Wild Seed

Without quite knowing why he did it, Doro rode on. He had planned to take Anyanwu as soon as he found her—take her while she was off guard, still human and vulnerable. Instead, he went away, found lodging for the night at the cabin of one of Anyanwu’s poorer neighbors. That neighbor was a man, his wife, their four young children, and several thousand fleas. Doro spent a miserable, sleepless night, but over both supper and breakfast, he found the family a good source of information about its wealthy neighbor. It was from this man and woman that Doro learned of the married daughters, the bastard slave children, Mr. Warrick’s unneighborly behavior—a great sin in the eyes of these people. And there was the dead wife, the frequent trips Warrick made to who knew where, and most strangely, that the Warrick property was haunted by what the local Acadians called aloup-garou —a werewolf. The creature appeared to be only a large black dog, but the man of the family, born and raised within a few miles of where he now lived, swore the same dog had been roaming that property since he was a boy. It had been known to disarm grown men, then stand over their rifles growling and daring them to take back what was theirs. Rumor had it that the dog had been shot several times—shot point-blank—but never felled. Never. Bullets passed through it as though through smoke.

That was enough for Doro. For how many years had Anyanwu spent much of her time either away from home or in the form of a large dog. How long had it taken her to realize that he could not find her while she was an animal? Most important, what would happen now if she had spotted him somehow, if she took animal form and escaped. He should have killed her at once! Perhaps he could use hostages again—let his senses seek out those of her slaves who would make good prey. Perhaps he could force her back by threatening them. They would almost certainly be the best of her children.

The next morning Doro headed his black gelding up the pathway to Anyanwu’s mansion. As he reached it an adolescent boy came to take his horse. It was the boy with the deformed arms.

“Is your master at home?” Doro asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the boy softly.

Doro laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Leave the horse here. He’ll be all right. Take me to your master.” He had not expected to make such a quick decision, but the boy was perfect for what he wanted. Despite his deformity, he was highly desirable prey. No doubt Anyanwu treasured him—a beloved son.

The boy looked at Doro, unafraid, then started toward the house. Doro kept a grip on his shoulder, though he did not doubt that the boy could have gotten away easily. Doro was wearing the body of a short, slight Frenchman while the boy was well-muscled, powerful-looking in spite of his own short stature. All Anyanwu’s children tended to be short.

“What happened to your arms?” Doro asked.

The boy glanced at him, then at the foreshortened arms. “Accident, massa,” he said softly. “I tried to bring horses out of a stable fire. ‘Fore I could get ‘em out, de beam fell on me.” Doro did not like his slave patois. It sounded false.

“But …” Doro frowned at the tiny child’s arms on the young man’s body. No accident could cause such a deformity. “I mean were you born with your arms that way?”

“No, sir. I was born with two good arms—long as yours.”

“Then why do you have deformed arms now!” Doro demanded exasperated.

“ ‘Cause of de beam, massa. Old arms broken up and burnt. Had to grow new ones. Couple more weeks and dese be long enough.”

Doro jerked the boy around to face him, and the boy smiled. For a moment, Doro wondered whether he was demented—as warped of mind as he was of body. But the eyes were intelligent—even mocking now. It seemed that the boy was perfectly intelligent, and laughing at him.

“Do you always tell people you can do such things—grow new arms?”

The boy shook his head, straightened so that he met Doro’s eyes levelly. There was nothing of the slave in his gaze. When he spoke again, he ceased to make even his minimal effort to sound like a slave.

“I’ve never told any outsider before,” he said. “But I’m told that if I let you know what I can do and that I’m the only one who can do it, I’ll stand a better chance of living out the day.”

There was no point in asking who had told him. Somehow, Anyanwu had spotted him. “How old are you?” he asked the boy.

“Nineteen.”

“How old were you at transition?”

“Seventeen.”

“What can you do?”

“Heal myself. I’m slower at it than she is, though, and I can’t change my shape.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I suppose because my father couldn’t.”

“What could he do?”

“I never knew him. He died. But she says he could hear what people were thinking.”

“Can you?”

“Sometimes.”

Doro shook his head. Anyanwu had come almost as near to success as he had—and with far less raw material. “Take me to her!” he said.

“She’s here,” the boy said.

Startled, Doro looked around, searching for Anyanwu, knowing she must be in animal form since he had not sensed her. She stood perhaps ten paces behind him near a yellow pine sapling. She was a large, sharp-faced black dog, standing statue—still, watching him. He spoke to her impatiently.

“I can’t very well talk to you while you’re like that!”

She began to change. She took her time about it, but he did not complain. He had waited too long for a few minutes to matter.

Finally, human, female, and unself-consciously naked, she walked past him onto the porch. In that moment, he meant to kill her. If she had taken any other form, become anyone other than her true self, she would have died. But she was now as she had been over a hundred and fifty years—a century and a half—before. She was the same woman he had shared a clay couch with thousands of miles away, lifetimes ago. He raised his hand toward her. She did not see it. He could have taken her then and there without further trouble. But he lowered the hand before it touched her smooth, dark shoulder. He stared at her, angry with himself, frowning.

“Come into the house, Doro,” she said.

Her voice was the same, soft and young. He followed her in feeling oddly confused, suspended in time, with only the watchful, protective young son to jar him to reality.

He looked at the son, ragged and shoeless and dusty. The boy should have seemed out of place inside the handsomely furnished home, but somehow, he did not.

“Come into the parlor,” he said, catching Doro’s arm in his child-sized hands. “Let her put her clothes on. She’ll be back.”

Doro did not doubt that she would. Apparently, the boy understood his role as hostage.

Doro sat down in an upholstered armchair and the boy sat opposite him on a sofa. Between them was a small wooden table and a fireplace of carved black stone. There was a large oriental rug on the floor and several other chairs and tables scattered around the room. A maid in a plain clean blue dress and white apron brought brandy and looked at the boy as though daring him to have any. He smiled and did not.

The maid would have been good prey too. A daughter? “What can she do?” Doro asked when she was gone.

“Nothing but have babies,” the boy said.

“Did she have a transition?”

“No. She won’t either. Not as old as she is.”

A latent then. One who could pass her heritage on to her children, but could not use it herself. She should be bred to a near relative. Doro wondered whether Anyanwu had overcome her squeamishness enough to do this. Was that where this boy who was growing arms had come from? Inbreeding? Was his father, perhaps, one of Anyanwu’s older sons?

“What do you know about me?” he asked the boy.

“That you’re no more what you appear to be than she is.” The boy shrugged. “She talked about you sometimes—how you took her from Africa, how she was your slave in New York back when they had slaves in New York.”

“She was never my slave.”

“She thinks she was. She doesn’t think she will be again though.”

In her bedroom, Anyanwu dressed quickly and casually as a man. She kept her body womanly—she wanted to be herself when she faced Doro—but after the easy unclothed freedom of the dog body, she could not have stood the layers of tight clothing women were expected to wear. The male clothing accented her womanliness anyway. No one had ever seen her this way and mistaken her for a man or boy.

Abruptly, she threw her shirt to the floor and stood, head in hands, before her dressing table. Doro would break Stephen into pieces if she ran now. He would probably not kill him, but he would make him a slave. There were people here in Louisiana and in the other Southern states who bred people as Doro did. They gave a man one woman after another and when the children came, the man had no authority over what was done to them, no responsibility to them or to their mothers. Authority and responsibility were the prerogatives of the masters. Doro would do that to her son, make him no more than a breeding animal. She thought of the sons and daughters she had left behind in Doro’s hands. It was not likely that any of them were alive now, but she had no doubt of the way Doro had used them while they did live. She could not have helped them. It was all she had been able to do to get Doro to give his word not to harm them during her marriage to Isaac. Beyond that, she could have stayed with them and died, but she could not have helped them. And growing up as they had in Wheatley, they would not have wanted her help. Doro seduced people. He made them want to please him, made them strive for his approval. He terrified them into submission only when he could not seduce them.

And when he could not terrify them …

What could she do? She could not run again and leave him Stephen and the others. But she was no more able to help them by staying than she had been able to help her children in Wheatley. She could not even help herself. What would he do to her when she went downstairs? She had run away from him, and he murdered runaways. Had he allowed her to dress herself merely so that he would not have the inconvenience of taking over a naked body?

What could she do?

Doro and Stephen were talking like old friends when Anyanwu walked into the parlor. To her surprise, Doro stood up. He had always seemed lazily unconcerned with such courtesies before. She sat with Stephen on the sofa, noticing automatically that the boy’s arms seemed to be forming well. He had been so good, so controlled on that terrible day when he lost them.

“Go back to your work now,” she told him softly.

He looked at her, surprised.

“Go,” she repeated. “I’m here now.”

Clearly, that was what was concerning him. She had told him a great deal about Doro. He did not want to leave her, but finally, he obeyed.

“Good boy,” Doro commented, sipping brandy.

“Yes,” she agreed.

He shook his head. “What shall I do with him, Anyanwu? What shall I do with you?”

She said nothing. When had it ever mattered what she said to him? He did as he pleased.

“You’ve had more success than I have,” he said. “Your son seems controlled—very sure of himself.”

“I taught him to lift his head,” she said.

“I meant his ability.”

“Yes.”

“Who was his father?”

She hesitated. He would ask, of course. He would inquire after the ancestry of her children as though after the bloodline of a horse. “His father was brought illegally from Africa,” she said. “He was a good man, but … much like Thomas. He could see and hear and feel too much.”

“And he survived a crossing on a slave ship?”

“Only part of him survived. He was mad most of the time, but he was docile. He was like a child. The slavers pretended that it was because he had not yet learned English that he seemed strange. They showed me how strong his muscles were—I had the form of a white man, you see.”

“I know.”

“They showed me his teeth and his hands and his penis and they said what a good breeder he would be. They would have pleased you, Doro. They thought very much as you do.”

“I doubt it,” he said amiably. He was being surprisingly amiable. He was at his first stage—seeking to seduce her as he had when he took her from her people. No doubt by his own reasoning he was being extremely generous. She had run from him, done what no one else could do, kept out of his hands for more than a lifetime; yet instead of killing her at once, he seemed to be beginning again with her—giving her a chance to accept him as though nothing had happened. That meant he wanted her alive, if she would submit.

Her own sense of relief at this realization startled her. She had come down the stairs to him expecting to die, ready to die, and here he was courting her again. And here she was responding …

No. Not again. No more Wheatleys.

What then?

“So you bought a slave you knew was insane because he had a sensitivity you liked,” Doro said. “You couldn’t imagine how many times I’ve done things like that myself.”

“I bought him in New Orleans because as he walked past me in chains on his way to the slave pens, he called to me. He said, ‘Anyanwu! Does that white skin cover your eyes too?’ ”

“He spoke English?”

“No. He was one of my people. Not a descendant, I think; he was too different. In the moment he spoke to me, he was sane and hearing my thoughts. Slaves were passing in front of me all chained, and I was thinking, ‘I have to take more sunken gold from the sea, then see the banker about buying the land that adjoins mine. I have to buy some books—medical books, especially to see what doctors are doing now …’ I was not seeing the slaves in front of me. I would not have thought I could be oblivious to such a thing. I had been white for too long. I needed someone to say what he said to me.”

“So you brought him home and bore him a son.”

“I would have borne him many sons. It seemed that his spirit was healing from what they had done to him on the ship. At the end, he was sane nearly all the time. He was a good husband then. But he died.”

“Of what sickness?”

“None that I could find. He saw his son and said in praise, ‘Ifeyinwa!—what is like a child.’ I made that Stephen’s other name, Ifeyinwa. Then Mgbada died. I am a bad healer sometimes. I am no healer at all sometimes.”

“No doubt the man lived much longer and better than he would have without you.”

“He was a young man,” she said. “If I were the healer I long to be, he would still be alive.”

“What kind of healer is the boy?”

“Less than I am in some ways. Slower. But he has some of his father’s sensitivity. Didn’t you wonder how he knew you?”

“I thought you had seen me and warned him.”

“I told him about you. Perhaps he knew your voice from hearing it in my thoughts. I don’t ask him what he hears. But no, I did not see you before you arrived—not to know you, anyway.” Did he really think she would have stayed to meet him, kept her children here so that he could threaten them? Did he think she had grown stupid with the years? “He can touch people sometimes and know what is wrong with them,” she continued. “When he says a thing is wrong, it is. But sometimes he misses things—things I wouldn’t miss.”

“He’s young,” Doro said.

She shrugged.

“Will he ever grow old, Anyanwu?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated, spoke her hope in a whisper. “Perhaps I have finally borne a son I will not have to bury.” She looked up, saw that Doro was watching her intently. There was a kind of hunger in his expression—hunger that he masked quickly.

“Can he control his thought reading?” he asked, neutral-voiced.

“In that, he is his father’s opposite. Mgbada could not control what he heard—like Thomas. That was why his people sold him into slavery. He was a sorcerer to them. But Stephen must make an effort to hear other people’s thoughts. It has not happened by accident since his transition. But sometimes when he tries, nothing happens. He says it is like never knowing when he will be struck deaf.”

“That is a tolerable defect,” Doro said. “He might be frustrated sometimes, but he will never go mad with the weight of other people’s thoughts pressing in on him.”

“I have told him that.”

There was a long silence. Something was coming, and it had to do with Stephen, Anyanwu knew. She wanted to ask what it was, but then Doro would tell her and she would have to find some way to defy him. When she did … when she did, she would fail, and he would kill her.

“He is to me what Isaac was to you,” she whispered. Would he hear that as what it was—a plea for mercy?

He stared at her as though she had said something incomprehensible, as though he was trying to understand. Finally, he smiled a small, uncharacteristically tentative smile. “Did you ever think, Anyanwu, how long a hundred years is to an ordinary person—or a hundred and fifty years?”

She shrugged. Nonsense. He was talking nonsense while she waited to hear what he meant to do to her son!

“How do the years seem to you?” he asked. “Like days? Like months? What do you feel when good companions are suddenly old and gray and addled?”

Again, she shrugged. “People grow old. They die.”

“All of them,” he agreed. “All but you and I.”

“You die constantly,” she said.

He got up and went to sit beside her on the sofa. Somehow, she kept still, subdued her impulse to get up, move away from him. “I have never died,” he said.

She stared past him at one of the candlesticks on the mantel. “Yes,” she said. “I should have said you kill constantly.”

