Virgin Earth

Summer 1643, Virginia

The days that followed John’s arrival in the Indian village fell into a routine as orderly as the smooth running of John’s English home. In the morning Suckahanna’s boy would waken him with one of the smooth black bowls filled with hot water for washing. Outside his hut, in the cool dawn light, John would see the People coming and going as they went down to the river for the morning prayer.

When they returned John would look for Suckahanna, her face bright as she walked beside her husband, his son at one side, her baby strapped on her back. The boy was Suckahanna’s shadow and she seemed to know his whereabouts, without even turning her head to look for him. It was as if, when she adopted him and married his father, she had made a bond with him that stretched over any distance but was as palpable as touch.

Before he was allowed to eat the boy had marksman training. Suckahanna plucked a piece of moss from a tree and threw it in the air for him. Not until his little arrow had pierced the falling moss could the boy eat his breakfast. Some mornings Suckahanna was out under the trees with him for three, four, five attempts before John heard her word of praise and saw the quick touch of her fingers on his dark head.

“He had no mother for his early years,” she explained to John. “He has much to learn.”

“Why did his father not teach him?” John asked. He was tempted to complain of Suckahanna’s husband, to make him look foolish in her eyes. She just tossed her head and laughed. “Bringing a child into the world is work for a woman,” she said simply. “A man cannot do it.”

As the sun rose and warmed the air they would all gather for a breakfast of fruits or nuts or a gruel made from corn flour and berries. This was the hungriest time of the year – the winter stores were almost exhausted and the summer crops were not yet ripe – but even so no one went hungry in the village. The stores had been put aside all through the rich fruitful time of the year, and then extra had been laid aside as well in the huge granary building filled with great bowls of dried pulses, huge netted sacks of dried maize, vats as big as a man filled with nuts. John wondered why they did not broach the great store, but no one would tell him.

After breakfast the men would string their bows, oil their bodies, tie back their hair, paint their faces, and go out to hunt together. John watched the laughing camaraderie of the huntsmen with the knowledge that he would always be an outsider. The men did not speak to him, he did not know if they even understood English. The women understood everything he said, but their replies were brief. Inevitably, John was learning the rhythm of Powhatan speech, picking up individual words and names. He watched the men, understanding that they were planning the hunt. Suckahanna’s husband was among them, in the very heart of the preparations. He was acknowledged as a fine hunter, a man who could kill a deer alone, without the help of a hunting party. Other braves could drop a deer with a well-placed arrow when it had been driven from one cover to another and directed toward them; but Suckahanna’s husband could throw a deerskin over his shoulder, strap the horns to his head and move so skillfully and so deerlike with his tittupping step and his nervous, flickering head-tossing, with his sudden staglike stillness, that he could go among a herd of deer and pick one off as it grazed beside him. A man had to be blessed by the deer god to manage such a feat. Suckahanna’s husband was treated with loving respect and he alone decided the course of every hunt. Even his name showed his nature. He was called Attone – the arrow.

As the men readied themselves to leave the village, the women gathered children and their gardening tools and went to the fields to plant and to weed. While John was weak from his illness and under Suckahanna’s special protection he went with her, and watched them planting. Their crop was set in a field which had been roughly cleared by burning. They left the tree stumps, left even the biggest living trees and planted around them. The edge of the field was ragged, where the fire had not taken hold. Its disorder offended John’s sense of how a tidy field should be set square on the landscape, its lines drawn clearly, hedged and ditched.

“You could get the men to help you clear the tree stumps,” he suggested to Suckahanna. “It wouldn’t take long to uproot them and pull them out. Then you could plant your crops in straight rows. Those tree stumps you have left in will only grow back within a season, and then you’ll have all the work to do all over again.”

“We want the trees to grow back,” she said. “We don’t want this field for more than a season.”

“But if you cleared it properly then you could use it year after year,” John insisted. “You would not have to move on. You could have the same fields and keep the village in the same place.”

Decidedly, she shook her head. “The earth gets weary of working for us,” she said. “We plant a field here and then we set her free. We move on to another place. If you plant corn in the same field three years running, then in the third year you will harvest nothing. The earth gets weary of hungry men. She has to rest like a woman with a baby at the breast, needs to rest, needs some time alone. She cannot be always feeding.”

“White men plant the same fields, and go back to them year after year,” John observed.

“White men did,” she corrected him. “All around Jamestown now they are finding that the land is tiring of them. The land is weary of the hungry white mouth which eats and eats and eats and cannot be satisfied and will not move on.”

She moved to the next row with her hoeing stick. In each hole she dropped four grains of corn and two bean seeds. Behind her another woman came sowing pumpkin seeds. Later, beneath the crops, they would plant the quicker-growing amaracocks for their lush, thirst-quenching fruit.

John picked up a stick of his own and hunkered down beside her. “I’ll help,” he said.

She could not repress a giggle at the sight of him, and then she shook her head. “This is women’s work, only women do it.”

“I can do it. I’m a gardener in my own country. I can plant.”

Still Suckahanna refused. “I know that you can. And any Powhatan man can do it, if he has to. But women like to do it. It is what we do.”

“To serve the men?” John asked, thinking of the delicious idleness of the hunting men when they returned to camp and found their dinner waiting for them and their fields cleared and planted, their houses swept clean, the sweat lodge heated and ready for them.

She shot him a quick, scornful look from under her dark eyebrows. “Because the earth and the women are together,” she half-whispered. “That is where the power of the People belongs, not in the war councils or in the hunting parties. It is women who have the power to make things grow, to give birth. The rest – is pipesmoke.”

John felt his view, his comfortable view of the world, shift and rock. “Men have the power,” he said. “God made them in his image.”

She looked at him as if he might be joking. “You may believe that your god did that,” she said politely. “But we are the children of the Hare.”

“The Hare?”

She stopped her work and sat back on her heels. “I shall tell you as if you were my little child,” she said with a smile. “Listen. In the very beginning when there was nothing but darkness and the sound of the running water, the great Hare came out of the darkness and made both man and woman.”

John squatted down beside her in the damp earth, watched the smile move from her eyes to her lips, and the way her hair fell over her bare shoulders.

“They were hungry. Men and women are always hungry. So the Hare put them in a bag until he could feed them. He ran through the darkness with the bag held tight in his mouth and everywhere he ran there was land made, and water made, and the great deer to walk the land and drink the water and feed the new-made man and woman. And everywhere he went there were fierce mouths biting at him from out of the darkness, hungry meat-eating mouths that would snap at his heels and at the bag he was carrying. But everywhere he ran, the mouths were destroyed, and fled back into the darkness until it was safe for him to do what he wished.”

John waited.

Suckahanna smiled. “Then, and only then, he opened the bag and let out the man and the woman. The man ran to hunt the deer. The man has the great richness of the deer. This is what he wanted. But the woman-” she paused and gave him a sly sideways smile “ – the woman has everything else.”

A year ago John would have called it a heathen tale full of heresy and nonsense. But now he listened and nodded. “The women have everything else?”

“Everything but hunting and war.”

“So what am I to do?” he asked her.

Suckahanna looked momentarily surprised, as if he had moved the conversation onward in one great bound. “You will get well,” she said slowly. “And then you will decide.”

“Decide?”

“Where you want to live. What kind of man you want to be.”

John hesitated. “I thought I would get well and go back to my home – to my fields up the river.”

