Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

The man behind shoved John abruptly in the back but did not utter a single sound. John touched Attone’s shoulder. “I cannot do it,” he said.

Attone turned and his glance was as cold as the blade of a knife on bare skin. “What?”

“I cannot do it. I cannot go in and kill my people.”

“Do you want me to kill you now?”

Dumbly John shook his head.

“The others will kill you if I do not.”

John leaned forward as if he would take Attone in his arms and lie his unhappy face against the man’s shoulder. “They must then. Because I cannot do it.”

“Will you wait here while we do it?”

John nodded.

“And not cry out, nor run off?”

John nodded again.

“My brother will stand guard,” Attone said simply to the others. “Follow me.”

The men trotted past John without a glance at him. He leaned back against a tree, a useless guard, a faithless friend, a broken warrior, and a shamed husband.

They were quick and clean. There was one surprised cry and no more, and in moments they came back, Attone wiping his shell-bladed knife on a piece of European muslin. “Go on,” he said briskly to the others.

They nodded and turned to the trail again. One man had something in his hand. Attone reached out and smacked it down. A stone bottle fell to the ground and rolled away. Attone kicked it with his foot so that it spun round and round, spilling out the raw spirit and making the air stink. Then he turned to John.

“Can you find your way back to Suckahanna at the village?”

“Yes.”

“Then go back there. Wait till the men return.”

“She won’t have me,” John said certainly.

“No,” Attone said. “We none of us will want you, Eagle.” He paused as a thought struck him. “What was your name? Before you were my brother the Eagle?”

“I was John Tradescant,” John said, the name unfamiliar on his tongue.

“Then you will have to be him again,” Attone said flatly. “Now go to Suckahanna before someone kills you.”

“I am sorry-” John started.

“Go to Suckahanna before I kill you myself,” Attone said abruptly, and disappeared into the darkness.

The village was guarded by Attone’s son, who recognized John’s footfall and called into the gray dawn: “Is that you, Eagle?”

“No,” John said. His voice was flat and weary. “You must call me John.”

“Is my father with you? Are the braves coming home?”

“They are at war,” John said. “I am alone.”

The boy checked his loving run forward into John’s arms and suddenly looked at him as if a terrible fear was invading him, as if his trust and certainty in John was suddenly unreliable. “You are not with the men?”

“I could not do it,” John said simply. He had thought that the worst thing would have been to tell Suckahanna; but the bright gaze of her son was hard to meet. The light went slowly out of the boy’s face.

“I don’t understand,” he said plaintively, willing it to be difficult, too complex for his understanding, tempting John to create another explanation.

“I could not kill an Englishman,” John said heavily. “I thought I could do it, but when it came to it, I could not. I left my home in England because I could not choose sides and kill Englishmen, and now I am here, in this new land, and I still cannot choose sides and kill.”

The boy’s eyes scanned his face. “I thought you were a brave,” he said reproachfully.

John shook his head. “No. It seems I cannot be.”

“But you are my father’s friend!”

“Not anymore.”

“And Suckahanna loves you!”

A movement behind him made him turn. Suckahanna was standing there, watching John. The man and the boy turned and faced her, waiting for her judgment.

“So you have decided at last,” she said calmly. “You are an Englishman after all.”

Slowly John dropped to his knees, both his knees, in the gesture he had only ever used before to the greatest queen in Europe, and then unwillingly. “I am,” he said. “I did not know it until the moment when I could not shed their blood. I am sorry, Suckahanna.”

She looked at him and through him, as if she understood everything about him, and for a moment John thought that he would be forgiven, and that the steady, constant love between them could overcome even this. But then she turned away and snapped her fingers for her boy and walked, light-footed, down the street in the dawn light. She did not look back at him. He knew she would never look at him with love again.

The braves came home jubilant. The first wave of the attack on the isolated houses along the riverside had gone perfectly. The attack on Jamestown had hit the sleeping town and taken it unawares. As many as five hundred colonists had been killed, but as soon as the alarm was given the Indian army had fallen back. Although the fort was taken unawares, the town was now so spread out, and the houses so defended with shutters and stout doors, that no single battle could complete the war. The braves had fallen back to regroup, to heal the wounds and bury the dead, and then they would push forward again.

Meanwhile in Jamestown the governor was mustering all the able-bodied men and hunting dogs to counterattack. He had promised the colonists a fight to the death, a solution once and for all.

“We have to move,” Attone said as soon as all the men had returned. “Deeper into the forest, perhaps across the river and into the wet creeks. Once the village is safely hidden we can come out again and fight.”

The women went to the houses at once to start packing. “And the crops in the fields?” Suckahanna asked him.

He made a gesture which told her that they were lost. “Perhaps later. Perhaps we can come back,” he said.

They exchanged a sharp, hard look. He took in the hardness of the lines around her mouth and John, hovering helplessly behind her.

“You are hurt,” she said.

“Just bruised. You?”

She turned away. “Just bruised.”

They traveled all day. Once, when they paused, they heard a hunting horn and the baying of a dog. It was the governor Sir William Berkeley’s hounds on the track, hunting Indians would be the colonists’ great sport this season.

They crossed the river at once, the children riding on the shoulders of the men, the women wading through chest-high, rapid-flowing water without a whisper of complaint, and crossed it again, then Attone led them on at a steady run.

John was in the rear, helping the old men and women keep up, carrying burdens for them. Suckahanna had told no one of what had passed between her and her husband, but she did not need to speak. Everyone could see that the Eagle was not at the side of his friend, not at the side of his wife. Everyone could see that he was a dead man to Attone, to Suckahanna, as surely as if he had gone into Jamestown and fought like a brave and died like a hero. So they let him carry their goods or hold them steady in the river as if he were a rock or a tree, or something of use. But they did not speak to him, nor smile at him, nor even look into his eyes.

All day they traveled as Attone led them closer to the sea, where the mosquitoes rose in clouds from the sodden grass and reeds and the trees bowed down low over dark, silty, salty water. At night they found some ground only a little higher than the tidewash. “Here,” Attone said. “Make shelters but no fires.”

An old woman died in the night, and they piled a heap of stones over her face.

“We move on,” Attone said.

All day they traveled at that punishing pace. An old man and an old woman stopped at the side of the trail and said they would go no further. Attone left them with a bow and arrow to do what damage they could to the pursuers, and with a tiny sliver of sharpened bark to open their veins rather than be captured. None of them stopped to say goodbye. The safety of the People was greater than the farewells of individuals. Attone wanted to get the People away.