The grandness of the name caused a murmur of admiration from the other braves at the honour being done to John.
‘Eagle?’
‘Yes. Because you kill a deer by dropping on it from the sky.’
There was a scream of uncontrollable laughter and the men were clinging to each other for support again, John in the centre, Attone with his arms around him. ‘Eagle!’ the braves said. ‘Mighty hunter!’ ‘He who falls like an eagle without warning!’
They turned and ran down to the river together to wash. The women pulled the smaller children out of the way of the laughing, shouting men. They plunged into the river together and splashed like boys before huskanaw. Then Attone caught sight of a shadowy tall figure on the riverbank and straightened up and looked serious.
The werowance was watching them. Attone came out of the river and the men of the hunt followed him. They dried themselves and pulled on clean buckskins and then, when they were all ready, the werowance led the way to the dancing circle and the braves stood before him.
‘Did the man who wants Suckahanna kill his deer?’ the werowance asked in their own language.
There was a moment’s complete consternation.
‘We brought three deer home,’ Attone said smoothly. ‘A fine day’s kill, and the man who wants Suckahanna was at my shoulder the whole day. He did not hang back, he did not fail, he did not tire. He planned the hunt and his plan was a good one. It drove the deer to the river and we killed three.’
‘Which one did he kill?’ the werowance asked.
Attone fell silent.
‘We could have killed none without his plan,’ one of the other men volunteered. ‘He saw that we could drive them to the river. He showed us the way.’
The werowance nodded leisurely as if he were prepared to spend all night on this inquisition. ‘And which did he kill?’ he asked. ‘One of the bucks? The doe?’
John, following this interrogation as well as he could, understood that the hunters could not conceal his failure. He felt a great wave of disappointment wash through him: that the hunt and the laughter and his naming should all come to nothing because an old man, old enough to be his father, should stick to the letter of the law. He thought that the way of a brave would be to acknowledge his failure, like a man, and then walk away from the village and never look back. He stepped forwards, he opened his mouth to speak. He took a moment to think of the word which meant defeat in Powhatan and realised that he did not know one. Perhaps there was no word for defeat in Powhatan. He framed a sentence with the words he did know. Something like – ‘I have not killed. I cannot marry.’
‘Yes?’ The werowance invited him to speak.
There was a cry from the women at the edge of the dancing circle.
‘Whose deer is this?’ someone asked.
A woman came towards them. She had hold of the front legs of a deer and was dragging it towards them. From the loll of the head it was clear that the neck was broken.
‘That’s my deer!’ John exclaimed. He hammered Attone on the shoulder. ‘That’s my deer!’ He ran towards the woman and took the delicate legs from her hands. ‘This is my deer! My deer!’
‘I found it at the river’s edge,’ she said. ‘It had been washed downriver. But it had not been in the water long.’
‘The Eagle killed it!’ Attone announced. At once there was a ripple of laughter from the braves. The werowance shot a quick sharp look around them.
‘Did you kill this deer?’ he asked John.
John could feel a bubble of laughter, of joy, rising up in his tight throat. ‘Yes, sire,’ he said. ‘That is my deer, I killed it. I want Suckahanna.’
‘Eagle! Eagle!’ The shout went up from the braves.
The werowance looked at Attone. ‘Do you release your wife to this man, your wife and your first-born son, and your second-born child?’
Attone looked straight at John and his hard, dark face creased into an irresistible smile. ‘He’s a good man,’ he said. ‘He has the determination of a salmon leaping homeward, and the heart of a buffalo. I release Suckahanna to him. He is my brother. He is the Eagle.’
The werowance raised his ornate spear. ‘Hear this,’ he said so quietly that all the women at the edge of the dancing circle craned forward to listen, Suckahanna among them.
‘This is our brother. He has proved himself in the hunt and he is the husband of Suckahanna. Tomorrow we receive him into the People, and his name shall be Eagle.’
There was a roar of approval and applause and people crowded around John. John had to fight his way through smiling faces and slapping hands to get to Suckahanna and fold her in his arms. She clung to him and lifted her face to his. As their lips met he felt a sudden jolt of passion, a feeling he had forgotten for many years, and a deep hunger for more of her; more, as if a kiss alone would not satisfy him, could never satisfy him, as if nothing would ever be enough but to fold her into his heart and keep her beside him for always.
Suckahanna moved her face from his and reluctantly John released her. She rested her head on his shoulder and his senses shifted again to take in the touch of her slight body tucked beneath his arm, the way her long legs matched his side, the scent of her hair, the warmth of her naked skin against his cool damp chest.
The people were cheering them, linking their names together.
‘Why do they call you Eagle?’ she asked, turning her head up to look into his face.
He caught sight of Attone, waiting for his answer. ‘It is private,’ he said with assumed coldness. ‘Something for us braves.’
Attone grinned.
John could not sleep with Suckahanna that night, though she moved from Attone’s house to stay the night with Musses. Attone himself carried her deerskin, her baskets and her pots to Musses’s hut and kissed her tenderly on the forehead as he left her there.
‘Does he not mind?’ John asked, watching this affectionate farewell.
Suckahanna shot him a quick, mischievous smile. ‘Only a little,’ she said.
‘I should mind,’ John observed.