He was silenced. She faced him, looked into eyes that were large and wide-set and brown. He had the eyes of a larger man—or his current body did. They gave him a false expression of gentleness.

“Did you come here to kill?” she asked. “Am I to die? Are my children to become mares and studs? Is that why you could not leave me alone!”

“Why do you want to be alone?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. “Doro, tell me what is to happen.”

“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps eventually, I will bring your son a wife.”

“One wife?” she said, disbelieving.

“One wife here, as with you and Isaac. I never brought women to Wheatley for him.”

That was so. From time to time, he took Isaac away with him, but he never brought women to Isaac. Anyanwu knew that the husband she had loved most had sired dozens of children with other women. “Don’t you care about them?” she had asked once, trying to understand. She cared about each one of her children, raised each one she bore and loved it.

“I never see them,” he had answered. “They are his children. I sire them in his name. He sees that they and their mothers are well cared for.”

“So he says!” She had been bitter that day, angry at Doro for making her pregnant when her most recent child by Isaac was less than a year old, angry at him for afterward killing a tall, handsome girl whom Anyanwu had known and liked. The girl, understanding what was to happen to her, had still somehow treated him as a lover. It was obscene.

“Have you ever known him to neglect the needs of the children he claims?” Isaac had asked. “Have you ever seen his people left landless or hungry? He takes care of his own.”

She had gone away from Isaac to fly for hours as a bird and look down at the great, empty land below and wonder if there was nowhere in all the forests and rivers and mountains and lakes, nowhere in that endless land for her to escape and find peace and cleanness.

“Stephen is nineteen years old,” she said. “He is a man. Your children and mine grow up very quickly, I think. He has been a man since his transition. But he’s still young. You’ll make him an animal if you use him as you used Isaac.”

“Isaac was fifteen when I gave him his first woman,” Doro said.

“Then he had been yours for fifteen years. For you, Stephen will be as much wild seed as I was.”

Doro nodded agreeably. “It is better for me to get them before they reach their transitions—if they’re going to have transitions. What will you give me then, Anyanwu?”

She turned to look at him in surprise. Was he offering to bargain with her? He had never bargained before. He had told her what he wanted and let her know what he would do to her or to her children if she did not obey.

Was he bargaining now, then, or was he playing with her? What could she lose by assuming that he was serious? “Bring Stephen the woman,” she said. “One woman. When he is older, perhaps there can be others.”

“Do you imagine there are none now?”

“Of course not. But he chooses his own. I don’t tell him to breed. I don’t send him women.”

“Do women seem to like him?”

She surprised herself by smiling a little. “Some do. Not enough to suit him, of course. There is a widow paying a lot of attention to him now. She knows what she is doing. Left alone, he will find a good wife here when he is tired of wandering around.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t let him get tired of it.”

“I tell you, you will make an animal of him if you don’t!” she said. “Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other men. One thinks he is greater than another because he has more children. Both exaggerate the number of women who have borne them children, neither is doing anything a father should for his children, and the master who is indifferently selling off his own brown children is laughing and saying, ‘You see? Niggers are just like animals!’ Slavery down here opens one’s eyes, Doro. How could I want such a life for my son?”

There was silence. He got up, wandered around the large room examining the vases, lamps, the portrait of a slender white woman with dark hair and solemn expression. “Was this your wife?” he asked.

She wanted to shake him. She wanted to use her strength, make him tell her what he meant to do. “Yes,” she whispered.

“How did you like it—being a man, having a wife?”

“Doro …!”

“How did you like it?” He would not be rushed. He was enjoying himself.

“She was a good woman. We pleased each other.”

“Did she know what you were?”

“Yes. She was not ordinary herself. She saw ghosts.”

“Anyanwu!” he said with disgust and disappointment.

She ignored his tone, stared up at the picture. “She was only sixteen when I married her. If I hadn’t married her, I think she would have been put in an asylum eventually. People spoke about her in the way you just said my name.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“You should. Most people believe in a life that goes on after their bodies die. There are always tales of ghosts. Even people who think they are too sophisticated to be frightened are not immune. Talk to five people and at least three will have seen what they believe was a ghost, or they will know another person who has seen. But Denice really did see. She was very sensitive; she could see when no one else could—and since no one else could, people said she was mad. I think she had had a kind of transition.”

“And it gave her a private view into the hereafter.”

Anyanwu shook her head. “You should be less skeptical. You are a kind of ghost yourself, after all. What is there of you that can be touched?”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Of course.” She paused. “Doro, I will talk to you about Denice. I will talk to you about anyone, anything. But first, please, tell me what you plan for my son.”

“I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about you and your potential value to me.” He looked again at the portrait. “You were right, you know. I came here to finish old business—kill you and take your children to one of my settlements. No one has ever done what you did to me.”

“I ran from you and lived. Other people have done that.”

“Only because I chose to let them live. They had their freedom for only a few days before I caught them. You know that.”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly.

“Now, a century after I lost you, I find you young and well—greeting me as though we had just seen each other yesterday. I find you in competition with me, raising witches of your own.”

“There is no competition.”

“Then why have you surrounded yourself with the kinds of people I seek out? Why do you have children by them?”

“They need me … those people.” She swallowed thinking of some of the things done to her people before she found them. “They need someone who can help them, and I can help. You don’t want to help them, you want to use them. But I can help.”

“Why should you?”

“I’m a healer, Doro.”

“That’s no answer. You chose to be a healer. What you really are is what’s called in this part of the country loup-garou—a werewolf.”

“I see you’ve been talking to my neighbors.”

“I have. They’re right, you know.”

“The legends say werewolves kill. I have never killed except to save myself. I am a healer.”

“Most … healers don’t have children by their patients.”

“Most healers do as they please. My patients are more like me than any other people. Why shouldn’t I find mates among them?”

Doro smiled. “There is always an answer, isn’t there? But it doesn’t matter. Tell me about Denice and her ghosts.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, calming herself. “Denice saw what people left behind. She went into houses and saw the people who had preceded her there. If someone had suffered or died there, she saw that very clearly. It terrified her. She would go into a house and see a child running, clothing afire, and there would be no child. But two, ten, twenty years before, a child would have burned to death there. She saw people stealing things days or years before. She saw slaves beaten and tortured, slave women raped, people shaking with ague or covered with smallpox. She did not feel things as people do in transition. She only saw them. But she could not tell whether what she was seeing was actually happening as she saw it or whether it was history. She was slowly going mad. Then her parents gave a party and I was invited because I seemed young and rich and handsome—perhaps a good prospect for a family with five daughters. I remember, I was standing with Denice’s father telling lies about my origins, and Denice brushed past. She touched me, you see. She could see people’s past lives when she touched them just as she could see the past of wood and brick. She saw something of what I am even in that brief touch, and she fainted. I didn’t know what had happened until she came to me days later. I was the only person she had ever found to be stranger than herself. She knew all that I was before we married.”

“Why did she marry you?”

“Because I believed her when she told me what she could do. Because I was not afraid or ridiculing. And because after a while, we started to want each other.”

“Even though she knew you were a woman and black?”

“Even so.” Anyanwu stared up at the solemn young woman, remembering that lovely, fearful courting. They had been as fearful of marrying as they had been of losing each other. “She thought at first that there could be no children, and that saddened her because she had always wanted children. Then she realized that I could give her girls. It took her a long time to understand all that I could do. But she thought the children would be black and people would say she had been with a slave. White men leave brown children all about, but a white woman who does this becomes almost an animal in the eyes of other whites.”

“White women must be protected,” Doro said, “whether they want to be or not.”

“As property is protected.” Anyanwu shook her head. “Preserved for the use of owners alone. Denice said she felt like property—like a slave plotting escape. I told her I could give her children who were not related to me at all if she wished. Her fear made me angry even though I knew the situation was not her fault. I told her my Warrick shape was not a copy of anyone. I had molded myself freely to create it, but if she wished, I could take the exact shape of one of the white men I had treated in Wheatley. Then as with the dolphins, I could have young who inherited nothing at all from me. Even male young. She did not understand that.”

“Neither do I,” Doro said. “This is something new.”

“Only for me. You do it all the time—fathering or giving birth to children who are no blood kin to you. They are the children of the bodies you wear, even though you call them your own.”

“But … you only wear one body.”

“And you have not understood how completely that one body can change. I cannot leave it as you can, but I can make it over. I can make it over so completely in the image of someone else that I am no longer truly related to my parents. It makes me wonder what I am—that I can do this and still know myself, still return to my true shape.”

“You could not do this before in Wheatley.”

“I have always done it. Each time I learned a new animal shape, I did it. But I did not understand it very well until I began running from you. Until I began to hide. I bore dolphin young—and they were dolphins. Not human at all. They were the young of the dolphin Isaac caught and fed to us so long ago. My body was a copy of hers down to the smallest living part. There are no words for me to tell you how deep and complete such a change is.”

“So you could become another person so completely that the children you gave Denice were not really yours.”

“I could have. But when she understood, she did not want that. She said she would rather have no children at all. But that sacrifice was not necessary. I could give her girl children of my own body. Girl children who would have her coloring. It was hard work arranging all that. There are so many tiny things within even one cell of a human body. I could have given her a monstrosity if I had been careless.”

“I made you study these things by driving you away?”

“You did. You made me learn very much. Much of the time, I had nothing to do but study myself, try things I had not thought of before.”

“If you duplicated another man’s shape then, you could father sons.”

“The other man’s sons.”

Slowly, Doro drew his mouth into a smile. “That’s the answer then, Anyanwu. You’ll take your son’s place. You’ll take the place of a great many people.”

“You mean … for me to go here and there getting children and then forgetting about them?”

“Either you go or I’ll bring women to you here.”

She got up wearily, without even outrage to make her stiff and hostile. “You are a complete fool,” she told him quietly, and she walked into the hall, through the house, and out the back door. From there, through the trees she could see the bayou with its slow water. Nearer were the dependencies and the slave cabins that were not inhabited by slaves. She owned no slaves. She had bought some of the people who worked for her and recruited the others among freedmen, but those she bought, she freed. They always stayed to work for her, feeling more comfortable with her and with each other than they had ever been elsewhere. That always surprised the new ones. They were not used to being comfortable with other people.

They were misfits, malcontents, troublemakers—though they did not make trouble for Anyanwu. They treated her as mother, older sister, teacher, and, when she invited it, lover. Somehow, even this last intimacy did nothing to diminish her authority. They knew her power. She was who she was, no matter what role she chose.

And yet, she did not threaten them, did not slaughter among them as Doro did among his people. The worst she did was occasionally fire someone. Firing meant eviction. It meant leaving the safety and comfort of the plantation and becoming a misfit again in the world outside. It meant exile.

Few of them knew how difficult it was for Anyanwu to turn one of them out—or worse, turn a family out. Few of them knew how their presence comforted her. She was not Doro, breeding people as though they were cattle, though perhaps her gathering of all these special ones, these slightly strange ones would accomplish the same purpose as his breeding. She was herself, gathering family. No doubt some of these people were of her family, her descendants. They felt like her children. Perhaps, there had been intermarriage, her descendants drawn together by a comforting but indefinable similarity and not knowing of their common origins. And there were other people probably not related to her, who had rudimentary sensitivity that could become true thought reading in a few generations. Mgbada had told her this—that she was gathering people who were like his grandparents. He had told her she was breeding witches.

An old woman came up to her—a white woman, withered and gray, Luisa, who did what sewing she could for her keep. She was one of five white people on the place. There could have been many more whites, fitting in very comfortably, but the race-conscious culture made that dangerous. The four younger whites tried to lessen the danger by telling people they were octoroons. Luisa was a Creole—a French-Spanish mixture—and too old to care who knew it.

“Is there trouble?” Luisa asked.

Anyanwu nodded.

“Stephen said he was here—Doro, the one you told me about.”

“Go and tell the others not to come in from the fields until I call them in myself.”

Luisa stared hard at her. “What if he calls—with your mouth?”

“Then they must decide whether to run or not. They know about him. If they want to run now, they can. Later, if the black dog is seen in the woods again, they can come back.” If Doro killed her, he would not be able to use her healing or metamorphosing abilities. She had learned that from her stay in Wheatley. He could possess someone’s body and use it to have children, but he could use only the body. When he possessed Thomas so long ago, he had not gained Thomas’ thought-reading ability. She had never known him to use any extra ability from a body he possessed.

The old woman took Anyanwu by the shoulders and hugged her. “What will you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I have never seen him and I hate him.”

“Go,” Anyanwu told her.

Luisa hurried across the grass. She moved well for her age. Like Anyanwu’s children, she had lived a long, healthy life. Cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other diseases swept across the land and left Anyanwu’s people almost untouched. If they caught a disease, they survived it and recovered quickly. If they hurt themselves, Anyanwu was there to care for them.

As Luisa disappeared into the trees, Doro came out of the house. “I could go after her,” he said. “I know you sent her to warn your field hands.”

Anyanwu turned to face him angrily. “You are many times as old as I am. You must have some inborn defect to keep you from getting wisdom to go with your years.”

“Will you eventually condescend to tell me what wisdom you have gotten?” There was an edge to his voice finally. She was beginning to irritate him and end the seductive phase. That was good. How stupid of him to think she could be seduced again. It was possible, however, that she might seduce him.

“You were pleased to see me again, weren’t you?” she said. “I think you were surprised to realize how pleased you were.”

“Say what you have to say, Anyanwu!”

She shrugged. “Isaac was right.”

Silence. She knew Isaac had spoken to him several times. Isaac had wanted them together so badly—the two people he loved best. Did that mean anything at all to Doro? It had not years before, but now … Doro had been glad to see her. He had marveled over the fact that she seemed unchanged—as though he was only now beginning to realize that she was only slightly more likely to die than he was, and not likely at all to grow decrepit with age. As though her immortality had been emotionally unreal to him until now, a fact that he had accepted with only half his mind.

“Doro, I will go on living unless you kill me. There is no reason for me to die unless you kill me.”

“Do you think you can take over work I’ve spent millennia at?”

“Do you think I want to?” she countered. “I was telling the truth. These people need me, and I need them. I never set out to build a settlement like one of yours. Why should I? I don’t need new bodies as you do. All I need is my own kind around me. My family or people who feel like my family. To you, most of my people here wouldn’t even be good breeding stock, I think.”

“Forty years ago, that old woman would have.”

“Does that make it competition for me to give her a home now?”

“You have others. Your maid …”

“My daughter!”

“I thought so.”

“She is unmarried. Bring her a man. If she likes him, let her marry him and bear interesting children. If she doesn’t like him, then find her someone else. But she needs only one husband, Doro, as my son needs only one wife.”

“Is that what your own way of life tells them? Or shall I believe you sleep alone because your husbands are dead?”

“If my children show any signs of growing as old as I am, they may do as they please.”

“They will anyway.”

“But without you to guide them, Doro. Without you to make them animals. What would my son be in your hands? Another Thomas? You are going everywhere tending ten different settlements, twenty, and not giving enough of yourself to any of them. I am staying here looking after my family and offering to let your children marry mine. And if the offspring are strange and hard to handle, I will handle them. I will take care of them. They need not live alone in the woods and drink too much and neglect their bodies until they are nearly dead.”

To her surprise, he hugged her very much as Luisa had, and he laughed. He took her arm and walked her over to the slave quarters, still laughing. He quieted though as he pushed open a random door and peered into one of the neat, sturdy cabins. There was a large brick fireplace with a bake kettle down amid the nearly dead coals.

Someone’s supper bread. There was a large bed in one corner and a trundle bed beneath. There were a table and four chairs all of which looked homemade, but adequate. There was a cradle that also looked homemade—and much used. There were a wood box and a water bucket with its gourd dipper. There were bunches of herbs and ears of corn hung from the ceiling to dry and cooking utensils over and alongside the fireplace. Overall, the cabin gave the impression of being a plain but comfortable place to live.

“Is it enough?” Anyanwu asked.

“I have several people, black and white, who don’t live this well.”

“I don’t.”

He tried to draw her into the cabin toward the chairs or the bed—she did not know which—but she held back.

“This is someone else’s home,” she said. “We can go back into the house if you like.”

“No. Later, perhaps.” He put an arm around her waist. “You must feed me again and find us another earthen couch to lie on.”

And hear you threaten my children again,she thought.

As though in answer, he said: “And I must tell you why I laughed. It isn’t because your offer doesn’t please me, Anyanwu; it does. But you have no idea what kinds of creatures you are volunteering to care for.”

Didn’t she? Hadn’t she seen them in Wheatley?

“I’m going to bring you some of your own descendants,” Doro said. “I think they will surprise you. I’ve done a great deal of work with them since Nweke. I think you won’t be wanting to care for them or their children for long.”

“Why? What new thing is wrong with them?”

“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps your influence is just what they need. On the other hand, perhaps they will disrupt the family you’ve made for yourself here as nothing else could. Will you still have them?”

“Doro, how can I know? You haven’t told me anything.”

Her hair was loose and short and rounded as it had been when he first styled it for her. Now he put his hands on either side of it, pressing it to her head. “Sun Woman, either you will accept my people in this way that you have defined or you will come with me, taking mates when and where I command, or you will give me your children. One way or another, you will serve me. What is your choice?”

Yes,she thought bitterly.Now the threats. “Bring me my grandchildren,” she said. “Even though they have never seen me, they will remember me. Their bodies will remember me down to the smallest structures of their flesh. You cannot know how well people’s bodies remember their ancestors.”

“You will teach me,” he said. “You seem to have learned a great deal since I saw you last. I’ve been breeding people nearly all my life and I still don’t know why some things work and others don’t, or why a thing will work only some of the time even with the same couple. You will teach me.”

“You will not harm my people?” she asked, watching him carefully.

“What do they know about me?”

“Everything. I thought if you ever found us, there wouldn’t be time for me to explain the danger.”

“Tell them to obey me.”

She winced as though in pain and looked away. “You cannot always take everything,” she said. “Or just take my life. What is the good of living on and on and having nothing?”

There was silence for a moment. “Did they obey Denice?” he asked finally. “Or Mgbada?”

“Sometimes. They are a very independent people.”

“But they obey you.”

“Yes.”

“Then tell them to obey me. If you don’t, I’ll have to tell them myself—in whichever way they understand.”

“Don’t hurt them!”

He shrugged. “If they obey me, I won’t.”

He was making a new Wheatley. He had settlements everywhere, families everywhere. She had only one, and he was taking it. He had taken her from one people and driven her from another, and now, he was casually reaching out to strip her of a third. And she was wrong. She could live on and on and have nothing. She would. He would see to it.

CHAPTER 12

Anyanwu had never watched a group like her own break apart. She did not know whether there had ever before been a group like her own. Certainly, once Doro began to spend time at the plantation, exercising his authority as he chose while Anyanwu stood by and said nothing, the character of the group began to change. When he brought Joseph Toler as husband for one of Anyanwu’s daughters, the young man changed the group more by refusing to do work of any kind. His foster parents had pampered him, allowed him to spend his time drinking and gambling and bedding young women. But he was a beautiful young man—honey-colored with curly black hair, tall and slender. Anyanwu’s daughter Margaret Nneka was fascinated by him. She accepted him very quickly. Few other people on the plantation accepted him at all. He was not doing his share of the work, yet he could not be fired and sent away. He could, however, make a great deal of trouble. He had been on the plantation for only a few weeks when he went too far and lost a fist fight with Anyanwu’s son Stephen.

Anyanwu was alone when Stephen came to tell her what had happened. She had just come from treating a four-year-old who had wandered down to the bayou and surprised a water moccasin. She had been able to manufacture within her own body a medicine to counter the poison easily, since one of the first things she had done on settling in Louisiana was allow herself to be bitten by such a snake. By now, countering the poison was almost second nature to her. She did like to have a meal afterward, though; thus Stephen, bruised and disheveled, found her in the dining room eating.

“You’ve got to get rid of that lazy, worthless bastard,” he said.

Anyanwu sighed. There was no need to ask who the boy meant. “What has he done?”

“Tried to rape Helen.”

Anyanwu dropped the piece of cornbread she had been about to bite. Helen was her youngest daughter—eleven years old. “He what!”

“I caught them in the Duran cabin. He was tearing her clothes off.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. She’s in her room.”

Anyanwu stood up. “I’ll see her in a little while, then. Where is he?”

“Lying in front of the Duran cabin.”

She went out, not knowing whether she was going to give the young man another beating or help him if Stephen had hurt him seriously. But what kind of animal was he to try to rape a child? How could Anyanwu possibly tolerate him here after this? Doro would have to take him away, breeding be damned.

The young man was not beautiful when Anyanwu found him. He was half again as large as Stephen and strong in spite of his indolence, but Stephen had inherited much of Anyanwu’s strength. And he knew how to administer a good beating, even with his tender, newly finished arms and hands.

The young man’s face was a lumpy mass of bruised tissue. His nose was broken and bleeding. The flesh around his eyes was grotesquely swollen. The left ear was torn nearly off. He would lose it and look like one of the slaves marked and sold South for running away.

His body was so bruised beneath his shirt that Anyanwu was certain he had broken ribs. And he was lacking several of his front teeth. He would never be beautiful again. He began to come to as Anyanwu was probing at his ribs. He grunted, cursed, coughed, and with the cough, twisted in agony.

“Be still,” Anyanwu said. “Breathe shallowly, and try not to cough any more.”

The young man whimpered.

“Be thankful Stephen caught you,” she said. “If it had been me, you would take no more interest in women, I promise you. Not for the rest of your life.”

In spite of his pain, the young man cringed away from her, clutching himself protectively.

“What can there be in you worth inflicting on descendants?” she asked in disgust. She made him stand up, ignoring his weakness, his moans of pain. “Now get into the house!” she said. “Or go lie in the barn with the other animals.”

He made it into the house, did not pass out until he reached the stairs. Anyanwu carried him up to a small, hot attic bedroom, washed him, bandaged his ribs, and left him there with water, bread, and a little fruit. She could have given him something to ease his pain, but she did not.

The little girl, Helen, lay asleep on her bed still wearing her torn dress. Her face was swollen on one side as though from a heavy blow, and the sight of it made Anyanwu want to give the young man another beating. Instead, she woke the child gently.

In spite of her gentleness, Helen awoke with a start and cried out.

“You are safe,” Anyanwu told her. “I’m here.”

The child clung to her, not weeping, only holding tightly, holding with all her strength.

“Are you hurt?” Anyanwu asked. “Did he hurt you?”

The girl did not respond.

“Obiageli, are you hurt?”

The girl lay down again slowly and looked up at her. “He came into my thoughts,” she said. “I could feel him come in.”

“… into your thoughts?”

“I could feel it. I knew it was him. He wanted me to go to Tina Duran’s house.”

“He made you go?”

“I don’t know.” Finally, the child began to cry. She pulled her pillow around her swollen face and wept into it. Anyanwu rubbed her shoulders and her neck and let her cry. She did not think the girl was crying because she had nearly been raped.

“Obiageli,” she whispered. Before the girl’s birth, a childless white woman named Helen Matthews had asked Anyanwu to give a child her name. Anyanwu had never liked the name Helen, but the white woman had been a good friend—one of those who had overcome her own upbringing and her neighbors’ noisy mouths and come to live on the plantation. She had never been able to have children, had been past the age of bearing when she met Anyanwu. Thus, Anyanwu’s youngest daughter was named Helen. And Helen was the daughter Anyanwu most often called by her second name, Obiageli. Somehow, she had lost that custom with the others.

“Obiageli, tell me all that he did.”

After a while, the girl sniffed, turned over, and wiped her face. She lay still, staring up at the ceiling, one small frown between her eyes.

“I was getting water,” she said. “I wanted to help Rita.” This was the os rouge cook—a woman of black and Indian ancestry and Spanish appearance. “She needed water, so I was at the well. He came to talk to me. He said I was pretty. He said he liked little girls. He said he had liked me for a long time.”

“I should have thrown him into the pigsty,” muttered Anyanwu. “Let his body wallow in shit so that it could be fit for his mind.”

“I tried to go take the water to Rita,” the girl continued. “But he told me to come with him. I went. I didn’t like to go, but I could feel him in my thoughts. Then I was away from myself—someplace else watching myself walk with him. I tried to turn back, but I couldn’t. My legs were walking without me.” She stopped, looked at Anyanwu. “I never knew if Stephen was looking into my thoughts.”

“But Stephen can only look,” Anyanwu said. “He can’t make you do anything.”

“He wouldn’t anyway.”

“No.”

Eyes downcast, the girl continued. “We went into Tina’s cabin and he was closing the door when I found I could move my legs again. I ran out the door before he could get it shut. Then he took back my legs and I screamed and fell. I thought he would make me walk back, but he came out and grabbed me and dragged me back. I think that was when Stephen saw us.” She looked up. “Did Stephen kill him?”

“No.” Anyanwu shuddered, not wanting to think of what Doro might have done to Stephen if Stephen had killed the worthless Joseph. If there had to be killing, she must do it. Probably no one on the plantation disliked killing more than she did, but she had to protect her people from both Doro’s malicious strangers and Doro himself. Still, she hoped Joseph would behave himself until Doro returned and took him away.

“Stephen should have killed him,” Helen said softly. “Now maybe he’ll make my legs move again. Or maybe he’ll do something worse.” She shook her head, her child’s face hard and old.

Anyanwu took her hand, remembering—remembering Lale, her Isaac’s unlikely, unworthy brother. In all her time with Doro, she had not met another of his people as determinedly vicious as Lale.

Until now, perhaps. Why had Doro given her such a man? And why had he not at least warned her?

“What will you do with him?” the girl asked.

“Have Doro take him away.”

“Will Doro do that—just because you say so?”

Anyanwu winced.Just because you say so … How long had things been going on on the plantation just because she said so? People had been content with what she said. If they had problems they could not solve, they came to her. If they quarreled and could not settle matters themselves, they came to her. She had never invited them to come to her with their troubles, but she had never turned them away either. They had made her their final authority. Now her eleven-year-old daughter wanted to know if a thing would happen just because she said so. Her eleven-year-old! It had taken time, patience, and at least some wisdom to build the people’s confidence in her. It took only a few weeks of Doro’s presence to erode that confidence so badly that even her children doubted her.

“Will Doro take him away?” the girl persisted.

“Yes,” Anyanwu said quietly. “I will see to it.”

That night, Stephen walked in his sleep for the first time in his life. He walked out onto the upper gallery of the porch and fell or jumped off.

There was no disturbance; Stephen did not cry out. At dawn, old Luisa found him sprawled on the ground, his neck so twisted that Luisa was not surprised to find his body cold.

The old woman climbed the stairs herself to wake Anyanwu and take her to an upstairs sitting room away from the young daughter who was sleeping with her. The daughter, Helen, slept on, content, moving over a little into the warm place Anyanwu had left.

In the sitting room, Luisa stood hesitant, silent before Anyanwu, longing for a way to ease the terrible news. Anyanwu did not know how she was loved, Luisa thought. She gathered people to her and cared for them and helped them care for each other. Luisa had a sensitivity that had made closeness with other people a torture to her for most of her life. Somehow, she had endured a childhood and adolescence on a true plantation, where the ordinary accepted cruelties of slaveholder to slave drove her away into a marriage that she should not have made. People thought she was merely kind and womanishly unrealistic to be in such sympathy with slaves. They did not understand that far too much of the time, she literally felt what the slaves felt, shared fragments of their meager pleasure and far too many fragments of their pain. She had had none of Stephen’s control, had never completed the agonizing change that she knew had come to the young man two years before. The man-thing called Doro had told her this was because her ancestry was wrong. He said she was descended from his people. It was his fault then that she had lived her life knowing of her husband’s contempt and her children’s indifference. It was his fault that she had been sixty years old before she found people whose presence she could endure without pain—people she could love and be loved by. She was “grandmother” to all the children here. Some of them actually lived in her cabin because their parents could not or would not care for them. Luisa thought some parents were too sensitive to any negative or rebellious feelings in their children. Anyanwu thought it was more than that—that some people did not want any children around them, rebellious or not. She said some of Doro’s people were that way. Anyanwu took in stray children herself—as well as stray adults. Her son had shown signs of becoming much like her. Now, that son was dead.

“What is it?” Anyanwu asked her. “What has happened?”

“An accident,” Luisa said, longing to spare her.

“Is it Joseph?”

“Joseph!” That son of a whore Doro had brought to marry one of Anyanwu’s daughters. “Would I care if it were Joseph?”

“Who then? Tell me, Luisa.”

The old woman took a deep breath. “Your son,” she said. “Stephen is dead.”

There was a long, terrible silence. Anyanwu sat frozen, stunned. Luisa wished she would wail with a mother’s grief so that Luisa could comfort her. But Anyanwu never wailed.

