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Disclaimer: Most of these characters belong to the Disney corporation in their present form, a few are my own.

Note: you see my plot problem now is to get the English to try and meet up with the Indians as any sane colonists would, but somehow prevent them from succeeding.

CHAPTER 10

A guard was set at Werowocomoco too that night and no one slept well. The air seemed to shake, as if all the spirits far and wide were disturbed by the unknown marauders. When Kocoum's small scouting party had come back in haste in mid-afternoon with one of their number wounded, everyone's fears had been confirmed. Powhatan knew he had to reckon with war.

Kocoum was ashamed and angry. He felt responsible that a man under his command had been wounded needlessly, and this made him rage all the more at the wantonness of the strangers' attack. Now that it was known that they would attack unprovoked, anyone who approached them must be even more cautious than before, and he, who had had the best chance to spy on them, had found out so little.

'There are a hundred and ten of them that we counted,' he said to Powhatan. 'All men, no women or children. And their chiefs drive them like prisoners of war.'

'They must be men of no account,' said Powhatan tautly, 'grey wolves, outcasts from their own people. They have no law.'

'Their chief gave himself plenty of consequence,' said Kocoum. 'Fat as a bear in autumn. He strutted about like a turkey cock.'

'Cowards are the greatest boasters.'

'Not only do they have the weapons that strike at a distance,' said Kocoum, 'they have weapon-proof clothing themselves. I hit the man who was coming for Namontack, full on the head with my axe, and the covering on his head cracked the blade.'

Powhatan glanced at him: Kocoum was brooding, not boasting.

'We will find Kekata,' he said.

They went into Namontack's house, where he was lying on a bed with the shaman tending him. His mother was holding his head between her hands. His brother and sisters stood around helplessly, and their children stared round-eyed from the shadows. Powhatan knelt beside him.

'I was to blame, Chief,' said the wounded man, gasping for breath. 'They saw me. One of them cut himself with his axe and I looked out to see if they bleed the way we do. They do. At least I saw that.' He stopped talking and moved his head restlessly from side to side.

'More of them will bleed for this,' said Kocoum.

Kekata paused from chanting and passing a charmed bundle above the wound. 'This wound is strange to me,' he said.

The twin bones below the knee were shattered, as if they had been struck a blow by some more than human force. The only time Powhatan had seen anything like it was when a man had had his leg trapped under a boulder that had fallen down a high cliff. That man had been crippled for life. So would Namontack be. The evidence of the power that these reasonless creatures could wield filled Powhatan with helpless anger. He had been going to ask Kekata what magic he could weave against the invaders. Now the question seemed childish. Magic would only work hand in hand with law, against creatures who knew the proper fear of the divine powers and their constraints on life. What could it do to men like these, so puffed up with their own power that they defied the laws of nature?

At least there were only so many of them. And their weapons could not be infallible, or all Kocoum's band would be dead. His people would fight them with strength and cunning, but taking the greatest care themselves not to offend the gods.

He was thankful that because of the war against the Massowomecks there were already more fighting men gathered in the village than there would otherwise have been, but they were still not enough. That same afternoon he sent messengers on foot and by water to all his subject chiefs commanding them to send help. Their men, too, would not yet have scattered; their arrows would not have been used up on game, their spears would not have lost their sharpness. They would resent having to give up more strength to war when the harvest season was just beginning, but that would have to be lived with.

He ordered other men to begin building a stockade, and forbade anyone to go out of sight of the village except the chosen warriors who would continue to spy on the white men's camp. He had the warning drums beaten to call in anyone who might still be wandering the land unaware of the danger abroad. While he arranged all this, he was gnawed by anxiety for his daughter. It seemed that she had left the village in the early morning, and in the late afternoon she was still not back. How like Pocahontas, to run off alone in her wild maidenhood to consider the prospect of marriage he had put before her! But today, of all days ... Could it have been only that morning that he had had a whole mind to give to his daughter's marriage?

