“Did not the Israelites face burning sands before they reached the Promised Land?”

“Aye,” said Simeon. “Let us give thanks for what the Lord has brought us to.”

The chart showed that the Lord had brought them to a peninsula resembling, in all its parts, a man’s arm raised to strike a blow at the sea. The chart called the place Cape James, a name John Smith had given to curry the favor of King James. But sailors used the name that Bartholomew Gosnold had given it after fishing here in 1602: Cape Cod.

iii.

More had come.

Men in a great canoe, as big as a hillside, driven by white wings on the wind. Men whose faces grew hair like the pelt of the beaver. Men who dressed in layers of colored skins, yet whose own skin was as white as birchbark. Men who brought some good things… and many bad.

The canoe, called a ship, was the largest that Autumnsquam had ever seen, and he felt fear, like the taste of blood, rise in his throat.

He had been a boy when les françaises appeared in the Bay of the Nausets, fifteen summers before. He still remembered the one called Champlain, who sat on the bow of his canoe and made pictures of the land.

The next year les françaises had visited the Nausets again, then sailed south to the land of the Monomoyicks. They stayed too long and would not leave, and there was a fight in which many whites and Monomoyicks died.

More came after that. Some flew the red-crossed flag of the English, others the flowered flag of les françaises. A few showed a black flag with a white skull and bones. Some simply fished. Some traded knives and metal for pelts. A few pretended trade only to steal Nausets for slaves, and their evil stained every white.

But in the life of the Nausets and the Wampanoag nation, in the sachemdoms from the tip of the Narrow Land to the edge of the Narragansett Bay, the Great Sickness that followed the white men would be remembered before anything else, good or bad.

It began, they said, to the north, in the Penobscot Land, where the whites fished and traded. It reached Autumnsquam’s village shortly after a runner brought news of it. An old man began to shiver and felt great pains in his head. His skin grew hot as a baking stone. His woman bathed him in cold water, and the pauwau sang his song. It did no good. The old man died four days later.

But few noticed, because by then, people everywhere were shivering and growing hot at the same time. Little children went so mad with the heat inside their heads that they did not know their own parents. Brave men who had hunted wolves whimpered like old women with pain. Some jumped into the sea to cool their misery, and some of them drowned.

But few noticed, because the Wampanoags were dying everywhere. Autumnsquam did not notice, because he was burying his baby daughter and his own woman.

The dying began in fall and did not end until spring. In some parts of the Wampanoag nation, there were more dead than alive, more dead than the living could bury, and the bones lay bleaching on the sand. For reasons that no man knew, there was less dying on the Narrow Land than in other places, but still there was too much.

Before the white man, there had never been such sickness, the Nausets had never before been dragged into slavery, and the eastern horizon had been the home of the dawn, not the lair of great canoes called ships. Now, the Nausets were no longer friendly to the whites. They enslaved those who were shipwrecked and drove off those who came to trade. But this was the biggest ship that ever had come.

And it was turning south.

Autumnsquam feared that they were searching for the Bay of the Nausets, to steal more of his people and punish them for what they had done to other whites. He would bring the warning, and his people would be ready.

He had learned from his father to measure his gait by the movement of the copper pendants that hung from his ears.