Sabotaged

35

They were strewn about on the shore of a nearby island. It looked as if so many deaths had occurred there that nobody had been left to pick up the bodies.

“Our tracers didn’t know we’d drifted so close to Croatoan while we were talking,” Brendan whispered. “And they were trying so hard not to think about it… They blocked it from their minds.”

“Because it’s too awful,” Antonio agreed.

“Did Second do this?” Jonah asked, his outrage building. “This massacre-”

“No, no,” Brendan began.

Katherine let out a huge gasp of air, as if she’d been holding her breath.

“They’re not human,” she said. “I thought they were human!”

Jonah blinked. He could see why Katherine had thought that. He had almost thought it himself. But he didn’t feel any relief as his eyes assured him that there were just animal skeletons before him-skulls and rib cages that must belong to deer, foxes, wolves, beavers… not humans. The bones were so numerous that they seemed to whisper, Death, death, everyone died…

“This is so wrong,” Brendan said in a tight voice. “An abomination.”

“A desecration,” Antonio said.

Jonah thought that they’d slipped into Algonquian to say that, as if the English words weren’t quite strong enough.

“I don’t understand,” Katherine said. “You’ve killed animals. I mean-your tracers did. And not just fish. We saw the tracers back on Roanoke shooting that deer. They… slaughtered it.”

“After asking the deer’s permission,” Brendan said.

“Stop trying to explain,” Antonio said harshly. “They’re not going to understand!”

“No-I have to explain,” Brendan said. He looked directly at Katherine. “Our tribe sees itself in balance with nature. When we take a life, we do it with respect. We treat the animal with respect, even in death.” He made a rueful face. “No matter how it might have looked to you, we’re not savages.”

“The white men are the savages!” Antonio said. “The way they kill-without respect-”

“Antonio, you’re white too!” Jonah said, because he couldn’t take any more of this.

“I gave that up,” Antonio said, his face utterly serious. “I am a tribesman now.”

And then Jonah couldn’t argue with that. He could tell that Antonio wasn’t talking about skin color, but a mind-set, a way of seeing the world.

“So Europeans did this?” Katherine asked in a puzzled voice. She waved her hand toward the skeletons lining the shore. “Was it the English? The Spanish? Or-”

“Yes and no,” Brendan said.

“It was because of my people,” Andrea said in a haunted voice. “The Roanoke colonists. We brought death when we came here. Plagues. I read all about the diseases, but I didn’t understand…”

Jonah had been so focused on the scene before him that he’d almost forgotten about Andrea. She’d been sitting there so silently. Even now she looked like a statue, her face gone pale beneath the sunburn, her eyes glittering with pain. Jonah knew nothing about art, and didn’t often think about it, but he could imagine someone making a sculpture of Andrea right now.

The title of the sculpture would be Devastated.

“You mean, the Roanoke colonists brought some plague, some disease, that killed all these animals?” Katherine asked, still sounding baffled.

“No, their diseases killed people,” Brendan said. “Lots and lots of people. In some villages, so many people died that the survivors just fled, leaving the bodies where they fell.”

“And to us, to tribesmen-that’s a terrible sin,” Antonio said. “Sacrilege.”

“Our tracers know to avoid those villages,” Brendan said. “They believe the evil spirits linger.”

Jonah noticed that Antonio didn’t correct Brendan this time about calling the germs evil spirits.

“But here, at Croatoan, this is the worst place,” Brendan said. “As people were dying, they put out animal carcasses on the shore, to warn travelers away, to warn of the evil. Because this is evil too, treating dead animals this way.”

He gestured at the skeletons, the rows and rows of the dead.

“And all the people died, so their bones are still here too?” Katherine asked, horrified.

Brendan shrugged helplessly.

“That’s what our tracers think,” he said.

“Don’t show my grandfather this,” Andrea burst out. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t let your tracers show my grandfather what happened here.”

Jonah had stopped thinking about the tracers. It had completely slipped his mind why they’d come here-because John White had asked Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much to take him to Croatoan Island. Because John White thought he would find his family and friends there.

Jonah forced himself to look past the skeletons littering the shore. Just beyond the shoreline, rows of native huts were falling in on themselves, clearly abandoned. They looked so much worse than the Indian village back at Roanoke. So much sadder.

This would not be the scene of the happy family reunion that John White-and Andrea-were longing for.

“Andrea,” Brendan said apologetically. “We can’t control our tracers. We don’t know how to stop them.”

Andrea bent down and hugged John White’s shoulders.

“Oh, Grandfather, I’m so glad you’re not conscious for real!” she said. “I’m so glad you’re going to miss this!”

