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Disclaimer: Characters belong to the Disney Corporation.

To my reviewers: thank you, thank you and thank you!

In this coming chapter I have the problem of conveying the 'Colours of the Wind' song without music, and without Pocahontas's miraculous ability to speak English, a trick you can play in a cartoon but not in a novel. I have tackled the language problem by having Pocahontas and John Smith both unusually, but not I hope impossibly quick at picking up languages. Do you think it works?

CHAPTER 7

She was a young girl, hardly eighteen years old, with copper-coloured skin; dressed in a shift of greyish deerskin with a fringe that moved a little in the wind; her arms and legs bare; poised on the rock with an unconscious wild grace that pierced him through. All of a sudden he knew himself for an intruder, with no right to be there at all, but still he stared at her – foolishly, he knew; and she stared back, with a still, unreadable expression. Searching? Accusing? Beseeching? Whatever else it was, it was not ashamed and not afraid.

Slowly and with growing amazement he wondered how far she had followed him – perhaps all the way from the village, and in the end he had only caught her because he happened to know a trick that she did not. She had followed him, alone. Why? Who knew whether she had human motives at all? Was he being shown something that no man had ever seen before?

The waterfall thundered beside them, they stood facing each other, and slowly he went down on one knee, laying the musket on the rock beside him. She was a girl, a human girl – but that made her beauty and the rarity of the spirit he sensed in her more amazing, not less.

Pocahontas felt as if she had steered her canoe too far to one side, in playful over-confidence, and now the whirlpool over the hidden rocks was sucking her down, its stark force in contrast with the slightness of the movement she had made. The man faced her, no longer a teasing, distant brother. His face was the mask of the mountain lion when it springs. She had meddled in what she did not understand. She could have no kinship with these men: they were takers, they were destroyers, and this one was going to kill her. She would be punished for her folly. All the same, she was not going to be ashamed of what she had done. Folly it might have been, but she would not deny it at the last moment, when the spirit that had called it out of her had been so strong. Let him kill her as she was, if it was what he intended.

But it seemed it was not. He stood up, letting down his weapon, and gazed at her. The fume of the waterfall drifted between them, making his face look more ghostly than ever, but it was so near that she saw it clearly. With parted lips and those strange wide eyes, he was staring at her with an intensity that brushed her with fire. Suddenly all her fear returned – terror of being seen and known for what she was by a being that she could not comprehend, one who knew no laws, no restraints. He had seen the truth; it was the echo of her own desire that was returning to her out of the alien face.

She stood watching as if rooted to the spot while he slowly knelt down, lowered one foot, then the other into the fast-running water and began wading towards her, step by step, braced against the current, but smoothly, as if to avoid frightening an animal. He had left his weapon on the rock; he was empty-handed, his arms stretched out for balance. He never stopped looking at her. Panic took all her judgment away: she understood his face less the longer she saw it. When he was so close that he had to tilt back his head to look at her, he raised one hand, removed the hard, shining covering from his head and stood holding it. His golden hair shook loose, and all at once he looked young and almost fragile. His face moved as if he were about to speak.

Pocahontas could bear it no longer. The stranger had seen what was in her heart and was going to use it to triumph over her. Even his pose of courtesy was intolerable. She wanted to be free of it, to shake off all the confusion and fear, to be the girl she had always been. She leaped past him to the next stone, then frantically on across the river and up the rocks to the edge of the forest. In a minute she could make sure he would never find her.

'No! Stop - wait ...'

The unearthly silence between them had lasted so long that his shout sounded to him clumsy and irreverent. But he could not let her go. He must know who she was. He caught up the gun and scrambled over the rocks, and as he reached the bank caught a glimpse of her running like a deer between the first trees. In a moment would he wonder if he had ever seen her at all?

'Wait – please …' he called, out of breath.

This woman was the promise the country had held out to him from the moment he had landed. The sense of being welcomed to his real home, of being offered new life – this was what it had meant, or it meant nothing. What were rocks and trees and rivers – all the lonely sterility of the earth? I've seen dozens of new worlds: what could possibly be different about this one? She was – if only she would wait.

She was waiting. In a small grassy space overlooking the water, overshadowed by one huge tree, she was there – touching the tree-trunk with one hand, poised to run again.

He propped the musket on a rock at the edge of the little meadow and came forward again a few steps with his hands held out. 'Don't run away. I'm not going to hurt you.' Foolish words. As if he could, even if he wanted to. She could outrun him; she had more power than he did. But he had to say something. She was afraid, trembling. If she only knew ...