“How could he die?” Anyanwu whispered. “He was nineteen. He was a healer. How could he die?”

“I don’t know. He … fell.”

“From where?”

“Upstairs. From the gallery.”

“But how? Why?”

“How can I know, Anyanwu? It happened last night. It … must have. I only found him a few moments ago.”

“Show me!”

She would have gone down in her gown, but Luisa seized a cloak from her bedroom and wrapped her in it. She noticed as she left with Anyanwu that the little girl was moving restlessly in her sleep, moaning softly. A nightmare?

Outside, others had discovered Stephen’s body. Two children stood back, staring at him wide-eyed, and a woman knelt beside him wailing as Anyanwu would not.

The woman was Iye, a tall, handsome, solemn woman of utterly confused ancestry—French and African, Spanish and Indian. The mixture blended all too well in her. Luisa knew her to have thirty-six years, but she could have passed easily for a woman of twenty-six or even younger. The children were her son and daughter and the one in her belly would be Stephen’s son or daughter. She had married a husband who loved wine better than he could love any woman, and wine had finally killed him. Anyanwu had found her destitute with her two babies, selling herself to get food for them, and considering very seriously whether she should take her husband’s rusty knife and cut their throats and then her own.

Anyanwu had given her a home and hope. Stephen, when he was old enough, had given her something more. Luisa could remember Anyanwu shaking her head over the match, saying, “She is like a bitch in heat around him! You would never know from her behavior that she could be his mother.”

And Luisa had laughed. “You should hear yourself, Anyanwu. Better yet, you should see yourself when you find a man that you want.”

“I am not like that!” Anyanwu had been indignant.

“Of course not. You are very much better—and very much older.”

And Anyanwu, being Anyanwu, had gone from angry silence to easy laughter. “No doubt he will be a better husband someday for having known her,” she said.

“Or perhaps he will surprise you and marry her,” Luisa countered. “Despite their ages, there is more than the ordinary pull between them. She is like him. She has some of what he has, some of the power. She cannot use it, but it is there. I can feel it in her sometimes—especially in those times when she is hottest after him.”

Anyanwu had ignored this, preferring to believe that eventually her son would make a suitable marriage. Even now, Luisa did not know whether Anyanwu knew of the child coming. There was nothing showing yet, but Iye had told Luisa. She would not have told Anyanwu.

Now, Anyanwu went to the body, bent to touch the cold flesh of the throat. Iye saw her and started to move away, but Anyanwu caught her hand. “We both mourn,” she said softly.

Iye hid her face and continued to weep. It was her youngest child, a boy of eight years, whose scream stopped both her crying and Anyanwu’s more silent grief.

At the boy’s cry, everyone looked at him, then upward at the gallery where he was looking. There, Helen was slowly climbing over the railing.

Instantly, Anyanwu moved. Luisa had never seen a human being move that quickly. When Helen jumped, Anyanwu was in position beneath her. Anyanwu caught her in careful, cushioning fashion, so that even though the girl had dived off the railing head first, her head did not strike the ground. Neither her head nor her neck were injured. She was almost as large as Anyanwu, but Anyanwu was clearly not troubled by her size or weight. By the time Luisa realized what was happening, it was over. Anyanwu was calming her weeping daughter.

“Why did she do it?” Luisa asked. “What is happening?”

Anyanwu shook her head, clearly frightened, bewildered.

“It was Joseph,” Helen said at last. “He moved my legs again. I thought it was only a dream until …” She looked up at the gallery, then at her mother who still held her. She began to cry again.

“Obiageli,” Anyanwu said. “Stay here with Luisa. Stay here. I’m going up to see him.”

But the child clung to Anyanwu and screamed when Luisa tried to pry her loose. Anyanwu could have pried her loose easily, but she chose to spend a few moments more comforting her. When Helen was calmer, it was Iye, not Luisa, who took her.

“Keep her with you,” Anyanwu said. “Don’t let her go into the house. Don’t let anyone in.”

“What will you do?” lye asked.

Anyanwu did not answer. Her body had already begun to change. She threw off her cloak and her gown. By the time she was naked, her body was clearly no longer human. She was changing very quickly, becoming a great cat this time instead of the familiar large dog. A great spotted cat.

When the change was complete, she went to the door, and Luisa opened it for her. Luisa started to follow her in. There would be at least one other door that needed opening, after all. But the cat turned and uttered a loud coughing cry. It barred Luisa’s path until she turned and went outside again.

“My God,” whispered Iye as Luisa returned. “I’m never afraid of her until she does something like that right in front of me.”

Luisa ignored her, went to Stephen and straightened his neck and body, then covered him with Anyanwu’s discarded cloak.

“What’s she going to do?” Iye asked.

“Kill Joseph,” Helen said quietly.

“Kill?” Iye stared uncomprehending into the small solemn face.

“Yes,” the child said. “And she ought to kill Doro too before he brings us somebody worse.”

In leopard form, Anyanwu padded down the hall and up the main stairs, then up the narrower stairs to the attic. She was hungry. She had changed a little too quickly, and she knew she would have to eat soon. She would control herself, though; she would eat none of Joseph’s disgusting flesh. Better to eat stinking meat crawling with maggots! How could even Doro have brought her human vermin like Joseph?

His door was shut, but Anyanwu opened it with a single blow of her paw. There was a hoarse sound of surprise from inside. Then, as she bounded into the room, something plucked at her forelegs, and she went sliding on chin and chest to jam her face against his washstand. It hurt, but she could ignore the pain. What she could not ignore was the fear. She had hoped to surprise him, catch him before he could use his ability. She had even hoped that he could not stop her while she was in a nonhuman form. Now, she gave her tearing, coughing roar of anger and of fear that she might fail.

For an instant, her legs were free. Perhaps she had frightened him into losing control. It did not matter. She leaped, claws extended, as though to the back of a running deer.

Joseph screamed and threw his arms up to shield his throat. At the same moment, he controlled her legs again. He was inhumanly quick in his desperation. Anyanwu knew that because she was inhumanly quick all the time.

Sensation left her legs, and she almost toppled off him. She seized a hold with her teeth, sinking them into one of his arms, tearing away flesh, meaning to get at the throat.

Feeling returned to her legs, but suddenly she could not breathe. Her throat felt closed, blocked somehow.

Instantly, she located the blockage, opened a place beneath it—a hole in her throat through which to breathe. And she got his throat between her teeth.

Utterly desperate, he jammed his fingers into the newly-made breathing hole.

At another time with other prey, she might have collapsed at the sudden, raw agony. But now the image of her dead son was before her, and her daughter nearly dead in the same way. What if he had merely closed their throats as he had just closed hers? She might never have known for sure. He might have gotten away with it.

She ripped his throat out.

He was dying when she gave way to her own pain. He was too far gone to hurt her any more. He died with soft bubbling noises and much bleeding as she lay across him reviving herself, mending herself. She was hungry. Great God, she was hungry. The smell of blood filled her nostrils as she restored her normal breathing ability, and the smell and the flesh beneath her tormented her.

She got up quickly and loped down the narrow stairs, down the main stairs. There, she hesitated. She wanted food before she changed again. She was sick with hunger now. She would be mad with it if she had to change to order food.

Luisa came into the house, saw her, and stopped. The old woman was not afraid of her. There was none of that teasing fear smell to make her change swiftly before she lost her head.

“Is he dead?” the old woman asked.

Anyanwu lowered her cat head in what she hoped would be taken for a nod.

“Good riddance,” Luisa said. “Are you hungry?”

Two more quick nods.

“Go into the dining room. I’ll bring food.” She went through the house and out toward the kitchen. She was a good, steady, sensible friend. She did more than sewing for her keep. Anyanwu would have kept her if she had done nothing at all. But she was so old. Over seventy. Soon some frailty that Anyanwu could not make a medicine for would take her life and another friend would be gone. People were temporary. So temporary.

Disobeying orders, Iye and Helen came in through the front door and saw Anyanwu, still bloody from her kill, and not yet gone to the dining room. If not for the presence of the child, Anyanwu would have roared her anger and discomfort at Iye. She did not like having her children see her at such a time. She loped away down the hall to the dining room.

Iye stayed where she was, but allowed Helen to follow Anyanwu. Anyanwu, struggling with fear smell, blood smell, hunger, and anger, did not notice the child until they were both in the dining room. There, wearily, Anyanwu lay down on a rug before the cold fireplace. Fearlessly, the child came to sit on the rug beside her.

Anyanwu looked up, knowing that her face was smeared with blood and wishing she had cleaned herself before she came downstairs. Cleaned herself and left her daughter in the care of someone more reliable.

Helen stroked her, fingered her spots, caressed her as though she were a large house cat. Like most children born on the plantation, she had seen Anyanwu change her shape many times. She was as accepting of the leopard now as she had been of the black dog and the white man named Warrick who had to put in an occasional appearance for the sake of the neighbors. Somehow, under the child’s hands, Anyanwu began to relax. After a while, she began to purr.

“Agu,” the little girl said softly. This was one of the few words of Anyanwu’s language Helen knew. It meant simply, “leopard.” “Agu,” she repeated. “Be this way for Doro. He wouldn’t dare hurt us while you’re this way.”

CHAPTER 13

Doro returned a month after Joseph Toler’s grisly corpse had been buried in the weed patch that had once been a slaves’ graveyard, and Stephen Ifeyinwa Mgbada had been buried in ground that had once been set aside for the master and his family. Joseph would be very lonely in his slave plot. No one else had been buried as a slave since Anyanwu bought the plantation.

Doro arrived knowing through his special senses that both Joseph and Stephen were dead. He arrived with replacements—two boy children no older than Helen. He arrived unannounced and walked through the front door as though he owned the house.

Anyanwu, unaware of his presence, was in the library writing out a list of supplies needed for the plantation. So much was purchased now instead of homemade. Soap, ordinary cloth, candles—even some medicines purchased ready-made could be trusted, though sometimes not for the purposes their makers intended. And of course, new tools were needed. Two mules had died and three others were old and would soon need replacing. Field hands needed shoes, hats … It was cheaper to have people working in the fields bringing in large harvests than it was to have them making things that could be bought cheaply elsewhere. That was especially important here, where there were no slaves, where people were paid for their work and supplied with decent housing and good food. It cost more to keep people decently. If Anyanwu had not been a good manager, she would have had to return to the sea much more often for the wearisome task of finding and robbing sunken vessels, then carrying away gold and precious stones—usually within her own body.

She was adding a long column of figures when Doro entered with the two little boys. She turned at the sound of his footsteps and saw a pale, lean, angular man with lank, black hair and two fingers missing from the hand he used to lower himself into the armchair near her desk.

“It’s me,” he said wearily. “Order us a meal, would you? We haven’t had a decent one for some time.”

How courteous of him to ask her to give the order, she thought bitterly. Just then, one of her daughters came to the door, stopped, and looked at Doro with alarm. Anyanwu was in her youthful female shape, after all. But Edward Warrick was known to have a handsome, educated black mistress.

“We’ll be having supper early,” Anyanwu told the girl. “Have Rita get whatever she can ready as quickly as possible.”

The girl vanished obediently, playing her role as a maid, not knowing the white stranger was only Doro.

Anyanwu stared at Doro’s latest body, wanting to scream at him, order him out of her house. It was because of him that her son was dead. He had let the snake loose among her children. And what had he brought with him this time? Young snakes? God, she longed to be rid of him!

“Did they kill each other?” Doro asked her, and the two little boys looked at him wide-eyed. If they were not young snakes, he would teach them to crawl. Clearly, he did not care what was said before them.

She ignored Doro. “Are you hungry now?” she asked the boys.

One nodded, a little shy. “I am!” the other said quickly.

“Come with me then,” she said. “Rita will give you bread and peach preserve.” She noticed that they did not look to Doro for permission to leave. They jumped up, followed her, and ran out to the kitchen when she pointed it out to them. Rita would not be pleased. It was enough, surely, to ask her to rush supper. But she would feed the children and perhaps send them to Luisa until Anyanwu called for them. Sighing, Anyanwu went back to Doro.

“You were always one to overprotect children,” he commented.

“I only allow them to be children for as long as they will,” she said. “They will grow up and learn of sorrow and evil quickly enough.”

“Tell me about Stephen and Joseph.”

She went to her desk, sat down, and wondered whether she could discuss this calmly with him. She had wept and cursed him so many times. But neither weeping nor cursing would move him.

“Why did you bring me a man without telling me what he could do?” she asked quietly.

“What did he do?”

Anyanwu told him, told him everything, and ended with the same falsely calm question. “Why did you bring me a man without telling me what he could do?”

“Call Margaret,” Doro said, ignoring her question. Margaret was the daughter who had married Joseph.

“Why?”

“Because when I brought Joseph here, he couldn’t do anything. Not anything. He was just good breeding stock with the potential to father useful children. He must have had a transition in spite of his age, and he must have had it here.”

“I would have known. I’m called here whenever anyone is sick. And there were no signs that he was approaching transition.”

“Get Margaret. Let’s talk to her.”

Anyanwu did not want to call the girl. Margaret had suffered more than anyone over the killings, had lost both the beautiful, worthless husband she had loved, and the younger brother she had adored. She had not even a child to console her. Joseph had not managed to make her pregnant. In the month since his and Stephen’s death, the girl had become gaunt and solemn. She had always been a lively girl who talked too much and laughed and kept people around her amused. Now, she hardly spoke at all. She was literally sick with grief. Recently, Helen had taken to sleeping with her and following her around during the day, helping her with her work or merely keeping her company. Anyanwu had watched this warily at first, thinking that Margaret might resent Helen as the cause of Joseph’s trouble—Margaret was not in the most rational of moods—but this was clearly not the case. “She’s getting better,” Helen told Anyanwu confidentially. “She was by herself too much before.” The little girl possessed an interesting combination of ruthlessness, kindness, and keen perception. Anyanwu hoped desperately Doro would never notice her. But the older girl was painfully vulnerable. And now, Doro meant to tear open wounds that had only just begun to heal.

“Let her alone for a while, Doro. This has hurt her more than it’s hurt anyone else.”

“Call her, Anyanwu, or I will.”

Loathing him, Anyanwu went to find Margaret. The girl did not work in the fields as some of Anyanwu’s children did, thus she was nearby. She was in the washhouse sweating and ironing a dress. Helen was with her, sprinkling and rolling other clothing.