For the moment, he was completely joined with his tracer, the tracer’s eyes closed just as tightly as the real man’s.

“Didn’t the tracer boys tell John White what he’d see here?” Katherine asked. “Didn’t they warn him?”

Antonio shook his head.

“They tried, but-they’re not communicating very well,” he said. “Our tracers can’t speak English, and John White doesn’t know much Algonquian.”

Jonah realized that the whole time Antonio and Brendan had been with their tracers, he really hadn’t heard them say much back and forth with John White.

“But back on Roanoke, all the tracers seemed to be talking to each other,” Jonah said. “Making sense. When John White asked the tracer boys to get his treasure chest… When he asked to come to Croatoan…”

Jonah remembered the slow, deliberate way the tracer boys had nodded. Had they said something before or after that, trying to explain? Jonah hadn’t really been paying attention, because he and Katherine and Andrea had gotten so excited about going to Croatoan Island themselves.

“Everything John White said, he said in both Algonquian and English,” Brendan explained.

“Oh! That’s why I could understand!” Andrea said, as if this was something she’d been wondering about.

“Even though his Algonquian’s like baby talk, our tracers can follow some of it,” Antonio said. “But no matter how much they tried to use easy words, he couldn’t understand much of what they said. So… they thought they’d just have to show him.”

Jonah was kind of hoping they’d just keep talking about translations or some other boring, useless topics. But Brendan and Antonio’s tracers had stopped staring silently at the skeletons on Croatoan Island. The two tracer boys set their jaws and clenched their teeth-tiny, almost imperceptible signs that they were bracing themselves for an unpleasant task-and got into position to paddle toward the Croatoan shore.

Brendan and Antonio themselves didn’t move.

“We don’t have to stay with our tracers for this,” Brendan said softly. “They’re not planning to be on Croatoan long. We can just stay in the canoe and wait for them.”

Everyone turned to Andrea, as if they all silently agreed that she deserved to make this decision.

“No, no,” she said in a strangled voice. “We should… I should see this. The rest of you can wait with the canoe, but I have to go…”

Without another word, Antonio spun around. With a few deft movements, he’d caught up with his tracer. In the back of the canoe, Jonah could hear Brendan’s paddle dipping quietly into the water.

They reached the shore too quickly, Antonio and Brendan tying the canoe to a tree too efficiently.

I’m not ready to see this, Jonah thought.

“John White wouldn’t be able to tell any difference between Croatoan skeletons and English skeletons, would he?” Andrea asked faintly.

“I don’t… think so,” Katherine said, with none of her usual confidence.

“I just wouldn’t want him to look at the skeletons and be able to know, This was my daughter, this was my son-in-law, this was…,” Andrea’s voice shook, but she made herself finish, “… this was my granddaughter.”

“Andrea, your skeleton won’t be here,” Jonah said. “Remember? You feel good in this time period, so you’re still alive; Virginia Dare is still alive. Your tracer’s still out there somewhere.”

It was hard thinking ahead, past this island of death. But they were still going to have to look for Andrea’s tracer… somewhere.

Even if they were out of clues.

Andrea winced.

“I’m not… exactly… feeling so good right now,” she said, and made a brave attempt at a smile.

Andrea stepped out of the canoe right behind Brendan and Antonio. Dare jumped out beside her and rubbed against her leg, whimpering, as if he understood that she was facing something awful.

Meanwhile, Antonio bent over and started to pick up John White. Then he stepped back, so it was only his tracer picking up the tracer of John White.

“We’ll leave the real man safe and asleep in the canoe,” he mumbled, and Jonah felt a little guilty for having thought that Antonio was nothing but a jerk.

Antonio rejoined his tracer as soon as the tracer straightened up. Jonah and Katherine climbed out of the canoe too.

“Really, you don’t all have to see this,” Andrea said. “It could just be me and the tracers.”

“We’re all in this together,” Katherine said, and for once Jonah agreed with his sister wholeheartedly. He even forgot to be annoyed that he hadn’t thought to say that himself.

Antonio carried John White’s tracer very gingerly past the animal bones littering the shoreline. The others all stayed close by, picking their way around the bones. Antonio stepped so carefully-and gracefully-that John White’s tracer stayed asleep, snoring gently. No, Jonah corrected himself. Antonio can’t affect the tracer. Antonio couldn’t wake him up if he tried! But Antonio was moving completely in concert with his own tracer, so it looked like the boy really was interacting with the old man’s tracer. Once they reached the row of collapsing huts, Antonio crouched down with the tracer man, seeming to shake him awake and place him in a seated position, facing away from the bones on the shore.

“He’s being so kind,” Andrea marveled. “He’s trying to keep John White from seeing the worst of it!”

