor-nail, the blood scalding forth. Manteo leaned to the source and covered the wound with his mouth, gulping in great long drafts, the child’s blood filling him, pounding through his veins like war drums. He drank of him, feeling at once the boy’s blood escaping his living corpus and entering his own body, a transference. As Manteo sucked and engorged himself, the boy’s head slumped to the side, his ear lain upon his shoulder. Then there was Raleigh beside him, urging him to continue, his voice rimmed with ecstasy:

“Yes,” he moaned. “Drain him.”

Manteo finished at the neck and tore the clothes from the boy and ravaged him, gluttonous, moving next to the arm bends, then the wrists, then plunging finally below, to the place between his legs, lifting and holding aside his delicate boyhood as he sliced there and imbibed. Manteo devoured each slit anew, savoring the hot liquid thrill in his mouth, in the back of his throat. At last he released the boy, who dropped to the ground lifeless and devoid of fluid, a cadaverous heap of limbs and garments.

Manteo reclined against the railing, more alert and empowered than he had ever been in his life. He was awash in blood, sheathed by a thick film. He licked underneath his nails, smacking his lips, feeling as he looked on the bereft boy a blushing shame and disgust. Tears streaked Manteo’s blood-veiled face. But these regretful emotions and revulsion were tempered by a profound and carnal euphoria.

Raleigh stood near, and Manteo saw him transfixed, his eyes wide open, rocking back and forth on his heels, holding his manhood aquiver. At his feet was a stain of his spent flood. He buttoned up his breeches and replaced his codpiece.

“Beautiful,” said Raleigh. “Perfect. But you are not done yet.”

They hurried back over the bridge, the dead boy redressed and propped between them, one of his arms slung across each of their shoulders. They steered him along as they would bring a drunk home from the tavern.

“To the bone yard with this one,” Raleigh said as they flew through the cold black lanes, “Before he awakens.”

They cast through the blackest shires of the night and arrived at a decaying charnel ground beyond the London Wall at Moor Fields, a squalid graveyard Raleigh often used to dispose of his victims, the ones he wished to destroy. The field was limned by haphazard mounds devoid of headstones, a burial place for orphans and gypsies and vagabonds.

Raleigh guided them to the far north end of the cemetery where moonlight pooled in an open space between two recently piled hummocks of earth. A shovel leaned against a stone shed. Manteo felt innervated, satiated and vital, but he also feared what would come next. They lay the body on the ground in the dirt.

“Remember when I told you about the importance of proper burial?” Raleigh asked, then continued before Manteo said anything. “Well, that is true for the human and the revenant alike. This boy here, he will be one of us soon enough, lest we take the necessary precautions.”

Manteo looked down at the poor lad, his skin now sallow and silvered, oyster-gray.

“Why not let him become one of us?” he asked.

“Can’t have too many revenants running around now, can we. One must pick and choose. That is one of our gifts—we can decide who gets to live or die, or… more accurately, who gets to die and then live again, undead. This chap here has served his purpose, so we have no more need of him. But we must allow him to rest in peace,” Raleigh said, scanning about the rude moor, “or some semblance of it.”

The moon hovered overhead, and Raleigh worked fast with the shovel, digging furiously but effortlessly. Manteo wondered at Raleigh’s speed, each shovelful of heavy soil flying from the hole like dust. When Raleigh finished, only his head showed above the edge. He climbed from the crypt, clapping mire from his knees and thighs.

“There are three main ways to destroy a revenant, or to keep a fresh kill from becoming one,” he said, as matter-of-factly and naturally as he would describe the nuances of court etiquette. “Cremation of course, but it is messy, requires a very large fire and is hard to engage in undetected, as you might imagine. I spoke of decapitation before, and that works too—though I’ve found few folks other than the already dead or those imprisoned in a rack who are willing to sit still for it!” He paused and smiled, amused by his own quip.

“Most effective on a fresh victim,” he continued, unsheathing his sword and handing it to Manteo, “is the removal of the heart. Here you are then; he is your virgin kill and the honor is yours.”

Manteo held the sword handle in both hands, the moonlit steel blade light as wind. He looked at the orphan, then raised his eyes to Raleigh, thinking he now had an advantage. Perhaps he could end it right here. Their eyes met, bearing upon one another like doom beacons in the night. Raleigh smiled and let out a laugh that reverberated around the eerie death yard.

“It will not work, Manteo,” said Raleigh, continuing to chuckle and eyeing the sword as though he knew exactly what Manteo had in mind. “I’m much too fast for you yet. But try if you really want to. Have a swing or two with my war blade. Though I suspect you do not yet wish my end, for more than my demise you desire a tutor as much as the next new revenant.”

Manteo averted his gaze and frowned. Though he thought of testing Raleigh, he resolutely believed him, and he had no interest now in Raleigh’s games. He would be patient like a warrior and wait until the time was right.

“Proceed, Sir Walter,” said Manteo, resigned for now to comply. “Tell me what I must do.”

Manteo listened, following directions, his actions mimicking Raleigh’s words. He knelt and removed the shirt from the corpse, then stood again and placed the sword tip at the chest, just above the sternum. Wolves yowled across a distant moor and the voices of brawling drunkards fell on the cemetery, but through these intrusions Raleigh kept talking. Manteo hesitated, arrested by his conscience.

“Go ahead and open him, he won’t bite,” urged Raleigh. “Or maybe he will, for even now he stirs.”

Manteo saw the dead boy’s hands begin to spasm, the fingers fidgeting alive, and he drove the point home, parting the pallid flesh with an X and exposing the heart, the blood muscle black and ashen within its cavity. Manteo sliced the sinewy connective arteries and ventricles and valves and the last residual blood seeped free of them, bubbling from their cut ends. As he pulled the heart from the body the corpse arms ceased their twitching. The heart was cold as a river stone in his hands.

“Well done,” said Raleigh, dragging the body to the grave edge. “Soon he can repose.” Raleigh took the heart from Manteo and impaled it once with his dagger, the meat parting as easily as veal. Then he eased the twice-dead heart back into the body, patting the organ almost tenderly as he replaced it. He looked upon Manteo.

“The events of tonight may seem to you disagreeable, Manteo, but they are an integral part of the process, I assure you. So last, as added assurance, off with his head.”

Manteo wished only for his loathsome initiation to be at end. He took up Raleigh’s sword again and with one swift swing cleaved clean the head, which rolled and dropped into the grave. Manteo handed the broadsword back to Raleigh and turned away. With his boot Raleigh nudged the boy into the black hole too, and the cadaver fell into the abyss. Then Raleigh shoveled full the grave.

“Now his soul, should he have one, might rest,” said Raleigh. “He is made whole again, as are you. You have been commuted and renewed. Transformed.”

With that last word Raleigh sheathed again his sword and stalked away into the night, Manteo trailing grimly behind, an involuntary and reluctant ghoul borne for now by his maker Raleigh into some black and nether realm where life and light succumb to death and darkness.

Raleigh raised his eyes from his reading as Manteo entered the knight’s study within the turret overlooking the Thames. Raleigh often spent his days here, writing poetry, reading, poring over maps and charting expeditions. From his desk at the window he could see the river and had a grand view of Lambeth Marsh across the water, Southwark to the east. Raleigh set down his quill pen.

“A good new day to you, Manteo,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Manteo fixed his eyes on Raleigh. The knight appeared different now, imperial, fuller of body, his face florid and beaming. Images from last night in that dark and nebulous lair of the Black Swan recurred and receded, and Manteo struggled to maintain his composure. The warrior within him told him to rush Raleigh and end him as he would an enemy, and he moved toward Raleigh, but something held him back.

“What have you done to me?

Raleigh pressed his palm to the manuscript pages before him, a serious mien on his face. He appeared unmoved by Manteo’s encroachment.

“Yes, that. Well, you cut to the chase, a man after my own heart. An explanation is in order—and there is much to explain. Certainly this reading can wait.”

Manteo stepped closer. “What happened?” he pressed again.

Raleigh closed the bound book with a snap and straightened in his chair and looked out his window.

“Sit down, Manteo. This will take some time.”

“I will stand.”

Raleigh appeared bemused, though his voice when he spoke bore a tone of sympathy, a calming tenor.

“Very well then,” began Raleigh, twirling his moustache in thought, “Where to begin? The events of last evening will be confusing for you … ”

“Who bandaged my wounds?” asked Manteo. “And where, and what, is Constance? What are you?”

Raleigh bristled at the interruption. “You’ll do well to simply listen, Manteo, and not to cut me off. Harriot attended you. Lady de Beverley has returned to her haunt at Whitby Abbey, her business here concluded for the moment—until I call on her again. Let me continue, and shortly much will be explained to you, if not believed. Later tonight, you will fully understand.”

Manteo nodded, lulled now by Raleigh’s hypnotic voice, sat and balanced his limp arms on the armrests and leaned against the chair’s high-backed cushions and waited, exhausted and shaky.

“I know what you are going through, Manteo. I have experienced it as well. You feel as weak and frightened as you have ever been. But know that today is primordial, the glorious dawn of your new life. For you have died and been reborn. You have been made revenant. I have made you revenant.”

Raleigh paused for a moment to let the word resonate.

“Revenant, you are. As am I. Undead. You exist now in a border world, a medium between the living and the dead.”

Manteo shifted in his seat and righted himself and spoke the word in a hoarse whisper: “Revenant.”

“That’s right,” said Raleigh. “From the French word revenir—to return or come back again. You have indeed returned. As have we all.”

Manteo steeled himself against these words, which seemed at once fantastic and utterly possible, given his complex and mystifying spirit world. He thought that Raleigh and what he said must be part of a spell wrought upon him by his own severe god Okeus, who kept watch over the doings of men, and that he was being punished for abandoning his people. He wished his own tribal priest were here to perform a conjuring ritual to disarm this power Raleigh seemed to hold, but now all he could do was wait, and listen.

“We survive on blood, Manteo, both human and animal—but mostly human. I will get to all that eventually. Last night Constance de Beverley and I drained you, sapped and siphoned you of your lifeblood. After you died we brought you back home to Durham House, and Harriot bandaged you, and you awoke, anew. Quite soon—likely you are experiencing this already—you’ll be exceedingly hungry… and thirsty. I should say both.”

Manteo, lulled as if in a trance, wished to know everything.

“Did the same thing happen to you? How did you become … revenant?”

Sir Walter Raleigh opened a desk drawer and pulled out a small pipe and tobacco box. “I think I will smoke,” he said. He lighted a bowl and offered it to Manteo, who shook his head in refusal.

“Me? Ah, you bring me back to my youth. My situation was quite different, for I was the unwitting author of my own conversion. I was but seventeen, young and idealistic and ambitious. I craved advancement, station. So I signed on in 1569 to fight in France with the Huguenot Protestants against the Catholics. Bloody religious wars, civil wars. I don’t recommend them. One should fight for something he really believes in—love or honor or family or country—not imagined gods.

At any rate, I engaged with the cavalry in the Battle of Jarnac. It is beautiful and rolling and fertile there—lush vineyards and grapes known for the delicate cognac they produce. I have some in my cellars below—we must drink some later. We were positioned four leagues from Poitiers, and though we were outnumbered, our captain Louis de Bourbon—the famous Prince of Condé, led the cavalry in a headlong charge. He galloped bravely at the front. I was just off his flank when a musket ball struck his horse and they crumpled on the field. The royalists swarmed us and we retreated, beaten back and forced to watch from a short distance away as Prince Condé was recognized by the royalist captains. Condé tried to surrender with dignity but they shot him point blank through the head, then paraded him ingloriously through the streets of Jarnac on the back of a donkey.

‘Twas a dreadful day—we lost some 400 men and withdrew to the town of Triac, carrying many of our dead away with us. I was ordered to bury some of these unfortunates. An officer handed me a spade and told me to give them a proper Christian burial, then left me there at a foul streamside bog with a dull digging tool among a heap of three corpses. Even at this young age I had my pride, and I deemed the task unbefitting someone of my station, thought such work better suited to a common foot soldier than a cavalryman. But there I was.

Evening approached and nighthawks called from the woods. I was mortally terrified, thinking that enemy soldiers watching from the forest would shoot me or run me through with swords. So I hurried, wishing only to be away from that horrid place. Mist hovered over the bog and I dug fast, furiously carving deep graves for the first two, tamping them down firmly with peaty soil.

But the last. The last I hurried, for it darkness fell and it began to rain and I thought only of my own comfort. I was cold and wet and frightened as the night sounds encircled me. I heard the voices of our camp beyond the riverbank, saw the glow from the warming cook fires and wished only to be there, away from that morbid improper cemetery. I cut but a shallow depression in the ground and rolled the last man in with my boot and the spade, covered him but loosely with earth. I feared—no, I knew—that he would be unearthed by wolves or dogs and torn apart, so poor and shallow was his grave. But I cared not, thought only for myself. With a last disinterested shovelful of dirt I knelt to catch my breath beside that rude and insufficient crypt.

And then the ground where the dead man lay began to sift, to shift and move at the surface. I thought at first it must be natural settling of soil, but to my utter disbelief and horror a hand erupted through the earth, encased in grime, clutching and grasping. And the fingernails, as long nearly as the putrid fingers themselves.

Then an entire arm sprung forth groping and I staggered back, stupefied. The corpse—now revenant—emerged entirely, sitting erect, wiping itself of sod and debris and I saw that it was naked, bloated and engorged as if long dead, twice again the size of the dead man I had only recently buried … or failed to bury properly—one way a revenant is born. The revenant coughed, dirt clods spewing from the mouth, then groaned. It emitted a vile stench. Blood ran from the corners of the mouth, and the tongue wagged forth, filmy with gore and rudely tumescent.