She shook her head. “You must know by now that you cannot live there,” she said gently. “You cannot live there alone. You must know by now that you cannot survive in this land alone. You would have died there, my love.” The endearment slipped out, she flushed and bit her lip as if she would have taken it back.

“I thought – I thought I might get a servant, or a slave. I thought-” He hesitated. “I have been thinking that you might come with me?”

“As a servant? As a slave?” Her look blazed at him.

“I meant I must have someone to work under me,” John corrected himself. “And I have been praying that you would come to me ever since I made landfall. I meant a servant, and you as well.”

“I shall never lie under a white man’s roof again,” Suckahanna said firmly. “I have taken my decision, and I am with the People.”

John jumped to his feet and took a stride away from her and then back again. “Then there is nothing for me here,” he cried out. “I came to make a new life for myself, to farm virgin earth, to find you. And you tell me I cannot plow or hoe alone. I cannot keep myself or even keep my fire in. I cannot take you away from your people, and I cannot take you to my people. I have been a fool to run from one life to another and still achieve nothing.”

There was a cry from the little platform shelter where the children played. Suckahanna glanced back, listening for her own baby’s voice. They heard another woman call in response and get up from her knees and go to see to the crying child. Suckahanna returned her attention to her gardening, picked up her hoeing stick, picked out little weed seedlings from her row. Without turning her head to see if John was listening she spoke very quietly to him.

“Perhaps you could be with me,” she said slowly. “Leave your people and join mine.”

“I can’t live here, seeing you every day,” John said softly. “I want you, Suckahanna. I can’t bear to live near you and yet to sleep every night only a footstep away from you.”

“I know,” she said, so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear. But still her hands worked, her hoeing stick piercing the fresh soil and the seeds dropping quickly and accurately through her fingers. “I could ask my husband to release me.”

“Release you?” John asked incredulously. “This is possible?”

“He might,” she said evenly. “If it was my wish.”

“Your people let their wives come and go as they choose?”

She shot him a small smile. “I told you that we were a proud people. Wives are not slaves. If they wish to leave they must be free to do so, don’t you think?”

“Yes… but-”

“We would have the children,” she went on. “The little boy and my own baby. You would have to promise to love them and care for them like a father.”

“And where would we live? You said you would not live in my house?”

“We would live here,” she said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “Among the People. You would become a Powhatan.”

“I would learn your language? Live among you as an equal?”

“You are learning it already,” she observed. “You laughed at Musses the other day and she was not speaking English.”

“I can understand some, but-”

“You would have to join the People, as a brother.”

“They would accept me?”

“We would accept you.”

John was silent, his head spinning. This was a far greater step than his adventure to Virginia, this was a step into the unknown beyond the plantation, into the darkness of unknowable lands.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You would have to decide,” she repeated patiently, as if she had led a child around a circle of explanation and returned to the key point at last. “You would have to decide, my love.”

John hesitated at the endearment. “Do you want me to be with you?” he asked.

At once her hands returned to their work, her head bowed and her veil of dark hair tumbled over her face hiding her expression, brushing her naked brown shoulder. “You would have to decide, without advice from me,” she said to the earth. “I don’t want a man with half a heart.”

At midday the women rested. The fields they were working were distant from home, too far to return to the village for the usual meal, prayers and rest. They ate a little cold gruel and fruit which they had brought with them, they said their brief prayers to the sun which stood precisely above each and every one of them, blessing each and every one with light and warmth on the exact center of her head. Then they rested in the shade of the trees. Suckahanna’s baby was at her breast as she lay back, the little boy playing stalking or marksmanship with his tiny bow and arrow, with the others. John rested near Suckahanna, listened to the ripple of talk, picked out words, one word after another, all of them making more sense to him. He watched her openly now, wondering how it would be if they were married. If she could indeed leave her husband and come to him. If he could indeed become a Powhatan. If he could ever be recognized as a man among the People.

When they returned to camp he touched her arm. “I need to take advice from a man,” he said. “Can one of the men speak my language? Someone I can trust to tell me how a Powhatan man might see this? Not a friend of your husband?”

At once her dark eyes lit up with laughter. “Oh! You don’t trust me!”

“I do-” John heard himself stammering. “Of course!”

Suckahanna turned her head and babbled a string of words at her sister-in-law who was a few paces ahead. The woman screamed with laughter and turned back, laughing at John, and pointed an accusing finger at him. John picked out among the rapid flow the few words: man, Powhatan, talk, talk, talk, everything.

“What is she saying?”

“She says you are a true man, a Powhatan already. She says all men need to talk, talk, talk among themselves, to make the decisions which are already known.”

“Known?” John queried.

Suckahanna veiled her eyes with the downward sweep of her eyelashes. “Everyone thinks that you love me,” she said quietly. “Everyone thinks that I love you. We are all just waiting…”

“Waiting?”

“For you. To decide.”

John went that night before supper to the house of the werowance, the senior man of the village. It stood foursquare at the head of the village street, near the dancing ground, at a distance from the smoke of the cooking fires. It was walled with tree bark, and roofed with bark roughly cut in shingles. In the heat of the day the bark walls would be rolled up like curtains, but as the evening grew cold the old men closed out the chill night air. The werowance himself was sitting on a raised platform at the end of the tent; at his side were two of the old men of the tribe. They all carried their sharp hunting knives, John noticed. They all looked grave.

John stood in the doorway, awkward as a boy.

“You can come.” The werowance spoke in heavily accented English; but there was neither welcome nor warmth in his voice.

John entered the darkness of the house and sat, obedient to the small gesture, on a pile of soft deerskin. For a moment he was reminded of King Charles’s wordless gestures to his servants, and the thought gave him a little courage in the darkness of the strange house. He had served the greatest king in England, he could surely bear himself like a man before someone who was nothing more than a savage chief clinging to the edge of unknown land.

“You desire Suckahanna?” the werowance said briefly.

John found he was looking at the length and sharpened cane blades of the hunting knives.

“I knew her before she was a married woman,” he said. His voice sounding weak and apologetic, even in his own ears. “We were promised to each other. I promised I would come back for her.”

The werowance nodded. “But you did not come back,” he observed.

John gritted his teeth. “When I got to my home in my country my father had died and my children needed care. I had to stay.”

“She waited,” the werowance pointed out. The old men on either side of him nodded, their sharp faces like stone eagles on a lectern in church. “She trusted your word.”

“I am sorry,” John said awkwardly.

“You have a new wife and children in your own country?”

John thought of a swift lie, thought he might tell them that the plague had taken both his children as well as Jane. But a fearful superstition halted his tongue. “Yes, I have children,” he said quietly. “And a wife.”

“And is your wife now the one who waits?”

John nodded.

The werowance sighed as if John’s infidelity was a riddle, too tedious and complex to unravel. There was a silence that stretched for a long time. John’s back ached, he had sat awkwardly and now he felt too uneasy to wriggle back on the pile of skins and lean against the wall of the house.

“Where do you want to be?” the werowance asked him. “With Suckahanna or your wife?”

“With Suckahanna,” John said.

“You will care for her children as if they were your own?”

“Gladly.”

“You know the children are not to be taken to your people? They will stay with the Powhatan?”

John nodded.

“And their mother stays with us too. She will never go to your country with you.”

John nodded again. “She told me this.” He could feel a squirm of excitement starting to grow inside him. This had all the signs of an interrogation of a bridegroom, it was not the preamble to a refusal.

