Of Beginnings and Endings Page 9

  "But if they come up the river, find out they can get up there that way and do it, they're going to have to leave all their big, deep-draught ships behind, and that means no big guns, nothing any bigger than swivel guns. And with nothing but fucking deer trails through the woods, they're gonna play hell getting any of their guns that're bigger than men can break down and carry on their backs to use against us up north. But that'll prob'ly be some time next summer or fall."

  "But Arsen," pleaded Lisa, "if you truly feel the way you say you do, why fight them at all? Why not just get completely beyond their reach? Why not project everybody and everything up to the valley, not leave a trail of any kind they can follow?"

  The black-bearded man sighed and shook his head, setting his thick braids of hair to swishing. "Because it won't work, honey, not in the long run. The Indians in our world, that's just what a whole lot of them did as soon as they found out they couldn't drive the Europeans back, out of their lands—they moved away from the parts of the country that had been theirs and that the whites were then occupying, only to see their children and grandchildren go through the same things they had as more and more whites came from Europe. Despite all the wars and diseases and starvation in Europe in this world, just like it was in our world, it's flat running over with people; from what I heard and understood while we were in this world's England and what the Micco has told me, I'd say it's prob'ly more people living on that one island than there are Indians in this whole damn continent, and Spain is bound to have more people than England, too. And there's Irish up north of here, along the Atlantic coast, and French north of them and Norwegians or Swedes or Danes up north of the French, so none of these Indians are going to stand a fucking chance unless they all get together, stop fighting each other, and stand up against the whites, see."

  "But according to Micco, I could talk myself blue in the face to the various tribes within traveling distance—Tuscaroras, Shawnees, Cherokees, Powhatans, the other Creeks, Choctaws, and so on—and the best they'd do would to be to listen politely, accept anything I'd give them free, give me a good feed or two, see me on my way, and then go back to doing things no different at all. But if they can be gotten word that a bunch of redskins has beat the shit out of the Spanish once or twice or three times, then they'll want to come to us, learn how we did it, and see if they can do it too to whatever kinds of Europeans have been plaguing them and their folks over the years."

  "So, no, Lisa, I don't want to fight and kill and wound a bunch of Spanish—hell, I admire them, sometimes, in a way—but I'm still going to have to do it if I want to see a real, meaningful Indian Confederation that can hurt the Europeans here so bad that they'll maybe not do in this world what they did in our world to the Indians. Goddammit, this fucking country is big enough to share—there never was any need to try to kill all the Indians off.''

  John the Greek shook his own head of brown curls. "But Arsen," he said sadly, "didn't you know it wasn't warfare that killed off most of the Indians in our world? It was VD, smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, even, things the poor bastards had never gotten any racial immunity to. How the hell're you going to stop that kind of decimation, huh? And it's already started, too. You're not the only one has been talking to the Micco and some of his council, you know, and considering what passes for long-distance communication in this part of the world, it's amazing just how much they all seem to know about things."

  "The Irish seem to be able to get along with the Indians, in wherever they settle. They were in Florida a long time before the Spanish got there, you know. They were living and farming and all tooth by jowl with the Indians for years before the Spanish came and ran them out and they sailed up to where they are now. What they call Great Ireland seems the best I can figure to be coastal parts of Virginia and North Carolina and a little bit of Delaware."

  "But when the Irish first went to Florida in any numbers, and the Micco leads me to believe that was as much as two hundred years ago, there were a fair number of Indians living there, living well, at least one tribe of them with what the other Indians considered to be a high degree of culture or civilization or whatever you want to call it. But over the years they lived completely at peace with the Irish, something like eighty percent of them died of various diseases, while the Irish lived on happy as clams among them."

  "Now the Irish have been up in their new areas for something over a hundred years . . . and lo and behold, the Powhatans and the Tuscaroras are dying off from diseases, too; they're dying of diseases they'd never had before the Irish came."

  "So, Arsen, if your planned confederation does come off, get off the ground at all, how the hell are you and it going to fight a bunch of bacteria, viruses, and what-have-you? How will all the godawful weapons in all the Ademian warehouses combined keep tens of thousands of super-vulnerable people from dying of what you and I consider kid's diseases? Tell me that before you start planning a bloodbath for those Spaniards and Moors downriver there."

  5

  The Irish, who had been the first white men in the place, had called their settlement Corr Torpur—the Well of Cranes—and had dwelt thereabouts for at least a century, farming the rich riverside land, and cutting timber for many and varied uses, which included the burning of charcoal for use in the conversion of bog ore out of the swamps to iron. Their little colony had been virtually self-sufficient, and as they had lived in peace with the nearest Indians, they had neither built nor seen a need for any sort of defensive excavations or structures. In the time of their long tenure, the low, rocky hill at the riverside just above the deep anchorage inlet had been the site of their church—the largest building of any kind in the settlement and the only one partially constructed of rough stone.

