Wild Seed

“Thank you for these things,” she said softly in English.

“They make you even more beautiful,” he told her.

“I am like a prisoner. All bound.”

“You’ll get used to it. Now you can be a real lady.”

Anyanwu turned that over in her mind. “Real lady?” she said, frowning. “What was I before?”

Isaac’s face went red. “I mean you look like a New York lady.”

His embarrassment told her that he had said something wrong, something insulting. She had thought she was misunderstanding his English. Now she realized she had understood all too well.

“Tell me what I was before, Isaac,” she insisted. “And tell me the word you used before: Civilization. What is civilization?”

He sighed, met her eyes after a moment of gazing past her at the main mast. “Before, you were Anyanwu,” he said, “mother of I-don’t-know-how-many children, priestess to your people, respected and valued woman of your town. But to the people here, you would be a savage, almost an animal if they saw you wearing only your cloth. Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.” He smiled tentatively. “You’re already a chameleon, Anyanwu. You understand what I’m saying.”

“Yes.” She did not return his smile. “But in a land where most of the people are white, and of the few blacks, most are slaves, can only a few pieces of cloth make me a ‘real lady.’ ”

“In Wheatley I can!” he said quickly. “I’m white and black and Indian, and I live there without trouble.”

“But you look like a ‘real man.’ ”

He winced. “I’m not like you,” he said. “I can’t help the way I look.”

“No,” she admitted.

“And it doesn’t matter anyway. Wheatley is Doro’s ‘American’ village. He dumps all the people he can’t find places for in his pure families on us. Mix and stir. No one can afford to worry about what anyone else looks like. They don’t know who Doro might mate them with—or what their own children might look like.”

Anyanwu allowed herself to be diverted. “Do people even marry as he says?” she asked. “Does no one resist him?”

Isaac gave her a long, solemn look. “Wild seed resists sometimes,” he said softly. “But he always wins. Always.”

She said nothing. She did not need to be reminded of how dangerous and how demanding Doro could be. Reminders awakened her fear of him, her fear of a future with him. Reminders made her want to forget the welfare of her children whose freedom she had bought with her servitude. Forget and run!

“People run away sometimes,” Isaac said, as though reading her thoughts. “But he always catches them and usually wears their bodies back to their home towns so that their people can see and be warned. The only sure way to escape him and cheat him out of the satisfaction of wearing your body, I guess, is my mother’s way.” He paused. “She hanged herself.”

Anyanwu stared at him. He had said the words with no particular feeling—as though he cared no more for his mother than he had for his brother Lale. And he had told her he could not remember a time when he and Lale had not hated each other.

“Your mother died because of Doro?” she asked, watching him carefully.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I was only four. But I don’t think so. She was like Lale—able to send and receive thoughts. But she was better at it than he was, especially better at receiving. From Wheatley, sometimes she could hear people in New York City over a hundred and fifty miles away.” He glanced at Anyanwu. “A long way. A damned long way for that kind of thing. She could hear anything. But sometimes she couldn’t shut things out. I remember I was afraid of her. She used to crouch in a corner and hold her head or scratch her face bloody and scream and scream and scream.” He shuddered. “That’s all I remember of her. That’s the only image that comes when I think of her.”

Anyanwu laid a hand on his arm in sympathy for both mother and son. How could he have come from such a family and remained sane himself, she wondered. What was Doro doing to his people, to his own children, in his attempt to make them more as the children of his own lost body might have been. For each one like Isaac, how many were there like Lale and his mother?

“Isaac, has there been nothing good in your life?” she asked softly.

He blinked. “There’s been a lot. Doro, the foster parents he found me when I was little, the travel, this.” He rose several inches above the deck. “It’s been good. I used to worry that I’d be crazy like my mother or mad-dog vicious like Lale, but Doro always said I wouldn’t.”

“How could he know?”

“He used a different body to father me. He wanted a different ability in me, and sometimes he knows exactly which families to breed together to get what he wants. I’m glad he knew for me.”

She nodded. “I would not want to know you if you were like Lale.”

He looked down at her in that intense disturbing way he had developed over the voyage, and she took her hand away from his arm. No son should look at his father’s wife that way. How stupid of Doro not to find a good girl for him. He should marry and begin fathering yellow-haired sons. He should be working his own farm. What good was sailing back and forth across the sea, taking slaves, and becoming wealthy when he had no children?

In spite of slight faltering winds, the trip upriver to Wheatley took only five days. The Dutch sloop captains and their Dutch-speaking, black-slave crews peered at the sagging sails, then at each other, clearly frightened. Doro complimented them in pretended ignorance on the fine time they were making. Then in English, he warned Isaac, “Don’t frighten them too badly, boy. Home isn’t that far away.”

Isaac grinned at him and continued to propel the stoops along at exactly the same speed.

Cliffs, hills, mountains, farmland and forests, creeks and landings, other sloops and smaller craft, fishermen, Indians … Doro and Isaac, having little to do as passengers on other men’s vessels, entertained Anyanwu by identifying and pronouncing in English whatever caught her interest. She had an excellent memory, and by the time they reached Wheatley, she was even exchanging a few words with the Afro-Dutch crew. She was beautiful and they taught her eagerly until Doro or Isaac or their duties took her from them.

Finally, they reached “Gilpin” as the captains and crews called the village of Wheatley. Gilpin was the name given to the settlement sixty years before by its first European settlers, a small group of families led by Pieter Willem Gilpin. But the English settlers whom Doro had begun bringing in well before the 1664 British takeover had renamed the village Wheatley, wheat being its main crop, and Wheatley being the name of the English family whose leadership Doro had supported. The Wheatleys had been Doro’s people for generations. They had vague, not-too-troublesome, mind-reading abilities that complemented their good business sense. With a little help from Doro, old Jonathan Wheatley now owned slightly less land than the Van Rensselaers. Doro’s people had room to spread and grow. Without the grassland village, they would not grow as quickly as Doro had hoped, but there would be others, odd ones, witches. Dutch, German, English, various African and Indian peoples. All were either good breeding stock or, like the Wheatleys, served other useful purposes. In all its diversity, Wheatley pleased Doro more than any of his other New World settlements. In America, Wheatley was his home.

Now, welcomed with quiet pleasure by his people, he dispersed the new slaves to several separate households. Some were fortunate enough to go to houses where their native languages were spoken. Others had no fellow tribesmen in or around the village and they had to be content with a more alien household. Relatives were kept together. Doro explained to each individual or group exactly what was happening. All knew they would be able to see each other again. Friendships begun during the voyage did not have to end now. They were apprehensive, uncertain, reluctant to leave what had become a surprisingly tight-knit group, but they obeyed Doro. Lale had chosen them well—had hand-picked every one of them, searching out small strangenesses, buddings, beginnings of talents like his own. He had gone through every group of new slaves brought out of the forest to Bernard Daly while Doro was away—gone through picking and choosing and doubtless terrifying people more than was necessary. No doubt he had missed several who could have been useful. Lale’s ability had been limited and his erratic temperament had often gotten in his way. But he had not included anyone who did not deserve to be included. Only Doro himself could have done a better job. And now, until some of his other potentially strong young thought readers matured, Doro would have to do the job himself. He did not seek people out as Lale did, deliberately, painstakingly. He found them almost as effortlessly as he had found Anyanwu—though not from as great a distance. He became aware of them as easily as a wolf became aware of a rabbit when the wind was right—and in the beginning he had gone after them for exactly the same reason wolves went after rabbits. In the beginning, he had bred them for exactly the same reason people bred rabbits. These strange ones, his witches, were good kills. They offered him the most satisfying durable food and shelter. He still preyed on them. Soon he would take one from Wheatley. The people of Wheatley expected it, accepted it, treated it as a kind of religious sacrifice. All his towns and villages fed him willingly now. And the breeding projects he carried on among them entertained him as nothing else could. He had brought them so far—from tiny, blind, latent talents to Lale, to Isaac, and even, in a roundabout way, to Anyanwu. He was building a people for himself, and he was feeding well. If he was sometimes lonely as his people lived out their brief lives, he was at least not bored. Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

There was a large, low yellow-brick farmhouse at the edge of town for Doro—an ex-Dutch farmhouse that was more comfortable than handsome. Jonathan Wheatley’s manor house was much finer, as was his mansion in New York City, but Doro was content with his farmhouse. In a good year, he might visit it twice.

An English couple lived in Doro’s house, caring for it and serving Doro when he was at home. They were a farmer, Robert Cutler, and his wife, youngest of the nine Wheatley daughters, Sarah. These were sturdy, resilient people who had raised Isaac through his worst years. The boy had been difficult and dangerous during his adolescent years as his abilities matured. Doro had been surprised that the couple survived. Lale’s foster parents had not—but then, Lale had been actively malevolent. Isaac had done harm only by accident. Also, neither of Lale’s foster parents had been Wheatleys. Sarah’s work with Isaac had proved again the worth of her kind—people with too little ability to be good breeding stock or food. It occurred to Doro that if his breeding projects were successful, there might come a time—in the far future—when he had to make certain such people continued to exist. Able people, but not so powerful that their ability might turn on them and cripple or kill them.

For now, though, it was his witches who had to be protected—even protected from him. Anyanwu, for instance. He would tell her tonight that she was to marry Isaac. In telling her, he would have to treat her not as ordinary recalcitrant wild seed, but as one of his daughters—difficult, but worth taking time with. Worth molding and coercing with more gentleness and patience than he would bother to use on less valuable people. He would talk to her after one of Sarah’s good meals when they were alone in his room, warm and comfortable before a fire. He would do all he could to make her obey and live.

He thought about her, worried about her stubbornness as he walked toward home where she waited. He had just placed Okoye and Udenkwo in a home with a middle-aged pair of their countrymen—people from whom the young couple could learn a great deal. He walked slowly, answering the greetings of people who recognized his current body and worrying about the pride of one small forest peasant. People sat outside, men and women, Dutch fashion, gossiping on the stoops. The women’s hands were busy with sewing or knitting while the men smoked pipes. Isaac got up from a bench where he had been sitting with an older woman and fell into step with Doro.

“Anneke is near her transition,” the boy said worriedly. Mrs. Waemans says she’s been having a lot of trouble.”

“That’s to be expected,” Doro answered. Anneke Strycker was one of his daughters—a potentially good daughter. With luck, she would replace Lale when her transition was complete and her abilities mature. She lived now with her foster mother, Margaret Waemans, a big, physically powerful, mentally stable widow of fifty. No doubt, the woman needed all her resources to handle the young girl now.

Isaac cleared his throat. “Mrs. Waemans is afraid she’ll … do something to herself. She’s been talking about dying.”

Doro nodded. Power came the way a child came—with agony. People in transition were open to every thought, every emotion, every pleasure, every pain from the minds of others. Their heads were filled with a continuous screaming jumble of mental “noise.” There was no peace, little sleep, many nightmares—everyone’s nightmares. Some of Doro’s best people—too many of them—stopped at this stage. They could pass their potential on to their children if they lived long enough to have any, but they could not benefit from it themselves. They could never control it. They became hosts for Doro, or they became breeders. Doro brought them mates from distant unrelated settlements because that kind of crossbreeding most often produced children like Lale. Only great care and fantastic good luck produced a child like Isaac. Doro glanced at the boy fondly. “I’ll see Anneke first thing tomorrow,” he told him.

“Good,” Isaac said with relief. “That will help. Mrs. Waemans says she calls for you sometimes when the nightmares come.” He hesitated. “How bad will it get for her?”

“As bad as it was for you and for Lale.”

“My God!” Isaac said. “She’s only a girl. She’ll die.”

“She has as much of a chance as you and Lale did.”

Isaac glared at Doro in sudden anger. “You don’t care what happens to her, do you? If she does die, there will always be someone else.”

Doro turned to look at him, and after a moment, Isaac looked away.

“Be a child out here if you like,” Doro told him. “But act your age when we go in. I’m going to settle things between you and Anyanwu tonight.”

“Settle … you’re finally going to give her to me?”

“Think of it another way. I want you to marry her.”

The boy’s eyes widened. He stopped walking, leaned against a tall maple tree. “You … you’ve made up your mind, I suppose. I mean … you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“Of course.” Doro stopped beside him.

“Have you told her?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell her after dinner.”

“Doro, she’s wild seed. She might refuse.”

“I know.”

“You might not be able to change her mind.”

Doro shrugged. Worried as he was, it did not occur to him to share his concern with Isaac. Anyanwu would obey him or she wouldn’t. He longed to be able to control her with some refinement of Lale’s power, but he could not—nor could Isaac.

“If you can’t reach her,” Isaac said, “if she just won’t understand, let me try. Before you … do anything else, let me try.”

“All right.”

“And … don’t make her hate me.”

“I don’t think I could. She might come to hate me for a while, but not you.”

“Don’t hurt her.”

“Not if I can help it.” Doro smiled a little, pleased by the boy’s concern. “You like the idea,” he observed. “You want to marry her.”

“Yes. But I never thought you’d let me.”

“She’ll be happier with a husband who does more than visit her once or twice a year.”

“You’re going to leave me here to be a farmer?”

“Farm if you want to—or open a store or go back to smithing. No one could handle that better than you. Do whatever you like, but I am going to leave you here, at least for a while. She’ll need someone to help her fit in here when I’m gone.”

“God,” Isaac said. “Married.” He shook his head, then began to smile.

“Come on.” Doro started toward the house.

“No.”

Doro looked back at him.

“I can’t see her until you tell her … now that I know. I can’t. I’ll eat with Anneke. She could use the company anyway.”

“Sarah won’t think much of that.”

“I know.” Isaac glanced homeward guiltily. “Apologize for me will you?”

Doro nodded, turned, and went in to Sarah Cutler’s linen-clothed, heavily laden table.

Anyanwu watched carefully as the white woman placed first a clean cloth, then dishes and utensils on the long, narrow table at which the household was to eat. Anyanwu was glad that some of the food and the white people’s ways of eating it were familiar to her from the ship. She could sit down and have a meal without seeming utterly ignorant. She could not have cooked the meal, but that would come, too, in time. She would learn. For now, she merely observed and allowed the interesting smells to intensify her hunger. Hunger was familiar and good. It kept her from staring too much at the white woman, kept her from concentrating on her own nervousness and uncertainty in the new surroundings, kept her attention on the soup, thick with meat and vegetables, and the roast deer flesh—venison, the white woman had called it—and a huge fowl—a turkey. Anyanwu repeated the words to herself, reassured that they had become part of her vocabulary. New words, new ways, new foods, new clothing … She was glad of the cumbersome clothing, though, finally. It made her look more like the other women, black and white, whom she had seen in the village, and that was important. She had lived in enough different towns through her various marriages to know the necessity of learning to behave as others did. What was common in one place could be ridiculous in another and abomination in a third. Ignorance could be costly.

“How shall I call you?” she asked the white woman. Doro had said the woman’s name once, very quickly, in introduction, then hurried off on business of his own. Anyanwu remembered the name—Sarahcutler—but was not certain she could say it correctly without hearing it again.

“Sarah Cutler,” the woman said very distinctly. “Mrs. Cutler.”

Anyanwu frowned, confused. Which was right? “Mrs. Cutler?”

“Yes. You say it well.”

“I am trying to learn.” Anyanwu shrugged. “I must learn.”

“How do you say your name?”

“Anyanwu.” She said it very slowly, but still the woman asked:

“Is that all one name?”

“Only one. I have had others, but Anyanwu is best. I come back to it.”

“Are the others shorter?”

“Mbgafo. That is the name my mother gave me. And once I was called Atagbusi, and honored by that name. And I have been called—”

“Never mind.” The woman sighed, and Anyanwu smiled to herself. She had had to give five of her former names to Isaac before he shrugged and decided Anyanwu was a good name after all.

“Can I help to do these things?” she asked. Sarah Cutler was beginning to put food on the table now.

“No,” the woman said. “Just watch now. You’ll be doing this soon enough.” She glanced at Anyanwu curiously. She did not stare, but allowed herself these quick curious glances. Anyanwu thought they each probably had an equal number of questions about the other.

Sarah Cutler asked: “Why did Doro call you ‘Sun Woman’?”

Doro had taken to doing that affectionately when he spoke to her in English, though, though Isaac complained that it made her sound like an Indian.

“Your word for my name is ‘Sun,’ ” she answered. “Doro said he would find an English name for me, but I did not want one. Now he makes English of my name.”

The white woman shook her head and laughed. “You’re more fortunate than you know. With him taking such an interest in you, I’m surprised you’re not already Jane or Alice or some such.”

Anyanwu shrugged. “He has not changed his own name. Why should he change mine?”

The woman gave her what seemed to be a look of pity.

“What is Cutler?” Anyanwu asked.

“What it means?”

“Yes.”

“A cutler is a knifemaker. I suppose my husband had ancestors who were knifemakers. Here, taste this.” She gave Anyanwu a bit of something sweet and oily, fruit-filled, and delicious.

“It is very good!” Anyanwu said. The sweet was unlike anything she had tasted before. She did not know what to say about it except the words of courtesy Doro had taught her. “Thank you. What is this called?”

The woman smiled, pleased. “It’s a kind of cake I haven’t made before—special for Isaac and Doro’s homecoming.”

“You said…” Anyanwu thought for a moment. “You said your husband’s people were knifemakers. Cutler is his name?”

“Yes. Here, a woman takes the name of her husband after marriage. I was Sarah Wheatley before I married.”

“Then Sarah is the name you keep for yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I call you Sarah—your own name?”

The woman glanced at her sidelong. “Shall I call you … Mbgafo?” She mispronounced it horribly.

“If you like. But there are very many Mbgafos. That name only tells the day of my birth.”

“Like … Monday or Tuesday?”

“Yes. You have seven. We have only four: Eke, Oye, Afo, Nkwo. People are often named for the day they were born.”

“Your country must be overflowing with people of the same name.”

Anyanwu nodded. “But many have other names as well.”

“I suppose Anyanwu really is better.”

“Yes.” Anyanwu smiled. “Sarah is good too. A woman should have something of her own.”

Doro came in then, and Anyanwu noted how the woman brightened. She had not been sad or grim before, but now, years seemed to drop from her. She only smiled at him and said dinner was ready, but there was a warmth in her voice that had not been there before in spite of all her friendliness. At some time, this woman had been wife or lover to Doro. Probably lover. There was still much fondness between them, though the woman was no longer young. Where was her husband, Anyanwu wondered. How was it that a woman here could cook for a man neither her kinsman nor in-law while her husband probably sat with others in front of one of the houses and blew smoke out of his mouth?

Then the husband came in, bringing two grown sons and a daughter, along with the very young, shy wife of one of the sons. The girl was slender and olive-skinned, black-haired and dark-eyed, and even to Anyanwu’s eyes, very beautiful. When Doro spoke to her courteously, her answer was a mere moving of the lips. She would not look at him at all except once when his back was turned. But the look she gave him then spoke as loudly as had Sarah Cutler’s sudden brightening. Anyanwu blinked and began to wonder what kind of man she had. The women aboard the ship had not found Doro so desirable. They had been terrified of him. But these women of his people … Was he like a cock among them, going from one hen to another? They were not, after all, his kinsmen or his friends. They were people who had pledged loyalty to him or people he had bought as slaves. In a sense, they were more his property than his people. The men laughed and talked with him, but none presumed as much as Isaac had. All were respectful. And if their wives or sisters or daughters looked at Doro, they did not notice. Anyanwu strongly suspected that if Doro looked back, if he did more than look, they would make an effort not to notice that either. Or perhaps they would be honored. Who knew what strange ways they practiced?