When she finally returned, not much before sunset, she gave him no comfort for the anxiety she had caused him. She would not tell where she had been, and she listened to the news of the invaders as if she took no interest in it. He almost lost patience. Yet, as always since her mother died, he found he could not speak harshly to her. She was the best reminder he had of Suleawa, and yet was so unlike her – distant, poised to walk away from him into a world that he would never know as a living man. How could he risk fraying the bond of love that already held her to him so loosely? It had not been like that with Suleawa. He remembered the times they had let fly at each other like deadly enemies, and then been surprised by the new understanding that welled up between them when the battle was over. But then Suleawa had come to him freely in the beginning. Pocahontas had not. There was some spirit in her that rebelled against having been born his daughter.

That made his obligation to her all the stronger. People were supposed to feel gratitude and respect towards the ancestors who gave them life, but Powhatan wondered if they should not rather feel this gratitude towards the children who gave that life meaning as they grew old. It had been so easy for him and his wife to bring their girl-child into the world. She had brought them nothing but pride and joy, while they, by begetting her, had condemned her at some time to sadness, pain and death. How could her father do otherwise than try to keep her safe, to guide her into a sheltered path? Though her spirit might seek danger as its own destiny, in some sense the consequences would always be his fault.

*****

The next morning as soon as the sun was high a runner came from the watchers around the white men's camp.

'Ten of them are coming this way,' he told Powhatan breathlessly, 'along the ridge path.'

'How long do you make it before they get here?'

'An hour, perhaps. They have a heavy load to carry, and their weapons.'

Powhatan had been watching the building of the stockade. As he listened he walked away, the messenger still beside him, to find Kekata and the other elders of the village.

'What are they carrying?'

'I couldn't see. Something heavy made of wood; two men at a time are carrying it. They are wearing the clothes that protect them, and they have the weapons that thunder and others too ...' He tried to find a way to describe the others, and failed.

Powhatan had collected the six men he wanted. They all went to the dusty ground within the circle of carved wooden posts at the centre of the village.

'You have heard Opechanc's tale,' he said to them. 'It sounds as if these men are coming to treat with us, after it seemed clear that they wished only to kill. My own thought is that we should have nothing to do with them. The smoke warned us against their gifts yesterday. They made no move to declare themselves; they attacked our watch; and now they must think that we are afraid and will more easily be persuaded to whatever they have planned. We must show them their mistake. What do you think? We must decide quickly.'

'What if we ambush them on the trail?' suggested one man. 'Ten less out of a hundred and ten is something.'

No one agreed. 'It would be foolish, before we know how soon the other warriors can be here,' said another.

Powhatan nodded. 'It must be all or nothing.'

'But how can we avoid treating with them, if we do not attack?' asked the third elder.

'Leave the village,' said Powhatan. 'Let them find no one here. That should make it clear enough to them that they are not welcome, without provoking them to attack us at once.'

'What, leave our village undefended?' said the first speaker incredulously. 'With the corn standing in the fields, and…'

'We will cross the river,' said Powhatan levelly, 'and leave watchers within bowshot. If we have to attack we will still have the advantage. Otherwise, we will return when the strangers leave. What do you say, Kekata?'

'I agree with the chief,' Kekata said to the others. 'It would be wrong to meet them face to face even if they were our own kind: the law says three days must pass after a wounding before the fighters confront each other. If the attacker comes earlier, he insults the victim. Their coming like this shows that they think we are of no account. Coming in such numbers, with all their weapons…'

'They have a totem, too,' put in the messenger, 'some kind of a patterned hide, carried in the air.'

'You see how insolent they are?'

There was a general murmur of agreement. 'And yet,' said one man, 'would it not be wise to hear what they have to say before we make up our minds to drive them out?'

Powhatan looked at Kekata. 'I dare not,' said the shaman. 'Not unless I hear some sign against what I heard yesterday. Whatever flattery or gifts they offer, it will be to our ruin in the end. We must not allow them to trap us.'

'But to let them come into the village unresisted,' protested the first elder again, 'to spy around our holy place, here, as they have already done in the field of the dead ... and what if they take things of ours to work magic on us?'

'We must chance that,' said the chief. 'We must keep watch and see how they conduct themselves. And we may leave them a message.'

'I thought the same thing,' said Kekata. 'You, elders, collect the people and make them start at once. I shall do what must be done here.'

