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 forward 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 graying 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 center 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 skillfully 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 that 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 center of it was hollowed to take a man’s chin, and the wood on either side had been sharply cut with an ax. With a sensation of dull horror John recognized 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 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.