i know you know, it felt like something old

Jamestown, Virginia, October 1609

There is a pregnant virgin in the settlement.

That’s what she says at least. Nominative determinism in the colony of Virginia aside, it seems unlikely.

But then again, England has seen stranger things. Half-fae and changeling children and wombs poisoned by curse. Giants submerged under the sea and swamp hags with mossy teeth.

A small part of him hopes. Could this be the child he has been waiting for? It’s rare but it happens. Oftentimes nations emerge from the dirt, sprouting to the surface like corn. Sometimes an ancient tree sighs as a branch finally cracks away, stumbling on wooden limbs that turn to bone and grow nation flesh. Or a tremor shakes apart the earth and nations are dislodged from mountain faces in a burst of shale and dust. Some nations are born, clawing their way out of wombs not meant to bear such aberrations.

Arthur has no womb, and he is too impatient to wait for the mountains to tremble or the trees to split open. Perhaps this girl, Mary Jones, will be the virgin mother of his new colony.

Mary is barely out of childhood herself, a servant and destined to marry in the new world. That seems unlikely now, however, unless any of the young lads are prepared to come forward and admit the babe is theirs.

Arthur has been learning what the new world herbs and plants can be used for. When the physician cannot provide a satisfactory Christian answer, the settlers turn to him for ancient, less godly medicine. His face is of a young man, and they whisper behind his back about his wisdom beyond his years. Changeling, one of them had muttered, seeing him miraculously recover from deadly typhoid. But they come to him all the same.

Mary clutches her shift to her breasts as he gently looks over her gravid belly. “Around four to five months, I would say.” He murmurs. A midwife could say more accurately, but he is not a midwife.

“The best thing to do now is to just prepare for the birth. I can make you some herbal balms to soften the womb.”

She slowly redresses, pulling her shift back down and rolling her hose back up to her knees.

“Is there…” Mary hesitates. “No, I shouldn’t ask. It is not godly.”

Arthur glances out into the pitch black and sees no sign that they have company beyond the closed door. “What is it?”

“It is wicked.”

“Speak plainly, Mary.”

She fumbles with the fabric of her shift. “I…have heard…that there are ways to provoke the menses.”[1]

Tansy, pennyroyal, and juniper, to name a few.

Arthur nods slowly. “There are. But you said you have already started quickening?”[2]

Mary looks close to tears as she nods.

“Then it is too late,” he says, as gently as he can. He reaches forward to hold Mary’s hands still and rubs his thumb across her palm soothingly. “You will have this baby.”

She chokes on a sob. “Then I am to have them alone!”

“You will have to take a husband.”

That was the wrong thing to say, because she only bawls harder. “Who would have me?”

The answer is staring him in the face. If Mary is being truthful, then this child may be a blessing upon them and the new colony. A child descended of the land itself in a human womb. An incorruptible body that cannot rot.

It will be his duty to care for them, and to raise them into a strong, loyal, English settlement.

Jamestown, Virginia, Lent 1610 (The Starving Time)

It becomes clear that his young wife, hastily married over Christmas, won’t survive the birth. The child is breach, and Arthur listens through the closed door as she screams in agony. The midwives usher in and out with bloody soaked linens and bowls of water.

The immaculate child will be born an orphan. Perhaps one of the other mothers will be able to take them. Or perhaps not, given the lack of food in the fort. He listens, and listens, and listens, until eventually Mary stops screaming sometime in the late evening. There’s a pause, a rush of movement, and then, nothing.

Arthur fears the worst in the agonising minutes he waits. An owl hoots outside.

Then, the door swings open and the exhausted midwives bring a babe.

“A girl,” one of them says as they tilt the swaddled bundle towards him.

Through the open door he can see Mary’s body lying in her own blood; so much blood that the room smells of iron. The midwives have had to cut her open across her navel to deliver the baby in their arms. The child has been wiped down but there is still a smear of her mother’s blood across her cheek. She is far too pale and grey and far too small, with little frail features.

“What is wrong with her?” Arthur demands.

The midwives’ gesture tiredly at him to lower his voice. “She is very weak.”

They try to pass the bundle, but he instinctively steps back as if he’d been offered the crown jewels. “I may drop her.”

The eldest midwife shakes her head fondly. “You won’t. Fathers never do.”