But now, Doro gave his attention to Anyanwu. She was shy in this company—men and women together eating strange food and talking in a language she felt she spoke poorly and understood imperfectly. Doro kept making her talk, speaking to her of trivial things.

“Do you miss the yams? There are none quite like yours here.”

“It does not matter.” Her voice was like the young girl’s—no more than a moving of the lips. She felt ashamed to speak before all these strangers—yet she had always spoken before strangers, and spoken well. One had to speak well and firmly when people came for medicine and healing. What faith could they have in someone who whispered or bowed her head?

Determinedly, she raised her head and ceased concentrating so intently on her soup. She did miss the yams. Even the strange soup made her long for an accompanying mound of pounded yam. But that did not matter. She looked around, meeting the eyes first of Sarah Cutler, then of one of Sarah’s sons and finding only friendliness and curiosity in both. The young man, thin and brown-haired, seemed to be about Isaac’s age. Thought of Isaac made Anyanwu look around.

“Where is Isaac?” she asked Doro. “You said this was his home.”

“He’s with a friend,” Doro told her. “He’ll be in later.”

“He’d better!” Sarah said. “His first night back and he can’t come home to supper.”

“He had reason,” Doro told her. And she said nothing more.

But Anyanwu found other things to say. And she no longer whispered. She paid some attention to spooning up the soup as the others did and to eating the other meats and breads and sweets correctly with her fingers. People here ate more carefully than had the men aboard the ship; thus, she ate more carefully. She spoke to the shy young girl and discovered that the girl was an Indian—a Mohawk. Doro had matched her with Blake Cutler because both had just a little of the sensitivity Doro valued. Both seemed pleased with the match. Anyanwu thought she would have been happier with her own match with Doro had her people been nearby. It would be good for the children of their marriage to know her world as well as Doro’s—be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery. She resolved to make her homeland live for them whether Doro permitted her to show it to them or not. She resolved not to let them forget who they were.

Then she found herself wondering whether the Mohawk girl would have preferred to forget who she was as the conversation turned to talk of war with Indians. The white people at the table were eager to tell Doro how, earlier in the year, “Praying Indians” and a group of whites called French had stolen through the gates of a town west of Wheatley—a town with the unpronounceable name of Schenectady—and butchered some of the people there and carried off others. There was much discussion of this, much fear expressed until Doro promised to leave Isaac in the village, and leave one of his daughters, Anneke, who would soon be very powerful. This seemed to calm everyone somewhat. Anyanwu felt that she had only half understood the dispute between so many foreign people, but she did ask whether Wheatley had ever been attacked.

Doro smiled unpleasantly. “Twice by Indians,” he said. “I happened to be here both times. We’ve had peace since that second attack thirty years ago.”

“That’s time enough for them to forget anything,” Sarah said. “Anyway, this is a new war. French and Praying Indians!” She shook her head in disgust.

“Papists!” her husband muttered. “Bastards!”

“My people could tell them what powerful spirits live here,” whispered the Mohawk girl, smiling.

Doro looked at her as though not certain whether she were serious, but she ducked her head.

Anyanwu touched Doro’s hand. “You see?” she said. “I told you you were a spirit!”

Everyone laughed, and Anyanwu felt more comfortable among them. She would find out another time exactly what Papists and Praying Indians were and what their quarrel was with the English. She had had enough new things for one day. She relaxed and enjoyed her meal.

She enjoyed it too much. After much eating and drinking, after everyone had gathered around the tall, blue-tiled parlor hearth for talking and smoking and knitting, she began to feel pain in her stomach. By the time the gathering broke up, she was controlling herself very closely lest she vomit up all the food she had eaten and humiliate herself before all these people. When Doro showed her her room with its fireplace and its deep soft down mattresses covering a great bed, she undressed and lay down at once. There she discovered that her body had reacted badly to one specific food—a rich sweet that she knew no name for, but that she had loved. This on top of the huge amount of meat she had eaten had finally been too much for her stomach. Now, though, she controlled her digestion, soothed the sickness from her body. The food did not have to be brought up. Only gotten used to. She analyzed slowly, so intent on her inner awareness that she appeared to be asleep. If someone had spoken to her, she would not have heard. Her eyes were closed. This was why she had waited, had not healed herself downstairs in the presence of others. Here, though, it did not matter what she did. Only Doro was present—across the large room sitting at a great wooden desk much finer than the one he had had on the ship. He was writing, and she knew from experience that he would be making marks unlike those in any of his books. “It’s a very old language,” he had told her once. “So old that no one living can read it.”

“No one but you,” she had said.

And he had nodded and smiled. “The people I learned it from stole me away into slavery when I was only a boy. Now they’re all dead. Their descendants have forgotten the old wisdom, the old writing, the old gods. Only I remember.”

She had not known whether she heard bitterness or satisfaction in his voice then. He was very strange when he talked about his youth. He made Anyanwu want to touch him and tell him that he was not alone in outliving so many things. But he also roused her fear of him, reminded her of his deadly difference. Thus, she said nothing.

Now, as she lay still, analyzing, learning not only which food had made her ill, but which ingredient in that food, she was comfortably aware of Doro nearby. If he had left the room in complete silence, she would have known, would have missed him. The room would have become colder.

It was milk that had sickened her. Animal milk! These people cooked many things with animal milk! She covered her mouth with her hand. Did Doro know? But of course he did. How could he not? These were his people!

Again it required all her control to prevent herself from vomiting—this time from sheer revulsion.

“Anyanwu?”

She realized that Doro was standing over her between the long cloths that could be closed to conceal the bed. And she realized that this was not the first time he had said her name. Still, it surprised her that she had heard him without his shouting or touching her. He had only spoken quietly.

She opened her eyes, looked up at him. He was beautiful standing there with the light of candles behind him. He had stripped to the cloth he still wore sometimes when they were alone together. But she noticed this with only part of her mind. Her main thoughts were still of the loathsome thing she had been tricked into doing—the consumption of animal milk.

“Why didn’t you tell me!” she demanded.

“What?” He frowned, confused. “Tell you what?”

“That these people were feeding me animal milk!”

He burst into laughter.

She drew back as though he had hit her. “Is it a joke then? Are the others laughing too now that I cannot hear?”

“Anyanwu …” He managed to stop his laughter. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I was thinking of something else or I wouldn’t have laughed. But, Anyanwu, we all ate the same food.”

“But why was some of it cooked with—”

“Listen. I know the custom among your people not to drink animal milk. I should have warned you—would have, if I had been thinking. No one else who ate with us knew the milk would offend you. I assure you, they’re not laughing.”

She hesitated. He was sincere; she was certain of that. It was a mistake then. But still … “These people cook with animal milk all the time?”

“All the time,” Doro said. “And they drink milk. It’s their custom. They keep some cattle especially for milking.”

“Abomination!” Anyanwu said with disgust.

“Not to them,” Doro told her. “And you will not insult them by telling them they are committing abomination.”

She looked at him. He did not seem to give many orders, but she had no doubt that this was one. She said nothing.

“You can become an animal whenever you wish,” he said. “You know there’s nothing evil about animal milk.”

“It is for animals!” she said. “I am not an animal now! I did not just eat a meal with animals!”

He sighed. “You know you must change to suit the customs here. You have not lived three hundred years without learning to accept new customs.”

“I will not have any more milk!”

“You need not. But let others have theirs in peace.”

She turned away from him. She had never in her long life lived among people who violated this prohibition.

“Anyanwu!”

“I will obey,” she muttered, then faced him defiantly. “When will I have my own house? My own cooking fire?”

“When you’ve learned what to do with them. What kind of meal could you cook now with foods you’ve never seen before? Sarah Cutler will teach you what you need to know. Tell her milk makes you sick and she’ll leave it out of what she teaches you.” His voice softened a little, and he sat down beside her on the bed. “It did make you sick, didn’t it?”

“It did. Even my flesh knows abomination.”

“It didn’t make anyone else sick.”

She only glared at him.

He reached under the blanket, rubbed her stomach gently. Her body was almost buried in the too-soft feather mattress. “Have you healed yourself?” he asked.

“Yes. But with so much food, it took me a long time to learn what was making me sick.”

“Do you have to know?”

“Of course. How can I know what to do for healing until I know what healing is needed and why? I think I knew all the diseases and poisons of my people. I must learn the ones here.”

“Does it hurt you—the learning?”

“Oh yes. But only at first. Once I learn, it does not hurt again.” Her voice became bantering. “No, give me your hand again. You can touch me even though I am well.”

He smiled and there was no more tension between them. His touches became more intimate.

“That is good,” she whispered. “I healed myself just in time. Now lie down here and show me why all those women were looking at you.”

He laughed quietly, untied his cloth, and joined her in the too-soft bed.

“We must talk tonight,” he said later when both were satiated and lying side by side.

“Do you still have strength for talking, husband?” she said drowsily. “I thought you would go to sleep and not awaken until sunrise.”

“No.” There was no humor in his voice now. She had laid her head on his shoulder because he had shown her in the past that he wanted her near him, touching him until he fell asleep. Now, though, she lifted her head and looked at him.

“You’ve come to your new home, Anyanwu.”

“I know that.” She did not like the flat strangeness of his tone. This was the voice he used to frighten people—the voice that reminded her to think of him as something other than a man.

“You are home, but I will be leaving again in a few weeks.”

“But—”

“I will be leaving. I have other people who need me to rid them of enemies or who need to see me to know they still belong to me. I have a fragmented people to hunt and reassemble. I have women in three different towns who could bear powerful children if I give them the right mates. And more. Much more.”

She sighed and burrowed deeper into the mattress. He was going to leave her here among strangers. He had made up his mind. “When you come back,” she said resignedly, “there will be a son for you here.”

“Are you pregnant now?”

“I can be now. Your seed still lives inside me.”

“No!”

She jumped, startled at his vehemence.

“This is not the body I want to beget your first children here,” he said.

She made herself shrug, speak casually. “All right. I’ll wait until you have … become another man.”

“You need not. I have another plan for you.”

The hairs at the back of her neck began to prickle and itch. “What plan?”

“I want you to marry,” he said. “You’ll do it in the way of the people here with a license and a wedding.”

“It makes no difference. I will follow your custom.”

“Yes. But not with me.”

She stared at him, speechless. He lay on his back staring at one of the great beams that held up the ceiling.

“You’ll marry Isaac,” he said. “I want children from the two of you. And I want you to have a husband who does more than visit you now and then. Living here, you could go for a year, two years, without seeing me. I don’t want you to be that alone.”

“Isaac?” she whispered. “Your son?”

“My son. He’s a good man. He wants you, and I want you with him.”

“He’s a boy! He’s …”

“What man is not a boy to you, except me? Isaac is more a man than you think.”

“But … he’s your son! How can I have the son when his father, my husband, still lives? That is abomination!”

“Not if I command it.”

“You cannot! It is abomination!”

“You have left your village, Anyanwu, and your town and your land and your people. You are here where I rule. Here, there is only one abomination: disobedience. You will obey.”

“I will not! Wrong is wrong! Some things change from place to place, but not this. If your people wish to debase themselves by drinking the milk of animals, I will turn my head. Their shame is their own. But now you want me to shame myself, make myself even worse than they. How can you ask it of me, Doro? The land itself will be offended! Your crops will wither and die!”

He made a sound of disgust. “That’s foolishness! I thought I had found a woman too wise to believe such nonsense.”

“You have found a woman who will not soil herself! How is it here? Do sons lie with their mothers also? Do sisters and brothers lie down together?”

“Woman, if I command it, they lie down together gladly.”

Anyanwu moved away from him so that no part of her body touched his. He had spoken of this before. Of incest, of mating her own children together with doglike disregard for kinship. And in revulsion, she had led him quickly from her land. She had saved her children, but now … who would save her?

“I want children of your body and his,” Doro repeated. He stopped, raised himself to his elbow so that he leaned over her. “Sun woman, would I tell you to do something that would hurt my people? The land is different here.It is my land ! Most of the people here exist because I caused their ancestors to marry in ways your people would not accept. Yet everyone lives well here. No angry god punishes them. Their crops grow and their harvests are rich every year.”

“And some of them hear so much of the thoughts of others that they cannot think their own thoughts. Some of them hang themselves.”

“Some of your own people hang themselves.”

“Not for such terrible reasons.”

“Nevertheless, they die. Anyanwu, obey me. Life can be very good for you here. And you will not find a better husband than my son.”

She closed her eyes, dismissed his pleading as she had his commands. She strove to dismiss her budding fear also, but she could not. She knew that when both commanding and pleading failed, he would begin to threaten.

Within her body, she killed his seed. She disconnected the two small tubes through which her own seed traveled to her womb. She had done this many times when she thought she had given a man enough children. Now she did it to avoid giving any children at all, to avoid being used. When it was done, she sat up and looked down at him. “You have been telling me lies from the day we met,” she said softly.

He shook his head against the pillow. “I have not lied to you.”

“ ‘Let me give you children who will live,’ you said. ‘I promise that if you come with me, I will give you children of your own kind,’ you said. And now, you send me away to another man. You give me nothing at all.”

“You will bear my children as well as Isaac’s.”

She cried out as though with pain, and climbed out of his bed. “Get me another room!” she hissed. “I will not lie there with you. I would rather sleep on the bare floor. I would rather sleep on the ground!”

He lay still, as though he had not heard her. “Sleep wherever you wish,” he said after a while.

She stared at him, her body shaking with fear and anger. “What is it you would make of me, Doro? Your dog? I cared for you. It has been lifetimes since I cared as much for a man.”

He said nothing.

She stepped nearer to the bed, looked down into his expressionless face, pleading herself now. She did not think it was possible to move him by pleading once he had made up his mind, but so much was at stake. She had to try.

“I came here to be a wife to you,” she said. “But there were always others to cook for you, others to serve you in nearly all the ways of a wife. And if there had not been others, I know so little of this place that I would have performed my duties poorly. You knew it would be this way for me, but still you wanted me—and I wanted you enough to begin again like a child, completely ignorant.” She sighed and looked around the room, feeling as though she were hunting for the words that would reach him. There was only the alien furniture: the desk, the bed, the great wooden cabinet beside the door—akas, it was called, a Dutch thing for storing clothing. There were two chairs and several mats—rugs—of heavy, colorful cloth. It was all as alien as Doro himself. It gave her a feeling of hopelessness—as though she had come to this strange place only to die. She stared into the fire in the fireplace—the only familiar thing in the room—and spoke softly:

“Husband, it may be a good thing that you’re going away. A year is not so long, or two years. Not to us. I have been alone before for many times that long. When you come back, I will know how to be a wife to you here. I will give you strong sons.” She turned her eyes back to him, saw that he was watching her. “Do not cast me aside before I show you what a good wife I can be.”

He sat up, put his feet on the floor. “You don’t understand,” he said softly. He pulled her down to sit beside him on the bed. “Haven’t I told you what I’m building? Over the years, I’ve taken people with so little power they were almost ordinary, and bred them together again and again until in their descendants, small abilities grew large, and a man like Isaac could be born.”

“And a man like Lale.”

“Lale wasn’t as bad as he seemed. He handled what ability he had very well. And I’ve created others of his kind who had more ability and a better temperament.”

“Did you create him, then? From what? Mounds of clay?”

“Anyanwu!”

“Isaac tells me the whites believe their god made the first people of clay. You talk as though you think you were that god!”

He drew a deep breath, looked at her sadly. “What I am or think I am need not concern you at all. I’ve told you what you must do—no, be quiet. Hear me.”

She closed her mouth, swallowed a new protest.

“I said you didn’t understand,” he continued. “Now I think you’re deliberately misunderstanding. Do you truly believe I mean to cast you aside because you’ve been a poor wife?”

She looked away. No, of course she did not believe that. She had only hoped to reach him, make him stop his impossible demands. No, he was not casting her aside for any reason at all. He was merely breeding her as one bred cattle and goats. He had said it: “I want children of your body and his.” What she wanted meant nothing. Did one ask a cow or a nanny goat whether it wished to be bred?

“I am giving you the very best of my sons,” he told her. “I expect you to be a good wife to him. I would never send you to him if I thought you couldn’t.”

She shook her head slowly. “It is you who have not understood me.” She gazed at him—at his very ordinary eyes, at his long, handsome face. Until now, she had managed to avoid a confrontation like this by giving in a little, obeying. Now she could not obey.

“You are my husband,” she said quietly, “or I have no husband. If I need another man, I will find one. My father and all my other husbands are long dead. You gave no gifts for me. You can send me away, but you cannot tell me where I must go.”

“Of course I can.” His quiet calm matched her own, but in him it was clearly resignation. “You know you must obey, Anyanwu. Must I take your body and get the children I want from it myself?”

“You cannot.” Within herself, she altered her reproductive organs further, made herself literally no longer a woman, but not quite a man—just to be certain. “You may be able to push my spirit from my body,” she said. “I think you can, though I have never felt your power. But my body will give you no satisfaction. It would take too long for you to learn to repair all the things I have done to it—if you can learn. It will not conceive a child now. It will not live much longer itself without me to keep watch on it.”

She could not have missed the anger in his voice when he spoke again. “You know I will collect your children if I cannot have you.”

She turned her back on him, not wanting him to see her fear and pain, not wanting her own eyes to see him. He was a loathsome thing.

He came to stand behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. She struck them away violently. “Kill me!” she hissed. “Kill me now, but never touch me that way again!”

“And your children?” he said unmoved.

“No child of mine would commit the abominations you want,” she whispered.

“Now who’s lying?” he said. “You know your children don’t have your strength. I’ll get what I want from them, and their children will be as much mine as the people here.”

She said nothing. He was right, of course. Even her own strength was mere bravado, a façade covering utter terror. It was only her anger that kept her neck straight. And what good was anger or defiance? He would consume her very spirit; there would be no next life for her. Then he would use and pervert her children. She felt near to weeping.

“You’ll get over your anger,” he said. “Life will be rich and good for you here. You’ll be surprised to see how easily you blend with these people.”

“I will not marry your son, Doro! No matter what threats you make, no matter what promises, I will not marry your son!”

He sighed, tied his cloth around him, and started for the door. “Stay here,” he told her. “Put something on and wait.”

“For what!” she demanded bitterly.

“For Isaac,” he answered.

And when she turned to face him, mouth open to curse both him and his son, he stepped close to her and struck her across the face with all his strength.

There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have caught his arm and broken the bones within it like dry sticks. There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have torn out his throat.

But she absorbed the blow, moved with it, made no sound. It had been a long time since she had wanted so powerfully to kill a man.

“I see you know how to be quiet,” he said. “I see you’re not as willing to die as you thought. Good. My son asked for a chance to talk to you if you refused to obey. Wait here.”

“What can he say to me that you have not said?” she demanded harshly.

Doro paused at the door to give her a look of contempt. His blow had had less power to hurt her than that look.

