Wild Seed

“Not a coastal people,” Doro said. “An inland tribe from the grasslands beyond the forests. I showed you a few of them years ago when we met.”

“These blacks are all alike,” Daly said. “It’s hard to tell.” He took a swallow of brandy.

Doro reached across the small table and grasped Daly’s wrist just above the man’s sole remaining hand. “If you can’t do better than that,” he said, “you’re no good to me.”

Daly froze, terrified, arresting a sudden effort to jerk his hand away. He sat still, perhaps remembering how his men had died years before whether Doro touched them or not. “It was a joke,” he whispered hoarsely.

Doro said nothing, only looked at him.

“Your people have Arab blood,” Daly said quickly. “I remember their looks and the words of their language that you taught me and their vile tempers. Not an easy people to enslave and keep alive. None like them have gone through my hands without being tested.”

“Speak the words I taught you.”

Daly spoke them—words in the seed people’s own language asking them whether they were followers of Doro, whether they were “Doro’s seed”—and Doro released Daly’s wrist. The slaver had said the words perfectly and none of Doro’s seed villagers had failed to respond. They were, as Daly had said, difficult people—bad-tempered, more suspicious than most of strangers, more willing than most to murder each other or attack their far-flung neighbors, more willing to satisfy their customs and their meat-hunger with human flesh. Doro had isolated them on their sparsely populated savanna for just that reason. Had they been any closer to the larger, stronger tribes around them, they would have been wiped out as a nuisance.

They were also a highly intuitive people who involuntarily saw into each other’s thoughts and fought with each other over evil intentions rather than evil deeds. This without ever realizing that they were doing anything unusual. Doro had been their god since he had assembled them generations before and commanded them to marry only each other and the strangers he brought to them. They had obeyed him, throwing away clearly defective children born of their inbreeding, and strengthening the gifts that made them so valuable to him. If those same gifts made them abnormally quick to anger, vicious, and savagely intolerant of people unlike themselves, it did not matter. Doro had been very pleased with them, and they had long ago accepted the idea that pleasing him was the most important thing they could do.

“Your people are surely dead if they have been taken,” Daly said. “The few that you brought here with you years ago made enemies wherever they went.”

Doro had brought five of the villagers out to crossbreed them with certain others he had collected. They had insulted everyone with their arrogance and hostility, but they had also bred as Doro commanded them and gotten fine children—children with even greater, more controllable sensitivity.

“Some of them are alive,” Doro said. “I can feel their lives drawing me when I think of them. I’m going to have to track as many of them as I can before someone does kill them though.”

“I’m sorry,” Daly said. “I wish they had been brought to me. As bad as they are, I would have held them for you.”

Doro nodded, sighed. “Yes, I know you would have.”

And the last of the slaver’s tension melted away. He knew Doro did not blame him for the seed people’s demise, knew he would not be punished. “What is the little Igbo you have brought aboard?” he asked curiously. There was room for curiosity now.

“Wild seed,” Doro said. “Carrier of a bloodline I believed was lost—and, I think, of another that I did not know existed. I have some exploring to do in her homeland once she is safely away.”

“She! But … that black is a man.”

“Sometimes. But she was born a woman. She is a woman most of the time.”

Daly shook his head, unbelieving. “The monstrosities you collect! I suppose now you will breed creatures who don’t know whether to piss standing or squatting.”

“They will know—if I can breed them. They will know, but it won’t matter.”

“Such things should be burned. They are against God!”

Doro laughed and said nothing. He knew as well as Daly how the slaver longed to be one of Doro’s monstrosities. Daly was still alive because of that desire. Ten years before, he had confronted what he considered to be just another black savage leading five other less black but equally savage-looking men. All six men appeared to be young, healthy—fine potential slaves. Daly had sent his own black employees to capture them. He had lost thirteen men that day. He had seen them swept down as grain before a scythe. Then, terrified, confronted by Doro in the body of the last man killed, he had drawn his own sword. The move cost him his right hand. He never understood why it had not cost him his life. He did not know of Doro’s habit of leaving properly disciplined men of authority scattered around the world ready to serve whenever Doro needed them. All Daly understood was that he had been spared—that Doro had cauterized his wound and cared for him until he recovered.

And by the time he recovered, he had realized that he was no longer a free man—that Doro was capable of taking the life he had spared at any time. Daly was able to accept this as others had accepted it before him. “Let me work for you,” he had said. “Take me aboard one of your ships or even back to your homeland. I’m still strong. Even with one hand, I can work. I can handle blacks.”

“I want you here,” Doro had told him. “I’ve made arrangements with some of the local kings while you were recovering. They’ll trade with you exclusively from now on.

Daly had stared at him in amazement. “Why would you do such a thing for me?”

“So that you can do a few things for me,” Doro had answered.

And Daly had been back in business. Doro sent him black traders who sold him slaves and his company sent him white traders who bought them. “Someone else would set up a factory here if you left,” Doro told him. “I can’t stop the trade even where it might touch my people, but I can control it.” So much for his control. Neither his support of Daly nor his spies left along the coast—people who should have reported to Daly—had been enough. Now they were useless. If they had been special stock, people with unusual abilities, Doro would have resettled them in America, where they could be useful. But they were only ordinary people bought by wealth or fear or belief that Doro was a god. He would forget them. He might forget Daly also once he had returned to Anyanwu’s homeland and sought out as many of her descendants as he could find. At the moment, though, Daly could still be useful—and he could still be trusted; Doro knew that now. Perhaps the seed people had been taken to Bonny or New Calabar or some other slave port, but they had not passed near Daly. The most talented and deceptive of Doro’s own children could not have lied to him successfully while he was on guard. Also, Daly had discovered he enjoyed being an arm of Doro’s power.

“Now that your people are gone,” Daly said, “why not take me to Virginia or New York where you have blacks working. I’m sick to death of this country.”

“Stay here,” Doro ordered. “You can still be useful. I’ll be coming back.”

Daly sighed. “I almost wish I was one of those strange beings you call your people,” he admitted.

Doro smiled and had the ship’s captain, John Woodley, pay for the boy, Okoye, and send Daly ashore.

“Slimy little bastard,” Woodley muttered when Daly was gone.

Doro said nothing. Woodley, one of Doro’s ordinary, ungifted sons, had always disliked Daly. This amused Doro since he considered the two men much alike. Woodley was the child of a casual liaison Doro had had forty-five years before with a London merchant’s daughter. Doro had married the woman and provided for her when he learned she would bear his child, but he quickly left her a widow, well off, but alone except for her infant son. Doro had seen John Woodley twice as the boy grew toward adulthood. When, on the second visit, Woodley expressed a desire to go to sea, Doro had him apprenticed to one of Doro’s shipmasters. Woodley had worked his own way up. He could have become wealthy, could now be commanding a great ship instead of one of Doro’s smallest. But he had chosen to stay near Doro. Like Daly, he enjoyed being an arm of Doro’s power. And like Daly, he was envious of others who might outrank him in Doro’s esteem.