WITH METICULOUS CARE, DORO disentangled himself from Anyanwu. It was much easier than he had thought it would be—stopping in the middle of what could have been an intensely satisfying kill. But he had never intended to kill. He had gone further with her, though, than he did with the most powerful of his children. With them, he forced the potentially deadly contact to enable him to understand the limits of their power, understand whether that power could ever in any way threaten him. He did it soon after their transitions so that he found them physically depleted, emotionally weary, and too ignorant of their newly matured abilities to even begin to understand how to fight him—if they could fight him. Very rarely, he found someone who could, and that person died. He wanted allies, not rivals.
But he had not been testing Anyanwu. He knew she could not threaten him, knew he could kill her as long as she was in human form. He had never doubted it. She did not have the kinds of thought-reading and thought-controlling abilities that he considered potentially dangerous. He destroyed anyone who showed the potential, the strength to someday read or control his thoughts. Anyanwu had almost absolute control of every cell of her malleable body, but her mind was as open and defenseless as the mind of any ordinary person—which meant she would eventually have trouble with the people he was bringing her. They would marry into her large “family” and cause dissension. He had warned her of that. Eventually, she would have children and grandchildren here who were more like Joseph and Lale than like the congenial, weakly sensitive people she had collected around her. But that was another matter. He could think about it later. Now, all that was important was that she revive whole and well. Nothing must happen to her. No amount of anger or stupidity on her part or his must induce him to think again of killing her. She was too valuable in too many ways.
She awoke slowly, opening her eyes, looking around to find the library in darkness except for the fire he had made in the fireplace and a single lamp on the table at her head. He lay close beside her, warming himself by her warmth. He wanted her close to him.
“Doro?” she whispered.
He kissed her cheek and relaxed. She was all right. She had been so completely passive in her grief. He had been certain he could do this to her and not harm her. He had been certain that this once she would not resist and make him hurt or kill her.
“I was dying,” she said.
“No you weren’t.”
“I was dying. You were—”
He put his hand over her mouth, then let her move it away when he saw that she would be still. “I had to know you that way at least once,” he said. “I had to touch you that way.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s the closest I’ll ever come to you.”
She did not respond to that for a long while. Eventually, though, she moved her head to rest it on his chest. He could not remember when she had done that last on her own. He folded his arms over her, remembering that other more complete enfolding. How had he ever had the control to stop, he wondered.
“Is it that way, that easy for all the others?” she asked.
He hesitated, not wanting to lie to her, not wanting to talk about his kills at all. “Fear makes it worse for them,” he said. “And they’re always afraid. Also … I have no reason to be gentle with them.”
“Do you hurt them? Is there pain?”
“No. I feel what they feel so I know. They don’t feel pain any more than you did.”
“It was … good,” she said with wonder. “Until I thought you would kill me, it was so good.”
He could only hold her and press his face into her hair.
“We should go upstairs,” she said.
“Soon.”
“What shall I do?” she asked. “I have fought you all these years. My reasons for fighting you still exist. What shall I do?”
“What Isaac wanted. What you want. Join with me. What’s the good of fighting me? Especially now.”
“Now …” She was still, perhaps, savoring their brief contact. He hoped she was. He was. He wondered what she would say if he told her no one had ever before enjoyed such contact with him. No one in nearly four thousand years. His people found contact with him terrifying. Thought readers and controllers who survived such contact quickly learned that they could not read or control him without sacrificing their lives. They learned to pay attention to the vague wariness they felt of him as soon as their transitions ended. Occasionally, he found a man or woman he cared for, enjoyed repeated contact with. These endured what he did since they could not prevent it, though their grim, long-suffering attitudes made him feel like a rapist. But Anyanwu had participated, had enjoyed, had even taken the initiative for a while, greatly intensifying his pleasure. He looked at her with wonder and delight. She looked back solemnly.
“Nothing is solved,” she said, “except that now, I must fight myself as well as you.”
“You’re talking foolishness,” he said.
She turned and kissed him. “Let it be foolishness for now,” she said. “Let it be foolishness for this moment.” She looked down at him in the dim light. “You don’t want to go upstairs, do you?”
“No.”
“We’ll stay here then. My children will whisper about me.”
“Do you care?”
“Now you are talking foolishness,” she said, laughing. “Do I care! Whose house is this? I do as I please!” She covered them both with the wide skirt of her dress, blew out the lamp, and settled to sleep in his arms.
Anyanwu’s children did whisper about her—and about Doro. They were careless—deliberately so, Doro thought—and he heard them. But after a while, they stopped. Perhaps Anyanwu spoke to them. For once, Doro did not care. He knew he was no longer fearsome to them; he was only another of Anyanwu’s lovers. How long had it been since he was only someone’s lover? He could not remember. He went away now and then to take care of his businesses, put in an appearance at one of his nearer settlements.
“Bring this body back to me as long as you can,” Anyanwu would tell him. “There cannot be two as perfect as this.”
He would laugh and promise her nothing. Who knew what punishment he might have to inflict, what madman he might have to subdue, what stupid, stubborn politician, businessman, planter, or other fool he might have to remove? Also, wearing a black body in country where blacks were under constant obligation to prove they had rights to even limited freedom was a hindrance. He traveled with one of his older white sons, Frank Winston, whose fine old Virginia family had belonged to Doro since Doro brought it from England 135 years before. The man could be as distinguished and aristocratic or as timid and naive as he chose to be, as Doro ordered him to be. He had no inborn strangeness great enough to qualify him as good breeding stock. He was simply the best actor, the best liar Doro knew. People believed what he told them even when he grew expansive and outrageous, when he said Doro was an African prince mistakenly enslaved, but now freed to return to his homeland and take the word of God back to his heathen people.
Though caught by surprise, Doro played his role with such a confusing mixture of arrogance and humility that slaveholders were first caught between bewilderment and anger, then convinced. Doro was like no nigger they had ever seen.
Later, Doro warned Frank to stick to more conventional lies—though he thought the man was probably laughing too hard to hear him.
He felt more at ease than he had for years—even at ease enough to laugh at himself—and his son enjoyed traveling with him. It was worth the inconvenience to keep Anyanwu happy. He knew that a kind of honeymoon phase of their relationship would end when he had to give up the body that pleased her so. She would not turn away from him again, he was certain, but their relationship would change. They would become occasional mates as they had been in Wheatley, but with better feelings. She would welcome him now, in whichever body he wore. She would have her men, and if she chose, her women—husbands, wives, lovers. He could not begrudge her these. There would be years, multiples of years, when he would not see her at all. A woman like her could not be alone. But there would always be room for him when he came back to her, and he would always go back to her. Because of her, he was no longer alone. Because of her, life was suddenly better than it had been for him in centuries, in millennia. It was as though she was the first of the race he was trying to create—except that he had not created her, had not been able to re-create her. In that way, she was only a promise unfulfilled. But someday …
Doro’s woman Susan had her child a month after Iye bore Stephen’s child. Both were boys, sturdy and healthy, promising to grow into handsome children. Iye accepted her son with love and gratitude that amazed Anyanwu. Anyanwu had delivered the child and all Iye could think of through her pain was that Stephen’s child must live and be well. It had not been an easy birth, but the woman clearly did not care. The child was all right.
But Iye could not feed it. She had no milk. Anyanwu produced milk easily and during the day visited Iye’s cabin regularly to nurse the child. At night, she kept the child with her.
“I’m glad you could do this,” Iye told her. “I think it would be too hard for me to share him with anyone else.” Anyanwu’s prejudices against the woman were fast dissolving.
As were her prejudices against Doro—though this frightened and disturbed her. She could not look at him now with the loathing she had once felt, yet he continued to do loathsome things. He simply no longer did them to her. As she had predicted, she was at war with herself. But she showed him no signs of that war. For the time he wore the beautiful little body that had been his gift to her, it pleased her to please him. For that short time, she could refuse to think about what he did when he left her. She could treat him as the very special lover he appeared to be.
“What are you going to do now?” Doro asked her when he came home from a short trip to find her nursing the baby. “Push me away?”
They were alone in her upstairs sitting room so she gave him a look of mock annoyance. “Shall I do that? Yes, I think so. Go away.”
He smiled, not believing her any more than she wished to be believed. He watched the nursing child.
“You will be father to one like this in seven months more,” she said.
“You’re pregnant now?”
“Yes. I wanted a child by this body of yours. I was afraid you would be getting rid of it soon.”
