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CHAPTER 4

Her heart eased as the familiar rhythm of the paddle absorbed her energy and the tapping of water under the prow brought its usual exhilaration. To be out on the water in the cloudy dawn – it must be nearly sunrise now, but the light was still cool and grey – was almost pure happiness. She gave every stroke full consideration, digging and trailing the paddle judiciously to stay in the middle of the current. The two otters played and wove in and out just in front of her until they reached the limits of their territory. She swept round a bend and the air was suddenly full of beating white wings as she disturbed a crowd of gulls that had been roosting on the water.

'Steady!' she thought. 'The river's always changing: you never know what is going to be around the next bend.'

Her thoughts were still disconnected, but at least now they bobbed up freely, like the ripples in the morning wind.

'No harm will come to you!' she thought. 'Is that what you think matters to me, Father? Was that what mattered to you and Mother, in the old days? Oh, Father, are you becoming an old man? How can you think I'd settle for so little?'

She dug in her paddle viciously and only then realised how angry she was with her father. He had said, 'I want to know everything you have been doing,' and then, instead of listening, he had only talked. He had not been in the least interested in the dream that was so important to her; all he had wanted to do was make her accept the future that he had planned out for her – he who had known all his life that you cannot plan the future.

She paddled across a wide pool, past the dams of beavers. A buck-toothed male, waddling across from the bank with a mouthful of sticks, paused with an air of absurd self-importance to watch her go by. 'Sturdy walls!' she thought. 'If that was all I wanted, I might as well marry one of those!' She giggled to herself at the thought of Kocoum's solemnity, then felt sorry. He wasn't as bad as all that. Still – marry him? She knew full well that her father had the right to force her to if he so decided. She knew equally well that he would not. But why must she rely on his forbearance? Where was his understanding?

The banks grew high and rocky as she neared the narrow, fast stretch just before the home river joined the Quiyoughcohannock. Where a curtain of water fell from overhanging rocks she steered the canoe behind it, nudging up to the cool, mossy stones while a silver rain kept her secret from the outside world. She was tempted to hold the canoe there for a while, but her anger got the better of her again and she veered out with two big sweeps of the paddle, straight for the rapids.

They began with a sloping fall of three times a man's height. She laughed triumphantly as the canoe stood on end and then shot out into the boiling white water. Soaked through, shaking water out of her eyes, she shifted her balance and watched for her moment to flick the paddle, first on one side and then on the other, to take the narrow way between jagged rocks and glassy water with a ruff of foam which showed that rocks lay just under the surface. She counted to herself to help with the rhythm. It was just like dancing, with the water for your partner, except that if you made a split-second's mistake you died. No one would shoot these rapids except a few of the most daring young men, when all their peers were watching. Everyone else carried the canoes around. No one knew that Pocahontas did it, not even her father. Did he know that it had been her mother who had showed her how?

Without breaking her concentration on the water, she allowed bright angry thoughts to flicker through her tensed mind. He might not know that, but he knew that his wife had defied her own father, an old headman who had thought that Powhatan would come to nothing, and had run away to marry him. Powhatan had told Pocahontas of the day when the Massawomecks hunted them through the forest and his wife had covered their retreat with her bow and brought down five enemy warriors while he carried a wounded friend to safety. He had told her many other stories of the same kind, and yet now he thought that she, her mother's daughter, needed a Kocoum to look after her. Powhatan's love and the dire straits of her people had saved her mother, in her lifetime, from having to be an ordinary wife. And of course, now that she was dead, her deeds could be ascribed to some singular spirit and kept safely in the past, as marvels, not as examples – thought Pocahontas, bitterly. But to find her father himself doing it ...!

And the necklace. The necklace her mother had risked everything to wear – he was using it as a bauble to coax a child. Pocahontas almost wanted to tear it off. The knowledge that she had, in fact, behaved like a child did not improve her temper.

The banks grew lower and the whirling race of the water began to slow down. The confluence was near. A little way ahead the river grew broader, with backwaters meandering between large marshy islands fringed with reeds and covered with willow trees. After its headlong race, the water needed to rest.

Perhaps things are different now, thought Pocahontas. Perhaps Mother would have behaved differently if she had lived in a time of peace, like this. Maybe my dreams are out of place; maybe I need to take root like these trees and live in tranquillity. Should I marry Kocoum?

Kocoum, she knew, would not want his wife to shoot the rapids and dive over waterfalls. He always did what was proper, even to visiting his mother exactly the number of times in a moon that were expected of him; Pocahontas had always slightly despised him for it. As his wife, she would have to learn to be like the others: learn all the nuances of the game that bored her so, the endless game of rank among the village women, edging in front or behind through their husbands' standing and the number of their children, the baskets they wove, the feasts they gave, the firmness with which they maintained order and respectability ... Was this the best offering she could make to her people now? Was this the price for being free from the terrified flights at midnight, the red flames in the corn?

She had to ask.

