Seed to Harvest

  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 someone—an 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 gently—or 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 wall—made of red clay and over six feet high—would 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 you—any 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 met—and 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 accident—and 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.”

  “Others!”

  “Did you think I could take only one?” She began molding her malleable body into another shape. “I took animal shapes to frighten my people when they wanted to kill me,” she said. “I became a leopard and spat at them. They believe in such things, but they do not like to see them proved. Then I became a sacred python, and no one dared to harm me. The python shape brought me luck. We were needing rain then to save the yam crop, and while I was a python, the rains came. The people decided my magic was good and it took them a long time to want to kill me again.” She was becoming a small, well-muscled man as she spoke.

  Now Doro did try to strip away her cloth, moving slowly so that she would understand. He felt her strength for a moment when she caught his hand and, with no special effort, almost broke it. Then, as he controlled his surprise, prevented himself from reacting to the pain, she untied her cloth herself and took it off. For several seconds, he was more impressed with that casual grip than with her body, but he could not help noticing that she had become thoroughly male.

  “Could you father a child?” he asked.

  “In time. Not now.”

  “Have you?”

>   “Yes. But only girl children.”

  He shook his head, laughing. The woman was far beyond anything he had imagined. “I’m surprised your people have let you live,” he said.

  “Do you think I would let them kill me?” she asked.

  He laughed again. “What will you do then, Anyanwu? Stay here with them, convincing each new generation that you are best let alone—or will you come with me?”

  She tied her cloth around her again, then stared at him, her large too-clear eyes looking deceptively gentle in her young man’s face. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “For me to go with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is your true reason for coming here then.”

  He thought he heard fear in her voice, and his throbbing hand convinced him that she must not be unduly frightened. She was too powerful. She might force him to kill her. He spoke honestly.

  “I let myself be drawn here because people who had pledged loyalty to me had been taken away in slavery,” he said. “I went to their village to get them, take them to a safer home, and I found … only what the slavers had left. I went away, not caring where my feet took me. When they brought me here, I was surprised, and for the first time in many days, I was pleased.”

  “It seems your people are often taken from you.”

  “It does not seem so, it is so. That is why I am gathering them all closer together in a new place. It will be easier for me to protect them there.”

  “I have always protected myself.”

  I can see that. You will be very valuable to me. I think you could protect others as well as yourself.”

  “Shall I leave my people to help you protect yours?”

  “You should leave so that finally you can be with your own kind.”

  “With one who kills men and shrouds himself in their skins? We are not alike, Doro.”

  Doro sighed, looked over at her house—a small, rectangular building whose steeply sloping thatched roof dipped to within a few feet of the ground. Its walls were made of the same red earth as the compound wall. He wondered obscurely whether the red earth was the same clay he had seen in Indian dwellings in southwestern parts of the North American continent. But more immediately, he wondered whether there were couches in Anyanwu’s house, and food and water. He was almost too tired and hungry to go on arguing with the woman.

  “Give me food, Anyanwu,” he said. “Then I will have the strength to entice you away from this place.”

  She looked startled, then laughed almost reluctantly. It occurred to him that she did not want him to stay and eat, did not want him to stay at all. She believed the things he had told her, and she feared that he could entice her away. She wanted him to leave—or part of her did. Surely there was another part that was intrigued, that wondered what would happen if she left her home, walked away with this stranger. She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.

  “A bit of yam, at least, Anyanwu,” he said smiling. “I have eaten nothing today.” He knew she would feed him.

  Without a word, she walked away to another smaller building and returned with two large yams. Then she led him into her kitchen and gave him a deerskin to sit on since he carried nothing other than the cloth around his loins. Still in her male guise, she courteously shared a kola nut and a little palm wine with him. Then she began to prepare food. Besides the yams, she had vegetables, smoked fish, and palm oil. She built up a fire from the live coals in the tripod of stones that formed her hearth, then put a clay pot of water on to boil. She began to peel the yams. She would cut them up and boil the pieces until they were tender enough to be pounded as her people liked them. Perhaps she would make soup of the vegetables, oil, and fish, but that would take time.

  “What do you do?” she asked him as she worked. “Steal food when you are hungry?”

  “Yes,” he said. He stole more than food. If there were no people he knew near him, or if he went to people he knew and they did not welcome him, he simply took a new strong, young body. No person, no group could stop him from doing this. No one could stop him from doing anything at all.

  “A thief,” said Anyanwu with disgust that he did not think was quite real. “You steal, you kill. What else do you do?”