“I will be,” he admitted. “I’ll have to. But eventually you’ll have two children to nurse. Won’t that be hard on you?”
“I can do it. Do you think I can’t?”
“No.” He smiled again. “If only I had more like you and Iye. That Susan …”
“I’ve found a home for her child,” Anyanwu said. “It won’t be fostered with the older ones, but it will have loving parents. And Susan is big and strong. She’s a fine field hand.”
“I didn’t bring her here to be a field hand. I thought living with your people might help her—calm her and make her a little more useful.”
“It has.” She reached over and took his hand. “Here, if people fit in, I let them do whatever work they prefer. That helps to calm them. Susan prefers field work to anything indoors. She is willing to have as many more children as you want, but caring for them is beyond her. She seems especially sensitive to their thoughts. Their thoughts hurt her somehow. She is a good woman otherwise, Doro.”
Doro shook his head as though dismissing Susan from his thoughts. He stared at the nursing child for a few seconds more, then met Anyanwu’s eyes. “Give me some of the milk,” he said softly.
She drew back in surprise. He had never asked such a thing, and this was certainly not the first child he had seen her nursing. But there were many new things between them now. “I had a man who used to do that,” she said.
“Did you mind?”
“No.”
He looked at her, waiting.
“Come here,” she said softly.
The day after Anyanwu gave him milk, Doro awoke trembling, and he knew the comfortable time in the compact little body he had taken as a gift to her was over. It had not been a particularly powerful body. It had little of the inborn strangeness he valued. Anyanwu’s child by it might be beautiful, but chances were, it would be very ordinary.
Now the body was used up. If he held onto it for much longer, he would become dangerous to those around him. Some simple excitement or pain that he would hardly notice normally might force transmigration. Someone whose life was important to him might die.
He looked over at Anyanwu, still asleep beside him and sighed. What had she said that night months before? That nothing had really changed. They had finally accepted each other. They would keep each other from loneliness now. But beyond that, she was right. Nothing had changed. She would not want him near her for a while after he had changed. She would still refuse to understand that whether he killed out of need, accident, or choice, he had to kill. There was no way for him to avoid it. An ordinary human might be able to starve himself to death, but Doro could not. Better, then, to make a controlled kill than to just let himself go until he did not know who he would take. How many lifetimes would pass before Anyanwu understood that?
She awoke beside him. “Are you getting up?” she asked.
“Yes. But there is no reason for you to. It’s not even dawn.”
“Are you going away? You’ve just come back.”
He kissed her. “Perhaps I’ll come back again in a few days.” To see how she reacted. To be certain that nothing had changed—or perhaps in the hope that they were both wrong, that she had grown a little.
“Stay a little longer,” she whispered.
She knew.
“I can’t,” he said.
She was silent for a moment, then she sighed. “You were asleep when I fed the child,” she said. “But there is still milk for you if you want it.”
At once, he lowered his head to her breast. Probably, there would not be any more of this either. Not for a long while. Her milk was rich and good and as sweet as this time with her had been. Now, for a while, they would begin the old tug of war again. She stroked his head and he sighed.
Afterward, he went out and took Susan. She was the kind of kill he needed now—very sensitive. As sweet and good to his mind as Anyanwu’s milk had been to his former body.
He woke Frank and together they hauled his former body to the old slave graveyard. He did not want one of Anyanwu’s people to find it and go running to Anyanwu. She would know what had happened without that. If it were possible, he wanted to make this time easy for her.
By the time he and Frank left, a hoe gang of field hands was trooping out toward the cotton fields.
“Are you going to be wearing that body long?” Frank asked him, looking at Susan’s tall, stocky profile.
“No, I’ve already got what I need from it,” Doro said. “It’s a good body through. It could last a year, maybe two.”
“But it wouldn’t do Anyanwu much good.”
“It might if it were anyone but Susan. Anyanwu’s had wives, after all. But she knew Susan, liked her. Except in emergencies, I don’t ask people to overcome feelings like that.”
“You and Anyanwu,” Frank muttered. “Changing sex, changing color, breeding like—”
“Shut your mouth,” Doro said in annoyance, “or I’ll tell you a few things you don’t want to hear about your own family.”