“Leave that for a while,” Anyanwu told Margaret. “Come in with me.”

“What is it?” Margaret asked. She put one iron down to heat and, without thinking, picked up another.

“Doro,” Anyanwu said softly.

Margaret froze, holding the heavy iron motionless and upright in the air. Anyanwu took it from her hand and put it down on the bricks of the hearth far from the fire. She moved the other two irons away from where they were heating.

“Don’t try to iron anything,” she told Helen. “I have enough of a bill for cloth now.”

Helen said nothing, only watched as Anyanwu led Margaret away.

Outside the washhouse, Margaret began to tremble. “What does he want with me? Why can’t he leave us alone?”

“He will never leave us alone,” Anyanwu said flatly.

Margaret blinked, looked at Anyanwu. “What shall I do?”

“Answer his questions—all of them, even if they are personal and offensive. Answer and tell him the truth.”

“He scares me.”

“Good. There is very much to fear. Answer him and obey him. Leave any criticizing or disagreeing with him to me.”

There was silence until just before they reached the house. Then Margaret said, “We’re your weakness, aren’t we? You could outrun him for a hundred more years if not for us.”

“I’ve never been content without my own around me,” Anyanwu said. She met the girl’s light brown eyes. “Why do you think I have all these children? I could have husbands and wives and lovers into the next century and never have a child. Why should I have so many except that I want them and love them? If they were burdens too heavy for me, they would not be here. You would not be here.”

“But … he uses us to make you obey. I know he does.”

“He does. That’s his way.” She touched the smooth, red-brown skin of the girl’s face. “Nneka, none of this should concern you. Go and tell him what he wants to hear, then forget about him. I have endured him before. I will survive.”

“You’ll survive until the world ends,” said the girl solemnly. “You and him.” She shook her head.

They went into the house together and to the library where they found Doro sitting at Anyanwu’s desk looking through her records.

“For God’s sake!” Anyanwu said with disgust.

He looked up. “You’re a better businesswoman than I thought with your views against slavery,” he said.

To her amazement, the praise reached her. She was not pleased that he had gone snooping through her things, but she was abruptly less annoyed. She went to the desk and stood over him silently until he smiled, got up, and took his armchair again. Margaret took another chair and sat waiting.

“Did you tell her?” Doro asked Anyanwu.

Anyanwu shook her head.

He faced Margaret. “We think Joseph may have undergone transition while he was here. Did he show any signs of it?”

Margaret had been watching Doro’s new face, but as he said the word transition, she looked away, studied the pattern of the oriental rug.

“Tell me about it,” said Doro quietly.

“How could he have?” demanded Anyanwu. “There was no sign!”

“He knew what was happening,” Margaret whispered. “I knew too because I saw it happen to … to Stephen. It took much longer with Stephen though. For Joe it came almost all at once. He was feeling bad for a week, maybe a little more, but nobody noticed except me. He made me promise not to tell anyone. Then one night when he’d been here for about a month, he went through the worst of it. I thought he would die, but he begged me not to leave him alone or tell anyone.”

“Why?” Anyanwu demanded. “I could have helped you with him. You’re not strong. He must have hurt you.”

Margaret nodded. “He did. But … he was afraid of you. He thought you would tell Doro.”

“It wouldn’t have made much sense for her not to,” Doro said.

Margaret continued to stare at the rug.

“Finish,” Doro ordered.

She wet her lips. “He was afraid. He said you … you killed his brother when his brother’s transition ended.”

There was silence. Anyanwu looked from Margaret to Doro. “Did you do it?” she asked frowning.

“Yes. I thought that might be the trouble.”

“But his brother! Why, Doro!”

“His brother went mad during transition. He was … like a lesser version of Nweke. In his pain and confusion he killed the man who was helping him. I reached him before he could accidentally kill himself, and I took him. I got five children by his body before I had to give it up.”

“Couldn’t you have helped him?” Anyanwu asked. “Wouldn’t he have come back to his senses if you had given him time?”

“He attacked me, Anyanwu. Salvageable people don’t do that.”

“But …”

“He was mad. He would have attacked anyone who approached him. He would have wiped out his family if I hadn’t been there.” Doro leaned back and wet his lips, and Anyanwu remembered what he had done to his own family so long ago. He had told her that terrible story. “I’m not a healer,” he said softly. “I save life in the only way I can.”

“I had not thought you bothered to save it at all,” Anyanwu said bitterly.

He looked at her. “Your son is dead,” he said. “I’m sorry. He would have been a fine man. I would never have brought Joseph here if I had known they would be dangerous to each other.”

He seemed utterly sincere. She could not recall the last time she had heard him apologize for anything. She stared at him, confused.

“Joe didn’t say anything about his brother going crazy,” Margaret said.

“Joseph didn’t live with his family,” Doro said. “He couldn’t get along with them, so I found foster parents for him.”

“Oh …” Margaret looked away, seeming to understand, to accept. No more than half the children on the plantation lived with their parents.

“Margaret?”

She looked up at him, then quickly looked down again. He was being remarkably gentle with her, but she was still afraid.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

“I wish I were,” she whispered. She was beginning to cry.

“All right,” Doro said. “All right, that’s all.”

She got up quickly and left the room. When she was gone, Anyanwu said, “Doro, Joseph was too old for a transition! Everything you taught me says he was too old.”

“He was twenty-four. I haven’t seen anyone change at that age before, but …” He hesitated, changed direction. “You never asked about his ancestry, Anyanwu.”

“I never wanted to know.”

“You do know. He’s your descendant, of course.”

She made herself shrug. “You said you would bring my grandchildren.”

“He was the grandchild of your grandchildren. Both his parents trace their descent back to you.”

“Why do you tell me that now? I don’t want to know any more about it. He’s dead!”

“He’s Isaac’s descendant too,” Doro continued relentlessly. “People of Isaac’s line are sometimes a little late going into transition, though Joseph is about as late as I’ve seen. The two children I’ve brought to you are sons of his brother’s body.”

“No!” Anyanwu stared at him. “Take them away! I want no more of that kind near me!”

“You have them. Teach them and guide them as you do your own children. I told you your descendants would not be easy to care for. You chose to care for them anyway.”

She said nothing. He made it sound as though her choice had been free, as though he had not coerced her into choosing.

“If I had found you earlier, I would have brought them to you when they were even younger,” he said. “Since I didn’t, you’ll have to do what you can with them now. Teach them responsibility, pride, honor. Teach them whatever you taught Stephen. But don’t be foolish enough to teach them you believe they’ll grow up to be criminals. They’ll be powerful men someday and they’re liable to fulfill your expectations—either way.”

Still she said nothing. What was there for her to say—or do? He would be obeyed, or he would make her life and her children’s lives not worth living—if he did not kill them outright.

“You have five to ten years before the boys’ transitions,” he said. “They will have transitions; I’m as sure as I can be of that. Their ancestry is just right.”

“Are they mine, or will you interfere with them?”

“Until their transitions, they’re yours.

“And then?”

“I’ll breed them, of course.”

Of course. “Let them marry and stay here. If they fit here, they’ll want to stay. How can they become responsible men if their only future is to be bred?”

Doro laughed aloud, opening his mouth wide to show the empty spaces of several missing teeth. “Do you hear yourself, woman? First you want no part of them, now you don’t want to let go of them even when they’re grown.”

She waited silently until he stopped laughing, then asked: “Do you think I’m willing to throw away any child, Doro? If there is a chance for those boys to grow up better than Joseph, why shouldn’t I try to give them that chance? If, when they grow up, they can be men instead of dogs who know nothing except how to climb onto one female after another, why shouldn’t I try to help?”

He sobered. “I knew you would help—and not grudgingly. Don’t you think I know you by now, Anyanwu?”

Oh, he knew her—knew how to use her. “Will you do it then? Let them marry and stay here if they fit?”

“Yes.”

She looked down, examining the rug pattern that had held so much of Margaret’s attention. “Will you take them away if they don’t fit, can’t fit, like Joseph?”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Their seed is too valuable to be wasted.”

He thought of nothing else. Nothing!

“Shall I stay with you for a while, Anyanwu?”

She stared at him in surprise, and he looked back neutral-faced, waiting for an answer. Was he asking a real question, then? “Will you go if I ask you to?”

“Yes.”

Yes. He was saying that so often now, being so gentle and cooperative—for him. He had come courting again.

“Go,” she said as gently as she could. “Your presence is disruptive here, Doro. You frighten my people.” Now. Let him keep his word.

He shrugged, nodded. “Tomorrow morning,” he said.

And the next morning, he was gone.

Perhaps an hour after his departure, Helen and Luisa came hand in hand to Anyanwu to tell her that Margaret had hanged herself from a beam in the washhouse.

For a time after Margaret’s death, Anyanwu felt a sickness that she could not dispel. Grief. Two children lost so close together. Somehow, she never got used to losing children—especially young children, children it seemed had been with her for only a few moments. How many had she buried now?

At the funeral, the two little boys Doro had brought saw her crying and came to take her hands and stand with her solemnly. They seemed to be adopting her as mother and Luisa as grandmother. They were fitting in surprisingly well, but Anyanwu found herself wondering how long they would last.

“Go to the sea,” Luisa told her when she would not eat, when she became more and more listless. “The sea cleanses you. I have seen it. Go and be a fish for a while.”

“I’m all right,” Anyanwu said automatically.

Luisa swept that aside with a sound of disgust. “You are not all right! You are acting like the child you appear to be! Get away from here for a while. Give yourself a rest and us a rest from you.”

The words startled Anyanwu out of her listlessness. “A rest from me?”

“Those of us who can feel your pain as you feel it need a rest from you.”

Anyanwu blinked. Her mind had been elsewhere. Of course the people who took comfort in her desire to protect them and keep them together, people who took pleasure in her pleasure, would also suffer pain when she suffered.

“I’ll go,” she told Luisa.

The old woman smiled. “It will be good for you.”

Anyanwu sent for one of her white daughters to bring her husband and children for a visit. They were not needed or wanted to run the plantation, and they knew it. That was why Anyanwu trusted them to take her place for a while. They could fit in without taking over. They had their own strangenesses. The woman, Leah, was like Denice, her mother, taking impressions from houses and pieces of furniture, from rocks, trees, and human flesh, seeing ghosts of things that had happened in the past. Anyanwu warned her to keep out of the washhouse. The front of the main house where Stephen had died was hard enough on her. She learned quickly where she should not step, what she should not touch if she did not want to see her brother climbing the railing, diving off head-first.

The husband, Kane, was sensitive enough to see occasionally into Leah’s thoughts and know that she was not insane—or at least no more insane than he. He was a quadroon whose white father had educated him, cared for him, and unfortunately, died without freeing him—leaving him in the hands of his father’s wife. He had run away, escaped just ahead of the slave dealer and left Texas for Louisiana, where he calmly used all his father had taught him to pass as a well-bred young white man. He had said nothing about his background until he began to understand how strange his wife’s family was. He still did not fully understand, but he loved Leah. He could be himself with her without alarming her in any way. He was comfortable with her. To keep that comfort, he accepted without understanding. He could come now and then to live on a plantation that would run itself without his supervision and enjoy the company of Anyanwu’s strange collection of misfits. He felt right at home.

“What’s this about your going to sea?” he asked Anyanwu. He got along well with her as long as she kept her Warrick identity. Otherwise, she made him nervous. He could not accept the idea that his wife’s father could become a woman—in fact, had been born a woman. For him, Anyanwu wore the thin, elderly Warrick guise.

“I need to go away from here for a while,” she said.

“Where will you go this time?”

“To find the nearest school of dolphins.” She smiled at him. The thought of going to sea again had made her able to smile. During her years of hiding, she had not only spent a great deal of time as a large dog or a bird, but she had left home often to swim free as a dolphin. She had done it first to confuse and evade Doro, then to get wealth and buy land, and finally because she enjoyed it. The freedom of the sea eased worry, gave her time to think through confusion, took away boredom. She wondered what Doro did when he was bored. Kill?

“You’ll fly to open water won’t you?” Kane asked.

“Fly and run. Sometimes it’s safer to run.”

“Christ!” he muttered. “I thought I’d gotten over envying you.”

She was eating as he spoke. Eating what would probably be her last cooked meal for some time. Rice and stew, baked yams, cornbread, strong coffee, wine, and fruit. Her children complained that she ate like a poor woman, but she ignored them. She was content. Now she looked up at Kane through her blue white-man’s-eyes.

“If you’re not afraid,” she said, “when I come back, I’ll try to share the experience with you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have the control. Stephen used to be able to share things with me … both of us working together, but me alone …” He shrugged.

There was an uncomfortable silence, then Anyanwu pushed back from the table. “I’m leaving now,” she said abruptly. She went upstairs to her bedroom where she undressed, opened her door to the upper gallery of the porch, took her bird shape, and flew away.

More than a month passed before she flew back, eagle-shaped but larger than any eagle, refreshed by the sea and the air, and ravenous because in her eagerness to see home again, she had not stopped often enough to hunt.

She circled first to see that there were no visitors—strangers to be startled, and perhaps to shoot her. She had been shot three times this trip. That was enough.

When she had satisfied herself that it was safe, she came down into the grassy open space three quarters enclosed by the house, its dependencies, and her people’s cabins. Two little children saw her and ran into the kitchen. Seconds later, they were back, each tugging at one of Rita’s hands.

Rita walked over to Anyanwu, looked at her, and said with no doubt at all in her voice, “I suppose you’re hungry.”

Anyanwu flapped her wings.

Rita laughed. “You make a fine, handsome bird. I wonder how you would look on the dining-room table.”

Rita had always had a strange sense of humor. Anyanwu flapped her wings again impatiently, and Rita went back to the kitchen and brought her two rabbits, skinned, cleaned, ready for cooking. Anyanwu held them with her feet and tore into them, glad Rita had not gotten around to cooking them. As she ate, a black man came out of the house, Helen at his side. The man was a stranger. Some local freedman, perhaps, or even a runaway. Anyanwu always did what she could for runaways, either feeding and clothing them and sending them on their way better equipped to survive or, on those rare occasions when one seemed to fit into the house, buying him.

This was a compact, handsome little black man not much bigger than Anyanwu was in her true form. She raised her head and looked at him with interest. If this one had a mind to match his body, she might buy him even if he did not fit. It had been too long since she had had a husband. Occasional lovers ceased to satisfy her after a while.

