"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 touched 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 not 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 them. 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 any more," she said softly. "I don't want to hear you telling me what to do any more."
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.