Startled, Frank fell silent. He was sensitive about his ancestry, his old Virginia family. For some foolish reason, it was important to him. Doro caught himself as he was about to destroy completely any illusions the man still had about his blue blood—or for that matter, his pure white skin. But there was no reason for Doro to do such a thing. No reason except that one of the best times he could remember was ending and he was not certain what would come next.
Two weeks later, when he went back to Anyanwu, home to Anyanwu, he was alone. He had sent Frank home to his family and put on the more convenient body of a lean, brown-haired white man. It was a good, strong body, but Doro knew better than to expect Anyanwu to appreciate it.
She said nothing when she saw him. She did not accuse him or curse him—did not seem hostile to him at all. On the other hand, she was hardly welcoming.
“You did take Susan, didn’t you?” was all she said. When he said yes, she turned and walked away. He thought that if she had not been pregnant, she would have gone to sea and left him to deal with her not-quite-respectful children. She knew he would not harm them now.
Pregnancy kept her in human form, however. She was carrying a human child. She would almost certainly kill it by taking a nonhuman form. She had told him that during one of her early pregnancies by Isaac, and he had counted it a weakness. He had no doubt that she could abort any pregnancy without help or danger to herself. She could do anything with that body of hers that she wished. But she would not abort. Once a child was inside her, it would be born. During all the years he had known her, she had been as careful with her children before they were born as afterward. Doro decided to stay with her during this period of weakness. Once she accepted his two most recent changes, he did not think he would have trouble with her again.
It took him many long, uncommunicative days to find out how wrong he was. Finally, it was Anyanwu’s young daughter Helen who made him understand. The girl sometimes seemed very much younger than her twelve years. She played with other children and fought with them and cried over trivial hurts. At other times, she was a woman wearing the body of a child. And she was very much her mother’s daughter.
“She won’t talk to me,” the child told Doro. “She knows I know what she’s going to do.” She had come to sit beside him in the cool shade of a giant oak tree. For a time, they had watched in silence as Anyanwu weeded her herb garden. This garden was off limits to other gardeners and to helpful children, both of whom considered a great many of Anyanwu’s plants nothing but weeds themselves. Now, though, Doro looked away from the garden and at Helen.
“What do you mean?” he asked her. “What is she going to do?”
She looked up at him, and he had no doubt that a woman looked out of those eyes. “She says Kane and Leah are going to come and live here. She says after the baby comes, she’s going away.”
“To sea?”
“No, Doro. Not to sea. Someday, she would have to come out of the sea. Then you would find her again, and she would have to watch you kill her friends, kill your own friends.”
“What are you talking about?” He caught her by the arms, barely stopped himself from shaking her.
She glared at him, furious, clearly loathing him. Suddenly she lowered her head and bit his hand as hard as she could with her sharp little teeth.
Pain made Doro release her. She could not know how dangerous it was for her to cause him sudden unexpected pain. Had she done it just before he killed Susan, he would have taken her helplessly. But now, having fed recently, he had more control. He held his bloody hand and watched her run away.
Then, slowly, he got up and went over to Anyanwu. She had dug up several purple-stemmed, yellow-rooted weeds. He expected her to throw them away, but instead she cut the plants from their root-stocks, brushed the dirt from the stocks, and put the stocks in her gathering basket.
“What are those things?” he asked.
“A medicine,” she said, “or a poison if people don’t know what to do with it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Powder it, mix it with some other things, steep it in boiling water and give it to children who have worms.”
Doro shook his head. “I’d think you could help them more easily by making the medicine within your own body.”
“This will work just as well. I’m going to teach some of the women to make it.”
“Why?”
“So that they can heal themselves and their families without depending on what they see as my magic.”
He reached down and tipped her head up so that she faced him. “And why shouldn’t they depend on your magic? Your medicines are more efficient than any ground weed.”
She shrugged. “They should learn to help themselves.”
He picked up her basket and drew her to her feet. “Come into the house and talk with me.”
“There is nothing to say.”
“Come in anyway. Humor me.” He put his arm around her and walked her back to the house.
He started to take her into the library, but a group of the younger children were being taught to read there. They sat scattered in a half circle on the rug looking up at one of Anyanwu’s daughters. As Doro guided Anyanwu away from them, he could hear the voice of one of his sons by Susan reading a verse from the Bible: “Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.”
Doro glanced back. “That sounds as though it would be an unpopular scripture in this part of the country,” he said.
