Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

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.”