"Are they all dead?" she asked Doro. "These . . . kinsmen of mine?"
"Yes."
"Then they were not like me."
"They might have been after many more generations. You are not only their child. Your Onitsha kinsmen must have been unusual in their own right."
Anyanwu nodded slowly. She could think of several unusual things about her mother. The woman had stature and influence in spite of the gossip about her. Her husband was a member of a highly respected clan, well known for its magical abilities, but in his household, it was Anyanwu's mother who made magic. She had highly accurate prophetic dreams. She made medicine to cure disease and to protect the people from evil. At market, no woman was a better trader. She seemed to know just how to bargain—as though she could read the thoughts in the other women's minds. She became very wealthy.
It was said that Anyanwu's clan, the clan of her mother's husband, had members who could change their shapes, take animal forms at will, but Anyanwu had seen no such strangeness in them. It was her mother in whom she had found strangeness, closeness, empathy that went beyond what could be expected between mother and daughter. She and her mother had shared a unity of spirit that actually did involve some exchange of thoughts and feelings, though they were careful not to flaunt this before others. If Anyanwu felt pain, her mother, busy trading at some distant market, knew of the pain and came home. Anyanwu had no more than ghosts of that early closeness with her own children and with three of her husbands. And she had sought for years through her clan, her mother's clan, and others for even a ghost of her greatest difference, the shape changing. She had collected many frightening stories, but had met no other person who, like herself, could demonstrate this ability. Not until now, perhaps. She looked at Doro. What was it she felt about him—what strangeness? She had shared no thoughts with him, but something about him reminded her of her mother. Another ghost.
"Are you my kinsman?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But your kinsmen had given me their loyalty. That is no small thing."
"Is that why you came when . . . when my difference attracted you.
He shook his head. "I came to see what you were."
She frowned, suddenly cautious. "I am myself. You see me."
"As you see me. Do you imagine you see everything?"
She did not answer.
"A lie offends me, Anyanwu, and what I see of you is a lie. Show me what you really are."
"You see what you will see!"
"Are you afraid to show me?"
". . . No." It was not fear. What was it? A lifetime of concealment, of commanding herself never to play with her abilities before others, never to show them off as mere tricks, never to let her people or any people know the full extent of her power unless she were fighting for her life. Should she break her tradition now simply because this stranger asked her to? He had done much talking, but what had he actually shown her about himself? Nothing.
"Can my concealment be a lie if yours is not?" she asked.
"Mine is," he admitted.
"Then show me what you are. Give me the trust you ask me to give you."
"You have my trust, Anyanwu, but knowing what I am would only frighten you."
"Am I a child then?" she asked angrily. "Are you my mother who must shield me from adult truths?"
He refused to be insulted. "Most of my people are grateful to me for shielding them from my particular truth," he said.
"So you say. I have seen nothing."
He stood up, and she stood to face him, her small withered body fully in the shadow of his. She was little more than half his size, but it was no new thing for her to face larger people and either bend them to her will with words or beat them into submission physically. In fact, she could have made herself as large as any man, but she chose to let her smallness go on deceiving people. Most often, it put strangers at their ease because she seemed harmless. Also, it caused would-be attackers to underestimate her.
Doro stared down at her. "Sometimes only a burn will teach a child to respect fire," he said. "Come with me to one of the villages of your town, Anyanwu. There I will show you what you think you want to see."
"What will you do?" she asked warily.
"I will let you choose someone—an enemy or only some useless person that your people would be better without. Then I will kill him."
"Kill!"
"I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth." He breathed deeply. "This is not the body I was born into. It's not the tenth I've worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. Your gift seems to be a gentle one. Mine is not."
"You are a spirit," she cried in alarm.
"I told you you were a child," he said. "See how you frighten yourself?"
He was like an ogbanje, an evil child spirit born to one woman again and again, only to die and give the mother pain. A woman tormented by an ogbanje could give birth many times and still have no living child. But Doro was an adult. He did not enter and re-enter his mother's womb. He did not want the bodies of children. He preferred to steal the bodies of men.
