She frowned, suddenly cautious. “I am myself. You see me.”
“As you see me. Do you imagine you see everything?”
She did not answer.
“A lie offends me, Anyanwu, and what I see of you is a lie. Show me what you really are.”
“You see what you will see!”
“Are you afraid to show me?”
“… No.” It was not fear. What was it? A lifetime of concealment, of commanding herself never to play with her abilities before others, never to show them off as mere tricks, never to let her people or any people know the full extent of her power unless she were fighting for her life. Should she break her tradition now simply because this stranger asked her to? He had done much talking, but what had he actually shown her about himself? Nothing.
“Can my concealment be a lie if yours is not?” she asked.
“Mine is,” he admitted.
“Then show me what you are. Give me the trust you ask me to give you.”
“You have my trust, Anyanwu, but knowing what I am would only frighten you.”
“Am I a child then?” she asked angrily. “Are you my mother who must shield me from adult truths?”
He refused to be insulted. “Most of my people are grateful to me for shielding them from my particular truth,” he said.
“So you say. I have seen nothing.”
He stood up, and she stood to face him, her small withered body fully in the shadow of his. She was little more than half his size, but it was no new thing for her to face larger people and either bend them to her will with words or beat them into submission physically. In fact, she could have made herself as large as any man, but she chose to let her smallness go on deceiving people. Most often, it put strangers at their ease because she seemed harmless. Also, it caused would-be attackers to underestimate her.
Doro stared down at her. “Sometimes only a burn will teach a child to respect fire,” he said. “Come with me to one of the villages of your town, Anyanwu. There I will show you what you think you want to see.”
“What will you do?” she asked warily.
“I will let you choose someonean enemy or only some useless person that your people would be better without. Then I will kill him.”
“Kill!”
“I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth.” He breathed deeply. “This is not the body I was born into. It’s not the tenth I’ve worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. Your gift seems to be a gentle one. Mine is not.”
“You are a spirit,” she cried in alarm.
“I told you you were a child,” he said. “See how you frighten yourself?”
He was like an ogbanje, an evil child spirit born to one woman again and again, only to die and give the mother pain. A woman tormented by an ogbanje could give birth many times and still have no living child. But Doro was an adult. He did not enter and re-enter his mother’s womb. He did not want the bodies of children. He preferred to steal the bodies of men.
“You are a spirit!” she insisted, her voice shrill with fear. All the while part of her mind wondered why she was believing him so easily. She knew many tricks herself, many frightening lies. Why should she react now like the most ignorant stranger brought before her believing that a god spoke through her? Yet she did believe, and she was afraid. This man was far more unusual than she was. This man was not a man.
When he touched her arm lightly, unexpectedly, she screamed.
He made a sound of disgust. “Woman, if you bring your people here with your noise, I will have no choice but to kill some of them.”
She stood still, believing this also. “Did you kill anyone as you came here?” she whispered.
“No. I went to great trouble to avoid killing for your sake. I thought you might have kinsmen here.”
“Generations of kinsmen. Sons and their sons and even their sons.”
“I would not want to kill one of your sons.”
“Why?” She was relieved but curious. “What are they to you?”
“How would you receive me if I came to you clothed in the flesh of one of your sons?”
She drew back, not knowing how to imagine such a thing.
“You see? Your children should not be wasted anyway. They may be good” He spoke a word in another language. She heard it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. The word was seed.
“What is seed?” she asked.
“People too valuable to be casually killed,” he said. Then more softly, “You must show me what you are.”
“How can my sons be of value to you?”
He gave her a long silent look, then spoke with that same softness. “I may have to go to them, Anyanwu. They may be more tractable than their mother.”
She could not recall ever having been threatened so gentlyor so effectively. Her sons … “Come,” she whispered. “It is too open for me to show you here.”
With concealed excitement, Doro followed the small, wizened woman to her tiny compound. The compound wallmade of red clay and over six feet highwould give them the privacy Anyanwu wanted.
“My sons would do you no good,” she told him as they walked. “They are good men, but they know very little.”
“They are not like youany of them?”
“None.”
“And your daughters?”
“Nor them. I watched them carefully until they went away to their husbands’ towns. They are like my mother. They exert great influence on their husbands and on other women, but nothing beyond that. They live their lives and they die.”
“They die …?”
She opened the wooden door and led him through the wall, then barred the door after him.
“They die,” she said sadly. “Like their fathers.”
“Perhaps if your sons and daughters married each other …”
“Abomination!” she said with alarm. “We are not animals here, Doro!”
He shrugged. He had spent most of his life ignoring such protests and causing the protestors to change their minds. People’s morals rarely survived confrontations with him. For now, though, gentleness. This woman was valuable. If she were only half as old as he thought, she would be the oldest person he had ever metand she was still spry. She was descended from people whose abnormally long lives, resistance to disease, and budding special abilities made them very important to him. People who, like so many others, had fallen victim to slavers or tribal enemies. There had been so few of them. Nothing must happen to this one survivor, this fortunate little hybrid. Above all, she must be protected from Doro himself. He must not kill her out of anger or by accidentand accidents 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.”