Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony by Libbie Hawker

Author:Libbie Hawker [Hawker, Libbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Historical Fiction, Jamestown
ISBN: 9781477829929
Amazon: 147782992X
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2015-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Popanow closed over the land, choking light from the days with a cold, hard fist. The season was as bitter as Powhatan had predicted it would be. The covers on the women’s storage pits froze in place beneath thick ice; the steel axes and knives that had been traded or stolen from the white men passed from hand to hand as the people of Werowocomoco labored to reopen their caches. Women took to the marshlands, wrapping hands and feet in strips of fur-lined leather. They hacked at the hard, frozen ground with digging sticks and axes, prying long, pale tuckahoe roots from the mud. The tubers were wrinkled and tasted dry and bland, but they would stretch the meager stores of food until springtime.

During these dark and terrible days, Pocahontas spent more time with Powhatan than she ever had before. Since that autumn afternoon when she had seen him in his trembling wonder, helpless before the spell of the tassantassa crown, Pocahontas had taken on a significance to her father that she scarcely understood. He clung to her presence, keeping her as close as a priest kept his best talisman. But Pocahontas was under no illusions. This was not the role she had long desired, a place as her father’s trusted advisor, hard won through excellence and useful service. Her proximity to him was almost punitive, as if he feared that if his daughter went free, all of Werowocomoco would learn of his shame, the strange thrall the white men’s tanx hat had inflicted upon him.

And so it was that Pocahontas was at her father’s side when news arrived of Chawnzmit’s aggressions. She had joined with his wives in refreshing the mix-pot stew. They clustered about the large pot—copper, a prize won from the tassantassas in exchange for some corn, no doubt, or a basket of beans, goods Powhatan’s women would likely prefer this winter to the ostentatious gleam of trade copper. The stew retained the fishy scent of a season’s worth of oyster and sturgeon. The sweet, herbaceous tang of autumn’s deer fat still laced richly through the thick broth, and juicy kernels of corn bobbed to the surface as Pocahontas stirred. But the pot was more than half-empty, and they had nothing to renew it but thick slices of starchy tuckahoe, a handful of dried oysters, and a small measure of withered beans. By the end of the winter, the copper stewpot would be the most dismal place in all of Werowocomoco.

The tuckahoe slices plopped drearily into the broth. Over the sound of her stirring, Pocahontas caught men’s voices raised in tense conversation. The sound came from just outside the door flap. She craned toward the sound, but Winganuske dealt a quick blow to Pocahontas’s ear.

“Mind your task, Amonute.”

Pale winter light flooded briefly into the hall as the door flap opened and then quickly closed. Pocahontas blinked into the returned darkness, unable to see the men striding down the length of Powhatan’s great house. She could hear their footsteps well enough: hard, direct, heavy with purpose.

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