“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.”