“I see to it that they learn some of the less popular ones,” Anyanwu answered. “There is another: Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ They live in a world that does not want them to hear such things.”
“You’re raising them as Christians, then?”
She shrugged. “Most of their parents are Christian. They want their children to read so they can read the Bible. Besides”—she glanced at him, the corners of her mouth turned down—“besides, this is a Christian country.”
He ignored her sarcasm, took her into the back parlor. “Christians consider it a great sin to take one’s own life,” he said.
“They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”
“Anyanwu, why have you decided to die?” He would not have thought he could say the words so calmly. What would she think? That he did not care? Could she think that?
“It’s the only way I can leave you,” she said simply.
He digested that for a moment. “I thought staying with you now would help you get used to … to the things I have to do,” he said.
“Do you think I’m not used to them?”
“You haven’t accepted them. Why else should you want to die?”
“Because of what we have already said. Everything is temporary but you and me. You are all I have, perhaps all I would ever have.” She shook her head slowly. “And you are an obscenity.”
He frowned, staring at her. She had not said such things since their night together in the library. She had never said them this way, matter-of-factly, as though she were saying “You are tall.” He found that he could not even manufacture anger against her.
“Shall I go away?” he asked.
“No. Stay with me. I need you here.”
“Even though I’m an obscenity.”
“Even so.”
She was as she had been after Luisa’s death—uncharacteristically passive, ready to die. Then it was loneliness and grief pressing on her, weighing her down then. Now … what was it now, really?
“Is it Susan?” he asked. “I didn’t think you had gotten that close to her.”
“I hadn’t. But you had. She gave you three children.”
“But …”
“You did not need her life.”
“There was no other way she could be of use to me. She had had enough children, and she could not care for them. What did you expect me to do with her?”
Anyanwu got up and walked out of the room.
Later, he tried to talk to her again. She would not listen. She would not argue with him or curse him. When he offered again to go, she asked him to stay. When he came to her room at night, she was strangely, quietly welcoming. And she was still planning to die. There was an obscenity. An immortal, a woman who could live through the millennia with him, yet she was intent on suicide—and he was not even certain why.
He became more desperate as her pregnancy advanced, because he could not reach her, he could not touch her. She admitted she needed him, said she loved him, but some part of her was closed away from him and nothing he said could reach it.
Finally, he did go away for a few weeks. He did not like what she was doing to him. He could not remember a time when his thoughts had been so confused, when he had wanted so badly, so painfully, something he could not have. He had done what Anyanwu had apparently had done. He had allowed her to touch him as though he were an ordinary man. He had allowed her to awaken feelings in him that had been dormant for several times as long as even she had been alive. He had all but stripped himself before her. It amazed him that he could do such a thing—or that she could see him do it, and not care. She, of all people!
He went down to Baton Rouge to a woman he had once known. She was married now, but, as it happened, her husband was in Boston and she welcomed Doro. He stayed with her for a few days, always on the verge of telling her about Anyanwu, but never quite getting around to it.
He took a new body—that of a free black who owned several slaves and treated them brutally. Afterward, he wondered why he had killed the man. It was no concern of his how a slaveholder treated his chattels.
He shed the slaveholder body and took that of another free black—one who could have been a lighter-skinned brother to the one Anyanwu had liked, compact, handsome, red-brown. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too like the other one without being the other one. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too unlike the other one. Who knew which way her mind would turn. But perhaps she would accept it and talk to him and close the distance between them before she shut herself off like used machinery.
He went home to her.
Her belly got in the way when he hugged her in greeting. On any other occasion, he would have laughed and stroked it, thinking of his child inside. Now, he only looked at it, realized that she could give birth any time. How stupid he had been to go away and leave her, to give up any part of what might be their last days together.
She took his hand and led him into the house while her son Julien took his horse. Julien gave Doro a long, frightened, pleading look that Doro did not acknowledge. Clearly, the man knew.
Inside the house, he got the same kinds of looks from Leah and Kane, whom Anyanwu had sent for. Nobody said anything except in ordinary greeting, but the house was filled with tension. It was as though everyone felt it but Anyanwu. She seemed to feel nothing except solemn pleasure in having Doro home again.