When the door closed behind him, she went to the bed and sat down to stare, unseeing, into the fire. By the time Isaac knocked on the door, her face was wet with tears she did not remember shedding.

She made him wait until she had wrapped a cloth around herself and dried her face. Then with leaden, hopeless weariness, she opened the door and let the boy in.

He looked as depleted as she felt. The yellow hair hung limp into his eyes and the eyes themselves were red. His sun-browned skin looked as pale as Anyanwu had ever seen it. He seemed not only tired, but sick.

He stood gazing at her, saying nothing, making her want to go to him as though to Okoye, and try to give him comfort. Instead, she sat down in one of the room’s chairs so that he could not sit close to her.

Obligingly, he sat opposite her in the other chair. “Did he threaten you?” he asked softly.

“Of course. That is all he knows how to do.”

“And promise you a good life if you obey?”

“… yes.”

“He’ll keep his word, you know. Either way.”

“I have seen how he keeps his word.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, Isaac whispered, “Don’t make him do it, Anyanwu. Don’t throw away your life!”

“Do you think I want to die?” she said. “My life has been good, and very long. It could be even longer and better. The world is a much wider place than I thought; there is so much for me to see and know. But I will not be his dog! Let him commit his abominations with other people!”

“With your children?”

“Do you threaten me too, Isaac?”

“No!” he cried. “You know better, Anyanwu.”

She turned her face away from him. If only he would go away. She did not want to say things to hurt him. He spoke softly:

“When he told me I would marry you, I was surprised and a little afraid. You’ve been married many times, and I not even once. I know Okoye is your grandson—one of your younger grandsons—and he’s at least my age. I didn’t see how I could measure up against all your experience. But I wanted to try! You don’t know how I wanted to try.”

“Will you be bred, Isaac? Does it mean nothing to you?”

“Don’t you know I wanted you long before he decided we should marry?”

“I knew.” She glanced at him. “But wrong is wrong!”

“It isn’t wrong here. It …” He shrugged. “People from outside always have trouble understanding us. Not very many things are forbidden here. Most of us don’t believe in gods and spirits and devils who must be pleased or feared. We have Doro, and he’s enough. He tells us what to do, and if it isn’t what other people do, it doesn’t matter—because we won’t last long if we don’t do it, no matter what outsiders think of us.”

He got up, went to stand beside the fireplace. The low flame seemed to comfort him too. “Doro’s ways aren’t strange to me,” he said. “I’ve lived with them all my life. I’ve shared women with him. My first woman …” He hesitated, glanced at her as though to see how she was receiving such talk, whether she was offended. She was almost indifferent. She had made up her mind. Nothing the boy said would change it.

“My first woman,” he continued, “was one he sent to me. The women here are glad to go to him. They didn’t mind coming to me either when they saw how he favored me.”

“Go to them then,” Anyanwu said quietly.

“I would,” he said matching her tone. “But I don’t want to. I’d rather stay with you—for the rest of my life.”

She wanted to run out of the room. “Leave me alone, Isaac!”

He shook his head slowly. “If I leave this room tonight, you’ll die tonight. Don’t ask me to hurry your death.”

She said nothing.

“Besides, I want you to have the night to think.” He frowned at her. “How can you sacrifice your children?”

“Which children, Isaac? The ones I have had or the ones he will make me have with you and with him?”

He blinked. “Oh.”

“I cannot kill him—or even understand what there is to kill. I have bitten him when he was in another body, and he seemed no more than flesh, no more than a man.”

“You never touched him,” Isaac said. “Lale did once—he reached out in that way of his to change Doro’s thoughts. He almost died. I think he would have died if Doro hadn’t struggled hard not to kill him. Doro wears flesh, but he isn’t flesh himself—nor spirit, he says.”

“I cannot understand that,” she said. “But it does not matter. I cannot save my children from him. I cannot save myself. But I will not give him more people to defile.”

He turned from the fire, went back to his chair and pulled it close to her. “You could save generations unborn if you wished, Anyanwu. You could have a good life for yourself, and you could stop him from killing so many others.”

“How can I stop him?” she said in disgust. “Can one stop a leopard from doing what it was born to do?”

“He’s not a leopard! He’s not any sort of mindless animal!”

She could not help hearing the anger in his voice. She sighed. “He is your father.”

“Oh God,” muttered Isaac. “How can I make you see … I wasn’t resenting an insult to my father, Anyanwu, I was saying that in his own way, he can be a reasonable being. You’re right about his killing; he can’t help doing it. When he needs a new body, he takes one whether he wants to or not. But most of the time, he transfers because he wants to, not because he has to; and there are a few people—four or five—who can influence him enough sometimes to stop him from killing, save a few of his victims. I’m one of them. You could be another.”

“You do not mean stop him,” she said wearily. “You mean”—she hunted through her memory for the right word—“you mean delay him.”

“I mean what I said! There are people he listens to, people he values beyond their worth as breeders or servants. People who can give him … just a little of the companionship he needs. They’re among the few people in the world that he can still love—or at least care for. Although compared to what the rest of us feel when we love or hate or envy or whatever, I don’t think he feels very much. I don’t think he can. I’m afraid the time will come when he won’t feel anything. If it does … there’s no end to the harm he could do. I’m glad I won’t have to live to see it. You, though, you could live to see it—or live to prevent it. You could stay with him, keep him at least as human as he is now. I’ll grow old; I’ll die like all the others, but you won’t—or, you needn’t. You are treasure to him. I don’t think he’s really understood that yet.”

“He knows.”

“He knows, of course, but he doesn’t … doesn’t feel it yet. It’s not yet real to him. Don’t you see? He’s lived for more than thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the Son of the God of most white people in these colonies was born, Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always been temporary for him—wives, children, friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make him know you’re not like everyone else—make him feel it. Prove it to him, even if for a while, you have to do some things you don’t like. Reach out to him; keep reaching. Make him know he’s not alone any more!”

There was a long period of silence. Only the log in the fireplace slipped, then spat and crackled as new wood began to burn. Anyanwu covered her face, shook her head slowly. “I wish I knew you to be a liar,” she whispered. “I am afraid and angry and desperate, yet you heap burdens on me.”

He said nothing.

“What is forbidden here, Isaac? What is so evil that a man could be taken out and killed?”

“Murder,” Isaac said. “Theft sometimes, some other things. And of course, defying Doro.”

“If a man killed someone and Doro said he must not be punished, what would happen?”

Isaac frowned. “If the man had to be kept alive—maybe for breeding, Doro would probably take him. Or if it was too soon, if he was being saved for a girl still too young, Doro would send him away from the colony. He wouldn’t ask us to tolerate him here.”

“And when the man was no longer needed, he would die?”

“Yes.”

Anyanwu took a deep breath. “Perhaps you try to keep some decency, then. Perhaps he has not made animals of you yet.”

“Submit to him now, Anyanwu, and later, you can keep him from ever making animals of us.”

Submit to him.The words brought a vile taste to her mouth, but she looked at Isaac’s haggard face, and his obvious misery and his fear for her calmed her somehow. She spoke softly. “When I hear you speak of him, I think you love him more than he loves you.”

“What does that matter?”

“It does not matter. You are a man to whom it need not matter. I thought he could be a good husband. On the ship, I worried that I could not be the wife he needed. I wanted to please him. Now I can only think that he will never let me go.”

“Never?” Isaac repeated with gentle irony. “That’s a long time, even for you and him.”

She turned away. Another time she might have been amused to hear Isaac counseling patience. He was not a patient young man. But now, for her sake, he was desperate.

“You’ll get freedom, Anyanwu,” he said, “but first you’ll have to reach him. He’s like a tortoise encased in a shell that gets thicker every year. It will take a long time for you to reach the man inside, but you have a long time, and there is a man inside who must be reached. He was born as we were. He’s warped because he can’t die, but he’s still a man.” Isaac paused for breath. “Take the time, Anyanwu. Break the shell; go in. He might turn out to be what you need, just as I think you’re what he needs.”

She shook her head. She knew now how the slaves had felt as they lay chained on the bench, the slaver’s hot iron burning into their flesh. In her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She could no longer deny it. Doro’s mark had been on her from the day they met. She could break free of him only by dying and sacrificing her children and leaving him loose upon the world to become even more of an animal. So much of what Isaac said seemed to be right. Or was it her cowardice, her fear of Doro’s terrible way of killing that made his words seem so reasonable? How could she know? Whatever she did would result in evil.

Isaac got up, came to her, took her hands, and drew her to her feet. “I don’t know what kind of husband I could be to … to someone like you,” he said. “But if wanting to please you counts for anything …”

Wearily, hopelessly, she allowed him to draw her closer. Had she been an ordinary woman, he would have crushed the breath from her. After a moment, she said, “If Doro had done this differently, Isaac, if he had told me when we met that he wanted a wife for his son and not for himself, I would not have shamed you by refusing you.”

“I’m not ashamed,” he whispered. “Just as long as you’re not going to make him kill you …”

“If I had the courage of your mother, I would kill myself.”

He stared at her in alarm.

“No, I will live,” she said reassuringly. “I have not the courage to die. I had never thought before that I was a coward, but I am. Living has become too precious a habit.”

“You’re no more a coward than the rest of us,” he said.

“The rest of you, at least, are not doing evil in your own eyes.”

“Anyanwu …”

“No.” She rested her head against him. “I have decided. I will not tell any more brave lies, even to myself.” She looked up at his young face, his boy face. “We will marry. You are a good man, Isaac. I am the wrong wife for you, but perhaps, somehow, in this place, among these people, it will not matter.”

He lifted her with the strength of his arms alone and carried her to the great soft bed, there to make the children who would prolong her slavery.

Book II

Lot’s Children

1741

CHAPTER 7

Doro had come to Wheatley to see to the welfare of one of his daughters. He had a feeling something was wrong with her, and as usual, he allowed such feelings to guide him.

As he rode into town from the landing, he could hear a loud dispute in progress—something about one man’s cow ruining another’s garden.

Doro approached the disputants slowly, watching them. They stood before Isaac, who sat on a bench in front of the house he and Anyanwu had built over fifty years before. Isaac, slender and youthful-looking in spite of his age and his thick gray hair, had no official authority to settle disputes. He had been a farmer, then a merchant—never a magistrate. But even when he was younger, people brought their disagreements to him. He was one of Doro’s favorite sons. That made him powerful and influential. Also, he was known for his honesty and fairness. People liked him as they could not quite like Doro. They could worship Doro as a god, they could give him their love, their fear, their respect, but most found him too intimidating to like. One of the reasons Doro came back to a son like Isaac, old and past most of his usefulness, was that Isaac was a friend as well as a son. Isaac was one of the few people who could enjoy Doro’s company without fear or falseness. And Isaac was an old man, soon to die. They all died so quickly …

Doro reached the house and sat slouched for a moment on his black mare—a handsome animal who had come with his latest less-than-handsome body. The two men arguing over the cow had calmed down by now. Isaac had a way of calming unreasonable people. Another man could say and do exactly what Isaac said and did and be knocked down for his trouble. But people listened to Isaac.

“Pelham,” Isaac was saying to the older of the two men—a gaunt, large-boned farmer whom Doro remembered as poor breeding stock.

“Pelham, if you need help repairing that fence, I’ll send one of my sons over.”

“My boy can handle it,” Pelham answered. “Anything to do with wood, he can handle.”

Pelham’s son, Doro recalled, had just about enough sense not to wet himself. He was a huge, powerful man with the mind of a child—a timid, gentle child, fortunately. Doro was glad to hear that he could handle something.

Isaac looked up, noticed for the first time the small sharp-featured stranger Doro was just then, and did what he had always done. With none of the talents of his brother Lale to warn him, Isaac inevitably recognized Doro. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time you got back to us.” Then he turned toward the house and called, “Peter, come out here.”

He stood up spryly and took the reins of Doro’s horse, handing them to his son Peter as the boy came out of the house.

“Someday, I’m going to get you to tell me how you always know me,” Doro said. “It can’t be anything you see.”

Isaac laughed. “I’d tell you if I understood it myself. You’re you, that’s all.”

Now that Doro had spoken, Pelham and the other man recognized him and spoke together in a confused babble of welcome.

Doro held up his hand. “I’m here to see my children,” he said.

The welcomes subsided. The two men shook his hand, wished him a good evening, and hurried off to spread the news of his return. In his few words, he had told him that his visit was unofficial. He had not come to take a new body, and thus would not hold court to settle serious grievances or offer needed financial or other aid in the way that had become customary in Wheatley and some of his other settlements. This visit, he was only a man come to see his children—of whom there were forty-two here, ranging from infants to Isaac. It was rare for him to come to town for no other purpose than to see them, but when he did, other people left him alone. If anyone was in desperate need, they approached one of his children.

“Come on in,” Isaac said. “Have some beer, some food.” He did not have an old man’s voice, high and cracking. His voice had become deeper and fuller—it contributed to his authority. But all Doro could hear in it now was honest pleasure.

“No food yet,” Doro said. “Where’s Anyanwu?”

“Helping with the Sloane baby. Mrs. Sloane let it get sick and almost die before she asked for help. Anyanwu says it has pneumonia,” Isaac poured two tankards of beer.

“Is it going to be all right?”

“Anyanwu says so—although she was ready to strangle the Sloanes. Even they’ve been here long enough to know better than to let a child suffer that way with her only a few doors away.” Isaac paused. “They’re afraid of her blackness and her power. They think she’s a witch, and the mold-medicine she made some poison.”

Doro frowned, took a swallow of beer. The Sloanes were his newest wild seed—a couple who had found each other before Doro found them. They were dangerous, unstable, painfully sensitive people who heard the thoughts of others in intermittent bursts. When one received a burst of pain, anger, fear, any intense emotion, it was immediately transmitted to the other, and both suffered. None of this was deliberate or controlled. It simply happened. Helplessly, the Sloanes did a great deal of fighting and drinking and crying and praying for it to stop happening, but it would not. Not ever. That was why Doro had brought them to Wheatley. They were amazingly good breeding stock to be wild seed. He suspected that in one way or another, they were each descended from his people. Certainly, they were enough like his people to make excellent prey. And as soon as they had produced a few more children, Doro intended to take them both. It would be almost a kindness.

But for now, they would go on being abysmal parents, neglecting and abusing their children not out of cruelty, but because they hurt too badly themselves to notice their children’s pain. In fact, they were likely to notice that pain only as a new addition to their own. Thus, sometimes their kind murdered children. Doro had not believed the Sloanes were dangerous in that way. Now, he was less certain.

“Isaac …?”

Isaac looked at him, understood the unspoken question. “I assume you mean to keep the parents alive for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d better find another home for the child—and for every other child they have. Anyanwu says they should never have had any.”

“Which means, of course, that they should have as many as possible.”

“From your point of view, yes. Good useful people. I’ve already begun talking to them about giving up the child.”

“Good. And?”

“They’re worried about what people might think. I got the impression they’d be glad to get rid of the child if not for that—and one other thing.”

“What?”

Isaac looked away. “They’re worried about who’ll care for them when they’re old. I told them you’d talk to them about that.”

Doro smiled thinly. Isaac refused to lie to the people he thought Doro had selected as prey. Most often, he refused to tell them anything at all. Sometimes such people guessed what was being kept from them, and they ran. Doro took pleasure in hunting them down. Lann Sloane, Doro thought, would be especially good game. The man had a kind of animal wariness about him.

“Anyanwu would say you have on your leopard face now,” Isaac commented.

Doro shrugged. He knew what Anyanwu would say, and that she meant it when she compared him to one kind of animal or another. Once she had said such things out of fear or anger. Now she said them out of grim hatred. She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever known. She was alive because of Isaac. Doro had no doubt that if he had tried to give her to any of his other sons, she would have refused and died. He had asked her what Isaac said to change her mind, and when she refused to tell him, he had asked Isaac. To his surprise, Isaac refused to tell him, too. His son refused him very little, angered him very rarely. But this time …

“You’ve given her to me,” Isaac had said. “Now she and I have to have things of our own.” His face and his voice told Doro he would not say any more. Doro had left Wheatley the next day, confident that Isaac would take care of the details-marry the woman, build himself a house, help her learn to live in the settlement, decide on work for himself, start the children coming. Even at twenty-five, Isaac had been very capable. And Doro had not trusted himself to stay near either Isaac or Anyanwu. The depth of his own anger amazed him. Normally, people had only to annoy him to die for their error. He had to think to remember how long it had been since he had felt real anger and left those who caused it alive. But his son and this tiresome little forest peasant who was, fortunately for her, the best wild seed he had ever found, had lived. There was no forgiveness in Anyanwu, though. If she had learned to love her husband, she had not learned to forgive her husband’s father. Now and then, Doro tried to penetrate her polite, aloof hostility, tried to break her, bring her back to what she was when he took her from her people. He was not accustomed to people resisting him, not accustomed to their hating him. The woman was a puzzle he had not yet solved—which was why now, after she had given him eight children, given Isaac five children, she was still alive. She would come to him again, without the coldness. She would make herself young without being told to do so, and she would come to him. Then, satisfied, he would kill her.

He licked his lips thinking about it, and Isaac coughed. Doro looked at his son with the old fondness and amended his thought. Anyanwu would live until Isaac died. She was keeping Isaac healthy, perhaps keeping him alive. She was doing it for herself, of course. Isaac had captured her long ago as he captured everyone, and she did not want to lose him any sooner than she had to. But her reasons did not matter. Inadvertently, she was doing Doro a service. He did not want to lose Isaac any sooner than he had to either. He shook his head, spoke to divert himself from the thought of his son’s dying.

“I was down in the city on business,” he said. “Then about a week ago when I was supposed to leave for England, I found myself thinking about Nweke.” This was Anyanwu’s youngest daughter. Doro claimed her as his daughter too, though Anyanwu disputed this. Doro had worn the body that fathered the girl, but he had not worn it at the time of the fathering. He had taken it afterward.

“Nweke’s all right,” Isaac said. “As all right as she can be, I suppose. Her transition is coming soon and she has her bad days, but Anyanwu seems to be able to comfort her.”

“You haven’t noticed her having any special trouble in the past few days?”

Isaac thought for a moment. “No, not that I recall. I haven’t seen too much of her. She’s been helping to sew for a friend who’s getting married—the Van Ness girl, you know.”

Doro nodded.

“And I’ve been helping with the Boyden house. I guess you could say I’ve been building the Boyden house. I have to use what I’ve got now and then, no matter how Anyanwu nags me to slow down. Otherwise, I find myself walking a foot or so off the ground or throwing things. The ability doesn’t seem to weaken with age.”

“So I’ve noticed. Do you still enjoy it?”

“You couldn’t know how much,” Isaac said, smiling. He looked away, remembered pleasure flickering across his face, causing him to look years younger than he was. “Do you know we still fly sometimes—Anyanwu and I? You should see her as a bird of her own design. Color you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’m afraid I’ll see you as a corpse if you go on doing such things. Firearms are improving slowly. Flying is a stupid risk.”

“It’s what I do,” Isaac said quietly. “You know better than to ask me to give it up entirely.”

Doro sighed. “I suppose I do.”

“Anyway, Anyanwu always goes along with me—and she always flies slightly lower.”