“She came to us for a home, she could wait for you no longer. She made her choice and now she is our child. We have taken her to our hearts.”

The older men nodded. One said something low in their language. The werowance nodded. “My brother says that we love her. We would avenge her hurt.”

“I understand,” John said. He was afraid they would hear the beating of his heart, it sounded so loud in his own ears. “I don’t want to take her from you. I know she has made her choice, and that she and her children will be with you.”

“And any children you may have with her,” came a low growl from another man, speaking clearly in English. “They will not be Englishmen, remember. They too will be the People of the Hare.”

John had not thought of his children being born here, being raised by Suckahanna, being rocked in the papoose, learning deadly accuracy with a reed arrow. He felt his heart leap at the thought of fathering such a son. He swallowed. “Yes.”

“If you choose her, you choose to be with her, to be with us,” the werowance repeated.

John bowed his head.

There was a silence.

“Do you wish to be our brother?”

John drew a breath. Lambeth seemed a long way away, Hester more dead to him than his first wife, Jane. His own children half forgotten. The pulse in his blood, the drumming beat in his ears, was for Suckahanna. “I will,” he said.

Faster than the eye could follow, like a striking snake, the werowance snatched at John’s wrist, twisting it so that he fell to his knees before the basilisk gazes of the three old men. The pain shot up John’s arm to his shoulder, the grip on his wrist joint was so powerful that he had to stay on his knees.

“Against your own people?” the werowance demanded.

“It won’t come to that,” John gasped. He could feel the bones in his arm starting to bend, an ounce more pressure and they would break. “I know that they have treated your people badly but they have the land they need now, it won’t come to a war.”

“They have driven us back like helpless deer,” the man said, his grip unchanging. “And they will drive us back and back, every time they need an inch more land. Is that not so?”

John did not dare to answer. He felt the sweat standing on his back, the muscles in his arm singing with the pain. “I can’t say.”

“They use the land and leave it, like a hog in a stall, don’t they? They foul it and then it is good for nothing. So always they need more land, and more land, and then more?”

Abruptly the werowance let John go and he pitched facedown on the rushes of the floor, biting his lips to keep from crying out. He could not contain his panting breath, he whooped like a hurt child.

“So there will come a time when every inlet of the river and every tall standing tree sees an Englishman hammering in a stake.”

John sat back on his heels, fingered his forearm, his shoulder. “Yes,” he conceded unwillingly.

“So when you say you are our brother, you must realize that we will call on you as our brother. You will die beside us when we run forward. Your hands will be red with the blood of white men. You will have their scalps tied to your belt.”

John thought of the Hoberts in their little house hidden among the trees, and the inn at Jamestown, the serving maid at the governor’s house, the rough kindliness of the planters, the hopeful faces of the emigrants when they first docked at the quay. The werowance clapped his hands, a sharp ringing sound.

“I knew you couldn’t do it,” he remarked, and rose to his feet and walked from the house.

John scrambled to his feet and took three rapid strides after him. One of the old men stuck out a bony leg and John tripped and pitched down to the skins on the floor.

“Lie still, Englishman,” the old man said, his speech perfect, his diction Oxford pure. “Lie still like a fool. Did you think we would give our daughter to a man with half a heart?”

“I love her,” John said. “I swear it.”

The two old men got slowly to their feet.

“Love is not enough,” said the old man. “You need custom and kinship as well. Love her all you like. There is no shame in it. But choose your people and stay with them. That is the path of a brave.”

Without another word the old men went out, their bare feet passing within an inch of John’s face. He lay on the skins, the very symbol of a man brought low, and let them walk past him.

It grew dark. John lay still. He did not notice the thickening of the light and the spreading shadows on the wall. He heard the distant sound of singing and knew that dinner had been cooked and eaten and that Suckahanna’s people were at the dancing circle, singing down the moon, singing the fine weather in, singing the herds of deer toward them, singing the fish into the weirs and the seeds strong and tall out of the ground. John lay face down in the skins and neither wished nor wept. He knew his own emptiness.

A light came to the doorway, a twig of burning candlewood, bright as the best wax in London. Beneath it, half lit, half shadowed, was Suckahanna.

“You told them you did not want me?” she asked from the doorway.

“I failed a test,” John said. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face. He felt immensely weary. “They said I should have to fight against my own people and I could not agree to do it.”

“Very well.” She turned to go.

“Suckahanna!” he cried and the desperation and passion in his voice would have made any woman pause but a woman of the Powhatan. She did not even hesitate. She did not drag her feet. She went out as lightly stepping as if she were about to join a dance. John leaped up from the floor and ran out after her. She must have heard him coming, she knew the rhythm of his stride from her girlhood, but she did not hesitate nor look around. She walked without breaking her pace down the little street to her own house, parted the deerskin at the door and slipped inside without even glancing back.

John skidded to a standstill and felt an urge to scream and hammer his fist through the wall of the light, beautifully made house. He took a sobbing breath and turned toward the fire at the dancing circle.

They were dancing for joy, it was not a religious ceremony. He could tell that at once since the werowance was seated on a low stool with only an ordinary cape thrown for warmth around his shoulders, and no sacred abalone shells around his neck. He was clapping his hands to the music of the drums and flutes, and smiling.

John went toward the light but knew that he was not suddenly revealed. They would all have seen him in the shadows, sensed him running after Suckahanna and then turning back to them. He skirted the beaten earth of the dancing floor and worked his way around to the werowance’s seat. The three old men glared at him with the bland amusement of cynical old age which always enjoys the diversion of youthful pain.

“Ah, the visitor,” said the werowance.

“I want to marry her,” John announced without preamble. “And my children will be Powhatan, and my heart will be with the Powhatan. And you may command me as a brave.”

The sharp, beaky face gleamed with pleasure. “You have changed your mind,” the werowance observed.

“I have learned the price,” John said. “I am not a changeable man. I did not know what Suckahanna would cost me. Now you have told me and I know. And I agree.”

One of the men smiled. “A merchant, a trader,” he said, and it was not a compliment.

“Your children to be Powhatan?” the other old man confirmed. “And you to be our brave?”

John nodded.

“Against your own people?”

“I trust it will never come to that.”

“If it ever does?”

John nodded again. “Yes.”

The werowance rose to his feet. At once the drumming stopped, the dancing halted. He put out his arm and John, uncertainly, went toward him. The thin arm came down lightly on John’s broad shoulders but he could feel the strength of the sinews in the hand as the werowance gripped him.

“The Englishman wants to be a brave of the Powhatan and marry Suckahanna,” the werowance announced in Powhatan. “We are all in agreement. Tomorrow he goes hunting with the braves. He marries her as soon as he has shown he can catch his own deer.” John scowled at the effort of understanding what was being said. Then the beaky face turned toward him and the werowance spoke in English.

“You have a day to prove yourself,” he said. “One day only. If you cannot mark, hunt and kill your deer in the day from dawn to sunset then you must go back to your people and their gunpowder. If you want a Powhatan woman then you have to be able to feed her with your hands.”

Suckahanna’s husband grinned at John from the center of the dancing circle. “Tomorrow then,” he said invitingly in Powhatan, not caring whether John understood or not. “We start at dawn.”

