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