When the corpse began to rise I ran howling for my life, my terrorized cries swallowed by the river and the woods. But fast it was upon me. I felt my shoulder ripped backwards, heard the tearing of my coat as I went down. It seemed that I was being attacked by a wild animal or raptor, the fingernails digging like claws or talons into my back, my chest, slicing at my wrists, venting me, tapping me of my blood. I slumped onto my back, believing that I was surely dead. I felt, and could hear the thing strangely drinking of my wrist, sensed my life leaving me.

Then I remembered my sword. With what last strength I could summon, I reached to my side, fumbled for the handle, and wrested free my sword. The revenant only had time to lift its head from me and look up when I swung with all my might in a sideways arc and hit home at the neck, the war blade cleaving the head from the body. Blood—the revenant’s and my own—showered forth from the neck stump, covering me and my wounds with glazy warmth. I wriggled away in the mud, fearing that the headless thing would attack me, but I had killed it. I passed out in the rain along the riverbank, and when I awoke the next day I was, as you are now, reborn. But I was without a mentor, and would have to learn nearly everything on my own… until, it turned out, I had the good fortune to meet Constance de Beverley.”

Sir Walter Raleigh stopped, lost in recollection. He reloaded his small clay pipe and fired it again, inhaling the smoke in furious gulps.

“It will take time for you to understand everything, Manteo. It is quite expected for you to be uncertain and confused. But I am here to guide you, and to prepare you for what comes next—here, tonight and in the coming days, and then when you return to your homeland, as you help to create my City of Raleigh.”

Manteo had sat transfixed by Raleigh’s tale, but he knew not whether he should believe him.

“How can I be certain that what you have told me is true?” he asked plainly.

Raleigh rose from his chair and moved to the door of the study, swinging it closed and latching it locked from the inside. Walking back to his desk he unfastened his peascod doublet. Manteo watched as Raleigh removed the outer garment, then the silken shirt beneath, revealing lustrous white skin, smooth and lucid. Raleigh turned in a slow circle and Manteo could see long purplish claw scars running from one shoulder down the back and sides, and deep-fissured tracks where the nails had raked his chest, as if he had been mauled by a cougar or a bear.

“I am quite used to these blemishes by now,” said Raleigh, wriggling back into his shirt and doublet, “but I dare say when I feed I perform much tidier work myself, as a point of honor and decorum. Unless, of course, I am drunk—as was the case last night.”

Manteo grew weaker now, queasy. His breathing was short and he thought that he might faint.

“But … why, Sir Walter? Why me?”

Raleigh moved to the shelves on the wall and took down a rolled parchment. He unfurled the lambskin vellum, a large detailed map of the outer banks and the Virginia coastline, and smoothed it flat on the desk.

“One of life’s—and deaths’—ironies, I suppose,” Raleigh said, looking down at the maps in memory. “It was not supposed to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

Raleigh lifted a large sketchbook. He pulled out a painting and palmed it onto the desk. It was a Secotan warrior leaning on his longbow. He wore a bead necklace, loincloth and arrow quiver. A single raven feather rose from the point of his shorn black hair like a topknot.

“That is Wanchese!” exclaimed Manteo.

“Indeed,” replied Raleigh. “The painter John White did a fine likeness, it seems. Yes, Wanchese was to be the one, but things went dismally afoul, I’m afraid.”

Raleigh lit again his pipe. “On the eve of our reconnaissance voyage two years ago I was engaged here by the Queen and could not journey. So I dispatched John White and Harriot and a few dozen potential colonists, mostly soldiers. The good Doctor Harriot was charged with a special mission, an experiment I wished to try. We wanted to settle a small colony there, if we could. But at Roanoke, the Secotans were initially unfriendly, inhospitable. Downright warlike. Harriot managed to arrange a truce parlay on our flagship Lion, and they sent Wanchese as their spokesman, for he was something akin to a chief.”

Manteo could hardly believe what he was hearing. He had spent years trying to find and avenge Wanchese.

There was a knock at the door, and Raleigh and Manteo both looked up. It was Harriot.

“Ah, perfect timing as usual, Thomas. Come, come. You can best explain the rest to Manteo—I’m a bit out of my field here, really. I was just telling him about our experiment with Wanchese … how he boarded the Lion to discuss terms … And then… Well, you go ahead, as you were there.”

Harriot sat next to Manteo and looked at him with something like sympathy, his eyes meeting Manteo’s for just a moment, then lowering.

“Sir Walter’s idea, you see, had been to transform someone into revenance from afar, using his blood but without him physically being there. It was exciting, unprecedented scientifically,” began Harriot, running his thumb under his coat sleeve rather nervously. “White had traveled south—to Croatoan Island, in fact, and was engaged drawing and studying your people, Manteo—when Wanchese came onto our ship to discuss terms of a treaty, and some possible trade. It was the perfect opportunity for the experimental procedure. I had aboard the Lion a great quantity of Sir Walter’s revenant blood in sealed vats for just this purpose, and carried as well my phlebotomist’s tools, lancets and tourniquets, tubes and vacutainers, my bloodsticks and bloodbowls. I slipped a sedative into the wine I offered him, and while he drowsed hypoxic I blood-let him through venesection, draining his blood into the vacutainers and transfusing him with Sir Walter’s revenant blood. All right there in my quarters aboard the rocking Lion. Quite an operation, really.”

“The experiment went poorly, I should say,” chirped in Raleigh. “But we learn from our mistakes, yes? But pardon my interruption, Thomas. Go on.”

“I watched Wanchese carefully,” Harriot continued, “expecting, as we thought, for him to awake a revenant, and I would tutor him and release him back among his people, now our blood-brethren. Alas, things went awry.”

Harriot reached for a cup of wine Raleigh had poured for him. His hand shook as he took it.

“Unfortunately, Wanchese did not ease calmly from his sedation but shook and convulsed, his hands knotting and then sprouting not revenant nails but feline-like claws, and he morphed then into something other—something we have never seen, some amalgamation of revenant and beast, an unintended hybrid I named Homo-felis concolor. We do not yet understand how it occurred. Frankly, I remain perplexed. By the time he sprouted fang-like incisors I had seen enough—I fled my quarters for assistance and a firearm. But when I returned Wanchese had awakened and escaped, torn asunder and half-devoured seven of the crew, then leapt from the ship and swam ashore, returned to the Secotans as some grotesque man-beast, a catamount-revenant. Half mountain cat and half Indian-revenant, uncontrollable, and he of our making. Dreadful, all of it.”

Raleigh filled Harriot’s cup once more, then looked long at Manteo.

“So they took you, instead, Manteo,” he said. “And brought you home to me. White had seen you at Croatoan Island, he painted you as well. Once Harriot saw your image, realized you were another local chief we could use instead for my purposes, he sent for boats to take you. And I must admit, Manteo, that from the moment you first arrived here on my reconnaissance ship, from the first instant I saw you, I knew you were the one. I knew your fate, understood how I would use you for my plan in the New World. It was obvious, came hurtling at me like a fully formed poem, crystallized and complete. But I had to wait until everything was ready, until my licenses had been granted by the Queen, until the colonizing ships had been procured and were seaworthy, before I transformed you and prepared you to deal with Wanchese, and for the rest of my plan.”

Manteo watched the late afternoon light pour through the turret window and streak across Raleigh’s desk, flaring over the maps like flames. He felt sickened by what the two men had told him, and his hunger and thirst raged now.

“And just what is your ‘plan’?”

Raleigh’s face flushed with excitement. He was eager to unveil his grand scheme, but there were pressing matters of transformation to attend to first.

“All will be revealed in due time, Manteo, I assure you. But evening nears, and dear lad, I can see that you are ravenous. Come, we need to find you something to eat.”

Now, back to the Lost Colony …

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Raleigh raised his eyes from his reading as Manteo entered the knight’s study within the turret overlooking the Thames. Raleigh often spent his days here, writing poetry, reading, poring over maps and charting expeditions. From his desk at the window he could see the river and had a grand view of Lambeth Marsh across the water, Southwark to the east. Raleigh set down his quill pen.

“A good new day to you, Manteo,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Manteo fixed his eyes on Raleigh. The knight appeared different now, imperial, fuller of body, his face florid and beaming. Images from last night in that dark and nebulous lair of the Black Swan recurred and receded, and Manteo struggled to maintain his composure. The warrior within him told him to rush Raleigh and end him as he would an enemy, and he moved toward Raleigh, but something held him back.

“What have you done to me?

Raleigh pressed his palm to the manuscript pages before him, a serious mien on his face. He appeared unmoved by Manteo’s encroachment.

“Yes, that. Well, you cut to the chase, a man after my own heart. An explanation is in order—and there is much to explain. Certainly this reading can wait.”

Manteo stepped closer. “What happened?” he pressed again.

Raleigh closed the bound book with a snap and straightened in his chair and looked out his window.

“Sit down, Manteo. This will take some time.”

“I will stand.”

Raleigh appeared bemused, though his voice when he spoke bore a tone of sympathy, a calming tenor.

“Very well then,” began Raleigh, twirling his moustache in thought, “Where to begin? The events of last evening will be confusing for you … ”

“Who bandaged my wounds?” asked Manteo. “And where, and what, is Constance? What are you?”

Raleigh bristled at the interruption. “You’ll do well to simply listen, Manteo, and not to cut me off. Harriot attended you. Lady de Beverley has returned to her haunt at Whitby Abbey, her business here concluded for the moment—until I call on her again. Let me continue, and shortly much will be explained to you, if not believed. Later tonight, you will fully understand.”

Manteo nodded, lulled now by Raleigh’s hypnotic voice, sat and balanced his limp arms on the armrests and leaned against the chair’s high-backed cushions and waited, exhausted and shaky.

“I know what you are going through, Manteo. I have experienced it as well. You feel as weak and frightened as you have ever been. But know that today is primordial, the glorious dawn of your new life. For you have died and been reborn. You have been made revenant. I have made you revenant.”

Raleigh paused for a moment to let the word resonate.

“Revenant, you are. As am I. Undead. You exist now in a border world, a medium between the living and the dead.”

Manteo shifted in his seat and righted himself and spoke the word in a hoarse whisper: “Revenant.”

“That’s right,” said Raleigh. “From the French word revenir—to return or come back again. You have indeed returned. As have we all.”

Manteo steeled himself against these words, which seemed at once fantastic and utterly possible, given his complex and mystifying spirit world. He thought that Raleigh and what he said must be part of a spell wrought upon him by his own severe god Okeus, who kept watch over the doings of men, and that he was being punished for abandoning his people. He wished his own tribal priest were here to perform a conjuring ritual to disarm this power Raleigh seemed to hold, but now all he could do was wait, and listen.

“We survive on blood, Manteo, both human and animal—but mostly human. I will get to all that eventually. Last night Constance de Beverley and I drained you, sapped and siphoned you of your lifeblood. After you died we brought you back home to Durham House, and Harriot bandaged you, and you awoke, anew. Quite soon—likely you are experiencing this already—you’ll be exceedingly hungry… and thirsty. I should say both.”

Manteo, lulled as if in a trance, wished to know everything.

“Did the same thing happen to you? How did you become … revenant?”

Sir Walter Raleigh opened a desk drawer and pulled out a small pipe and tobacco box. “I think I will smoke,” he said. He lighted a bowl and offered it to Manteo, who shook his head in refusal.

“Me? Ah, you bring me back to my youth. My situation was quite different, for I was the unwitting author of my own conversion. I was but seventeen, young and idealistic and ambitious. I craved advancement, station. So I signed on in 1569 to fight in France with the Huguenot Protestants against the Catholics. Bloody religious wars, civil wars. I don’t recommend them. One should fight for something he really believes in—love or honor or family or country—not imagined gods.

At any rate, I engaged with the cavalry in the Battle of Jarnac. It is beautiful and rolling and fertile there—lush vineyards and grapes known for the delicate cognac they produce. I have some in my cellars below—we must drink some later. We were positioned four leagues from Poitiers, and though we were outnumbered, our captain Louis de Bourbon—the famous Prince of Condé, led the cavalry in a headlong charge. He galloped bravely at the front. I was just off his flank when a musket ball struck his horse and they crumpled on the field. The royalists swarmed us and we retreated, beaten back and forced to watch from a short distance away as Prince Condé was recognized by the royalist captains. Condé tried to surrender with dignity but they shot him point blank through the head, then paraded him ingloriously through the streets of Jarnac on the back of a donkey.

‘Twas a dreadful day—we lost some 400 men and withdrew to the town of Triac, carrying many of our dead away with us. I was ordered to bury some of these unfortunates. An officer handed me a spade and told me to give them a proper Christian burial, then left me there at a foul streamside bog with a dull digging tool among a heap of three corpses. Even at this young age I had my pride, and I deemed the task unbefitting someone of my station, thought such work better suited to a common foot soldier than a cavalryman. But there I was.

Evening approached and nighthawks called from the woods. I was mortally terrified, thinking that enemy soldiers watching from the forest would shoot me or run me through with swords. So I hurried, wishing only to be away from that horrid place. Mist hovered over the bog and I dug fast, furiously carving deep graves for the first two, tamping them down firmly with peaty soil.