Pocahontas glanced up to see the stranger coming, then looked down again, but knew that he had stopped. Why did she not run, make good her escape? Did the note of need in his voice have more power over her than anything yet?

It took more courage than she had needed in her life for her to raise her head and look him in the face now that there was no protection, not even a few feet of water, between herself and him. She saw again the burning look which had so frightened her, but saw, too, gentleness and a certain clarity and firmness, as of a man who could put himself under restraint, and who would keep his word.

She trusted him. She felt like one who has begun falling down a cliff, whose fall is broken by a wide, secure ledge. He is still trapped in mid-air, not knowing how to go forward or back, but for a short time the solid safety of the ledge seems enough.

She noticed for the first time the vivid colour in his light eyes: the colour of the summer sky.

'I won't harm you,' he said. 'Please stay.'

She answered a few words in a strange language, pleadingly, twisting her fingers in the hair that hung by her cheek. The girlishness of the gesture, in one who had seemed so free and sure, moved him intensely. Of course she could not understand what he was saying.

'Who are you?' he whispered, as much to himself as to her.

Pocahontas understood the question. He was not asking her name, which would have been effrontery. It was something else. The underground stream in her mind welled up silently to sweep away her fear, her uncertainty, and the obstruction of all that could not be said or understood. To feel foolish was a waste of time, when she saw clearly on his face the look of a young man receiving the dream that tells him what his life must be, and questioning it, searching out the meaning of the figures it shows him.

A sense of awed responsibility came over her. Many times already she had wondered if the ship and the bright-haired man were dream-figures, or answers to her dream. Now it seemed that she, and her whole world, were dream, sign and spirit to him. Was she mistaken in thinking herself part of the waking world at all? Or could they somehow both be awake and dreaming at the same time? She felt the boundaries of her understanding stretch and give, more dizzyingly than when she had heard the voice of the wind. She fleetingly thought of Grandmother Willow: how simple and one-voiced her advice had seemed to be to the child who had sat before her that morning – to listen with your heart.

If she was this man's dream, it was her duty to speak to him gently and clearly. She must tell him her meaning, which meant saying her name after all.

'Pocahontas,' she said, looking at him levelly. Still he looked perplexed, so she said it again, with her hand on her heart. 'My name is Pocahontas.'

At that his face relaxed and he smiled with relief. Her fear returned for a moment. Was he laughing at her? What would he do with her name now that she had trusted him with it? Had she not behaved foolishly, as if they were two children who had happened to meet at play by the waterside – 'What's your name?' 'Who's your father?'

But perhaps in this new life of meeting dreams they had to begin as if they were children again. Still smiling, he pointed to himself and said his own name. She could not repeat it at first: it seemed to begin twice over and end without having made any sounds you could seize on. But she tried, and they laughed together.

Standing in the shade of the tree, they looked at one another without any idea what to say or do next, but with understanding threading the air between them, frail and shining as gossamer.

*****

The summer afternoon went on. Heavy thunder-clouds built up in the sky, but failed to reach as high as the sun. The leaves rustled and the water of the river shone in a flickering rhythm beneath their shadow. Birds with bobbing tails came down to drink, perching on the stepping-stones. The calls of other, unseen birds sounded from the forest, over the endless, outpouring note of the waterfall. In this bright, secret world, the man and the woman felt that their spirits were fallen leaves scudding on the surface of the water. Hesitantly at first, then more and more easily, they gave way to laughter. He was a boy, pulling faces and playing to the gallery, she a small girl, hugging her knees and shaking with giggles. Now and then one of them would get up to snatch a stick and draw on the ground, or go between the rocks to where the soil was soaked in order to trace signs with a wet finger. They asked questions and exchanged words at random, laughing when all words failed, then falling silent and looking at each other sidelong, or gazing at the playing light and water, wondering what to do with the huge freight that moved, ponderous and silent, under the surface where the crisp leaves danced.

They already knew, though darkly and without confidence, that they were matched: each needed the other and no one else, although they had been born thousands of miles apart and neither could understand a word the other spoke. It was this which made them laugh, yet the sheer size of what they might share and its fragility made them afraid. Was it not madness even to think of steering such a cargo through the waters ahead of them? He knew, and she guessed, that his people had come to take what they wanted from hers without the slightest regard. Not yet knowing how their meeting could possibly change this, they both avoided making it clear. The pretence was transparent, yet they gave themselves up to it joyfully. They did not touch one another; they left passion undisturbed, and met only at the edges of themselves, in the evanescence of laughter. For a while it satisfied them.

