Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“When do we pass through this land!” she asked in disgust. It was raining now. They were on someone’s pathway laboring through sucking ankle-deep mud.

“There is a river not far ahead of us,” he told her. He stopped for a moment to cough. “I have an arrangement with people at a riverside town. They will take us the rest of the way by canoe.”

“Strangers,” she said with alarm. They had managed to avoid contact with most of the people whose lands they had crossed.

“You will be the stranger here,” Doro told her. “But you need not worry. These people know me. I have given them gifts—dash, they call it—and promised them more if they rowed my people down the river.”

“Do they know you in this body?” she asked, using the question as an excuse to touch the hard flat muscle of his shoulder. She liked to touch him.

“They know me,” he said. “I am not the body I wear, Anyanwu. You will understand that when I change—soon, I think.” He paused for another fit of coughing. “You will know me in another body as soon as you hear me speak.”

“How?” She did not want to talk about his changing, his killing. She had tried to cure his sickness so that he would not change, but though she had eased his coughing, prevented him from growing sicker, she had not made him well. That meant she might soon be finding out more about his changing whether she wanted to or not. “How will I know you?” she asked.

“There are no words for me to tell you—as with your tiny living things. When you hear my voice, you will know me. That’s all.”

“Will it be the same voice?”

“No.”

“Then how …?”

“Anyanwu …” He glanced around at her. “I am telling you, you will know!”

Startled, she kept silent. She believed him. How was it she always believed him?

The village he took her to was a small place that seemed not much different from waterside communities she had known nearer home. Here some of the people stared at her and at Doro, but no one molested them. She heard speech here and there and sometimes it had a familiar sound to it. She thought she might understand a little if she could go closer to the speakers and listen. As it was, she understood nothing. She felt exposed, strangely helpless among people so alien. She walked closely behind Doro.

He led her to a large compound and into that compound as though it belonged to him. A tall, lean young man confronted him at once. The young man spoke to Doro and when Doro answered, the young man’s eyes widened. He took a step backward.

Doro continued to speak in the strange language, and Anyanwu discovered that she could understand a few words—but not enough to follow the conversation. This language was at least more like her own than the new speech, theEnglish , Doro was teaching her. English was one of the languages spoken in his homeland, he had told her. She had to learn it. Now, though, she gathered what she could from the unspoken language of the two men, from their faces and voices. It was obvious that instead of the courteous greeting Doro had expected, he was getting an argument from the young man. Finally, Doro turned away in disgust. He spoke to Anyanwu.

“The man I dealt with before has died,” he told her. “This fool is his son.” He stopped to cough. “The son was present when his father and I bargained. He saw the gifts I brought. But now that his father has died, he feels no obligation to me.”

“I think he fears you,” Anyanwu said. The young man was blustering and arrogant; that she could see despite the different languages. He was trying hard to seem important. As he spoke, though, his eyes shifted and darted and looked at Doro only in brief glances. His hands shook.

“He knows he is doing a dangerous thing,” Doro said. “But he is young. His father was a king. Now the son thinks he will use me to prove himself. He has chosen a poor target.”

“Have you promised him more gifts?”

“Yes. But he sees only my empty hands. Move away from me, Anyanwu, I have no more patience.”

She wanted to protest, but her mouth was suddenly dry. Frightened and silent, she stumbled backward away from him. She did not know what to expect, but she was certain the young man would be killed. How would he die? Exactly what would Doro do?

Doro stepped past the young man and toward a boy-child of about seven years who had been watching the men talk. Before the young man or the child could react, Doro collapsed.

His body fell almost on top of the boy, but the child jumped out of the way in time. Then he knelt on the ground and took Doro’s machete. People were beginning to react as the boy stood up and leaned on the machete. The sounds of their questioning voices and their gathering around almost drowned out the child’s voice when he spoke to the young man. Almost.

The child spoke calmly, quietly in his own language, but as Anyanwu heard him, she thought she would scream aloud. The child was Doro. There was no doubt of it. Doro’s spirit had entered the child’s body. And what had happened to the child’s spirit? She looked at the body lying on the ground, then she went to it, turned it over. It was dead.

“What have you done?” she said to the child.

“This man knew what his arrogance could cost,” Doro said. And his voice was high and childlike. There was no sound of the man Doro had been. Anyanwu did not understand what she was hearing, what she was recognizing in the boy’s voice.

“Keep away from me,” Doro told her. “Stay there with the body until I know how many others of his household this fool will sacrifice to his arrogance.”

She wanted nothing more than to keep away from him. She wanted to run home and try to forget she had ever seen him. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, fighting panic. There was shouting around her, but she hardly heard it. Intent on her own fear, she paid no attention to anything else until someone knocked her down.

Then someone seized her roughly, and she realized she was to pay for the death of the child. She thrust her attacker away from her and leaped to her feet ready to fight.

“That is enough!” Doro shouted. And then more quietly, “Do not kill him!”

She saw that the person she had thrust away was the young man—and that she had pushed him harder than she thought. Now he was sprawled against the compound wall, half conscious.

Doro went to him and the man raised his hands as though to deflect a blow. Doro spoke to him in quiet, chilling tones that should never have issued from the mouth of a child. The man cringed, and Doro spoke again more sharply.

The man stood up, looked at the people of the household he had inherited from his father. They were clearly alarmed and confused. Most had not seen enough to know what was going on, and they seemed to be questioning each other. They stared at the new head of their household. There were several young children, women, some of whom must have been wives or sisters of the young man, men who were probably brothers and slaves. Everyone had come to see.

Perhaps the young man felt that he had shamed himself before his people. Perhaps he was thinking about how he had cringed and whimpered before a child. Or perhaps he was merely the fool Doro took him to be. Whatever his reasoning, he made a fatal error.

With shouted words that had to be curses, the man seized the machete from Doro’s hand, raised it, and brought it slashing down through the neck of the unresisting child-body.

Anyanwu looked away, absolutely certain of what would happen. There had been ample time for the child to avoid the machete. The young man, perhaps still groggy from Anyanwu’s blow, had not moved very quickly. But the child had stood still and awaited the blow with a shrug of adult weariness. Now she heard the young man speaking to the crowd, and she could hear Doro in his voice. Of course.