Wild Seed (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

He glanced toward the cabin where Thomas was.

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

"You wanted them," he said reasonably.

"For him. So he could heal."

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

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

"Anyanwu wants to go home," said Doro blandly.

Thomas stared at her with disbelief and pain. "Anyanwu . . .?"

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

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

"Not quite yet," Doro said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For an instant, Thomas stood frozen.

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

Thomas ran off toward the woods.

"I'll kill her," shouted Doro. "Your life or hers."

Thomas stopped, looked back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doro's eyes focused on him.

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

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

"Bury that," Doro said to her from Thomas' mouth. He gestured toward his own former body.

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

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

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

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

"Use your hands!" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not much."

"I put medicine into them."

"Will they heal?"

"Yes, if you keep very clean and eat well and . . . don't drink the way he did."

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 9

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

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

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

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