Wild Seed (6 page)

Then the machete was at the man's throat. "That could have been your hand," Doro said softly. "It could have been your head."

"My people would kill you where you stand."

"What good would that do you—in hell?"

Silence.

"Turn, and we'll go to see Daly."

The slaver obeyed hesitantly, muttering some obscenity about Doro's ancestry.

"Another word will cost you your head," Doro said.

Again, there was silence.

The three marched single file past the chained slaves, past the fire where the branding had stopped, past Daly's men who stared at them. They went to the tree-shaded, three-sided shelter where Daly sat on a wooden crate, drinking from an earthen jug. He lowered the jug, though, to stare at Doro and Anyanwu.

"I see business is good," Doro said.

Daly stood up. He was short and square and sunburned and unshaven. "Speak again," he growled. "Who are you?" He was a little hard of hearing, but Doro thought he had heard enough. Doro could see in him the strange combination of apprehension and anticipation that Doro had come to expect from his people. He knew when they greeted him this way that they were still his servants, loyal and tame.

"You know me," he said.

The slaver took a step back.

"I've left your man alive," Doro said. "Teach him manners."

"I will." He waved the confused, angry man away. The man glared at Doro and at the now lowered machete. Finally, he stalked away.

When he was gone, Doro asked Daly, "Has my crew been here?"

"More than once," the slaver said. "Just yesterday, your son Lale chose two men and three women. Strong young blacks they were—worth much more than I charged."

"I'll soon see," Doro said.

Suddenly Anyanwu screamed.

Doro glanced at her quickly to see that she was not being molested. Then he kept his eyes on Daly and on his men. "Woman, you will cause me to make a mistake!" he muttered.

"It is Okoye," she whispered. "The son of my youngest daughter. These men must have raided her village."

"Where is he?"

"There!" She gestured toward a young man who had just been branded. He lay on the ground dirty, winded, and bruised from his struggles to escape the hot iron.

"I will go to him," Anyanwu said softly, "though he will not know me."

"Go," Doro told her. Then he switched back to English. "I may have more business for you, Daly. That boy."

"But . . . that one is taken. A company ship—"

"A pity," Doro said. "The profit will not be yours then."

The man raised his stump to rub his hairy chin. "What are you offering?" It was his habit to supplement his meager salary by trading with interlopers—non-Company men—like Doro. Especially Doro. It was a dangerous business, but England was far away and he was not likely to be caught.

"One moment," Doro told him, then switched language. "Anyanwu, is the boy alone or are there other members of your family here?"

"He is alone. The others have been taken away."

"When?"

She spoke briefly with her grandson, then faced Doro again. "The last ones were sold to white men many days ago."

Doro sighed. That was that, then. The boy's relatives, strangers to him, were even more completely lost than the people of his seed village. He turned and made Daly an offer for the boy—an offer that caused the slaver to lick his lips. He would give up the boy without coercion and find some replacement for whoever had bought him. The blackened, cooked gouge on the boy's breast had become meaningless. "Unchain him," Doro ordered.

Daly gestured to one of his men, and that man removed the chains.

"I'll send one of my men back with the money," Doro promised.

Daly shook his head and stepped out of the shelter. "I'll walk with you," he said. "It isn't far. One of your people might shoot you if they see you looking that way with only two more blacks as companions."

Doro laughed and accepted the man's company. He wanted to talk to Daly about the seed village anyway. "Do you think I'll cheat you?" he asked. "After all this time?"

Daly smiled, glanced back at the boy who walked with Anyanwu. "You could cheat me," he said. "You could rob me whenever you chose, and yet you pay well. Why?"

"Perhaps because you are wise enough to accept what you cannot understand."

"You?"

"Me. What do you tell yourself I am?"

"I used to think you were the devil himself."

Doro laughed again. He had always permitted his people the freedom to say what they thought—as long as they stopped when he silenced them and obeyed when he commanded them. Daly had belonged to him long enough to know this. "Who are you, then?" he asked the slaver. "Job?"

"No." Daly shook his head sadly. "Job was a stronger man."

Doro stopped, turned, and looked at him. "You are content with your life," he said.