At dawn they were in the river, in the deep, solemn silence of the prayers for the rising of the sun. Around the braves, scattered on the water, were the smoking leaves of the wild tobacco plant, acrid and powerful in the morning air. The braves and the women stood waist-deep in the icy water in the half-darkness, washed themselves, prayed for purity, burned the tobacco and scattered the burning leaves. The embers, like fireflies, swirled away downriver, sparks against the grayness.

John waited on the bank, his head bowed in respect. He did not think he should join them until he was invited, and anyway, his own strict religious background meant that he shrank in fear for his immortal soul. The story of the Hare and the man and the woman in his bag was clearly nonsense. But was it any more nonsense than a story about a woman visited by the Holy Ghost, bearing God’s own child before kneeling oxen while angels sang above them?

When the people turned and came out of the water their faces were serene, as if they had seen something which would last them all the day, as if they had been touched by a tongue of fire. John stepped forward from the bushes and said in careful Powhatan, “I am ready,” to Suckahanna’s husband.

The man looked him up and down. John was dressed like a brave in a buckskin shirt and buckskin pinny. He had learned to walk without his boots and on his feet were Powhatan moccasins, though his feet would never be as hard as those of men who had run over stones and through rivers and climbed rocks barefoot since childhood. John was no longer starved thin; he was lean and hardened like a hound.

Suckahanna’s husband grinned at John. “Ready?” he asked in his own language.

“Ready,” John replied, recognizing the challenge.

But first every man had to check his weapons, and sons and girls were sent running for spare arrowheads and shafts, and new string for a bow. Then a woman ran after them with her husband’s strip of dried meat which she had forgotten to give him. It was a full hour after sunrise before the hunting party trotted out of the village. John suppressed a smug sense of satisfaction at what he regarded as inefficient delays; but kept his face grave as they jogged past the women, setting off for the fields. There were catcalls and hoots of encouragement at the men’s hard pace and at John, keeping up in the rear.

“For a white man, he can run,” a woman said fairly to Suckahanna, and Suckahanna turned her head to look after them as if to demonstrate that she had not been watching and had not noticed.

John did not permit himself a grin of satisfaction. The fat had been leached off him during his hungry time in the woods and his stay in the Indian village had been hard work. He was always running errands from field to village, or helping the women with the heavy work of clearing the land. The food they gave him had built only muscle, and he knew that though he might be thirty-five this year he had never been healthier. He imagined that Attone would think that he would drop from the line of braves panting and gasping within the first ten minutes, but he would be proved wrong.

Ten minutes went by and John was gasping for breath and fighting the desire to drop out from the line. It was not that they moved so fast, John could easily have sprinted past them, it was the very steadiness of their pace which was so exhausting. It was not a run and it was not a walk, it was a walk on the balls of their feet, a fast walk which never quite broke into a run. It was hard on the calf muscles, it was hard on the arch of the instep. It was sweating agony on the lungs and the face and the chest and the whole racking frame of the Englishman as he tried first to run and then to walk and found himself forever out of stride.

He would not give up. John thought that he might die on the trail behind the Powhatan braves, but he would not return to the village and say that he had not even sighted the deer he had promised to kill because he had been out of breath and too weary to walk to the woods.

For another ten minutes, and another unbearable ten after that, the file of braves danced along the path, following in each other’s footsteps so precisely that anybody tracking them would think he was following only one man. Behind them came John, taking two steps to their one, then one and a half, then a little burst of a run, then back to a walk.

Suddenly they halted. Attone’s fingers had spread slightly as he held his hand to his side. No other signal was needed. The fingers opened and closed twice: deer, a herd. Forefinger and little finger were raised: with a stag. Attone looked back down the line of the hunting party and slowly, one by one, all the half-shaven heads turned to look back at John. There was a polite smile on Attone’s face which was soon mirrored down the line. Here was the herd, here was a stag. It was John’s hunt. How did he propose they should go about killing one, or preferably three, deer?

John looked around. Sometimes a hunting party would set fires in the forest and drive a herd of deer into an ambush. Even more skill was required for an individual hunter to stalk an animal. Attone was famous among the People for his gift of mimicry. He could throw a deerskin over his shoulders and strap a pair of horns to his head and get so close to an animal that he could stand alongside it and all but slide a hand over its shoulders and cut its throat as it grazed. John knew he could not emulate that expertise. It would have to be a drive and then a kill.

They were near to an abandoned white settlement. Some time ago there had been a house by the river here, the deer were grazing on shoots of maize between the grass. There was a jumble of sawn timber where a house had once been and there was a landing stage where the tobacco ship would have moored. It had all gone to ruin years before. The landing stage had sunk on its wooden legs into the treacherous river mud and now made a slippery pier into the river. John looked at the lie of the land and thought, for no reason at all, of his father telling him of the causeway on the Ile de Rhé and how the French had chased the English soldiers over the island and to the wooden road across the mudflats and then picked them off as the tide swirled in.

He nodded, affecting confidence, as if he had a plan, as if he had anything in his head more than a vision of something his father had done, whereas what he needed now, and so desperately, was something he himself could do.

Attone smiled encouragingly, raised his eyebrows in a parody of interest and optimism.

He waited.

They all waited for John. It was his hunt. It was his herd of deer. They were his braves. How were they to dispose themselves?

Feeling foolish but persisting despite his sense of complete incompetence, John pointed one man to the rear of the herd, another to the other side. He made a cupping shape with his hands: they were to surround the deer and drive them forward. He pointed to the river, to the sunken pier. They were to drive the deer in that direction.

Their faces as blank as impudent schoolboys, the men nodded. Yes indeed, if that was what John wanted. They would surround the deer. No one warned John to check the direction of the wind, to think how the men would get into place in time, to disperse them in stages so that each would get to his place as the others were also ready. It was John’s hunt, he should fail in his own way, without the distraction of their help.

He had beginner’s luck. Just as the men started to move into their places the rain started, heavy thick drops which laid the scent and hid the noise of the men moving through the woodland surrounding the clearing. And they were skilled hunters and could not restrain their skill. They could not move noisily or carelessly when they were encircling a herd of deer even if they wanted to, their training was too deeply engrained. They stepped lightly on dry twigs, they moved softly through crackling shrubs, they slid past thorns which would have caught in their buckskin clouts with the sharp noise of paper tearing. They might not care whether or not they helped John in his task; but they could not deny their own skill.

In seconds the hunting team was cupped around the herd, ready for the signal to move forward. John held back, at the base of the cup, he hoped to see the herd driven before him and struggling in the mud, giving him the chance of a clear shot. He made the small gesture with his hand which meant “drive on”; and he had the pleasure of seeing all of them, even Attone, move cooperatively to his bidding.

One, two, the deer’s heads went up, the does looking for their young. The stag snuffed the wind. He could smell nothing, the wind had veered with the rain. The only scent he got was the clear water smell of the river behind the herd. Uneasily he glanced around and then he turned his head and walked a little back the way they had come, to the river.

The braves paused at John’s gesture and then, as he beckoned them, moved forward again. The herd knew that something was happening. They could see nothing in the sudden downpour of rain and hear nothing over the pitter-pat of fat raindrops on summer leaves, but they had a sense of uneasiness. They bunched closer together and followed the stag as he went, his heavy head swinging to one side and then the other, looking all about him, and led the way toward the river.

