Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“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.”