But the last. The last I hurried, for it darkness fell and it began to rain and I thought only of my own comfort. I was cold and wet and frightened as the night sounds encircled me. I heard the voices of our camp beyond the riverbank, saw the glow from the warming cook fires and wished only to be there, away from that morbid improper cemetery. I cut but a shallow depression in the ground and rolled the last man in with my boot and the spade, covered him but loosely with earth. I feared—no, I knew—that he would be unearthed by wolves or dogs and torn apart, so poor and shallow was his grave. But I cared not, thought only for myself. With a last disinterested shovelful of dirt I knelt to catch my breath beside that rude and insufficient crypt.

And then the ground where the dead man lay began to sift, to shift and move at the surface. I thought at first it must be natural settling of soil, but to my utter disbelief and horror a hand erupted through the earth, encased in grime, clutching and grasping. And the fingernails, as long nearly as the putrid fingers themselves.

Then an entire arm sprung forth groping and I staggered back, stupefied. The corpse—now revenant—emerged entirely, sitting erect, wiping itself of sod and debris and I saw that it was naked, bloated and engorged as if long dead, twice again the size of the dead man I had only recently buried … or failed to bury properly—one way a revenant is born. The revenant coughed, dirt clods spewing from the mouth, then groaned. It emitted a vile stench. Blood ran from the corners of the mouth, and the tongue wagged forth, filmy with gore and rudely tumescent.

When the corpse began to rise I ran howling for my life, my terrorized cries swallowed by the river and the woods. But fast it was upon me. I felt my shoulder ripped backwards, heard the tearing of my coat as I went down. It seemed that I was being attacked by a wild animal or raptor, the fingernails digging like claws or talons into my back, my chest, slicing at my wrists, venting me, tapping me of my blood. I slumped onto my back, believing that I was surely dead. I felt, and could hear the thing strangely drinking of my wrist, sensed my life leaving me.

Then I remembered my sword. With what last strength I could summon, I reached to my side, fumbled for the handle, and wrested free my sword. The revenant only had time to lift its head from me and look up when I swung with all my might in a sideways arc and hit home at the neck, the war blade cleaving the head from the body. Blood—the revenant’s and my own—showered forth from the neck stump, covering me and my wounds with glazy warmth. I wriggled away in the mud, fearing that the headless thing would attack me, but I had killed it. I passed out in the rain along the riverbank, and when I awoke the next day I was, as you are now, reborn. But I was without a mentor, and would have to learn nearly everything on my own… until, it turned out, I had the good fortune to meet Constance de Beverley.”

Sir Walter Raleigh stopped, lost in recollection. He reloaded his small clay pipe and fired it again, inhaling the smoke in furious gulps.

“It will take time for you to understand everything, Manteo. It is quite expected for you to be uncertain and confused. But I am here to guide you, and to prepare you for what comes next—here, tonight and in the coming days, and then when you return to your homeland, as you help to create my City of Raleigh.”

Manteo had sat transfixed by Raleigh’s tale, but he knew not whether he should believe him.

“How can I be certain that what you have told me is true?” he asked plainly.

Raleigh rose from his chair and moved to the door of the study, swinging it closed and latching it locked from the inside. Walking back to his desk he unfastened his peascod doublet. Manteo watched as Raleigh removed the outer garment, then the silken shirt beneath, revealing lustrous white skin, smooth and lucid. Raleigh turned in a slow circle and Manteo could see long purplish claw scars running from one shoulder down the back and sides, and deep-fissured tracks where the nails had raked his chest, as if he had been mauled by a cougar or a bear.

“I am quite used to these blemishes by now,” said Raleigh, wriggling back into his shirt and doublet, “but I dare say when I feed I perform much tidier work myself, as a point of honor and decorum. Unless, of course, I am drunk—as was the case last night.”

Manteo grew weaker now, queasy. His breathing was short and he thought that he might faint.

“But … why, Sir Walter? Why me?”

Raleigh moved to the shelves on the wall and took down a rolled parchment. He unfurled the lambskin vellum, a large detailed map of the outer banks and the Virginia coastline, and smoothed it flat on the desk.

“One of life’s—and deaths’—ironies, I suppose,” Raleigh said, looking down at the maps in memory. “It was not supposed to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

Raleigh lifted a large sketchbook. He pulled out a painting and palmed it onto the desk. It was a Secotan warrior leaning on his longbow. He wore a bead necklace, loincloth and arrow quiver. A single raven feather rose from the point of his shorn black hair like a topknot.

“That is Wanchese!” exclaimed Manteo.

“Indeed,” replied Raleigh. “The painter John White did a fine likeness, it seems. Yes, Wanchese was to be the one, but things went dismally afoul, I’m afraid.”

Raleigh lit again his pipe. “On the eve of our reconnaissance voyage two years ago I was engaged here by the Queen and could not journey. So I dispatched John White and Harriot and a few dozen potential colonists, mostly soldiers. The good Doctor Harriot was charged with a special mission, an experiment I wished to try. We wanted to settle a small colony there, if we could. But at Roanoke, the Secotans were initially unfriendly, inhospitable. Downright warlike. Harriot managed to arrange a truce parlay on our flagship Lion, and they sent Wanchese as their spokesman, for he was something akin to a chief.”

Manteo could hardly believe what he was hearing. He had spent years trying to find and avenge Wanchese.

There was a knock at the door, and Raleigh and Manteo both looked up. It was Harriot.

“Ah, perfect timing as usual, Thomas. Come, come. You can best explain the rest to Manteo—I’m a bit out of my field here, really. I was just telling him about our experiment with Wanchese … how he boarded the Lion to discuss terms … And then… Well, you go ahead, as you were there.”

Harriot sat next to Manteo and looked at him with something like sympathy, his eyes meeting Manteo’s for just a moment, then lowering.

“Sir Walter’s idea, you see, had been to transform someone into revenance from afar, using his blood but without him physically being there. It was exciting, unprecedented scientifically,” began Harriot, running his thumb under his coat sleeve rather nervously. “White had traveled south—to Croatoan Island, in fact, and was engaged drawing and studying your people, Manteo—when Wanchese came onto our ship to discuss terms of a treaty, and some possible trade. It was the perfect opportunity for the experimental procedure. I had aboard the Lion a great quantity of Sir Walter’s revenant blood in sealed vats for just this purpose, and carried as well my phlebotomist’s tools, lancets and tourniquets, tubes and vacutainers, my bloodsticks and bloodbowls. I slipped a sedative into the wine I offered him, and while he drowsed hypoxic I blood-let him through venesection, draining his blood into the vacutainers and transfusing him with Sir Walter’s revenant blood. All right there in my quarters aboard the rocking Lion. Quite an operation, really.”

“The experiment went poorly, I should say,” chirped in Raleigh. “But we learn from our mistakes, yes? But pardon my interruption, Thomas. Go on.”

“I watched Wanchese carefully,” Harriot continued, “expecting, as we thought, for him to awake a revenant, and I would tutor him and release him back among his people, now our blood-brethren. Alas, things went awry.”

Harriot reached for a cup of wine Raleigh had poured for him. His hand shook as he took it.

“Unfortunately, Wanchese did not ease calmly from his sedation but shook and convulsed, his hands knotting and then sprouting not revenant nails but feline-like claws, and he morphed then into something other—something we have never seen, some amalgamation of revenant and beast, an unintended hybrid I named Homo-felis concolor. We do not yet understand how it occurred. Frankly, I remain perplexed. By the time he sprouted fang-like incisors I had seen enough—I fled my quarters for assistance and a firearm. But when I returned Wanchese had awakened and escaped, torn asunder and half-devoured seven of the crew, then leapt from the ship and swam ashore, returned to the Secotans as some grotesque man-beast, a catamount-revenant. Half mountain cat and half Indian-revenant, uncontrollable, and he of our making. Dreadful, all of it.”

Raleigh filled Harriot’s cup once more, then looked long at Manteo.

“So they took you, instead, Manteo,” he said. “And brought you home to me. White had seen you at Croatoan Island, he painted you as well. Once Harriot saw your image, realized you were another local chief we could use instead for my purposes, he sent for boats to take you. And I must admit, Manteo, that from the moment you first arrived here on my reconnaissance ship, from the first instant I saw you, I knew you were the one. I knew your fate, understood how I would use you for my plan in the New World. It was obvious, came hurtling at me like a fully formed poem, crystallized and complete. But I had to wait until everything was ready, until my licenses had been granted by the Queen, until the colonizing ships had been procured and were seaworthy, before I transformed you and prepared you to deal with Wanchese, and for the rest of my plan.”

Manteo watched the late afternoon light pour through the turret window and streak across Raleigh’s desk, flaring over the maps like flames. He felt sickened by what the two men had told him, and his hunger and thirst raged now.

“And just what is your ‘plan’?”

Raleigh’s face flushed with excitement. He was eager to unveil his grand scheme, but there were pressing matters of transformation to attend to first.

“All will be revealed in due time, Manteo, I assure you. But evening nears, and dear lad, I can see that you are ravenous. Come, we need to find you something to eat.”

Manteo awoke to harsh midday light burning through his bedroom window. He squinted and groped and drew shut the curtains, then surveyed his surroundings and confirmed that he was in his room at Durham House, though he had no recollection of how he had returned here. The events of the previous evening seemed too strange to be true, like some ghast nightmare borne of consuming intoxicating jimsonweed, and he wondered how much of what he remembered had occurred, and how much was but a weird dream or vision.

He rose unsteadily and sat on the edge of his bed, burdened by an immense fatigue and soreness, his entire body riddled with ache. He remembered only one other time feeling like this—as a boy going through the huskanaw ritual to become a man. He and the other eligible initiates from his tribe were led by elder men to a river valley, where the boys were slathered in white body paint and forced to dance to exhaustion while tribal members encircled them and sang, the women howling and weeping in mourning song.

After the dance the initiate boys ran through a human gauntlet of elder men, some wearing black horns and waving green boughs, the others beating the naked boys with tightly wound reed bundles. Following this flagellation the elders mixed jimsonweed and secret roots into a hallucinatory drink and forced it down young Manteo and the others, continuing the ritual and the reed canings until the boys were so crazed and deranged that they were herded to a great cone-shaped huskanaw pen, locked inside, and instructed to forget everything about their former lives as boys. Within the pen they fasted for weeks but for the secret herb concoction, their minds wracked by visions both terrifying and revelatory, and those who survived and emerged from the huskanaw pen were said to have been ceremonially killed as boys and reborn as men.

Manteo now stood and regarded himself. He was naked but for gauze dressings at his wrists and elbows and groin. He dressed slowly, noting above his weakness a powerful hunger and thirst. He craved the fresh deer heart his father shared with him after a hunt, the heart pulled hot and pulsing from the freshly killed animal. He imagined the heat of the animal’s heart in his hands, could still recall the smell of steaming blood-meat.

Manteo felt a sharp pang of longing for his father. He slumped back down on the bed and closed his eyes and drowsed in memory, a broken half-sleep, half-dream that transported him to a day long ago, to his initiation hunt just after the huskanaw pen, with his father Matwau and his older brother Ahanu. His family needed food, and as a new warrior it was Manteo’s duty now to provide for his people. They had canoed across the sound, to the mainland where large deer herds roamed, and following a creek inland they were soon on the edge of Secotan hunting grounds. Manteo found fresh scent and sign, and guided his father and brother up the draw. They crept in silence, once seeing the splay of a great deer’s antlers nodding like splendid elm branches ahead in a clearing. A good harem of does trailed the buck, then dissolved with him into the cover.

Manteo tracked the herd until midday. They closed on the animals and could see them drinking from a spring just off the creek, the animals knee-deep in sweet-smelling sedge. Manteo knelt and slung an arrow from his quiver, mounting it on his bowstring. He shouldered the bow and drew on the buck when his father raised a hand to the air and hissed, “Secotans.” But it was too late. They had gone too far into Secotan hunting territory.

Enemy arrows skirled through the trees. Heat pierced Manteo’s side and he fell to the ground, an arrow lodged in him. In a blur his father scooped Manteo from the ground and shoved him behind a tree while Ahanu drew his bow. Matwau held up both hands with all his fingers to show Ahanu there were ten at least, then he too drew and they both let fly their arrows.

A high-pitched wail-chant pierced the timber as the Secotans came fast as cougars, their spears held out in front as they rushed. Ahanu looked back and called to Matwau, “Save him.” Then he turned and dashed screaming at the oncoming warriors.

Matwau hefted Manteo up beneath his arms and ran him along until Mateo began to run on his own. They cut quickly away from the creek and into the gnarled forest, running until their breath burned like fire in their chests. Manteo could no longer hear the chants and screams of the Secotans. He felt blood running hot and wet down his side and his father led him into an empty bear den and they crawled inside and hid.

Later, his father handed him a stub of tree root and told him to bite down hard on it, and as Manteo sunk his teeth into the earth-caked wood his father in one motion pulled the arrow from him, the weapon passing like a flame-heated spear through his flank. His father left the hollow and returned with healing bloodroot and bark. He bent to Manteo and sucked clean his wound and spit, then pressed the herbs to his lesion and bound the poultice there with the leather strap from his arrow quiver, cinching the truss tight until Manteo winced.

“Come,” Matwau said, crawling from the den. “We must rescue Ahanu.”

Manteo followed his father through the blackening woods. They crept soundlessly, Matwau stopping now and then to still his breathing and listen. At last they heard wailing voices on the wind, songs crying like faraway birdcalls through the treetops. They followed those cries and the smell of wood smoke to the edge of the Secotan village. Matwau guided Manteo behind a giant deadfall where they hid and watched the ceremony beginning.