Daly looked away, refusing to meet whatever looked through the very ordinary eyes of the body Doro wore. But when Doro began to walk again, Daly followed. He would follow Doro to his ship, and if Doro himself offered payment for the young slave, Daly would refuse to take it. The boy would become a gift. Daly had never taken money from Doro's hand. And always, he had sought Doro's company.

"Why does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear. "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu. She had presented herself to the boy as a distant kinsman of his mother. "And also," she added, "I think this man serves him somehow."

"If the white man is a slave, why should he be paid?"

Doro answered this himself. "Because I choose to pay him, Okoye. A man may choose what he will do with his slaves."

"Do you send your slaves to kill our kinsmen and steal us away?"

"No," Doro said. "My people only buy and sell slaves." And only certain slaves at that if Daly was obeying him. He would know soon.

"Then they send others to prey on us. It is the same thing!"

"What I permit my people to do is my affair," Doro said.

"But they—!"

Doro stopped abruptly, turned to face the young man who was himself forced to come to an awkward stop. "What I permit them to do is my affair, Okoye. That is all."

Perhaps the boy's enslavement had taught him caution. He said nothing. Anyanwu stared at Doro, but she too kept silent.

"What were they saying?" Daly asked.

"They disapprove of your profession," Doro told him.

"Heathen savages," Daly muttered. "They're like animals. They're all cannibals."

"These aren't," Doro said, "though some of their neighbors are."

"All of them," Daly insisted. "Just give them the chance."

Doro smiled. "Well, no doubt the missionaries will reach them eventually and teach them to practice only symbolic cannibalism."

Daly jumped. He considered himself a pious man in spite of his work. "You shouldn't say such things," he whispered. "Not even you are beyond the reach of God."

"Spare me your mythology," Doro said, "and your righteous indignation." Daly had been Doro's man too long to be pampered in such matters. "At least we cannibals are honest about what we do," Doro continued. "We don't pretend as you slavers do to be acting for the benefit of our victims' souls. We don't tell ourselves we've caught them to teach them civilized religion."

Daly's eyes grew round. "But . . . I did not mean you were a . . . a . . . I did not mean . . ."

"Why not?" Doro looked down at him enjoying his confusion. "I assure you, I'm the most efficient cannibal you will ever meet."

Daly said nothing. He wiped his brow and stared seaward. Doro followed his gaze and saw that there was a ship in sight now, lying at anchor in a little cove—Doro's own ship, the
Silver Star
, small and hardy and more able than any of his larger vessels to go where it was not legally welcome and take on slave cargo the Royal African Company had reserved for itself. Doro could see some of his men a short distance away loading yams onto a longboat. He would be on his way home soon.

Doro invited Daly out to the ship. There, he first settled Anyanwu and her grandson in his own cabin. Then he ate and drank with Daly and questioned the slaver about the seed village.

"Not a coastal people," Doro said. "An inland tribe from the grasslands beyond the forests. I showed you a few of them years ago when we met."

"These blacks are all alike," Daly said. "It's hard to tell." He took a swallow of brandy.

Doro reached across the small table and grasped Daly's wrist just above the man's sole remaining hand. "If you can't do better than that," he said, "you're no good to me."

Daly froze, terrified, arresting a sudden effort to jerk his hand away. He sat still, perhaps remembering how his men had died years before whether Doro touched them or not. "It was a joke," he whispered hoarsely.

Doro said nothing, only looked at him.

"Your people have Arab blood," Daly said quickly. "I remember their looks and the words of their language that you taught me and their vile tempers. Not an easy people to enslave and keep alive. None like them have gone through my hands without being tested."

"Speak the words I taught you."

Daly spoke them—words in the seed people's own language asking them whether they were followers of Doro, whether they were "Doro's seed"—and Doro released Daly's wrist. The slaver had said the words perfectly and none of Doro's seed villagers had failed to respond. They were, as Daly had said, difficult people—bad-tempered, more suspicious than most of strangers, more willing than most to murder each other or attack their far-flung neighbors, more willing to satisfy their customs and their meat-hunger with human flesh. Doro had isolated them on their sparsely populated savanna for just that reason. Had they been any closer to the larger, stronger tribes around them, they would have been wiped out as a nuisance.

