Their slow progress was not a complete waste of time, though. It gave him a chance to learn more about Anyanwuand there was more to learn. He discovered that he would not have to steal food while she was with him. Once the two yams were roasted and eaten, she found food everywhere. Each day as they traveled, she filled her basket with fruit, nuts, roots, whatever she could find that was edible. She threw stones with the speed and force of a sling and brought down birds and small animals. At day’s end, there was always a hearty meal. If a plant was unfamiliar to her, she tasted it and sensed within herself whether or not it was poison. She ate several things she said were poison, though none of them seemed to harm her. But she never gave him anything other than good food. He ate whatever she gave him, trusting her abilities. And when a small cut on his hand became infected, she gave him even more reason to trust her.
The infected hand had begun to swell by the time she noticed it, and it was beginning to make him sick. He was already deciding how he would get a new body without endangering her. Then, to his surprise, she offered to help him heal.
“You should have told me,” she said. “You let yourself suffer needlessly.”
He looked at her doubtfully. “Can you get the herbs you need out here?”
She met his eyes. “Sometimes the herbs were for my peoplelike the gods in my compound. If you will let me, I can help you without them.”
“All right.” He gave her his swollen, inflamed hand.
“There will be pain,” she warned.
“All right,” he repeated.
She bit his hand.
He bore it, holding himself rigid against his own deadly reaction to sudden pain. She had done well to warn him. This was the second time she had been nearer to death than she could imagine.
For a time after biting him, she did nothing. Her attention seemed to turn inward, and she did not answer when he spoke to her. Finally, she brought his hand to her mouth again and there was more pain and pressure, but no more biting. She spat three times, each time returning to his hand, then she seemed to caress the wound with her tongue. Her saliva burned like fire. After that she kept a watch on the hand, attending it twice more with that startling, burning pain. Almost at once, the swelling and sickness went away and the wound began to heal.
“There were things in your hand that should not have been there,” she told him. “Living things too small to see. I have no name for them, but I can feel them and know them when I take them into my body. As soon as I know them, I can kill them within myself. I gave you a little of my body’s weapon against them.”
Tiny living things too small to see, but large enough to make him sick. If his wound had not begun to heal so quickly and cleanly, he would not have believed a word she said. As it was, though, his trust in her grew. She was a witch, surely. In any culture she would be feared. She would have to fight to keep her life. Even sensible people who did not believe in witches would turn against her. And Doro, breeder of witches that he was, realized all over again what a treasure she was. Nothing, no one, must prevent his keeping her.
It was not until he reached one of his contacts near the coast that someone decided to try.
Anyanwu never told Doro that she could jump all but the widest of the rivers they had to cross. She thought at first that he might guess because he had seen the strength of her hands. Her legs and thighs were just as powerful. But Doro was not used to thinking as she did about her abilities, not used to taking her strength or metamorphosing ability for granted. He never guessed, never asked what she could do.
She kept silent because she feared that he too could leap the gorgesthough in doing so, he might leave his body behind. She did not want to see him kill for so small a reason. She had listened to the stories he told as they traveled, and it seemed to her that he killed too easily. Far too easilyunless the stories were lies. She did not think they were. She did not know whether he would take a life just to get across a river quickly, but she feared he might. This made her begin to think of escaping from him. It made her think longingly of her people, her compound, her home …
Yet she made herself womanly for him at night. He never had to ask her to do this. She did it because she wanted to, because in spite of her doubts and fears, he pleased her very much. She went to him as she had gone to her first husband, a man for whom she had cared deeply, and to her surprise, Doro treated her much as her first husband had. He listened with respect to her opinions and spoke with respect and friendship as though to another man. Her first husband had taken much secret ridicule for treating her this way. Her second husband had been arrogant, contemptuous, and brutal, yet he had been considered a great man. She had run away from him as she now wished to run away from Doro. Doro could not have known what dissimilar men he brought alive in her memory.
He had still given her no proof of the power he claimed, no proof that her children would be in danger from other than an ordinary man if she managed to escape. Yet she continued to believe him. She could not bring herself to get up while he slept and vanish into the forest. For her children’s sake she had to stay with him, at least until she had proof one way or the other.
She followed him almost grimly, wondering what it would be like finally to be married to a man she could neither escape nor outlive. The prospect made her cautious and gentle. Her earlier husbands would not have known her. She sought to make him value her and care for her. Thus she might have some leverage with him, some control over him later when she needed it. Much married as she was, she knew she would eventually need it. They were in the lowlands now, passing through wetter country. There was more rain, more heat, many more mosquitoes. Doro got some disease and coughed and coughed. Anyanwu got a fever, but drove it out of herself as soon as she sensed it. There was enough misery to be had without sickness.
“When do we pass through this land!” she asked in disgust. It was raining now. They were on someone’s pathway laboring through sucking ankle-deep mud.
“There is a river not far ahead of us,” he told her. He stopped for a moment to cough. “I have an arrangement with people at a riverside town. They will take us the rest of the way by canoe.”
“Strangers,” she said with alarm. They had managed to avoid contact with most of the people whose lands they had crossed.
“You will be the stranger here,” Doro told her. “But you need not worry. These people know me. I have given them giftsdash, they call itand promised them more if they rowed my people down the river.”
“Do they know you in this body?” she asked, using the question as an excuse to touch the hard flat muscle of his shoulder. She liked to touch him.
“They know me,” he said. “I am not the body I wear, Anyanwu. You will understand that when I changesoon, I think.” He paused for another fit of coughing. “You will know me in another body as soon as you hear me speak.”
“How?” She did not want to talk about his changing, his killing. She had tried to cure his sickness so that he would not change, but though she had eased his coughing, prevented him from growing sicker, she had not made him well. That meant she might soon be finding out more about his changing whether she wanted to or not. “How will I know you?” she asked.