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followed their captors in blind faith as if they trusted their God to take care of them, and Opechancanough wondered if the young ones understood more than he had thought possible.
    The children had earned his respect with their silence and fortitude, and he wondered what thoughts ran through their minds. Did they think they would be killed? If, as he suspected, they had lived at Ocanahonan, did they hold bitterness in their young hearts toward the Powhatan? If he untied the leather strips that held their hands, would he awaken in the night to find the older boy holding a knife to his heart?
    Opechancanough understood bitterness. As his feet methodically fell into the steps of the warrior ahead of him, he slowly submerged himself into memory. On a summer’s day years ago, as an unnamed youth, he had been forced to hide his fear and swallow the desperation of loneliness. At sixteen, not much older than the boy who traveled with him now, he had seen two winged ships enter the great bay called Chesapeake. Unafraid and ignorant of such ships, he, his father the chief, and several warriors paddled out in their canoes to board the largest vessel. The Spanish Admiral aboard welcomed them, and, much taken with the youth, asked permission to take him across the great ocean so that the King of Spain might see him. In return the Admiral promised Opechancanough’s father much wealth and many garments.
    The boy hid his fear as best he could when the ships sailed eastward, and by a tremendous effort he stopped the trembling of his knees when he was presented to Spain’s King Philip II as an Indian prince. The clothed men’s king, with pale skin, long, curling hair, and a drooping moustache, had been delighted with the boy in the same way the young Indian had been delighted when the children of his village presented him with a trained squirrel.
    The young prince was powerless in the land of the clothed men. New sights, sounds, and smells assaulted him. Men and women in this strange land adorned themselves with an excess of clothing and perfume. Jewels dripped from their necks, their heads, their hands, and they wore more garments in one day than any Indian wore in a year. But they carried the long sticks of thunder, and unending swords that gleamed with silver sharper than a snake’s fangs. The youth did not dare displeasure his hosts.
    He wanted to go home, but he was taken to Seville for instruction in both the Spanish language and religion. Under the stern Dominican friars he learned to speak the lilting tongue of the Spanish men. After five years, his teachers were not only reporting that the Indian possessed a powerful intellect, but that he was also “wily and crafty.”
    Indeed, he had absorbed his lessons and stored them away for future use. A chameleon among the clothed people, he aped their tongue and their manners while pondering how he could escape to his father’s kingdom across the great ocean. From the Dominican fathers and later from the Jesuits, he learned an important lesson: what could not be won by force might be achieved by diplomacy. Patients and long-range planning, he came to realize, were tools of great significance.
    And so, while in Spain, he made a profession of faith and, to all observers, became a devoted Christian. It was the only way to please the priests who labored over his mind and soul, and he reasoned it was the most likely way to win his release and effect his return back to the land the clothed men called America.
    When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés crossed to Mexico in 1563, the young prince was allowed to go with him. King Philip had decreed that the Indian be allowed to return to his people, but when Menéndez tried to fulfill the king’s order, the Archbishop of Mexico, an insecure and ambitious man who feared that the Indian might relapse into his former devil worship, refused to give his permission. Frustrated, Menéndez compromised, and left the prince with the Dominicans of New Spain, where