Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) (7 page)

“She! But … that black is a man.”

“Sometimes. But she was born a woman. She is a woman most of the time.”

Daly shook his head, unbelieving. “The monstrosities you collect! I suppose now you will breed creatures who don’t know whether to piss standing or squatting.”

“They will know—if I can breed them. They will know, but it won’t matter.”

“Such things should be burned. They are against God!”

Doro laughed and said nothing. He knew as well as Daly how the slaver longed to be one of Doro’s monstrosities. Daly was still alive because of that desire. Ten years before, he had confronted what he considered to be just another black savage leading five other less black but equally savage-looking men. All six men appeared to be young, healthy—fine potential slaves. Daly had sent his own black employees to capture them. He had lost thirteen men that day. He had seen them swept down as grain before a scythe. Then, terrified, confronted by Doro in the body of the last man killed, he had drawn his own sword. The move cost him his right hand. He never understood why it had not cost him his life. He did not know of Doro’s habit of leaving properly disciplined men of authority scattered around the world ready to serve whenever Doro needed them. All Daly understood was that he had been spared—that Doro had cauterized his wound and cared for him until he recovered.

And by the time he recovered, he had realized that he was no longer a free man—that Doro was capable of taking the life he had spared at any time. Daly was able to accept this as others had accepted it before him. “Let me work for you,” he had said. “Take me aboard one of your ships or even back to your homeland. I’m still strong. Even with one hand, I can work. I can handle blacks.”

“I want you here,” Doro had told him. “I’ve made arrangements with some of the local kings while you were recovering. They’ll trade with you exclusively from now on.”

Daly had stared at him in amazement. “Why would you do such a thing for me?”

“So that you can do a few things for me,” Doro had answered.

And Daly had been back in business. Doro sent him black traders who sold him slaves and his company sent him white traders who bought them. “Someone else would set up a factory here if you left,” Doro told him. “I can’t stop the trade even where it might touch my people, but I can control it.” So much for his control. Neither his support of Daly nor his spies left along the coast—people who should have reported to Daly—had been enough. Now they were useless. If they had been special stock, people with unusual abilities, Doro would have resettled them in America, where they could be useful. But they were only ordinary people bought by wealth or fear or belief that Doro was a god. He would forget them. He might forget Daly also once he had returned to Anyanwu’s homeland and sought out as many of her descendants as he could find. At the moment, though, Daly could still be useful—and he could still be trusted; Doro knew that now. Perhaps the seed people had been taken to Bonny or New Calabar or some other slave port, but they had not passed near Daly. The most talented and deceptive of Doro’s own children could not have lied to him successfully while he was on guard. Also, Daly had discovered he enjoyed being an arm of Doro’s power.

“Now that your people are gone,” Daly said, “why not take me to Virginia or New York where you have blacks working. I’m sick to death of this country.”

“Stay here,” Doro ordered. “You can still be useful. I’ll be coming back.”

Daly sighed. “I almost wish I was one of those strange beings you call your people,” he admitted.

Doro smiled and had the ship’s captain, John Woodley, pay for the boy, Okoye, and send Daly ashore.

“Slimy little bastard,” Woodley muttered when Daly was gone.

Doro said nothing. Woodley, one of Doro’s ordinary, ungifted sons, had always disliked Daly. This amused Doro since he considered the two men much alike. Woodley was the child of a casual liaison Doro had had forty-five years before with a London merchant’s daughter. Doro had married the woman and provided for her when he learned she would bear his child, but he quickly left her a widow, well off, but alone except for her infant son. Doro had seen John Woodley twice as the boy grew toward adulthood. When on the second visit, Woodley expressed a desire to go to sea, Doro had him apprenticed to one of Doro’s shipmasters. Woodley had worked his own way up. He could have become wealthy, could be commanding a great ship instead of one of Doro’s smallest. But he had chosen to stay near Doro. Like Daly, he enjoyed being an arm of Doro’s power. And like Daly, he was envious of others who might outrank him in Doro’s esteem.

“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 most 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.

T
HE 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.

“
Nwadiani
—daughter’s child—do 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 wanted—to 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.

When she realized the years had ceased to mark her body, she experimented and learned to age herself as her husband aged. She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft. But while her first husband lived, she never entirely gave up her beauty. And sometimes when he came to her at night, she allowed her body to return to the youthful shape that came so easily, so naturally—the true shape. In that way, her husband had a young senior wife for as long as he lived. And now Okoye had a mother’s mother who appeared to be younger than he was.

“Nneochie?”
the boy said doubtfully. “Mother’s mother?”

“Still,” Anyanwu said. “This is the way I look when I do nothing. And this is the way I look when I marry a new husband.”

“But … you are old.”

“The years do not touch me.”

“Nor him … ? Your new husband?”

“Nor him.”

Okoye shook his head. “I should not be here. I am only a man. What will you do with me?”

“You belong to Doro. He will say what is to be done with you—but you need not worry. He wants me as his wife. He will not harm you.”

The water harmed him.

Soon after Anyanwu had revealed herself, he began to grow ill. He became dizzy. His head hurt him. He said he thought he would vomit if he did not leave the confinement of the small room.

Anyanwu took him out on deck where the air was fresh and cooler. But even there, the gentle rocking of the ship seemed to bother him—and began to bother her. She began to feel ill. She seized on the feeling at once, examining it. There was drowsiness, dizziness, and a sudden cold sweat. She closed her eyes, and while Okoye vomited into the water, she went over her body carefully. She discovered that there was a wrongness, a kind of imbalance deep within her ears. It was a tiny disturbance, but she knew her body well enough to notice the smallest change. For a moment, she observed this change with interest. Clearly, if she did nothing to correct it, her sickness would grow worse; she would join Okoye, vomiting over the rail. But no. She focused on her inner ears and remembered perfection there, remembered organs and fluids and pressures in balance, their wrongness righted. Remembering and correcting were one gesture; balance was restored. It had taken her much practice—and much pain—to learn such ease of control. Every change she made in her body had to be understood and visualized. If she was sick or injured, she could not simply wish to be well. She could be killed as easily as anyone else if her body was damaged in some way she could not understand quickly enough to repair. Thus, she had spent much of her long life learning the diseases, disorders, and injuries that she could suffer—learning them often by inflicting mild versions of them on herself, then slowly, painfully, by trial and error, coming to understand exactly what was wrong and how to impress healing. Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing.