‘I thank you for my life,’ he said, speaking their language haltingly, mixing in English words when he was at a loss. ‘I will never forget this. I gladly take you to my wife and I gladly join the People.’

‘I take you,’ she stressed very slightly.

‘I am glad that you take me to your husband, and I am glad that the People admit me,’ John corrected himself.

There was a ripple of pleasure throughout the crowd and then everyone looked to the werowance, dark in his dark feathers, hunched like a heron in a pine tree, brooding over the couple. He raised his spear.

‘Eagle!’ he shouted.

There was a roar from the braves, and then the women and the children took it up. ‘Eagle!’ ‘Eagle!’ ‘Eagle!’

John felt his knees give way and he grabbed for Suckahanna as she swayed too. The women were at her side, the braves bore him up, Attone among them.

‘Eagle!’ Attone cheered, and with a swift sideways grin at John: ‘Eagle! who kills by diving on his deer and pisses himself at his own wedding.’

They got intoxicated that night. Dazed and riotous and then stupefied and giggly, then dancing and leaping and singing under a big yellow midsummer moon. They smoked the sacred tobacco until their heads rang with it and their very eardrums grew hot and itchy. They smoked until they saw dozens of moons cavorting in the sky and they danced on the dancing ground beneath them, following the lunar steps. They smoked until they were whimpering for cool water for their aching throats, and they ran down to the river and exclaimed at more moons, floating in the water, like stepping stones into the darkness. They smoked until they grew hungry like children and raided the stores for anything sweet and spicy and ate handfuls of dried blueberries and popped corn on the embers of the fire and burned their tongues in their hurry. They smoked in a great orgy to celebrate that the Eagle had passed the test and put his head on the block, and that a woman of the People had laid her head down beside him for love of him, and such a thing had never been seen since the time of Pocahontas, when Princess Pocahontas herself had laid her head down to save John Smith, though she had been little more than a girl and hardly understood the risk she took.