Roanoke: The Price of Power

Prologue: The Island of Roanoke

Jeremy Swift stopped in the shade of a squat elm and let go the handles of his hand-drawn wagon. It was a simple conveyance and only moderately burdensome with its loose wheels and a load of salted bear meat weighing about eight stone and a quarter.

Not much of a haul, he thought, midst arming sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. The Croatan Indians on the mainland, across the Sound east of the island, were turning out less and less food for trade with each month that came and went. Of course that didn't surprise Swift. Didn't surprise any one of the hundred-fifty-so colonists on the island; because for eight-score honest English planters, they sure as hell weren't turning out much food themselves.

Roanoke needed rain. The mainland needed rain. Francis Drake needed to drift by and take the whole damned lot back home, same as he did the last eight-score honest English planters when they gave up on the first Raleigh Colony.

Goddamned Raleigh. What kinda man leaves a hundred-fifty men, women and children to take over a colony that already failed, even after finding nothin' of the fifteen men he left behind? Nothin' save a few bleached bones?

Same kind of man who turns about and calls the colonists prim and spoiled for asking for more provisions; a fair request, by God, given the conditions of this bloody forsaken island.

Swift narrowed his eyes against the early afternoon sun as he watched a flock of gulls on the horizon. From the birds and the sun he figured himself a good halfway back to the colony. The ache in the narrow of his back (which was turning more into a feeling of a hot knife blade with each passing season) told him he was already done for the day.

Swift snatched his water skin from atop the pile of bear meat and took a deep draw. The Indians he'd met at the shoreline had been kind enough to fill it with their medicine, and the burn that it delivered to his throat also helped to dull the throbbing in his back.

"Well, back at it."

Swift stowed the skin and took hold of the wagon's pair of handles.

"Let's get this done, ye warp-wheeled heap a' shite."

He dug in his heels to pull, then paused when a figure caught his eye down the trail. Something small, bobbing toward him and rustling the small branches that had grown across the path.

I'll be damned . . .

"Oy! That li'l Tom Archard I see?" he called out. "The devil ya doin' all the way out here, boy?"

Swift narrowed his aged eyes again. They'd been giving him nearly as much grief as his back lately, but he could see the right of his first guess.

It was Tom Archard, a boy about thirteen years. A planter's son and one of the nine children that came to the island three years ago with the rest of the colonists. The boy stopped a few paces from Swift and his wagon and stood, staring silently at the man and his burden.

Swift cocked his head and stepped out from between the wagon's handles. The shade departed, and the sun beat across his neck like a strapping. The sweat immediately reappeared on his brow (and from every pore that could give way to water.)

Swift sighed. He was starting to feel like eight stone and a quarter of salted bear meat.

"What's got ya, boy? I asked a . . ."

Swift felt something course wrap around his neck and pull tight; he was unable to breathe in a blink. Swift kicked his feet, but it only served to break his balance and he found himself falling to the ground to land on his knees. His vision blurred, darkness seeped in like ink poured into his eyes.

He tried to call out to the boy, tried to tell him to run and get help, but the rope at his neck tightened and all words were choked off at the source.

The will and strength to fight waned with each futile attempt at breath; even his arms gave up the fight and fell dully to his side as he watched young Tom step closer to him.

No! Run! Get your pa!

But the boy wasn't running. He was walking closer still. And the boy was smiling. Swift caught a flash of something in the boys hand. Both hands. A cup? And?

A knife? That's it boy! Cut this bastard down and save ol' Swift!

Through the haze of waning consciousness, Swift felt the warmth and stubble of a cheek pressing against the side of his head. Hot breath issued out from the unseen mouth of the man delivering the strangling.

His words followed: "Do it, son."

The boy leaned forward and raised the knife. Swift felt the point, sharp like a razor, digging into the soft flesh of his throat, just below the choking rope. The cut was slow and unsteady, like the apprehensive work of an amateur surgeon. Swift felt every inch of it as it worked though his neck.

Those weren't the eyes of an amateur beyond the metal goblet that slowly filled with his blood, he thought. Not at all. Swift died staring into the eyes of a young boy monster, and that wretched old pain in his back followed him to the end.