As the elders moved away, Powhatan asked, 'What message will you leave?'

'Only the plain ones,' said Kekata. '"Stranger, you are entering a holy place. Leave an offering and walk on humbly." And the one a messenger takes with him when he demands compensation. All the peoples we have ever dealt with understand those. If these strangers are men at all, they should mean something to them.'

Powhatan nodded doubtfully. He walked down through the village to the landing-place. Lines of silent women, hung about with babies and bundles, began moving into the shallows and taking their places in canoes. Only small children and the very old complained or questioned. The canoes shuttled back and forth across the smooth water; after the women went the men, and last went Powhatan and Kekata, with the three young men who carried the chief's weapons and insignia and the shaman's chest. They took a last look at the village before walking away under the trees, along a clear trail that was nevertheless unmarked and invisible from the opposite side of the river. Powhatan wondered if his move had been wise or foolish. Angrily he asked himself what action could be other than foolish in a predicament like this.

*****

The evening before, with very few words wasted, the chief's sister Nijlon had told Pocahontas to come and share her sleeping quarters, 'and keep that raccoon of yours out of my sight, or I'll have its tail for a cape,' and this morning she and her children were with Pocahontas when the order came for everyone to leave the village, cross the river and go to the northern look-out hill. She went with them as she was told, sullenly but without any idea of refusing. She knew that the order came from her father. After yesterday, he was determined to keep her safe. She knew too that the family, although carefully courteous as always, resented her and resented having to look after her. She did not mind: if it had mattered, she would have found a way to escape them. But at the moment she could come to no decision as to what to do. Her mind was in confusion, too full for thought.

The women sat around her on the leaf-mould under the trees and spread out their sewing. The chief's wife coaxed Nijlon's youngest children, the small prince and princess, to try to weave a mat of grasses. The voices of other mothers could be heard here and there scolding their children not to make too much noise at their play, and not to run off; but most of them were sufficiently scared to need no reminding. Although the people were packed together as if at a festival, it was so quiet the buzzing of the flies could be heard.

Pocahontas had brought some work along, a half-finished cape and a bundle of feathers to stitch to it, but she had even less patience than usual for the finicky task. She kept having to brush away flies, and the shifting sun-spots coming between the leaves spoiled her eye. When her needle broke she abandoned the work thankfully, stood up and began to walk around, although her aunt's hard stare was not lost on her.

The leading men were sitting in a circle at the top of the hill under the high tree that served as a look-out post over the village and river. A little down the slope the fighting men sat in groups, most of them mending or making arrows or spears. Namontack's friends had just finished making him a bed of cut branches with a screen round it to keep sun and flies off. Further on, a group of young boys with too little to do were beginning a well-tried pastime:

'What's that smell?' said the biggest of them loudly, pretending to look round. 'Oh, look, it's Abukcheech. What's he doing here?'

The others joined in with enthusiasm. 'Get further downwind, Abukcheech.' 'That's my tree. Didn't you know? What makes you think you can put your dirty backside under it?'

'I was here first,' said Abukcheech. A small, delicate boy, his attempts to defend himself were always more pathetic than instant submission would have been.

'"I was here first,"' mimicked the ringleader. 'Yes, he made sure he got away in the first boatload when he knew the foreigners were coming.'

'Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!'

'Look at him! Wearing shoes when he's only got to sit around all day. Afraid the ants'll bite you, Abukcheech?'

'Come on, let's get his shoe.'

Pocahontas started to walk on. The bullying made her sick, but it was not for her to intervene. She was only an unmarried girl. After a scuffle, a moccasin went flying into the air and stuck in one of the branches of the tree above the boys. 'Give that back!' Abukcheech was shouting.

'There it is. Why don't you go and get it?'

'Go on, Abukcheech. It's not far.'

'Nah! He can't climb.'

'Shut your noise,' the wounded Namontack called from his shelter. 'Or come over here and say it. I can't climb either, can I?'

Abashed for the moment, the boys stopped their jeering and sat down. Abukcheech began throwing sticks into the tree in an attempt to bring his moccasin down. At each unsuccessful throw the other boys nudged each other with muffled sniggers, suppressed whenever they felt the eyes of their elders on them.