Anyanwu the protector, Doro thought with bitterness that surprised him. Anyanwu the defender of anyone who needed her. Doro wondered what she would do if he told her he needed her. Laugh? Very likely. She would be right, of course. Over the years it had become almost as difficult for him to get a lie past her as it was for her to lie successfully to him. The only reason she did not know of his colony of her African descendants in South Carolina was that he had never given her reason to ask. Even Isaac did not know.

“Does it bother you?” he asked Isaac. “Having her protecting you that way?”

“It did, at first,” Isaac said. “I would outdistance her. I’m faster than any bird if I want to be. I would leave her behind and ignore her. But she was always there, laboring to catch up, hampered by winds that didn’t bother me at all. She never gave up. After a while, I began expecting her to be there. Now, I think I’d be more bothered if she didn’t come along.”

“Has she been shot?”

Isaac hesitated. “That’s what the bright colors are for, I guess,” he said finally. “To distract attention from me. Yes, she’s been shot a couple of times. She falls a few yards, flops about to give me time to get away. Then she recovers and follows.”

Doro looked up at the portrait of Anyanwu on the wall opposite the high, shallow fireplace. The style of the house was English here, Dutch there, Igbo somewhere else. Anyanwu had made earthen pots, variations of those she had once sold in the marketplaces of her homeland, and stout handsome baskets. People bought them from her and placed them around their houses as she had. Her work was both decorative and utilitarian, and here in her house with its Dutch fireplace and kas, its English settle and thronelike wainscot chairs, it evoked memories of a land she would not see again. Anyanwu had never sanded the floor as Dutch women did. Dirt was for sweeping out, she said contemptuously, not for scattering on the floor. She was more house proud than most English women Doro knew, but Dutch women shook their heads and gossiped about her “slovenly” housekeeping and pretended to pity Isaac. In fact, in the easy atmosphere of Wheatley, nearly every woman pitied Isaac so much that had he wished, he could have spread his valuable seed everywhere. Only Doro drew female attention more strongly—and only Doro took advantage of it. But then, Doro did not have to worry about outraged husbands—or an outraged wife.

The portrait of Anyanwu was extraordinary. Clearly, the Dutch artist had been captured by her beauty. He had draped her in a brilliant blue that set off her dark skin beautifully as blue always had. Even her hair had been hidden in blue cloth. She was holding a child—her first son by Isaac. The child too, only a few months old, was partly covered by the blue. He looked out of the painting, large-eyed and handsomer than any infant should have been. Did Anyanwu deliberately conceive only handsome children? Every one of them was beautiful, even though Doro had fathered some with hideous bodies.

The portrait was a black madonna and child right down to Anyanwu’s too-clear, innocent-seeming eyes. Strangers were moved to comment on the likeness. Some were appreciative, looking at the still handsome Anyanwu-she kept herself looking well for Isaac even as she aged herself along with him. Others were deeply offended, believing that someone actually had tried to portray the Virgin and Child as “black savages.” Race prejudice was growing in the colonies—even in this formerly Dutch colony where things had once been so casual. Earlier in the year, there had been mass executions at New York City. Someone had been setting fires and the whites decided it must be the blacks. On little or no evidence, thirty-one blacks were killed—thirteen of them burned at the stake. Doro was beginning to worry about this upriver town. Of all his English colonial settlements, only in this one did his blacks not have the protection of powerful white owners. How soon before whites from elsewhere began to see them as fair game.

Doro shook his head. The woman in the portrait seemed to look down at him as he looked up. He should have had too much on his mind to think about her or about her daughter Ruth, called Nweke. He should not have allowed himself to be drawn back to Wheatley. It was good to see Isaac … but that woman!

“She was the right wife for me after all,” Isaac was saying. “I remember her telling me she wasn’t once before we married, but that was one of the few times I’ve known her to be wrong.”

“I want to see her,” Doro said abruptly. “And I want to see Nweke. I think the girl’s a lot closer to her change than you realize.”

“You think that’s why you were pulled back here?”

Doro did not like the word “pulled,” but he nodded without comment.

Isaac stood up. “Nweke first, while you’re still in a fairly good mood.” He went out of the house without waiting for Doro to answer. He loved Doro and he loved Anyanwu and it bothered him that the two got along so badly together.

“I don’t see how you can be such a fool with her,” he told Doro once—to Doro’s surprise. “The woman is not temporary. She can be everything you need if you let her—mate, companion, business partner, her abilities complement yours so well. Yet all you do is humiliate her.”

“I’ve never hurt her,” Doro had told him. “Never hurt one of her children. You show me one other wild seed woman I’ve allowed to live as long as she has after childbearing.” He had not touched her children because from the first, she promised him that if any one of them was harmed, she would bear no more. No matter what he did to her, she would bear no more. Her sincerity was unmistakable; thus he refrained from preying on her least successful children, refrained from breeding her daughters to her sons—or bedding those daughters himself. She did not know what care he had taken to keep her content. She did not know, but Isaac should have.

“You treat her a little better than the others because she’s a little more useful,” Isaac had said. “But you still humiliate her.”

“If she chooses to be humiliated by what I have her do, she’s creating her own problem.”

Isaac had looked at him steadily, almost angrily, for several seconds. “I know about Nweke’s father,” he had said. He had said it without fear. Over the years, he had come to learn that he was one of the few people who did not have to be afraid.

Doro had gone away from him feeling ashamed. He had not thought it was still possible for him to feel shame, but Anyanwu’s presence seemed to be slowly awakening several long dormant emotions in him. How many women had he sent Isaac to without feeling a thing. Isaac had done as he was told and come home. Home from Pennsylvania, home from Maryland, home from Georgia, home from Spanish Florida … Isaac didn’t mind either. He didn’t like being away from Anyanwu and the children for long periods, but he didn’t mind the women. And they certainly didn’t mind him. He didn’t mind that Doro had begotten eight of Anyanwu’s children. Or seven. Only Anyanwu minded that. Only she felt humiliated. But Nweke’s father was, perhaps, another matter.

The girl, eighteen years old, small and dark like her mother, came through the door, Isaac’s arm around her shoulders. She was redeyed as though she had been crying or as though she hadn’t been sleeping. Probably both. This was a bad time for her.

“Is it you?” she whispered, seeing the sharp-featured stranger.

“Of course,” Doro said, smiling.

His voice, the knowledge that he was indeed Doro, triggered tears. She went to him crying softly, looking for comfort in his arms. He held her and looked over her shoulder at Isaac.

“Whatever you’ve got to say to me, I deserve it,” Isaac said. “I didn’t notice and I should have. After all these years, I surely should have.”

Doro said nothing, motioned Isaac back out the door.

Isaac obeyed silently, probably feeling more guilt than he should have. This was no ordinary girl. None of her brothers or sisters had reached Doro miles away with their desperation as their transitions neared. What had he felt about her? Anxiety, worry, more. Some indefinable feeling not only that she was near transition, but that she was on the verge of becoming something he had not known before. Something new. It was as though from New York City he had sensed another Anyanwu—new, different, attracting him, pulling him. He had never followed a feeling more willingly.

The girl moved in his arms and he took her to the high-backed settle near the fireplace. The narrow bench was nearly as uncomfortable as the wainscot chairs. Not for the first time, Doro wondered why Isaac and Anyanwu did not buy or have made some comfortable modern furniture. Surely they could afford it.

“What am I going to do?” the girl whispered. She had put her head against his shoulder, but even that close, Doro could hardly hear her. “It hurts so much.”

“Endure it,” he said simply. “It will end.”

“When!” From a whisper to almost a scream. Then back to the whisper. “When?”

“Soon.” He held her away from him a little so that he could see the small face, swollen and weary. The girl’s coloring was gray rather than its usual rich dark brown. “You haven’t been sleeping?”

“A little. Sometimes. The nightmares … only they aren’t nightmares, are they?”

“You know what they are.”

She shrank against the back of the bench. “You know David Whitten, two houses over?”

Doro nodded. The Whitten boy was twenty. Fairly good breeding stock. His family would be worth more in generations to come. They had a sensitivity that puzzled Doro. He did not know quite what they were becoming, but the feeling he got from them was good. They were a pleasant mystery that careful inbreeding would solve.

“Almost every night,” Nweke said, “David … he goes to his sister’s bed.”

Startled, Doro laughed aloud. “Does he?”

“Just like married people. Why is that funny? They could get into trouble—brother and sister. They could …”

“They’ll be all right.”

She looked at him closely. “Did you know about it?”

“No.” Doro was still smiling. “How old is the girl? Around sixteen?”

“Seventeen.” Nweke hesitated. “She likes it.”

“So do you,” Doro observed.

Nweke twisted away, embarrassed. There was no coyness to her; her embarrassment was real. “I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t try to know!”

“Do you imagine I’m criticizing you for knowing? Me?”

She blinked, licked her lips. “Not you, I guess. Were you going to … to put them together anyway?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

“No. I was going to move them down to Pennsylvania. I see now that I’d better prepare a place for them quickly.”

“They were almost a relief,” Nweke said. “It was so easy to get caught up in what they were doing that sometimes I didn’t have to feel other things. Last night, though … last night there were some Indians. They caught a white man. He had done something—killed one of their women or something. I was in his thoughts and they were all blurred at first. They tortured him. It took him so long … so long to die.” Her hands were clinched tight around each other, her eyes wide with remembering. “They tore out his fingernails, then they cut him and burned him and the women bit him—bit pieces away like wolves at their kill. Then …” She stopped, choked. “Oh God!”

“You were with him the whole time?” Doro asked.

“The whole time—through … everything.” She was crying silently, not sobbing, only staring straight ahead as tears ran down her face and her nails dug themselves into her palms. “I don’t understand how I can be alive after all that,” she whispered.

“None of it happened to you,” Doro said.

“All of it happened to me, every bit of it!”

Doro took her hands and unclinched the long, slender fingers. There were bloody marks on her palms where the nails had punctured. Doro ran a finger across the hard neatly cut nails. “All ten,” he said, “right where they should be.None of it happened to you .”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’ve been through transition, girl. In fact, I may have been the first person ever to go through it—back more years than you can imagine. I understand, all right.”

“Then you’ve forgotten! Maybe what happens doesn’t leave marks on your body, but it leaves marks. It’s real. Oh God, it’s so real!” She began sobbing now. “If someone whips a slave or a criminal, I feel it, and it’s as real to me as to the person under the lash!”

“But no matter how many times others die,” Doro said, “you won’t die.”

“Why not? People die in transition. You died!”

He grinned. “Not entirely.” Then he sobered. “Listen, the one thing you don’t have to worry about is becoming what I am. You’re going to be something special, all right, but nothing like me.”

She looked at him timidly. “I would like to be like you.”

Only the youngest of his children said such things. He pushed her head back to his shoulder. “No,” he said, “that wouldn’t be safe. I know what you’re supposed to be. It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to surprise me.”

She understood and said nothing. Like most of his people, she did not try to move away from him when he warned or threatened. “What will I be?” she asked.

“I hope, someone who will be able to do for others what your mother can do for herself. A healer. The next step in healers. But even if you inherit talent from only one of your parents, you’ll be formidable, and nothing like me. Your father, before I took him, could not only read thoughts but could see into closed places—mentally ‘see.’ ”

“You’re my father,” she said against him. “I don’t want to hear about anyone else.”

“Hear it!” he said harshly. “When your transition is over, you’ll see it in Isaac’s mind and Anyanwu’s. You should know from Anneke that a mind reader can’t delude herself for long.” Anneke Strycker Croon. She was the one who should have been having this talk with Nweke. She had been his best mind reader in a half-dozen generations—beautifully controlled. Once her transition was ended, she never entered another person’s mind unless she wanted to. Her only flaw was that she was barren. Anyanwu tried to help her. Doro brought her one male body after another, all in vain. Thus, finally, Anneke had half adopted Nweke. The young girl and the old woman had found a similarity in each other that pleased Doro. It was rare for someone with Anneke’s ability to take any pleasure at all in children. Doro saw the friendship as a good omen for Nweke’s immature talents. But now, Anneke was three years dead, and Nweke was alone. No doubt her next words came at least partially out of her loneliness.

“Do you love us?” she asked.

“All of you?” Doro asked, knowing very well that she did not mean everyone—all his people.

“The ones of us who change,” she said not looking at him. “The different ones.”

“You’re all different. It’s only a matter of degree.”

She seemed to force herself to meet his eyes. “You’re laughing at me. We endure so much pain … because of you, and you’re laughing.”

“Not at your pain, girl.” He took a deep breath and stilled his amusement. “Not at your pain.”

“You don’t love us.”

“No.” He felt her start against him. “Not all of you.”

“Me?” she whispered timidly, finally. “Do you love me?”

The favorite question of his daughters—only his daughters. His sons hoped he loved them, but they did not ask. Perhaps they did not dare to. Ah, but this girl …

When she was healthy, her eyes were like her mother’s-clear whites and browns, baby’s eyes. She had finer bones than Anyanwu—slenderer wrists and ankles, more prominent cheekbones. She was the daughter of one of Isaac’s older sons—a son he had had by a wild seed Indian woman who read thoughts and saw into distant closed places. The Indians were rich in untapped wild seed that they tended to tolerate or even revere rather than destroy. Eventually, they would learn to be civilized and to understand as the whites understood that the hearing of voices, the seeing of visions, the moving of inanimate objects when no hand touched them, all the strange feelings, sensitivities, and abilities were evil or dangerous, or at the very least, imaginary. Then they too would weed out or grind down their different ones, thus freezing themselves in time, depriving their kind of any senses but those already familiar, depriving their children and their children’s children of any weapons with which to confront Doro’s people. And surely, in some future time, the day of confrontation would come. This girl, as rare and valuable for her father’s blood as for her mother’s, might well live to see that day. If ever he was to breed a long-lived descendant from Anyanwu, it would be this girl. He felt utterly certain of her. Over the years, he had taught himself not to assume that any new breed would be successful until transition ended and he saw the success before him. But the feelings that came to him from this girl were too powerful to doubt. He had no more certain urge than the urge that directed him toward the very best prey. Now it spoke to him as it had never spoken before, even for Isaac or Anyanwu. The girl’s talent teased and enticed him. He would not kill her, of course. He did not kill the best of his children. But he would have what he could of her now. And she would have what she wanted of him.

“I came back because of you,” he said, smiling. “Not because of any of the others, but because I could feel how near you were to your change. I wanted to see for myself that you were all right.”

That was apparently enough for her. She caught him in a joyful stranglehold and kissed him not at all as a daughter should kiss her father.

“I do like it,” she said shyly. “What David and Melanie do. Sometimes I try to know when they’re doing it. I try to share it. But I can’t. It comes to me of itself or not at all.” And she echoed her stepfather—her grandfather. “I have to have something of my own!” Her voice had taken on a fierceness, as though Doro owed her what she was demanding.

“Why tell me?” he said, playing with her. “I’m not even handsome right now. Why not choose one of the town boys?”

She clutched at his arms, her hard little nails now digging into his flesh. “You’re laughing again!” she hissed. “Am I so ridiculous? Please …”

To his disgust, Doro found himself thinking about Anyanwu. He had always resisted the advances of her daughters before. It had become a habit. Nweke was the last child Doro had coerced Anyanwu into bearing, but Doro had gone on respecting Anyanwu’s superstitions—not that Anyanwu appreciated the kindness. Well, Anyanwa was about to lose her place with him to this young daughter. Whatever he had been reaching for, trying to bribe from the mother, the daughter would supply. The daughter was not wild seed with years of freedom to make her stubborn. The daughter had been his from the moment of her conception—his property as surely as though his brand were burned into her flesh. She even thought of herself as his property. His children, young and old, male and female, most often made the matter of ownership very simple for him. They accepted his authority and seemed to need his assurance that strange as they were, they still belonged to someone.

“Doro?” the girl said softly.

She had a red kerchief tied over her hair. He pushed it back to reveal her thick dark hair, straighter than her mother’s but not as straight as her father’s. She had combed it back and pinned it in a large knot. Only a single heavy curl hung free to her smooth brown shoulder. He resisted the impulse to remove the pins, let the other curls free. He and the girl would not have much time together. He did not want her wasting what they had pinning up her hair. Nor did he want her appearance to announce at once to Anyanwu what had happened. Anyanwu would find out—probably very quickly—but she would not find out through any apparent brazenness on the part of her daughter. She would find out in such a way as to cause her to blame Doro. Her daughter still needed her too badly to alienate her. No one in any of Doro’s settlements was as good at helping people through transition as Anyanwu. Her body could absorb the physical punishment of restraining a violent, usually very strong young person. She did not hurt her charges or allow them to hurt themselves. They did not frighten or disgust her. She was their companion, their sister, their mother, their lover through their agony. If they could survive their own mental upheaval, they would come through to find that she had taken good care of their physical bodies. Nweke would need that looking after—whatever she needed right now.

He lifted the girl, carried her to an alcove bed in one of the children’s bedrooms. He did not know whether it was her bed, did not care. He undressed her, brushing away her hands when she tried to help, laughing softly when she commented that he seemed to know pretty well how to get a woman out of her clothes. She did not know much about undressing a man, but she fumbled and tried to help him.

And she was as lovely as he had expected. A virgin of course. Even in Wheatley, young girls usually saved themselves for husbands, or for Doro. She was ready for him. She had some pain, but it didn’t seem to matter to her.

“Better than with David and Melanie,” she whispered once, and held onto him as though fearing he might leave her.

Nweke and Doro were in the kitchen popping corn and drinking beer when Isaac and Anyanwu came in. The bed had been remade and Nweke had been properly dressed and cautioned against even the appearance of brazenness. “Let her be angry at me,” Doro had said, “not at you. Say nothing.”

“I don’t know how to think about her now,” Nweke said. “My sisters whispered that we could never have you because of her. Sometimes I hated her. I thought she kept you for herself.”

“Did she?”

“… no.” She glanced at him uncertainly. “I think she tried to protect us from you. She thought we needed it.” Nweke shuddered. “What will she feel for me now?”

Doro did not know, and he did not intend to leave until he found out. Until he could see that any anger Anyanwu felt would do her daughter no harm.

“Maybe she won’t find out,” the girl said hopefully.

That was when Doro took her into the kitchen to investigate the stew Anyanwu had left simmering and the bread untended in its bake kettle, hot and tender, unburned in the coals. They set the table, then Nweke suggested beer and popcorn. Doro agreed, humoring her, hoping she would relax and not worry about facing her mother. She seemed peaceful and content when Isaac and Anyanwu came in, yet she avoided her mother’s eyes. She stared down into her beer.

Doro saw Anyanwu frown, saw her go to Nweke and take the small chin in her fingers and raise it so that she could see Nweke’s frightened eyes.

“Are you well?” she asked Nweke softly in her own language. She spoke perfect English now, along with Dutch and a few words of some Indian and foreign African dialects, but at home with her children, she often spoke as though she had never left home. She would not adopt a European name or call her children by their European names—though she had condescended to give them European names at Doro’s insistence. Her children could speak and understand as well as she could. Even Isaac, after all the years, could understand and speak fairly well. No doubt, he heard as clearly as Doro and Nweke the wariness and tension in Anyanwu’s soft question.

