Nweke began screaming again—hoarse, terrible sounds.
“Oh God,” Isaac whispered.
“Her voice will soon be gone at that rate,” Doro said. Then, offhandedly, “Do you have any more of those cakes?”
Isaac knew him too well to be surprised. He got up to get the plate of fruit-filled Dutch olijkoecks that Anyanwu had made earlier. It was rare for another person’s pain to disturb Doro. If the girl seemed to be dying, he would be concerned that good seed was about to be lost. But if she were merely in agony, it did not matter. Isaac forced his thoughts back to Anyanwu.
“Doro?” He spoke so softly that the girl’s screams almost drowned his single word. But Doro looked up. He held Isaac’s gaze, not questioningly or challengingly, not with any reassurance or compassion. He only looked back. Isaac had seen cats stare at people that way. Cats. That was apt. More and more often, nothing human looked out of Doro’s eyes. When Anyanwu was angry, she said Doro was only a man pretending to be a god. But she knew better. No man could frighten her—and Doro, whatever he had failed to accomplish with her, had taught her to fear him. He had taught Isaac to fear for him.
“What will you lose,” Isaac said, “if you leave Anyanwu her life?”
“I’m tired of her. That’s all. That’s enough. I’m just tired of her.” He sounded tired—good, honest, human weariness, annoyance, and frustration.
“Then let her go. Send her away and let her make her own life.”
Doro frowned, looked as harassed as Isaac had ever seen him. Surely that was a good sign. “Think about it,” he said. “Finally to have someone who isn’t temporary—and wild seed that she is, you’ll have lifetimes to tame her. Surely she can feel loneliness too. She should be a challenge to you, not an annoyance.”
He said nothing more. It was not good to try to get promises from Doro. Isaac had learned that long ago. It was best to push him almost to agreement, then leave him alone. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes Isaac did it well enough to save lives. And sometimes he failed.
They sat together, Doro slowly eating olijkoecks and Isaac listening to the sounds of pain from the bedroom—until those sounds ceased, Nweke’s voice all but gone. The hours passed. Isaac made coffee.
“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 Dor
o 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 somehow? Why not? Who was more suited to causing illness than one born to cure it?
Desperately, Doro turned to Anyanwu. The moment his attention was focused on her, he knew she was still alive. He could sense it. She felt like prey, not like a useless corpse. Doro took her hand, then released it because it felt limp and dead. He touched her face, leaned down close to her ear. “Can you hear me, Anyanwu?”
She gave no sign.
“Anyanwu, Isaac needs you. He’ll die without your help.”
Her eyes opened. She stared up at him for a second, perhaps reading his desperation on his face. “Am I on a rug?” she whispered finally.
He frowned wondering whether she too had gone out of her mind. But she was Isaac’s only hope. “Yes,” he said.
“Then use it to pull me close to him. As close as you can. Don’t touch me otherwise.” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t touch me.”
He moved back from her and drew her toward Isaac with the rug.
“She went mad,” Anyanwu whispered. “Her mind broke somehow.”
“I know,” Doro said.
“Then she tried to break everything inside me. Like being cut and torn from the inside. Heart, lungs, veins, stomach, bladder. …She was like me, like Isaac, like … maybe like Thomas too—reaching into minds, seeing into my body. She must have been able to see.”
Yes. Nweke had been all Doro had hoped for and more. But she was dead. “Help Isaac, Anyanwu!”
“Go get me food,” she said. “Is there some stew left?”
“Can you reach Isaac?”
“Yes. Go!”
Trying to trust her, Doro left the room.
Somehow, Anyanwu healed herself enough so that moving would not start her bleeding inside again. There was so much damage, and it had all been done so quickly, so savagely. When she changed her shape, she transformed organs that already existed and formed any necessary new organs while sustained by old ones. She was still partly human in most changes long after she had ceased to look human. But Nweke had all but destroyed organ after organ. If the girl had gone to work on her brain, Anyanwu knew she would have died before she could heal herself. Even now, there were massive repairs to be made and massive illnesses to be avoided. Even not touching her brain at all, Nweke had nearly killed her.
How could she make herself fit now to help Isaac? But she had to. She had known in the first year of their marriage that she had been wrong about him. He had been the best possible husband. With his power and hers, they had built this house. People came to watch them and watch for them so that no strangers happened by to see the witchcraft. Her strength had fascinated Isaac, but it had never disturbed him. His power she trusted absolutely. She had seen him carry great logs from the forest and strip them of bark. She had seen him kill wolves without touching them. In a fight once, she had seen him kill a man—a fool who had drunk too much and chosen to take offense at Isaac’s quiet, easy refusal to be insulted. The fool had a gun and Isaac did not. Isaac never went armed. There was no need. The man died as the wolves had died—instantly, his head broken and bloodied as though he had been bludgeoned. Afterward, Isaac himself was sickened by the killing.
