“You should sleep,” Doro told him. “Take one of the children’s beds. It will be over when you wake.”
Isaac shook his head wearily. “How could I sleep not knowing?”
“All right, then, don’t sleep, but at least lie down. You look terrible.” Doro took Isaac by the shoulder and steered him into one of the bedrooms. The room was dark and cold, but Doro made a fire and lit a single candle.
“Shall I wait with you here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Isaac said gratefully. Doro brought a chair.
The screaming began again, and for a moment it confused Isaac.
The girl’s voice had become only a hoarse whisper long ago, and except for an occasional jarring or creaking of the bed and the harsh, ragged breathing of the two women, the house had been silent. Now there was screaming.
Isaac sat up suddenly and put his feet on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” Doro asked.
Isaac barely heard him. Suddenly he was up and running toward the other bedroom. Doro tried to stop him but Isaac brushed the restraining hands away. “Can’t you hear?” he shouted. “It’s not Nweke. It’s Anyanwu!”
It seemed to Doro that Nweke’s transition was ending. The time was right?early morning, a few hours before dawn. The girl had survived the usual ten to twelve hours of agony. For some time now, she had been silent, not screaming, or groaning or even moving around enough to shake the bed. That was not to say, though, that she could not move. Actually, the final hours of transition were the most dangerous. They were the hours in which people lost control of their bodies, not only feeling what others felt, but moving as others moved. This was the time when someone like Anyanwu, physically strong, unafraid, and comforting was essential. Anyanwu herself was perfect because she could not be hurt?or at least, not in any permanent way.
Doro’s people had told him this was the time they suffered most, too. This was the time when the madness of absorbing everyone else’s feelings seemed endless?when, in desperation, they would do anything to stop the pain. Yet this was also the time when they began to feel there was a way just beyond their reach?a way of controlling the madness, shutting themselves away from it. A way of finding peace.
But instead of peace for Nweke, there was more screaming, and there was Isaac springing up like a boy, running for the door, shouting that the screams were not Nweke’s, but Anyanwu’s.
And Isaac was right. What had happened? Had Anyanwu been unable to keep the girl alive in spite of her healing ability? Or was it something else, some other trouble with transition? What could make the formidable Anyanwu scream that way?
“Oh my God,” Isaac cried from within the bedroom. “What have you done? My God!”
Doro ran into the room, stood near the door staring. Anyanwu lay on the floor, bleeding from her nose and mouth. Her eyes were closed and she made no sound now at all. She seemed only barely alive.
On the bed, Nweke sat up, her body half concealed by the feather mattress. She was staring down at Anyanwu. Isaac had stopped for a moment beside Anyanwu. He shook her as though to rouse her and her head lolled over bonelessly.
He looked up and saw Nweke’s face over a bulge of feather-filled cloth. Before Doro could guess what he meant to do Isaac seized the girl, slapped her hard across the face.
“Stop what you’re doing!” he shouted. “Stop it! She’s your mother!”
Nweke put a hand to her face, her expression startled, uncomprehending. Doro realized that before Isaac’s blow, her face had held no expression at all. She had looked at Anyanwu, fallen and bleeding, with no more interest than she might have expressed in a stone. She had looked, but she had almost certainly not seen?did not see now. Perhaps she felt the pain of Isaac’s blow. Perhaps she heard him shouting?though Doro doubted that she was able to distinguish words. All that reached her was pain, noise, confusion. And she had had enough of all three.
Her small, pretty, empty face contorted, and Isaac screamed. It had happened before. Doro had seen it happen. Some people’s bodies survived transition well enough, but their minds did not. They gained power and control of that power, but they lost all that would have made that power meaningful or useful. Why had Doro been so slow to understand? What if the damage to Isaac could not be repaired? What if both Isaac and Nweke were lost?
Doro stepped over Anyanwu and around Isaac, who was now writhing on the floor, and to the girl.
He seized her, slapped her as Isaac had done. “That’s enough!” he said, not shouting at all. If his voice reached her, she would live. If it did not, she would die. Gods, let it reach her. Let her have her chance to come back to her senses?if she had any left.
She drew back from Doro like a cornered animal. Whatever she had done to hurt Isaac and perhaps kill Anyanwu, she did nothing to Doro. His voice had reached her?after a fashion.
She half leaped and half fell from the bed to get away from him and somehow she landed on Isaac. Anyanwu was farther away, as though she had been trying to escape when Nweke struck her down.
Also, Anyanwu was unconscious. She would probably never have known it if the girl had landed on her. But Isaac knew, and he reacted instantly to this new pain.
He gripped Nweke, threw her upward away from his pain-racked body?threw her upward with all the power he had used so many times to propel great ships out of storms. He did not know what he was doing any more than she did. He never saw her hit the ceiling, never saw her body flatten into it, distorted, crushed, never saw her head slam into one of the great beams and break and send down a grisly rain of blood and bits of bone and brain.
Her body fell toward Doro, rag-limp and ruined. Somehow he caught it, kept it from landing on Isaac again. The girl was lost. She would have been lost with such wounds had she been twice the healer Doro had hoped for. He put her body on the bed hastily and bent to see whether Isaac was also lost. Later, he would feel this. Later, perhaps he would leave Wheatley?leave it for several years.
Isaac’s face was pale?a gray, ugly color. He was still now, very still though not quite unconscious. Doro could hear him panting, trying to catch his breath. Trouble with his heart, he had said. Could Nweke have aggravated that
