Changer's Daughter (2 page)

The baby weeps, his little brown face twisted up but his eyes wide open as if he seeks to make sense of a universe that hurts so very much. His infant skin is thickly marked with swollen pustules, dark red and running against cocoa-colored skin.

His mother, a young woman just out of college, cradles him in her hands, gently lowering him into a basin of water in the hope of bringing down his fever. The water is tepid, but it seems to bring some comfort. The baby stops crying. After a moment, his mother realizes that he has stopped breathing as well. She screams.

The dull slap of bare feet on an earthen floor answers her cries. A shadow darkens the door to a bedroom now become a death chamber. Beyond the shadow can be heard the murmur of many voices, gossiping, conjecturing, a few raised to wail, but the shadow does not speak.

It crosses the room and in the light from the partially curtained window resolves into a large woman, full-breasted and mature, lovely as a ripe yam is lovely. She lifts the infant’s body from where his mother’s hands still cradle it within the cooling water.

“He has been taken by this illness,” the older woman says, “as are so many others.”

“Oh, Oya, how I hate the King of Heaven!” the young woman sobs.

“So do I, Aduke,” Oya answers, studying the girl quizzically. “I think the time has come to make him answer.”

Chris Kristofer opens the front door of the hacienda at Pendragon Estates to find a tall, lean man standing in the sandstone entryway. The man’s black hair is long and loose. He wears nothing but a pair of red-nylon gym shorts, this despite the fact that the overcast November day is anything but warm.

“I want to use the telephone,” the man says in a deep, gravelly voice.

The last time Chris had seen this man he had lacked an eye, but now he has two, both the same yellow as those of the young reddish gold coyote bitch sitting on her haunches beside him. Catching Chris’s glance her way, the coyote thumps her tail in greeting.

Clearing his throat, Chris says, “Come right this way, sir. You’re the Changer, right?”

“Yes.”

The Changer doesn’t seem inclined to say more, but when Chris started this job a month and a half before, he had been given a short list of people who were to be assisted without question. The Changer had topped this list. So now Chris leads the Changer into an empty seminar room and indicates the telephone.

“Is that all, sir?”

“Get me Frank MacDonald’s number.”

Chris pulls an electronic organizer from his pocket and scribbles a number on the pad by the phone.

“And tell Arthur I’m here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t call me ‘sir.’”

Chris exits without another word, noting as he does so that the young coyote has happily settled down to chewing on a corner of an expensive handwoven rug.

“Arthur?” Chris enters the King’s office after a polite tap at the door. “You have a guest.”

The athanor who is once again using the name Arthur Pendragon looks up wearily from his computer screen and glowers at the human standing in the doorway. Chris Kristofer is an Anglo of average height and average build. His brown hair is neither too long, nor too short. His hazel-green eyes behind large wire-rimmed glasses are intelligent. There is nothing distasteful about his appearance, except that he is not the person whom Arthur wishes was there.

“Yes? Does this person have an appointment?”

Chris knows perfectly well that the King resents him. However, he also knows that keeping this job is a matter of life or death for him. Literally. He schools his voice to patience and answers:

“It’s the Changer, Arthur.”

“Oh!” Arthur’s blue eyes widen. He stands, smoothing his neat, reddish gold beard in a thoughtful gesture. In that attitude, he no longer looks like a slightly overweight desk jockey. He looks like the king he has been in many lifetimes. “Ask the Changer if he will come to me here.”

Chris hesitates. “Shahrazad is with him, sir.”

Arthur remembers the young coyote with a fondness that is tinged by memory of the destruction she can create.

“I see. The day is too chilly for us to sit in the courtyard. Ask the Changer to come to the kitchen. He’ll be hungry after his journey. Shapeshifters always are.”

“Yes, sir.”

Another thought strikes Arthur.

“Is the Changer wearing anything?”

“Gym shorts.”

Arthur sighs. Doubtless the shorts are stolen. The Changer not only has no respect for personal property, he doesn’t really acknowledge its existence.

“Chris, there are clothes that should fit the Changer in one of the ground-floor guest rooms. Ask him if he wants them.”

“Right.”

When Chris has left, Arthur recalls that the last time the Changer arrived unannounced on his doorstep, all sorts of trouble had ensued—trouble that had nearly meant the end of Arthur’s reign. The trouble hadn’t been the Changer’s fault, but Arthur has never completely discarded the primitive superstitions that he had imbibed along with his mother’s milk in ancient Sumer.

