She moved uncomfortably, understanding what he was telling her. She remembered his voice when he spoke to her the night before. “Come. Kill again. It has been a long time since 1 was a woman!” He would have consumed her spirit as she had consumed his son’s flesh. He would be wearing her body today.
She turned to look out at the leaping fish again, and when he drew her to his side this time, she did not move away. She was not afraid; she was relieved. Some part of her mind wondered how this could be, but she had no answer. People did not react rationally to Doro. When he did nothing, they feared him. When he threatened them, they believed him, but did not hate him or flee.
“Isaac is well,” he told her.
“Is he? What did he do for his hunger?”
“Endured it until it went away.”
To her surprise, his words sparked guilt in her. She had the foolish urge to find the young man and apologize for not keeping him with her. He would think she had lost her senses. “You should get him a wife,” she told Doro.
Doro nodded absently. “Soon,” he said.
There came a time when Doro said land was neara time when the strange food was rotten and full of worms and the drinking water stank and the ship stank and the slaves fought among themselves and the crewmen fished desperately to vary their disgusting diet and the sun’s heat intensified and the wind did not blow. In the midst of all this discomfort, there were events that Anyanwu would recall with pleasure for the rest of her life. This was when she came to understand clearly just what Isaac’s special ability was, and he came to understand her own.
After Lale’s death, she avoided the boy as best she could in the confined space of the ship, thinking that he might not be as indifferent to the death of a brother as Doro was to the death of a son. But Isaac came to her.
He joined her at the rail one day as she stood watching the leaping fish. He watched them himself for a moment, then laughed. She glanced up at him questioningly, and he pointed out to sea. When she looked there again, she saw one of the great fish hanging high above the water, struggling in midair.
It was as though the creature had been caught in some invisible net. But there was no net. There was nothing.
She looked at Isaac in amazement. “You?” she asked in her uncertain English. “You do this?”
Isaac only smiled. The fish, struggling wildly, drifted closer to the ship. Several crewmen noticed it and began shouting at Isaac. Anyanwu could not understand most of what they said, but she knew they wanted the fish. Isaac made a gesture of presenting it to Anyanwu, though it still hung over the water. She looked around at the eager crewmen, then grinned. She beckoned for the fish to be brought aboard.
Isaac dropped it at her feet.
Everyone ate well that night. Anyanwu ate better than anyone, because for her, the flesh of the fish told her all she needed to know about the creature’s physical structureall she needed to know to take its shape and live as it did. Just a small amount of raw flesh told her more than she had words to say. Within each bite, the creature told her its story clearly thousands of times. That night in their cabin, Doro caught her experimentally turning one of her arms into a flipper.
“What are you doing!” he demanded, with what sounded like revulsion.
She laughed like a child and stood up to meet him, her arm flowing easily back to its human shape. “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will tell Isaac how to help me, and I will swim with the fish! I will be a fish! I can do it now! I have wanted to for so long.”
“How do you know you can?” Curiosity quickly drove any negative feelings from him, as usual. She told him of the messages she had read within the flesh of the fish. “Messages as clear and fine as those in your books,” she told him. Privately she thought her flesh-messages even more specific than the books he had introduced her to, read to her from. But the books were the only example she could think of that he might understand. “It seems that you could misunderstand your books,” she said. “Other men made them. Other men can lie or make mistakes. But the flesh can only tell me what it is. It has no other story.”
“But how do you read it?” he asked.Read. If he used that English word, he too saw the similarity.
“My body reads itreads everything. Did you know that fish breathes air as we do? I thought it would breathe water like the ones we caught and dried at home.”
“It was a dolphin,” Doro murmured.
“But it was more like a land thing than a fish. Inside, it is much like a land animal. The changes I make will not be as great as I thought.”
“Did you have to eat leopard flesh to learn to become a leopard?”
She shook her head. “No, I could see what the leopard was like. I could mold myself into what I saw. I was not a true leopard, though, until I killed one and ate a little of it. At first, I was a woman pretending to be a leopardclay molded into leopard shape. Now when I change, I am a leopard.”
“And now you will be a dolphin.” He gazed at her. “You cannot know how valuable you are to me. Shall I let you do this?”
That startled her. It had not occurred to her that he would disapprove. “It is a harmless thing,” she said.
“A dangerous thing. What do you know of the sea?”
“Nothing. But tomorrow I will begin to learn. Have Isaac watch me; I will stay near the surface. If he sees that I’m in trouble, he can lift me out of the water and let me change back on deck.”
“Why do you want to do this?”
She cast about for a reason she could put into words, a reason other than the wrenching longing she had felt when she watched the dolphins leaping and diving. It was like the days at home when she had watched eagles fly until she could no longer stand to only watch. She had killed an eagle and eaten and learned and flown as no human was ever meant to fly. She had flown away, escaping her town, her duties, her kinsmen. But after a while, she had flown back to her people. Where else could she go? Afterward, though, when the seasons with them grew long and the duties tiresome, when the kinsmen by themselves became a great tribe, she would escape again. She would fly. There was danger. Men hunted her and once had nearly killed her. She made an exceptionally large, handsome eagle. But fear never kept her out of the sky. Nor would it keep her out of the water.
“I want this,” she told Doro. “I will do it without Isaac if you keep him from helping me.”
Doro shook his head. “Were you this way with your other husbandstelling them what you would do in spite of their wishes?”
“Yes,” she said seriously, and was very much relieved when he laughed aloud. Better to amuse him than to anger him.
The next day she stood by the rail, watching Doro and Isaac argue in English. It was Isaac who did most of the arguing. Doro said only a few words, and then later repeated them exactly. Anyanwu could find only one word in what Isaac said that was repeated. The word was “shark,” and Isaac said it with vehemence. But he stopped when he saw how little attention Doro was paying to him. And Doro turned to face her.
“Isaac fears for you,” he told her.
“Will he help?”
“Yesthough I told him he didn’t have to.”
“I thought you were speaking for me!”
“In this, I am only translating.”
His attitude puzzled her. He was not angry, not even annoyed. He did not even seem to be as concerned for her as Isaac was, and yet he said he valued her. “What is a shark?” she asked.
“A fish,” Doro said. “A large flesh eater, a killer at least as deadly in the sea as your leopards are on land.”
“You did not say there were such things.”
He looked at the water. “It is as dangerous down there as in your forests,” he told her. “You need not go.”
“You didn’t try hard to stop me from going.”