Ahanu stood, lashed naked to a stake in the center of the village clearing. Secotan boys fed sticks and branches to a fire near Ahanu while women screeched and wailed, swaying and gyrating and shaking gourds that rattled like snake tails. Warriors danced about Ahanu, taunting him, some thumping drums, others chanting and swinging spears. Their bodies and faces were bedaubed in black and red oil paints, their chests and arms tattooed in rings and spheres. A young warrior, the chosen initiate, hopped and sang, halting before Ahanu and clapping together a pair of halved clamshells pressed in his palms. Ahanu laughed, defiant and unafraid.

Manteo’s father held him close. “We are too late,” he said. “The torture ritual has begun.”

Manteo tried to rise, to go to help his brother Ahanu, but Matwau clutched him firm.

“No, Manteo. I will lose only one son today,” Matwau whispered. “Ahanu will die a good death, the proud and brave death of a Croatoan warrior. Watch.”

Fire sparks exploded into the blackening sky. The warriors chanted the name of their initiate. Deer antlers were tethered to his head, and the boy-man leapt and danced, striking the clamshells together with the drumming and the calling of his name, “Wanchese, Wanchese, Wanchese.”

Wanchese of the Secotans then moved forward to face Ahanu, who knew what would come next and only offered his adversary a smile. He would not dishonor himself nor his tribe with so much as a sound as the sharp-edged shells cut into his skin and Wanchese flayed Ahanu’s limbs to the bone, then disemboweled him, tossing his viscera into the fire.

Manteo ran before it was over. He did not witness Ahanu’s final moments, the serenity passing over his face as his body went slack or the euphoric and ecstatic chants of the Secotans. He ran all the way back to the bear den, bramble thorns tearing at his face and neck as he streaked the game trails and leapt the downfall. When his father caught up with him there was almost no light left in the woodland and Manteo sat against a tree, crying. Blood ran anew from his wound and his father wrapped it once more, packing the puncture with fresh herbs.

Finally Manteo spoke. “I will hunt down and kill this Secotan warrior, this Wanchese.”

Matwau sat against the tree next to Manteo. Owls hooted from their roosts in the copse and the night animals skittered across the forest floor.

“These things are hard to understand, Manteo. This I know. But Ahanu’s death was good, and we must honor it.” Matwau let his words trail away into the night. He waited until Manteo stopped crying.

“This is the way things always have been, the way things always will be. Our ways are as old as time and they must be obeyed. If you must take revenge, you must do so with honor, in a time of warfare as now, with a properly captured prisoner. If you do not heed the rules, you dishonor the memory of Ahanu and you will offend our ancestor’s spirits. You must take an oath with me now—sealing your promise that you understand all that I have said.”

Manteo understood. An oath between Croatoan warriors was lifelong and inviolate; to break such an oath brought shame worse than a cowardly death. He placed one hand on his heart, and the other he held upward toward the sky, to the moon glowing through a gap in the treetops. His father did the same, one hand on his heart and the other aloft, coming together finally with Manteo’s, their palms touching, their fingers interlacing.

Manteo roused from the bed again, shuddering himself awake. He lifted his shirt and reached down to his side just above his hip, felt the cleft of the scar where the arrow hand entered, and behind, where it exited. Then he felt again the bandages about his wounds. He knew that he would have more scars soon.

He left the room and went in search of Raleigh.

Thomas Harriot

Chapter Seven

It was just on midnight as Raleigh and Manteo entered the Black Swan, a boisterous tavern on Maid Lane. The air inside was tight and reeked of spilled ale and sweat and piss. Corner lanterns flickered, casting a dull orange hue along the dark walls, and Raleigh pushed through the brawling crowd, past busy dice and card tables, hauling Mateo along. At some of the tables buxom whores sat beside the dice-playing gallants, the bawds’ breasts fully exposed, spilling out of their bodice-fronts and held aloft by tightly cinched laces.  

Raleigh navigated to an empty corner table against the far wall  where he could drink and watch the patrons in their levity and depravity. 

“Plenty of cut-purses and cony-catchers here,” Raleigh said as he produced his coin purse, looking suspiciously around him, “one can never be too careful.” With that, he waved over the tavern keeper. At the far corner of the room a trio of musicians played on a pipe, a flute, and a fiddle, their shrill and jangly notes accompanied by the foot stomping of patrons dancing on the main floor. 

“Ah,” mused Raleigh, leaning back against the cold stone wall and eyeing the minstrels and the scurrilous throng dancing before them, “the sounds and sights of sin.” It was a far cry from court music, to be sure, but Raleigh relished the cacophonic pulse, the raw energy it elicited, and the illicit behavior the music and drinking produced. 

The tavern-keeper arrived at the table. “Evening, Sir,” he said, bowing his head slightly. “Your usual?” 

“Yes, make it two—no, three of your best clarets, and I’ll pay in advance for three more. I’m expecting a guest soon.” He pressed a stack of shilling coins into the tavern-keeper’s palm and gave him a knowing glance. The keeper came back shortly, the claret brimming the tops of four heavy pewter cups. 

Raleigh clasped both hands around the middle of his cup so as not to spill, and carried it to his mouth, downing the scarlet beverage and frowning at the wine’s inferiority. He urged Manteo to follow suit. Manteo started toward his cup, then paused. 

“You know I prefer not to drink.” 

“Yes, yes. But you hardly touched my private reserve tonight, and we are celebrating. Come now, up with it, tipple it back then.” 

Manteo acquiesced, though in truth he had consumed at least three goblets of wine at dinner. He palmed the cup of claret.  “Celebrating?” he asked before drinking. 

“Your return home soon, Manteo. As discussed. You will go on the next ships in a month’s time, with John White and the other colonists I have told you about. It’s all arranged. There will be more than one hundred of you, all told.” 

“And Eleanor Dare as well? She’ll be with John White?” asked Manteo. 

“Yes, certainly. Eleanor and her husband Ananias will accompany White.”

Manteo nodded as he tilted his head back and let the liquid pour down his throat. It tasted earthy and tart and made him shudder.

“I’ll have the tapster add some sugar and rosewater to the next round,” said Raleigh. “This batch lacks for sweetness.” 

“Ha, look there … speaking of sugar and sweetness. There she is now. I brought you here as I’ve been very much desirous that you meet someone.” 

Manteo looked across the room to see a well-dressed woman emanating from a darkened hallway. She glided across the tavern, her path on the periphery of the dance floor unimpeded by the rowdy dancers, her gait languorous and fluid, as if she floated above the floor. No one else in the room seemed to notice her presence as she passed through, and then suddenly she was before them. 

Raleigh stood and swung his heavy vermillion cloak from his midriff, revealing his rich satin linings, and his sword buckled and sheathed in the scabbard. He doffed his feathered hat. He kissed his own right hand at a distance, bowed, and waited as the woman made a half-curtsey, then turned slightly to the side and smoothed the ruffles of her dress with her palms. Manteo watched, waiting for Raleigh to offer that they rise and go through the greeting motions they had learned as part of their etiquette instruction, though Manteo doubted the necessity of the formality in such a rude and bawdy establishment. Probably Raleigh was simply showing off. 

“Manteo,” said Raleigh at length, with a grand gesture of his hand, “I present to you lady Constance de Beverley.” He pulled a chair for her and she sat with them just as the next round of claret arrived. Raleigh slid a cup from the previous round her way. 

“Here you are, my mistress Constance. You’d best catch up; you’re quite behind.” 

She pursed her thick red lips into an impish smile and drank with a calm delicacy, her elongated white fingers curling around the cup. As she finished the first and began the second, Manteo noticed her fingernails, which were even longer than Raleigh’s, hers the length of small bone knives, and they shone iridescent and sharp as seashells in the table’s candle glow. Her dress seemed different from those Manteo knew at court and those worn by the ladies visiting Durham House, less modest and more revealing, lacking the high neck frill. Manteo gazed on her, drawn in and beguiled by her neck, and below, too, the skin of her throat and high bosom pale, almost translucent and spidered with blue veins. But her high cheeks bloomed pink-red and flushed rosy, as if long chaffed by the wind, and her thick red hair was pinned behind and netted with a threaded silk snood. Her eyes, lurid and vibrant grey-blue as the sea, bored right through Manteo as their glances met for a moment. Manteo looked away. 

Constance de Beverley laughed, husky and resonant. 

Raleigh broke the spell. “Lady de Beverley and I have been dear friends—associates really—for many years. We met at Whitby Abbey, back when she was still a nun. Seems another lifetime ago.” 

Manteo saw an opportunity to flatter. “How can that be?” he offered, “for the lady appears so young.” 

Raleigh grinned knowingly. “Yes, she does. The North Yorkshire air, perhaps—where she is from. But looks sometimes deceive, I assure you. Constance de Beverley is a good deal older than she seems.” 

“Well,” said Constance, waving dismissively at Raleigh, “I’ll take Manteo’s compliment, thank you.” Then she added, abruptly, “Enough idle chatter.  Shall we dance?” 

She stood and offered her hand toward Manteo. It was backward, Manteo knew; here in England the man was supposed to ask the woman. But in the tavern none of the rules of etiquette or protocol Raleigh and Harriot had taught him seemed to apply, so he rose and followed her lead.  She pulled him out onto the floor and entwined her cold hands tightly into his as she led him in swirling circles across the serried dance floor. Other men, gallants and commoners alike, clasped half-clad strumpets in their arms and spun and sashayed to the music, singing and stomping, and Manteo felt the floorboards bounce and sway. He dizzied as Constance twirled him about, bumping first into the tavern counter and then careening into a table of men at cards. When the song ended Constance led Manteo back to their table. 

The claret continued to appear as if conjured by the snap of Raleigh’s long fingers. He and the lady quaffed the cups like seasoned tipplers, while Manteo held his hand up, trying to beg off. But Raleigh would have none of it, nearly forcing a full flagon of claret down him, showing him how to hold the jug by its circle ring with his middle finger, cradling it with his forearm, and drinking from its mouth by tipping it up with his elbow.  

The hours drenched by in this way until Manteo, returning from relieving himself outside, bumped into a harlot at the edge of the dance floor. Now quite drunk, Manteo hauled the prostitute over to the table. She spoke to Raleigh. 

“I’m bought and paid for, Sir,” she said, almost apologetically, “but if you wish to raise the price I’ll tup the dark fella…” 

A puffy, inebriated would-be gallant stomped over, fists out and nostrils flaring. “I’ll kill the black bastard,” he yelled. Manteo turned slowly to face him, legs apart and arms raised, standing at ready. 

“You could try,” Raleigh said casually from his chair, then added with a laugh, “Though in truth he is red, not black.” He leaned back, his boots now up on the table. “But I wager fifty pounds on Manteo here. Let’s see… he with his bare hands and you with your dagger. Yes, that’s fair. Manteo is a warrior. He has spent his whole life fighting harder men than you. But it would make for interesting sport. If you’re game, man, have out with your money!” 

The man carefully surveyed Manteo, whose physique, even draped by his fancy garments, appeared strong and lean and battle-hardened. The man stared at Raleigh for a time and then seemed to recognize him. His bravado shriveled as he thought better of taking a drubbing—or worse yet, dying—over a bawd, paid for or not.

“Have the weedy strumpet then,” he fumed. “I’ll get another. But someone owes me twenty shillings.” 

Raleigh laughed aloud and tossed a stack of coins onto the floor at the man’s feet. “For your troubles,” he chuckled as the man bent awkwardly to retrieve the coinage from the soiled floor. “I’ll double the fees for hers.” 

Then he rose and commanded, “Come then ladies and lad. To the back room.” 

Raleigh and Constance de Beverley led the way past the tavern bar and through a low darkened doorway that turned sharply into a long, narrow hallway, poorly lit. Beyond the hallway they entered a low-ceilinged and even darker corridor, like a mine tunnel, lighted only by intermittent wall candles whose melting wax oozed downward and solidified, suspended like strange stalactites. Their footfalls echoed as they went.  

“Here we are,” said Raleigh, shoving open a heavy slatted door and allowing everyone to enter. He took their cloaks and hung them on some pegs. The door creaked shut behind them. Raleigh turned the lock closed and pocketed the key.

The room was small and spare, just two beds and a rude four-legged night table, with a chamber pot at the foot of each bed. A lantern blazed on the night table and another hung on the back wall, also aflame. A window, with curtains pulled open, faced the street.

Constance de Beverly guided Manteo to the nearest bed, sitting him down and propping him against the headboard. She reclined beside him, her taffeta gown settling with a shuffle. She ran her sharp fingernails up and along his thigh and he straightened, rousing from his boozy stupor. With her other hand she scratched lightly at his neck and the back of his head, then started kissing gently about his ear, her breath ticklish and cooling, almost liquid. Manteo opened his eyes and gazed about the dim room, turning to look at Constance de Beverley. She let her hair spill down and began unlacing her silken bodice. Manteo struggled out of his shirt. 

The prostitute pulled Raleigh to the other bed, shrugging from her shoulder straps as she went and hiking her dress up around her waist. Raleigh lay back on the mattress and let her work him out of his leggings. She was fast and efficient, and soon climbed atop Raleigh and rode him, the rickety bed legs thumping as she bounced. After a while Raleigh groaned and the whore stopped bucking. Raleigh breathed hard for a minute, then laughed. The whore dismounted and stood up. “You want more?” the bawd asked Raleigh. 

“Another round, yes. Go to the end of the bed and face the wall.” 

Raleigh moved quickly behind her. There was the ruffling of her skirts, her peals of laughter. Music and raucous voices still rang from the main room, tavern clamor trailing down the corridor. The metallic zing of a sword unsheathed from its scabbard. 