She went back to tearing at the rabbits unself-consciously, as her daughter and the stranger watched. When she finished, she wiped her beak on the grass, gave the attractive stranger a final glance, and flew heavily around to the upper gallery outside her room. There, comfortably full, she dozed for a while giving her body a chance to digest the meal. It was good to be able to take her time, do things at a pace her body found comfortable.

Eventually, she became herself, small and black, young and female. Kane would not like it, but that did not matter. The stranger would like it very much.

She put on one of her best dresses and a few pieces of good jewelry, brushed her glossy new crown of hair, and went downstairs.

Supper had just been finished without her. Her people never waited for her when they knew she was in one or another of her animal forms. They knew her leisurely habits. Now, several of her adult children, Kane and Leah, and the black stranger sat eating nuts and raisins, drinking wine, and talking quietly. They made room for her, breaking their conversation for greeting and welcome. One of her sons got her a glass and filled it with her favorite Madeira. She had taken only a single pleasant sip from it when the stranger said, “The sea has done you good. You were right to go.”

Her shoulders drooped slightly, though she managed not to change expression. It was only Doro.

He caught her eye and smiled, and she knew he had seen her disappointment, had no doubt planned her disappointment. She contrived to ignore him, looked around the table to see exactly who was present. “Where is Luisa?” she asked. The old woman often took supper with the family, feeding her foster children first, then coming in, as she said, to relearn adult conversation.

But now, at the mention of Luisa’s name, everyone fell silent. The son next to her, Julien, who had poured her wine, said softly, “She died, Mama.”

Anyanwu turned to look at him, yellow-brown and plain except for his eyes, utterly clear like her own. Years before when a woman he wanted desperately would have nothing to do with him, he had gone to Luisa for comfort. Luisa had told Anyanwu and Anyanwu had been amazed to find that she felt no resentment toward the old woman, no anger at Julien for taking his pain to a stranger. With her sensitivity, Luisa had ceased to be a stranger the day she arrived on the plantation.

“How did she die?” Anyanwu whispered finally.

“In her sleep,” Julien said. “She went to bed one night, and the next morning, the children couldn’t wake her up.”

“That was two weeks ago,” Leah said. “We got the priest to come out because we knew she’d want it. We gave her a fine funeral.” Leah hesitated. “She … she didn’t have any pain. I lay down on her bed to see, and I saw her go out just as easy …”

Anyanwu got up and left the table. She had gone away to find some respite from loved ones who died and died, and others whose rapid aging reminded her that they too were temporary. Leah, only thirty-five, had far too much gray mixed with her straight black hair.

Anyanwu went into the library, closed the door—closed doors were respected in her house—and sat at her desk, head down. Luisa had been seventy … seventy-eight years old. It was time for her to die. How stupid to grieve over an old woman who had lived what, for her kind, was a long life.

Anyanwu sat up and shook her head. She had been watching friends and relatives grow old and die for as long as she could remember. Why was it biting so deeply into her now, hurting her as though it were a new thing? Stephen, Margaret, Luisa … There would be others. There would always be others, suddenly here, then suddenly gone. Only she would remain.

As though to contradict her thought, Doro opened the door and came in.

She glared at him angrily. Everyone else in her house respected her closed doors—but then, Doro respected nothing at all.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

“Nothing.” He pulled a chair over to the side of her desk and sat down.

“What, no more children for me to raise?” she said bitterly. “No more unsuitable mates for my children? Nothing?”

“I brought a pregnant woman and her two children, and I brought an account at a New Orleans bank to help pay their way. I didn’t come to you to talk about them, though.”

Anyanwu turned away from him not caring why he had come. She wished he would leave.

“It goes on, you know,” he said. “The dying.”

“It doesn’t hurt you.”

“It does. When my children die—the best of my children.”

“What do you do?”

“Endure it. What is there to do but endure it? Someday, we’ll have others who won’t die.”

“Are you still dreaming that dream?”

“What could I do, Anyanwu, if I gave it up?”

She said nothing. She had no answer. “I used to believe in it too,” She said. “When you took me from my people, I believed it. For fifty years, I made myself believe it. Perhaps … perhaps sometimes I still believe it.”

“You never behaved as though you believed it.”

“I did! I let you do all the things you did to me and to others, and I stayed with you until I could see you had decided to kill me.”

He drew a deep breath. “That decision was a mistake,” he said. “I made it out of habit as though you were just another not entirely controllable, wild-seed woman who had had her quota of children. Centuries-old habit said it was time to dispose of you.”

“And what of your habit now?” she asked.

“It’s broken now as far as you’re concerned.” He looked at her, looked past her. “I want you alive for as long as you can live. You cannot know how I have fought with myself over this.”

She did not care how he had fought.

“I tried hard to make myself kill you,” he said. “It would have been easier than trying to change you.”

She shrugged.

He stood up and took her arms to raise her to her feet. She stood passively, knowing that if she let him have his way, they would wind up on the sofa together. He wanted her. He did not care that she had just suffered the loss of a friend, that she wanted to be alone.

“Do you like this body?” he asked. “It’s my gift to you.”

She wondered who had died so that he could give such a “gift.”

“Anyanwu!” He shook her once, gently, and she looked at him. She did not have to look up. “You’re still the little forest peasant, trying to climb the ship’s railings and swim back to Africa,” he said. “You still want what you can’t have. The old woman is dead.”

Again, she only shrugged.

“They’ll all die, except me,” he continued. “Because of me, you were not alone on the ship. Because of me, you will never be alone.”

He took her to the sofa, finally, undressed her, made love to her. She found that she did not mind particularly. The lovemaking relaxed her, and when it was over, she escaped easily into sleep.

Not much time had passed when he woke her. The sunlight and the long shadows told her it was still evening. She wondered why he had not left her. He had what he wanted, and intentionally or not, he had given her peace. Now if only he would go away.

Anyanwu looked at him seated beside her half dressed, still shirtless. They were not crowded together on the large sofa as they would have been had he been wearing one of his usual large bodies. Again, she wondered about the original owner of his beautiful, unlikely, new body, but she asked no questions. She did not want to learn that it had been one of her descendants.

He caressed her silently for a moment and she thought he meant to resume the lovemaking. She sighed and decided that it did not matter. So little seemed to matter now.

“I’m going to try something with you,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do it for years. Before you ran away, I assumed I would do it someday. Now … now everything is changed, but I mean to have some of this anyway.”

“Some of what?” she asked wearily. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t explain,” he said. “But … Look at me, Anyanwu. Look!”

She turned onto her side, faced him.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Hear and see whatever it is that helps you know I’m being honest with you. I won’t hurt you. You’ll be in danger only if you disobey me. This body of mine is strong and young and new to me. My control is excellent. Obey me, and you will be safe.”

She lay flat again. “Tell me what you want, Doro. What shall I do for you now?”

To her surprise, he smiled and kissed her. “Just lie still and trust me. Believe that I mean you no harm.”

She did believe, though at the moment, she barely cared. How ironic that now he was beginning to care, beginning to see her as more than only another of his breeding animals. She nodded and felt his hands grip her.

Abruptly, she was in darkness, falling through darkness toward distant light, falling. She felt herself twisting, writhing, grasping for some support. She screamed in reflexive terror, and could not hear her own voice. Instantly, the darkness around her vanished.

She was on the sofa again, with Doro gasping beside her. There were bloody nail marks on his chest and he was massaging his throat as though it hurt. She was concerned in spite of herself. “Doro, have I hurt your throat?”

He took a deep ragged breath. “Not much. I was ready for you—or I thought I was.”

“What did you do? It was like the kind of dream children wake screaming from.”

“Alter your hands,” he said.

“What?”

“Obey me. Make claws of your hands.”

With a shrug, she formed powerful leopard claws.

“Good,” Doro said. “I didn’t even weaken you. My control is as steady as I thought. Now change back.” He fingered his throat lightly. “I wouldn’t want you going at me with those.”

Again she obeyed. She was behaving like one of his daughters, doing things she did not understand unquestioningly because he commanded it. That thought roused her to question.

“Doro, what are we doing?”

“Do you see,” he said, “that the … the thing you felt has not harmed you in any way?”

“But what was it?”

“Wait, Anyanwu. Trust me. I’ll explain all I can later, I promise you. For now, relax. I’m going to do it again.”

“No!”

“It won’t hurt you. It will be as though you were in midair under Isaac’s control. He would never have hurt you. I won’t either.” He had begun stroking and caressing her again, trying to calm her—and succeeding. She had not really been hurt, after all. “Be still,” he whispered. “Let me have this, Anyanwu.”

“It will … please you somehow—as though we were making love?”

“Even more.”

“All right.” She wondered what she was saying all right to. It had nothing to do with Isaac’s tossing her into the air and catching her with that gentle sure ability of his. This was nightmare stuff—helpless, endless falling. But it was not real. She had not fallen. She was not injured. Finally, Doro wanted something of her that would not hurt anyone. Perhaps if she gave it to him—and survived—she would gain leverage with him, be better able to protect her people from him. Let them live their brief lives in peace.

“Don’t fight me this time,” he said. “I’m no match for you in physical strength. You know that. Now that you know what to expect, you can be still and let it happen. Trust me.”

She lay watching him, quiescent, waiting. “All right,” she repeated. He moved closer to her, put his arm around her so that her head was pillowed on it.

“I like contact,” he said, explaining nothing. “It’s never as good without contact.”

She glanced at him, then made herself comfortable with her body and his touching along their length.

“Now,” he said softly.

There was the darkness again, the feeling of falling. But after a moment it seemed more like drifting slowly. Only drifting. She was not afraid. She felt warm and at ease and not alone. Yet it seemed that she was alone. There was a light far ahead of her, but nothing else, no one else.

She was drifting toward the light, watching it grow as she moved nearer. It was a distant star at first, faint and flickering. Eventually, it was the morning star, bright, dominating her otherwise empty sky.

Gradually, the light became a sun, filling her sky with brightness that should have blinded her. But she was not blinded, not uncomfortable in any way. She could feel Doro near her though she was no longer aware of his body or even her own body lying on the sofa. This was another kind of awareness, a kind she had no words to describe. It was good, pleasurable. He was with her. If he had not been, she would have been utterly alone. What had he said before the lovemaking, before the relaxed, easy sleep? That because of him, she would never be alone. The words had not comforted her then, but they comforted her now.

The sun’s light enveloped her, and there was no darkness anywhere. In a sense now, she was blind. There was nothing to see except blazing light. But still, there was no discomfort. And there was Doro with her, touching her as no one had touched her before. It was as though he touched her spirit, enfolding it within himself, spreading the sensation of his touch through every part of her. She became aware slowly of his hunger for her—literal hunger—but instead of frightening her, it awakened a strange sympathy in her. She felt not only his hunger, but his restraint and his loneliness. The loneliness formed a kinship between them. He had been alone for so long. So impossibly long. Her own loneliness, her own long life seemed insignificant. She was like a child beside him. But child or not, he needed her. He needed her as he had never needed anyone else. She reached out to touch him, hold him, ease his long, long solitude. Or she seemed to reach.

She did not know what he did nor what she actually did but it was startlingly good. It was a blending that went on and on, a joining that it seemed to Anyanwu she controlled. Not until she rested, pleasantly weary, did she begin to realize she was losing herself. It seemed that his restraint had not held. The joining they had enjoyed was not enough for him. He was absorbing her, consuming her, making her part of his own substance. He was the great light, the fire that had englobed her. Now he was killing her, little by little, digesting her little by little.

In spite of all his talk he was betraying her. In spite of all the joy they had just given each other, he could not forego the kill. In spite of the new higher value he had tried to place on her, breeding and killing were still all that had meaning to him.

Well then, so be it. So be it; she was tired.

CHAPTER 14

With meticulous care, Doro disentangled himself from Anyanwu. It was much easier than he had thought it would be—stopping in the middle of what could have been an intensely satisfying kill. But he had never intended to kill. He had gone further with her, though, than he did with the most powerful of his children. With them, he forced the potentially deadly contact to enable him to understand the limits of their power, understand whether that power could ever in any way threaten him. He did it soon after their transitions so that he found them physically depleted, emotionally weary, and too ignorant of their newly matured abilities to even begin to understand how to fight him—if they could fight him. Very rarely, he found someone who could, and that person died. He wanted allies, not rivals.

But he had not been testing Anyanwu. He knew she could not threaten him, knew he could kill her as long as she was in human form. He had never doubted it. She did not have the kinds of thought-reading and thought-controlling abilities that he considered potentially dangerous. He destroyed anyone who showed the potential, the strength to someday read or control his thoughts. Anyanwu had almost absolute control of every cell of her malleable body, but her mind was as open and defenseless as the mind of any ordinary person—which meant she would eventually have trouble with the people he was bringing her. They would marry into her large “family” and cause dissension. He had warned her of that. Eventually, she would have children and grandchildren here who were more like Joseph and Lale than like the congenial, weakly sensitive people she had collected around her. But that was another matter. He could think about it later. Now, all that was important was that she revive whole and well. Nothing must happen to her. No amount of anger or stupidity on her part or his must induce him to think again of killing her. She was too valuable in too many ways.

She awoke slowly, opening her eyes, looking around to find the library in darkness except for the fire he had made in the fireplace and a single lamp on the table at her head. He lay close beside her, warming himself by her warmth. He wanted her close to him.

“Doro?” she whispered.

He kissed her cheek and relaxed. She was all right. She had been so completely passive in her grief. He had been certain he could do this to her and not harm her. He had been certain that this once she would not resist and make him hurt or kill her.

“I was dying,” she said.

“No you weren’t.”

“I was dying. You were—”

He put his hand over her mouth, then let her move it away when he saw that she would be still. “I had to know you that way at least once,” he said. “I had to touch you that way.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s the closest I’ll ever come to you.”

She did not respond to that for a long while. Eventually, though, she moved her head to rest it on his chest. He could not remember when she had done that last on her own. He folded his arms over her, remembering that other more complete enfolding. How had he ever had the control to stop, he wondered.

“Is it that way, that easy for all the others?” she asked.

He hesitated, not wanting to lie to her, not wanting to talk about his kills at all. “Fear makes it worse for them,” he said. “And they’re always afraid. Also … I have no reason to be gentle with them.”

“Do you hurt them? Is there pain?”

“No. I feel what they feel so I know. They don’t feel pain any more than you did.”

“It was … good,” she said with wonder. “Until I thought you would kill me, it was so good.”

He could only hold her and press his face into her hair.