At last John Smith leaned back on a rock and tried a catechism of all the words in her language that she had taught him until then, while she interspersed the English translations and they laughed at each other. 'Chicahominy ... Quiyoughcohannock ... Pocahontas,' he ended and raised his eyebrows. 'You have most unusual names,' he added in English.

She understood him. 'Not as strange as yours,' she replied in her own language, 'John Smith.' The extreme care with which she pronounced that most ordinary of names made him snort with laughter. Yet he suddenly liked the name better than before. Is this the first time in my life I've really liked being John Smith? he wondered. He stretched a hand out behind him to find his bag with the tablets in it, to write the Indian words down, and found instead a furry haunch, which he grabbed and pulled. He swung the raccoon over his head, loose in its grey fur and with all four paws splayed out, its head buried in his satchel, which came with it.

'Meeko!' said Pocahontas reproachfully, taking the racoon round the middle. Its head emerged, unrepentantly chewing on John Smith's last biscuit.

'Friend of yours?' asked John, then remembered where he had seen such an animal before. The ring-tailed beast on the rock, with the sharp-eyed girl behind it ... He looked straight into Pocahontas's eyes, and she looked back at him, glanced away abashed, and then started to laugh. He began laughing too. Five minutes after his first landing! What was done was done. But how many Indians might be watching the men in camp now, without their having the least idea?

He put this thought aside. 'Well, good day, Meeko,' he said and bowed to the raccoon. Then he had to explain the greeting to the girl. In return, she showed him a circular movement of her hand from the shoulder, which went with the word Win-gapo and a smile of welcome. Then she stood up and half turned as if leaving. 'An-na,' she said, beginning to move her hand round in the opposite direction.

He rose quickly and raised his hand to prevent her. She understood and stopped in mid-gesture, and for a moment, as they looked at each other, a chill fell on both of them.

It was broken when they heard a scuffling sound beside them. The raccoon, looking for more food, had found something else inside the satchel: a small round object. John Smith shouted and Pocahontas lunged after Meeko, but he swarmed smartly up a rock and, failing to bite through the compass, banged it hard against the stone like a tough nutshell. Chased further, he took refuge in the tallest tree, where he went on hammering with the compass for some moments, then tucked it into his cheek and disappeared.

So as not to distress Pocahontas, John shouted after the raccoon: 'All right! Keep it. Call it a gift!'

'What was that?' she asked. It had not crumbled or broken, but had struck sparks from the rock.

'My compass,' he answered. 'It helps you find your way when you get lost.' He imitated a man scanning the horizon, guided by a pointing finger. This did not seem to mean much to Pocahontas, but she was still upset by the loss. 'Don't worry, I can get another one,' he assured her. In fact, being without the compass was a serious nuisance, but he tried to recover his carefree mood.

'What was it?' asked Pocahontas as they sat down again. 'Hard!' She mimed hammering as the raccoon had done.

'Hard,' replied John in English. 'Metal ... steel.' He took his helmet and tapped it with a stone so that it rang. He showed her how thin and light the steel was. Then he laid his knife beside it and tried the edge with his thumb. Holding a stone in each hand, he struck the two together until one of them chipped and crumbled. 'Stone is not so good,' he said, smiling. 'Steel is better. We'll show you, later.' He stood up and used the knife to cut a large blaze on the trunk of the tree in the clearing. It shaved the bark off easily.

Suddenly, Pocahontas's face closed. She rose and stood watching the white scar on the great tree begin to moisten like a superficial graze on human skin. Without a word she turned her back and walked away towards the waterside. John Smith stared after her. She was clearly angry, but for a moment he could not think what he could possibly have done to make her so.

He came up behind. 'What is it?' he asked. She turned on him with eyes like a hunting cat's, hissed something and strode further away. For a cold instant he feared that all their earlier understanding had been illusory, and that she was as unpredictable as a wild thing. Then he began to see what he had done. For the first time he had let a superior note into his voice; he had spoken from the deep assumption, which he had never thought to question before he met her, that the savages were ignorant and his own people were wise: that the English had all to teach and nothing to learn. Until that moment he had treated her as a respected equal; but then she must have seen all at once how much he and his people despised hers. Of course she was furious, and how would he be able to mend his mistake?

But was it a mistake? He floundered in the gap between the training of a lifetime and the inchoate knowledge of the last hour, as he scrambled among the rocks to try to keep the girl in sight. He called out to her to wait and got for answer a high, clear shout of two syllables, heard only faintly above the noise of the water, but plain enough in meaning. By the time he reached a place with a clear view she was nowhere to be seen. He cast to and fro for a minute or two, then sat down despondently. What was the use of searching for her, if she did not want to be found?