He resists the urge to tell her that he isn’t actually this girl’s father and hesitantly takes the baby from her. The girl weighs almost nothing. Her breathing is so shallow that Arthur could almost miss it, short and fluttery.

It’s the silence that’s the worst.

Despite everything Arthur finds himself sitting down in the chair pulled up in front of the fire and instinctively rocking his arms gently back and forth. The babe barely stirs, which he knows is not good. He scoots closer to the fire, hoping that the warmth of the flames and his own body—though leaner and colder than it has been before—may help.

“Hello,” he murmurs quietly. “Hello,” he repeats.

He barely registers the faint bustling in and out of Mary’s room as the midwives attempt to repair and clean her body. His attention is solely focused on the little child in his arms. One of the midwives tries to encourage the babe to wail by aggressively rubbing her chest and back, and Arthur copies her, to no avail. Someone sends for the reverend to christen the child before the inevitable.

Arthur murmurs absent-minded nothings under his breath as he gently rocks and pats his daughter through the thick swaddle. He can convince himself that it helps ease the passage of the tiny, fragile soul.

The reverend doesn’t make it in time.

London, England, Winter 1612

Arthur spasms on the floor again, moaning like a wounded animal. He clutches his bare belly, which burns and cramps with fiery pain so excruciating it makes the room spin around him. He can’t scream. Won’t scream. Not under the same roof as his King. His king who is already so displeased with Arthur for returning from the new world empty-handed.

He scrabbles for his spellbook, written in an untouched version of his tongue so old only he remembers it, and pulls it towards him. Where has he gone wrong? What incantation did he miss? Has he been cursed? He wishes his brother was with him.

The blood sigils on his lower stomach flicker and tremble. He’d heard of nation pregnancies, whispered over campfires or from behind cupped palms when another nation is just a little too swollen for it to be passed off as indigestion. Feliciano, titan-killer, claims to anyone who will listen that he clawed out of Rome’s belly like Athena from the skull of Zeus.

Something moves inside him, deep behind his navel, and Arthur whimpers frantically. He tries to swallow back the bile in his throat, but a fresh wave of pain forces his gorge up his throat and down his chin. Black spots dance at the edge of his vision as he claws at his own body, desperate to rip out the thing growing and bubbling underneath his skin. Out. Out.

With a choked growl England summons all his strength to roll over onto his front and tuck his knees. He lurches upright, kneeling in repentance for his envy, and gravity makes the spasming weight in his abdomen droop downwards, as if pulling towards his pelvis. Arthur shudders, shoulders heaving, and his hands scrabble for the antler blade at his belt. He lets go of his middle with a cry as something rolls inside him. The last thing he remembers is grasping the antler with both shaking hands; the tip pointed at his own navel. Out!

England comes to in a pool of his own blood however many hours later. The gash across his belly has knitted itself closed, new pink skin drawing fresh blood.  

His gorge rises again at the stench of rotten meat. He stares at the grotesque, blackened, lump of cervical tissue in a wet lump on the floor beside him. Nation flesh shouldn’t rot. Whatever he has cut out of himself was never supposed to be there.

Jamestown, Virginia, September 1618

Over. Under. Over. Under. Over. Under.

Arthur weaves the damp willow back and forth, scooping water from the stream occasionally when the wood becomes too dry and brittle to ply. Sometimes he misjudges it and blisters the tips of his fingers. Then he has to wait for his body to sluggishly heal, sending fresh skin to the surface so that he may work again.

The face he’s working on is slowly taking shape, rows upon rows of split willow woven tightly together to bear the beating of the mallet carving out a nose and browbone. Further up the hill he can hear revelry and drinking, as the settlers celebrate their first successful wheat harvest in the new world.[3]

He picks a loose bit of weed out of the wicker face. He’d dragged his creation out from its hiding place in the coppiced hedgerows. The brook babbling by his feet has kept the submerged willow rods wet and flexible to add the final touches. And with the harvest in, there is enough straw and loose chaff to stuff the body cavity. He has made a basket too, so that if anybody grows suspicious of his absence, he has something to show for it.

Perhaps sub-consciously, the wicker face looks a bit like his own. England recognises his own rectangular jaw, slightly pinched mouth, and stubborn gaze looking back at him. The wicker face’s eyes are made from balls of clay, pressed into the weave. There is a fleck of grey blue in the right eye; a chip of stone or a crushed woodlouse. He has spared them of his thick brows.