“It can’t possibly be that bad again,” he says to the empty air. But leaving his office he raps his knuckles against his desk. The gesture is comparatively modern—having originated in ancient Rome.

“Touch wood,” he mutters.

First their reservations had been lost. Then the plane had a flat tire that necessitated an overnight layover at some obscure airfield until a new tire could be flown in. After that, they had paid a small fortune in bribes -- “dash” the Nigerians called it— before they could clear Customs. Then they had paid even more money to be taken to a small hotel run by friends of Anson, only to be told that the manager and his wife had cleared out a week before, leaving no forwarding address.

Fresh from the United States, from not only civilization but also from the privileged life of a wealthy man, Eddie Zagano is having the most fun he has had in years. He’d forgotten how much fun it could be to be irresponsible, not to be at anyone’s beck and call, not to have it matter when he arrived somewhere or when he left.

True, he’d fidgeted a bit at first, but his traveling companion, Anson A. Kridd, had laughed at him so hard that Eddie had fallen into a sulk. He’d let Anson deal with everything. Then, when after a day or so no catastrophe occurred, he realized that Anson
could
deal with everything. After that, he had relaxed and enjoyed the ride.

“Your soul is taking color from your face, eh?” Anson says some days after they arrive in Lagos. “Not so much hurry-hurry, lots more taking the day as it comes.”

Eddie nods. “Ifa alone knows the destiny the unborn soul has chosen, not me. Prayer might change my life, but worrying won’t.”

His speech is in flawless Yoruban, spoken with the accent of a native of Lagos, but Eddie is no more Yoruban at heart than he is naturally dark brown of skin, hair, and eye. Both his mastery of the language and his new appearance come courtesy of Arthur’s staff wizard, Ian Lovern. These sorcerous alterations enable Eddie to pass as a citizen of Nigeria, born to the Yoruba people, and a resident of Lagos. The false papers he cobbled together from his complicated data bank back in New Mexico complete the trick.

To conceal his ignorance of Lagos, Eddie’s cover story is that he has been studying for the last ten years in the United States and has only just come home. Since Lagos is as large as New York City and not an intimate family compound, he can memorize enough details to maintain his deception.

Anson A. Kridd (also known as Anansi the Spider, and by many other names, not all of them complimentary) needs no such elaborate cover. In this life he is registered as Anson A. Kridd and possesses dual citizenship in Nigeria and the United States. For this trip, he has cropped off the long dreadlocks he had worn until recently and colored his English with a heavy local accent, but otherwise he remains as before: long, thin, and wiry with only a small potbelly despite his voracious appetite.

For Eddie, who only recognizes the perpetual five o’clock shadow in the face that looks out from his reflection, Anson’s constancy is the buoy he holds on to as he launches into the uncharted chaos of Lagos.

“So, what’s next, boss?” he asks, as they come out of a shop where Anson has been interrogating the barber.

“I want to find my friends who are missing,” Anson says, “and I begin to think I know where to find them. All the gossip says that they received a message from their home city, Monamona, and went there.”

“Without leaving a forwarding address?” Eddie asks, the organized American in him surfacing. “And knowing that you were coming?”

“They must have had a reason,” Anson answers, but he frowns as he says this. “Fortunately, I, too, have business in Monamona.”

“You do?” Eddie says, almost indignant. “This is the first I have heard of it!”

Anson grins. “So, maybe I forget to mention it, eh? No matter what good Arthur think, I have a job and earn my living by it. That job is what will take us to Monamona.”

“Oil,” Eddie says. “Right?”

“Oil,” Anson answers. “Come, I ask some more questions. Then we see how best we get to Monamona. Maybe we kill two birds with one stone and eat from a full pot.”

“Do you ever think about anything except eating?” Eddie laughs, watching as his friend tosses a few
kobo
to a market woman in exchange for a bag of thick
chinchin
.

“Oh, yes,” Anson answers, passing Eddie a couple of the sweet fried dough balls. “Sometimes I think how I can fix it so that others can eat, too.”

Over bowls of lamb stew liberally seasoned with green chile, the Changer tells Arthur his plans. “I’m taking Shahrazad to Frank MacDonald’s place in Texas. I want her socialized.”

Arthur cocks an eyebrow. “I thought the entire reason you hauled her back into the mountains was that you
didn’t
want her socialized.”

The Changer almost smiles. “Yes. I’ve discovered that I was wrong. She has a much more companionable nature than mine, but I can’t have her running around with other coyotes. Until she gets bigger, they’d hurt her while jockeying for position.”

“I thought you considered such punishment part of the natural course of things,” Arthur gibes.