Anyanwu had seen these things, but none of them had made her fear her husband as she had feared Doro. Sometimes Isaac tossed her about and she screamed or laughed or swore at him—whichever seemed right for the occasion—but she never feared him. And she never held him in contempt. “He has more sense than men two and three times his age,” she had told Doro when Isaac was young and she and Doro were on slightly better terms. In some ways, Isaac had more sense than Doro. And Isaac understood even better than she did that he would have to share her, at least with Doro. And she would have to share him with the women Doro gave to him. She was used to sharing a man, but she had had no experience in being shared. She did not like it. She grew to hate the sound of Doro’s voice identifying him, warning her that she must give him another child. Isaac accepted each of her children as though they were his own. He accepted her without bitterness or anger when she came to him from Doro’s bed. And somehow, he helped her to endure even when Doro strove to break and reshape her when her increasingly silent obedience ceased to be enough for him. Strangely, though she could not forgive Doro any longer even for small things, she felt no resentment when Isaac forgave him. The bond between Isaac and Doro was at least as firm as that between an ordinary father and a son of his body. If Isaac had not loved Doro, and if that love had not been returned strongly in Doro’s own way, Doro would have seemed totally inhuman.
She did not want to think what her life would be like without Isaac—how she would endure Doro without Isaac. Not since her first husband had she allowed herself to become so dependent on anyone, husband or child. Other people were temporary. They died—except for Doro. Why, why could it not be Isaac who lived and lived, and Doro who died?
She kissed Isaac. She had given him many such kisses as he grew old. They were of more than love. Within her body, she synthesized medicine for him. She had studied him very carefully, had aged herself, her own organs to study the effects of age. It had been dangerous work. A miscalculation could have killed her before she understood it enough to counter it. She listened closely as Isaac described the pain he felt—the fearful tightening, the squeezing within his chest, the dizziness, the too-rapid beating of his heart, the way the pain spread from his chest to his left shoulder and arm.
The first time he felt the pain—twenty years before—he had thought he was dying. The first time she managed to induce such pain in her body, she too had feared she was dying. It was terrible, but she lived as Isaac had lived, and she came to understand how old age and too much good, rich food could combine to steal away the youthful flexibility of his blood vessels—especially, if her simulations had led her aright, the blood vessels that nourished his heart.
What needed doing, then? How could aging, fat-narrowed blood vessels be restored? She could restore her own, of course. Since the pain had not killed her, and since she understood what she had done to produce the disorder, she could simply, carefully replace the damaged vessels, then dissolve away the useless hardened tissue, become the physiologically young woman she had been since the time of her transition. But transition had not frozen Isaac in youth. It had paid him other wages, good wages, but was useless in prolonging his life. If only she could give him some of her power …
That was pointless dreaming. If she could not heal the damage age and bad habits had caused, she could at least try to prevent further damage. He must not eat so much any longer, must not eat some foods at all. He must not smoke or work so hard—not with his muscles nor with his witch-power. Both took a physical toll. He would save no more ships from storms. Lighter tasks were all right as long as they did not bring on pain, but she told Doro very firmly that unless he wanted to kill Isaac, he would have to find a younger man for his heavy lifting and towing.
That done, Anyanwu spent long painful hours trying to discover or create a medicine that would ease Isaac’s pain when it did come. In the end, she so tired and weakened herself that even Isaac begged her to stop. She did not stop. She poisoned herself several times trying plant and animal substances she had not used before, noting minutely her every reaction. She rechecked familiar substances, found that as simple a thing as garlic had some ability to help, but not enough. She worked on, gained knowledge that helped others later. For Isaac, she at last, almost accidentally created a potentially dangerous medicine that would open wide the healthy blood vessels he had left, thus relieving the pressure on his undernourished heart and easing the pain. Whe
n his pain came again, she gave him the medicine. The pain vanished and he was amazed. He took her into New York City and made her choose the finest cloth. Then he took her to a dressmaker—a black freed-woman who stared at her with open curiosity. Anyanwu began telling the woman what she wanted, but when she paused for breath, the dressmaker spoke up.
“You are the Onitsha woman,” she said in Anyanwu’s native language. And she smiled at Anyanwu’s surprise. “Are you well?”
Anyanwu found herself greeting a countrywoman, perhaps a kinswoman. This was another gift Isaac was giving her. A new friend. He was good, Isaac. He could not die now and leave her.
But this time, the medicine that had always worked seemed to be failing. Isaac gave no sign that his pain was ending.
He lay ashen, sweating and gasping for breath. When she lifted her head from him, he opened his eyes. She did not know what to do. She wanted to look away from him, but could not. In her experimenting, she had found conditions of the heart that could kill very easily—and that could grow out of the problem he already had. She had almost killed herself learning about them. She had been so careful in her efforts to keep Isaac alive, and now, somehow, poor Nweke had undone all her work.
“Nweke?” Isaac whispered as though he had heard her thought.
“I don’t know,” Anyanwu said. She looked around, saw how the feather mattress billowed. “She is asleep.”
“Good,” he gasped. “I thought I had hurt her. I dreamed …”
He was dying! Nweke had killed him. In her madness, she had killed him and he was worried that he might have hurt her! Anyanwu shook her head, thought desperately. What could she do? With all her vast knowledge, there must be something …
He managed to touch her hand. “You have lost other husbands,” he said.
She began to cry.
“Anyanwu, I’m old. My life has been long and full—by ordinary standards, at least.” His face twisted with pain. It was as though the pain knifed through Anyanwu’s own chest.