John should have held back, but he could not. He made the gesture to “go forward” and was saved from disaster only by the braves’ own skill. They could not have borne to have moved forward and stampeded the herd and lost them. Not if there had been a dozen Englishmen to humiliate. They could not have done it any more than John could have mown down a bed of budding tulips. Their skill asserted itself even over their desire for mischief. They disobeyed John’s hurried commands and fell back, waiting until the anxious heads dropped again to graze and the flickering ears ceased to swivel and flick.

John gestured again: “go forward”! And now, slowly the braves moved a little closer as if their own looming presence alone could move the deer toward the river. They were right. The empathy between deer and Powhatan was such that the deer did not need to hear, did not need to see. The stag’s head was up again and he went determinedly down the path which the farmer had once trod from his maize field to his pier, and the does and fawns followed behind.

John waved, “on, on,” and the deer went faster, and the hunters went faster behind them. Then, as if they could sense the excitement before they could even hear or smell or see, the deer knew they were being pursued; and they threw their heads back and their dark liquid eyes rolled, and they trotted and then they cantered, and then they flung themselves headlong down the little muddy single-file path to the deceptive safety of the pier as it stretched out into the river like an avenue to a haven.

The braves broke into a run following them, each one fitting an arrow to his bow as he ran, a faultless smooth gesture, even while dancing around fallen trees, leaping logs. John fumbled for his arrow, dropped it in his haste, put his hand to his hip for another and found that his quiver had been torn from him as he ran. He was weaponless. He threw aside his bow in a burst of impatience but his feet pounded faster still.

The deer were following a trail, the braves were filtering through thick forest but still they went as fast as the herd, they kept pace with them, they were the power behind the herd, driving it forward, exactly to the place where John wanted them to go, to the wooden causeway, out into the river.

“Yes!” he cried. The braves broke from the trees in a perfect crescent, the herd a tossing tawny mass of horn and eyes and heads and thundering feet cupped inside the circle of running men. “Now!” John yelled, a great passion for the deer and for the hunt rising up in him. He felt a great desire to kill a deer, thus owning it and this moment forever: the moment that John led his hunting party and took his deer.

But just as that moment was there, just as the first deer leaped down to the causeway to the illusion of safety, and lost her footing at once on the slippery betraying timbers, and an arrow went zing through the air and pierced her pounding heart, just as the others were ready to follow her, one young buck jinked to the right, to the bank, to the clear run downriver to freedom, and another, seeing the sudden spurt of his pace, followed him, and Tradescant saw in that split second of time that his cup of braves was not holding, that his herd of deer would be lost, spilled like quicksilver out of an alchemist’s goblet, and would run away downriver.

“No!” he yelled. “No! My deer!” And now he was not thinking of Suckahanna, nor of his pride, nor of the respect of Attone and the other braves. Now he was intent, determined that his plan should work, that his beautiful strategy should be beautifully performed and that no fleet, infuriating beast should spoil the perfection of the moment of the hunt. “No!”

At once he was running in great jolting, ground-eating strides, running as he had never run before, to plug the gap in the line, to outpace the first hunter on the extreme right, to stop the deer escaping from his goblet, his beautiful, deer-filled goblet. Attone, his arrow on a string, heard the yell as the Englishman, his long hair flying behind him, took breakneck strides, great leaps down the hill, watched openmouthed, even forgetting the imperative of the hunt, as the Englishman yelled, “No!” and while yelling outpaced one, two and then three hunters, and flung himself toward the breach.

John’s sudden eruption caused terror in the herd. Instead of slipping away through the gap they doubled back and met the upstream wing of the hunters. There was nowhere for them to go but out into the river, on the slippery causeway. One after another they leaped and scrabbled for it. Their sharp hooves could gain no purchase on the greasy, half-rotted wood, they fell, they pitched into the river, there was a hail of arrows.

But John did not see any of this. All he saw was the gap in his plan, the breach in the perfection of his hunt, and a deer jinking and swerving to get past him. He ran, he ran toward it, his hands outstretched as if he would catch it by the throat. The deer caught sight of him and went for freedom, made a great leap down the steep bank to the river, splashed into the water, fought its way to the surface and laid its smooth head back so the wet, dark nose was able to pant, and it was able to swim, sharp legs flailing, to the center of the river.

John, unable to bear the sight of his prey escaping, let out a desperate “Hulloah!” and flung himself, as if he thought he could fly, down the six-foot riverbank and into the water, on top of the deer, falling head first in a wild dive so there was a resounding crack as deer skull met John’s forehead, and while he was still blinded by the blow they plunged down into the depths of the river and rose up together, and even gazed into each other’s startled, desperate eyes. John felt his hands close around the deer’s throat before a sharp hoof struck him like a bullet in his chest and pushed him down below the water again.

Attone, far from letting fly with his arrow at the disappearing head, far from picking off the deer which were slithering and plunging off the causeway, found that he was screaming with laughter at the sight of the Englishman, the despised, overanxious, women-guarded Englishman howling like a spirit from the dark world, bounding as if he could outrun a deer, and then diving headfirst into a shallow river. A man so filled with bloodlust, so insane with desire, that he could come nose to nose in deep water with a deer and still close his hands around its throat.

Attone gripped a tree for support and called in English: “Englishman! Englishman! Are you dead? Or just mad?”

Tradescant, surfacing and realizing suddenly that he was in cold, weedy water, that he had neither bow nor arrow nor kill, but instead a sensation very like a broken rib and a hoof-shaped bruise over his heart, and a cracked head for his pains, heard also the irresistible laughter of a Powhatan engulfed by amusement, and started to laugh too. He paddled like a weak dog to the water’s edge and then found he was laughing too much to climb up the bank. It was absurdly high and he recalled that he had dived off the top of it and actually landed head first on the deer. The thought made him collapse in laughter again, and the sight of Attone holding out his hand, his brown face creased in helpless laughter, redoubled Tradescant’s own amusement.

He gripped Attone’s hand but it was too much for both of them and their grip slipped as their helpless giggles weakened them so that all Attone could do was fall back on the soft grass of the riverbank and give himself up to it, while Tradescant lay back in the river and howled like a dog at the thought of his hunt and his madness and his incompetence.

When Suckahanna saw the men coming back to camp she went out slowly to greet them; she was proud, and this was a difficult matter for any woman. Her husband was the finest hunter among the people but she was proposing to leave him for an Englishman who had been seen by everyone as incapable of even shooting a pigeon with one of the white man’s infallible guns.

First he saw the kill. Six of the hunters carried in three deer lashed by their feet to pruned branches. It was a kill that any hunting party would have been proud to bring home, enough to feed the village and leave surplus meat for salting down. Suckahanna breathed in sharply and drew herself a little higher. She would not be seen by anyone running up to the braves and asking them who had done the kill. But three deer was a successful hunt; three deer was undeniable evidence that the braves on the hunt had done well.

Then she saw John. At first she thought he must be wounded, grievously wounded, for the man who was supporting him was her own husband, Attone. She started to run toward him, but then she checked herself after two paces. There was something odd about the way they walked together, it was not the stumble of a sick man and the load-bearing stride of his helper. They were clinging together as if they were both dizzy, as if they were both drunk. She watched, then she put her hand up to shade her eyes from the evening sun. She heard their voices, they were not talking to each other in low, anxious tones, like men helping one another home, nor exchanging the odd satisfied word, like men returning sated from the hunt. They were saying one word and then another and then they would do a little wandering detour in a circle, like drunkards, legless with laughter.

