“Her mother is a whore,” the lodging-house woman remarked spitefully.

“Well, she is but a little maid yet,” J said firmly. “And I would not be the man to abuse her.”

The woman shook her head. “They’re not like us. She’s no more a maid than my young mastiff bitch is a maid. When she’s ready she’ll couple like an animal. They’re not like us, they’re half beasts.”

“You speak badly of them because of your losses,” J’s fellow lodger said fairly. He nodded to J. “Mistress Whitely here lost her man and her child in the Indian rising of ’twenty-two. She doesn’t forget. No one who was here at the time can ever forget.”

“What happened?” J asked.

The woman lowered herself to the bench opposite him and leaned her chin on her hand. “They were in and out of Jamestown every night and day,” she said. “The children stayed in our houses, our men went out hunting with them. Again and again we would have starved if they had not traded with us – food, fish, game. They taught us how to plant: corn and the rest. They taught us how to harvest it and cook it. We would have died over and over again if they had not sold us food. The vicar was going to have an Indian school. We were going to teach them our ways, Christian ways. They were to be subjects of the king. There was not the slightest warning, not the hint of a warning. The chief had been their leader for years and he came and went through Jamestown as free as a white man. We had his own son as a hostage, we feared nothing. Nothing.”

“Why did you have hostages then?” J asked.

“Not hostages,” she corrected herself swiftly. “Adopted children. Godchildren. Children in our care. We were educating them in our ways. Turning them from savagery.”

“And what happened?” J asked.

“They waited and planned.” Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. “They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.”

“What happened?”

“They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.”

She turned her bleak face to J. “My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,” she said. “My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrowhead of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.”

There was a long silence.

She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. “That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,” she said. “They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land will never be home for me until every one of them is gone.”

“How many of us died?” J asked. He said “us” without thinking. This was a war of the dark forests against the white men; of course he counted himself among the planters.

“Not quite four hundred,” she said bitterly. “Four hundred men and women who wanted nothing more than to live in peace in a little part of a great great land. And then the hunger came.”

“Hunger?”

“We had to leave the crops in the field, we were too afraid to bring them in,” she explained. “We all crowded into Jamestown and manned the guns over the wooden walls. It was a bitter winter, and there wasn’t enough to eat. And we couldn’t trade with them as we usually did. We had always traded with them for their winter stores, they always had plenty and they always sold to us. But now we were at war with the very people who had fed us.”

J waited for more.

“We don’t talk about that time,” she said shortly. “About that winter. We ate what we could, and no blame to those who found what they could.”

J turned to his fellow lodger for an explanation.

“The graveyard,” the man said in an undertone. “They dug up their dead and ate them.”

The woman’s face was stony. “We ate what we could get,” she said. “And you’d have done the same. There’s no such thing as Christian behavior when you’re starving. We did what we had to do.”

J felt the suppawn dinner rise up in the back of his throat at the thought of what the cook had tasted.

“We survived,” she said flatly.

“I’m sure-” J stammered.

“And when the weather got warmer those who were not dead of their wounds, or of grief, or of starvation, died of the plague,” she went on. “All of us packed in to this little town, all of us sick with grief and fear. Hundreds died that winter, and it was all the Indians’ fault. As soon as we could muster men and supplies we went against them. We passed a law and we swore an oath, that not a man or a woman would be left alive.”

The man nodded. “We hunted them down like dogs and we pushed them further and further away. It was an order – kill all the men and women and enslave the children. We pretended to be at peace for a while and we watched them plant their crops and commit themselves to their fields, and then, and only then, we went in and destroyed their harvest. They make fish weirs, intricate clever things, we destroyed them wherever we saw them. We drove away the game so that they would starve when they went hunting, we burned them out of their villages so they were homeless, we trampled their crops in the field so they would know hunger as we had known hunger. We took our revenge.”

“We had some good hunting,” the woman said reminiscently. She drew three mugs of ale and set them on the table. “I remember the soldiers from the fort coming in with the heads of the savages at their belt, and then setting them up along the gate like a gamekeeper stakes up a dead weasel.”

“And are they finished now?” J could hear the nervousness in his own voice.

“Oh yes,” the man said. “This was sixteen years ago, remember, and there’s not been a word from them since. They cannot live without the spread of land for their game and farming, and we have pushed them backward and backward toward the mountains. They used to live always on the move, you see: winter inland, summer down toward the sea, spring to the fields. Once we built our houses and cleared the forest we drove them out, drove them like a herd of deer into bad foraging.”

“They must hate us as their worst enemies,” J said.

Neither of them answered. The man shrugged and lowered his face into his mug.

“We won, and that’s the main thing,” the woman said firmly. “It’s our land now and if they want to live here they have to serve us. There’s no more schools and teaching of them. There’s no more peace and promises of friendship. If they want to stay in our borders they do as they are bid. They can be our slaves or their blood can water the fields. Nothing else.”

At dawn J was down at the quayside, Jamestown silent behind him and only the gleam of the fires in the bread ovens showing that anyone was awake.

The girl was there before him. She had a small dugout canoe bobbing in the dark water. J surveyed it uneasily. It too much resembled the tree it recently had been. The bark had been stripped off and the sides roughly chiseled so that it was shaped to a point at both ends, the inside had been scorched and then scraped clean; but it still looked nothing more than a small tree: stripped, shaped and hollowed.