She was just a savage, surely. A child, or a beautiful animal, in whom his loneliness had seen something that was not really there; good to beguile the time for an afternoon, but not to deflect him from his views or his purposes ... No! If he thought that, he was insulting himself. She was rare and precious, unique; the others could not be like her. But then he thought further and saw that that would not do, either. Were not the things that drew him to her inseparable from her being a 'savage'? Her daring, her physical freedom, the innocence that allowed her to sit beside him half naked and yet possess herself more fully and assuredly than any lady he had ever met caparisoned in tassels and lace – could these be virtues that savages were more likely to encourage than civilised people? And where did that leave him and his mission?

He got up again with new determination to find her and know her better, however angry she might be. And this time he found her almost at once, sitting right at the water's edge, her head bent down to the mossy, overhanging roots of a tree. She raised her head as he hesitantly came nearer, and gave him a long look that prevented him from speaking. It was free of anger, assessing but remote, and sorrowful, as if she had gone deep into herself and discovered something new in the time they had been apart.

How old is she really? he wondered. Perhaps much older than I thought: I never saw a girl of eighteen look like that.

She said a word that clearly meant 'Look', and drew him down with a gesture onto the moss beside her. He watched and waited.

She pointed to the moss under her hand, vivid green and cushioned, and said a name, glancing up at him to make sure that he understood. He nodded, but when he tried to repeat the word she hushed him in order to point out some moss that he saw, after a glance, was a slightly different kind, with tall club heads, growing mingled with the first. Then she named a third moss, long-stranded and grey, that grew further up the trunk of the tree. Then, steadily, she went on to name two different lichens and the rough, cracked bark of the tree itself, showing in the gaps between them. A group of ants was labouring across the cracks carrying a yellow, early-fallen leaf. Pocahontas gave a name to the leaf, then to the ants. Further up scurried a different, larger kind of ant; she named that.

She gave a sound of satisfaction and pushed aside a spray of green leaves growing by itself from the base of the tree. All that he could see, sheltering behind them on the bark, was an insect with dark, folded wings, crawling slowly upwards. It seemed insignificant until it reached a patch of sunlight and sat still. Then its wings began to spread, uncrumpling movement by tiny movement, like the ripples of a rising tide lapping on a beach. It was a butterfly with wings of a translucent green like antique glass. Nearby was the pale, dry husk of the chrysalis from which it had just hatched.

As Pocahontas murmured, whether to the butterfly or about it he could not tell, he felt a movement of protest and raillery in himself. He had work to do. What was he doing sitting here, attending to these minute things like a truant schoolboy with the whole day to waste? But the movement was half-hearted. Already without knowing it he was sunk more deeply in the world than he had ever been before. Where for many years other living things had formed a half-noticed stage for whatever effort or enterprise he was engaged in at the time, now they took on solidity and significance. He began, with wonder, to have an inkling of how the world seemed to the girl beside him. It was not like his world of half-remembered scenes from three continents and twenty cities, held together only by a sense of his own progress through fleeting companionships and dangers; it was one solid world, limited indeed, but understood to the smallest detail, with depths and intricacies nested one within another, like the chapels and shrines in a cathedral, or like amethyst crystals inside a boulder; a world in which one might move quietly, knowing one's own insignificance, content in the sufficiency of the whole.

They both watched the butterfly as it rose a little from the bark and vibrated its wings, now dry in the sunlight and ready to take its first flight. Suddenly it flickered and was yards away in the air, flying with strong wing-beats over the river. They could hardly see it against the brilliant water, but they searched for it with their eyes and found it hovering low over the flecks of foam that raced away from the waterfall. Perhaps it mistook them for flowers; whatever the reason, it landed on the surface, and they saw it struggling for only a moment before the current carried it past them and away.

John Smith looked at Pocahontas curiously. What would be her response to this proof of the everyday waste and cruelty in her gem-like world? Would she weep, would she be callous, or would she feel it but shrug it off as anyone older than a child must? She felt it, he was sure. She knelt gazing after the butterfly for many moments without speaking. Her face was still but her eyes were fierce and, he thought, bright with tears. Then she rose and walked a few steps upstream along the bank. They had come some way below the waterfall and, from where they stood, could see the rainbow that hung in the fine sunlit spray midway down its drop. She knelt down by the water again and scooped the surface with her hand. There was a tiny bay in the river's edge into which floating debris was driven and could not easily escape. Her hand came up full of drowned insects: tiny flies, mosquitoes, a spider, and two or three beetles. She let the water run off them and told over all their names, as she had done with the mosses at the tree-root. Dipping them off her hand back into the water, she stood up, walked on again with a sign to him to wait, and leaned slowly and carefully on an outcrop of rock that overhung the water just ahead. She glanced back at him with a smile: in the same instant he heard a whir of wings and saw a glint of metallic blue as a kingfisher darted from its nest in the rocks. It sheared the water, flew right into the spray of the falls and out again, and vanished among the trees on the opposite bank. Pocahontas stood in the straight, pliant stance in which he had first seen her and cried a short, musical word after the kingfisher.

