awaken until sunrise.”
“No.” There was no humor in his voice now. She had laid her head on his shoulder because he had shown her in the past that he wanted her near him, touching him until he fell asleep. Now, though, she lifted her head and looked at him.
“You’ve come to your new home, Anyanwu.”
“I know that.” She did not like the flat strangeness of his tone. This was the voice he used to frighten people?the voice that reminded her to think of him as something other than a man.
“You are home, but I will be leaving again in a few weeks.”
“But?”
“I will be leaving. I have other people who need me to rid them of enemies or who need to see me to know they still belong to me. I have a fragmented people to hunt and reassemble. I have women in three different towns who could bear powerful children if I give them the right mates. And more. Much more.”
She sighed and burrowed deeper into the mattress. He was going to leave her here among strangers. He had made up his mind. “When you come back,” she said resignedly, “there will be a son for you here.”
“Are you pregnant now?”
“I can be now. Your seed still lives inside me.”
“No!”
She jumped, startled at his vehemence.
“This is not the body I want to beget your first children here,” he said.
She made herself shrug, speak casually. “All right. I’ll wait until you have … become another man.”
“You need not. I have another plan for you.”
The hairs at the back of her neck began to prickle and itch. “What plan?”
“I want you to marry,” he said. “You’ll do it in the way of the people here with a license and a wedding.”
“It makes no difference. I will follow your custom.”
“Yes. But not with me.”
She stared at him, speechless. He lay on his back staring at one of the great beams that held up the ceiling.
“You’ll marry Isaac,” he said. “I want children from the two of you. And I want you to have a husband who does more than visit you now and then. Living here, you could go for a year, two years, without seeing me. I don’t want you to be that alone.”
“Isaac?” she whispered. “Your son?”
“My son. He’s a good man. He wants you, and I want you with him.”
“He’s a boy! He’s …”
“What man is not a boy to you, except me? Isaac is more a man than you think.”
“But … he’s your son! How can I have the son when his father, my husband, still lives? That is abomination!”
“Not if I command it.”
“You cannot! It is abomination!”
“You have left your village, Anyanwu, and your town and your land and your people. You are here where I rule. Here, there is only one abomination: disobedience. You will obey.”
“I will not! Wrong is wrong! Some things change from place to place, but not this. If your people wish to debase themselves by drinking the milk of animals, I will turn my head. Their shame is their own. But now you want me to shame myself, make myself even worse than they. How can you ask it of me, Doro? The land itself will be offended! Your crops will wither and die!”
He made a sound of disgust. “That’s foolishness! I thought I had found a woman too wise to believe such nonsense.”
“You have found a woman who will not soil herself! How is it here? Do sons lie with their mothers also? Do sisters and brothers lie down together?”
“Woman, if I command it, they lie down together gladly.”
Anyanwu moved away from him so that no part of her body touched his. He had spoken of this before. Of incest, of mating her own children together with doglike disregard for kinship. And in revulsion, she had led him quickly from her land. She had saved her children, but now … who would save her?
“I want children of your body and his,” Doro repeated. He stopped, raised himself to his elbow so that he leaned over her. “Sun woman, would I tell you to do something that would hurt my people? The land is different here.It is my land ! Most of the people here exist because I caused their ancestors to marry in ways your people would not accept. Yet everyone lives well here. No angry god punishes them. Their crops grow and their harvests are rich every year.”
“And some of them hear so much of the thoughts of others that they cannot think their own thoughts. Some of them hang themselves.”
“Some of your own people hang themselves.”
“Not for such terrible reasons.”