As he carefully closes the final seam of the wicker skull, Arthur starts his incantations. His voice turns low and throaty in a way that he doesn’t recognise as his own as the ancient words flow subconsciously through him, echoed across centuries.

Sometimes nations are made. Pressed together from clay or woven from willow and birch, shaped under insistent thumbs. New colonies, built by their sires and imperial mothers, stuffed into bodies too old for them.

If a child will not show themselves to him, and he cannot sire one, he will make one.

He weaves with his voice as well as his hands, praying to both his old and new gods.

England wishes for health. He wants his colony strong and fit, able to endure the scramble for land and European cultivation in the new world. For prosperity. For fields bursting with tobacco, wheat, barley, rye, corn, beans, gourds, rice, and cotton. For industry. For raised cities, busy ports, felled timber and trade routes.

Arthur reflects and changes the lilt of his voice. For generosity. To give when asked and to welcome strangers. For obedience. Because a good colony is one that looks to its imperial mother for approval. But also, for self-reliance. He needs a colony who can survive without him.

As he murmurs under his breath the trees around him shudder and embrace the dappled glade—the chosen cradle of his new ward. The brook babbles and sings with a thousand years of voices collected from soil and pyre. There is a hesitation in the choir. As if England has intruded upon something he was not meant to see or hear.

He ties off the last rod of willow, which leaves a stray curl sticking up stubbornly from the top of the golden wicker skull. He takes a short knife from his belt and cuts shallowly across the meat of his thumb. As fresh blood wells to the surface he tilts his hand over his creation and allows the blood to dribble onto its chest, where its straw heart should be. The cut closes quickly.

And then Arthur waits. The brook tumbles over the riverbed placidly, and a bird calls above his head. He holds his breath as there is faint whisper of rattling breath.

The wicker man sits up.

He looks like he wants to blink against the sudden light, but Arthur has forgotten to give him eyelids, giving the man a distinctly startled look. No wonder, he supposes. He would be fairly alarmed to be alive in the same position. For a moment he doesn’t move. Then the wicker man twists minutely and starts toppling over backwards as his weight shifts.

“Begging your pardon,” England instinctively apologises as he catches the wicker man about the wrist and pulls him upright. He yanks with more force than necessary, as there is not much weight to the willow and straw, and gently corrects, brushing the other down.

“Oh, you’ve got—a bit…in your ear…” Arthur gestures to his companion’s ear politely. The wicker man tilts his head.

“A bit of chaff. Let me just. I’ll get it.” Arthur reaches up and pulls the straw from the wicker man’s ear. He grimaces when the piece that unravels is longer than his hand, and his own ears and jaw tingle sympathetically. The wicker man flinches, then shudders in relief as his ear is unblocked.

Arthur discards the piece of chaff to the breeze.

“Do you have a name?”

England swears he can see something flicker in the wicker man’s mud pellet gaze.

“I made you from this land.” He says, gesturing around himself at the new world.

The wicker man shudders again, then slowly, like Gogmagog rising from the ocean, his mouth creaks open with the sound of willow squealing.

The voice that rasps from within sounds scratchy, and a puff of wheat husks floats out of its mouth.

“I. Am.”

“Yes!” England grasps the wicker man by his hands, taking care not to crush the delicate phalanges. “Yes, you are. I made you.”

“Made you.” The wicker man echoes.

“No, no, no. See, I am Arthur,” he lets go of one hand to gesture to himself. “And I am England.”

“And you,” he gently touches the wicker man’s chest, where there is no heartbeat. “Are this land.”

The wicker man’s face pulls together in a simulacrum of confusion. “Land.”

“Land. Yes. This land.” England grasps a handful of soil and lets it run between his fingers. The wicker man watches, attentive. Then, slowly, creaking like an old oak in the wind, dips his willow fingertips into the soil. Arthur holds his breath.

This is the moment. He waits for the mud to draw up the wicker man’s hand, compelled by the magnetism of a growing new country. Pink flesh will hug the struts of willow like an old shirt, capillaries will knit together from straw, mud will coagulate into ocular flesh set in a birch browbone. He’s waiting for the face of his new world son to smile up at him, shaped by his own blistered hands.

But the wicker man’s hand touches the soil and nothing changes. He runs his fingers through it, tracing aimless swirling patterns. Then he looks back up at Arthur.

