Page 4 of Dawnlands

“You hold the pistol while I untie him,” the jailer said, pulling a pistol from his belt, showing it to the prisoners, who turned their heads away, as if in disdain. He pressed it into Ned’s hands. “If anyone moves, shoot them in the foot: right?”

“Right,” Ned said, taking the heavy firearm in his hand and pointing it at the huddled crowd.

The jailer took a knife out of his boot and slashed through the ropes on either side of the youth, pushing him, still tied and hobbled, towards Ned. He made the trailing ropes into two rough but serviceable loops and handed them to Ned, like the long reins for a young horse, as he took back his pistol.

Ned opened his satchel and counted out the coins. “Does he have any papers?”

The man laughed. “Do cows have papers?” he demanded. “Do pigs? Of course he don’t. But we can take him to the blacksmith and brand him with your initial on his cheek.”

Ned felt the cords in his hand tighten, as the slim youth braced himself against terror.

“No need,” he said. “We sail in an hour. I’ll load him on board now and lock him in my cabin.”

“Mind he don’t drown himself,” the jailer said. “They do it the moment they get the chance. Someone told me they think they will rise out of the waves on a muskrat.” He laughed loudly, showing his yellow stumps of teeth, rotted by sugar and rum.

“Yes, they do think that…” Ned remembered his friend telling him the Pequot legend of the making of the world: a muskrat bringing earth from the seabed as a gift of life from the animal to the first woman in the world.

“Take a brace?” the jailer gestured. “You can have another for the same price?”

“Nay.” Ned tugged gently on the rope that trailed from the lad’s tied wrists and led the way to the ship. The boy followed with his shuffling walk. Ned did not look back, no white man looks for his slave, and the boy hobbled behind him.

Ned did not speak to the lad, not even when they were on board. He locked him in the windowless cabin and found the loadmaster and paid for another passage, a quarter price as it was a slave. He refused the offer to chain the boy in the cargo hold and pay for him as if he were baggage. He went back to the inn and bought a few shirts and a pair of breeches for the lad, and then he stayed on deck until the captain shouted, the gangway was drawn in, the ropes cast off and the bell towers and roofs of the city got smaller and smaller until the new city of Boston was just a smudge on the horizon, the sun sinking behind it. Ned stretched his aching back and went through the hatch and down the ladder to the tiny cabins below the deck.

The lad was seated on the floor, his head resting on his knees, as if he did not dare to touch the narrow bunk. When the door opened on Ned, carrying a gimbaled candlestick in one hand, the bundle of clothes in the other, he rose to his feet, alert as a cornered deer. His breath came a little quicker, but he showed no sign of fear. Ned, knowing the extraordinary courage of the Pokanoket, was not surprised. He put down the candle, the counterweight base moving gently with the ship to hold the candle upright.

“You know me,” Ned fumbled to remember the words of the banned language of Pokanoket. “You called meNippe Sannup.”

The youth nodded stiffly.

“Have you seen me in the wilderness? Have I traded with your people?”

The boy said nothing.

“Have your people traded furs with me? Or gathered herbs for me?”

Still there was no answer.

“What language do you speak?” Ned asked in the forbidden language of the Pokanoket, then he tried again in Mohawk.

“I can speak English,” the youth said slowly.

“What is your people?” Ned demanded.

The boy’s face was expressionless, but one tear rose up and rolled down his face. He did not brush it aside, as if the name that might never be spoken was Sorrow. “We are forbidden to say our name,” he said quietly. “I knew you when I was a child. You wereNippe Sannup, the ferryman at Hadley. My people took your ferry when the Quinnehtukqut was in flood.”

Ned felt the familiar sense of longing for that lost time. “Fifteen years ago? When I kept the ferry at Hadley?”

The youth nodded.

“That was a lifetime. You must’ve been a child.”

“Are we at sea? Is the boat at sea?” he suddenly demanded.

“Aye.”

“You will not throw me over the side?”

“Why would I do that, fool? I just rescued you! And paid a fortune!”