‘He married me because he was advised to do so,’ she explained. ‘And then he had to keep me, and my mother, and we brought no dowry, no bride price at all. So he could never afford to take another wife, if he should like another woman. He was stuck with only one: me. And now everything has changed for him. He is a bachelor again, you will have to pay him for me, he will like that, and he can look about him and choose a girl he really wants this time.’
‘How much will I have to pay?’ John asked.
‘Maybe a lot,’ she warned him. ‘Maybe one of your guns that you left at your house.’
‘Are they still there?’ John asked incredulously. ‘I would have thought that everything had been stolen.’
She nodded serenely. ‘Everything has been stolen. But if it is to be Attone’s gun I think you will find that it will be returned.’
‘I should like my guns returned to me,’ John observed.
She laughed. ‘I should think you would. When you are adopted tomorrow, when you are one of the People, then no man or woman or child will steal from you ever again, not even if they are starving. But they took your goods when you were a rich white man, and now your goods are gone.’
She looked at his half-convinced expression.
‘What would you want with them? What would you do with them here, when everything that a man wants can be got with a bow and arrow, a spear, a hoeing stick, a knife or a fish trap?’
John thought for a moment and realised that his goods were part of the life he had left behind, part of his old life, better lost and forgotten than standing in the corner of his new Indian house reminding him of the man he had been, of the life he might have lived.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If he can get them back he can have them.’
John was woken just before dawn by Attone’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Awake, Eagle,’ the man whispered. ‘Come and wash.’
They were early, only th
e men were moving like grey shadows down the village street. It was still dark, only a line of pale grey like a smudge of limewash above the dark of the forest trees showed that dawn was coming.
Tradescant waded into the river beside Attone and followed every move that he made. First the careful washing of the face: eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears. Then the meticulous washing of armpits, and crotch, and then finally a deep immersion in icy water, while rubbing chest, back, thighs, calves, and feet. Attone emerged blowing water and flinging back his long hair.
He waded for the shore, John followed him. There was a little fire built on the pebble beach and a handful of the tiny Indian tobacco leaves piled beside it. Attone took up an abalone shell, took up a leaf, lit it at one of the glowing embers, and, blowing on the spark, walked back into the river with the burning leaf outstretched and the abalone shell cupped beneath it to catch the sacred ash. He faced towards the sun and murmured the prayer. John copied him exactly, and got very close to the prayer as well, invoking the sun to rise, the deer to eat well and be happy, the rain to come, the plants to grow, Okee the cruel god to withhold his anger, and the People to tread lightly on the earth and to keep the love of their mother. Then he scattered the ash and embers on the water and turned his face to the shore. John followed suit.
Waiting there was Suckahanna, her face grave. When John went to his clothes, the hand-me-down buckskin he had been given on his arrival at the village, she shook her head wordlessly and held out for him a new buckskin clout made of soft new leather, and a little buckskin apron exquisitely embroidered.
John smiled at her, remembering the little girl she had been when she had first showed him the Indian clothes and how reluctant he had been to part with his breeches. She crinkled her eyes at him but she did not smile with her lips, nor speak. It was a moment too solemn for speech.
John stepped forwards and let her dress him as she wished, and then let her and Musses paint him with the red bear-grease ointment so that his skin was as dark as theirs in the greying light of the dawn.
From the village they could hear the roll of drums and then a steady, insistent beat.
‘It is time,’ said Attone. ‘Come, Eagle. It is your time.’
John turned, expecting to see Attone laughing at the name, but the brave’s gaze was steady and his face was grave. There was not even a smile in his look.
‘My time?’ John asked uneasily.
Suckahanna turned and led the way back to the village but when they approached the dancing circle she fell back and joined the crowd of women who were waiting at one side. They linked arms around her so she was at the centre of a circle of women with arms interlinked, like a country dancer in the middle of the ring.
John found himself surrounded by braves, his friends of yesterday. But none of them greeted him with a smile. Their faces were unmoving, as hard as if carved from seasoned wood. John looked from one to another. They no longer seemed like friends; they seemed like enemies.
The door to the werowance’s hut was drawn back and the old man came out. He was terrifyingly dressed in a costume completely made of bird feathers, sewed so skilfully that John could see no seams and no cloth. He looked like a man transformed into a dark, glossy bird and he stalked on his long legs with the arrogant pace of an ill-tempered heron. Behind him came the two other elders, wearing black capes which gleamed with beads of jet. They chinked as they walked, they were laden with amulets and necklaces of copper and abalone shells.
At a gesture from the werowance’s richly carved spear two young men came awkwardly from his house, carrying something low and square between them. For a moment John thought they had brought a mounting block, a post, or a pedestal for the werowance to stand on and address the people, but then he saw that the centre of it was hollowed to take a man’s chin, and the wood on either side had been sharply cut with an axe. With a sensation of dull horror John recognised what it was. He had been on Tower Hill often enough, he knew an executioner’s block when he saw one.
‘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 axe would be a mercy rather than a disembowelling, 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 agonised, pleading desperately with the women around her, and forever looking towards him and calling ‘John!’
The braves clutched his arms, there was no chance of escape, and marched him towards 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 skilfully shaped wood and he felt his body recognise 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 axe, 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 towards 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 towards 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 saviour.
‘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.’