“Not this land.”

“What?” England splutters impatiently. “Of course you are. I made you. Rome made colonies out of clay.”

The wicker man manages something like a shrug, though the movement is restrained halfway by the limits of his own woven body. “I am not this land.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The wicker man’s head creaks as he turns to look at the sunset, contemplating.

England fidgets. “Are you sure?”

The wicker man nods. “Quite sure.”

Arthur growls under his breath. All his work wasted. How many hours?

“Some use you are.” He gripes.

The wicker man does not seem to have the capacity to be offended, if his golden face is anything to go by.

“I’m sorry.” He rasps.

He feels a pang of guilt for this newborn thing he has created. “It’s fine.”

The wicker man stares at him placidly, something old and ambivalent in its mud gaze.

“Would you, uh, like to come with me? We have food.”

The wicker man runs his hands through the earth again. “I think I’d like to be returned, if you don’t mind.”

“You don’t…want to live?”

“Not in this body.”

Arthur gnaws on his lip. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. If it’s not too much trouble.” The wicker man looks down at himself. “You should probably start with my fingers.”

“Unravel them?”

“Yes please.”

Arthur slowly reaches forward and takes the wicker man’s hand. There’s no resistance when he makes a small incision with his knife against one of the wicker man’s digits, opening a seam that he can pry his own fingers into.

“Is this alright?”

“Quite alright.”

Arthur gently unthreads the wicker, and the man’s hand slowly comes apart. Straw flutters out and tumbles away on the faint breeze, catching in the green canopy or tumbling downstream.

Under. Over. Under. Over. Under. Over.

After the arms have been disassembled, he begins on the legs. The wicker creature watches him the whole while and says nothing as his body slowly unravels. The golden dusk fades into soft pinks and yellows; a peach blush across the horizon. The birds get louder, harking the end of the day with a sonorous crescendo. Arthur’s fingers blister but he keeps unravelling, keeps pulling apart the wicker frame and handfuls of dry straw.

Arthur gently unthreads the last piece of willow around the torso. With nothing holding them together, the birch ribs sigh and collapse under his hands. The last few veins and arteries of wheat stuffed into the chest cavity catch the breeze and tumble playfully into the wind.

“It won’t be long yet,” Arthur says to the wickerwork face.

There’s no response, and he glances up.

He’s talking to a heap of lifeless wood and straw.

Jamestown, Virginia, August 1619

In the end, the new country is not born of the English settlers or forced from his own body.

It’s a horribly hot August day and Arthur is helping bring in the tobacco harvest.[4] Picking tobacco is spine-breaking work and leaves an unpleasant sticky residue on his hands that attracts flies. But the rhythmic repetitive action and the footstep-clutch-rip sound of those around him makes quiet the constantly buzzing part of his skull.

Which is why he notices quickly when the work around him stops

Arthur straightens, wiping the sweat from his brow and out of his eyes. He licks his lips, suddenly aware of how thirsty he is under the beating sun, and tastes salt. He’s growing hungry too, which only exacerbates the sudden irritableness he feels at the impromptu pause to his work. The other pickers have stopped and gathered around something in the mud, crouched with their heads down. They are at the edge of the field, where crop meets wild thicketed woodland. One man removes his hat and uses it to shade whatever has captured their attention from the sun.

“Oi!” He snaps. “Indolence will get us nowhere.”

Nobody pays him the slightest bit of attention.

Arthur grimaces and turns back around to pick. This will be his last harvest before he returns again to England, having spent three tedious summers indentured in the new world. With no land-babe to show for his time, he is counting down the days until his contract ends and a ship is due to depart for London.

Two tobacco plants later and his curiosity gets the better of him, and he pauses again to look back up. The other settlers are still gathered around something in the mud.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

He slams his basket on the ground with more force than is strictly necessary and stomps over to the gathered huddle. He’ll give them a piece of his mind.

“Whatever you are gambling on it can wait until this evening,” Arthur snaps loudly, intending to frighten, peering over their shoulders to see what all the fuss is about.

There is a baby in the mud. Swaddled and half under a bush.

“Shh!” One of the pickers, William, flaps at him. “You’ll wake him!”

