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his task of wrestling down one of the colonial women and shouted in their direction.
    “Bring them back,” Blandine understood the raider to say.
    Zigzag turned and called in reply, “We have them.”
    Suddenly Yellow Boy ran at Blandine in an abrupt, sudden charge, but fell to his knees and skidded to a stop a few feet away, laughing at her fright.
    Zigzag dashed forward to slug Lace with a vicious punch, knocking her down. While Blandine pulled the woman back to her feet, the Mahican stood dancing in place, inches away, shouting threateningly into her face. But, abruptly, Zigzag turned his back on them and strode away.
    The effect, Blandine knew, was designed for maximum fear.
    In a staggering march, trailed by the two warriors, the three women left the scene of the berry-harvest attack behind. The shouts of the raiders and cries of settlers faded. Behind them, Zigzag and Yellow Boy continued their negligent pursuit. They would stop, plucking a leaf or berry, calling out to a hawk circling in the sky above them.
    And then, suddenly, nothing. Blandine led Lace and Mally down a steep incline and turned them into a sheltered glade. They no longer could see their two pursuers. Silence. Even the faint whooping from the distant berry patch died out.
    “Is it over?” Lace said, her voice half-strangled with fear.
    “Keep going,” Blandine said. Her heart raced. She did not dare to think they had escaped so easily. But it seemed true.
    A keening scream. Zigzag and Yellow Boy stood on the crest of the slope above them. In a combative display, the Mahicans battered each other, slapping and pummeling their chests like two boys in a school yard.
    As the raiders advanced downward, their nonchalance vanished. Zigzag freed his stiffened member from behind its cloth, waving it at them arrogantly.
    “Lord Jesus save me,” Lace whispered. Her hand gripped Blandine’s, nails abrading the skin.
    “Now we run,” Blandine said.
    The three women fled down the slope to the shore of the river. Blandine led them to the reed bed where the native dugouts were beached.
    Mally leapt into the first canoe. Lace climbed into the unsteady craft with her.
    “Come on!” Mally shouted to Blandine.
    But, for a long breathless moment, Blandine stayed on shore, working to push the other canoes out of the shallows, casting them off into the river current. If their pursuers wanted them, they would have to swim.
    Finally, she dove for the little boat.
    Together the three women paddled the craft out into the current, working furiously. The raiders arrived at the shore and splashed into the water behind them. They lunged forward, swimming to within a few yards of the women in the dugout.
    But they came up short. Blandine, Mally and Lace moved into deeper water, outdistancing the Mahicans.
    When the three women arrived wet, bedraggled and still fear-stricken at the settlement, and once the Dutch director general sent a well-armedwar party of his own to retaliate against the raiders, Blandine felt herself drawn into the lives of Mally and Lace and the community of Little Angola.
    None of the others in the berrying party survived.
    In the aftermath of the raid, Blandine noted with scorn some of her erstwhile suitors shying away from her as soiled goods. The men of the colony were never sure what exactly happened in the berry patch on the river.
    Only the first love of her life, Kees Bayard, stayed true. “You are my brave girl,” Kees said to her, solicitous in the wake of the tragedy. He defended her stoutly. He volunteered for the company that pursued the fleeing raiders.
    Deep inside, though, Blandine felt that no one understood the terror she experienced that day. Only Lace and Mally. It was as though, when your house burns down, you want to talk only to other people who have had their houses burn down. Her later friendship with Antony only cemented her connection with the Africans.
    So it was natural, when one of their own disappeared that fall four