  “I build,” he said quietly. “I search the land for people who are a little different—or very different. I search them out, I bring them together in groups, I begin to build them into a strong new people.”

  She stared at him in surprise. “They let you do this—let you take them from their people, their families?”

  “Some bring their families with them. Many do not have families. Their differences have made them outcasts. They are glad to follow me.”

  “Always?”

  “Often enough,” he said.

  “What happens when people will not follow you? What happens if they say, ‘It seems too many of your people are dying, Doro. We will stay where we are and live.’”

  He got up and went to the doorway of the next room where two hard but inviting clay couches had been built out from the walls. He had to sleep. In spite of the youth and strength of the body he was wearing, it was only an ordinary body. If he were careful with it—gave it proper rest and food, did not allow it to be injured—it would last him a few more weeks. If he drove it, though, as he had been driving it to reach Anyanwu, he would use it up much sooner. He held his hands before him, palms down, and was not surprised to see that they were shaking.

  “Anyanwu, I must sleep. Wake me when the food is ready.”

  “Wait!”

  The sharpness of her voice stopped him, made him look back.

  Answer, she said. What happens when people will not follow you?”

  Was that all? He ignored her, climbed onto one of the couches, lay down on the mat that covered it, and closed his eyes. He thought he heard her come into the room and go out again before he drifted off to sleep, but he paid no attention. He had long ago discovered that people were much more cooperative if he made them answer questions like hers for themselves. Only the stupid actually needed to hear his answer, and this woman was not stupid.

  When she woke him, the house was full of the odor of food and he got up alert and ravenous. He sat with her, washed his hands absently in the bowl of water she gave him, then used his fingers to scoop up a bit of pounded yam from his platter and dip it into the common pot of peppery soup. The food was good and filling, and for some time he concentrated on it, ignoring Anyanwu except to notice that she was also eating and did not seem inclined to talk. He recalled distantly that there had been some small religious ceremony between the washing of hands and the eating when he had last been with her people. An offering of food and palm wine to the gods. He asked about it once he had taken the edge off his hunger.

  She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?”

  “None.”

  “And why not?”

  “I help myself,” he said.

  She nodded. “In at least two ways, you do. I help myself too.”

  He smiled a little, but could not help wondering how hard it might be to tame even partially a wild seed woman who had been helping herself for three hundred years. It would not be hard to make her follow him. She had sons and she cared for them, thus she was vulnerable. But she might very well make him regret taking her—especially since she was too valuable to kill if he could possibly spare her.

  “For my people,” she said, “I respect the gods. I speak as the voice of a god. For myself …In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.”

  “You are very much out of place here.”

  She sighed. “Everything comes back to that. I am content here, Doro. I have already had ten husbands to tell me what to do. Why should I make you the eleventh? Because you will kill me if I refuse? Is that how men get wives in your homeland—by threatening murder? Well, perhaps you c
annot kill me. Perhaps we should find out!”

  He ignored her outburst, noticed instead that she had automatically assumed that he wanted her as his wife. That was a natural assumption for her to make, perhaps a correct assumption. He had been asking himself which of his people she should be mated with first, but now he knew he would take her himself—for a while, at least. He often kept the most powerful of his people with him for a few months, perhaps a year. If they were children, they learned to accept him as father. If they were men, they learned to obey him as master. If they were women, they accepted him best as lover or husband. Anyanwu was one of the handsomest women he had ever seen. He had intended to take her to bed this night, and many more nights until he got her to the seed village he was assembling in the British-ruled Colony of New York. But why should that be enough? The woman was a rare find. He spoke softly.

  “Shall I try to kill you then, Anyanwu? Why? Would you kill me if you could?”

  “Perhaps I can!”

  “Here I am.” He looked at her with eyes that ignored the male form she still wore. Eyes that spoke to the woman inside—or he hoped they did. It would be much more pleasant to have her come to him because she wanted to rather than because she was afraid.

  She said nothing—as though his mildness confused her. He had intended it to.

  “We would be right together, Anyanwu. Have you never wanted a husband who was worthy of you?”

  “You think very much of yourself.”

  “And of you—or why would I be here?”

  “I have had husbands who were great men,” she said. “Titled men of proven courage even though they had no special ability such as yours. I have sons who are priests, wealthy sons, men of standing. Why should I want a husband who must prey on other men like a wild beast?”

  He touched his chest. “This man came to prey on me. He attacked me with a machete.”

  That stopped her for a moment. She shuddered. “I have been cut that way—cut almost in half.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I … I healed myself. I would not have thought I could heal so quickly.”

  “I mean what did you do to the man who cut you?”