The Lost Colony of Roanoke Series

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Manteo of the Croatoans

The Revenant Series: Part I—The Lost Colony of Roanoke

By Buddy Levy

Prologue

“Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.”

Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

August, 1587—Roanoke Island, Outer Banks, “Raleigh’s Virginia”

Manteo heard the sentry's footfalls before he saw him, heard his running and labored wheezing. The sentry forced himself through the fort’s palisade gate and slumped against the wall, choking. Manteo ran and caught him in his arms as the Englishman strained to speak. An arrow pierced the man’s neck, sunk to the fletching on one side, the point protruding out the other, the arrowhead covered in blood and flesh.

The sentry buckled to his knees and bowed slightly at the waist as if in prayer. Manteo released him when he heard the whir of arrows cutting through the air and raining down inside the compound. The sentry craned his head, blood bubbling at the sides of his mouth and streaming from his nostrils, and looked up at Manteo.

“Run,” the man said, then fell to his chest in the dirt and died.

Manteo had known they would come. He had posted the sentries around the fort to warn the leader John White and the other colonists, and now Manteo glanced through the barricade slats and saw the Secotans storming from the stand of forest beyond the maize fields. The lines of warriors came naked save their loincloths and arrow quivers, ran howling and screeching toward the colony fort, some with their spears held high, others firing arrows, their bodies daubed in umber and scarlet, their faces dyed pitch black and oiled, their eyes masked white and yellow and red.

A chieftain raced at the front of the raiders, his dark form a living shadow flying through the dusk light: he wore cougar-hide wrist guards and his war club slung tethered to his back. Resplendent bird feathers tied to his crop of night-black hair flashed in the sunset as he charged.

Manteo sprinted to the house of John White, calling the other colonists to arms. White stood ready outside his house, his sword drawn, when Manteo arrived.

“Cannons and matchlocks!” Manteo yelled, “They are upon us.”

Manteo grabbed White and ducked him beneath the doorway awning, shielding him from a skein of arrows that stuck into the wooden house walls.

“Guard the dead and wounded at all costs,” Manteo barked out to White. “We must not allow any prisoners taken away, nor any dead.”

White sped for the cannon battery, calling out after Manteo, “Hide Eleanor!”

Manteo burst into the hut of White’s daughter, Eleanor Dare. Eleanor lay on a crude pallet, her belly heaving with the coming child. Young Agnes Wood hovered at her side, giving her water. Eleanor’s husband Ananias stood armed, his rifle shouldered.

“Put Eleanor and the girl in the root cellar below,” said Manteo. “Then come.”

The Secotans attacked from all around the oval palisade, some forcing their way through the vertical timber poles, others scaling the main gate and bounding across the central yard, their yips primitive and lupine as they tore for the colonists’ houses. The Englishmen scurried to arms, the married men staunch before their homes brandishing matchlocks and swords. The single men manned the small cannons and falconets and they fired on the rushing natives, the guns exploding percussively across the outer banks.

Manteo remained before the Dare’s house, ready next to Ananias. Manteo’s black hair was shorn tight on both sides and sharply ridged on top in the style of his people, but he wore the clothes and shoes of the English colonists, with a doublet and breeches and hose. His cloak flapped in the wind. He unsheathed a long Spanish conquistador’s sword from his scabbard, the razor-sharp blade of Toledo steel. He scanned the grounds, saw chaos.

The first warrior came at Manteo with his war club raised above his shoulder and on his head he wore the furred head and upper jaw and snout of a cougar, and a mountain lion hide he wore caped over his shoulders like a second skin. Manteo dodged the swinging cudgel and in an upward arc swung his blade and cleaved the Secotan at his nape, the wildcat head and the man’s falling blood-slaked to the ground.

The colonists fired on the rushing savages, the weapons’ flash pans flaring across the yard like airborne fires and then smoking as men knelt to repack powder and reload among the onslaught of arrows and spears. Secotans struck by gunfire fell amid the dust and leaves and some crawled about wounded and confused, for they had never before seen or heard such weapons, steel weapons that belched fire and smoke and roared thunder into the air.

Manteo battled hand to hand while all around him there was carnage. One planter tottered from behind a cannon and staggered in a slow circle with his arms flailing and two spears lanced through him crossways. The man collapsed, one hand pawing dirt and the other clutching a spear where it exited his belly. Another colonist cried out for his son to get inside but the boy fought at his flank, firing his father’s rifle while the man crumpled and clasped at the stove-in side of his head.

The chieftain appeared in a swirl of dust and smoke at the center of the yard. He suspended an Englishman aloft, one arm about his neck, the man’s feet kicking wildly. The leader looked across at Manteo and their eyes met and Manteo saw that it was Wanchese. He started for him but then stopped short—he knew that he was not yet strong enough to contest him. He could only watch as Wanchese scored his thumb’s claw-nail across the man’s forehead in rude circumference, gouging the talon around his head until he flaunted the scalp aloft in his hand, a trophy of bloody hair and flesh. The man cried out, his face awash in blood. Wanchese raised high his claw and sundered the throat. Blood sprayed and Wanchese spun the man and tore at his neck with his elongated catamount incisors, then hurled him to the earth.

Manteo ran for the cannons. White was already there, charging the touchholes. Between rounds White gazed aghast at Wanchese, who now crawled bestial bestride the prostrate man, ravaging him of his flesh and hissing as he ripped and tore.

“Dear God, what is he?” White wondered of Manteo. “What are they?”

“Windigo,” said Manteo. He bent to the ordnance and rammed the cannon muzzle with heavy shot.

“Fire on him,” he said.

John White sparked the powder at the touchhole. The cannon fired, rumbling the ground beneath their feet, the big gun lurching rearwards on its stanchion and pluming smoke that clouded the air, then levitated over the grounds. Manteo waved away smoke and sunk low to survey the yard but as the smoke diffused he could see naught but colonists dead and dying, some quilled with arrows and scalped and others reeling buckle-legged in the half-light with their abdomens rent and spilling chewed viscera and all about the expanse dust settled. The air fell quiet save the moans of men severed and half-devoured.

Wanchese and his prey the Englishman and all the Secotans were gone, vanished into the gloam like apparitions from another world.

Which is exactly what they were.

To be continued … if you want me to …