"Husband, it may be a good thing that you're going away. A year is not so long, or two years. Not to us. I have been alone before for many times that long. When you come back, I will know how to be a wife to you here. I will give you strong sons." She turned her eyes back to him, saw that he was watching her. "Do not cast me aside before I show you what a good wife I can be."
He sat up, put his feet on the floor. "You don't understand," he said softly. He pulled her down to sit beside him on the bed. "Haven't I told you what I'm building? Over the years, I've taken people with so little power they were almost ordinary, and bred them together again and again until in their descendants, small abilities grew large, and a man like Isaac could be born."
"And a man like Lale."
"Lale wasn't as bad as he seemed. He handled what ability he had very well. And I've created others of his kind who had more ability and a better temperament."
"Did you create him, then? From what? Mounds of clay?"
"Anyanwu!"
"Isaac tells me the whites believe their god made the first people of clay. You talk as though you think you were that god!"
He drew a deep breath, looked at her sadly. "What I am or think I am need not concern you at all. I've told you what you must do—no, be quiet. Hear me."
She closed her mouth, swallowed a new protest.
"I said you didn't understand," he continued. "Now I think you're deliberately misunderstanding. Do you truly believe I mean to cast you aside because you've been a poor wife?"
She looked away. No, of course she did not believe that. She had only hoped to reach him, make him stop his impossible demands. No, he was not casting her aside for any reason at all. He was merely breeding her as one bred cattle and goats. He had said it: "I want children of your body and his." What she wanted meant nothing. Did one ask a cow or a nanny goat whether it wished to be bred?
"I am giving you the very best of my sons," he told her. "I expect you to be a good wife to him. I would never send you to him if I thought you couldn't."
She shook her head slowly. "It is you who have not understood me." She gazed at him—at his very ordinary eyes, at his long, handsome face. Until now, she had managed to avoid a confrontation like this by giving in a little, obeying. Now she could not obey.
"You are my husband," she said quietly, "or I have no husband. If I need another man, I will find one. My father and all my other husbands are long dead. You gave no gifts for me. You can send me away, but you cannot tell me where I must go."
"Of course I can." His quiet calm matched her own, but in him it was clearly resignation. "You know you must obey, Anyanwu. Must I take your body and get the children I want from it myself?"
"You cannot." Within herself, she altered her reproductive organs further, made herself literally no longer a woman, but not quite a man—just to be certain. "You may be able to push my spirit from my body," she said. "I think you can, though I have never felt your power. But my body will give you no satisfaction. It would take too long for you to learn to repair all the things I have done to it—if you can learn. It will not conceive a child now. It will not live much longer itself without me to keep watch on it."
She could not have missed the anger in his voice when he spoke again. "You know I will collect your children if I cannot have you."
She turned her back on him, not wanting him to see her fear and pain, not wanting her own eyes to see him. He was a loathsome thing.
He came to stand behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. She struck them away violently. "Kill me!" she hissed. "Kill me now, but never touch me that way again!"
"And your children?" he said unmoved.
"No child of mine would commit the abominations you want," she whispered.
"Now who's lying?" he said. "You know your children don't have your strength. I'll get what I want from them, and their children will be as much mine as the people here."
She said nothing. He was right, of course. Even her own strength was mere bravado, a façade covering utter terror. It was only her anger that kept her neck straight. And what good was anger or defiance? He would consume her very spirit; there would be no next life for her. Then he would use and pervert her children. She felt near to weeping.
"You'll get over your anger," he said. "Life will be rich and good for you here. You'll be surprised to see how easily you blend with these people."
"I will not marry your son, Doro! No matter what threats you make, no matter what promises, I will not marry your son!"
He sighed, tied his cloth around him, and started for the door. "Stay here," he told her. "Put something on and wait."
"For what!" she demanded bitterly.
"For Isaac," he answered.
And when she turned to face him, mouth open to curse both him and his son, he stepped close to her and struck her across the face with all his strength.
There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have caught his arm and broken the bones within it like dry sticks. There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have torn out his throat.
But she absorbed the blow, moved with it, made no sound. It had been a long time since she had wanted so powerfully to kill a man.
"I see you know how to be quiet," he said. "I see you're not as willing to die as you thought. Good. My son asked for a chance to talk to you if you refused to obey. Wait here."
"What can he say to me that you have not said?" she demanded harshly.
Doro paused at the door to give her a look of contempt. His blow had had less power to hurt her than that look.
When the door closed behind him, she went to the bed and sat down to stare, unseeing, into the fire. By the time Isaac knocked on the door, her face was wet with tears she did not remember shedding.
She made him wait until she had wrapped a cloth around herself and dried her face. Then with leaden, hopeless weariness, she opened the door and let the boy in.
He looked as depleted as she felt. The yellow hair hung limp into his eyes and the eyes themselves were red. His sun-browned skin looked as pale as Anyanwu had ever seen it. He seemed not only tired, but sick.
He stood gazing at her, saying nothing, making her want to go to him as though to Okoye, and try to give him comfort. Instead, she sat down in one of the room's chairs so that he could not sit close to her.
Obligingly, he sat opposite her in the other chair. "Did he threaten you?" he asked softly.
"Of course. That is all he knows how to do."
"And promise you a good life if you obey?"
". . . yes."
"He'll keep his word, you know. Either way."
"I have seen how he keeps his word."
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, Isaac whispered, "Don't make him do it, Anyanwu. Don't throw away your life!"
"Do you think I want to die?" she said. "My life has been good, and very long. It could be even longer and better. The world is a much wider place than I thought; there is so much for me to see and know. But I will not be his dog! Let him commit his abominations with other people!"
"With your children?"
"Do you threaten me too, Isaac?"
