Page 117 of Dawnlands

PEABODY PLANTATION, BARBADOS, AUTUMN 1686

It was planting season in the cane fields, and the first gang was digging out holes for the new canes. The field looked like a chessboard, divided into deep squares, the sides heaped high with a bank of earth. They laid the cane pieces along each square and filled them up with muck from the night soil pit and the stables. The stink was unbearable: the night soil seeped into their hair from the baskets on their heads and could not be cleaned from their fingernails. Little cuts became raw and poisoned, people got ulcers at their mouths and eyes and a vomiting sickness.

Rowan was afraid that Caskwadadas would get sick, as she raked and watered the dung pits. Every night Rowan paused in the dark shadow behind the women slaves’ shed.

“Tow wow,” she whispered, “sister,” and Caskwadadas would appear in the doorway like a shadow, and then blend with the shadows behind the hut.

Rowan would pull a stolen bundle of food from the pockets of her baggy breeches and Caskwadadas would take it with a word of thanks.

“You are well?” Rowan asked in their language. “It is easier now?”

The woman nodded. “It’s better with the food. But my son—Wómpatuck—he’s getting too old for the women’s hut and working beside me. They’ll take him away when he is twelve and make him work with the men.”

Rowan hissed through her teeth. “I didn’t know they did that.”

“He’ll have to go into the men’s huts and work in the men’s work gang. He can’t do it. He can’t carry the weights they have to carry, he can’t load the cart. He can’t bring in cane, not even in the second gang. He’s too light, and he’s too short.”

“Can you lie about his age? Keep him with you another year?”

“They know his age well enough. It was only that he was too young to wear black warpaint and fight to the death that they did not kill him at Montaup. They sent him here instead, to die from overwork.”

“What can we do?” Rowan asked.

“You would help me?” the woman asked.

Rowan nodded.

“But why?”

“Nenomous,”Rowan said softly. “I am your People.Tow wow, I am your sister. Wómpatuck is my brother. You are all the family I have left.”

“It’s too great a risk for you,” Caskwadadas said. “You’re safe where you are. You’re fed, you are clothed. You’re not beaten, you don’t work in the mill or in the fields. They think you’re a man, they don’t take you into their hut when they want. Mr. Sir doesn’t rape you.”

“But I’m not free,” Rowan said, thinking of Ned and the green flag of liberty. “And we are the people of the Dawnlands. Of all the peoples in the world we—the first to see the sun—should be free.”

The woman looked doubtful. “I thought only that we might get Wómpatuck into hiding. Do you mean escape?”

Rowan caught her breath at the thought of escape, of doing something more than enduring, of being, once again, an actor in her own destiny, not subject to someone else’s whim. “Is it even possible?” Rowan whispered. “Mr. Peabody makes me guard the huts but no one has ever run away?”

“It is possible.”

“You’ve known someone escape?” Rowan demanded.

The woman nodded.

“They got away? And stayed free?”

“For months,” she said. “Then one of them was brought back.”

“Punished?”

“Flogged to death.”

The two women stood in silence, Rowan looking into Caskwadadas’s eyes. “Even so,” she said quietly. “How would we escape? If we dared to do it? If we dare?”

She was calling, knowingly, to the courage of the People.Caskwadadas might have named herself Kitonckquêi, a dead woman, a ghost, but beneath her despair was a longing to live, and a hunger that her son should live.

“How might we get Wómpatuck away? A ship from Bridge?”