He lit the fuse on his musket and held the gun across his chest, the fuse between his two fingers, the end of it aglow. Then he led the way into the enclosed village.

John walked through the gate, and then stopped and blinked. It was like the village he had known, but in miniature; the long houses were too few and built too small. There was a dancing circle but it was compressed against one of the blank encircling wooden walls. There was the central street leading up to the house of the werowance but it could be walked in forty strides. There was no sweat lodge that he could see. All around the houses, planted with the meticulous care of the Powhatan women, were the food crops, cramped up against the houses. John recognized at once the growing stalks of the Indian corn and the amaracock planted between them, and the little shelter built to overlook the field where the children would wait for their mothers to finish their work.

“Can I talk to them alone?” John asked the soldier.

“They don’t speak English,” he said. “You’d better just look for your girl. I can line them up for you. They understand ‘Muster.’”

“No, no,” John said. “I can speak Powhatan. Let me speak with them.”

The soldier hesitated. “Shout if you need help then,” he said and went back to his seat.

The women working in the field did not raise their eyes at this exchange, they did not take more than a glance at John. But John knew that they would have seen every detail of him, and that if Suckahanna or Attone or any of his people were alive in this cage then they would know within minutes that he had come.

He walked up to the little confined field and spoke in Powhatan.

“Sister,” he said. “I was the husband of Suckahanna and the friend of Attone. They called me the Eagle when they took me into the People.”

She did not break off her work, her hands still moved in the earth, setting the little plants, dropping in seeds. She did not look up at him, she might as well have been deaf.

“I have come to find Suckahanna, or Attone, or any of my people,” John said. “Or news of them.”

She nodded at that; but did not pause in the steady, sweeping movement of her hands.

“Did you know them?” John asked. “Suckahanna, Attone, any of them? She had a little boy-”

The woman turned her head and called a single word, the name Popanow, the child of winter, and a young girl came forward.

“I knew Suckahanna,” she said simply. “You must be the Eagle. I would not have known you, they spoke of a hunter and you are too fat and old.”

John concealed the hurt to his vanity and looked at the girl. “I don’t remember you.”

“I was born in the village of the bad water,” she said. “You were long gone.”

“Suckahanna?”

She paused. “Why d’you want to know, white man?”

John hesitated. “I am a white man, I know,” he said humbly. “But once I was a Powhatan. Suckahanna was my wife and Attone was my friend. Tell me, Popanow, what became of my wife and my friend and my people? I was not with them because they sent me away. I have come back to learn what became of them. Tell me, Popanow.”

She nodded. “It was like this. The soldiers were hunting us down, every month they came a little closer. It was like a hunting trip for them, they came out in spring. Winter we were left alone to starve and freeze but spring and summer they came out and destroyed our fields when they could find them, and broke down the fish weirs, and tracked us with their dogs.”

John flinched at the matter-of-fact solidity of her description. “Attone wanted to lead us upriver and north, away from the white men. We thought that another People might take us in, or if they would not then we could fight the white men and die in the fighting rather than be picked off one at a time. Others thought that the white men would grow weary of the sport of hunting us and start to hunt for food. They would leave us alone after a while. I think Suckahanna was with Attone. She said we should go.

“We started to move out in the winter. We had not enough stores of food, and it was not safe to light fires. A slave saw us.” She was suddenly alight with anger, animated with resentment. “A black slave who thought more of his master than anything else – the white man’s dog, the white man’s fool – he ran and told his master, who brought out some other planters and they hunted us through the snow and we were easy to track in the deep snow, and slow-moving with old people and babies to carry.”

John nodded. “I remember. I was with them when they went to the marshland.”

“We left the people who could not keep up with us. We thought perhaps they would be taken up by the hunting party behind us and sent back to Jamestown for servants. But they did not take them for servants, they killed them where they lay in the snow. The white men cut their throats and scalped their heads where they lay. It was…” she sought the word to describe it and found none, “…ugly.

“Attone said we should make a stand and fight the hunting party and then we would be safe to go on. They sent the older women and the babies ahead and the rest of us made a trap, a pit in the road, and we hid in the trees, and waited.” She paused. “It was desperate, digging and trying to hide the pit with branches and fresh snow scattered on top, and knowing they were so close behind.”

“You were there?”

“I was there. I had my bow and my quiver of arrows. I was ready to kill.”

“And?”

“They had horses and guns and dogs,” she said. “They were hunting dogs, they would keep coming even with an arrow in their eye. They got me at the shoulder and pulled me down. I thought they would eat me alive. I could hear the crunch of their jaws on my bone and smell their breath on me.” She swept back her hair and John saw the ragged scars where a deep bite had been gouged out of her neck and shoulder. “It’s odd to feel an animal licking your blood,” she said.

“My God,” John whispered.

“Half a dozen of us were still alive at the end, and they made us walk back to Jamestown.”

“Suckahanna?”

“Dead.”

The word was like a blow in the pit of his belly, it fell no lighter for being expected. He had known that Suckahanna would never have been taken alive. He had known from the very start that what he was seeking in this strange diminished village was the news of her death.

“Attone?”

“Dead.”

“Suckahanna’s son?”

“He got away,” she said. “He could be anywhere. Maybe dead in the forest.”

“The baby? The little girl?”

“Died of hunger or fever or something. Before we tried to leave the village of bad water.”

There was a silence. John looked at the girl who had seen so much, who was indeed a child of winter.

“I shall go.” He paused. “Is there anything I can do for you or for the People?”

“Would they set us free if you asked them?”

“No,” John said. “They would not listen to me.”

“Do you think that they will hold us here forever?” she asked. “Do you think that they mean us to have enough land to plant, but nothing that we can enjoy, nowhere we can run free? Do they think that now we will do nothing more forever than just cling to life at the edge of the white man’s land?”

“No,” John said. “I am sure not. There is a new government in England and it is pledged to care for the poor and for the men and women who are driven off their land by enclosures. It gives rights to tenants and people who live on the land. Surely they will give you the same rights here.”

She looked at him and for a moment he saw Suckahanna in her eyes with that delicious sense of the ridiculous which had been so often and so lovingly directed at John. “Oh, do you?” she said and then turned and went back to her work.

John walked home dryshod in his English boots across the wooden causeway, not touching the earth, forgetting the marsh flower, not seeing anything but the winter battle in the snow and Suckahanna going down, fighting to the last minute, and Attone falling beside her.