Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

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

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

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

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.