Suckahanna stepped sharply back into the doorway of her house and dropped the curtain of skins to hide herself. In the darkness she turned and lifted the side of the skin so she could peep out. The men carrying the deer were staking them out for cleaning and skinning, but Attone and John were not going to set to work. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they headed for the sweat lodge with most of the braves, and even as they went Suckahanna could still hear that sudden explosion of giggling.

“Dived in!” she heard, and then a crow of laughter from Tradescant: “But what you don’t know is that I fell on its head!” That was too much for Attone, his knees simply gave way beneath him.

“I saw you. You had no arrows?”

“Why does he need arrows? If he is going to fall on deer to kill them?”

There was another scream and all the braves flung their arms around each other’s shoulders and swayed together, their feet pounding to their bellowing laugh.

A woman came to Suckahanna’s doorway. Suckahanna pushed back the deerskin and came outside.

“What are the men doing tonight?” the woman asked.

Suckahanna shrugged with a smile which said at once, “Men!” and said, “How I love him!” and said, “How impossible he is!”

“How should I know?” she asked.

The half-sacred silence of the sweat lodge calmed them and the exhaustion of the day took its toll. They sat against the walls illuminated by the glowing coals, eyes shut, soaking up the healing heat, sweating out the aches and pains. Every now and then one of the braves would grimace and giggle and then there would be a little ripple of laughter.

They stayed in the heat for a long time until their sinuses were hot and dry, until the very bones of their faces were filled with heat. John could feel the bruise on his head swelling like a maggot and the hoof print on his chest growing dark and tender. He did not care. He cared for nothing but the deep, sensual pleasure of this heat and rest.

After a long, long while, Attone rose to his feet and stretched himself like a cat, every vertebra in his backbone extending. He put out a peremptory hand to John and spoke in Powhatan. “Come, my brother.”

John looked up, saw the proffered hand and reached up his own to clasp it. Attone pulled him to his feet and for a moment the men stood side by side, hand-clasped, looking deep into each other’s eyes with a measuring, honest look of respect and affection.

Attone led the way out of the sweat lodge. “I have a name for you, your tribal name,” Attone said. “You cannot be John Tradescant any more. You are a brave now.”

John took in the full meaning. So he was accepted. “What shall my name be?” he asked.

“Eagle,” Attone announced.

The grandness of the name caused a murmur of admiration from the other braves at the honor being done to John.

“Eagle?”

“Yes. Because you kill a deer by dropping on it from the sky.”

There was a scream of uncontrollable laughter and the men were clinging to each other for support again, John in the center, Attone with his arms around him. “Eagle!” the braves said. “Mighty hunter!” “He who falls like an eagle without warning!”

They turned and ran down to the river together to wash. The women pulled the smaller children out of the way of the laughing, shouting men. They plunged into the river together and splashed like boys before the celebration of huskanaw. Then Attone caught sight of a shadowy tall figure on the riverbank and straightened up and looked serious.

The werowance was watching them. Attone came out of the river and the men of the hunt followed him. They dried themselves and pulled on clean buckskins and then, when they were all ready, the werowance led the way to the dancing circle and the braves stood before him.

“Did the man who wants Suckahanna kill his deer?” the werowance asked in their own language.

There was a moment’s complete consternation.

“We brought three deer home,” Attone said smoothly. “A fine day’s kill, and the man who wants Suckahanna was at my shoulder the whole day. He did not hang back, he did not fail, he did not tire. He planned the hunt and his plan was a good one. It drove the deer to the river and we killed three.”

“Which one did he kill?” the werowance asked.

Attone fell silent.

“We could have killed none without his plan,” one of the other men volunteered. “He saw that we could drive them to the river. He showed us the way.”

The werowance nodded leisurely as if he were prepared to spend all night on this inquisition. “And which did he kill?” he asked. “One of the bucks? The doe?”

John, following this interrogation as well as he could, understood that the hunters could not conceal his failure. He felt a great wave of disappointment wash through him: that the hunt and the laughter and his naming should all come to nothing because an old man, old enough to be his father, should stick to the letter of the law. He thought that the way of a brave would be to acknowledge his failure, like a man, and then walk away from the village and never look back. He stepped forward, he opened his mouth to speak. He took a moment to think of the word which meant defeat in Powhatan and realized that he did not know one. Perhaps there was no word for defeat in Powhatan. He framed a sentence with the words he did know. Something like – “I have not killed. I cannot marry.”

“Yes?” The werowance invited him to speak.

There was a cry from the women at the edge of the dancing circle.

“Whose deer is this?” someone asked.

A woman came toward them. She had hold of the front legs of a deer and was dragging it toward them. From the loll of the head it was clear that the neck was broken.

“That’s my deer!” John exclaimed. He hammered Attone on the shoulder. “That’s my deer!” He ran toward the woman and took the delicate legs from her hands. “This is my deer! My deer!”

“I found it at the river’s edge,” she said. “It had been washed downriver. But it had not been in the water long.”

“The Eagle killed it!” Attone announced. At once there was a ripple of laughter from the braves. The werowance shot a quick sharp look around them.

“Did you kill this deer?” he asked John.

John could feel a bubble of laughter, of joy, rising up in his tight throat. “Yes, sire,” he said. “That is my deer, I killed it. I want Suckahanna.”

“Eagle! Eagle!” The shout went up from the braves.

The werowance looked at Attone. “Do you release your wife to this man, your wife and your firstborn son, and your secondborn child?”

Attone looked straight at John and his hard, dark face creased into an irresistible smile. “He’s a good man,” he said. “He has the determination of a salmon leaping homeward, and the heart of a buffalo. I release Suckahanna to him. He is my brother. He is the Eagle.”

The werowance raised his ornate spear. “Hear this,” he said so quietly that all the women at the edge of the dancing circle craned forward to listen, Suckahanna among them.

“This is our brother. He has proved himself in the hunt and he is the husband of Suckahanna. Tomorrow we receive him into the People, and his name shall be Eagle.”

There was a roar of approval and applause and people crowded around John. John had to fight his way through smiling faces and slapping hands to get to Suckahanna and fold her in his arms. She clung to him and lifted her face to his. As their lips met he felt a sudden jolt of passion, a feeling he had forgotten for many years, and a deep hunger for more of her; more, as if a kiss alone would not satisfy him, could never satisfy him, as if nothing would ever be enough but to fold her into his heart and keep her beside him for always.

Suckahanna moved her face from his and reluctantly John released her. She rested her head on his shoulder and his senses shifted again to take in the touch of her slight body tucked beneath his arm, the way her long legs matched his side, the scent of her hair, the warmth of her naked skin against his cool damp chest.

The people were cheering them, linking their names together.

“Why do they call you Eagle?” she asked, turning her head up to look into his face.

He caught sight of Attone, waiting for his answer. “It is private,” he said with assumed coldness. “Something for us braves.”

Attone grinned.

John could not sleep with Suckahanna that night, though she moved from Attone’s house to stay the night with Musses. Attone himself carried her deerskin, her baskets and her pots to Musses’s hut and kissed her tenderly on the forehead as he left her there.

“Does he not mind?” John asked, watching this affectionate farewell.

Suckahanna shot him a quick, mischievous smile. “Only a little,” she said.

“I should mind,” John observed.