Nweke did not answer. Frightened, she glanced at Doro. Anyanwu followed the glance and her infant-clear, bright eyes took on a look of incongruous ferocity. She said nothing. She only stared with growing comprehension. Doro met her gaze levelly until she turned back to look at her daughter.

“Nweke, little one, are you well?” she whispered urgently.

Something happened within Nweke. She took Anyanwu’s hands between her own, held them for a moment, smiling. Finally she laughed aloud—delighted child’s laughter with no hint of falseness or gloating. “I’m well,” she said. “I didn’t know how well until this moment. It has been so long since there were no voices, nothing pulling at me or hurting me.” Relief made her forget her fear. She met Anyanwu’s eyes, her own eyes full of the wonder of her newfound peace.

Anyanwu closed her eyes for a moment, drew a long, shuddering breath.

“She’s all right,” Isaac said from where he sat at the table. “That’s enough.”

Anyanwu looked at him. Doro could not read what passed between them, but after a moment, Isaac repeated, “That’s enough.”

And it seemed to be. At that moment, the twenty-two-year-old son Peter, incongruously called Chukwuka—God is Supreme—arrived, and dinner was served.

Doro ate slowly, recalling how he had laughed at the boy’s Igbo name. He had asked Anyanwu where she had found her sudden devotion to God—any god. Chukwuka was a common enough name in her homeland, but it was not a name he would have expected from a woman who claimed she helped herself. Predictably, Anyanwu had been silent and unamused at his question. It took him a surprisingly long time to begin to wonder whether the name was supposed to be a charm—her pathetic attempt to protect the boy from him. Where had Anyanwu found her sudden devotion to God? Where else but in her fear of Doro? Doro smiled to himself.

Then he stopped smiling as Nweke’s brief peace ended. The girl screamed—a long, ragged, terrible sound that reminded Doro of cloth tearing. Then she dropped the dish of corn she had been bringing to the table and collapsed to the floor unconscious.

CHAPTER 8

Nweke lay twitching, still unconscious in the middle of Isaac and Anyanwu’s bed. Anyanwu said it was easier to care for her here in a bed merely enclosed within curtains than in one of the alcove beds. Oblivious to Doro’s presence, Anyanwu had stripped Nweke to her shift and removed the pins from her hair. The girl looked even smaller than she was now, looked lost in the deep, soft feather mattress. She looked like a child. Doro felt a moment of unease, even fear for her. He remembered her laughter minutes earlier and wondered whether he would hear it again.

“This is transition,” Anyanwu said to him, neutral-voiced.

He glanced at her. She stood beside the bed looking weary and concerned. Her earlier hostility had been set aside—and only set aside. Doro knew her too well to think it had been forgotten.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “She’s passed out before, hasn’t she?”

“Oh yes. But this is transition. I know it.”

He thought she was probably right. He sensed the girl very strongly now. If his body had been a lesser one or one he had given long use, he would not have dared to stay so near her.

“Will you stay?” Anyanwu asked, as though hearing his thoughts.

“For a while.”

“Why? You have never stayed before when my children changed.”

“This one is special.”

“So I have seen.” She gave him another of her venomous looks. “Why, Doro?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand. “Do you know what she has been receiving? What thoughts she has been picking up?”

“She told me about the man last night—the torture.”

“Not that. She’s been picking up people making love—picking it up often.”

“And you thought that was not enough for an unmarried girl!”

“She’s eighteen years old. It wasn’t enough.”

Nweke made a small sound as though she were having a bad dream. No doubt she was. The worst of dreams. And she would not be permitted to wake fully until it was over.

“You have not molested my children before,” she said.

“I wondered whether you had noticed.”

“Is that it?” She turned to face him. “Were you punishing me for my … my ingratitude?”

“… no.” His eyes looked past her for a moment though he did not move. “I’m not interested in punishing you any longer.”

She turned a little too quickly and sat down beside the bed. She sat on a chair Isaac had made for her—a taller-than-normal chair so that in spite of her small size and the height of the bed, she could see and reach Nweke easily. Eventually she would move onto the bed with the girl. People in transition needed close physical contact to give them some hold on reality.

But for now, Anyanwu’s move to the chair was to conceal emotion. Fear, Doro wondered, or shame or anger or hatred … His last serious attempt to punish her had involved Nweke’s father. That attempt had stood between them all Nweke’s life. Of all the things she considered that he had done to her, that was the worst. Yet it was a struggle she had come very near winning. Perhaps she had won. Perhaps that was why the incident could still make him uneasy.

Doro shook his head, turned his attention to the girl. “Do you think she’ll come through all right?” he asked.

“I have never had any of them die in my care.”

He ignored the sarcasm in her voice. “What do you feel, Anyanwu? How can you help them so well when you cannot reach their minds in even the shadowy way that I can?”

“I bit her a little. She is strong and healthy. There is nothing, no feeling of death about her.” He had opened his mouth, but she held up a hand to stop him. “If I could tell you more clearly, I would. Perhaps I will find a way—on the day you find a way to tell me how you move from body to body.”

“Touché,” he said, and shrugged. He took a chair from beside the fireplace and brought it to the foot of the bed. There, he waited. When Nweke came to, shaking and crying wildly, he spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Anyanwu went onto the bed silent, grim-faced, and held the girl until her tears had slowed, until she had stopped shaking.

“You are in transition,” Doro heard Anyanwu whisper. “Stay with us until tomorrow and you will have the powers of a goddess.” That was all she had time to say. Nweke’s body stiffened. She made retching sounds and Anyanwu drew back from her slightly. But instead of vomiting, she went limp again, her consciousness gone to join someone else’s.

Eventually, she seemed to come to again, but her open eyes were glazed and she made the kind of gibbering sounds Doro had heard in madhouses—especially in the madhouses to which his people had been consigned when their transitions caught them outside their settlements. Nweke’s face was like something out of a madhouse, too—twisted and unrecognizable, covered with sweat, eyes, nose, and mouth streaming. Wearily, sadly, Doro got up to leave.

There had been a time when he had to watch transitions—when no one else could be trusted not to run away or murder his writhing charge or perform some dangerous, stupid ritual of exorcism. But that was long ago. He was not only building a people now; they were building themselves. It was no longer necessary for him to do everything, see everything.

He looked back once as he reached the door and saw that Anyanwu was watching him.

“It is easier to doom a child to this than to stay and watch it happen, isn’t it?” she said.

“I watched it happen to your ancestors!” he said angrily. “And I’ll watch it happen to your descendants when even you are dust!” He turned and left her.

When Doro had gone, Anyanwu clambered off the featherbed and went to the washstand. There she poured water from the pitcher to the basin and wet a towel. Nweke was having a difficult time already, poor girl. That meant a long, terrible night. There was no duty Anyanwu hated more than this—especially with her own children. But no one else could handle it as well as she could.

She bathed the girl’s face, thinking, praying:Oh, Nweke, little one, stay until tomorrow. The pain will go away tomorrow.

Nweke quieted as though she could hear the desperate thoughts. Perhaps she could. Her face was gray and still now. Anyanwu caressed it, seeing traces of the girl’s father in it as she always did. There was a man damned from the day of his birth—all because of Doro. He was fine breeding stock, oh yes. He was a forest animal unable to endure the company of other people, unable to get any peace from their thoughts. He had not been as Nweke was now, receiving only large emotions, great stress. He received everything. And also, he saw visions of things far from him, beyond the range of even her eyes, of things closed away from any eyes. In a city, even in a small town, he would have gone mad. And his vulnerability was not a passing thing, not a transition from powerlessness to godlike power. It was a condition he had had to endure to the day of his death. He had loved Doro pathetically because Doro was the one person whose thoughts could not entangle him. His mind would not reach into Doro’s. Doro said this was a matter of self-preservation; the mind that reached into his became his. It was consumed, extinguished, and Doro took over the body it had animated. Doro said even people like this man—Thomas, his name was—even people whose mind-reading ability seemed completely out of control somehow never reached into Doro’s thoughts. People with control could force themselves to try—as they could force their hands into fire—but they could not make the attempt without first feeling the “heat” and knowing they were doing a dangerous thing.

Thomas could not force his “hands” into anything at all. He lived alone in a filthy cabin well hidden within a dark, awesome Virginia woods. When Doro brought her to him, he cursed her. He told her she should not mind the way he lived, since she was from Africa where people swung through the trees and went naked like animals. He asked Doro what wrong he had done to be given a nigger woman. But it was not his wrong that had won him Anyanwu. It was hers.

Now and then, Doro courted her in his own way. He arrived with a new body—sometimes an appealing one. He paid attention to her, treated her as something more than only a breeding animal. Then, courting done, he took her from Isaac’s bed to his own and kept her there until he was certain she was pregnant. Still, Isaac urged her to use these times to tie Doro to her and strengthen whatever influence she had with him. But Anyanwu never learned to forgive Doro’s unnecessary killings, his casual abuse when he was not courting her, his open contempt for any belief of hers that did not concur with his, the blows for which she could not retaliate and from which she could not flee, the acts she must perform for him no matter what her beliefs. She had lain with him as a man while he wore the body of a woman. She had not been able to become erect naturally. He was a beautiful woman, but he repelled her. Nothing he did gave her pleasure. Nothing.

No …

She sighed and stared down at her daughter’s still face. No, her children gave her pleasure. She loved them, but she also feared for them. Who knew what Doro might decide to do to them? What would he do to this one?

She lay down close to Nweke, so that the girl would not awake alone. Perhaps even now, some part of Nweke’s spirit knew that Anyanwu was nearby. Anyanwu had seen that people in transition thrashed around less if she lay close to them and sometimes held them. If her nearness, her touch, gave them any peace, she was willing to stay close. Her thoughts returned to Thomas.

Doro had been angry with her. He never seemed to get truly angry with anyone else—but then, his other people loved him. He could not tell her that he was angry because she did not love him. Even he could not utter such foolishness. Certainly, he did not love her. He did not love anyone except perhaps Isaac and a very few of his other children. Yet he wanted Anyanwu to be like his many other women and treat him like a god in human form, competing for his attention no matter how repugnant his latest body nor even whether he might be looking for a new body. They knew he took women almost as readily as he took men. Especially, he took women who had already given him what he wanted of them—usually several children. They served him and never thought they might be his next victims. Someone else. Not them. More than once, Anyanwu wondered how much time she might have left. Had Doro merely been waiting for her to help this last daughter through transition? If so, he might be in for a surprise. Once Nweke had power and could care for herself, Anyanwu did not plan to stay in Wheatley. She had had enough of Doro and everything to do with him; and no person was better fitted to escape him than she was.

If only Thomas had been able to escape …

But Thomas had not had power—only potential, unrealized, unrealizable. He had had a long sparse beard when Doro took her to him, and long black hair clotted together with the grease and dirt of years of neglect. His clothing might have stood alone, starched as it was with layers of dirt and sweat, but it was too ragged to stand. In some places, it seemed to be held together by the dirt. There were sores on his body, ignored and filthy—as though he were rotting away while still alive. He was a young man, but his teeth were almost gone. His breath, his entire body, stank unbelievably.

And he did not care. He did not care about anything—beyond his next drink. He looked, except for the sparse beard, like an Indian, but he thought of himself as a white man. And he thought of Anyanwu as a nigger.

Doro had known what he was doing when in exasperation, he had said to her, “You think I ask too much of you? You think I abuse you? I’m going to show you how fortunate you’ve been!”

And he gave her to Thomas. And he stayed to see that she did not run away or kill the grotesque ruin of a man instead of sharing his vermin-infested bed.

But Anyanwu had never killed anyone except in self-defense. It was not her business to kill. She was a healer.

At first, Thomas cursed her and reviled her blackness. She ignored this. “Doro has put us together,” she told him calmly. “If I were green, it would make no difference.”

“Shut your mouth!” he said. “You’re a black bitch brought here for breeding and nothing more. I don’t have to listen to your yapping!”

She had not struck back. After the first moments, she had not even been angry. Nor had she been pitying or repelled. She knew Doro expected her to be repelled, but that proved nothing more than that he could know her for decades without really knowing her at all. This was a man sick in a dozen ways—the remnants of a man. Healer that she was, creator of medicines and poisons, binder of broken bones, comforter—could she take the remnants here and build them into a man again?

Doro looked at people, healthy or ill, and wondered what kind of young they could produce. Anyanwu looked at the sick—especially those with problems she had not seen before—and wondered whether she could defeat their disease.

Helplessly, Thomas caught her thoughts. “Stay away from me!” he muttered alarmed. “You heathen! Go rattle your bones at someone else!”

Heathen, yes. He was a god-fearing man himself. Anyanwu went to his god and said, “Find a town and buy us food. That man won’t sire any children as he is now, living mostly on beer and cider and rum—which he probably steals.”

Doro stared at her as though he could not think of anything to say. He was wearing a big burly body and had been using it to chop wood while Anyanwu and Thomas got acquainted.

“There’s food enough here,” he protested finally. “There are deer and bear and game birds and fish. Thomas grows a few things. He has what he needs.”

“If he has it, he is not eating it!”

“Then he’ll starve. But not before he gets you with a child.”

In anger that night, Anyanwu took her leopard form for the first time in years. She hunted deer, stalking them as she had at home so long ago, moving with the old stealth, using her eyes and her ears even more efficiently than a true leopard might. The result was as it had been at home. Deer were deer. She brought down a sleek doe, then took her human form again, threw her prize across her shoulders, and carried it to Thomas’ cabin. By morning, when the two men awoke, the doe had been skinned, cleaned, and butchered. The cabin was filled with the smell of roasting venison.

Doro ate heartily and went out. He didn’t ask where the fresh meat had come from or thank Anyanwu for it. He simply accepted it. Thomas was less trusting. He drank a little rum, sniffed at the meat Anyanwu gave him, nibbled at a little of it.

“Where’d this come from?” he demanded.

“I hunted last night,” Anyanwu said. “You have nothing here.”

“Hunted with what? My musket? Who allowed you to …”

“I did not hunt with your musket! It’s there, you see?” She gestured toward where the gun, the cleanest thing in the cabin, hung from a peg by the door. “I don’t hunt with guns,” she added.

He got up and checked the musket anyway. When he was satisfied, he came to stand over her, reeking and forcing her to breathe very shallowly. “What did you hunt with, then?” he demanded. He wasn’t a big man, but sometimes, like now, he spoke in a deep rumbling voice. “What did you use?” he repeated. “Your nails and teeth?”

“Yes,” Anyanwu said softly.

He stared at her for a moment, his eyes suddenly wide. “A cat!” he whispered. “From woman to cat to woman again. But how … ?” Doro had explained that since this man had never completed transition, he had no control over his ability. He could not deliberately look into Anyanwu’s thoughts, but he could not refrain from looking into them either. Anyanwu was near him and her thoughts, unlike Doro’s, were open and unprotected.

“I was a cat,” she said simply. “I can be anything. Shall I show you?”

“No!”

“It’s like what you do,” she reassured him. “You can see what I’m thinking. I can change my shape. Why not eat the meat? It is very good.” She would wash him, she decided. This day, she would wash him and start on the sores. The stink was unendurable.

He snatched up his portion of food and threw it into the fire. “Witch food!” he muttered, and turned his jug up to his mouth.

Anyanwu stifled an impulse to throw the rum into the fire. Instead, she stood up and took it from his hands as he lowered it. He did not try to keep it from her. She set it aside and faced him.

“We are all witches,” she said. “All Doro’s people. Why would he notice us if we were ordinary?” She shrugged. “He wants a child from us because it will not be ordinary.”

He said nothing. Only stared at her with unmistakable suspicion and dislike.

“I have seen what you can do,” she continued. “You keep speaking my thoughts, knowing what you should not know. I will show you what I can do.”

“I don’t want to—”

“Seeing it will make it more real to you. It isn’t a hard thing to watch. I don’t become ugly. Most of the changes happen inside me.” She was undressing as she spoke. It was not necessary. She could shrug out of the clothing as she changed, shed it as a snake sheds its skin, but she wanted to move very slowly for this man. She did not expect her nudity to excite him. He had seen her unclothed the night before and he had turned away and gone to sleep—leaving her to go hunting. She suspected that he was impotent. She had made her body slender and young for him, hoping to get his seed in her and escape quickly, but last night had convinced her that she had more work to do here than she had thought. And if the man was impotent, all that she did might not be enough. What would Doro do then?

She changed very slowly, took the leopard form, all the while keeping her body between Thomas and the door. Between Thomas and the gun. That was wise because when she had finished, when she stretched her small powerful cat-body and spread her claws leaving marks in the packed earth floor, he dived for his gun.

Claws sheathed, Anyanwu batted him aside. He screamed and shrank back from her. By his manner, arm thrown up to protect his throat, eyes wide, he seemed to expect her to leap upon him. He was waiting to die. Instead, she approached him slowly, her body relaxed. Purring, she rubbed her head against his knee. She looked up at him, saw that the protective arm had come down from the throat. She rubbed her fur against his leg and went on purring. Finally, almost unwillingly, his hand touched her head, caressed tentatively. When she had him scratching her neck—which did not itch—and muttering to himself, “My God!” She broke away, went over and picked up a piece of venison and brought it back to him.

“I don’t want that!” he said.

She began to growl low in her throat. He took a step back but that put him against the rough log wall. When Anyanwu followed, there was nowhere for him to go. She tried to put the meat into his hand, but he snatched the hand away. Finally, around the meat, she gave a loud, coughing roar.

Thomas sank to the floor terrified, staring at her. She dropped the meat into his lap and roared again.

He picked it up and ate—for the first time in how long, she wondered. If he wanted to kill himself, why was he doing it in this slow terrible way, letting himself rot alive? Oh, this day she would wash him and begin his healing. If he truly wanted to die, let him hang himself and be done with it.

When he had finished the venison, she became a woman again and calmly put on her clothing as he watched.

“I could see it,” he whispered after a long silence. “I could see your body changing inside. Everything changing …” He shook his head uncomprehending, then asked: “Could you turn white?”

The question startled her. Was he really so concerned about her color? Usually Doro’s people were not. Most of them had backgrounds too thoroughly mixed for them to sneer at anyone. Anyanwu did not know this man’s ancestry but she was certain he was not as white as he seemed to think. The Indian appearance was too strong.

“I have never made myself white,” she said. “In Wheatley, everyone knows me. Who would I deceive—and why should I try?”

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “If you could become white, you would!”

“Why?”

He stared at her hostilely.

“I’m content,” she said finally. “If I have to be white some day to survive, I will be white. If I have to be a leopard to hunt and kill, I will be a leopard. If I have to travel quickly across land, I’ll become a large bird. If I have to cross the sea, I’ll become a fish.” She smiled a little. “A dolphin, perhaps.”

“Will you become white for me?” he asked. His hostility had died as she spoke. He seemed to believe her. Perhaps he was hearing her thoughts. If so, he was not hearing them clearly enough.

“I think you will have to endure it somehow that I am black,” she said with hostility of her own. “This is the way I look. No one has ever told me I was ugly!”

He sighed. “No, you’re not. Not by some distance. It’s just that …” He stopped, wet his lips. “It’s just that I thought you could make yourself look like my wife … just a little.”

“You have a wife?”

He rubbed at a scabbed over sore on his arm. Anyanwu could see it through a hole in his sleeve and it did not look as though it was healing properly. The flesh around the scab was very red and swollen.

