The door to the werowance’s hut was drawn back and the old man came out. He was terrifyingly dressed in a costume completely made of bird feathers, sewed so skilfully that John could see no seams and no cloth. He looked like a man transformed into a dark, glossy bird and he stalked on his long legs with the arrogant pace of an ill-tempered heron. Behind him came the two other elders, wearing black capes which gleamed with beads of jet. They chinked as they walked, they were laden with amulets and necklaces of copper and abalone shells.

At a gesture from the werowance’s richly carved spear two young men came awkwardly from his house, carrying something low and square between them. For a moment John thought they had brought a mounting block, a post, or a pedestal for the werowance to stand on and address the people, but then he saw that the centre of it was hollowed to take a man’s chin, and the wood on either side had been sharply cut with an axe. With a sensation of dull horror John recognised what it was. He had been on Tower Hill often enough, he knew an executioner’s block when he saw one.

‘No!’ he shouted and flinched back, but there were a dozen men around him. They did not even grab him, they pressed close to him and John was held in a solid wall of hard flesh. They interlocked arms, they held themselves tight, forcing themselves one against each other so John was helpless among them. Even if he had dropped dead in a faint of fear he would still have been standing, they had him so tight.

The werowance smiled his cruel, beak-nosed smile at John and his dark feathers quivered as if he were an English raven come all this way to peck out John’s eyes. John heard himself shout against the injustice of it. Why save him when he was burned and poisoned and starving to death to bring him here and behead him? But then he remembered the wisdom of Jamestown and knew that there was no reason to these people, nothing but mischief and meaningless cruelty, nothing but torture for sport and bloodshed for pleasure, and he started to think that a blow from an axe would be a mercy rather than a disembowelling, or a scalping, or being torn apart, or staked out on an anthill. The thought of these horrors made him cry out ‘Suckahanna!’ and he lunged so that he could see her, trapped as he was trapped, her face white and agonised, pleading desperately with the women around her, and forever looking towards him and calling ‘John!’