But it’s too late and the baby’s eyes pop open at Arthur’s outburst. They’re a startlingly bright sky blue, clearer than Francis’ eyes which lean grey to match his sudden moods of melancholy. He has a little chubby face and rosy, pink cheeks, though he’s small for a baby. There is a dusting of wheat-blonde hair at his crown, and his little fists are clenched around handfuls of claggy mud.

The baby stares at Arthur for a few seconds, then bursts into tears.

He’s got a set of lungs fit to call the angels back to earth, sharp and loud and indignant about being pulled from his earth womb. Two of the older men, George and Abraham, who have fathered and raised several of their own children, react instinctively. They pick him up and hum sympathetically.

“Oh, bless your heart. What are you doing out here?”

The baby wails harder and harder.

“Do you think?”

“Surely not…”

“Abandoned?”

They pat and soothe him while Arthur stares in stunned silence. There is a deep pull in his chest, somewhere between his heart and his swooping belly doing somersaults. An aching maternal urge, and his hands flutter in an aborted attempt to swipe his baby out of their hands. This newborn child has not been grown inside him, but Arthur can feel a tug in his lower stomach, a phantom placental wound. His vision blurs.

“G-Give him to me,” he chokes. “Please.”

The two older fathers raise their eyebrows at him. “He’s yours?”

“He’s mine,” Arthur claims viciously.

There’s a beat of hesitation, and for a sickening moment Arthur realises he’ll kill them with his bare hands if they won’t give his baby to him.

A pause, then a sigh. “You shouldn’t leave them out in the sun. No wonder he’s crying.” George chastises, and his baby warbles higher as if in agreement.

“And not so close to the woods,” Another tuts.

“His mother?” Abraham asks suspiciously.

“Not here,” Arthur snaps. “Give him to me.”

His baby is gently passed to him.

“He has your nose.” William grins.

But Arthur isn’t listening. There is something small and perfect in his arms and he loves them immediately. The tiny babe in his arms feels too light, too fragile, to carry the vastness of the new world around him. He almost fears that he will hold them too tightly. His son warbles and cries harder, searching for comfort.

“Shh…shh shh.” Arthur starts rocking on the spot, gently swaying back and forth. He rotates so his back is to the blistering sun, shading his baby with his own body.

“You’re safe. You’re safe.” It feels important that the new country hears that. He will protect his colony from anything, from starvation, disease, war—they will want for nothing. Arthur will build him the most excellent cradle in the best house in the settlement with the best food and the best wet nurses and the best governesses he can find. He will shield his new colony from the whole world, which was so cruel to him when he was small.

His son sniffles and gripes but slowly, trustingly, settles against Arthur’s frame. He babbles and his eyes slide open again, immediately fixating on him.

“Hello,” Arthur’s voice cracks. He sniffs hard. “Took your time, didn’t you little one?”

His son’s little mouth cracks open in a delighted smile, slobbery and muddy. He’s the most beautiful creature Arthur has ever seen.

Historical Notes:

[1] The ‘menses’ as in menstruation, also used to describe miscarriages and to obscure the true purpose of abortifacients in medical manuals.

[2] ‘Quickening’: foetal movement in the womb.

[3] Not an expert on this period, but desktop research seems to imply that after earlier attempts which resulted in poor harvests the first properly successful wheat crop in Jamestown was in 1618.

[4] The crop that actually made Jamestown viable as a settlement.

i. As the Caballo de Bastos / Knight of Clubs, Iker the representative of Basque country or Euskadi has two pseudo clubs: on his back the basque Makhila, a walking stick with a metal spike base that can be used as a weapon and the txistu, a traditional flute with three holes. The bastos suit is recognized also for having three cuts in the frame.

ii. As the Caballo de Copas / Knight of Chalice, Mireia or Catalunya wears a rich dress and present the Holy Grail that is believed in Spain to be in the Cathedral of Valencia. The most waited card in many old ganes the inscription "Ahi va" (Here she goes) shows her importance and riches. The Catalonian suits had kings and knight in long robes and vivid colors.

iii. As the Page de Oros / Page of Coin, Uxía is wearing a rural Galician attire and gives her back to a Galician coined in the Kingdom of Suebi a Germanic post Roman kingdowm On the coin we can read "Gallica".

iv. Antonio is in full Cid cosplay as the Caballo de Espada / Knight of the Sword holding La Tizona. The legendary sword of El Cid, a mercenary knight turned knightly legend, the sword was not his but the history is good.