They were also a highly intuitive people who involuntarily saw into each other's thoughts and fought with each other over evil intentions rather than evil deeds. This without ever realizing that they were doing anything unusual. Doro had been their god since he had assembled them generations before and commanded them to marry only each other and the strangers he brought to them. They had obeyed him, throwing away clearly defective children born of their inbreeding, and strengthening the gifts that made them so valuable to him. If those same gifts made them abnormally quick to anger, vicious, and savagely intolerant of people unlike themselves, it did not matter. Doro had been very pleased with them, and they had long ago accepted the idea that pleasing him was the most important thing they could do.

"Your people are surely dead if they have been taken," Daly said. "The few that you brought here with you years ago made enemies wherever they went."

Doro had brought five of the villagers out to cross-breed them with certain others he had collected. They had insulted everyone with their arrogance and hostility, but they had also bred as Doro commanded them and gotten fine children—children with even greater, more controllable sensitivity.

"Some of them are alive," Doro said. "I can feel their lives drawing me when I think of them. I'm going to have to track as many of them as I can before someone does kill them though."

"I'm sorry," Daly said. "I wish they had been brought to me. As bad as they are, I would have held them for you."

Doro nodded, sighed. "Yes, I know you would have."

And the last of the slaver's tension melted away. He knew Doro did not blame him for the seed people's demise, knew he would not be punished. "What is the little Igbo you have brought aboard?" he asked curiously. There was room for curiosity now.

"Wild seed," Doro said. "Carrier of a bloodline I believed was lost—and, I think, of another that I did not know existed. I have some exploring to do in her homeland once she is safely away."

"She! But . . . that black is a man."

"Sometimes. But she was born a woman. She is a woman most of the time."

Daly shook his head, unbelieving. "The monstrosities you collect! I suppose now you will breed creatures who don't know whether to piss standing or squatting."

"They will know—if I can breed them. They will know, but it won't matter."

"Such things should be burned. They are against God!"

Doro laughed and said nothing. He knew as well as Daly how the slaver longed to be one of Doro's monstrosities. Daly was still alive because of that desire. Ten years before, he had confronted what he considered to be just another black savage leading five other less black but equally savage-looking men. All six men appeared to be young, healthy—fine potential slaves. Daly had sent his own black employees to capture them. He had lost thirteen men that day. He had seen them swept down as grain before a scythe. Then, terrified, confronted by Doro in the body of the last man killed, he had drawn his own sword. The move cost him his right hand. He never understood why it had not cost him his life. He did not know of Doro's habit of leaving properly disciplined men of authority scattered around the world ready to serve whenever Doro needed them. All Daly understood was that he had been spared—that Doro had cauterized his wound and cared for him until he recovered.

And by the time he recovered, he had realized that he was no longer a free man—that Doro was capable of taking the life he had spared at any time. Daly was able to accept this as others had accepted it before him. "Let me work for you," he had said. "Take me aboard one of your ships or even back to your homeland. I'm still strong. Even with one hand, I can work. I can handle blacks."

"I want you here," Doro had told him. "I've made arrangements with some of the local kings while you were recovering. They'll trade with you exclusively from now on.

Daly had stared at him in amazement. "Why would you do such a thing for me?"

"So that you can do a few things for me," Doro had answered.

And Daly had been back in business. Doro sent him black traders who sold him slaves and his company sent him white traders who bought them. "Someone else would set up a factory here if you left," Doro told him. "I can't stop the trade even where it might touch my people, but I can control it." So much for his control. Neither his support of Daly nor his spies left along the coast—people who should have reported to Daly—had been enough. Now they were useless. If they had been special stock, people with unusual abilities, Doro would have resettled them in America, where they could be useful. But they were only ordinary people bought by wealth or fear or belief that Doro was a god. He would forget them. He might forget Daly also once he had returned to Anyanwu's homeland and sought out as many of her descendants as he could find. At the moment, though, Daly could still be useful—and he could still be trusted; Doro knew that now. Perhaps the seed people had been taken to Bonny or New Calabar or some other slave port, but they had not passed near Daly. The most talented and deceptive of Doro's own children could not have lied to him successfully while he was on guard. Also, Daly had discovered he enjoyed being an arm of Doro's power.