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.