“I had a wife,” he said. “Big, handsome girl with hair yellow as gold. I thought it would be all right if we didn’t live in a town or have neighbors too near by. She wasn’t one of Doro’s people, but he let me have her. He gave me enough money to buy some land, get a start in tobacco. I thought things would be fine.”

“Did she know you could hear her thoughts?”

He gave her a look of contempt. “Would she have married me if she had? Would anyone?”

“One of Doro’s people, perhaps. One who could also hear thoughts.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said bitterly.

His tone made her think, made her remember that some of the most terrible of Doro’s people were like Thomas. They weren’t as sensitive, perhaps. Living in towns didn’t seem to bother them. But they drank too much and fought and abused or neglected their children and occasionally murdered each other before Doro could get around to taking them. Thomas was probably right to marry a more ordinary woman.

“Why did your wife leave?” she asked.

“Why do you think! I couldn’t keep out of her thoughts any more than I can keep out of yours. I tried not to let her know, but sometimes things came to me so clearly … I’d answer, thinking she had spoken aloud and she hadn’t and she didn’t understand and …”

“And she was afraid.”

“God, yes. After a while, she was terrified. She went home to her parents and wouldn’t even see me when I went after her. I guess I don’t blame her. After that there were only … women like you that Doro brings me.”

“We’re not such bad women. I’m not.”

“You can’t wait to get away from me!”

“What would you feel for a woman who was covered with filth and sores?”

He blinked, looked at himself. “And I guess you’re used to better!”

“Of course I am! Let me help you and you will be better. You could not have been this way for your wife.”

“You’re not her!”

“No. She could not help you. I can.”

“I didn’t ask for your—”

“Listen! She ran away from you because you are Doro’s. You are a witch and she was afraid and disgusted. I am not afraid or disgusted.”

“You’d have no right to be,” he muttered sullenly. “You’re more witch than I’ll ever be. I still don’t believe what I saw you do.”

“If my thoughts are reaching you even some of the time, you should believe what I do and what I say. I have not been telling you lies. I am a healer. I have lived for over three hundred and fifty years. I have seen leprosy and huge growths that bring agony and babies born with great holes where their faces should be and other things. You are far from being the worst thing I have seen.”

He stared at her, frowned intently as though reaching for a thought that eluded him. It occurred to her that he was trying to hear her thoughts. Finally, though, he seemed to give up. He shrugged and sighed. “Could you help any of those others?”

“Sometimes I could help. Sometimes I can dissolve away dangerous growths or open blind eyes or heal sores that will not heal themselves …”

“You can’t take away the voices or the visions, can you?”

“The thoughts you hear from other people?”

“Yes, and what I ‘see’. Sometimes I can’t tell reality from vision.”

She shook her head sadly. “I wish I could. I have seen others tormented as you are. I’m better than what your people call a doctor. Much better. But I am not as good as I long to be. I think I am flawed like you.”

“All Doro’s children are flawed—godlings with feet of clay.”

Anyanwu understood the reference. She had read the sacred book of her new land, the Bible, in the hope of improving her understanding of the people around her. In Wheatley, Isaac told people she was becoming a Christian. Some of them did not realize he was joking.

“I was not born to Doro,” she told Thomas. “I am what he calls wild seed. But it makes no difference. I am flawed anyway.”

He glanced at her, then down at the floor. “Well I’m not as flawed as you think.” He spoke very softly. “I’m not impotent.”

“Good. If you were and Doro found out … he might decide you could not be useful to him any longer.”

It was as though she had said something startling. He jumped, peered at her in a way that made her draw back in alarm, then demanded: “What’s the matter with you! How can you care what happens to me? How can you let Doro breed you like a goddamn cow—and to me! You’re not like the others.”

“You said I was a dog. A black bitch.”

Even through the dirt, she could see him redden. “I’m sorry,” he said after several seconds.

“Good. I almost hit you when you said it—and I am very strong.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I care what Doro does to me. He knows I care. I tell him.”

“People don’t, normally.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here. Things are not right to me merely because he says they are. He is not my god. He brought me to you as punishment for my sacrilege.” She smiled. “But he does not understand that I would rather lie with you than with him.”

Thomas said nothing for so long that she reached out and touched his hand, concerned.

He looked at her, smiled without showing his bad teeth. She had not seen him smile before. “Be careful,” he said. “Doro should never find out how thoroughly you hate him.”

“He has known for years.”

“And you’re still alive? You must be very valuable.”

“I must be,” she agreed bitterly.

He sighed. “I should hate him myself. I don’t somehow. I can’t. But … I think I’m glad you do. I never met anyone who did before.” He hesitated again, raised his night-black eyes to hers. “Just be careful.”

She nodded, thinking that he reminded her of Isaac. Isaac too was always cautioning her. Then Thomas got up and went to the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To the stream out back to wash.” The smile again, tentatively. “Do you really think you can take care of these sores? I’ve had some of them for a long time.”

“I can heal them. They will come back, though, if you don’t stay clean and stop drinking so much. Eat food!”

“I don’t know whether you’re here to conceive a child or turn me into one,” he muttered, and closed the door behind him.

Anyanwu went out and fashioned a crude broom of twigs. She swept the mounds of litter out of the cabin, then washed what could be washed. She did not know what to do about the vermin. The fleas alone were terrible. Left to herself, she would have burned the cabin and built another. But Thomas would not be likely to go along with that.

She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and the terrible little cabin still did not suit her. There were no clean blankets, there was no clean clothing for Thomas. Eventually, he came in wearing the same filthy rags over skin scrubbed pale and nearly raw. He seemed acutely embarrassed when Anyanwu began stripping the rags from him.

“Don’t be foolish,” she told him. “When I start on those sores, you won’t have time for shame—or for any other thing.”

He became erect. Scrawny and sick as his body was, he was, as he had said, not impotent.

“All right,” murmured Anyanwu with gentle amusement. “Have your pleasure now and your pain later.”

His clumsy fingers had begun fumbling with her clothing, but they stopped suddenly. “No!” he said as though the pain had to come first after all. “No.” He turned his back to her.

“But … why?” Anyanwu laid a hand on his shoulder. “You want to, and it’s all right. Why else am I here?”

He spoke through his teeth as though every word was hurting him. “Are you still so eager to get away from me? Can’t you stay a little while?”

“Ah.” She rubbed the shoulder, feeling the bones sharply through their thin covering of flesh. “The women take your seed and leave you as quickly as possible.”

He said nothing.

She stepped closer to him. He was smaller than Isaac, smaller than most of the male bodies Doro brought her. It was strange to be able to meet a man’s eyes without looking up. “It will be that way for me too,” she said. “I have a husband. I have children. And also … Doro knows how quickly I can conceive. I am always deliberately quick with him. I must take your seed and leave you. But I will not leave you today.”

He stared at her for a moment, the black eyes intent as though again he was trying to control his ability, hear her thoughts now when he wanted to hear them. She found herself hoping her child—his child—would have those eyes. They were the only things about him that had never needed cleaning or healing to show their beauty. That was surprising considering how much he drank.

He seized her suddenly, as though it had just occurred to him that he could, and held her tightly for long moments before leading her to his splintery shelf bed.

Doro came in hours later, bringing flour, sugar, coffee, corn meal, salt, eggs, butter, dry peas, fresh fruit and vegetables, blankets, cloth that could be sewn into clothing, and, incidentally a new body. He had bought or stolen someone’s small crudely made wagon to carry his things.

“Thank you,” Anyanwu told him gravely, wanting him to see that her gratitude was real. It was rare these days for him to do what she asked. She wondered why he had bothered this time. Certainly he had not planned to the day before.

Then she saw him looking at Thomas. The bath had made the most visible difference in Thomas’ appearance, and Anyanwu had shaved him, cut off much of his hair, and combed the rest. But there were other more subtle changes. Thomas was smiling, was helping to carry the supplies into the cabin instead of standing aside apathetically, instead of muttering at Anyanwu when she passed him, her arms full.

“Now,” he said, happily oblivious to Doro’s eyes on him. “Now we’ll see how well you can cook, Sun Woman.”

That stupid name,she thought desperately. Why had he called her that? He must have read it in her thoughts. She had not told him it was Doro’s name for her.

Doro smiled. “I never thought you could do this so well,” he said to her. “I would have brought you my sick ones before.”

“I am a healer,” she said. His smile terrified her for Thomas’ sake. It was a smile full of teeth and utterly without humor. “I have conceived,” she said, though she had not meant to tell him that for days—perhaps weeks. Suddenly, though, she wanted him away from Thomas. She knew Doro. Over the years, she had come to know him very well. He had given her to a man he hoped would repel her, make her know how well off she had been. Instead, she had immediately begun helping the man, healing him so that eventually he would not repel anyone. Clearly, she had not been punished.

“Already,” Doro said in mock surprise. “Shall we leave then?”

“Yes.”

He glanced toward the cabin where Thomas was.

Anyanwu came around the wagon and caught Doro’s arms. He was wearing the body of a round-faced very young-looking white man. “Why did you bring the supplies?” she demanded.

“You wanted them,” he said reasonably.

“For him. So he could heal.”

“And now you want to leave him before that healing is finished.”

Thomas came out of the cabin and saw them standing together. “Is something wrong?” he asked. Anyanwu realized later that it was probably her expression or her thoughts that alerted him. If only he could have read Doro’s thoughts.

“Anyanwu wants to go home,” said Doro blandly.

Thomas stared at her with disbelief and pain. “Anyanwu …?”

She did not know what to do—what would make Doro feel that he had extracted enough pain, punished her enough. What would stop him now that he had decided to kill?

She looked at Doro. “I will leave with you today,” she whispered. “Please, I will leave with you now.”

“Not quite yet,” Doro said.

She shook her head, pleaded desperately: “Doro, what do you want of me? Tell me and I will give it.”

Thomas had come closer to them, looking at Anyanwu, his expression caught between anger and pain. Anyanwu wanted to shout at him to stay away.

“I want you to remember,” Doro said to her. “You’ve come to think I couldn’t touch you. That kind of thinking is foolish and dangerous.”

She was in the midst of a healing. She had endured abuse from Thomas. She had endured part of a night beside his filthy body. Finally, she had been able to reach him and begin to heal. It was not only the sores on his body she was reaching for. Never had Doro taken a patient from her in the midst of healing, never! Somehow, she had not thought he would do such a thing. It was as though he had threatened one of her children. And, of course, he was threatening her children. He was threatening everything dear to her. He was not finished with her, apparently, and thus would not kill her. But since she had made it clear that she did not love him, that she obeyed him only because he had power, he felt some need to remind her of that power. If he could not do it by giving her to an evil man because that man obstinately ceased to be evil, then he would take that man from her now while her interest in him was strongest. And also, perhaps Doro had realized the thing she had told Thomas—that she would rather share Thomas’ bed than Doro’s. For a man accustomed to adoration, that realization must have been a heavy blow. But what could she do?

“Doro,” she pleaded, “it’s enough. I understand. I have been wrong. I will remember and behave better toward you.”

She was clinging to both his arms now, and lowering her head before the smooth young face. Inside, she screamed with rage and fear and loathing. Outside, her face was as smooth as his.

But out of stubbornness or hunger or a desire to hurt her, he would not stop. He turned toward Thomas. And by now, Thomas understood.

Thomas backed away, his disbelief again clear in his expression. “Why?” he said. “What have I done?”

“Nothing!” shouted Anyanwu suddenly, and her hands on Doro’s arms locked suddenly in a grip Doro would not break in any normal way. “You’ve done nothing, Thomas, but serve him all your life. Now he thinks nothing of throwing away your life in the hope of hurting me. Run!”

For an instant, Thomas stood frozen.

“Run!” screamed Anyanwu. Doro had actually begun struggling against her—no doubt a reflex of anger. He knew he could not break her grip or overcome her by physical strength alone. And he would not use his other weapon. He was not finished with her yet. There was a potentially valuable child in her womb.

Thomas ran off toward the woods.

“I’ll kill her,” shouted Doro. “Your life or hers.”

Thomas stopped, looked back.

“He’s lying,” Anyanwu said almost gleefully. Man or devil, he could not get a lie past her. Not any longer. “Run, Thomas. He is telling lies!”

Doro tried to hit her, but she tripped him, and as he fell, she changed her grip on his arms so that he would not move again except in pain. Very much pain.

“I would have submitted,” she hissed into his ear. “I would have done anything!”

“Let me go,” he said, “or you won’t live, even to submit. It’s truth now, Anyanwu. Get up.”

There was death frighteningly close to the surface in his voice. This was the way he sounded when he truly meant to kill—his voice went fiat and strange and Anyanwu felt that the thing he was, the spirit, the feral hungry demon, the twisted ogbanje was ready to leap out of his young man’s body and into hers. She had pushed him too far.

Then Thomas was there. “Let him go, Anyanwu,” he said. She jerked her head up to stare at him. She had risked everything to give him a chance to escape—at least a chance—and he had come back.

He tried to pull her off Doro. “Let him go, I said. He’d go through you and take me two seconds later. There’s nobody else out here to confuse him.”

Anyanwu looked around and realized that he was right. When Doro transferred, he took the person nearest to him. That was why he sometimes touched people. In a crowd, the contact assured his taking the one person he had chosen. If he decided to transfer, though, and the person nearest to him was a hundred miles away, he would take that person. Distance meant nothing. If he was willing to go through Anyanwu, he could reach Thomas.

“I’ve got nothing,” Thomas was saying. “This cabin is my future—staying here, getting older, drunker, crazier. I’m nothing to die for, Sun Woman, even if your dying could save me.”

With far less strength than Doro had in his current body, he pulled her to her feet, freeing Doro. Then he pushed her behind him so that he stood nearest to Doro.

Doro stood up slowly, watching them as though daring them to ran—or encouraging them to panic and run hopelessly. Nothing human looked out of his eyes.

Seeing him, Anyanwu thought she would die anyway. Both she and Thomas would die.

“I was loyal,” Thomas said to him as though to a reasonable man.

Doro’s eyes focused on him.

“I gave you loyalty,” Thomas repeated. “I never disobeyed.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “I loved you—even though I knew this day might come.” He held out a remarkably steady right hand. “Let her go home to her husband and children,” he said.

Without a word, Doro grasped the hand. At his touch, the smooth young body he had worn collapsed and Thomas’ body, thin and full of sores, stood a little straighter. Anyanwu stared at him wide-eyed, terrified in spite of herself. In an instant, the eyes of a friend had become demon’s eyes. Would she be killed now? Doro had promised nothing. Had not even given his worshiper a word of kindness.

“Bury that,” Doro said to her from Thomas’ mouth. He gestured toward his own former body.

She began to cry. Shame and relief made her turn away from him. He was going to let her live. Thomas had bought her life.

Thomas’ hand caught her by the shoulder and shoved her toward the body. She hated her tears. Why was she so weak? Thomas had been strong. He had lived no more than thirty-five years, yet he had found the strength to face Doro and save her. She had lived many times thirty-five years and she wept and cowered. This was what Doro had made of her—and he could not understand why she hated him.

He came to stand over her and somehow she kept herself from cringing away. He seemed taller in Thomas’ body than Thomas had.

“I have nothing to dig with,” she whispered. She had not intended to whisper.

“Use your hands!” he said.

She found a shovel in the cabin, and an adz that she could swing to break up the earth—probably the same tool Thomas had used to dress the timbers of his cabin. As she dug the grave, Doro stood watching her. He never moved to help, never spoke, never looked away. By the time she had finished a suitable hole—rough and oblong rather than rectangular, but large and deep enough—she was trembling. The gravedigging had tired her more than it should have. It was hard work and she had done it too quickly. A man half again her size would not have finished so soon—or perhaps he would have, with Doro watching over him.

What was Doro thinking? Did he mean to kill her after all? Would he bury Thomas’ body with the earlier nameless one and walk away clothed in her flesh?

She went to the young man’s body, straightened it, and wrapped it in some of the linen Doro had brought. Then, somehow, she struggled it into the grave. She was tempted to ask Doro to help, but one look at his face changed her mind. He would not help. He would curse her. She shuddered. She had not seen him make a kill since their trip from her homeland. He did kill, of course, often. But he was private about it. He arrived in Wheatley wearing one body and left wearing another, but he did not make the change in public. Also, he usually left as soon as he had changed. If he meant to stay in town for a while, he stayed wearing the body of a stranger. He did not let his people forget what he was, but his reminders were discreet and surprisingly gentle. If they had not been, Anyanwu thought as she filled in the grave, if Doro flaunted his power before others as he was flaunting it now before her, even his most faithful worshipers would have fled from him. His way of killing would terrify anyone. She looked at him and saw Thomas’ thin face recently shaved by her own hand, recently taught a small, thin-lipped smile. She looked away, trembling.

Somehow, she finished filling in the grave. She tried to think of a white man’s prayer to say for the nameless corpse, and for Thomas. But with Doro watching her, her mind refused to work. She stood empty and weary and frightened over the grave.

“Now you’ll do something about these sores,” Doro said. “I mean to keep this body for a while.”

Thus she would live—for a while. He telling her she would live. She met his eyes. “I have already begun with them. Do they hurt?”

“Not much.”

“I put medicine into them.”

“Will they heal?”

“Yes, if you keep very clean and eat well and … don’t drink the way he did.”

Doro laughed. “Tend these things again,” he said. “I want them healed as soon as possible.”

“But there is medicine in them now. It has not had time to work.” She did not want to touch him, even in healing. She had not minded touching Thomas, had quickly come to like the man in spite of his wretchedness. Without his uncontrolled ability hurting him, he would have been a good man. In the end, he was a good man. She would willingly bury his body when Doro left it, but she did not want to touch it while Doro wore it. Perhaps Doro knew that.

“I said tend the sores!” he ordered. “What will I have to do next to teach you to obey?”

She took him into the cabin, stripped him, and went over the sick, scrawny body again. When she finished, he made her undress and lie with him. She did not weep because she thought that would please him. But afterward, for the first time in centuries, she was uncontrollably sick.

CHAPTER 9

Nweke had begun to scream. Doro listened calmly, accepting the fact that the girl’s fate was temporarily out of his hands. There was nothing for him to do except wait and remind himself of what Anyanwu had said. She had never lost anyone to transition. She would not be likely to tarnish that record with the death of one of her own children.

And Nweke was strong. All Anyanwu’s children were strong. That was important. Doro’s personal experience with transition had taught him the danger of weakness. He let his thoughts go back to the time of his own transition and away from worry over Nweke. He could remember his transition very clearly. There were long years following it that he could not remember, but his childhood and the transition that ended that childhood were still clear to him.

He had been a sickly, stunted boy, the last of his mother’s twelve children and the only one to survive—just right for the name Anyanwu sometimes called him: Ogbanje. People said his brothers and sisters had been robust healthy-looking babies, and they had died. He had been scrawny and tiny and strange, and only his parents seemed to think it right that he had lived. People whispered about him. They said he was something other than a child—some spirit. They whispered that he was not the son of his mother’s husband. His mother shielded him as best she could while he was very young, and his father—if the man was his father—claimed him and was pleased to have a son. He was a poor man and had little else.