Supper was quiet, almost grim, and everyone seemed to have something to do to keep from lingering at the table. Everyone but Doro. He coaxed Anyanwu to share wine and fruit and nuts and talk with him in the smaller, cooler back parlor. As it turned out, they shared wine and fruit and nuts and silence, but it did not matter. It was enough that she was with him.
Anyanwu’s child, a tiny, sturdy boy, was born two weeks after Doro’s return, and Doro became almost sick with desperation. He did not know how to deal with his feelings, could not recall ever having had such an intense confusion of feelings before. Sometimes he caught himself observing his own behavior as though from a distance and noticing with even greater confusion that there was nothing outwardly visible in him to show what he was suffering. He spent as much time as he could with Anyanwu, watching her prepare and mix her herbs; instruct several of her people at a time in their cultivation, appearance and use; tend those few who could not wait for this or that herb.
“What will they do when they have only the herbs?” he asked her.
“Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”
She found a woman to nurse her baby and she gave calm instructions to a frightened Leah. She considered Leah the strangest and the brightest of her white daughters and the one most competent to succeed her. Kane did not want this. He felt threatened, even frightened, by the thought of suddenly greater visibility. He would become more noticeable to people of his father’s class—people who might have known his father. Doro thought this too unlikely to worry about. He found himself trying to explain to the man that if Kane played his role as well as Doro had always seen him play it, and if also he clearly possessed all the trappings of a wealthy planter, it would never occur to people to assume that he was anything but a wealthy planter. Doro told the story of Frank’s passing him off as a Christianized African prince, and he and Kane laughed together over it. There had not been much laughter in the house recently, and even this ended abruptly.
“You have to stop her,” Kane said as though they had been discussing Anyanwu all along. “You have to. You’re the only one who can.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Doro admitted bleakly. Kane would have no idea how unusual such an admission was from him.
“Talk to her! Does she want something? Give it to her!”
“I think she wants me not to kill,” Doro said.
Kane blinked, then shook his head helplessly. Even he understood that it was impossible.
Leah came into the back parlor where they were talking and stood before Doro, hands on her hips. “I can’t tell what you feel,” she said. “I’ve never been able to somehow. But if you feel anything at all for her, go to her now!”
“Why?” Doro asked.
“Because she’s going to do it. She’s just about gotten herself to the brink. I don’t think she plans to wake up tomorrow morning—like Luisa.”
Doro stood up to go, but Kane stopped him with a question to Leah.
“Honey, what does she want? What does she really want from him?”
Leah looked from one man to another, saw that they were both awaiting her answer. “I asked her that myself,” she said. “She just said she was tired. Tired to death.”
She had seemed weary, Doro thought. But weary of what? Him? She had begged him not to go away again—not that he had planned to. “Tired of what?” he asked.
Leah held her hands in front of her and looked down at him. She opened and closed the fingers as though to grasp something, but she held only air. She gestured sometimes when receiving or remembering images and impressions no one else could see. In ordinary society, people would certainly have thought her demented.
“That’s what I can feel,” she said. “If I sit where she’s recently sat or even more if I handle something she’s worn. It’s a reaching and reaching and grasping and then her hands are empty. There’s nothing. She’s so tired.”
“Maybe it’s just her age,” Kane said. “Maybe it’s finally caught up with her.”
Leah shook her head. “I don’t think so. She’s not in any pain, hasn’t slowed down at all. She’s just …” Leah made a sound of frustration and distress—almost a sob. “I’m no good at this,” she said. “Things either come to me clear and sharp without my working and worrying at them or they never come clear. Mother used to be able to take something cloudy and make it clear for herself and for me. I’m just not good enough.”
Doro said nothing, stood still, trying to make sense of the strange grasping, the weariness.
“Go to her, damn you!” Leah screamed. And then more softly, “Help her. She’s been a healer since she was back in Africa. Now she needs somebody to heal her. Who could do it but you?”
He left them and went looking for Anyanwu. He had not thought in terms of healing her before. Let the tables be turned, then. Let him do what he could to heal the healer.
He found her in her bedroom, gowned for bed and hanging her dress up to air. She had begun wearing dresses exclusively when her pregnancy began to show. She smiled warmly as Doro came in, as though she were glad to see him.
“It’s early,” he said.
She nodded. “I know, but I’m tired.”
“Yes. Leah has just been telling me that you were … tired.”
She faced him for a moment, sighed. “Sometimes I long for only ordinary children.”