"No!" he cried. "You know better, Anyanwu."
She turned her face away from him. If only he would go away. She did not want to say things to hurt him. He spoke softly:
"When he told me I would marry you, I was surprised and a little afraid. You've been married many times, and I not even once. I know Okoye is your grandson—one of your younger grandsons—and he's at least my age. I didn't see how I could measure up against all your experience. But I wanted to try! You don't know how I wanted to try."
"Will you be bred, Isaac? Does it mean nothing to you?"
"Don't you know I wanted you long before he decided we should marry?"
"I knew." She glanced at him. "But wrong is wrong!"
"It isn't wrong here. It . . ." He shrugged. "People from outside always have trouble understanding us. Not very many things are forbidden here. Most of us don't believe in gods and spirits and devils who must be pleased or feared. We have Doro, and he's enough. He tells us what to do, and if it isn't what other people do, it doesn't matter—because we won't last long if we don't do it, no matter what outsiders think of us."
He got up, went to stand beside the fireplace. The low flame seemed to comfort him too. "Doro's ways aren't strange to me," he said. "I've lived with them all my life. I've shared women with him. My first woman . . ." He hesitated, glanced at her as though to see how she was receiving such talk, whether she was offended. She was almost indifferent. She had made up her mind. Nothing the boy said would change it.
"My first woman," he continued, "was one he sent to me. The women here are glad to go to him. They didn't mind coming to me either when they saw how he favored me."
"Go to them then," Anyanwu said quietly.
"I would," he said matching her tone. "But I don't want to. I'd rather stay with you—for the rest of my life."
She wanted to run out of the room. "Leave me alone, Isaac!"
He shook his head slowly. "If I leave this room tonight, you'll die tonight. Don't ask me to hurry your death."
She said nothing.
"Besides, I want you to have the night to think." He frowned at her. "How can you sacrifice your children?"
"Which children, Isaac? The ones I have had or the ones he will make me have with you and with him?"
He blinked. "Oh."
"I cannot kill him—or even understand what there is to kill. I have bitten him when he was in another body, and he seemed no more than flesh, no more than a man."
"You never touched him," Isaac said. "Lale did once—he reached out in that way of his to change Doro's thoughts. He almost died. I think he would have died if Doro hadn't struggled hard not to kill him. Doro wears flesh, but he isn't flesh himself—nor spirit, he says."
"I cannot understand that," she said. "But it does not matter. I cannot save my children from him. I cannot save myself. But I will not give him more people to defile."
He turned from the fire, went back to his chair and pulled it close to her. "You could save generations unborn if you wished, Anyanwu. You could have a good life for yourself, and you could stop him from killing so many others."
"How can I stop him?" she said in disgust. "Can one stop a leopard from doing what it was born to do?"
"He's not a leopard! He's not any sort of mindless animal!"
She could not help hearing the anger in his voice. She sighed. "He is your father."
"Oh God," muttered Isaac. "How can I make you see . . . I wasn't resenting an insult to my father, Anyanwu, I was saying that in his own way, he can be a reasonable being. You're right about his killing; he can't help doing it. When he needs a new body, he takes one whether he wants to or not. But most of the time, he transfers because he wants to, not because he has to; and there are a few people—four or five—who can influence him enough sometimes to stop him from killing, save a few of his victims. I'm one of them. You could be another."
"You do not mean stop him," she said wearily. "You mean"—she hunted through her memory for the right word—"you mean delay him."
"I mean what I said! There are people he listens to, people he values beyond their worth as breeders or servants. People who can give him . . . just a little of the companionship he needs. They're among the few people in the world that he can still love—or at least care for. Although compared to what the rest of us feel when we love or hate or envy or whatever, I don't think he feels very much. I don't think he can. I'm afraid the time will come when he won't feel anything. If it does . . . there's no end to the harm he could do. I'm glad I won't have to live to see it. You, though, you could live to see it—or live to prevent it. You could stay with him, keep him at least as human as he is now. I'll grow old; I'll die like all the others, but you won't—or, you needn't. You are treasure to him. I don't think he's really understood that yet."
"He knows."
"He knows, of course, but he doesn't . . . doesn't feel it yet. It's not yet real to him. Don't you see? He's lived for more than thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the Son of the God of most white people in these colonies was born, Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always been temporary for him—wives, children, friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make him know you're not like everyone else—make him feel it. Prove it to him, even if for a while, you have to do some things you don't like. Reach out to him; keep reaching. Make him know he's not alone any more!"
There was a long period of silence. Only the log in the fireplace slipped, then spat and crackled as new wood began to burn. Anyanwu covered her face, shook her head slowly. "I wish I knew you to be a liar," she whispered. "I am afraid and angry and desperate, yet you heap burdens on me."
He said nothing.
"What is forbidden here, Isaac? What is so evil that a man could be taken out and killed?"
"Murder," Isaac said. "Theft sometimes, some other things. And of course, defying Doro."
"If a man killed someone and Doro said he must not be punished, what would happen?"
Isaac frowned. "If the man had to be kept alive—maybe for breeding, Doro would probably take him. Or if it was too soon, if he was being saved for a girl still too young, Doro would send him away from the colony. He wouldn't ask us to tolerate him here."
"And when the man was no longer needed, he would die?"
"Yes."
Anyanwu took a deep breath. "Perhaps you try to keep some decency, then. Perhaps he has not made animals of you yet."
"Submit to him now, Anyanwu, and later, you can keep him from ever making animals of us."
Submit to him.
The words brought a vile taste to her mouth, but she looked at Isaac's haggard face, and his obvious misery and his fear for her calmed her somehow. She spoke softly. "When I hear you speak of him, I think you love him more than he loves you."