His parents were all he could recall that had been good about his youth. Both had loved and valued him extravagantly after eleven dead babies. Other people avoided him when they could. His were a tall, stately people—Nubians, they came to be called much later. It soon became clear to them that Doro would never be tall or stately. Eventually, it also became clear that he was possessed. He heard voices. He fell to the ground writhing with fits. Several people, fearful that he might loose his devils on them, wanted to kill him, but somehow, his parents protected him. Even then, he had not known how. But there was little, perhaps nothing, they would not have done to save him.

He was thirteen when the full agony of transition hit him. He knew now that that was too young. He had never known one of his witches to live when transition came that early. He had not lived himself. But unlike anyone he had managed to breed so far, he had not quite died either. His body had died, and for the first time, he had transferred to the living human body nearest to him. This was the body of his mother in whose lap his head had rested.

He found himself looking down at himself—at his own body—and he did not understand. He screamed. Terrified, he tried to run away. His father stopped him, held him, demanded to know what had happened. He could not answer. He looked down, saw his woman’s breasts, his woman’s body, and he panicked. Without knowing how or what he did, he transferred again—this time to his father.

In his once quiet Nile River village, he killed and killed and killed. Finally, his people’s enemies inadvertently rescued them. Raiding Egyptians captured him as they attacked the village. By then, he was wearing the body of a young girl—one of his cousins. Perhaps he killed some of the Egyptians too. He hoped so. His people had lived without the interference of Egypt for nearly two centuries while Egypt wallowed in feudal chaos. But now Egypt was back, wanting land, mineral wealth, slaves. Doro hoped he had killed many of them. He would never know. His memory stopped with the arrival of the Egyptians. There was a gap of what he later calculated to be about fifty years before he came to himself again and discovered that he had been thrown into an Egyptian prison, discovered that he now possessed the body of some middle-aged stranger, discovered that he was both more and less than a man, discovered that he could have and do absolutely anything.

It had taken him years to decide even approximately how long he had been out of his mind. It took more time to learn exactly where his village had been and that it was no longer there. He never found any of his kinsmen, anyone from his village. He was utterly alone.

Eventually, he began to realize that some of his kills gave him more pleasure than others. Some bodies sustained him longer. Observing his own reactions, he learned that age, race, sex, physical appearance, and except in extreme cases, health, did not affect his enjoyment of victims. He could and did take anyone. But what gave the greatest pleasure was something he came to think of as witchcraft or a potential for witchcraft. He was seeking out his spiritual kin—people possessed or mad or just a little strange. They heard voices, saw visions, other things. He did none of those things any longer—not since his transition ended. But he fed on those who did. He learned to sense them effortlessly—like following an aroma of food. Then he learned to gather reserves of them, breed them, see that they were protected and cared for. They, in turn, learned to worship him. After a single generation, they were his. He had not understood this, but he had accepted it. A few of them seemed to sense him as clearly as he sensed them. Their witch-power warned them but never seemed to make them flee sensibly. Instead, they came to him, competed for his attention, loved him as god, parent, mate, friend.

He learned to prefer their company to that of more normal people. He chose his companions from among them and restricted his killing to the others. Slowly, he created the Isaacs, the Annekes, the best of his children. These he loved as they loved him. They accepted him as ordinary people could not, enjoyed him, felt little or no fear of him. In one way, it was as though he repeated his own history with each generation. His best children loved him without qualification as his parents had. The others, like the other people of his village, viewed him through their various superstitions—though at least this time the superstitions were favorable. And this time, it was not his loved ones who fed his hunger. He plucked the others from their various settlements like ripe, sweet fruit and kept his special ones safe from all but sickness, old age, war, and sometimes, the dangerous effects of their own abilities. Occasionally, this last forced him to kill one of his special ones. One of them, drunk with his own power, displayed his abilities, drew attention to himself, and endangered his people. One of them refused to obey. One of them simply went mad. It happened.

These were the kills he should have enjoyed most. Certainly, on a sensory level, they were the most pleasurable. But in Doro’s mind, these killings were too much like what he had done accidentally to his parents. He never kept these bodies long. He consciously avoided mirrors until he could change again. At these times more than any others, he felt again utterly alone, forever alone, longing to die and be finished. What was he, he wondered, that he could have anything at all but an end?

People like Isaac and soon Nweke did not know how safe they were from him. People like Anyanwu—good, stable wild seed—did not know how safe they could be—though for Anyanwu herself, it was too late. Years too late, in spite of Isaac’s occasional pleas for her. Doro did not want the woman any longer—did not want her condemning stare, her silent, palpable hatred, her long-lived, grudge-holding presence. As soon as she was of no more use to Isaac, she would die.

Isaac paced around the kitchen, restless and frightened, unable to shut out the sound of Nweke’s screams. It was difficult for him not to go to her. He knew there was nothing he could do, no help he could give. People in transition did not respond well to him. Anyanwu could hold them and pet them and become their mother whether she actually was or not. And in their pain, they clung to her. If Isaac tried to comfort them, they struggled against him. He had never understood that. They always seemed to like him well enough before and after transition.

Nweke loved him. She had grown up calling him father, knowing he was not her father, and never caring. She was not Doro’s daughter either, but Isaac loved her too much to tell her that. He longed to be with her now to still the screaming and take away the pain. He sat down heavily and stared toward the bedroom.

“She’ll be all right,” Doro said from the table, where he was eating a sweet cake Isaac had found for him.

“How can even you know that?” Isaac challenged.

“Her blood is good. She’ll be fine.”

“My blood is good too, but I nearly died.”

“You’re here,” Doro said reasonably.

Isaac rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I don’t think I would feel this nervous if she were giving birth. She’s such a little thing—so like Anyanvru.”

“Even smaller,” Doro said. He looked at Isaac, smiled as though at some secret joke.

“She’s to be your next Anyanwu, isn’t she?” Isaac asked.

“Yes.” Doro’s expression did not change. The smile remained in place.

“She’s not enough,” Isaac said. “She’s a beautiful, lively young girl. After tonight, she’ll be a powerful young girl. But you’ve said she’d keep some of the mind-listening ability.”

“I believe she will.”

“It kills.” Isaac stared at the bedroom door, imagining the favored young stepdaughter turning vicious and bitter like his long-dead half-brother Lale, like his mother who had hanged herself. “That ability kills,” he repeated sadly. “It may not kill quickly, but it kills.” Poor Nweke. Even transition would not mean an end to her pain. Should he wish her life or death? And what should he wish for her mother?

“I’ve had people as good at mental communication as you are at moving things,” Doro said. “Anneke, for instance.”

“Do you think she’ll be like Anneke?”

“She’ll complete her transition. She’ll have some control.”

“Is she related to Anneke?”

“No.” Doro’s tone indicated that he did not wish to discuss Nweke’s ancestry. Isaac changed his approach.

“Anyanwu has perfect control over what she does,” he said.

“Yes, within the limits of her ability. But she’s wild seed. I’m tired of the effort it takes to control her.”

“Are you?” Nweke had stopped screaming. The room was suddenly still and silent except for Isaac’s two words.

Doro swallowed the last of his sweet. “You have something to say?”

“That it would be stupid to kill her. That it would be waste.”

Doro looked at him—a look Isaac had come to recognize, a look that gave him permission to say what Doro would not hear from others. Over the years, Isaac’s usefulness and loyalty had won him the right to say what he felt and be heard—though not necessarily heeded.

“I won’t take her from you,” Doro said quietly.

Isaac nodded. “If you did, I wouldn’t last long.” He rubbed his chest. “There’s something wrong with my heart. She makes a medicine for it.”

“With your heart!”

“She takes care of it. She says she doesn’t like being a widow.”

“I … thought she might be helping you a little.”

“She was helping me ‘a little’ twenty years ago. How many children have I gotten for you in the past twenty years?”

Doro said nothing. He watched Isaac without expression.

“She’s helped both of us,” Isaac said.

“What do you want?” Doro asked.

“Her life.” Isaac paused, but Doro said nothing. “Let her live. She’ll marry again after a while. She always has. Then you’ll have more of her children. She’s a breed unto herself, after all. Something even you’ve never seen before.”

“I had another healer once.”

“Did she live to be three hundred? Did she bear dozens of children? Was she able to change her shape at will?”

“He. And no to all three questions. No.”

“Then keep her. If she annoys you, ignore her for a while. Ignore her for twenty years or thirty. What difference would it make to you—or to her? When you go back to her, she’ll have changed in one way or another. But, Doro, don’t kill her. Don’t make the mistake of killing her.”

“I don’t want or need her any longer.”

“You’re wrong. You do. Because left alone, she won’t die or allow herself to be killed. She isn’t temporary. You haven’t accepted that yet. When you do, and when you take the trouble to win her back, you’ll never be alone again.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Isaac stood up, went to the table to look down on Doro. “If I don’t know the two of you and your needs, who does? She’s exactly right for you—not so powerful that you would have to worry about her, yet powerful enough to take care of herself and of others on her own. You might not see each other for years at a time, but as long as both of you are alive, neither of you will be alone.”

Doro had begun to watch Isaac with greater interest, causing Isaac to wonder whether he had really been too set in his ways to see the woman’s value.

“You said you knew about Nweke’s father,” Doro said.

Isaac nodded. “Anyanwu told me. She was so angry and frustrated—I think she had to tell someone.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“What difference does that make?” Isaac demanded. “Why bring it up now?”

“Answer.”

“All right.” Isaac shrugged. “I said I knew you—and her—so I wasn’t surprised at what you’d done. You’re both stubborn, vengeful people at times. She’s kept you angry and frustrated for years. You tried to get even. You do that now and then, and it only fuels her anger. The only person I pity is the man, Thomas.”

Doro lifted an eyebrow. “He ran. He sided with her. He had outlived his usefulness.”

Isaac heard the implied threat and faced Doro with annoyance. “Do you really think you have to do that?” he asked quietly. “I’m your son, not wild seed, not sick, not stranded halfway through transition. I could never hate you or run from you no matter what you did, and I’m one of the few of your children who could have made a successful escape. Did you think I didn’t know that? I’m here because I want to be.” Deliberately, Isaac extended his hand to Doro. Doro stared at him for a moment, then gave a long sigh and clasped the large, calloused hand in his own briefly, harmlessly.

For a time, they sat together in relaxed silence, Doro getting up once to put another log on the fire. Isaac let his thoughts go back to Anyanwu, and it occurred to him that what he had said of himself might also be true of her. She might be another of the very few people who could escape Doro—the way she could change her form and travel anywhere … Perhaps that was one of the things that bothered Doro about her. Though it shouldn’t have.

Doro should have let her go wherever she chose, do whatever she chose. He should only see her now and then when he was feeling lonely, when people died and left him, as everyone but her had to leave him. She was a healer in more ways than Doro seemed to understand. Nweke’s father had probably understood. And now, in her pain, no doubt Nweke understood. Ironically, Anyanwu herself often seemed not to understand. She thought the sick came to her only for her medicines and her knowledge. Within herself, she had something she did not know she had.

“Nweke will be a better healer than Anyanwu could ever be,” Doro said as though responding to Isaac’s thoughts. “I don’t think her mind reading will cripple her.”

“Let Nweke become whatever she can,” Isaac said wearily. “If she’s as good as you think she’ll be, then you’ll have two very valuable women. You’d be a damned fool to waste either of them.”

Nweke began screaming again—hoarse, terrible sounds.

“Oh God,” Isaac whispered.

“Her voice will soon be gone at that rate,” Doro said. Then, offhandedly, “Do you have any more of those cakes?”

Isaac knew him too well to be surprised. He got up to get the plate of fruit-filled Dutcholijkoecks that Anyanwu had made earlier. It was rare for another person’s pain to disturb Doro. If the girl seemed to be dying, he would be concerned that good seed was about to be lost. But if she were merely in agony, it did not matter. Isaac forced his thoughts back to Anyanwu.

“Doro?” He spoke so softly that the girl’s screams almost drowned his single word. But Doro looked up. He held Isaac’s gaze, not questioningly or challengingly, not with any reassurance or compassion. He only looked back. Isaac had seen cats stare at people that way. Cats. That was apt. More and more often, nothing human looked out of Doro’s eyes. When Anyanwu was angry, she said Doro was only a man pretending to be a god. But she knew better. No man could frighten her—and Doro, whatever he had failed to accomplish with her, had taught her to fear him. He had taught Isaac to fear for him.

“What will you lose,” Isaac said, “if you leave Anyanwu her life?”

“I’m tired of her. That’s all. That’s enough. I’m just tired of her.” He sounded tired—good, honest, human weariness, annoyance, and frustration.

“Then let her go. Send her away and let her make her own life.”

Doro frowned, looked as harassed as Isaac had ever seen him. Surely that was a good sign. “Think about it,” he said. “Finally to have someone who isn’t temporary—and wild seed that she is, you’ll have lifetimes to tame her. Surely she can feel loneliness too. She should be a challenge to you, not an annoyance.”

He said nothing more. It was not good to try to get promises from Doro. Isaac had learned that long ago. It was best to push him almost to agreement, then leave him alone. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes Isaac did it well enough to save lives. And sometimes he failed.

They sat together, Doro slowly eating olijkoecks and Isaac listening to the sounds of pain from the bedroom—until those sounds ceased, Nweke’s voice all but gone. The hours passed. Isaac made coffee.

“You should sleep,” Doro told him. “Take one of the children’s beds. It will be over when you wake.”

Isaac shook his head wearily. “How could I sleep not knowing?”

“All right, then, don’t sleep, but at least lie down. You look terrible.” Doro took Isaac by the shoulder and steered him into one of the bedrooms. The room was dark and cold, but Doro made a fire and lit a single candle.

“Shall I wait with you here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Isaac said gratefully. Doro brought a chair.

The screaming began again, and for a moment it confused Isaac.

The girl’s voice had become only a hoarse whisper long ago, and except for an occasional jarring or creaking of the bed and the harsh, ragged breathing of the two women, the house had been silent. Now there was screaming.

Isaac sat up suddenly and put his feet on the floor.

“What’s the matter?” Doro asked.

Isaac barely heard him. Suddenly he was up and running toward the other bedroom. Doro tried to stop him but Isaac brushed the restraining hands away. “Can’t you hear?” he shouted. “It’s not Nweke. It’s Anyanwu!”

It seemed to Doro that Nweke’s transition was ending. The time was right—early morning, a few hours before dawn. The girl had survived the usual ten to twelve hours of agony. For some time now, she had been silent, not screaming, or groaning or even moving around enough to shake the bed. That was not to say, though, that she could not move. Actually, the final hours of transition were the most dangerous. They were the hours in which people lost control of their bodies, not only feeling what others felt, but moving as others moved. This was the time when someone like Anyanwu, physically strong, unafraid, and comforting was essential. Anyanwu herself was perfect because she could not be hurt—or at least, not in any permanent way.

Doro’s people had told him this was the time they suffered most, too. This was the time when the madness of absorbing everyone else’s feelings seemed endless—when, in desperation, they would do anything to stop the pain. Yet this was also the time when they began to feel there was a way just beyond their reach—a way of controlling the madness, shutting themselves away from it. A way of finding peace.

But instead of peace for Nweke, there was more screaming, and there was Isaac springing up like a boy, running for the door, shouting that the screams were not Nweke’s, but Anyanwu’s.

And Isaac was right. What had happened? Had Anyanwu been unable to keep the girl alive in spite of her healing ability? Or was it something else, some other trouble with transition? What could make the formidable Anyanwu scream that way?

“Oh my God,” Isaac cried from within the bedroom. “What have you done? My God!”

Doro ran into the room, stood near the door staring. Anyanwu lay on the floor, bleeding from her nose and mouth. Her eyes were closed and she made no sound now at all. She seemed only barely alive.

On the bed, Nweke sat up, her body half concealed by the feather mattress. She was staring down at Anyanwu. Isaac had stopped for a moment beside Anyanwu. He shook her as though to rouse her and her head lolled over bonelessly.

He looked up and saw Nweke’s face over a bulge of feather-filled cloth. Before Doro could guess what he meant to do Isaac seized the girl, slapped her hard across the face.

“Stop what you’re doing!” he shouted. “Stop it! She’s your mother!”

Nweke put a hand to her face, her expression startled, uncomprehending. Doro realized that before Isaac’s blow, her face had held no expression at all. She had looked at Anyanwu, fallen and bleeding, with no more interest than she might have expressed in a stone. She had looked, but she had almost certainly not seen—did not see now. Perhaps she felt the pain of Isaac’s blow. Perhaps she heard him shouting—though Doro doubted that she was able to distinguish words. All that reached her was pain, noise, confusion. And she had had enough of all three.

Her small, pretty, empty face contorted, and Isaac screamed. It had happened before. Doro had seen it happen. Some people’s bodies survived transition well enough, but their minds did not. They gained power and control of that power, but they lost all that would have made that power meaningful or useful. Why had Doro been so slow to understand? What if the damage to Isaac could not be repaired? What if both Isaac and Nweke were lost?

Doro stepped over Anyanwu and around Isaac, who was now writhing on the floor, and to the girl.

He seized her, slapped her as Isaac had done. “That’s enough!” he said, not shouting at all. If his voice reached her, she would live. If it did not, she would die. Gods, let it reach her. Let her have her chance to come back to her senses—if she had any left.

She drew back from Doro like a cornered animal. Whatever she had done to hurt Isaac and perhaps kill Anyanwu, she did nothing to Doro. His voice had reached her—after a fashion.

She half leaped and half fell from the bed to get away from him and somehow she landed on Isaac. Anyanwu was farther away, as though she had been trying to escape when Nweke struck her down.

Also, Anyanwu was unconscious. She would probably never have known it if the girl had landed on her. But Isaac knew, and he reacted instantly to this new pain.

He gripped Nweke, threw her upward away from his pain-racked body—threw her upward with all the power he had used so many times to propel great ships out of storms. He did not know what he was doing any more than she did. He never saw her hit the ceiling, never saw her body flatten into it, distorted, crushed, never saw her head slam into one of the great beams and break and send down a grisly rain of blood and bits of bone and brain.

Her body fell toward Doro, rag-limp and ruined. Somehow he caught it, kept it from landing on Isaac again. The girl was lost. She would have been lost with such wounds had she been twice the healer Doro had hoped for. He put her body on the bed hastily and bent to see whether Isaac was also lost. Later, he would feel this. Later, perhaps he would leave Wheatley—leave it for several years.

Isaac’s face was pale—a gray, ugly color. He was still now, very still though not quite unconscious. Doro could hear him panting, trying to catch his breath. Trouble with his heart, he had said. Could Nweke have aggravated that somehow? Why not? Who was more suited to causing illness than one born to cure it?

Desperately, Doro turned to Anyanwu. The moment his attention was focused on her, he knew she was still alive. He could sense it. She felt like prey, not like a useless corpse. Doro took her hand, then released it because it felt limp and dead. He touched her face, leaned down close to her ear. “Can you hear me, Anyanwu?”

She gave no sign.

“Anyanwu, Isaac needs you. He’ll die without your help.”

Her eyes opened. She stared up at him for a second, perhaps reading his desperation on his face. “Am I on a rug?” she whispered finally.

He frowned wondering whether she too had gone out of her mind. But she was Isaac’s only hope. “Yes,” he said.

