Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Read Online Free Page A

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 cannot 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?”
    “Men. Seven of them came to kill me.”
    “What did you do, Anyanwu?”
    She seemed to shrink into herself at the memory. “I killed them,” she whispered. “To warn others and because … because I was angry.”
    Doro sat