*****

She steered the canoe along a winding stream that narrowed until she could almost touch both banks at once. The leaves grew so thickly overhead that it was almost dark: long trailing strands of willow leaves patterned like braided hair, or a herringbone border on a tunic, dipped in the water, waved gently in the breeze, met behind her after she had pushed them out of the way and nosed the boat between them. The water was dark and clear between rafts of floating yellow leaves. At last she climbed out onto the bank and pulled up the canoe among huge, gnarled roots in front of the largest willow tree of all. Its main bole, thicker around than three men's arms could reach, was hollow, and a trunk in front of it had been burned and lopped perhaps a hundred years before and stood as high as Pocahontas's chest, a flat-topped, blackened stump. But green life still spread through the branches for many yards around. Birds of all kinds, squirrels, racoons, chipmunks and hundreds of smaller creatures scampered, hid, and breathed the safe air of the great, embracing tree.

Pocahontas had made no sound for a long time, but now she found that even her thoughts had become hushed. Good: that was the right way to approach Grandmother Willow. Sometimes she had come here idly and got no answer to her call except a silvery, mocking rustle of leaves. But today the tree seemed to welcome her before she had even spoken. The shadowy face of knobs and fissures in the trunk smiled, and the creaking old voice said, 'Is that my Pocahontas?'

Pocahontas swung herself up onto the stump and sat back on her heels. 'Grandmother Willow! I need to talk to you.'

'Good,' said the voice. 'I was hoping you'd visit today. Ah!' Pocahontas felt a shock, a stirring of interest right down into the roots of the tree beneath her. 'Your mother's necklace!'

'Yes,' said Pocahontas, touching the white shell. 'That was what I wanted to talk to you about... My father came back yesterday and he wants me to marry Kocoum.'

'Kocoum? But he's so serious.'

Pocahontas often could not be quite sure that what she heard was the voice of Grandmother Willow and not the thoughts in her own mind – but there was no mistaking the conspiratorial, teasing note of the reply.

'I know,' she said hollowly. 'Father thinks it's the right path for me. But lately I've been having a dream, and ...'

'Oh, a dream!' It seemed to Pocahontas that even the little creatures in the willow-branches skittered and rustled in expectation. 'Let's hear all about it!'

'Well,' began Pocahontas and closed her eyes to see the dream-pictures more clearly. 'I'm running through the forest and suddenly, there in front of me, is an arrow. As I look at it, it starts to spin.'

'A spinning arrow? How unusual!'

'Yes ... It spins and spins, faster and faster, and then, suddenly, it stops.'

'Hmmm.' Grandmother Willow paused, waiting to be sure that Pocahontas had finished. 'Well. It seems to me that this spinning arrow is pointing you down your path.'

That much was easy, surely. 'But, Grandmother Willow, what is my path? How am I ever going to find it?'

Grandmother Willow gave her ancient, unhurried smile. 'Your mother asked me the very same question.'

'And what did you say to her?' Pocahontas asked with a trace of impatience.

'I told her to listen! ... All around you are spirits, my child. They live in the air, in the water, under the earth. If you listen to them, they will guide you.'

'But I do listen, Grandmother! All the time! I know they're telling me to look for something, but I don't know where to find it! I'm afraid of missing my path: suddenly I'll have gone too far for the turning.'

'I think not, my child. I think that for you, it will be clear when it comes. Be patient. The arrow has to stop spinning: the moment has to come. Unless everything in you points to your path, wait, go on waiting ... But something tells me that it will come soon. Listen. Listen now. What do you hear?'

Pocahontas closed her eyes again and concentrated.

'I hear the wind.' The morning wind was rising, stirring in the branches, carrying away the little sounds of the forest creatures.

'What is it saying?'

'... I don't understand.'

Grandmother Willow's branches creaked and crooned softly in the breeze. She seemed to sing, almost too soft to hear:

'Listen with your heart:

You will understand.'

Eyes closed, Pocahontas felt the world fade from around her and the steps of her mind slow down until she thought that she must be about to fall asleep. Then she heard the note of the wind again, and shivered suddenly, for she was aware that this was no longer the wind's sound, but the wind's voice – the voice in which that great spirit spoke its heart. Although the wind was light, the voice seemed to rise like the beginnings of a storm with the menace of what it was bringing.

'It says something's coming,' Pocahontas called out loudly. The sound of her own voice startled her. She opened her eyes and was looking up at the patches of sky between the leaves. She knew that the sky was grey, but now it looked dark blue, with only the feathery edges of storm clouds creeping up in it, blue on blue, air writhing and twisting in air –

'Strange clouds,' Pocahontas heard herself say.

She had not thought the words: they had been spoken through her. Awed, she gazed around her, suddenly back in the waking world, and was possessed by a sense of urgency. She must see what was in the sky. There might not be a moment to lose. The note of the wind really had risen and the branches were tossing. Pocahontas scrambled from the stump to the main trunk of the tree, then swarmed up a branch until she could look out over the forest canopy. It was a rippling sea of green leaves, beautiful and impenetrable, more secretive than the real sea that lay beyond it.

'What do you see?' came the wind-tossed voice of Grandmother Willow from below.

'Clouds,' replied Pocahontas wonderingly.

They showed above the tree-tops near the mouth of the river, grey-white, moving at the speed of the wind, but purposefully ... pointed like wings ... and what were the dark slender trees that seemed to move along with them? Why, as she could just make out, were seagulls attending them, in dark breaking skeins in front and behind?

'Strange clouds.'