Keeper nodded. 'Like a picture.'

'Yes, a picture. Of the whole world, on a ball, because the world is a big ball. And you can mark it with the names of the islands and lakes.'

Keeper didn't look convinced, but what he was put off by, Iagogeh couldn't tell. He instructed the sachems to get ready for the council.

Iagogeh went off to help with the clean up. Fromwest brought bowls over to the lakeside to be washed.

'Please,' Iagogeh said, embarrassed. 'We do that.'

'I am no one's servant,' Fromwest said, and continued to bring bowls to the girls for a while, asking them about their embroidery. When he saw Iagogeh had drawn back to sit down on a bit of raised bank, he sat on the bank beside her.

As they watched the girls, he said, 'I know that Hodenosaunee wisdom is such that the women decide who marries whom.'

Iagogeh considered this. 'I suppose you could say that.'

'I am a Doorkeeper now, and a Hawk. I will live the rest of my days here among you. I too hope to marry some day.'

'I see.' She regarded him, looked at the girls. 'Do you have someone in mind?'

'Oh no!' he said. 'I would not be so bold. That is for you to decide. After your advice concerning lacrosse players, I am sure you will know best.'

She smiled. She looked at the festive dress of the girls, aware or unaware of their elders' presence. She said, 'How many summers have you seen?'

'Thirty five or so, in this life.'

'You have had other lives?'

'We all have. Don't you remember?'

She regarded him, unsure if he was serious. 'No.'

'The memories come in dreams, mostly, but sometimes when something happens that you recognize.'

' I've had that feeling.'

'That's what it is.'

She shivered. It was cooling down. Time to get to the fire. Through the net of leafy branches overhead a star or two winked. 'Are you sure you don't have a preference?'

' None. Hodenosaunee women are the most powerful women in this world. Not just the inheritance and the family lines, but choosing the marriage partnerships. That means you are deciding who comes back into the world.'

She scoffed at that: 'If children were like their parents.' The offspring she and Keeper had had were all very alarming people.

'The one that comes into the world was there waiting. But many were waiting. Which one comes depends on which parents.'

'Do you think so? Sometimes, when I watched mine – they were only strangers, invited into the Long House.'

'Like me.'

'Yes. Like you.'

Then the sachems found them, and took Fromwest to his raising up.

Iagogeh made sure the cleaning was near its finish, then went after the sachems, and joined them to help prepare the new chief. She combed his straight black hair, much the same as hers, and helped him tie it up the way he wanted, in a topknot. She watched his cheery face. An unusual man.

He was given appropriate waist and shoulder belts, each a winter's work for some skilful woman, and in these he suddenly looked very fine, a warrior and a chief, despite his flat round face and hooded eyes. He did not look like anyone she had ever met, certainly not like the one glimpse she had had of the foreigners who had come over the eastern sea to their shores. But she was beginning to feel he was familiar anyhow, in a way that made her feel peculiar.

He looked up at her, thanking her for her help. When she met his gaze she felt some odd sense of recognition.

Some branches and several great logs were thrown on the central fire, and the drums and turtleshell rattles grew loud as the fifty sachems of the Hodenosaunee gathered in their great circle for the raising up. The crowd drew in behind them, manoeuvring and then sitting down so all could see, forming a kind of broad valley of faces.

The raising up ceremony for a chief was not long compared to that of the fifty sachems. The sponsoring sachem stepped forward and announced the nomination of the chief. In this case it was Big Forehead, of the Hawk tribe, who stood forth and told them all again the story of Fromwest, how they had come across him being tortured by the Sioux, how he had been instructing the Sioux in the superior methods of torture found in his own country; how he already spoke an unfamiliar version of the Doorkeeper dialect, and how it had been his hope to come visit the people of the Long House before his capture by the Sioux. How he had lived among the Doorkeepers and learned their ways, and led a band of warriors far down the Ohio River to rescue many Senecan people enslaved by the Lakotas, guiding them so that they were able to effect the rescue and bring them home. How this and other actions had made him a candidate for chiefdom, with the support of all who knew him.

Big Forehead went on to say that the sachems had conferred that morning, and approved the choice of the Doorkeepers, even before Fromwest's display of skill in lacrosse. Then with a roar of acclamation Fromwest was led into the circle of sachems, his flat face shiny in the firelight, his grin so broad that his eyes disappeared in their folds of flesh.

He held out a hand, indicating he was ready to make his speech. The sachems sat on the beaten ground so that the whole congregation could see him. He said, 'This is the greatest day of my life. Never as long as I live will I forget any moment of this beautiful day. Let me tell you now how I came to this day. You have beard only part of the story. I was born on the island Hokkaido, in the island nation Nippon, and grew up there as a young monk and then a samurai, a warrior. My name was Busho.

'In Nippon people arranged their affairs differently. We had a group of sachems with a single ruler, called the Emperor, and a tribe of warriors were trained to fight for the rulers, and make the farmers give part of their crops to them. I left the service of my first ruler because of his cruelty to his farmers, and became a ronin, a warrior without tribe.

' I lived like that for years, wandering the mountains of Hokkaido and Honshu as beggar, monk, singer, warrior. Then all Nippon was invaded by people from farther west, on the great island of the world. These people, the Chinese, rule half the other side of the world, or more. When they invaded Nippon no great kamikaze storm wind came to sink their canoes, as always had happened before. The old gods abandoned Nippon, perhaps because of the Allah worshippers who had taken over its southernmost islands. In any case, with the water passable at last, they were unstoppable. We used banks of guns, chains in the water, fire, ambush in the night, swimming attacks over the inner sea, and we killed a great many of them, fleet after fleet, but they kept coming. They established a fort on the coast we could not eject them from, a fort protecting a long peninsula, and in a month they had filled that peninsula. Then they attacked the whole island at once, landing on every west beach with thousands of men. All the people of the Hodenosaunee league would have been but a handful in that host. And though we fought and fought, back up into the hills and mountains where only we knew the caves and ravines, they conquered the flatlands, and Nippon, my nation and my tribe, was no more.

'By then I should have died a hundred times over, but in every battle some fluke or other would save me, and I would prevail over the enemy at hand, or slip away and live to fight another time. Finally there were only scores of us left in all Honshu, and we made a plan, and joined together one night and stole three of the Chinese transport canoes, huge vessels like many floating long houses tied together. We sailed them cast under the command of those among us who had been to Gold Mountain before.

'These ships had cloth wings held up on poles to catch the wind, like you may have seen the foreigners from the east use, and most winds come from the west, there as here. So we sailed east for a few moons, and when the winds were bad drifted on a great current in the sea.