Wild Seed

“Others!”

“Did you think I could take only one?” She began molding her malleable body into another shape. “I took animal shapes to frighten my people when they wanted to kill me,” she said. “I became a leopard and spat at them. They believe in such things, but they do not like to see them proved. Then I became a sacred python, and no one dared to harm me. The python shape brought me luck. We were needing rain then to save the yam crop, and while I was a python, the rains came. The people decided my magic was good and it took them a long time to want to kill me again.” She was becoming a small, well-muscled man as she spoke.

Now Doro did try to strip away her cloth, moving slowly so that she would understand. He felt her strength for a moment when she caught his hand and, with no special effort, almost broke it. Then, as he controlled his surprise, prevented himself from reacting to the pain, she untied her cloth herself and took it off. For several seconds, he was more impressed with that casual grip than with her body, but he could not help noticing that she had become thoroughly male.

“Could you father a child?” he asked.

“In time. Not now.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. But only girl children.”

He shook his head, laughing. The woman was far beyond anything he had imagined. “I’m surprised your people have let you live,” he said.

“Do you think I would let them kill me?” she asked.

He laughed again. “What will you do then, Anyanwu? Stay here with them, convincing each new generation that you are best let alone—or will you come with me?”

She tied her cloth around her again, then stared at him, her large too-clear eyes looking deceptively gentle in her young man’s face. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “For me to go with you?”

“Yes.”

“That is your true reason for coming here then.”

He thought he heard fear in her voice, and his throbbing hand convinced him that she must not be unduly frightened. She was too powerful. She might force him to kill her. He spoke honestly.

“I let myself be drawn here because people who had pledged loyalty to me had been taken away in slavery,” he said. “I went to their village to get them, take them to a safer home, and I found … only what the slavers had left. I went away, not caring where my feet took me. When they brought me here, I was surprised, and for the first time in many days, I was pleased.”

“It seems your people are often taken from you.”

“It does not seem so, it is so. That is why I am gathering them all closer together in a new place. It will be easier for me to protect them there.”

“I have always protected myself.”

“I can see that. You will be very valuable to me. I think you could protect others as well as yourself.”

“Shall I leave my people to help you protect yours?”

“You should leave so that finally you can be with your own kind.”

“With one who kills men and shrouds himself in their skins? We are not alike, Doro.”

Doro sighed, looked over at her house—a small, rectangular building whose steeply sloping thatched roof dipped to within a few feet of the ground. Its walls were made of the same red earth as the compound wall. He wondered obscurely whether the red earth was the same clay he had seen in Indian dwellings in southwestern parts of the North American continent. But more immediately, he wondered whether there were couches in Anyanwu’s house, and food and water. He was almost too tired and hungry to go on arguing with the woman.

“Give me food, Anyanwu,” he said. “Then I will have the strength to entice you away from this place.”

She looked startled, then laughed almost reluctantly. It occurred to him that she did not want him to stay and eat, did not want him to stay at all. She believed the things he had told her, and she feared that he could entice her away. She wanted him to leave—or part of her did. Surely there was another part that was intrigued, that wondered what would happen if she left her home, walked away with this stranger. She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.

“A bit of yam, at least, Anyanwu,” he said smiling. “I have eaten nothing today.” He knew she would feed him.

Without a word, she walked away to another smaller building and returned with two large yams. Then she led him into her kitchen and gave him a deerskin to sit on since he carried nothing other than the cloth around his loins. Still in her male guise, she courteously shared a kola nut and a little palm wine with him. Then she began to prepare food. Besides the yams, she had vegetables, smoked fish, and palm oil. She built up a fire from the live coals in the tripod of stones that formed her hearth, then put a clay pot of water on to boil. She began to peel the yams. She would cut them up and boil the pieces until they were tender enough to be pounded as her people liked them. Perhaps she would make soup of the vegetables, oil, and fish, but that would take time.

“What do you do?” she asked him as she worked. “Steal food when you are hungry?”

“Yes,” he said. He stole more than food. If there were no people he knew near him, or if he went to people he knew and they did not welcome him, he simply took a new strong, young body. No person, no group could stop him from doing this. No one could stop him from doing anything at all.

“A thief,” said Anyanwu with disgust that he did not think was quite real. “You steal, you kill. What else do you do?”

“I build,” he said quietly. “I search the land for people who are a little different—or very different. I search them out, I bring them together in groups, I begin to build them into a strong new people.”

She stared at him in surprise. “They let you do this—let you take them from their people, their families?”

“Some bring their families with them. Many do not have families. Their differences have made them outcasts. They are glad to follow me.”

“Always?”

“Often enough,” he said.

“What happens when people will not follow you? What happens if they say, ‘It seems too many of your people are dying, Doro. We will stay where we are and live.’ ”

He got up and went to the doorway of the next room where two hard but inviting clay couches had been built out from the walls. He had to sleep. In spite of the youth and strength of the body he was wearing, it was only an ordinary body. If he were careful with it—gave it proper rest and food, did not allow it to be injured—it would last him a few more weeks. If he drove it, though, as he had been driving it to reach Anyanwu, he would use it up much sooner. He held his hands before him, palms down and was not surprised to see that they were shaking.

“Anyanwu, I must sleep. Wake me when the food is ready.”

“Wait!”

The sharpness of her voice stopped him, made him look back.

“Answer,” she said. “What happens when people will not follow you?”

Was that all? He ignored her, climbed onto one of the couches, lay down on the mat that covered it, and closed his eyes. He thought he heard her come into the room and go out again before he drifted off to sleep, but he paid no attention. He had long ago discovered that people were much more cooperative if he made them answer questions like hers for themselves. Only the stupid actually needed to hear his answer, and this woman was not stupid.

When she woke him, the house was full of the odor of food and he got up alert and ravenous. He sat with her, washed his hands absently in the bowl of water she gave him, then used his fingers to scoop up a bit of pounded yam from his platter and dip it into the common pot of peppery soup. The food was good and filling, and for some time he concentrated on it, ignoring Anyanwu except to notice that she was also eating and did not seem inclined to talk. He recalled distantly that there had been some small religious ceremony between the washing of hands and the eating when he had last been with her people. An offering of food and palm wine to the gods. He asked about it once he had taken the edge off his hunger.