Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She began to cry.

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

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

She obeyed still weeping silently.

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

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

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

The thought sickened her. She said nothing.

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

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

CHAPTER 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

Doro shrugged. “We’ll have peace.”

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

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

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