“Doro?” she whispered.
He kissed her cheek and relaxed. She was all right. She had been so completely passive in her grief. He had been certain he could do this to her and not harm her. He had been certain that this once she would not resist and make him hurt or kill her.
“I was dying,” she said.
“No you weren’t.”
“I was dying. You were?”
He put his hand over her mouth, then let her move it away when he saw that she would be still. “I had to know you that way at least once,” he said. “I had to touch you that way.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s the closest I’ll ever come to you.”
She did not respond to that for a long while. Eventually, though, she moved her head to rest it on his chest. He could not remember when she had done that last on her own. He folded his arms over her, remembering that other more complete enfolding. How had he ever had the control to stop, he wondered.
“Is it that way, that easy for all the others?” she asked.
He hesitated, not wanting to lie to her, not wanting to talk about his kills at all. “Fear makes it worse for them,” he said. “And they’re always afraid. Also … I have no reason to be gentle with them.”
“Do you hurt them? Is there pain?”
“No. I feel what they feel so I know. They don’t feel pain any more than you did.”
“It was … good,” she said with wonder. “Until I thought you would kill me, it was so good.”
He could only hold her and press his face into her hair.
“We should go upstairs,” she said.
“Soon.”
“What shall I do?” she asked. “I have fought you all these years. My reasons for fighting you all still exist. What shall I do?”
“What Isaac wanted. What you want. Join with me. What’s the good of fighting me? Especially now.”
“Now …” She was still, perhaps, savoring their brief contact. He hoped she was. He was. He wondered what she would say if he told her no one had ever before enjoyed such contact with him. No one in nearly four thousand years. His people found contact with him terrifying. Thought readers and controllers who survived such contact quickly learned that they could not read or control him without sacrificing their lives. They learned to pay attention to the vague wariness they felt of him as soon as their transitions ended. Occasionally, he found a man or woman he cared for, enjoyed repeated contact with. These endured what he did since they could not prevent it, though their grim, long-suffering attitudes made him feel like a rapist. But Anyanwu had participated, had enjoyed, had even taken the initiative for a while, greatly intensifying his pleasure. He looked at her with wonder and delight. She looked back solemnly.
“Nothing is solved,” she said, “except that now, I must fight myself as well as you.”
“You’re talking foolishness,” he said.
She turned and kissed him. “Let it be foolishness for now,” she said. “Let it be foolishness for this moment.” She looked down at him in the dim light. “You don’t want to go upstairs, do you?”
“No.”
“We’ll stay here then. My children will whisper about me.”
“Do you care?”
“Now you are talking foolishness,” she said, laughing. “Do I care! Whose house is this? I do as I please!” She covered them both with the wide skirt of her dress, blew out the lamp, and settled to sleep in his arms.
Anyanwu’s children did whisper about her?and about Doro. They were careless?deliberately so, Doro thought?and he heard them. But after a while, they stopped. Perhaps Anyanwu spoke to them. For once, Doro did not care. He knew he was no longer fearsome to them; he was only another of Anyanwu’s lovers. How long had it been since he was only someone’s lover? He could not remember. He went away now and then to take care of his businesses, put in an appearance at one of his nearer settlements.
“Bring this body back to me as long as you can,” Anyanwu would tell him. “There cannot be two as perfect as this.”
He would laugh and promise her nothing. Who knew what punishment he might have to inflict, what madman he might have to subdue, what stupid, stubborn politician, businessman, planter, or other fool he might have to remove? Also, wearing a black body in country where blacks were under constant obligation to prove they had rights to even limited freedom was a hindrance. He traveled with one of his older white sons, Frank Winston, whose fine old Virginia family had belonged to Doro since Doro brought it from England 135 years before. The man could be as distinguished and aristocratic or as timid and naive as he chose to be, as Doro ordered him to be. He had no inborn strangeness great enough to qualify him as good breeding stock. He was simply the best actor, the best liar Doro knew. People believed what he told them even when he grew expansive and outrageous, when he said Doro was an African prince mistakenly enslaved, but now freed to return to his homeland and take the word of God back to his heathen people.
Though caught by surprise, Doro played his role with such a confusing mixture of arrogance and humility that slaveholders were first caught between bewilderment and anger, then convinced. Doro was like no nigger they had ever seen.
Later, Doro warned Frank to stick to more conventional lies?though he thought the man was probably laughing too hard to hear him.