“We should go upstairs,” she said.

“Soon.”

“What shall I do?” she asked. “I have fought you all these years. My reasons for fighting you all still exist. What shall I do?”

“What Isaac wanted. What you want. Join with me. What’s the good of fighting me? Especially now.”

“Now …” She was still, perhaps, savoring their brief contact. He hoped she was. He was. He wondered what she would say if he told her no one had ever before enjoyed such contact with him. No one in nearly four thousand years. His people found contact with him terrifying. Thought readers and controllers who survived such contact quickly learned that they could not read or control him without sacrificing their lives. They learned to pay attention to the vague wariness they felt of him as soon as their transitions ended. Occasionally, he found a man or woman he cared for, enjoyed repeated contact with. These endured what he did since they could not prevent it, though their grim, long-suffering attitudes made him feel like a rapist. But Anyanwu had participated, had enjoyed, had even taken the initiative for a while, greatly intensifying his pleasure. He looked at her with wonder and delight. She looked back solemnly.

“Nothing is solved,” she said, “except that now, I must fight myself as well as you.”

“You’re talking foolishness,” he said.

She turned and kissed him. “Let it be foolishness for now,” she said. “Let it be foolishness for this moment.” She looked down at him in the dim light. “You don’t want to go upstairs, do you?”

“No.”

“We’ll stay here then. My children will whisper about me.”

“Do you care?”

“Now you are talking foolishness,” she said, laughing. “Do I care! Whose house is this? I do as I please!” She covered them both with the wide skirt of her dress, blew out the lamp, and settled to sleep in his arms.

Anyanwu’s children did whisper about her—and about Doro. They were careless—deliberately so, Doro thought—and he heard them. But after a while, they stopped. Perhaps Anyanwu spoke to them. For once, Doro did not care. He knew he was no longer fearsome to them; he was only another of Anyanwu’s lovers. How long had it been since he was only someone’s lover? He could not remember. He went away now and then to take care of his businesses, put in an appearance at one of his nearer settlements.

“Bring this body back to me as long as you can,” Anyanwu would tell him. “There cannot be two as perfect as this.”

He would laugh and promise her nothing. Who knew what punishment he might have to inflict, what madman he might have to subdue, what stupid, stubborn politician, businessman, planter, or other fool he might have to remove? Also, wearing a black body in country where blacks were under constant obligation to prove they had rights to even limited freedom was a hindrance. He traveled with one of his older white sons, Frank Winston, whose fine old Virginia family had belonged to Doro since Doro brought it from England 135 years before. The man could be as distinguished and aristocratic or as timid and naive as he chose to be, as Doro ordered him to be. He had no inborn strangeness great enough to qualify him as good breeding stock. He was simply the best actor, the best liar Doro knew. People believed what he told them even when he grew expansive and outrageous, when he said Doro was an African prince mistakenly enslaved, but now freed to return to his homeland and take the word of God back to his heathen people.

Though caught by surprise, Doro played his role with such a confusing mixture of arrogance and humility that slaveholders were first caught between bewilderment and anger, then convinced. Doro was like no nigger they had ever seen.

Later, Doro warned Frank to stick to more conventional lies—though he thought the man was probably laughing too hard to hear him.

He felt more at ease than he had for years—even at ease enough to laugh at himself—and his son enjoyed traveling with him. It was worth the inconvenience to keep Anyanwu happy. He knew that a kind of honeymoon phase of their relationship would end when he had to give up the body that pleased her so. She would not turn away from him again, he was certain, but their relationship would change. They would become occasional mates as they had been in Wheatley, but with better feelings. She would welcome him now, in whichever body he wore. She would have her men, and if she chose, her women—husbands, wives, lovers. He could not begrudge her these. There would be years, multiples of years, when he would not see her at all. A woman like her could not be alone. But there would always be room for him when he came back to her, and he would always go back to her. Because of her, he was no longer alone. Because of her, life was suddenly better than it had been for him in centuries, in millennia. It was as though she was the first of the race he was trying to create—except that he had not created her, had not been able to re-create her. In that way, she was only a promise unfulfilled. But someday …

Doro’s woman Susan had her child a month after Iye bore Stephen’s child. Both were boys, sturdy and healthy, promising to grow into handsome children. Iye accepted her son with love and gratitude that amazed Anyanwu. Anyanwu had delivered the child and all Iye could think of through her pain was that Stephen’s child must live and be well. It had not been an easy birth, but the woman clearly did not care. The child was all right.

But Iye could not feed it. She had no milk. Anyanwu produced milk easily and during the day visited Iye’s cabin regularly to nurse the child. At night, she kept the child with her.

“I’m glad you could do this,” Iye told her. “I think it would be too hard for me to share him with anyone else.” Anyanwu’s prejudices against the woman were fast dissolving.

As were her prejudices against Doro—though this frightened and disturbed her. She could not look at him now with the loathing she had once felt, yet he continued to do loathsome things. He simply no longer did them to her. As she had predicted, she was at war with herself. But she showed him no signs of that war. For the time he wore the beautiful little body that had been his gift to her, it pleased her to please him. For that short time, she could refuse to think about what he did when he left her. She could treat him as the very special lover he appeared to be.

“What are you going to do now?” Doro asked her when he came home from a short trip to find her nursing the baby. “Push me away?”

They were alone in her upstairs sitting room so she gave him a look of mock annoyance. “Shall I do that? Yes, I think so. Go away.”

He smiled, not believing her any more than she wished to be believed. He watched the nursing child.

“You will be father to one like this in seven months more,” she said.

“You’re pregnant now?”

“Yes. I wanted a child by this body of yours. I was afraid you would be getting rid of it soon.”

“I will be,” he admitted. “I’ll have to. But eventually you’ll have two children to nurse. Won’t that be hard on you?”

“I can do it. Do you think I can’t?”

“No.” He smiled again. “If only I had more like you and Iye. That Susan …”

“I’ve found a home for her child,” Anyanwu said. “It won’t be fostered with the older ones, but it will have loving parents. And Susan is big and strong. She’s a fine field hand.”

“I didn’t bring her here to be a field hand. I thought living with your people might help her—calm her and make her a little more useful.”

“It has.” She reached over and took his hand. “Here, if people fit in, I let them do whatever work they prefer. That helps to calm them. Susan prefers field work to anything indoors. She is willing to have as many more children as you want, but caring for them is beyond her. She seems especially sensitive to their thoughts. Their thoughts hurt her somehow. She is a good woman otherwise, Doro.”

Doro shook his head as though dismissing Susan from his thoughts. He stared at the nursing child for a few seconds more, then met Anyanwu’s eyes. “Give me some of the milk,” he said softly.

She drew back in surprise. He had never asked such a thing, and this was certainly not the first child he had seen her nursing. But there were many new things between them now. “I had a man who used to do that,” she said.

“Did you mind?”

“No.”

He looked at her, waiting.

“Come here,” she said softly.

The day after Anyanwu gave him milk, Doro awoke trembling, and he knew the comfortable time in the compact little body he had taken as a gift to her was over. It had not been a particularly powerful body. It had little of the inborn strangeness he valued. Anyanwu’s child by it might be beautiful, but chances were, it would be very ordinary.

Now the body was used up. If he held onto it for much longer, he would become dangerous to those around him. Some simple excitement or pain that he would hardly notice normally might force transmigration. Someone whose life was important to him might die.

He looked over at Anyanwu, still asleep beside him and sighed. What had she said that night months before? That nothing had really changed. They had finally accepted each other. They would keep each other from loneliness now. But beyond that, she was right. Nothing had changed. She would not want him near her for a while after he had changed. She would still refuse to understand that whether he killed out of need, accident, or choice, he had to kill. There was no way for him to avoid it. An ordinary human might be able to starve himself to death, but Doro could not. Better, then, to make a controlled kill than to just let himself go until he did not know who he would take. How many lifetimes would pass before Anyanwu understood that?

She awoke beside him. “Are you getting up?” she asked.

“Yes. But there is no reason for you to. It’s not even dawn.”

“Are you going away? You’ve just come back.”

He kissed her. “Perhaps I’ll come back again in a few days.” To see how she reacted. To be certain that nothing had changed—or perhaps in the hope that they were both wrong, that she had grown a little.

“Stay a little longer,” she whispered.

She knew.

“I can’t,” he said.

She was silent for a moment, then she sighed. “You were asleep when I fed the child,” she said. “But there is still milk for you if you want it.”

At once, he lowered his head to her breast. Probably, there would not be any more of this either. Not for a long while. Her milk was rich and good and as sweet as this time with her had been. Now, for a while, they would begin the old tug of war again. She stroked his head and he sighed.

Afterward, he went out and took Susan. She was the kind of kill he needed now—very sensitive. As sweet and good to his mind as Anyanwu’s milk had been to his former body.

He woke Frank and together they hauled his former body to the old slave graveyard. He did not want one of Anyanwu’s people to find it and go running to Anyanwu. She would know what had happened without that. If it were possible, he wanted to make this time easy for her.

By the time he and Frank left, a hoe gang of field hands was trooping out toward the cotton fields.

“Are you going to be wearing that body long?” Frank asked him, looking at Susan’s tall, stocky profile.

“No, I’ve already got what I need from it,” Doro said. “It’s a good body though. It could last a year, maybe two.”

“But it wouldn’t do Anyanwu much good.”

“It might if it were anyone but Susan. Anyanwu’s had wives, after all. But she knew Susan, liked her. Except in emergencies, I don’t ask people to overcome feelings like that.”

“You and Anyanwu,” Frank muttered. “Changing sex, changing color, breeding like—”

“Shut your mouth,” Doro said in annoyance, “or I’ll tell you a few things you don’t want to hear about your own family.”

Startled, Frank fell silent. He was sensitive about his ancestry, his old Virginia family. For some foolish reason, it was important to him. Doro caught himself as he was about to destroy completely any illusions the man still had about his blue blood—or for that matter, his pure white skin. But there was no reason for Doro to do such a thing. No reason except that one of the best times he could remember was ending and he was not certain what would come next.

Two weeks later, when he went back to Anyanwu, home to Anyanwu, he was alone. He had sent Frank home to his family and put on the more convenient body of a lean, brown-haired white man. It was a good, strong body, but Doro knew better than to expect Anyanwu to appreciate it.

She said nothing when she saw him. She did not accuse him or curse him—did not seem hostile to him at all. On the other hand, she was hardly welcoming.

“You did take Susan, didn’t you?” was all she said. When he said yes, she turned and walked away. He thought that if she had not been pregnant, she would have gone to sea and left him to deal with her not-quite-respectful children. She knew he would not harm them now.

Pregnancy kept her in human form, however. She was carrying a human child. She would almost certainly kill it by taking a nonhuman form. She had told him that during one of her early pregnancies by Isaac, and he had counted it a weakness. He had no doubt that she could abort any pregnancy without help or danger to herself. She could do anything with that body of hers that she wished. But she would not abort. Once a child was inside her, it would be born. During all the years he had known her, she had been as careful with her children before they were born as afterward. Doro decided to stay with her during this period of weakness. Once she accepted his two most recent changes, he did not think he would have trouble with her again.

It took him many long, uncommunicative days to find out how wrong he was. Finally, it was Anyanwu’s young daughter Helen who made him understand. The girl sometimes seemed very much younger than her twelve years. She played with other children and fought with them and cried over trivial hurts. At other times, she was a woman wearing the body of a child. And she was very much her mother’s daughter.

“She won’t talk to me,” the child told Doro. “She knows I know what she’s going to do.” She had come to sit beside him in the cool shade of a giant oak tree. For a time, they had watched in silence as Anyanwu weeded her herb garden. This garden was off limits to other gardeners and to helpful children, both of whom considered a great many of Anyanwu’s plants nothing but weeds themselves. Now, though, Doro looked away from the garden and at Helen.

“What do you mean?” he asked her. “What is she going to do?”

She looked up at him, and he had no doubt that a woman looked out of those eyes. “She says Kane and Leah are going to come and live here. She says after the baby comes, she’s going away.”

“To sea?”

“No, Doro. Not to sea. Someday, she would have to come out of the sea. Then you would find her again, and she would have to watch you kill her friends, kill your own friends.”

“What are you talking about?” He caught her by the arms, barely stopped himself from shaking her.

She glared at him, furious, clearly loathing him. Suddenly she lowered her head and bit his hand as hard as she could with her sharp little teeth.

Pain made Doro release her. She could not know how dangerous it was for her to cause him sudden unexpected pain. Had she done it just before he killed Susan, he would have taken her helplessly. But now, having fed recently, he had more control. He held his bloody hand and watched her run away.

Then, slowly, he got up and went over to Anyanwu. She had dug up several purple-stemmed, yellow-rooted weeds. He expected her to throw them away, but instead she cut the plants from their rootstocks, brushed the dirt from the stocks, and put the stocks in her gathering basket.

“What are those things?” he asked.

“A medicine,” she said, “or a poison if people don’t know what to do with it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Powder it, mix it with some other things, steep it in boiling water and give it to children who have worms.”

Doro shook his head. “I’d think you could help them more easily by making the medicine within your own body.”

“This will work just as well. I’m going to teach some of the women to make it.”

“Why?”

“So that they can heal themselves and their families without depending on what they see as my magic.”

He reached down and tipped her head up so that she faced him. “And why shouldn’t they depend on your magic? Your medicines are more efficient than any ground weed.”

She shrugged. “They should learn to help themselves.”

He picked up her basket and drew her to her feet. “Come into the house and talk with me.”

“There is nothing to say.”

“Come in anyway. Humor me.” He put his arm around her and walked her back to the house.

He started to take her into the library, but a group of the younger children were being taught to read there. They sat scattered in a half circle on the rug looking up at one of Anyanwu’s daughters. As Doro guided Anyanwu away from them, he could hear the voice of one of his sons by Susan reading a verse from the Bible: ” `Be of the same mine one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.’ ”

Doro glanced back. “That sounds as though it would be an unpopular scripture in this part of the country,” he said.

“I see to it that they learn some of the less popular ones,” Anyanwu answered. “There is another: ‘Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ They live in a world that does not want them to hear such things.”

“You’re raising them as Christians, then?”

She shrugged. “Most of their parents are Christian. They want their children to read so they can read the Bible. Besides”—she glanced at him, the corners of her mouth turned down—“besides, this is a Christian country.”

He ignored her sarcasm, took her into the back parlor. “Christians consider it a great sin to take one’s own life,” he said.

