NOVEL NEXT Prologue
It is the year 1687, and the new world is ablaze with the fires of war. Sixty-seven years since the Pilgrims from the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, and eighty-three since the French settled in Quebec. In the decades since, scores of folk from all over Europe have flocked to the budding colonies of New England and New France, enticed by the promise of opportunity and a new world waiting to be claimed. Only, this new world was not theirs to take, for a hundred tribes of native Indians called these lands their home. Thus began an age of great complexity, an awkward adolescence in the lifespan of a budding coexistence between the original custodians of the land and its unexpected new residents. An age of alliances formed and broken, of promises made in foreign tongues, tainted by foreign agendas. An age of death, riding on the wind in a blanket of shadow, covering the land in sickness and musket fire. Yet even in the darkest hours, hope remains. Even in these times of hatred and cruelty, love blossoms. And the future of the land and the people who tend to it remain ever-uncertain, as such times always are.
The Puritans came to this brave new world to escape the yoke of religious oppression, yearning to establish their own communities, with their own rule of law. Yet by doing so, they unknowingly immersed themselves in another web of politics and spirituality, one they struggled to understand. Squanto, last of the Patuxet, served as both a guide to this new world and a diplomat, teaching the Pilgrims not only to grow food and survive in their new unfamiliar climate, but of the complex cultural and political dynamics of those the Puritans had written off as savages. Serving as an emissary of the Great Sachem Ousamequin (known to the colonists by his title Massassoit), Squanto brokered an alliance on behalf of his chief and the Wampanoag. Without the help of Squanto, Ousamequin, and the Wompanoag, the new settlers would not have survived. Just the same, the Wompanoag would not have survived without the settlers, as it was the Englishman Edward Winslow who saved the great chief’s life. This gesture endeared the Wompanoag to the English colonists, and because of it, the two groups enjoyed prosperity and peace for over fifty years. Massassoit would warn the colonists of planned attacks from other neighboring tribes, the Narragansett and Massachusett. In return, the English traded readily with them, arming them with rifles and the knowledge of how to use them.
The peace was not to last. For no great ruler lives forever, and once the mighty Massassoit fell, relations between the two groups began to crumble and fade. After his passing, his eldest son, Wamsutta, became grand chief of the Wampanoag. He and his brother Metacomet traveled to Plymouth and asked to be granted English names, and so they were: Alexander and Philip. King Alexander, to be exact, for in the eyes of the Puritans he was the Wompanoag’s king, ruling over every tribe in the confederacy from the Aquinnah to the Pokanoket. And while the title bore the weight of the colonists’ respect, it brought all the paranoia that accompanied it. Rumors began to spread that Alexander was planning to infiltrate Plymouth from the inside, attacking the settlers when they were at their most vulnerable. Corrupted by a racist fear of savage invasion and a desire to spread their own settlements into Wampanoag lands, the English arrested Alexander after summoning him to the Plymouth court. Alexander fell ill and died during his capture.
The Pokanoket King’s unlawful imprisonment and sudden death would mark the end of those hopeful early years. Massassoit’s younger son Philip took up the mantle of grand sachem, and suspected the colonists of poisoning his beloved brother. Alexander’s widow, the wise saunskwa Weetamoo, urged Philip to maintain the peace his father had worked so hard for, but the seeds of mistrust had already been planted. Perhaps they might have never sprouted had the New Englanders not continued to water them. The uneasiness after Metacomet’s appointment as “king” only fanned the flames of their paranoia, and they demanded that the Wampanoag surrender their guns as subjects of English law. King Philip refused, as he was the ruler of his people, not some foreign pretender across the seas. But the Englishmen now refused to acknowledge his sovereignty, and when the praying Indian John Sassamon was murdered, it was the Englishmen who tried and hanged three Wampanoag men, one of whom was Philip’s counselor and friend. What’s more, they used the trial as an excuse to claim the land that Sassamon was murdered on as part of their brazenly false justice, and this outrage sparked the first flame of war.
Thus began the deadliest fighting the continent had ever seen, a brutal and bloody conflict where man’s animality was laid bare as both sides pillaged, raped, and slaughtered one another. By the time the war ended with King Philip’s death, thousands were dead, dozens of towns and villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of captured Wampanoags were sold into slavery in the Caribbean, including King Philip’s only son. The colonists had won, but not without consequence, left with a scar from a deep wound that would never truly heal.
It has been nine years since those dark times. But for many, the war didn’t start with King Philip’s declaration, nor did it end with his death. For the Five Nations of the Iroquois won that war, too, sworn allies of the English against tribes they were already at odds with. Their mighty warriors had been fighting long before King Philip cast his fateful dice, armed with new European weapons and strengthened by their cunning tactics and fierce battle prowess. The five proud tribes that made up the Iroquoian Confederacy had been raiding surrounding villages and conquering weaker tribes long before the first sailing ship landed from Europe, and the promise of lucrative trade had only made them more belligerent, desperate to monopolize the trade with the English.
For the Iroquois, this conquest was not just an expansion of territory or a securing of borders. It was a spiritual mandate given to them by the heavens, for they believed themselves to be keepers of a sacred balance in the grand cosmos. Thus, when they lost one of their own, they grieved more deeply and woefully than their neighbors. For their loss was not only a great pain to the deceased’s family and community–it was a cosmic injustice. The dead did not only need to be mourned, and wept for–the hole they left in people’s hearts needed to be refilled. And refilled they would be, for the Iroquois would wage their Mourning Wars–raids on nearby tribes not killing to avenge, but capturing to replace. The Iroquois absorbed defeated tribes into their own families and communities, using them to take the place of the beloved kinsmen they had lost.
The passage of time is as inevitable as the change that passage brings. So too did it for the Iroquois, for the blistering winds of death blew upon the Five Nations. Harrowing plagues of smallpox and measles came in sickening waves, killing thousands. Over the course of eighty years the Iroquois lost three quarters of their entire population, reduced to a shallow husk of the people they had once been. For a culture who mourns the death of one person as a deep spiritual crime, a loss of this scale was incomprehensible. So the Five Nations continue their Mourning Wars, the stakes higher than ever with the loss of so many tribesmen, and the conflicts themselves deadlier than ever since the introduction of the musket. The cemetery of their victims contains many tombstones: the Huron, the Neutral, the Erie, the Wenrohronon, and the Mohican. And though they have claimed so many lives already, they fight on, desperately trying to recover what would likely be gone forevermore.
In the face of this ever-growing threat, the tribes whose lands border Iroquois territory have taken up their own arms. They have begun to form powerful alliances, not only with their neighboring tribes, but with the French settlers to the north as well. The French are more than willing to help kill their English competitors’ primary Indian allies, all the while still benefiting from the high-quality furs only new world beasts can provide. The fur trade has become so profitable, in fact, that Louis XIV has trained and sent a full-fledged military force to reinforce the colony of New France: the Troupes de Marine.
The arrival of Europeans to the North American continent started the spinning of a grand tapestry, a complex web of selfish diplomacy, religious fanaticism, shaky trade agreements, and uneasy peace. Now, these ever-rising tensions are set to boil over once again. The more lucrative the native trade becomes, the more the Crowns of England and France want to compete for control of it. They seek to use the natives as pawns to that end, while the natives hope to use their European allies to help vanquish their own enemies. The Indian sachems are as shrewd and calculating as any feudal lord or colonial governor, each of them working to further their own agendas, to strengthen their own tribes. Uncertainty looms like a ticking clock over the land, a forbidding omen of what’s to come. Every man, woman, and child is a player in a game with no rules unbroken, and no end in sight.