Pocahontas walked away to the edge of the crowd and sat down, staring away from them across the hillside. What horrible creatures boys were; always had been. Kocoum had been no different, she remembered, although he was so dignified now. Her own elder brother had not been like that; somehow the boys had always seemed to be able to think of something better to do when he was around. But he was dead, killed in his first battle. The chief's wives resented the fact that Powhatan did not do their sons more favours, that Pocahontas and her brother were the only ones who had been brought up in the chief's house. What did they expect when their boys were all like this?

With a rush, her wandering thoughts flowed back into their main channel. The man she had met the day before: he had been different, too. His laughter had not been cruel, but a surrender to joy. She saw again the gentleness in his face and the intent way he had listened to her. How had she ever found it in her to reveal herself to a stranger, a warrior, as she had done? But he had attended to her humbly. Of course she had been his dream, his spirit-guide, no mere girl. She could not see how what had happened could be fitted with the rest of her life. She was just a girl now, insignificant and confused.

He belonged to the army of men who had landed uninvited and desecrated the field of the dead; who had felled trees and stolen food and water, and wantonly attacked the owners of the land who came to keep watch on them. She could not fault her father's actions when she remembered the aversion she had felt on first watching the strangers come ashore. They were a deadly danger, it was clear. If one were a little better than the others, what difference did that make? There were a hundred of them, all ready to take what they wanted. Even the man with the yellow hair: angrily and fearfully, she remembered his slighting look as he showed the mysterious power he could use so lightly, not caring what he destroyed. In return, she had shown him where strength lay for herself and for her people. But what if she had betrayed herself? What if he could somehow use that knowledge against them? The thought sent a chill through her, and she felt the need to huddle close to her people, to hide and protect what she knew. She would stay nearby and reassure her father. She would not even slip off to let Grandmother Willow know what had happened to her. What if she had already taken an irredeemably false step? In any case, she suspected Grandmother Willow would not, or could not, tell her. Her first step had been taken : she had set foot in her path and must follow it alone; only she could find, by groping and blundering, the twists and turns that lay out of sight of the entrance.

There was a stir in the crowd behind her. One of the men who had been left on watch at the riverside was coming up the hill. People moved aside to let him go by, throwing questioning words or glances at him, but he hurried on with an expressionless face. This increased the villagers' expectations and in a few moments everyone was gazing towards the hilltop where he stood talking with Chief Powhatan in a low voice. From the edge of the crowd, Pocahontas watched too. She thought she caught her father's eye for a moment, but nothing in his face spoke to her. As the inaudible talk went on, the tension in the cocked heads and craned necks in front of her gradually drained away. It seemed as if nothing of moment was going to happen after all, and first one and then another of the villagers bent their heads to their tasks again. Finally the messenger turned slowly and went back down the slope, alone. A ripple of mixed relief and disappointment ran through the crowd to where Pocahontas stood. 'Not going to fight yet, then, at least,' she heard the man nearest her say.

Powhatan spoke to the elders and two of them went down and spoke to some of the warriors. Then a few of these men started to move slowly among the people, pausing to talk to each group for some time. There was a message to deliver, but rather than address the people himself her father was having it distributed. That showed two things: that he thought it unsafe to speak aloud, and that there was no hurry. Pocahontas turned her attention away from the slow progress of the speakers, and sat down.

'Unsafe' and 'no hurry'. Those words were the keynote of the day. Everyone had brought some task to do, no one was simply lying and taking their ease as they might well have been if they had stayed in the village, but no one was applying himself to anything as if it really needed doing. The work was there merely to kill fear. The needles stayed poised, the arrow-bindings half wound, while their owners stared at the ground unseeing, the familiar objects in their hands serving only to dull their fear to lassitude. Then they might be seen fingering the protective amulets round their necks or even fetching out and unwrapping packages of secret objects belonging to their guardian spirits, first looking round to make sure no one was watching too closely. Of course everyone there past childhood remembered other times when they had had to leave their homes in a hurry. Pocahontas remembered makeshift camps in the forest, on colder days, with much less to eat than they had with them today, when danger had been more acute than it was now. But at least it had been a danger they understood well, not this alien terror. As if by contagion from the others, Pocahontas felt herself numbed by it, her thought and her very movements slowed down as if by winter cold. She started when she heard one of the elders speak loudly to the group beside her.