“They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”

“Anyanwu, why have you decided to die?” He would not have thought he could say the words so calmly. What would she think? That he did not care? Could she think that?

“It’s the only way I can leave you,” she said simply.

He digested that for a moment. “I thought staying with you now would help you get used to … to the things I have to do,” he said.

“Do you think I’m not used to them?”

“You haven’t accepted them. Why else should you want to die?”

“Because of what we have already said. Everything is temporary but you and me. You are all I have, perhaps all I would ever have.” She shook her head slowly. “And you are an obscenity.”

He frowned, staring at her. She had not said such things since their night together in the library. She had never said them this way, matter-of-factly, as though she were saying, “You are tall.” He found that he could not even manufacture anger against her.

“Shall I go away?” he asked.

“No. Stay with me. I need you here.”

“Even though I’m an obscenity.”

“Even so.”

She was as she had been after Luisa’s death—uncharacteristically passive, ready to die. Then it was loneliness and grief pressing on her, weighing her down then. Now … what was it now, really?

“Is it Susan?” he asked. “I didn’t think you had gotten that close to her.”

“I hadn’t. But you had. She gave you three children.”

“But …”

“You did not need her life.”

“There was no other way she could be of use to me. She had had enough children, and she could not care for them. What did you expect me to do with her?”

Anyanwu got up and walked out of the room.

Later, he tried to talk to her again. She would not listen. She would not argue with him or curse him. When he offered again to go, she asked him to stay. When he came to her room at night, she was strangely, quietly welcoming. And she was still planning to die. There was an obscenity. An immortal, a woman who could live through the millennia with him, yet she was intent on suicide—and he was not even certain why.

He became more desperate as her pregnancy advanced, because he could not reach her, he could not touched her. She admitted she needed him, said she loved him, but some part of her was closed away from him and nothing he said could reach it.

Finally, he did go away for a few weeks. He did not like what she was doing to him. He could not remember a time when his thoughts had been so confused, when he had wanted so badly, so painfully, something he could not have. He had done what Anyanwu had apparently not done. He had allowed her to touch him as though he were an ordinary man. He had allowed her to awaken feelings in him that had been dormant for several times as long as even she had been alive. He had all but stripped himself before her. It amazed him that he could do such a thing—or that she could see him do it, and not care. She, of all people!

He went down to Baton Rouge to a woman he had once known. She was married now, but, as it happened, her husband was in Boston and she welcomed Doro. He stayed with her for a few days, always on the verge of telling her about Anyanwu, but never quite getting around to it.

He took a new body—that of a free black who owned several slaves and treated them brutally. Afterward, he wondered why he had killed the man. It was no concern of his how a slaveholder treated his chattels.

He shed the slaveholder body and took that of another free black—one who could have been a lighter-skinned brother to the one Anyanwu had liked, compact, handsome, red-brown. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too like the other one without being the other one. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too unlike the other one. Who knew which way her mind would turn. But perhaps she would accept it and talk to him and close the distance between them before she shut herself off like used machinery.

He went home to her.

Her belly got in the way when he hugged her in greeting. On any other occasion, he would have laughed and stroked it, thinking of his child inside. Now, he only looked at it, realized that she could give birth any time. How stupid he had been to go away and leave her, to give up any part of what might be their last days together.

She took his hand and led him into the house while her son Julien took his horse. Julien gave Doro a long, frightened, pleading look that Doro did not acknowledge. Clearly, the man knew.

Inside the house, he got the same kinds of looks from Leah and Kane, whom Anyanwu had sent for. Nobody said anything except in ordinary greeting, but the house was filled with tension. It was as though everyone felt it but Anyanwu. She seemed to feel nothing except solemn pleasure in having Doro home again.

Supper was quiet, almost grim, and everyone seemed to have something to do to keep from lingering at the table. Everyone but Doro. He coaxed Anyanwu to share wine and fruit and nuts and talk with him in the smaller, cooler back parlor. As it turned out, they shared wine and fruit and nuts and silence, but it did not matter. It was enough that she was with him.

Anyanwu’s child, a tiny, sturdy boy, was born two weeks after Doro’s return, and Doro became almost sick with desperation. He did not know how to deal with his feelings, could not recall ever having had such an intense confusion of feelings before. Sometimes he caught himself observing his own behavior as though from a distance and noticing with even greater confusion that there was nothing outwardly visible in him to show what he was suffering. He spent as much time as he could with Anyanwu, watching her prepare and mix her herbs; instruct several of her people at a time in their cultivation, appearance and use; tend those few who could not wait for this or that herb.

“What will they do when they have only the herbs?” he asked her.

“Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”

She found a woman to nurse her baby and she gave calm instructions to a frightened Leah. She considered Leah the strangest and the brightest of her white daughters and the one most competent to succeed her. Kane did not want this. He felt threatened, even frightened, by the thought of suddenly greater visibility. He would become more noticeable to people of his father’s class—people who might have known his father. Doro thought this too unlikely to worry about. He found himself trying to explain to the man that if Kane played his role as well as Doro had always seen him play it, and if also he clearly possessed all the trappings of a wealthy planter, it would never occur to people to assume that he was anything but a wealthy planter. Doro told the story of Frank’s passing him off as a Christianized African prince, and he and Kane laughed together over it. There had not been much laughter in the house recently, and even this ended abruptly.

“You have to stop her,” Kane said as though they had been discussing Anyanwu all along. “You have to. You’re the only one who can.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Doro admitted bleakly. Kane would have no idea how unusual such an admission was from him.

“Talk to her! Does she want something? Give it to her!”

“I think she wants me not to kill,” Doro said.

Kane blinked, then shook his head helplessly. Even he understood that it was impossible.

Leah came into the back parlor where they were talking and stood before Doro, hands on her hips. “I can’t tell what you feel,” she said. “I’ve never been able to somehow. But if you feel anything at all for her, go to her now!”

“Why?” Doro asked.

“Because she’s going to do it. She’s just about gotten herself to the brink. I don’t think she plans to wake up tomorrow morning—like Luisa.”

Doro stood up to go, but Kane stopped him with a question to Leah.

“Honey, what does she want? What does she really want from him?”

Leah looked from one man to another, saw that they were both awaiting her answer. “I asked her that myself,” she said. “She just said she was tired. Tired to death.”

She had seemed weary, Doro thought. But weary of what? Him? She had begged him not to go away again—not that he had planned to. “Tired of what?” he asked.

Leah held her hands in front of her and looked down at them. She opened and closed the fingers as though to grasp something, but she held only air. She gestured sometimes when receiving or remembering images and impressions no one else could see. In ordinary society, people would certainly have thought her demented.

“That’s what I can feel,” she said. “If I sit where she’s recently sat or even more if I handle something she’s worn. It’s a reaching and reaching and grasping and then her hands are empty. There’s nothing. She’s so tired.”

“Maybe it’s just her age,” Kane said. “Maybe it’s finally caught up with her.”

Leah shook her head. “I don’t think so. She’s not in any pain, hasn’t slowed down at all. She’s just …” Leah made a sound of frustration and distress-almost a sob. “I’m no good at this,” she said. “Things either come to me clear and sharp without my working and worrying at them or they never come clear. Mother used to be able to take something cloudy and make it clear for herself and for me. I’m just not good enough.”

Doro said nothing, stood still, trying to make sense of the strange grasping, the weariness.

“Go to her, damn you!” Leah screamed. And then more softly, “Help her. She’s been a healer since she was back in Africa. Now she needs somebody to heal her. Who could do it but you?”

He left them and went looking for Anyanwu. He had not thought in terms of healing her before. Let the tables be turned, then. Let him do what he could to heal the healer.

He found her in her bedroom, gowned for bed and hanging her dress up to air. She had begun wearing dresses exclusively when her pregnancy began to show. She smiled warmly as Doro came in, as though she were glad to see him.

“It’s early,” he said.

She nodded. “I know, but I’m tired.”

“Yes. Leah has just been telling me that you were … tired.”

She faced him for a moment, sighed. “Sometimes I long for only ordinary children.”

“You were planning … tonight …”

“I still am.”

“No!” He stepped to her, caught her by the shoulders as though his holding her could keep life in her.

She thrust him away with strength he had not felt in her since before Isaac’s death. He was thrown back against the wall and would have fallen if there had not been a wall to stop him.

“Don’t say no to me any more,” she said softly. “I don’t want to hear you telling me what to do any more.”

He doused a reflexive flare of anger, stared at her as he rubbed the shoulder that had struck the wall. “What is it?” he whispered. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

“I’ve tried.” She climbed onto the bed.

“Then try again!”

She did not get under her blanket, but sat on top of it, watching him. She said nothing, only watched. Finally he drew a deep, shuddering breath and sat down in the chair nearest her bed. He was shaking. His strong, perfectly good new body was shaking as though he had all but worn it out. He had to stop her. He had to.

He looked at her and thought he saw compassion in her eyes—as though in a moment, she could come to him, hold him not only as a lover, but as one of her children to be comforted. He would have permitted her to do this. He would have welcomed it.

She did not move.

“I’ve told you,” she said softly, “that even when I hated you, I believed in what you were trying to do. I believed that we should have people more like ourselves, that we should not be alone. You had much less trouble with me than you could have because I believed that. I learned to turn my head and ignore the things you did to people. But, Doro, I could not ignore everything. You kill your best servants, people who obey you even when it means suffering for them. Killing gives you too much pleasure. Far too much.”

“I would have to do it whether it gave me pleasure or not,” he said. “You know what I am.”

“You are less than you were.”

“I …”

“The human part of you is dying, Doro. It is almost dead. Isaac saw that happening, and he told me. That is part of what he said to me on the night he persuaded me to marry him. He said someday you would not feel anything at all that was human, and he said he was glad he would not live to see that day. He said I must live so that I could save the human part of you. But he was wrong. I cannot save it. It’s already dead.”

“No.” He closed his eyes, tried to still his trembling. Finally, he gave up, looked over at her. If he could only make her see. “It isn’t dead, Anyanwu. I might have thought it was myself before I found you the second time, but it isn’t. It will die, though, if you leave me.” He wanted to touch her, but in his present state, he dared not risk being thrown across the room again. She must touch him. “I think my son was right,” he said. “Parts of me can die little by little. What will I be when there is nothing left but hunger and feeding?”

“Someone will find a way to rid the world of you,” she said tonelessly.

“How? The best people, the ones with the greatest potential power belong to me. I’ve been collecting them, protecting them, breeding them for nearly four millennia while ordinary people poisoned, tortured, hanged, or burned any that I missed.”

“You are not infallible,” she said. “For three centuries, you missed me.” She sighed, shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I cannot say what will happen, but like Isaac, I’m glad I won’t live to see it.”

He stood up, furious with her, not knowing whether to curse or to plead. His legs were weak under him and he felt himself on the verge of obscene weeping. Why didn’t she help him? She helped everyone else! He longed to get away from her—or kill her. Why should she be allowed to waste all her strength and power in suicide while he stood before her, his face wet with perspiration, his body trembling like a palsied old man.

But he could not leave or kill. It was impossible. “Anyanwu, you must not leave me!” He had control of his voice, at least. He did not have that half-in-and-half-out-of-his-body sound that frightened most people and that would have made Anyanwu think he was trying to frighten her.

Anyanwu pulled back the blanket and sheet and lay down. He knew suddenly that she would die now. Right in front of him, she would lie there and shut herself off.

“Anyanwu!” He was on the bed with her, pulling her up again. “Please,” he said not hearing himself any longer. “Please, Anyanwu. Listen.” She was still alive. “Listen to me. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to be able to lie down beside you and die when you die. You can’t know how I’ve longed …” He swallowed. “Sun Woman, please don’t leave me.” His voice caught and broke. He wept. He choked out great sobs that shook his already shaking body almost beyond bearing. He wept as though for all the past times when no tears would come, when there was no relief. He could not stop. He did not know when she pulled off his boots and pulled the blanket up over him, when she bathed his face in cool water. He did know the comfort of her arms, the warmth of her body next to him. He slept, finally, exhausted, his head on her breast, and at sunrise when he awoke, that breast was still warm, still rising and falling gently with her breathing.

EPILOGUE

There had to be changes.

Anyanwu could not have all she wanted, and Doro could no longer have all that he had once considered his by right. She stopped him from destroying his breeders after they had served him. She could not stop him from killing altogether, but she could extract a promise from him that there be no more Susans, no more Thomases. If anyone had earned the right to be safe from him, to have his protection, it was these people.

He did not command her any longer. She was no longer one of his breeders, nor even one of his people in the old proprietary way. He could ask her cooperation, her help, but he could no longer coerce her into giving it. There would be no more threats to her children.

He would not interfere with her children at all. There was disagreement here. She wanted him to promise that he would not interfere with any of her descendants, but he would not. “Do you have any idea how many descendants you have and how widely scattered they are?” he asked her. And, of course, she did not, though she thought by now they would no doubt make a fine nation. “I won’t make you any promises I can’t keep,” he said. “And I won’t wait to ask some stranger who interests me who his many-times-great-grandmother was.”

Thus, uncomfortably, she settled for protecting her children and any grandchildren or even strangers who became members of her household. These were hers to protect, hers to teach, hers to move if she wished. When it became clear within a few years that there would be a war between the Northern and Southern states, she chose to move her people to California. The move displeased him. He thought she was leaving not only to get away from the coming war, but to make it more difficult for him to break his word regarding her children. Crossing the continent, sailing around the Horn, or crossing the Isthmus of Panama to reach her would not be quick or simple matters even for him.

He accused her of not trusting him, and she admitted it freely. “You are still the leopard,” she said. “And we are still prey. Why should we tempt you?” Then she eased it all by kissing him and saying, “You will see me when you want to badly enough. You know that. When has distance ever really stopped you?”

It never had. He would see her. He stopped her cross-country plans by putting her and her people on one of his own clippers and returning to her one of the best of her descendants by Isaac to keep her safe from storms.

In California, she finally took a European name: Emma. She had heard that it meant grandmother or ancestress, and this amused her. She became Emma Anyanwu. “It will give people something to call me that they can pronounce,” she told him on his first visit.

He laughed. He did not care what she called herself as long as she went on living. And she would do that. No matter where she went, she would live. She would not leave him.

About this Title

This eBook was created using ReaderWorks™Publisher Preview, produced by OverDrive, Inc.

For more information on ReaderWorks, visit us on the Web at “www.readerworks.com”

ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html