“He married me because he was advised to do so,” she explained. “And then he had to keep me, and my mother, and we brought no dowry, no bride price at all. So he could never afford to take another wife, if he should like another woman. He was stuck with only one: me. And now everything has changed for him. He is a bachelor again, you will have to pay him for me, he will like that, and he can look about him and choose a girl he really wants this time.”

“How much will I have to pay?” John asked.

“Maybe a lot,” she warned him. “Maybe one of your guns that you left at your house.”

“Are they still there?” John asked incredulously. “I would have thought that everything had been stolen.”

She nodded serenely. “Everything has been stolen. But if it is to be Attone’s gun I think you will find that it will be returned.”

“I should like my guns returned to me,” John observed.

She laughed. “I should think you would. When you are adopted tomorrow, when you are one of the People, then no man or woman or child will steal from you ever again, not even if they are starving. But they took your goods when you were a rich white man, and now your goods are gone.”

She looked at his half-convinced expression.

“What would you want with them? What would you do with them here, when everything that a man wants can be got with a bow and arrow, a spear, a hoeing stick, a knife or a fish trap?”

John thought for a moment and realized that his goods were part of the life he had left behind, part of his old life, better lost and forgotten than standing in the corner of his new Indian house reminding him of the man he had been, of the life he might have lived.

“Very well,” he said. “If he can get them back he can have them.”

John was woken just before dawn by Attone’s hand on his shoulder. “Awake, Eagle,” the man whispered. “Come and wash.”

They were early, only the men were moving like gray shadows down the village street. It was still dark, only a line of pale gray like a smudge of limewash above the dark of the forest trees showed that dawn was coming.

Tradescant waded into the river beside Attone and followed every move that he made. First the careful washing of the face: eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears. Then the meticulous washing of armpits, and crotch, and then finally a deep immersion in icy water, while rubbing chest, back, thighs, calves, and feet. Attone emerged blowing water and flinging back his long hair.

He waded for the shore, John followed him. There was a little fire built on the pebble beach and a handful of the tiny Indian tobacco leaves piled beside it. Attone took up an abalone shell, took up a leaf, lit it at one of the glowing embers, and, blowing on the spark, walked back into the river with the burning leaf outstretched and the abalone shell cupped beneath it to catch the sacred ash. He faced toward the sun and murmured the prayer. John copied him exactly, and got very close to the prayer as well, invoking the sun to rise, the deer to eat well and be happy, the rain to come, the plants to grow, Okee the cruel god to withhold his anger, and the People to tread lightly on the earth and to keep the love of their mother. Then he scattered the ash and embers on the water and turned his face to the shore. John followed suit.

Waiting there was Suckahanna, her face grave. When John went to his clothes, the hand-me-down buckskin he had been given on his arrival at the village, she shook her head wordlessly and held out for him a new buckskin clout made of soft new leather, and a little buckskin apron exquisitely embroidered.

John smiled at her, remembering the little girl she had been when she had first showed him the Indian clothes and how reluctant he had been to part with his breeches. She crinkled her eyes at him but she did not smile with her lips, nor speak. It was a moment too solemn for speech.

John stepped forward and let her dress him as she wished, and then let her and Musses paint him with the red bear-grease ointment so that his skin was as dark as theirs in the graying light of the dawn.

From the village they could hear the roll of drums and then a steady, insistent beat.

“It is time,” said Attone. “Come, Eagle. It is your time.”

John turned, expecting to see Attone laughing at the name, but the brave’s gaze was steady and his face was grave. There was not even a smile in his look.

“My time?” John asked uneasily.

Suckahanna turned and led the way back to the village, but when they approached the dancing circle she fell back and joined the crowd of women who were waiting at one side. They linked arms around her so she was at the center of a circle of women with arms interlinked, like a country dancer in the middle of the ring.

John found himself surrounded by braves, his friends of yesterday. But none of them greeted him with a smile. Their faces were unmoving, as hard as if carved from seasoned wood. John looked from one to another. They no longer seemed like friends; they seemed like enemies.

The door to the werowance’s hut was drawn back and the old man came out. He was terrifyingly dressed in a costume completely made of bird feathers, sewed so skillfully that John could see no seams and no cloth. He looked like a man transformed into a dark, glossy bird and he stalked on his long legs with the arrogant pace of an ill-tempered heron. Behind him came the two other elders, wearing black capes that gleamed with beads of jet. They chinked as they walked, they were laden with amulets and necklaces of copper and abalone shells.

At a gesture from the werowance’s richly carved spear two young men came awkwardly from his house, carrying something low and square between them. For a moment John thought they had brought a mounting block, a post, or a pedestal for the werowance to stand on and address the people, but then he saw that the center of it was hollowed to take a man’s chin, and the wood on either side had been sharply cut with an ax. With a sensation of dull horror John recognized what it was. He had been on Tower Hill often enough, he knew an executioner’s block when he saw one.

“No!” he shouted and flinched back, but there were a dozen men around him. They did not even grab him, they pressed close to him and John was held in a solid wall of hard flesh. They interlocked arms, they held themselves tight, forcing themselves one against each other so John was helpless among them. Even if he had dropped dead in a faint of fear he would still have been standing, they had him so tight.

The werowance smiled his cruel, beak-nosed smile at John and his dark feathers quivered as if he were an English raven come all this way to peck out John’s eyes. John heard himself shout against the injustice of it. Why save him when he was burned and poisoned and starving to death to bring him here and behead him? But then he remembered the wisdom of Jamestown and knew that there was no reason to these people, nothing but mischief and meaningless cruelty, nothing but torture for sport and bloodshed for pleasure, and he started to think that a blow from an ax would be a mercy rather than a disemboweling, or a scalping, or being torn apart, or staked out on an anthill. The thought of these horrors made him cry out “Suckahanna!” and he lunged so that he could see her, trapped as he was trapped, her face white and agonized, pleading desperately with the women around her, and forever looking toward him and calling “John!”

The braves clutched his arms, there was no chance of escape, and marched him toward the block. John kicked out and swore but they held him, the sheer weight of them forcing his head down and down till his chin met the pitiless coolness of the skillfully shaped wood and he felt his body recognize the place of his death.

“God forgive me my sins,” John whispered. “And keep my children and Hester safe. God forgive me, God forgive me.” He closed his eyes for a moment against the horror and then he opened them again and looked for Suckahanna. The women had released her and she was standing stock still among them, her face as white as an Englishwoman’s with terror.

“Suckahanna,” John said softly.

He tried to smile at her, to reassure her that there was, even now, no bad blood between them, no regrets and no reproaches. But he knew that he could only bare his teeth, that all she would see was his skull beneath the rictus of the smile, that soon she would see the white of his skull as they peeled back his forehead to cut the trophy of his scalp.

The pressure on his back and his neck was gradually released as the men sensed his surrender. John rolled his eyes to look for the executioner and his ax, and saw instead a great war club, beautifully made and counterweighted, and the man holding it, waiting for the signal to step forward and pound John’s head into fragments.

His courage failed him completely then, he felt warm water gush between his legs. He heard a little wail which was his own voice of terror.

The werowance lifted his ornate ceremonial spear, the black feathers on his arms rustled like pinions, like a black angel he stood between John and the rising sun, and his face was filled with joy.

The spear fell. The war club rolled back on the upswing, and John waited for the blow.

Something hit him hard, and his whole tortured body flinched from the impact, but it was not a war club to the head, it was the full weight of Suckahanna, broken free of the circle of women, diving across the dancing ground to lie along his back, one knee in his piss, her hair falling over his flinching spine, her head above his, her chin on his skull, offering herself on the block.

