Wild Seed

And it seemed to be. At that moment, the twenty-two-year-old son Peter, incongruously called Chukwuka—God is Supreme—arrived, and dinner was served.

Doro ate slowly, recalling how he had laughed at the boy’s Igbo name. He had asked Anyanwu where she had found her sudden devotion to God—any god. Chukwuka was a common enough name in her homeland, but it was not a name he would have expected from a woman who claimed she helped herself. Predictably, Anyanwu had been silent and unamused at his question. It took him a surprisingly long time to begin to wonder whether the name was supposed to be a charm—her pathetic attempt to protect the boy from him. Where had Anyanwu found her sudden devotion to God? Where else but in her fear of Doro? Doro smiled to himself.

Then he stopped smiling as Nweke’s brief peace ended. The girl screamed—a long, ragged, terrible sound that reminded Doro of cloth tearing. Then she dropped the dish of corn she had been bringing to the table and collapsed to the floor unconscious.

CHAPTER 8

Nweke lay twitching, still unconscious in the middle of Isaac and Anyanwu’s bed. Anyanwu said it was easier to care for her here in a bed merely enclosed within curtains than in one of the alcove beds. Oblivious to Doro’s presence, Anyanwu had stripped Nweke to her shift and removed the pins from her hair. The girl looked even smaller than she was now, looked lost in the deep, soft feather mattress. She looked like a child. Doro felt a moment of unease, even fear for her. He remembered her laughter minutes earlier and wondered whether he would hear it again.

“This is transition,” Anyanwu said to him, neutral-voiced.

He glanced at her. She stood beside the bed looking weary and concerned. Her earlier hostility had been set aside—and only set aside. Doro knew her too well to think it had been forgotten.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “She’s passed out before, hasn’t she?”

“Oh yes. But this is transition. I know it.”

He thought she was probably right. He sensed the girl very strongly now. If his body had been a lesser one or one he had given long use, he would not have dared to stay so near her.

“Will you stay?” Anyanwu asked, as though hearing his thoughts.

“For a while.”

“Why? You have never stayed before when my children changed.”

“This one is special.”

“So I have seen.” She gave him another of her venomous looks. “Why, Doro?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand. “Do you know what she has been receiving? What thoughts she has been picking up?”

“She told me about the man last night—the torture.”

“Not that. She’s been picking up people making love—picking it up often.”

“And you thought that was not enough for an unmarried girl!”

“She’s eighteen years old. It wasn’t enough.”

Nweke made a small sound as though she were having a bad dream. No doubt she was. The worst of dreams. And she would not be permitted to wake fully until it was over.

“You have not molested my children before,” she said.

“I wondered whether you had noticed.”

“Is that it?” She turned to face him. “Were you punishing me for my … my ingratitude?”

“… no.” His eyes looked past her for a moment though he did not move. “I’m not interested in punishing you any longer.”

She turned a little too quickly and sat down beside the bed. She sat on a chair Isaac had made for her—a taller-than-normal chair so that in spite of her small size and the height of the bed, she could see and reach Nweke easily. Eventually she would move onto the bed with the girl. People in transition needed close physical contact to give them some hold on reality.

But for now, Anyanwu’s move to the chair was to conceal emotion. Fear, Doro wondered, or shame or anger or hatred … His last serious attempt to punish her had involved Nweke’s father. That attempt had stood between them all Nweke’s life. Of all the things she considered that he had done to her, that was the worst. Yet it was a struggle she had come very near winning. Perhaps she had won. Perhaps that was why the incident could still make him uneasy.

Doro shook his head, turned his attention to the girl. “Do you think she’ll come through all right?” he asked.

“I have never had any of them die in my care.”

He ignored the sarcasm in her voice. “What do you feel, Anyanwu? How can you help them so well when you cannot reach their minds in even the shadowy way that I can?”

“I bit her a little. She is strong and healthy. There is nothing, no feeling of death about her.” He had opened his mouth, but she held up a hand to stop him. “If I could tell you more clearly, I would. Perhaps I will find a way—on the day you find a way to tell me how you move from body to body.”

“Touché,” he said, and shrugged. He took a chair from beside the fireplace and brought it to the foot of the bed. There, he waited. When Nweke came to, shaking and crying wildly, he spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Anyanwu went onto the bed silent, grim-faced, and held the girl until her tears had slowed, until she had stopped shaking.

“You are in transition,” Doro heard Anyanwu whisper. “Stay with us until tomorrow and you will have the powers of a goddess.” That was all she had time to say. Nweke’s body stiffened. She made retching sounds and Anyanwu drew back from her slightly. But instead of vomiting, she went limp again, her consciousness gone to join someone else’s.

Eventually, she seemed to come to again, but her open eyes were glazed and she made the kind of gibbering sounds Doro had heard in madhouses—especially in the madhouses to which his people had been consigned when their transitions caught them outside their settlements. Nweke’s face was like something out of a madhouse, too—twisted and unrecognizable, covered with sweat, eyes, nose, and mouth streaming. Wearily, sadly, Doro got up to leave.

There had been a time when he had to watch transitions—when no one else could be trusted not to run away or murder his writhing charge or perform some dangerous, stupid ritual of exorcism. But that was long ago. He was not only building a people now; they were building themselves. It was no longer necessary for him to do everything, see everything.

He looked back once as he reached the door and saw that Anyanwu was watching him.

“It is easier to doom a child to this than to stay and watch it happen, isn’t it?” she said.

“I watched it happen to your ancestors!” he said angrily. “And I’ll watch it happen to your descendants when even you are dust!” He turned and left her.

When Doro had gone, Anyanwu clambered off the featherbed and went to the washstand. There she poured water from the pitcher to the basin and wet a towel. Nweke was having a difficult time already, poor girl. That meant a long, terrible night. There was no duty Anyanwu hated more than this—especially with her own children. But no one else could handle it as well as she could.

She bathed the girl’s face, thinking, praying:Oh, Nweke, little one, stay until tomorrow. The pain will go away tomorrow.

Nweke quieted as though she could hear the desperate thoughts. Perhaps she could. Her face was gray and still now. Anyanwu caressed it, seeing traces of the girl’s father in it as she always did. There was a man damned from the day of his birth—all because of Doro. He was fine breeding stock, oh yes. He was a forest animal unable to endure the company of other people, unable to get any peace from their thoughts. He had not been as Nweke was now, receiving only large emotions, great stress. He received everything. And also, he saw visions of things far from him, beyond the range of even her eyes, of things closed away from any eyes. In a city, even in a small town, he would have gone mad. And his vulnerability was not a passing thing, not a transition from powerlessness to godlike power. It was a condition he had had to endure to the day of his death. He had loved Doro pathetically because Doro was the one person whose thoughts could not entangle him. His mind would not reach into Doro’s. Doro said this was a matter of self-preservation; the mind that reached into his became his. It was consumed, extinguished, and Doro took over the body it had animated. Doro said even people like this man—Thomas, his name was—even people whose mind-reading ability seemed completely out of control somehow never reached into Doro’s thoughts. People with control could force themselves to try—as they could force their hands into fire—but they could not make the attempt without first feeling the “heat” and knowing they were doing a dangerous thing.