Then she turned back to John Smith. Her face grave, she brought up her hand slowly. She pointed to where the bird had flown, then with her other hand pointed to a drowned gnat still clinging to her palm. She touched her own breast, then the rock, then moving a couple of steps she laid her palm against the trunk of a tree and looked up into its canopy, and over towards where the grey trunks of the forest trees marched away, older than either of them knew and with leaves and lives on them beyond counting. With a shadow of a smile, she lightly touched John Smith on the chest. She held both hands as high as she could above her head, and brought them down and outward on each side until they met again in front of her waist, tracing a great circle, or perhaps a huge bale or a jar of something precious she had to carry. She then beckoned him away from the river and under the trees.

His heart was still. The glancing laughter of their first time together was far behind. She had touched him somewhere deeper, so deep that thought was impossible. But he had a kind of vision of what she was trying to show him. It was a world in which spirits stepped at will from insect to tree to stone; life flowed through transparent boundaries, ceasing here and beginning there, but never diminishing. He saw himself in this life too, content to walk with her among the trees, together with the wild things, with no aim but to be; not fencing out cold, or sun, or hunting creatures, but meeting them as equals without fear, so much effaced into the world that he could be prepared to send his own life into its keeping whenever it might become necessary, as calmly as one launches a leaf boat into a pool.

Afterwards he could not remember all that they had done. He remembered her picking berries and sharing them with him, and showing him flowers with faces like the sun and others that wreathed sky-blue round fallen tree trunks. She took him past the tree under which they had sat at first, and he wondered at the self he had been who had scarred it idly. But when he looked at the place he had cut with his knife, it was covered with tawny butterflies drinking the sap that had trickled out.

They climbed past the waterfall and stood together on the high rocks. In the blinding sky, almost too far up to be seen, wheeled two broad-winged hunting birds. Pocahontas threw her head far back, looking at them, and imitated the harsh, lonely cry which one of them gave. Then she called a word to them on two high notes, midway between a shout and a bird's call. The eagles flew lower little by little in broad sweeping curves. The girl went on crying and calling until one bird flew close by her head with a huge ruffling of black-and-white barred feathers, and alighted in passing on her outstretched arm. He saw its wild eye, like a flake of the gold he was supposed to be looking for; then it soared off. Her face shining, she motioned to him to reach out his arm too. When he did so, both birds came back, one to Pocahontas, its mate to him, and for a single moment they all stood there, the girl and the man with the talons of the eagles pricking their arms and the wind of their wings on their faces, four wary, deadly creatures trusting one another, until the humans tossed up their arms and stood with them raised in farewell, as the wings took the birds' weight and they rose again into their limitless world.

He had never felt such delight. He lowered his eyes from watching the eagles to look at the girl as she stood lit from one side by the sunshine that was growing golden in the late afternoon. Suddenly he sensed trouble in her. She was frowning and listening intently to something other than the bird-calls and the water.

'What is it?' he asked, going close to her.

She said something but he could not understand. She tapped a rhythm with one finger on her chest, sounding hollow, very soft but relentless. She led him behind a rock to where the sound of the waterfall was not so loud. He listened and then for a moment he heard too: drums being beaten far away, so far that he could hear them only when a gust of wind brought the sound more loudly. She heard them continuously.

Her eyes were wide with fear, which communicated itself to him at once, together with a reminder of long-neglected duty. If the drums meant trouble for her, what did they mean for him? What had been happening while they dallied the afternoon away together in the high country?

She spoke again and with swift decision turned as if to go. He tried to dissuade her. 'Please stay.' She pushed her hands forward in denial, looking at him pleadingly. 'I must see you again,' he said urgently. Her face was full of distress but she only shook her head, thrust herself away from him and plunged between the rocks. He stood as if rooted to the spot and watched her descend, leaping and turning with almost the momentum of falling water, then loping across a meadow and passing out of sight among the trees.

He passed his hand over his forehead. Perhaps he had dreamed it all, so suddenly was he alone again.