The executioner was too late to stop his downswing, he could only shift it to one side, and the mighty club thudded, like a cannon ball, into the beaten mud of the dancing ground. John felt the whistle of its passing lift the hair of his beard, opened his eyes and looked toward the werowance.

The old man was serene. He raised his spear and spoke as quietly as ever.

“See this, people of the forest and river, see this, people of the plains, see this, people of the seashore, and the swamp, see this, people of the sky, of the rain, of the sun, all the people who have run from the mouth of the Great Hare and who run over the land that He made. Suckahanna, our daughter, went to the very edge of the dark river for this man. He owes her his life. She has given him life, he has a Powhatan mother.”

The people nodded. “He has life from a Powhatan woman.”

John felt Suckahanna tremble down the length of her lean body pressed against his. He saw her shaking hands come down on either side of the executioner’s block and clench white as she forced herself up to kneel and then stand before her people. He thought he should stand too, beside her, but he doubted his legs would hold him. Then he thought again that if Suckahanna could dive toward him to have her head smashed in his place then he should stand for her. He should probably kneel to her.

He heaved himself to his feet and found that his legs were trembling and his body icy with sweat. Suckahanna turned to him and took his hand.

“I take you as my husband,” she said shakily. “I take you into our people. You are one of the People now and you always will be.”

There was a silence. John feared that his voice would shame him with a squeak of terror. He cleared his throat a little and looked at the girl who had become a woman and who had now twice become his savior.

“I thank you for my life,” he said, speaking their language haltingly, mixing in English words when he was at a loss. “I will never forget this. I gladly take you to my wife and I gladly join the People.”

“I take you,” she stressed very slightly.

“I am glad that you take me to your husband, and I am glad that the People admit me,” John corrected himself.

There was a ripple of pleasure throughout the crowd and then everyone looked to the werowance, dark in his dark feathers, hunched like a heron in a pine tree, brooding over the couple. He raised his spear.

“Eagle!” he shouted.

There was a roar from the braves, and then the women and the children took it up. “Eagle!” “Eagle!” “Eagle!”

John felt his knees give way and he grabbed for Suckahanna as she swayed too. The women were at her side, the braves bore him up, Attone among them.

“Eagle!” Attone cheered, and with a swift sideways grin at John: “Eagle! who kills by diving on his deer and pisses himself at his own wedding.”

They got intoxicated that night. Dazed and riotous and then stupefied and giggly, then dancing and leaping and singing under a big yellow midsummer moon. They smoked the sacred tobacco until their heads rang with it and their very eardrums grew hot and itchy. They smoked until they saw dozens of moons cavorting in the sky and they danced on the dancing ground beneath them, following the lunar steps. They smoked until they were whimpering for cool water for their aching throats, and they ran down to the river and exclaimed at more moons, floating in the water, like stepping-stones into the darkness. They smoked until they grew hungry like children and raided the stores for anything sweet and spicy and ate handfuls of dried blueberries and popped corn on the embers of the fire and burned their tongues in their hurry. They smoked in a great orgy to celebrate that the Eagle had passed the test and put his head on the block, and that a woman of the People had laid her head down beside him for love of him, and such a thing had never been seen since the time of Pocahontas, when Princess Pocahontas herself had laid her head down to save John Smith, though she had been little more than a girl and hardly understood the risk she took.

Suckahanna’s story was more passionate and the women made her tell it over and over again. How she had met John and feared him, how he had treated her gently and never known that she had understood every word he said, that she had heard him tell her that she was beautiful, that she had heard him say that she was lovable. The women sighed at that and the young braves giggled and dug each other in the ribs. Then Suckahanna told them how she waited and waited for him, in the cruelty of the white man’s world at Jamestown; and that when she gave him up she had been glad of a refuge with the People and glad of the kindness of Attone, who had been a husband that any woman might admire and love. And at this part of the story the young women nodded and glanced over to Attone in neutral judicial appreciation as if it had not occurred to any of them that Attone was now a free man. Then Suckahanna told them how she had heard of a new white man who had made a clearing in the wood and built a house and had planted a flower at his doorstep. She told them that at that word, at that single piece of news, she knew at once that John had come back to the land of the Great Hare and she went alone to stand in the shadow of the trees and see him. And that when she saw him, her heart went out to him and she knew then that he was still the only man she had ever loved and ever would love and she went straight to Attone and to the werowance and told them that the man she loved was an Englishman living alone in the forest and asked their permission to go to him.

But they were wise, she said now, and cautious, and they made her wait and watch him. And they realized as they watched him that he did not have the skill to keep himself. He could not feed himself and dig his fields and keep his fire in. It was too much work for a single white man to do. Even the children of the Great Hare live together so that the women can garden and the men can hunt and they can all work together. Then Suckahanna went to the werowance and to her husband Attone, and told them that she would like to be released to go to the Englishman and help him to make his home in the land of the Hare.

But again, they were too wise. They said that the Englishman could not be trusted with the children of Attone. That when Suckahanna returned to him he might take her as a servant and not as a wife. Or he might take her and then abandon her, as white men like to do. They said she should wait and watch.

She waited and she watched and she kept him alive with little gifts and then finally she saw him so near to death and to despair that he got in his canoe and could have drifted forever down to the Great Sea. Then, and only then, was Suckahanna allowed to take his life in her keeping and bring him to the Powhatan.

It was a good story and it lasted through the last hours of the night, when the smoke started to disperse from their wild, dazed heads, and the laughter subsided and the men and women and children drifted away from the dancing ground and the great fire they had built for their revels, and found themselves falling asleep with only an hour left of the night.

Suckahanna and John were among the last to leave. At last there was no hurry, there was no urgency in their meeting. They had their house, the werowance had allowed them to use one of the empty store houses, another house would be built soon. Suckahanna had put deerskin on the sleeping platforms and hung her baskets on the walls. The baby was slung up in its papoose, her little boy was lolled, his heavy head in her lap. Suckahanna smiled at John.

“I’m sleepy too,” she said.

John got to his feet and lifted Suckahanna’s son into his arms. The warm boy clung to him in sleep, with the easy trust of a child who has only ever known a loving touch. John followed Suckahanna to their new house and laid the boy, as she directed, on his little sleeping platform in the corner. Then he sat on the warm skins and watched his wife unbraid her hair, untie her little skirt and drop it to the floor. She stood before him naked.

John rose to his feet, his fingers fumbling for the tie of his own loincloth, found it and dropped the buckskin to the floor so that he was as naked as she. Her eyes traveled all over him, without shame, dark with desire, and she smiled a little, as a woman smiles when she sees that her man desires her: partly in vanity, partly in joy.

She turned with a proud little toss of her head and then stretched out on the sleeping platform, pulling the soft deerskin to one side so that it framed the bronze, smooth length of her, her dark hair spread, her lips half-parted, her breath coming a little faster and her eyes hazy with desire. John moved toward her and kneeled on the sleeping platform, moving over her with a sense of unreality, as if, after all his years of dreaming, this could only be another dream. He bent his head and kissed her and at the warmth and taste of her lips he knew himself to be awake and alive, and more powerfully alive than he had ever been in his life before. He gathered her warm buttocks into his hands and entered her with a quiet sigh of pleasure. Suckahanna’s dark eyes flickered shut.