“That little heathen would sail with you today if you’d let him,” Woodley told Doro. “He’s no better than one of his blacks. I don’t see what good he is to you.”
“He works for me,” Doro said. “Just as you do.”
“It’s not the same!”
Doro shrugged and let the contradiction stand. Woodley knew better than Daly ever could just how much it was the same. He’d worked too closely with Doro’s more gifted children to overestimate his own value. And he knew the living generations of Doro’s sons and daughters would populate a city. He knew how easily both he and Daly could be replaced. After a moment he sighed as Daly had sighed. “I suppose the new blacks you brought aboard have some special talent,” he said.
“That’s right,” Doro answered. “Something new.”
“Godless animals!” Woodley muttered bitterly. He turned and walked away.
CHAPTER 4
The ship frightened Anyanwu, but it frightened Okoye more. He had seen that the men aboard were mostly white men, and in his life, he had had no good experiences with white men. Also, fellow slaves had told him the whites were cannibals.
“We will be taken to their land and fattened and eaten,” he told Anyanwu.
“No,” Anyanwu assured him. “It is not their custom to eat men. And if it were, our master would not permit us to be eaten. He is a powerful man.”
Okoye shuddered. “He is not a man.”
Anyanwu stared at him. How had he discovered Doro’s strangeness so quickly?
“It was he who bought me, then sold me to the whites. I remember him; he beat me. It is the same face, the same skin. But something different is living inside. Some spirit.”
“Okoye.” Anyanwu spoke very softly and waited until he turned from his terrified gazing into space and looked at her. “If Doro is a spirit,” she said, “then he has done you a service. He has killed your enemy for you. Is that reason to fear him?”
“You fear him yourself. I have seen it in your eyes.”
Anyanwu gave him a sad smile. “Not as much as I should, perhaps.”
“He is a spirit!”
“You know I am your mother’s kinsman, Okoye.”
He stared at her for a time without answering. Finally he asked, “Have her people also been enslaved?”
“Not when I last saw them.”
“Then how were you taken?”
“Do you remember your mother’s mother?”
“She is the oracle. The god speaks through her.”
“She is Anyanwu, your mother’s mother,” Anyanwu said. “She fed you pounded yam and healed the sickness that threatened to take your life. She told you stories of the tortoise, the monkey, the birds … And sometimes when you looked at her in the shadows of the fire and the lamp, it seemed to you that she became these creatures. You were frightened at first. Then you were pleased. You asked for the stories and the changes. You wanted to change too.”
“I was a child,” Okoye said. “I was dreaming.”
“You were awake.”
“You cannot know!”
“I know.”
“I never told anyone!”
“I never thought you would,” Anyanwu said. “Even as a child, you seemed to know when to talk and when to keep quiet.” She smiled, remembering the small, stoic boy who had refused to cry with the pain of his sickness, who had refused to smile when she told him the old fables her mother had told her. Only when she startled him with her changes did he begin to pay attention.
She spoke softly. “Do you remember, Okoye, your mother’s mother had a mark here?” She drew with her finger the jagged old scar that she had once carried beneath her left eye. As she drew it, she aged and furrowed the flesh so that the scar appeared.
Okoye bolted toward the door.
Anyanwu caught him, held him easily in spite of his greater size and his desperate strength. “What am I that I was not before?” she asked when the violence had gone out of his struggles.
“You are a man!” he gasped. “Or a spirit.”
“I am no spirit,” she said. “And should it be so difficult for a woman who can become a tortoise or a monkey to become a man?”
He began to struggle again. He was a young man now, not a child. The easy childhood acceptance of the impossible was gone, and she dared not let him go. In his present state, he might jump into the water and drown.
“If you will be still, Okoye, I will become the old woman you remember.”
Still he struggled.
“Nwadianidaughter’s childdo you remember that even the pain of sickness could not make you weep when your mother brought you to me, but you wept because you could not change as I could?”
He stopped his struggles, stood gasping in her grip.
“You are my daughter’s son,” she said. “I would not harm you.”
He was still now, so she released him. The bond between a man and his mother’s kin was strong and gentle. But for the boy’s own safety, she kept her body between his and the door.
“Shall I become as I was?” she asked.
“Yes,” the boy whispered.
She became an old woman for him. The shape was familiar and easy to slip into. She had been an old woman for so long.
“It is you,” Okoye said wonderingly.
She smiled. “You see? Why should you fear an old woman?”
To her surprise, he laughed. “You always had too many teeth to be an old woman, and strange eyes. People said the god looked out of your eyes.”
“What do you think?”
He stared at her with great curiosity, walked around her to look at her. “I cannot think at all. Why are you here? How did you become this Doro’s slave?”
“I am not his slave.”
“I cannot see how any man would hold you in slavery. What are you?”
“His wife.”
The boy stared speechless at her long breasts.
“I am not this wrinkled woman, Okoye. I allowed myself to become her when my last husband, the father of your mother, died. I thought I had had enough husbands and enough children; I am older than you can imagine. I wanted to rest. When I had rested for many years as the people’s oracle, Doro found me. In his way, he is as different as I am. He wanted me to be his wife.”
“But he is not merely different. He is something other than a man!”
“And I am something other than a woman.”
“You are not like him!”
“No, but I have accepted him as my husband. It was what I wantedto have a man who was as different from other men as I am from other women.” If this was not entirely true, Okoye did not need to know.
“Show me …” Okoye paused as though not certain of what he wanted to say. “Show me what you are.”
Obligingly, she let her true shape flow back to her, became the young woman whose body had ceased to age when she was about twenty years old. At twenty, she had a violent, terrible sickness during which she had heard voices, felt pain in one part of her body after another, screamed and babbled in foreign dialects. Her young husband had feared she would die. She was Anasi, his first wife, and though she was in disfavor with his family because after five years of marriage, she had produced no children, he fought hard against losing her. He sought help for her, frantically paying borrowed money to the old man who was then the oracle, making sacrifices of valuable animals. No man ever cared more for her than he did. And it seemed that the medicine worked. Her body ceased its thrashing and struggling, and her senses returned, but she found herself vastly changed. She had a control over her body that was clearly beyond anything other people could manage. She could look inside herself and control or alter what she saw there. She could finally be worthy of her husband and of her own womanhood; she could become pregnant. She bore her husband ten strong children. In the centuries that followed, she never did more for any man.