  Then, a Spanish-Moorish pope having declared all of the lands in the west to belong properly to the kingdoms of the Hispanic peninsula, a great and well-armed force of Spaniards and Moors had come sailing up the river on a dark, ill-omened day and attacked the settlement without even the trace of an attempt to resolve the matter in less bloody fashion. Those poor Irish folk not butchered by the red-handed invaders had fled to their Indian friends for safety, and eventually some of them had found their way northward to the lands their fellow Irish held in the north, arriving there with nothing save their lives, having been bereft of the hard labors of many of the generations of their ancestors and the lives of full many of their nearest and dearest.

  The conquerors had burned the church and most of the other structures of the former Corr Torpur, when once anything of any value had been looted from out them. They had killed, or first raped or tortured and then killed, every white of any age they caught. They had killed many Indians, taken almost as many to be chained aboard their ships, then left the charred ruins to return to wilderness.

  More than two score years later, French ships had picked a way through the dangerous maze of sand and silt bars at the mouth of the river, and negotiated the meandering channel up from that mouth to the one-time site of Corr Torpur. They were attracted to it not by ruins, for none of these were easily visible, but by the fine, deep anchorage so very close to shore along the south side of the wide river, then by the spring-fed pool of clear, cold water on the hill above that anchorage.

  They were consciously trespassing on Spanish-Moorish territory and were so doing because that was what they had been sent south to do—nibble bits here and pieces there away from the Spanish and Moors to the glory of France.

  Their leader decided that this hillock would be an excellent location for a fort, and he and his military expedition immediately set about the building of one. They had not even thought to question the provenance of the roughly worked stones they found in the clearance of the hilltop; they had simply set them aside and later used them in their own fortifications.

  Having been periodically subjected to raids of Spanish and Moorish slavers for forty years, the Indians resident along the riversides to the north and those to the south of the river had happily traded lab
or for these new-come white iron-shirts' promise of protection from the rapacious other iron-shirts' long predations. As time had gone on, the aborigines had conducted an ongoing and peaceable trade of furs, hides, freshwater pearls, the stray semiprecious stone, and oddities with the new, relatively friendly iron-shirts in exchange for iron tools and weapons, beads, copper pots, brass scissors and needles, thread and cloth, and cheap spirits of various sorts. Their braves had more than willingly joined the French in the occasional foray against Spanish-Moorish settlements to the south, while the squaws had regularly bartered food to the garrison of the fortification that was going up as fast as worked stone and brick for the walls, guns to go on those walls, and slate and tiles for the roofs could be obtained and emplaced.

  By the time the Spanish authorities in Cuba had had enough of the impudent French settlement and its clandestine raiders and dispatched an overwhelming force against it and them, the Fort de St. Denis had been almost completed, though at the time of the attack, the garrison had been far from numerous, due principally to an unfortunate outbreak of pox which had virtually exterminated the nearby friendly Indians and caused not a few deaths among the French themselves.

  Unlike the force which had so brutally dispossessed the Irish so many long years before, this Spanish-Moorish military expedition had not been intent on performing a massacre, only wanting possession of the fort and settlement and to get the French interlopers out of easy raiding range of their own more northerly settlements; therefore, when the beleaguered French commander had asked for terms of surrender, he had received them, generous terms, which had been honored even after he himself had committed a messy form of suicide—blowing up the fort's magazine and himself along with it.

  With the French sailing north, the Spanish had rechristened the partially demolished place El Castillo de San Diego de Boca Osa and rapidly set about repairing it with shiploads of soft coquina limestone for the walls, lumber and brick for the interiors, and red tiles for the roofs. There being so few indios left at all close to the refurbished fort, settlers had been brought in from Florida, Cuba, and other places to engage in farming and stock-raising, while the soldiers to make up the new garrison had been encouraged to bring families, as too had the necessary craftsmen for the envisaged community. Within very few years after the takeover, the newly rebuilt fort was strong and comfortable for what it was—a primitive fortification set in the midst of a primitive wilderness—the old, Irish croplands had been recleared and once more were producing fine yields, herds of swine and goats and flocks of chickens battened in the woods, and a saw pit was reducing cured timber to planks for the church under construction in the riverside settlement.

  He who had led the victorious expedition against the French had been one Capitàn Don Guillermo ibn Mahmood de Vargas y Sanchez del Rio, and, his mission accomplished, he had in due time returned to render his official report to the Governor for King and Caliph, in Cuba. A part of his reward for his valuable services had been his appointment as lieutenant governor of the newly reconquered northern territories, which meant that he—a European of noble antecedents but bastard birth—thereby had achieved to dominance over an extent of territory larger than that ruled over by most reigning European kings.

  Considering, as too would have any of his peers, the office to be a business opportunity, Don Guillermo had carefully, meticulously picked and chosen the proper men to fill out his staff. As partner in the business aspect and second-in-command of the garrison, he had selected his old friend and battle-comrade of many years Capitàn Abdullah de Baza, for not only was the man a proven and doughty warrior, a born leader of men, and a pious Christian of well-proven loyalties, but he had had the invaluable experience of large-scale slaving on the Rio Kongo, was levelheaded, and rational, and possessed a turn of mind that had allowed him to turn disadvantages into very distinct advantages in both military and business senses, over the years of his life in the New World.