“You were planning … tonight …”
“I still am.”
“No!” He stepped to her, caught her by the shoulders as though his holding her could keep life in her.
She thrust him away with strength he had not felt in her since before Isaac’s death. He was thrown back against the wall and would have fallen if there had not been a wall to stop him.
“Don’t say no to me anymore,” she said softly. “I don’t want to hear you telling me what to do anymore.”
He doused a reflexive flare of anger, stared at her as he rubbed the shoulder that had struck the wall. “What is it?” he whispered. “Tell me what’s wrong?”
“I’ve tried.” She climbed onto the bed.
“Then try again!”
She did not get under her blanket, but sat on top of it, watching him. She said nothing, only watched. Finally he drew a deep, shuddering breath and sat down in the chair nearest her bed. He was shaking. His strong, perfectly good new body was shaking as though he had all but worn it out. He had to stop her. He had to.
He looked at her and thought he saw compassion in her eyes—as though in a moment, she could come to him, hold him not only as a lover, but as one of her children to be comforted. He would have permitted her to do this. He would have welcomed it.
She did not move.
“I’ve told you,” she said softly, “that even when I hated you, I believed in what you were trying to do. I believed that we should have people more like ourselves, that we should not be alone. You had much less trouble with me than you could have because I believed that. I learned to turn my head and ignore the things you did to people. But, Doro, I could not ignore everything. You kill your best servants, people who obey you even when it means suffering for them. Killing gives you too much pleasure. Far too much.”
“I would have to do it whether it gave me pleasure or not,” he said. “You know what I am.”
“You are less than you were.”
“I …”
“The human part of you is dying, Doro. It is almost dead. Isaac saw that happening, and he told me. That is part of what he said to me on the night he persuaded me to marry him. He said someday you would not feel anything at all that was human, and he said he was glad he would not live to see that day. He said I must live so that I could save the human part of you. But he was wrong. I cannot save it. It’s already dead.”
“No.” He closed his eyes, tried to still his trembling. Finally, he gave up, looked over at her. If he could only make her see. “It isn’t dead, Anyanwu. I might have thought it was myself before I found you the second time, but it isn’t. It will die, though, if you leave me.” He wanted to touch her, but in his present state, he dared not risk being thrown across the room again. She must touch him. “I think my son was right,” he said. “Parts of me can die little by little. What will I be when there is nothing left but hunger and feeding?”
“Someone will find a way to rid the world of you,” she said tonelessly.
“How? The best people, the ones with the greatest potential power belong to me. I’ve been collecting them, protecting them, breeding them for nearly four millennia while ordinary people poisoned, tortured, hanged, or burned any that I missed.”
“You are not infallible,” she said. “For three centuries, you missed me.” She sighed, shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I cannot say what will happen, but like Isaac, I’m glad I won’t live to see it.”
He stood up, furious with her, not knowing whether to curse or to plead. His legs were weak under him and he felt himself on the verge of obscene weeping. Why didn’t she help him? She helped everyone else! He longed to get away from her—or kill her. Why should she be allowed to waste all her strength and power in suicide while he stood before her, his face wet with perspiration, his body trembling like a palsied old man.
But he could not leave or kill. It was impossible. “Anyanwu, you must not leave me!” He had control of his voice, at least. He did not have that half-in-and-half-out-of-his-body sound that frightened most people and that would have made Anyanwu think he was trying to frighten her.
Anyanwu pulled back the blanket and sheet and lay down. He knew suddenly that she would die now. Right in front of him, she would lie there and shut herself off.
“Anyanwu!” He was on the bed with her, pulling her up again. “Please,” he said, not hearing himself any longer. “Please, Anyanwu. Listen.” She was still alive. “Listen to me. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to be able to lie down beside you and die when you die. You can’t know how I’ve longed …” He swallowed. “Sun Woman, please don’t leave me.” His voice caught and broke. He wept. He choked out great sobs that shook his already shaking body almost beyond bearing. He wept as though for all the past times when no tears would come, when there was no relief. He could not stop. He did not know when she pulled off his boots and pulled the blanket up over him, when she bathed his face in cool water. He did know the comfort of her arms, the warmth of her body next to him. He slept, finally, exhausted, his head on her breast, and at sunrise when he awoke, that breast was still warm, still rising and falling gently with her breathing.