“Then use it to pull me close to him. As close as you can. Don’t touch me otherwise.” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t touch me.”

He moved back from her and drew her toward Isaac with the rug.

“She went mad,” Anyanwu whispered. “Her mind broke somehow.”

“I know,” Doro said.

“Then she tried to break everything inside me. Like being cut and torn from the inside. Heart, lungs, veins, stomach, bladder … She was like me, like Isaac, like … maybe like Thomas too—reaching into minds, seeing into my body. She must have been able to see.”

Yes. Nweke had been all Doro had hoped for and more. But she was dead. “Help Isaac, Anyanwu!”

“Go get me food,” she said. “Is there some stew left?”

“Can you reach Isaac?”

“Yes. Go!”

Trying to trust her, Dore, left the room.

Somehow, Anyanwu healed herself enough so that moving would not start her bleeding inside again. There was so much damage, and it had all been done so quickly, so savagely. When she changed her shape, she transformed organs that already existed and formed any necessary new organs while sustained by old ones. She was still partly human in most changes long after she had ceased to look human. But Nweke had all but destroyed organ after organ. If the girl had gone to work on her brain, Anyanwu knew she would have died before she could heal herself. Even now, there were massive repairs to be made and massive illnesses to be avoided. Even not touching her brain at all, Nweke had nearly killed her.

How could she make herself fit now to help Isaac? But she had to. She had known in the first year of their marriage that she had been wrong about him. He had been the best possible husband. With his power and hers, they had built this house. People came to watch them and watch for them so that no strangers happened by to see the witchcraft. Her strength had fascinated Isaac, but it had never disturbed him. His power she trusted absolutely. She had seen him carry great logs from the forest and strip them of bark. She had seen him kill wolves without touching them. In a fight once, she had seen him kill a man—a fool who had drunk too much and chosen to take offense at Isaac’s quiet, easy refusal to be insulted. The fool had a gun and Isaac did not. Isaac never went armed. There was no need. The man died as the wolves had died—instantly, his head broken and bloodied as though he had been bludgeoned. Afterward, Isaac himself was sickened by the killing.

Anyanwu had seen these things, but none of them had made her fear her husband as she had feared Doro. Sometimes Isaac tossed her about and she screamed or laughed or swore at him—whichever seemed right for the occasion—but she never feared him. And she never held him in contempt. “He has more sense than men two and three times his age,” she had told Doro when Isaac was young and she and Doro were on slightly better terms. In some ways, Isaac had more sense than Doro. And Isaac understood even better than she did that he would have to share her, at least with Doro. And she would have to share him with the women Doro gave to him. She was used to sharing a man, but she had had no experience in being shared. She did not like it. She grew to hate the sound of Doro’s voice identifying him, warning her that she must give him another child. Isaac accepted each of her children as though they were his own. He accepted her without bitterness or anger when she came to him from Doro’s bed. And somehow, he helped her to endure even when Doro strove to break and reshape her when her increasingly silent obedience ceased to be enough for him. Strangely, though she could not forgive Doro any longer even for small things, she felt no resentment when Isaac forgave him. The bond between Isaac and Doro was at least as firm as that between an ordinary father and a son of his body. If Isaac had not loved Doro, and if that love had not been returned strongly in Doro’s own way, Doro would have seemed totally inhuman.

She did not want to think what her life would be like without Isaac—how she would endure Doro without Isaac. Not since her first husband had she allowed herself to become so dependent on anyone, husband or child. Other people were temporary. They died—except for Doro. Why,why could it not be Isaac who lived and lived, and Doro who died?

She kissed Isaac. She had given him many such kisses as he grew old. They were of more than love. Within her body, she synthesized medicine for him. She had studied him very carefully, had aged herself, her own organs to study the effects of age. It had been dangerous work. A miscalculation could have killed her before she understood it enough to counter it. She listened closely as Isaac described the pain he felt—the fearful tightening, the squeezing within his chest, the dizziness, the too-rapid beating of his heart, the way the pain spread from his chest to his left shoulder and arm.

The first time he felt the pain—twenty years before—he had thought he was dying. The first time she managed to induce such pain in her body, she too had feared she was dying. It was terrible, but she lived as Isaac had lived, and she came to understand how old age and too much good, rich food could combine to steal away the youthful flexibility his blood vessels—especially, if her simulations had led her aright, the blood vessels that nourished his heart.

What needed doing, then? How could aging, fat-narrowed blood vessels be restored? She could restore her own, of course. Since the pain had not killed her, and since she understood what she had done to produce the disorder, she could simply, carefully replace the damaged vessels, then dissolve away the useless hardened tissue, become the physiologically young woman she had been since the time of her transition. But transition had not frozen Isaac in youth. It had paid him other wages, good wages, but was useless in prolonging his life. If only she could give him some of her power …

That was pointless dreaming. If she could not heal the damage age and bad habits had caused, she could at least try to prevent further damage. He must not eat so much any longer, must not eat some foods at all. He must not smoke or work so hard—not with his muscles nor with his witch-power. Both took a physical toll. He would save no more ships from storms. Lighter tasks were all right as long as they did not bring on pain, but she told Doro very firmly that unless he wanted to kill Isaac, he would have to find a younger man for his heavy lifting and towing.

That done, Anyanwu spent long painful hours trying to discover or create a medicine that would ease Isaac’s pain when it did come. In the end, she so tired and weakened herself that even Isaac begged her to stop. She did not stop. She poisoned herself several times trying plant and animal substances she had not used before, noting minutely her every reaction. She rechecked familiar substances, found that as simple a thing as garlic had some ability to help, but not enough. She worked on, gained knowledge that helped others later. For Isaac, she at last, almost accidentally created a potentially dangerous medicine that would open wide the healthy blood vessels he had left, thus relieving the pressure on his undernourished heart and easing the pain. When his pain came again, she gave him the medicine. The pain vanished and he was amazed. He took her into New York City and made her choose the finest cloth. Then he took her to a dressmaker—a black freedwoman who stared at her with open curiosity. Anyanwu began telling the woman what she wanted, but when she paused for breath, the dressmaker spoke up.

“You are the Onitsha woman,” she said in Anyanwu’s native language. And she smiled at Anyanwu’s surprise. “Are you well?”

Anyanwu found herself greeting a countrywoman, perhaps a kinswoman. This was another gift Isaac was giving her. A new friend. He was good, Isaac. He could not die now and leave her.

But this time, the medicine that had always worked seemed to be failing. Isaac gave no sign that his pain was ending.

He lay ashen, sweating and gasping for breath. When she lifted her head from him, he opened his eyes. She did not know what to do. She wanted to look away from him, but could not. In her experimenting, she had found conditions of the heart that could kill very easily—and that could grow out of the problem he already had. She had almost killed herself learning about them. She had been so careful in her efforts to keep Isaac alive, and now, somehow, poor Nweke had undone all her work.

“Nweke?” Isaac whispered as though he had heard her thought.

“I don’t know,” Anyanwu said. She looked around, saw how the feather mattress billowed. “She is asleep.”

“Good,” he gasped. “I thought I had hurt her. I dreamed …”

He was dying! Nweke had killed him. In her madness, she had killed him and he was worried that he might have hurt her! Anyanwu shook her head, thought desperately. What could she do? With all her vast knowledge, there must be something …

He managed to touch her hand. “You have lost other husbands,” he said.

She began to cry.

“Anyanwu, I’m old. My life has been long and full by ordinary standards, at least.” His face twisted with pain. It was as though the pain knifed through Anyanwu’s own chest.

“Lie by me,” he said. “Lie here beside me.”

She obeyed still weeping silently.

“You cannot know how I’ve loved you,” he said.

Somehow, she controlled her voice. “With you it has been as though I never had another husband.”

“You must live,” he said. “You must make your peace with Doro.”

The thought sickened her. She said nothing.

With an effort, he spoke in her language. “He will be your husband now. Bow your head, Anyanwu. Live!”

He said nothing more. There were only long moments of pain before he slipped into unconsciousness, then to death.

CHAPTER 10

Anyanwu had gotten shakily to her feet when Doro arrived with a tray of food. She was standing beside the bed staring at the ruin of Nweke’s body. She did not seem to hear Doro when he put the tray down on a small table near her. He opened his mouth to ask her why she was not caring for Isaac, but the moment he thought of Isaac, his awareness told him Isaac was dead.

His awareness had never failed him. In past years, he had prevented a number of people from being buried alive by the certainty of his ability. Yet now he knelt beside Isaac and felt at the neck for a pulse. Of course, there was none.

Anyanwu turned and stared at him bleakly. She was young. In restoring her nearly destroyed body, she had returned to her true form. She looked like a girl mourning her grandfather and sister rather than a woman mourning her husband and daughter.

“He did not know,” she whispered. “He thought it was only a dream that he had hurt her.”

Doro glanced upward where Nweke’s body had left bloody smears on the ceiling. Anyanwu followed his gaze, then looked down again quickly. “He was out of his mind with pain,” Doro said. “Then, by accident, she hurt him again. It was too much.”

“One terrible accident after another.” She shook her head dazed. “Everything is gone.”

Surprisingly, she went to the food, took the tray out to the kitchen where she sat down and began to eat. He followed and watched her wonderingly. The damage Nweke had done her must have been even greater than he had thought if she could eat this way, tearing at the food like a starving woman while the bodies of those she loved most lay cooling in the next room.

After a while, she said, “Doro, they should have funerals.”

She was eating a sweet cake from the plate Isaac had put on the table for Doro. Doro felt hungry too, but could not bring himself to touch food. Especially, not those cakes. He realized that it was not food he hungered for.

He had only recently taken the body he was wearing. It was a good, strong body taken from his settlement in the colony of Pennsylvania. Ordinarily, it would have lasted him several months. He could have used it to sire Nweke’s first child. That would have been a fine match. There was stability and solid strength in his Pennsylvania settlers. Good stock. But stress, physical or emotional, took its toll, made him hunger when he should not have, made him long for the comfort of another change. He did nothave to change. His present body would sustain him for a while longer. But he would feel hungry and uncomfortable until he changed. But he had no pressing reason to bear the discomfort. Nweke was dead; Isaac was dead. He looked at Anyanwu.

“We must give them a funeral,” she repeated.

Doro nodded. Let her have the ritual. She had been good to Isaac. Then afterward …

“He said we should make our peace,” she said.

“What?”

“Isaac. It was the last thing he said—that we should have peace between us.”

Doro shrugged. “We’ll have peace.”

She said nothing more. Arrangements were made for the funeral, the numerous married children notified. It did not matter whether they were Isaac’s children or Doro’s, they had grown up accepting Isaac as their father. And there were several foster children—those Anyanwu had taken in because their parents were unfit or dead. And there was everyone else. Everyone in town had known Isaac and liked him. Everyone would come now to show their respect.

But on the day of the funeral, Anyanwu was nowhere to be found. To Doro’s tracking sense, it was as though she had ceased to exist.

She flew as a large bird for a while. Then, far out at sea, she drifted down wearily to the water and took the long-remembered dolphin form. She had come down near where she saw a school of dolphins leaping through the water. They would accept her, surely, and she would become one of them. She would cause herself to grow until she was as large as most of them. She would learn to live in their world. It could be no more alien to her than the world she had just left. And perhaps when she learned their ways of communication, she would find them too honorable or too innocent to tell lies and plot murder over the still warm corpses of their children.

Briefly, she wondered how long she could endure being away from kinsmen, from friends, from any human beings. How long would she have to hide in the sea before Doro stopped hunting her—or before he found her. She remembered her sudden panic when Doro took her from her people. She remembered the loneliness that Doro and Isaac and her two now-dead grandchildren had eased. How would she stand it alone among the dolphins? How was it that she wanted to live so badly that even a life under the sea seemed precious?

Doro had reshaped her. She had submitted and submitted and submitted to keep him from killing her even though she had long ago ceased to believe what Isaac had told her—that her longevity made her the right mate for Doro. That she could somehow prevent him from becoming an animal. He was already an animal. But she had formed the habit of submission. In her love for Isaac and for her children, and in her fear of death—especially of the kind of death Doro would inflict—she had given in to him again and again. Habits were difficult to break. The habit of living, the habit of fear … even the habit of love.

Well. Her children were men and women now, able to care for themselves. She would miss them. No feeling was better than that of being surrounded by her own. Her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She could never have been content moving constantly as Doro moved. It was her way to settle and make a tribe around her and stay within that tribe for as long as she could.

Would it be possible, she wondered, to make a tribe of dolphins? Would Doro give her the time she needed to try? She had committed what was considered a great sin among his people: She had run away from him. It would not matter that she had done so to save her life—that she could see he meant to kill her. After all her submission, he still meant to kill her. He believed it was his right to slaughter among his people as he chose. A great many of his people also believed this, and they did not run when he came for them. They were frightened, but he was their god. Running from him was useless. He invariably caught the runner and killed him or, very rarely, brought him home alive and chastened as proof to others that there was no escape. Also, to many, running was heretical. They believed that since he was their god, it was his right to do whatever he chose with them. “Jobs” she called them in her thoughts. Like the Job of the Bible, they had made the best of their situation. They could not escape Doro, so they found virtue in submitting to him.

Anyanwu found virtue in nothing that had to do with him. He had never been her god, and if she had to run for a century, never stopping long enough to build the tribes that brought her so much comfort, she would do it. He would not have her life. The people of Wheatley would see that he was not all-powerful. He would never show himself to them wearing her flesh. Perhaps others would notice his failure and see that he was no god. Perhaps they would run too—and how many could Doro chase? Surely some would escape and be able to live their lives in peace with only ordinary human fears. The powerful ones like Isaac could escape. Perhaps even a few of her children …

She put away from her the memory that Isaac had never wanted to escape. Isaac was Isaac, set apart from other people and not to be judged. He had been the best of all her husbands, and she could not even attend his funeral rites. Thinking of him, longing for him, she wished she had kept her bird form longer, wished she had found some solitary place, some rocky island perhaps where she could mourn her husband and her daughter without fearing for her own life. Where she could think and remember and be alone. She needed time alone before she could be a fit companion for other creatures.

But the dolphins had reached her. Several approached, chattering incomprehensibly, and for a moment, she thought they might attack her. But they only came to rub themselves against her and thus become acquainted. She swam with them and none of them molested her. She fed with them, snatching passing fish as hungrily as she had eaten the finest foods of Wheatley and of her homeland. She was a dolphin. If Doro had not found her an adequate mate, he would find her an adequate adversary. He would not enslave her again. And she would never be his prey.

Book III

Canaan

1840

CHAPTER 11

The old man had lived in Avoyelles Parish in the state of Louisiana for years, his neighbors told Doro. He had married daughters, but no sons. His wife was long dead and he lived alone on his plantation with his slaves—a number of whom were reputed to be his children. He kept to himself. He had never cared much for socializing, even when his wife was alive—nor had she.

Warrick, the old man’s name was, Edward Warrick. Within the past century, he was the third human Doro had found himself drawn toward with the feeling that he was near Anyanwu.

Anyanwu.

He had not even said her name aloud for years. There was no one alive in the state of New York who had known her. Her children were dead. The grandchildren who had been born before she fled had also died. Wars had taken some of them. The War of Independence. The stupid 1812 War. The first had killed many of his people and sent others fleeing to Canada because they were too insular and apolitical for anyone’s taste. British soldiers considered them rebels and colonists considered them Tories. Many lost all their possessions as they fled to Canada, where Doro found them months later. Now Doro had a Canadian settlement as well as a reconstructed Wheatley in New York. Now, also, he had settlements in Brazil, in Mexico, in Kentucky, and elsewhere, scattered over the two large, empty continents. Most of his best people were now in the New World where there was room for them to grow and increase their power—where there was room for their strangeness.

None of that was compensation for the near destruction of Wheatley, though, just as there could be no compensation for the loss in 1812 of several of his best people in Maryland. These Marylanders were the descendants of the people he had lost when he found Anyanwu. He had reassembled them painstakingly and got them breeding again. They had begun to show promise. Then suddenly the most promising ones were dead. He had had to bring in new blood to rebuild them for a third time—people as much like them as possible. That caused trouble because the people who proved to be most like them in ability were white. There was resentment and hatred on both sides and Doro had had to kill publicly a pair of the worst troublemakers to terrify the others back into their habit of obedience. More valuable breeders wasted. Trouble to settle with the surrounding whites who did not know quite what they had in their midst …

So much time wasted. There were years when he almost forgot Anyanwu. He would have killed her had he stumbled across her, of course. Occasionally, he had forgiven people who ran from him, people who were bright enough, strong enough to keep ahead of him for several days and give him a good hunt. But he forgave them only because once caught, they submitted. Not that they begged for their lives. Most did not. They simply ceased to struggle against him. They finally came to understand and acknowledge his power. They had first given him good entertainment, then, fully aware, they gave him themselves. When pardoned, they gave him a kind of loyalty, even friendship, equal to what he received from the best of his children. As with his children, after all, he had given them their lives.

There had been times when he thought he might spare Anyanwu. There had even been moments when, to his amazement and disgust, he simply missed her, wished to see her again. Most often, however, he thought of her when he bred together her African and American descendants. He was striving to create a more stable, controlled Nweke, and he had had some success—people who could perceive and to some degree control the inner workings not only of their own bodies, but of the bodies of others. But their abilities were not dependable. They brought agony as often as they brought relief. They killed as often as they healed. They could perform what ordinary doctors saw as miracles—or, as easily, as accidentally, what the most brutal slaveholder would see as atrocities. Also, they did not live long. Sometimes they made lethal mistakes within their own bodies and could not correct them in time. Sometimes relatives of their dead patients killed them. Sometimes they committed suicide. The better ones committed suicide—often after an especially ghastly failure. They needed Anyanwu’s control. Even now, if he could, Doro would have liked to breed her with some of them—let her give birth to superior human children for a change instead of the animal young she must have borne over her years of freedom. But it was too late for that. She was spoiled. She had known too much freedom. Like most wild seed, she had been spoiled long before he met her.

Now, finally, he went to complete the unfinished business of killing her and gathering up any new human descendants.

He located her home—her plantation—by tracking her while she was in human form. It was not easy. She kept changing even though she did not seem to travel far. For days, he would have nothing to track. Then she turned human again and he could sense that she had not moved geographically. He closed in, constantly fearing that she would take bird or fish form and vanish for more years. But she stayed, drawing him across country to Mississippi, to Louisiana, to the parish of Avoyelles, then through pine woods and wide fields of cotton.

When he reached the house that his senses told him concealed Anyanwu, he sat still on his horse for several minutes, staring at it from a distance. It was a large white frame house with tall, unnecessary columns and a porch with upper and lower galleries—a solid, permanent-looking place. He could see slave cabins extending out away from the house, almost hidden by trees. And there was a barn, a kitchen, and other buildings that Doro could not identify from a distance. He could see blacks moving around the grounds—children playing, a man chopping wood, a woman gathering something in the kitchen garden, another woman sweating over a steaming caldron of dirty clothes which she occasionally lifted on her stick. A boy with arms no longer than his forearms should have been was bending low here and there collecting trash with tiny hands. Doro looked long at this last slave. Was his deformity a result of some breeding project of Anyanwu’s?