Manteo came alert now. He glimpsed Raleigh, his back to him, his breeches down around his ankles. Then as Manteo tried to sit up there was Constance de Beverley, hovering naked before him like an apparition, bone white and luminescent, her flowing hair tumbling over her shoulders, over her breasts. He reached to feel the softness of her hip curves, his hands black against her gleaming whiteness. He startled when he touched her now. Her skin was icy cold, like the crystallizing edges of a frozen river. She pressed herself against him and though he wanted to resist, he could not. She eased him backwards and he acquiesced, releasing, feeling her freezing lips and teeth play across his stomach, his sides, along the insides of his bare arms. She lay herself beside him, draping one leg over his. He shuddered as he closed his eyes. He felt a rush of blood in his loins at her force against him, her form a weighted aura bearing all around and over him, hypnotic. His heart thrummed in his chest. 

Manteo heard a hiss, then a squeal coming from the corner, coming from the whore. She yelped, a cry not of passion but of pain, and Manteo strained to look but Constance de Beverley bestrode him, her strong frigid hands pinning him down, her body blocking his view. The whore screamed, then fell silent. Manteo heard her slump down on the floor, followed by a sucking sound where she fell, like an animal lapping, like a deer watering.

A searing pain caught Manteo at the inside of his elbows, a keen-edged slitting sensation as Constance de Beverley severed his veins with her razor-sharp thumbnails. Manteo rose halfway, almost sitting, and looked into her eyes. They were wide as an owl’s, fiery and incandescent, piercing right through him from some primeval netherworld. 

He tried to fight against her but a warm wetness pooled at his elbows and his strength seeped from his arms. His breathing slowed and he fell back and could only watch as if a spectator at bear-baiting as she slashed both of his wrists in short flicks with her fingernails. The pain shot deep and white-hot.  

The Croatoan warrior would not cry out, not even as blood surged from him in a torrent onto the coarse beddings. Constance de Beverley’s head descended and her mouth opened wide and she latched onto him, sucking at one wrist in cavernous gulps, as if she were trying to draw venom from a snakebite wound. Manteo sensed the blood leaving him, but he no longer endured pain, just a weak dreamy numbness in his limbs. His head slumped to the side and Constance began supping at the open gash in the crook of his arm. 

For a long time Manteo drifted in and out of consciousness. He could feel Constance de Beverley lipping the cuts at his inner elbows and wrists. Her touch grew warmer now, like heat from a cookfire, pulsing, almost soothing. Moonlight filtered through the window and as he looked up, Raleigh hovered over him. His moustache was blood-dampened, his lips and chin covered and dripping, his entire face enshrouded in a reddish caul. Manteo cringed as Raleigh’s hand extended, index finger erect, and flashed like a dagger at his groin, slashing the artery so that Manteo spouted a geyser of hot blood. Manteo exhaled with a long sigh as Raleigh lowered himself and then the Queen’s favored knight was upon him, licking and drinking of him.  As the sanguine fluid escaped his body Manteo felt something like ecstatic release, a relinquishing, a rush of pleasurable delirium. Then his vision began to blur and to fade.  

At last Manteo’s eyes fluttered shut, though he fought to remain awake, to remain alive. Finally there was only the faint sound of fiddle music in the air and the licking squelch of tongues on flesh, of throat-filled guzzling and swallowing, and all around the room lingered the taut and dangerous stillness of predators on a fresh kill.

II

April, 1587—Durham House on the Thames, London, England—

Four Months Before

Chapter Six

Sir Walter Raleigh appeared animated, even giddy, in his resplendent floor-length vermillion cloak. Leaning against an enormous marble pillar, he hoisted his silver wine goblet high in the air at meal’s end, sloshing the burgundy vintage on the great dining hall table in his wine-soaked ebullience. Bright ruby jewels flashed from his fingers and his ears. 

“Here, here! Raise your goblets to Manteo, our converted savage.” With that, he brought the silver vessel to his mouth and quaffed the wine, droplets soaking the upturned feline whiskers of his auburn mustache and dribbling down his pointy beard. He wiped his face with his sleeve frill, leaned back, and belched loudly, then laughed aloud. The assembled courtiers and ladies hoisted their chalices, toasting the two foreign visitors seated on either side of Raleigh and drinking of his French wine stock. As they clapped their cups back down on the oaken table, servants scurried to refill them and the carousing continued. 

Sir Walter Raleigh’s revelry was contagious, and bellowing laughter filled the great banquet hall of Durham House, his mansion on the Thames. The opulent palace, situated on a sweeping curve of the river and just off the newly-paved Strand, had been gifted to him by Queen Elizabeth. He was, at present, her favored courtier, the darling of the so-called “English Cleopatra.” Her fondness for him had won him much, including a recent knighting, an extensive wine monopoly, a fleet of sailing ships, multiple houses and palaces, and continued license to conduct his privateering and colonizing venture in Virginia. The Queen teased and jested with him, affectionately calling him “Water” to mimic his West Country brogue. Her public attentions made him a man at once revered and reviled by the other courtiers and would-be favorites. 

So Raleigh, a man possessing ferocious and insatiable appetites, drank his good fortune with his close friends and associates. The meal, arranged to honor the visiting Algonquian Manteo, was elaborate. In the center of the table remained carriage-wheel sized silver platters heaped with uneaten meats and fowl, including a tender young Suffolk pig, a whole wild boar, dozens of delicate squab, a brace of herons, roasted tenderloin of roe deer and a sturgeon steamed with parsley and vinegar. By now the revelers were into the fourth flagon of Raleigh’s prized burgundy. 

Raleigh leaned forward, raising aloft yet another full glass and nodding toward his compatriot Thomas Harriot, seated next to Manteo. 

“And last, madames et monsieurs,” slurred Raleigh, affecting his excellent French accent, “we honor the linguistic prowess and persistence of good Tom Harriot, who took Manteo from the wilderness and placed him under his wing. With his sage guidance and patriarchal tutelage, Manteo has learned to fly.” 

Another round of “here heres” erupted despite Raleigh’s muddled metaphor, and Harriot, a quiet man of letters and science, blushed. Slight and sloop-shouldered, Harriot wore the black suit of Elizabethan academics. He was Raleigh’s chief astronomer, mathematician, cartographer-navigator and physician. He was also a gifted linguist who for the last two years had been charged with teaching English to the native—taken from his home in coastal Virginia after a reconnaissance expedition dispatched by Raleigh in 1585. During this tutorship, Harriot had learned a great deal of the Algonquian language and could now speak with Manteo in his own tongue. He produced a small box from a leather satchel at his side, sliding the box onto the table. 

“I offer that we have a smoke, from some of Virginia Britannia’s finest—these leaves come from quite near Manteo’s home. They call it …what’s the word, Manteo?”

Manteo had been quiet throughout dinner, finding such affairs tedious and wasteful—the remaining food, sitting untouched, could feed their villages for a week. Though his English was now fluent, he preferred speaking it in one-on-one situations, and had grown weary of public displays such as this one. Numerous times during the last two years Raleigh had brought him to the nearby Palace of Whitehall to be observed by the Queen and her court, and these appearances made him feel trapped, like an animal penned for slaughter. Worse, of late Sir Walter had taken to dressing Manteo after his own extravagant style, with long velveteen cloaks and frilly wheel-ruffs at the neck, edged with lace. Manteo wore the bejeweled suits begrudgingly at feasts and banquets, changing happily out of them and into simpler clothes for daily wear. But at Harriot’s direct inquiry, about a plant important to his people, Manteo leaned forward and answered with modest precision. 

“We call the plant uppowoc.” 

“Ah, yes, sotweed!” enjoined Raleigh. “The miracle plant. Good fellow Drake brought me some on one of his returns from our Virginia—the first such, I understand, introduced to England. The Spaniards call it tobacco.” 

Harriot opened the box of dried leaves and passed them around the table for the guests to see. “Smell deeply of them,” he advised. When the box came back around he took out small clay pipe. He balled a pinch of the leaves between his thumb and finger and filled the bowl, tamping it down with his thumb. The guests looked on in stupefied amazement, having never seen such a device, or such an odiferous plant, before. 

“The Indians partake of it …” Harriot began, then stopped himself. “Why don’t you tell them, Manteo?”

Manteo obliged. “Uppowok is smoked in pipes, at feasts, celebrations, after important meals.” 

“Here then,” said Harriot to Raleigh. Slide that candle over and I shall show you how it is done, how one ‘drinks’ tobacco.” 

Harriot put the pipe in his mouth and angled the burning candle flame to the bowl, puffing vigorously. The pungent leaves ignited as he huffed. He inhaled deeply, fanning at the bowl with his free hand, and then nosing hungrily at the smoke escaping from the bowl. After holding the draw in for a moment, he exhaled a white cloud. There was spontaneous applause. He handed the pipe to Raleigh, encouraging him and all the others to try it. 

“Nicotiana tabacum,” instructed Harriot as the pipe went around, “highly medicinal. The Indians use it for purging, to cure gross humors, and to open the pores and passages of the body. I dare say with the smoking of it, Manteo and his people are quite healthier than we are in England.” 

Manteo showed one of the guests his technique, holding the smoke in for a very long time before blowing it out in a thin plume. 

“Our people offer uppowok as a gift of peace,” he said at last, choosing his words carefully. “We give it to newcomers, or visitors we do not yet know.” He paused, then added, “Or people we do not trust.” 

There was an uneasy silence. Manteo regarded Raleigh keenly.

“Surely you trust us,” Raleigh said finally, breaking the tension, raising his eyebrows and smiling. But Manteo was finished talking. The pipe went round until everyone had given the newfangled tobacco a try, some coughing violently. By tomorrow the talk of its use and powers would be circulating around the upper echelons of London’s elite. 

Sir Walter Raleigh stood at last and announced the banquet at end, promising a final, even larger affair on the eve of his colonizing ships setting sail for America. Servants courteously ushered the guests out, calling for carriages and wherry boats to take them to their nearby houses along the Strand and the river Thames. In a short time the massive dining hall had cleared out, with only the residents Raleigh, Harriot, and Manteo remaining. 

“Well then, gents,” Raleigh said as the enormous parlor door slammed shut, “how about a nightcap?” Raleigh teetered a bit as he arose, then righted himself against the high back of a chair and stood twirling his moustache upward, his inordinately long thumb and finger nails—long as claws—clicking together with each twist. 

Harriot yawned. At just twenty-five years of age, Thomas Harriot was a man of enormous discipline and energy, his work and achievements the result of long, exhausting days of study. He typically eschewed Raleigh’s requests for all-night debauchery. On this night Harriot was able to escape with little argument, reminding Raleigh that he needed to be fresh in the morning to work on the navigational maps of the treacherous outer banks and Virginia coastline, where Raleigh’s own ships would soon be heading. It was enough to allow Harriot leave to retire. 

Raleigh cuffed Manteo affectionately on both shoulders and then slung his long arm around his waist, “Looks like it is just me and my brute. Across the river to the stews of Southwark!” Raleigh roared, and out into the night they staggered. 

Southwark—or Bankside—the so-called “suburbs of sin, ” was Raleigh’s favored late night haunt. They made the short walk beyond the gatehouse and the courtyard, then veered for the graveled riverside, where Raleigh hailed a wherryman to ferry them across the Thames. They climbed aboard the wherry and sat on embroidered cushions listening to the rush of the river against the bow, watching lantern lights illuminating from Southwark like the glowing eyes of nocturnal animals. Manteo held his face against a light breeze as the wherryman rowed, and remembered his first visit to Bankside. 

Raleigh had taken Manteo across one day for some gaming and entertainment, in his words some “delightful blood sport.” They had ridden a coach down Fleet Street to Cheapside, then walked across London Bridge and proceeded afoot up squalid High Street, Manteo flinching as ragged beggars tugged at his cloak. Raleigh tossed pence coins into the dirty street to appease them, or shooed them away by brandishing his sword. They shouldered through crowded and fetid lanes, the muddied roadway squishing underfoot. Jugglers, ventriloquists and conjurers worked in shadowed alleyways. Hawkers cried out their cures for chilblains and sciatica, and freshwater porters lurched ponderously along, burdened beneath their yokes and sloshing buckets. 

Alongside the loathsome roadway men squatted and shat in plain view while others pissed against shop walls, and the gutters ran afoul with human ordure. Manteo remembered bathing in the clear-running rivers of his home, thought of purging in the cleansing sweathouse, the steam sweet smelling, laced with bear oil and mashed angelica root. Here, pushing through the rank streets strewn with refuse hurled from the house-windows above, Manteo had to hold a kerchief to his nose and mouth to keep from retching. 

Raleigh had led Manteo to the Bear Garden, a blood-sports amphitheater built for bull and bear-baiting events. That day nearly a thousand clamorous Londoners turned out, leaning over the railings of the viewing balconies as a half-dozen dog handlers healed their fighting mastiffs across the sandy ring to the enormous black bear tethered by its hind leg to a metal stake at center ring.  The bear was chained also to an iron collar about its neck, confining it to a diameter of some thirty feet. 

At the entertainment master’s cue, the handlers, holding their snarling mastiffs by the ears, turned them loose. The hounds sprinted to attack the bear, which reared and roared and clawed at the onrush of vicious, heavily muscled dogs. The center of the ring became a dust-cloud of yelp-snarl and yip and roar, and soon the dog’s hides glistened with blood. Some injured animals limped pitiful and limbless back to their masters even as others fought on, circling behind and biting, tearing at the bear’s flanks and rear legs. The crowd erupted at each new attack. 