  For a few years, the various business enterprises of the two knights had gone quite well. With a strong and constant demand for slaves from the colonies to the south, their seasonal predations on Shawnee, Tuscarora, Southern Cherokee, and Eastern Chickasaw clans and tribes had not only fattened their Cuban accounts, but had allowed them to clear more lands, bring in more colonists, and begin thus to produce more grain and suchlike than was needed by the settlements, this giving them other exports than slaves, furs, hides, timber and other natural products.

  Settlements had been made near the mouths of navigable rivers elsewhere in the vast tract which Don Guillermo held in trust for the Governor in Cuba, each with a triangular fortaleza of timber and rammed earth and rocks, four to five halcones and saqres—light cannon for the gates and corners—a few swivel guns, and a small, part-time garrison of soldier-farmers under command of a Creole sergeant.

  One larger and several smaller slaving stations, usually occupied only during the best slaving seasons, had been established on islands in the rivers and their larger tributaries. These stations allowed the relatively small parties of whites, Creoles, and their indio mercenaries not only to operate more easily in the more populous, inland territories, but to do so for longer periods of time, in conditions of enhanced safety from indio raids aimed at rescues or revenge.

  Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably, disaster had struck. Despite their constant warrings amongst themselves, all of them often abetted by Indian allies or mercenaries, the various groups and nationalities of whites—Spanish-Moorish, Portuguese-Moorish, French, Irish, and Norse—had always honored an agreement—for long unwritten, but finally formalized by all parties—that under no set of circumstances would the Indians be allowed to acquire, possess, or learn how to use firearms of any description. This stricture had applied, of course, only to full-blood, wild Indians, not to the many varieties of mixed-blood Creoles, who were generally considered by pure-blood Europeans to be not Indians at all but rather a much inferior sort of white.

  The first inkling of the disaster then looming so near had come to Don Guillermo in the form of a boat-borne message from Don Abdullah; that worthy then had been occupying the largest of the slaving stations set upon a well-fortified island high up the reaches of the Rio Oso, among some clans of the Shawnee. Don Abdullah had tersely reported the destructive rout of a slaving party at the hands of an awesomely armed white man who had spoken, it had been averred, pure, erudite Spanish or Moorish or both. Several boats had been captured, along with small swivel guns, casks of powder, and a quantity of other weapons, three creole soldiers had been killed, and some dozen or so Creek mercenaries had deserted to the enemy.

  Hard in the wake of that boat-borne message had come another: An expedition by boat upriver had been met by one or more of these same strange whites and turned back with some losses of boats, weapons, and life. Don Abdullah had noted some wounded, as well, and had reported his dispatch of one of his young Spanish knights with a patrol to ascend the opposite bank of the river and spy on the site of the first incident with a Venetian long-glass lent him for the purpose.

  The report which had followed the return and debriefing of the young leader of that patrol had been the first, though not the worst, bombshell. The young knight had said that he had observed not merely one or two but as many as a dozen whites—both men and women—in and about the indio village. Its palisade—badly damaged by the slavers—had been rebuilt, incorporating the wood that the indios always had used and finely dressed stone which they never before had been known to employ; earthen-and-timber mounds had been raised at the corners and flanking the main gate, and some of the captured swivel guns had been there emplaced, along with at least two carriage guns—full-size saqres, by the look of them. But worst of all, the knight had watched in horror while a white man had imparted European drill to a group of at least a score of indios, all of said indios being armed with a short, light-looking firearm of unfamiliar pattern and design!

  This hellish revelation had been sufficient to imp
el the horrified Don Guillermo to dispatch a message directly to the Governor of the Indies himself.

  And this alarming message had barely been well on its way when Don Abdullah's largest watercraft, a pinnace, had come limping down the Rio Oso, laden with dead, dying and seriously wounded—Don Abdullah himself among these latter—they being all that now remained of the slaving station and party.

  The story pieced together from the reports of survivors had been grim at best. There had been some elements of the fantastical in those reports, but Don Guillermo had initially regarded the chaotic circumstances and the well-known superstition-ridden imaginations of ignorant Creoles and had discounted the wildest of the yarns in their entireties . . . but that had been before Don Abdullah had sufficiently recovered to render his own cool, unemotional report.

  For reasons unknown save to God, the magazine had exploded in the night, setting fire to many areas of the fortaleza, including the garrison carriages of all of the guns. Then a pair of armored and wheeled tortugas—which siege devices had apparently been rafted down the river unseen by any sentries on the dark, drizzly night—had broken down a stretch of the already fire-weakened palisades and entered the fortaleza, and the armed whites and indios contained in them had opened fire with light arquebuses, pistoles, probably some swivel guns, and quite possibly one or two old-fashioned multi-barreled volley guns. As a result, all of the Spaniards, Moors, and Creoles who had not managed to get aboard the pinnace now were certainly dead, along with those of the Creek mercenaries who had not joined their fellow savages in deserting to these strange, white-skinned enemies. The gathered slaves all were lost, as too were the boats and everything else that had been in the fortaleza or upon that island.