"You are a spirit!" she insisted, her voice shrill with fear. All the while part of her mind wondered why she was believing him so easily. She knew many tricks herself, many frightening lies. Why should she react now like the most ignorant stranger brought before her believing that a god spoke through her? Yet she did believe, and she was afraid. This man was far more unusual than she was. This man was not a man.
When he touched her arm lightly, unexpectedly, she screamed.
He made a sound of disgust. "Woman, if you bring your people here with your noise, I will have no choice but to kill some of them."
She stood still, believing this also. "Did you kill anyone as you came here?" she whispered.
"No. I went to great trouble to avoid killing for your sake. I thought you might have kinsmen here."
"Generations of kinsmen. Sons and their sons and even their sons."
"I would not want to kill one of your sons."
"Why?" She was relieved but curious. "What are they to you?"
"How would you receive me if I came to you clothed in the flesh of one of your sons?"
She drew back, not knowing how to imagine such a thing.
"You see? Your children should not be wasted anyway. They may be good—" He spoke a word in another language. She heard it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. The word was seed.
"What is seed?" she asked.
"People too valuable to be casually killed," he said. Then more softly, "You must show me what you are."
"How can my sons be of value to you?"
He gave her a long silent look, then spoke with that same softness. "I may have to go to them, Anyanwu. They may be more tractable than their mother."
She could not recall ever having been threatened so gently—or so effectively. Her sons . . . "Come," she whispered. "It is too open for me to show you here."
With concealed excitement, Doro followed the small, wizened woman to her tiny compound. The compound wall—made of red clay and over six feet high—would give them the privacy Anyanwu wanted.
"My sons would do you no good," she told him as they walked. "They are good men, but they know very little."
"They are not like you—any of them?"
"None."
"And your daughters?"
"Nor them. I watched them carefully until they went away to their husbands' towns. They are like my mother. They exert great influence on their husbands and on other women, but nothing beyond that. They live their lives and they die."
"They die . . .?"
She opened the wooden door and led him through the wall, then barred the door after him.
"They die," she said sadly. "Like their fathers."
"Perhaps if your sons and daughters married each other . . ."
"Abomination!" she said with alarm. "We are not animals here, Doro!"
He shrugged. He had spent most of his life ignoring such protests and causing the protestors to change their minds. People's morals rarely survived confrontations with him. For now, though, gentleness. This woman was valuable. If she were only half as old as he thought, she would be the oldest person he had ever met—and she was still spry. She was descended from people whose abnormally long lives, resistance to disease, and budding special abilities made them very important to him. People who, like so many others, had fallen victim to slavers or tribal enemies. There had been so few of them. Nothing must happen to this one survivor, this fortunate little hybrid. Above all, she must be protected from Doro himself. He must not kill her out of anger or by accident—and accidents could happen so easily in this country. He must take her away with him to one of his more secure seed towns. Perhaps in her strangeness, she could still bear young, and perhaps with the powerful mates he could get her, this time her children would be worthy of her. If not, there were always her existing children.
"Will you watch, Doro?" she asked. "This is what you demanded to see."
He focused his attention on her, and she began to rub her hands. The hands were bird claws, long-fingered, withered, and bony. As he watched, they began to fill out, to grow smooth and young-looking. Her arms and shoulders began to fill out and her sagging breasts drew themselves up round and high. Her hips grew round beneath her cloth, causing him to want to strip the cloth from her. Lastly, she touched her face and molded away her wrinkles. An old scar beneath one eye vanished. The flesh became smooth and firm, and the woman startlingly beautiful.
Finally, she stood before him looking not yet twenty. She cleared her throat and spoke to him in a soft, young woman's voice. "Is this enough?"
For a moment he could only stare at her. "Is this truly you, Anyanwu?"
"As I am. As I would always be if I did not age or change myself for others. This shape flows back to me very easily. Others are harder to take."
"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.