'Good news,' he said without conviction. 'Most of them have gone without doing any damage. Only one is still there. We have to wait until he leaves too before we can go back.'

Pocahontas felt her heart beat furiously. Only one left: at once it came into her mind that it must be he. She was so occupied with trying to retrieve at least her outward calm that she did not hear the words of the nearby men, who were beginning to argue with the elder while he answered wearily as if he had been through the same argument several times already.

Now surely was the time for her to slip away and see who the man was who was still waiting in the village. Even if her absence was noticed, what harm could it do, now that the immediate danger was past? Or, failing that, was it not now time to go and confess to her father what had happened the day before, and urge him to speak with John Smith (she ran the name carefully through her mind) if he had the opportunity?

She could not. When she considered speaking of him it was as if she had been struck dumb: she simply could not imagine how she would bring the words out. So unreal, so strange did the events of the previous day seem that they would have to be spoken of in a different language from the one she knew. What had happened to her must be like one of the secret visions of the young warriors, which they were forbidden to reveal to anyone.

Except the shaman. Could she speak of it to Kekata? No, for he was more set against the foreigners than anyone else in the village, and besides he was only concerned with men's magic, not women's.

Come on, she said to herself, you are giving yourself too much importance. Aren't you simply afraid? Afraid that you have done wrong and will be blamed for it? It humiliated her to feel that she was skulking with her secret like a child who fears a beating if he owns up. She had never behaved that way; she had learned very early that it made far more sense to get things over and done with than to try to avoid the inevitable.

She was afraid, she admitted, but of much more besides reasonable anger at her folly. She was afraid of the fact that, in reality, she feared the white men much less than the rest of the people did. She feared only him, and her feelings about him. That very fear seemed to have emptied the other strangers of power. They were only dingy, greedy counterfeits of men. What could they do to her? She knew the true, practical answer to that, and knew that not to be afraid was madness and treachery. It seemed to make her yet more helpless to serve her people. It seemed like the absence of an ordinary necessary feeling, as if a hand or a foot had gone to sleep.

And as for what she felt about John Smith himself: that was the very centre of her confusion. It was all very well to talk about secret visions of the spirit world; a good deal of what she felt was much simpler than that. She hungered to see him again because he was so beautiful. She wanted to own his rarity and fineness the way she had collected coloured shells and bright feathers when she was younger. She wanted to have him, and was afraid that she could never be complete and content in herself, alone, again. She did not know whether to be proud or ashamed of these feelings, but she was paralysed by them. What was certain was that she could not find an entrance by which to lead anyone else into the maze of her confusion - any more than she could find a way out of it herself.

So she shifted about at the edge of the crowd, wretched with indecision and full of disbelief that she, of all people, could not think what to do. She blamed herself bitterly. Time was slipping by; surely any action was better than none. Several times she tensed herself as if to set off at a run, only to let her shoulders droop again and to stare unseeingly around her.

'Pocahontas,' said a voice at her elbow. It was Nakoma, bright-eyed with concern. 'Your aunt told me you were over here,' said Nakoma artlessly. 'I've been looking for you. Do you know anything? When are we going back?'

Pocahontas stared at her with dull hostility, as a sick man might watch flies buzzing in his doorway. 'I don't know.'

'Hasn't the chief told you … oh. Is he angry with you? I'm sorry. It's bad, isn't it? My mother shouted at me, just because I went to watch Kocoum and the others trying their new spears over there. She wanted me to help her with the little ones, and then she told me to go away because I was only making them worse ... What's going to happen, Pocahontas?'

Pocahontas drew a deep breath, like a diver coming up to the shallows. The temptation to identify with a simple worry, without responsibility, was too much.

'I don't know,' she said again, but resignedly this time. 'We might as well go and help with the children. It's about all we can do.'