Manteo had watched in amazed horror. At home the bear was respected and revered, a worthy adversary hunted as part of a young warrior’s rite of passage, the meat a delicacy spit-roasted and shared by all tribal members in deferential thanks to the animal for giving its life so that the tribe might survive. This bear—enchained and immobile—was being torn apart, the dogs ripping chunks of fur and flesh with flashing teeth, their mouths drooling bloody foam. 

After an hour of struggle the bear fell on its forelegs and bayed in agony as two fresh mastiffs leaped to its face, chomping down in a death hold, hanging from the bear’s nose and cheeks until the giant black animal collapsed in exhaustion and the remaining dogs slashed at the bear’s throat, blood pouring viscous down its neck and chest. Cheers went round the Bear Garden, and Raleigh, his hands shaking with blood lust, claimed a sack of shillings from a nobleman against whom he had wagered. Manteo had turned away long before the end.

In writing narrative nonfiction adventure history, one of the elements of research that is important to me is what I call "immersion research," which is active on-the-ground travel of the places and people one is hoping to understand and even conjure through language. Certainly, the hard academic book and library and archive and primary research is crucial, but if a writer wishes to recreate landscape, flora, and fauna from some 500 years ago, I believe it's important to travel the lands and rivers and seas of the people you are writing about (even though I understand full well that often the indigenous flora, fauna, and even people have in many cases been eradicated or replaced by marauding exotics). Such is the nature of history. 

In June of 2006, while researching the book CONQUISTADOR, I decided to follow the route of Cortes and his conquistadors from the east coast of Mexico, near where they landed in the spring of 1519 at Vera Cruz, up through the steaming jungles of the tierra caliente, over smoldering mountains and deep-fissured tablelands, and eventually make my way down into the Valley of Mexico, to the ruins of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City) where Cortes would finally meet the emperor Montezuma. I traveled by bus and by car and also by foot, hiking in the mountains and hoping to feel first hand the heat and humidity of the sultry coastal jungle, the dry parchment of the central badlands, the thin air of the high mountains. 

On the eastern coast I visited the ruins of the temple pyramids at Cempoala, a vitally important place for Cortes as the Cempoalans, part of the Totanac Federation, were reluctant tributaries of the Aztecs and among Cortes’s first native allies. I crossed the Rio Antigua on a small bridge and looked down the muddy river toward the Gulf of Mexico just a few miles away, imagining Spanish ships anchored there, their banners snapping in the wind. Cortes and his cavalry crossed this same river by swimming their horses, the footsoldiers forded it on rafts fashioned from branches and tree trunks. Once ashore, they hacked through the dense and crowded palm foliage, rich and green as jadestone, on their way to Cempoala. 

I headed through the quiet river town of Antigua towards the ruins, remembering the first reports of Cortes’s excited scouts: 

“One returned, breathless and wide-eyed, saying that he had seen their gleaming temples from afar, and they were burnished with silver. Indeed, he believed their worship temples to be made of pure silver!”

This scout was later humiliated, and Cortes disappointed, when they discovered that the silver was merely an optical illusion—the gleam was the bright midday sun reflected off the freshly whitewashed stones. 

Just as they were that spring day in 1519, many of the houses in the little town of Antigua were still painted in yellow, blue, red, and green, the roofs tidy, the walls cleanly scrubbed with lime. I arrived at the entrance to the ruins, paid a small fee and entered the grounds, flanked by great, swaying palms. Though it was early, maybe ten in the morning, I was a bit surprised to find myself completely alone in this sacred place. Before me, a series of pyramids had been erected with order and design across an expansive, flat plain and ritual plaza. I strode up to a central ring of stones, used for religious and ceremonial “gladiator battles” in which a rival prisoner would fight numerous men, and if victorious, would win his own life and avoid, at least for a time, ritual sacrifice at the nearby temple. 

I walked over and slowly climbed the steps of the main temple, a slight chill and twitch contracting my neck muscles as I recalled from the chronicles Cortes’s first encounter with this very temple. He had strode to the top and found a scene that shocked his zealous Christian sensibilities:

“Here were freshly sacrificed young boys, blood still pooling from their viscera. The walls of the altar were bespattered with blood, and the victims’ hearts were set out on plates. In the center were large, square sacrificial stones and sharp obsidian blades glistening with blood. There were dismembered torsos, the arms and legs severed from them cleanly…”

I stood on the top of the pyramid for a while, quietly pondering these images and scenes, conjuring the clamor from the ecstatic throng below, the low, mournful blowing of conch shells, the cacophony of drums and flutes and chanting. 

I finished my tour of the ruins and headed to the riverside café Las Mariscos Delicias for a late morning seafood breakfast of prawns and octopus and stuffed soft-shell crab. 

Mexico's magnificence and scale were transformative. I followed the conquerors’ route by bus up into the thickly wooded mountains near Jalapa, stopping for a few hours to visit the University of Vera Cruz’s Museum of Anthropology, memorable for its fluid design and collection of giant Olmec heads, so large and grand and mesmerizing as to be inconceivable. 

Then it was up through more mountains, winding through the scrubby sierra and cresting finally onto the sprawling hardpan plateau. I leaned against my window like an excited child, looking for the same volcanoes that Cortes and his men had seen and hardly believed, the enormous Popocatepetl (now shortened to Popo, it  means The Hill that Smokes), its conical dome smoldering, spewing cinder ash and steam high into the sky. 

Finally there it was, a volcano nearly 20,000 feet high looming in the distance. I squinted and blinked and readjusted my vision, trying to gain some scope, more scale or perspective. The cone of its summit hovered before me like a mirage, and I couldn’t believe it was real--it appeared Photoshopped against the skyline before me, but as the bus rumbled along for an hour, then another, I realize that the volcano had been more than 100 miles away when I first gazed on it.  

I staged in Cholula for a few days, famous now (not, as many gringos erroneously believe, for the excellent hot sauce) for having practically as many churches as there are days in the year, and important during the conquest as the site of Cortes’s brutal and controversial massacre of thousands of unarmed Cholulans which took place during Cortes's first visit there in this ancient city of religious pilgrimage. I stayed in a villa located literally at the steps of one of the most important archeological sites in all of Mexico. In 1519 Cholula boasted a great pyramid honoring Quetzalcoatl, with 120 steps leading to the summit of the structure, said to be the largest free-standing man made structure in the world, twice as long as the great Egyptian pyramid of Cheops. The pyramid was razed by the Spaniards and is now topped with a Spanish remnant, the impressive (but tragic, from the indigenous perspective) Church of Nuestra Senora de Los Remidios, and on most days you can see (as the Spaniards certainly did) Popo in the distance. For a nominal fee and for those not overly claustrophobic, you can explore the well-maintained and well-lit five miles of catacombs and tunnels that are literally in the bowels of this ancient pyramid. I am claustrophobic, but in the name of research I forced myself inside and into the dank labyrinth, and though I broke into the occasional panicked flop-sweat, the hour-long underground tour was worth my heart-clenching anxiety. 

In Cholula I was fortunate to befriend a local business owner named Rodrigo Moctezuma (yes, a distant relative of the emperor who shared his name). Rodrigo owns a stylish little jazz bar named Jazzatlan, and in the evenings I would sit and eat grilled nopales cactus and drink wine with Rodrigo and his friends and listen to local bands and watch art films projected onto the stucco wall. We talked of Mexican history, and of the conquest, and I told Rodrigo of the book I was writing and of my desire to see the noted Pass of Cortes, the high mountain pass where Cortes and his men first beheld the magnificent Tenochtitlan far below in the Valley of Mexico. Rodrigo agreed to take me there in his 1974 VW bus, and the next day, with both of us a bit rough, he picked me up and we were off. 

We drove through farmlands and small towns and soon the road was no longer paved but gravel and then dirt and we rose up through scrub pine and brushy mountain flanks, heading for the slung saddle between the volcanoes Popo and Ixta.  Eventually the dirt road curved through deeper forest, across rivers and next to cooling waterfalls, and I could feel the altitude in my veins, in my throbbing head, nausea creeping over me. I remembered that Cortes had lost many of his appropriated native Totonac bearers on this mountainside, the early winter temperatures and heights too harsh for his coastal porters. The horses shivered through the nights, the Spaniards huddled in their armor before feeble fires. Even in June, when I was there, the nearly 12,000 foot pass was freezing, and I wore a fleece as we left the van at the Pass of Cortes sign and began hiking the narrow trails heading up to the pass proper, what amounted to a flinty game trail creased between jagged stone walls. 

Mist shrouded the mountaintops and only occasionally could I see the volcano arched above me, and then it would disappear again in the gauzy haze. The altitude had weakened me (as had, I must admit, the previous nights debauchery coupled with the early gurglings and rumblings of Montezuma’s famed and justifiable revenge) and I stopped, leaned against a rock, swayed back and forth slowly, held my belly while Rodrigo laughed at me. I asked him to point to where Tenochtitlan would be, the great city on the water, and he smiled knowingly, pointing just to our left, to the west. "There, look below the fog," he said. 

I could see the outlines of buildings dotting the valley, thousands of flecks visible those many miles below, and I closed my eyes as the mist rose and swirled around us. I tried to imagine what it might have looked like to the Spaniards seeing it for the first time, the miraculous city of some 200,000 people at the time among the most populated cities on earth, larger even than Paris or Peking.  I thought of the words left by chronicler Bernal Diaz: 

“And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and that straight level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and temples had buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, and it seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Some of our soldiers asked if this was not all a dream.”

A dream indeed. Cortes himself would refer to Tenochtitlan as “The City of Dreams,” exclaiming that it was without question “the most beautiful thing in the world.”

It was a beauty he coveted, a thing that he believed he must possess for God and crown and country. 

Cortes and his men were soon to arrive, and for the Aztecs, a nightmare was about to begin unfolding, a nightmare that had been foretold in a bad omen that appeared in the sky, came “like a flaming ear of corn or the blaze of daybreak, seeming to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky. There was great outcry and confusion. The people clapped their hands against their mouths; they were amazed and frightened and asked themselves what it could mean.”

The fog had now completely enveloped us, and when I opened my eyes the mirage of my imagined Tenochtitlan had vanished. 

Rodrigo looked away, then said, "Let's go.  It’s gone."

Manteo moved up the narrow game trail winding through the dense and brambly hardwoods, trotting toward his cavern. He had taken off the cumbersome English leather boots and now ran barefoot, coursing silently through his forest as stealthily as a wolf. Gone, too, were the English garments, and he went bare-skinned, wearing only a deerskin loincloth. His limbs felt lithe and taut, his muscles sinewy. Owl hoots echoed through the shadowy light as he stole along, their calls a comfort to Manteo, assuring him that he was close, that night was coming on. He was hungry, ravenous, and soon he would be feeding. 

Darkness shrouded the cavern entrance as he cut the last of the snaking switchbacks that lead to his secret cave. He stopped at the rock cleft and looked around, still and utterly silent, scanning with the eyes of a predator, making sure that no one followed him, that no one watched him. At last there was just the sound of his measured breathing and the audible pounding of blood in his temples. When his breathing calmed he knelt to pull aside the hawthorn foliage and slide away the large limestone slab he used as a doorway and cover, then he propped both hands on the sides of the hole and lowered himself down and into the narrow cavern entryway. From underneath the slab, Manteo slid the rock back nearly all the way into place, covering his entrance, leaving only enough of an opening for airflow. 

Manteo fingered the cool, moist limestone rock wall, feeling his way down the central corridor to the fire pit, the walls warming as he drew nearer. He was pleased to see the glowing embers still burning from last night’s fire, and he bent to the woodpile and placed a few lengths of dried red maple on the coals. The fire flared. He struck alight a torch bundle and held it toward the main cavern. 

Above him, suspended upside down from long peeled poles and from the  high ceiling of the cave, hung Manteo’s colony of blood-bats. 

Manteo lit a lantern and climbed the wooden ladder that rose towards the dozen blood-bats on the pole, the most recently fed of the colony. The others, those dangling by their long, sharp thumbs from the slick limestone ceiling, would need to feed tonight, for the blood-bats could not survive two nights without a meal. Later, Manteo would take the ceiling dwellers out, but for now, he ascended toward the pole, his own weak blood beating feverishly with longing, a lust like a thirst for salt, like the marrow-deep desire for a woman pulsing through his veins. 

At the top of the ladder he slid onto his seating perch and struck afire the oil lamp he kept there. It sputtered, then blazed, illuminating the string of squirrel-sized bats that writhed on their limb, shrugging their shoulders and fluttering their translucent wings. He was delighted by how docile and malleable they had become, how willing they were to share their blood meal, a survival trait the adults passed on to their young. 

Last night the bats on the pole had fed well. Manteo had crated twelve and carried them in a deer hide basket through the dark to Roanoke Colony, releasing them through the open windows of the Payne’s house, and afterwards the Nichols’. The bats crawled on all fours, scuffling like hairy winged crabs across the dirt floors and leaping onto the heads of the children, who slept soundly. The bats then fed in their way, piercing their sharp incisors into the meaty neck flesh, or behind the ear, or even at the temple where a rich vein pulsed near the surface. The bats’ teeth so sharp and the puncture so fast that the children felt nothing. At the flow of blood the bats lapped hungrily with their pointy tongues until they were engorged, their furry bellies distended with blood meal. Filled, the bats leapt and flew from their victims, their sonar and smell-sense guiding them in a silent, ground-hovering flight back to the cave. 

