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.
“A bit of yam, at least, Anyanwu,” he said smiling. “I have eaten nothing today.” He knew she would feed him.
