“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.