Manteo now regarded the tawny flying creatures, marveling at their slight perfection, their pointed upturned ears, their beastly elfin faces. He stroked the first along its back, calming it, then pulled it slowly from the pole, using his thumb and forefinger to disengage the toe-claw, which pierced the hardwood like a thorn. He palmed the bat, cradling it warmly, scratching gently the animal’s neck, then downy thorax. With the tip of a finger he teased the bat’s mouth, and as it parted slightly at his urging, he brought the bat’s face close to his, exhaling deeply into the tiny face and letting the blood-bat feel his warmth, his hot breath, his mouth-scent indicating that he was blood-begging.

Manteo closed his mouth around the face and lips of the bat and began to gently suckle, his cheeks hollowing, then bellowing, with each tender draw.  Instinctively the bat complied, releasing and regurgitating, the stored child-blood issuing forth through its small mouth and into Manteo’s in a crawly stream like mother’s milk nursed from a teat. Manteo arched his back against his perch wall, squeezing gently on the bat’s stomach with his thumb, milking it of its human blood meal. The taste was sweet and saline at once, raw and redolent as liver, like liquid flesh. He blood-nursed one and then another and another, each in turn a miracle, a life-giving vessel, their gifts of fluid heat settling at his core. 

Manteo, chief of the Croatoans, newly baptized and entitled Lord of Roanoke, had much to consider. He thought of John White out on the violent Atlantic heading back to England—there was no way of knowing when, or if, he would ever make it back; he imagined lovely Eleanor and tiny Virginia Dare bundled warmly in their house, Ananias rising to stoke the fire, doting over the family he believed was truly his—Manteo wondered how long it would be before Ananias realized, came to understand. 

Manteo longed for the touch of Eleanor’s skin, desired her in ways he knew that he should not, ways both carnal and revenant. He longed, too, for a family of his own but doubted that would ever be possible now. He thought about his people, how the elders, even his own father, believed he was of two worlds—a Croatoan on the inside and an Englishman on the outside—and they said that it was not possible for one to be both. But despite what he had told his father and Chogan, they could not understand who he really was, what he had become, that there was another world still he now inhabited, a sphere of bloodlust and base craving and the darkest dominions of the night. 

And he worried about Wanchese, who would come for them, would never stop unless he himself was stopped. 

Finally, licking the last of the blood from the corners of his mouth, Manteo conjured Raleigh, that enigmatic curiosity Sir Walter Raleigh, his patron and his blood brethren. He remembered the blood-oath he had made to Raleigh before leaving England and returning to his home here, this place Raleigh and the English called the New World, but which to Manteo seemed older than time itself. He had vowed to keep Raleigh’s colony alive, and this he now knew he must do. But not for Raleigh. No, Manteo would do it for himself, for Eleanor and the baby, and for his own people. At whatever cost, he must protect the English colony. 

Manteo’s hunger was temporarily satiated, though he desired to feed again tonight. Later, he would ascend the upper ladder to retrieve the ceiling bats, for tonight was their turn. He would take them to the village and release them on the colonists, one family at a time. Then, after returning to the cave for another blood-sharing, he would leave the cavern in the predawn light to attend to his leech ponds, taking live fish from the weirs in the tidal estuaries and the stream mouths and releasing them into the ponds as food, keeping his blood-letting leeches healthy and hungry, for very soon he would call upon them too. 

For tomorrow at dawn, as sun shimmered blood-red across the sand-swept outer banks, Manteo would assume his role as new governor of Roanoke Island Colony, and all their lives depended on him. 

###

The next day the storm abated, and by late afternoon a small flyboat appeared in the harbor, having successfully navigated the shallow shoals of the treacherous outer banks. John White’s ride back to England was at hand.

Governor White carried a satchel under his arm filled with his drawings and notes, and walked to the water’s edge. A rowboat had arrived coming to transport him to the flyboat, which would take him to the Fernandez’s ship Lion, still at anchor outside the banks.  There had scarcely been time for proper goodbyes, and Eleanor clung with one arm to her father, pleading for him to stay. Under her other arm she cradled Virginia, swaddled in the warm fur of a bearskin wrap, a gift from Manteo. Ananias waded out knee-deep into the water to steady the rowboat. The governor palmed Eleanor’s shoulders. 

“By next spring I will be back,” he assured her. “With all we need. A fleet of boats filled with goods—wine and cheese—and perhaps even cattle.” He wiped the tears from Eleanor’s eyes with his sleeve.

“And clothes for baby Virginia?” she asked. “Something from the London merchants?” 

“Yes,” White smiled, hugging his daughter close to him. “A smock or two from the Cheapside clothiers.” Then he pulled her in close to him, gathering her in a firm embrace. 

“Now listen to me carefully, Eleanor,” he said. “What I tell you now is vital, and all your lives may rely on it. In the main, I trust Manteo, as does Sir Walter, but he is not one of us; he is Croatoan, and his allegiances may revert to his own people. Watch him carefully. I have seen him acting strangely of late—he leaves the colony village at night. He says he goes to parlay with his people, but I have had Ananias follow him, and Manteo vanishes into the inland woods. Ananias loses his tracks among the game trails. We know not where he goes.” 

Eleanor pulled away.  

“But Manteo saved my life … Surely you would not spy on him?”

“I give him the benefit of the doubt. But mark me this: because of Indian attacks, or the untenable nature of Roanoke Island, the colony may be forced to move. You have boats enough to relocate some fifty miles up the main, toward the Bay of Chesapeake. If the colony does move, I’m entrusting you to leave for me a mark, here at Roanoke in the trees, and at the fort, carving letters and words that point to where you have gone so that I can find you. Promise me this!” 

Eleanor had begun to cry again, but she straightened and gathered herself.

“I promise,” she said, dabbing her tears with the edge of the bearskin wrap.

“And last, my darling. So that I know the condition and circumstances of your departure … If when you leave here you are imperiled, under siege or in danger, carve the mark of the Maltese cross as a sign of your distress. If your departure is not under duress, leave none. Can you remember?” 

“I swear on Virginia’s life, father.” 

The boatman called out that it was time to leave. Ananias waded over and carried White’s satchel to the boat and placed it aboard, then promised to look after the man’s family, adding that he would care for his personal things. There was no time to say more. Ananias helped John White aboard and pushed the rowboat from the sandy shoal, and he and Eleanor waved goodbye and watched the boat row away, growing smaller and smaller until it was subsumed by the horizon and the graying light of the inlets.  As they turned inland, they saw that the entire colony had gathered to watch his departure as well, knowing that their lives and fates likely lay in the hands of the man now leaving them. 

But Eleanor Dare understood that more immediately, their well-being and governance rested in the hands of the Croatoan Manteo—whom she noticed as she scanned the huddle of resolute and murmuring colonists—was conspicuously nowhere to be found.

A week later the English colonists convened for the christening of the newborn. They huddled at the bank of the sound, the wash of waves against the shore drowned out by gusts of squall winds surging over the dunes. Each member looked on, their faces divulging a mixture of joy and anxiety. Joy at the miraculous event, the birth itself: the first English child born in America. Anxiety that this demon Wanchese and the Secotans would attack again. 

There was also the grim state of their food stores, which already ran short, the bulk having been soaked and spoiled by seawater during their voyage. Winter would soon be upon them, and they had not enough to last. As they stood along the shore, two English ships lay at anchor safely beyond the banks, waiting to take a chosen delegate back to England to enlist support and return with more provisions, more weapons and more gunpowder. 

John White read from the Bible, his delicate fingers holding open the book as he spoke directly to the baby, then to Eleanor and Ananias. Eleanor remained pale from her blood loss, but had recovered enough of her strength to attend the christening. White gestured with his other hand toward the sound as wind drove salt spray through the air, dampening the newborn’s florid red cheeks with a glossy sheen and causing her to cry. During a lull between wind blasts White’s voice rose, high and tremulous, and he declared to all, “Because this child is the first Christian born in Virginia, she will be named Virginia, in honor of our Virgin Queen!” With that the governor made the sign of the cross over the girl and held her aloft like a gift to the colony, her face ruddy and roseate. She was living and squirming and crying proof that these planter families could not only survive, but could propagate and flourish in this strange and hostile and faraway place. 

Manteo edged closer to view the wailing, red-faced baby. He wondered if indeed this child Virginia Dare symbolized the fate of the colony. To him, she signified a great deal more. He pondered how he might possibly live to watch her grow up, wondered if he would ever be able to tell her the truth—about herself, about himself. 

After the christening, John White waved Manteo over as the colonists dispersed and returned to their duties within the fort. The two men stood close, looking out across the wind-cupped bay at the thin crescent of reef beyond. Pelicans glided past, scouring the bay for fish. Manteo could see the faint outline of a ship’s sails on the horizon. White scratched at the sandy soil with a long piece of driftwood, leaning in close to speak as swaying sawgrass snapped in the spiraling gale. 

“It has been decided,” he said, “I will return to England.” White motioned toward the water, toward the ship. “Simon Fernandez has granted me passage aboard the Lion, the moment the weather breaks and he can safely enter the inlet in the flyboat.” 

Manteo did not speak for a time, absorbing and understanding the information before responding.

“There are others who could go. As governor, surely you are needed here.” 

“True,” agreed White. “But I believe I can convince Sir Walter Raleigh of the severity of our needs here … and that my drawings of colony and Indian life here will garner the Queen’s support. It is our best chance.” 

Manteo reached out and steadied a wavering cattail, running his palm along its velvety brown spike. “So it is,” he said after a time. “So it must be.” 

John White looked directly into Manteo’s cavernous dark eyes and spoke seriously, his words careful and measured. “In my absence, I entrust you to run the colony as governor, Manteo. Your recent baptism into the Church of England and Raleigh’s installing you as Lord of Roanoke point to you as the right choice. You and you alone can serve as liaison between the colony and the tribes, and I would trust no one else to watch over and keep safe my daughter and granddaughter.” 

“Not even Ananias?” 

“He is a decent husband and father. But as governor, the final choice was mine. Ananias argued, but in the end he had to acquiesce. At any rate, before we set sail Raleigh insisted that if for any reason I were incapacitated or forced to return, you should command the colony. He was quite clear on the matter, and he is the privateer and our patron.” 

Manteo held his long arm up in the air, his leathery palm feeling the wind. 

“The storm will break soon, then return with fury. You should be ready to go. I will do as you and Sir Walter ask of me. Your family, I will protect them.” 

Governor White shook Manteo’s hand firmly, at once thanking him and binding him to their agreement.

“What about this thing, this Wanchese?” White asked as they strode from the beachhead. Manteo stopped at the path leading to the fortifications and the village. “Wanchese will come again. Next time there will be more like him. But I have ways to defend against him, against them.”

Map of Roanoke Island from drawing by Colonist John White, circa 1587

Chapter Two

Manteo paddled the dugout canoe all day across the waters of the Albemarle Sound, churned through his weakness and his hunger. He guided the canoe south, toward Croatoan Island, staying outside of arrow reach, though he was now well beyond Secotan range. He had sent a Croatoan runner ahead with word that he wished to meet secretly at the sweat lodge with his father Matwau and their tribal priest Chogan. Manteo was anxious to see his father again, though he worried about what he would think of him dressed in leather boots and English garb, a habit now after living amongst them in England for two full years. He felt ashamed for taking weeks to visit after all this time. There was much he needed to explain, and much that he could not. 

He paddled through spindly eelgrass as he entered the marsh at the head of the island, then pulled the dugout over the sand and left it on the dune. He found the inland trail along the stream that ran toward the sound and followed it until he came to the large clearing and saw the hummock outline of the sapling sweat lodge at streamside. He had sweated there many times since he was a boy. A snake of smoke spiraled upward from the lodge fire, and Manteo saw Matwau and Chogan standing beside the lodge. Matwau snapped lengths of wood and stacked them in a pile as Manteo approached. 

Matwau looked long at his son, then held out his hand and greeted him formally, as a fellow warrior and Croatoan and not with the embrace of a father.  Chogan waved his right hand high and looked directly into Manteo’s eyes, then lowered his head. Both of the elders wore loincloths, seashell necklaces, and their shoulders, arms, and chests were heavily tattooed with rings and ovals and bands. 

“You have traveled far since they took you, Manteo,” Matwau said finally. He paused, surveying his son. “Now it is good to see you come home at last.”

Manteo wondered how he must look to these wise men, wondered whether they could detect the changes in him.

“My journey has been long and strange,” Manteo answered after a time. “I have seen things I never would have imagined or believed. Some of great beauty, and some I wish I could forget, but can not.” 

Onshore winds hurtled from the sound and clouds built in great knuckled fists in the sky. Chogan went inside the lodge to add wood to the sweat fire. “The Secotans are attacking the colony,” Chogan said when he came out, “You might have sent for our help.” 

Manteo shook his head. “It is not the Croatoans fight,” he said. “Not yet.”

Matwau smiled. “A fight with a Secotan is always a Croatoan’s fight.” 

Manteo laughed, and then the three men were quiet together. 

Chogan, the priest, broke the silence. “You have called us here, Manteo, and we have come. What is so important that you have sought our counsel?” 

Manteo looked down to the stream, watched the water running clear and fresh toward the sea. He thought how best to say what he must tell them, what he must ask. 

“This colony of one hundred English,” Manteo said at last, “We must help them.”

“But Manteo,” Matwau interrupted. “They stole you from your home, your people, and for this they must be punished. As you asked by messenger, we have agreed not to attack, and to provide food for a time, but our winter supply is short—the harvest has been poor, the drought long. You are a Croatoan chief—you must return to lead your people and together we will kill them all.”

Manteo felt his knees yielding under him. His father’s words were right and he felt shamed before him. Things did look bad—he was living among and assisting the people who had taken him away. But his father had no way of knowing everything, how much had changed while he was gone. Manteo’s thoughts now came to him in English and his Algonquian words eluded him. He fought for the proper words in his native tongue.

