Pelham’s son, Doro recalled, had just about enough sense not to wet himself. He was a huge, powerful man with the mind of a child?a timid, gentle child, fortunately. Doro was glad to hear that he could handle something.
Isaac looked up, noticed for the first time the small sharp-featured stranger Doro was just then, and did what he had always done. With none of the talents of his brother Lale to warn him, Isaac inevitably recognized Doro. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time you got back to us.” Then he turned toward the house and called, “Peter, come out here.”
He stood up spryly and took the reins of Doro’s horse, handing them to his son Peter as the boy came out of the house.
“Someday, I’m going to get you to tell me how you always know me,” Doro said. “It can’t be anything you see.”
Isaac laughed. “I’d tell you if I understood it myself. You’re you, that’s all.”
Now that Doro had spoken, Pelham and the other man recognized him and spoke together in a confused babble of welcome.
Doro held up his hand. “I’m here to see my children,” he said.
The welcomes subsided. The two men shook his hand, wished him a good evening, and hurried off to spread the news of his return. In his few words, he had told him that his visit was unofficial. He had not come to take a new body, and thus would not hold court to settle serious grievances or offer needed financial or other aid in the way that had become customary in Wheatley and some of his other settlements. This visit, he was only a man come to see his children?of whom there were forty-two here, ranging from infants to Isaac. It was rare for him to come to town for no other purpose than to see them, but when he did, other people left him alone. If anyone was in desperate need, they approached one of his children.
“Come on in,” Isaac said. “Have some beer, some food.” He did not have an old man’s voice, high and cracking. His voice had become deeper and fuller?it contributed to his authority. But all Doro could hear in it now was honest pleasure.
“No food yet,” Doro said. “Where’s Anyanwu?”
“Helping with the Sloane baby. Mrs. Sloane let it get sick and almost die before she asked for help. Anyanwu says it has pneumonia,” Isaac poured two tankards of beer.
“Is it going to be all right?”
“Anyanwu says so?although she was ready to strangle the Sloanes. Even they’ve been here long enough to know better than to let a child suffer that way with her only a few doors away.” Isaac paused. “They’re afraid of her blackness and her power. They think she’s a witch, and the mold-medicine she made some poison.”
Doro frowned, took a swallow of beer. The Sloanes were his newest wild seed?a couple who had found each other before Doro found them. They were dangerous, unstable, painfully sensitive people who heard the thoughts of others in intermittent bursts. When one received a burst of pain, anger, fear, any intense emotion, it was immediately transmitted to the other, and both suffered. None of this was deliberate or controlled. It simply happened. Helplessly, the Sloanes did a great deal of fighting and drinking and crying and praying for it to stop happening, but it would not. Not ever. That was why Doro had brought them to Wheatley. They were amazingly good breeding stock to be wild seed. He suspected that in one way or another, they were each descended from his people. Certainly, they were enough like his people to make excellent prey. And as soon as they had produced a few more children, Doro intended to take them both. It would be almost a kindness.
But for now, they would go on being abysmal parents, neglecting and abusing their children not out of cruelty, but because they hurt too badly themselves to notice their children’s pain. In fact, they were likely to notice that pain only as a new addition to their own. Thus, sometimes their kind murdered children. Doro had not believed the Sloanes were dangerous in that way. Now, he was less certain.
“Isaac …?”
Isaac looked at him, understood the unspoken question. “I assume you mean to keep the parents alive for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better find another home for the child?and for every other child they have. Anyanwu says they should never have had any.”
“Which means, of course, that they should have as many as possible.”
“From your point of view, yes. Good useful people. I’ve already begun talking to them about giving up the child.”
“Good. And?”
“They’re worried about what people might think. I got the impression they’d be glad to get rid of the child if not for that?and one other thing.”
“What?”
Isaac looked away. “They’re worried about who’ll care for them when they’re old. I told them you’d talk to them about that.”
Doro smiled thinly. Isaac refused to lie to the people he thought Doro had selected as prey. Most often, he refused to tell them anything at all. Sometimes such people guessed what was being kept from them, and they ran. Doro took pleasure in hunting them down. Lann Sloane, Doro thought, would be especially good game. The man had a kind of animal wariness about him.
“Anyanwu would say you have on your leopard face now,” Isaac commented.
Doro shrugged. He knew what Anyanwu would say, and that she meant it when she compared him to one kind of animal or another. Once she had said such things out of fear or anger. Now she said them out of grim hatred. She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever known. She was alive because of Isaac. Doro had no doubt that if he had tried to give her to any of his other sons, she would have refused and died. He had asked her what Isaac said to change her mind, and when she refused to tell him, he had asked Isaac. To his surprise, Isaac refused to tell him, too. His son refused him very little, angered him very rarely. But this time …