No, Jonah wanted to correct Andrea, too. It’s Antonio’s tracer being kind. But right now Antonio and his tracer were one, so it was impossible to think of them separately.

And then Jonah forgot everything else, watching the drama before him. Brendan, also completely joined with his tracer, crouched on the other side of John White’s tracer.

“This Croatoan Island,” Brendan said softly, speaking in his tracer’s voice. Jonah could tell how hard he was trying to speak slowly and simply for the sake of John White’s limited Algonquian skills. “Understand? Everyone gone. Maybe all dead. Maybe just left.”

“Dead?” John White’s tracer repeated numbly. His expression was so stark that, for once, Jonah thought he could read lips accurately. “Dead means…”

John White’s tracer struggled to stand up. For a moment it looked like Antonio was going to try to hold him back, but then Brendan said, with his tracer, “He’ll want to see for himself. He won’t believe us otherwise.”

Antonio began helping the old man’s tracer up. He kept his arm around the tracer’s shoulder. Brendan braced the tracer from the other side, and the two boys led him to the nearest hut.

Jonah couldn’t help admiring the way they guided John White’s tracer, keeping him from seeing the animal skeletons. But what good did that do if the tracer was just going to see human skeletons in the hut?

Nervously, Jonah crept up behind Antonio and Brendan and the tracer, trying to see past them into the hut.

“Oh!” Brendan exclaimed, whirling around, away from his tracer. “There aren’t any skeletons here!”

Jonah peeked in-it was just an empty hut.

The next hut was empty, too, as was the third and the fourth… Then they came to a different kind of a building, its walls lined with a sort of wooden scaffolding. Elongated lumps wrapped in animal skins lay on each level of the scaffolding-could the lumps be skeletons?

John White’s tracer nodded, as if he understood. But he didn’t look upset. He opened his mouth and spoke. Jonah wished so badly that he could hear what the tracer was saying. But of course, separated from the real John White, the tracer was completely silent.

“Oh, this is weird-he’s speaking English right now, and my tracer doesn’t understand. But I can understand what my tracer is hearing,” Brendan said. “John White is saying he knows this is the Croatoans’ temple, where the bodies of their important leaders are kept after death. He saw this in other villages, on his previous trips to America. He’s saying it’s like what they do in England, putting their honored dead in crypts in cathedrals.”

Jonah had actually been in one of those crypts, back in the 1400s, on his last trip through time. This village’s temple didn’t seem any creepier than that.

They stepped out of the temple, Jonah and Katherine and Andrea scurrying ahead so they didn’t keep Antonio and Brendan from staying with their tracers. The two boys walked John White’s tracer toward an open field.

“This is the burial ground for all the other dead,” Antonio said, speaking with his tracer.

John White spoke, and Brendan translated: “He’s asking us, ‘Many, many generations?’”

“No,” Antonio said. “Many died all at once.”

Jonah could tell that John White’s tracer understood, because sorrow crept over his face.

“But some survived,” Antonio said. “Some survived to bury their dead before they left.”

John White’s tracer spoke again, and Jonah could guess at his meaning even without Brendan’s translation: “Where did they go?”

Antonio shrugged.

“We don’t know,” he said softly. “Nobody knows until now, we didn’t know that anybody lived.”

John White’s tracer turned away, his expression sad and thoughtful-but not hopeless. He spoke.

“He’s saying, ‘My search goes on. I knew it would not be easy,’” Brendan whispered.

Andrea let out a gasp. She had tears in her eyes, but she was nodding.

She was still hopeful too.

The others turned back toward the rest of the village. But Jonah walked a little farther into the field.

No different than a cemetery, he thought. Just without creepy tombstones with the names and all. Maybe the Indians weren’t so concerned about how they’d be remembered?

Sunlight streamed down on Jonah’s head; tall grasses waved in the hot summer breeze. Without the piles of human skeletons Jonah had been expecting, this part of Croatoan Island wasn’t horrifying. It was… peaceful. Jonah knew there’d been death here-lots of it-but that was a long time ago. The bodies buried beneath this ground had been resting in peace for years.

Hadn’t they?

Jonah noticed a mound toward the back of the field. The soil here was more sand than dirt, and whoever had built this mound had had to pack the soil together tightly to get it to stay in place.

Jonah thought of sand castles on a beach, the way the ones you built at the beginning of a vacation always wore away by the end of the week. How could the sandy soil of this mound still look so tightly packed if it’d been built years ago?

It couldn’t have, Jonah thought.

He stared down at the mound, trying to read messages in grains of sand. They were tightly pressed. Nothing had worn away.

Didn’t that mean this grave, at least, was… fresh?