“It is not so simple, father. The English guns are strong.  And … there is a 

child ….” Manteo stopped, realizing the importance of these words.  He looked into his father’s eyes, saw some remnant of himself there, a reflection of who he used to be. Then he said, “Your grandchild.” 

Chogan took a deep breath. He regarded Matwau and Manteo. 

“Then there is a woman, too?” asked Matwau. 

Manteo answered apace. “Yes, there is a woman.”

“We should sit,” Chogan said. They all did, cross-legged at the edge of the river. 

Manteo ran his palm along the cutbank. His hunger surged and he knew that he must return tonight to the colony. But there was more he needed to say. 

“These English and their steel guns, more are coming. Many more.” 

Chogan straightened, snapping a stick of kindling with his strong hands. “How many?” 

Manteo motioned toward the sky. He entwined his hands into the shapes of wings flapping, the sign for geese. “You know when geese pass through with the cold and snow? How their shapes fill the sky with blackness, and you cannot see the skies behind them there are so many?” 

The two men nodded. 

“More than that,” said Manteo. “More than can be counted.”

The men shook their head at what Manteo told them. They trusted him as one of their own, but what he said seemed inconceivable, like something from a bad vision. It was quiet then, only the surge of the stream and the wind moving through the red oaks. 

Manteo cleared his throat, his thirst rising.

“Chogan,” Manteo whispered now, at once ashamed and afraid, “I need you. Something terrible has befallen me.” 

Chogan’s wrinkled eyes widened. “I was there at your huskanaw ritual when you changed from boy to man, Manteo. I am here for you now. What has happened? Are you sick?” 

Manteo slumped to one side, dizzy with weakness and overcome by what he was about to say. Tears spilled down his face and he looked away from these men, these warriors. Manteo had cried in front of his father only once in his life—that terrible day long ago in Secotan country, during his initiation hunt. Now he wept before them both, his body shuddering as he sobbed. 

After a time he was composed. He struggled to remember the Algonquian words for “monster,” and “evil,” words he now knew in English. He could tell them his peoples’ expression for what Wanchese was, a monstrous flesh and blood-eating creature—but Manteo consumed only blood, not flesh. It was the nearest he could remember.

He brushed away his tears with his cloak sleeves and spoke. 

“Windigo,” Manteo said. “I have been turned Windigo. But I need blood, not flesh. The English word is ‘revenant.’”

Chogan stood, moving away repulsed and nodding with understanding. Matwau regarded his son for a time, then leaned to Manteo and embraced him, swaddling him in his arms.  

Manteo let his father hold him, then lifted his head at last from Matwau’s shoulder and spoke to Chogan. 

“Can you help me? Can you drive this evil from me?” 

Chogan gestured toward the sweat lodge. “I do not know if my medicine is strong enough,” he said, bending for his bundle of wisakon herbs and beginning to shake his gourd rattle, “But we must try.”

Secotan Ritual Torture Dance

Chapter One

The child was born that night. After the attack Manteo organized the burial of the six dead colonists in an enclosed cemetery between the fort and the bay shore, interring the corpses in the English way to appease White but returning in the night, using his own measures to ensure that they were dead and properly buried. When he came back to the Dare’s house at dawn the servant Agnes Wood—having midwifed through the night—stood beside Eleanor. Eleanor’s eyes were closed, her face drawn and pallid, and she barely breathed. Manteo reached to touch her sweltering skin, afraid that she would perish. 

“She bleeds,” Agnes told Manteo. 

“The baby?” asked Manteo. He could see the infant’s form cradled in Eleanor’s arms beneath the coverings. 

“No, she seems well enough,” replied Agnes. “But Eleanor, she bleeds even now. I know not what to do.” 

There was no time to paddle to Croatoan Island for the tribal priest-doctor versed in wisakon herbal medicines to help staunch Eleanor’s bleeding. He would need to do this himself. Manteo hurried to the woods, returning to the Dare’s small hut with a handful of white plantain and snakeroot, a bough of pine and some tufts of silkgrass. Ananias Dare and John White remained outside, pacing at the half-timbered house’s entrance, White drawing in the dirt with his boot toe. Knowing what he was about to encounter, Manteo suppressed his own urges and desires.  

“Ease her burden,” said Ananias as Manteo stooped to enter the building. 

The smell of blood permeated the warm room, sweet and ferrous in Manteo’s nostrils as he inhaled deep. The essence swirled onto his palate, settling like a yearning on his tongue, like the ancient craving for bear meat. He closed his eyes and concentrated, willing aside his appetite. He knew he must be strong, must stay focused on her needs and not his own. 

He sat in the dark corner of the low-ceilinged, fire-lit hut. Eleanor moaned, throaty and guttural as a wounded animal. The newborn nursed through her mother’s cumbrous, uneven breathing. Manteo placed the herbs in a wooden mortar and with a blunt pestle he pulverized the leaves and roots as he had seen his father do, mashing and then stirring them in short circular strokes. He squeezed pine pitch and resin into the mortar, chewed on stalks of silk grass and into the paste he spat, working the curd into a thick grume to use as a clotting poultice against her blood rush. 

Manteo rose with the mortar and approached the birth bed, asking Agnes to tend the fire and light the oil lamp on the mantel. The girl did as Manteo bid her, adding dried cedar to the fire. Manteo leaned close, lifting the stained sheets up and over Eleanor’s ankles, then her calves, rolling the beddings finally above her knees, which he splayed gently outward to expose her. Her white thighs were bespattered with blood and mucous afterbirth, and beneath her rested a bowl of pooling blood. 

“More light,” he whispered to Agnes, who held the lamp a safe distance away. To Eleanor, Manteo was firm. “Hold still for this.” 

Manteo steeled himself for what came next, for what he knew he must do. He cupped a handful of the thick herbal pomace and reached down between Eleanor’s legs, sliding his salved fingers into and up her birthing canal, spreading the paste deep within, along her channel walls even as she shuddered against his intrusion. He withdrew his hand, daubed another palm-full of the poultice, and caulked the unguent to the entrance of her womanhood. Then he waited, uneasily regarding the blood bowl. After a time her bloody effusion slowed to droplets, then ceased. When he felt certain the bleeding had stopped he draped a new bedsheet over her and spoke to both Eleanor and Agnes. 

“She must stay very still the rest of the day, and then again tonight,” he said. He pointed to the herbal mixture, instructing Agnes, “Daub her again every few hours, both inside and out. I will bring more wisakon herbs later, and dispose of her blood for you … to keep from attracting predators.” 

Manteo wiped the bloody mucous from his hands onto a gauzy towel near the bedside, then threw the soiled rag in the fire; it sparked luminescent scarlet. He turned from Agnes so that she would not see how his hands shook. Eleanor opened her eyes now. Her breathing calmed, she smiled slightly. 

“Manteo,” she said faintly. “Am I to die?”

Manteo shook his head, held his palm out to quiet her. 

“Not tonight. Now sleep.”

The infant had finished feeding and lay curled against Eleanor’s breast. In the firelight Manteo observed the dark reddish color of the newborn’s skin, the child’s visage cast over with a crimson caul. 

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” asked Eleanor, stroking the infant’s hands. Then, noting Manteo’s long gaze, she added, “Her deep color. Must be a birthmark. And her fingernails, how fully formed already.” 

Manteo put his hand on Eleanor’s knee. “You both need to rest. And you should eat later, for strength.” 

Manteo, walked outside and faced anxious Ananias Dare and John White. 

“What of her condition?” asked White. 

“She will strengthen,” Manteo said. “The baby is sound.”

The two colonists embraced one another, then nodded to Manteo, one each in turn shaking his hand.  

“Our debt to you is deep,” said John White, now both father and grandfather.

Ananias Dare started to speak, but words would not come. He turned and walked inside to be with his family.

(To be continued …)

(Lincoln Ellsworth in Dornier-Wals airplane)

Not long after Norwegian Roald Amundsen and American Ellsworth’s heroic return from their 1925 near-death ordeal attempting to fly airplanes to the North Pole, the two men were holding a top-secret meeting at Amundsen’s home south of Oslo, Norway.

They had invited Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile—who had come under the aegis of Benito Mussolini’s fascist government’s Military Air Service—to discuss a plan that must not be leaked to the press, as Amundsen and Ellsworth wanted to create international headlines with their announcement and avoid alerting potential rivals of their plan: to fly an airship (aka dirigible) continent-to-continent, from Kings Bay, Svalbard, over the North Pole and across the Arctic Ocean to Alaska.

At 40-years-old, Umberto Nobile was dapper and refined, with a slight build and deep, penetrating black eyes. He was not an explorer but rather a scientist and university professor, an aeronautical engineer who happened to be designing and building some of the finest, most state-of-the-art airships in the world. And he also happened to have one for sale: the 350-foot-long N1.

The men haggled over details. Nobile, as Mussolini’s envoy, pushed for the airship to be flown under the Italian flag. If this expedition ended in success, tremendous national pride was in the offing. Amundsen flatly rejected this proposal, arguing that since he was expedition leader and from Norway, and because the Aero Club of Norway was sponsoring the expedition, the N1 must fly under the Norwegian flag—and it would also have to be renamed Norge—(meaning Norway). Lincoln Ellsworth had inherited a fortune from his father, and he pledged $100,000 U.S. dollars toward purchasing the airship, and he of course sided with Amundsen.

Nobile finally conceded to these terms. Now were questions of crew and command. Nobile wanted numerous Italians represented as crew. Amundsen and Ellsworth agreed to six, including Nobile. It made sense since Nobile’s engineers and mechanics were trained to operate the aircraft, and Nobile knew how to fly it. On the issue of command, Amundsen and Ellsworth were unwavering. Amundsen and Ellsworth would share overall command as “expedition leaders”; Nobile would be pilot and “airship commander.” The orders for the handling, operation, and steering of the airship would come from Nobile. But the direction and destination of the airship must be up to Amundsen and Ellsworth.

The three men shook hands, and the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Transpolar Flight was born.

***

In the spring of 1926, Kings Bay, Svalbard was the remote hub of what one journalist called “the most sensational sporting event in human history.” Not only were Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Nobile trying to make history by flying an airship to the North Pole and across the Arctic Ocean, but American aviator Richard E. Byrd had shown up in an impressive Fokker Trimotor airplane named the Josephine Ford, intending to beat Amundsen and Ellsworth to the North Pole. The press made a lot of noise about what they were calling the “Race to the Top of the World.”

Amundsen was unfazed by Byrd’s arrival and downplayed any competitive aspect of the so-called “race.” He knew from experience—as did Ellsworth—that what they were attempting was a serious, life-threatening mission and certainly no game of sport. But Ellsworth was irritated by Byrd’s arrival. “We had reason to be disgruntled,” he admitted, “Byrd’s flight divided the publicity from Spitsbergen … the Norge flight was costing a fortune. We needed to cash in every penny we could get as its result. We wanted complete media attention of the public … so that afterwards it would buy our book, see our pictures, attend out lectures.” Although Ellsworth was by now a dedicated explorer, he was also a savvy entrepreneur, and he estimated that the total cost of the expedition he was primarily financing would run close to five hundred thousand dollars. He needed every column inch he could get.

As it turned out, Lincoln Ellsworth would get his accolades. At 1:30 AM on May 12, 1926, the Norge crossed slowly over the North Pole. Ellsworth went to the gondola window with an American flag given to him in a ceremony by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge. The flag had been affixed to a heavy metal vane to ensure it stuck in the ice. Amundsen dropped his Norwegian flag, then Ellsworth tossed his American flag. Nobile threw his Italian flag, and all three metal stakes were impaled in the ice next to one another, their multi-colored banners waving in the Arctic wind.

So, it was the lesser-known Lincoln Ellsworth, not Robert Peary or Frederick Cook, who was the first American to the North Pole, as claims by both Peary and Cook have been widely disputed and discredited. Two days later, on May 14, 1926, the Norge made a forced landing in Teller, Alaska. As Amundsen and Ellsworth climbed down from the gondola and staggered weak legged onto shore ice, they realized the scope of their achievement: they’d flown 2700 miles in seventy-one hours, marking the first transpolar flight in history.

After the historic flight, Roald Amundsen announced his retirement from polar exploration, but Lincoln Ellsworth was really just getting started. Ellsworth soon turned his attention to the Antarctic, and between 1933 and 1939 he made four expeditions there, discovering and naming the Ellsworth Mountains (which include the 16,050ft. Mount Vinson) when he made a trans-Antarctic airplane flight from Dundee Island to the Ross Ice Shelf.

Lincoln Ellsworth (1880-1951) was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal that honored both his 1925 and 1926 polar flights, and he received the prestigious Hubbard Gold Medal from the National Geographic Society in 1935 for his Antarctic expedition and aerial survey. In 1937 he received the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographic Society for his improvements and innovations in developing the technique of aerial navigation in polar regions.

Bold, brave, visionary and wildly adventurous, he was the first person to fly across both polar continents. He stands among the world’s great polar explorers and should be remembered as such. In his book Beyond Horizons, Ellsworth stated that the three men he most admired, and the ones he most tried to emulate, were Theodore Roosevelt, Wyatt Earp, and Roald Amundsen.

Aspiring adventurers and explorers today could do worse than to try to emulate Lincoln Ellsworth.

Sources:

Quotes taken from Buddy Levy’s Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue.

Buddy Levy is the author of more than half a dozen books, including Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition; Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs; River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon. He is coauthor of No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon and Geronimo: Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior. His books have been published in eight languages. He lives in Idaho.