Wild Seed

Doro, upon discovering one of his villages has been decimated by slavers, discovers a pull within his supernatural sense and follows it west. After miles of travel, he discovers Anyanwu, who appears as an old woman tending her garden. Her senses are extraordinarily sharp, and she very quickly senses that she is being “stalked” by a strange man. She is surprised when he steps out into the open upon discovery and introduces himself.

They reveal themselves to each other. Anyanwu is over 300 years old and can change her form to any animal, human or otherwise. She is strong enough to crush stones with her bare hands. She is also a healer, able to produce both toxins and cures within her body. Doro is far older and reluctant to show his true power, at first: “I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is to kill a man and wear his body like a cloth,” he says (13). Though he values Anyanwu for her power, Doro secretly fears that he will have to kill her if she threatens him, which he may do by executing his power with a mere thought.

Anyanwu slowly realizes that she is trapped by Doro’s power, his ability to kill her and her kinsman. Doro requests that she go with him; his purpose, only half-revealed, is to incorporate her within his “village” system, an extensive breeding program meant to engender more superhumans. “You should leave so that finally you can be with your own kind,” says Doro (17). Though she understands the danger Doro represents, his argument appeals to her. She has long lived in a fraught relationship with her mortal kinsman. She chooses to believe that Doro’s “request” is a marriage proposal, and Doro chooses to let her believe it. She takes the form most natural to her, that of a young woman. That evening, they make love.

Doro and Anyanwu leave the next morning. Anyanwu takes the form of a man known to her kinsmen the better to pass from town to town on the way east. Doro discovers that the villages Anyanwu has touched by her presence have all thrived in trade and good health.

They make slow travel through the countryside. Doro receives a wound that becomes infected and considers killing in order to “trade” for a new body but is astonished to find that Anyanwu is able to identify the bacteria causing the infection, and to expel them with an antidote created in her saliva. Their strange bond increases, with Doro understanding with greater clarity the value of Anyanwu’s ability, and Anyanwu understanding her dependence on Doro the further they travel from her ancestral home. She often considers escape.

The two soon enter a riverside village whose indigenous leaders are known to Doro as slavers, a practice that both Doro and Anyanwu treat as an unfortunate but familiar fact of inter-African life. Doro has long had business transactions with the village leader, but discovers that with the leader’s recent death, his intractable son is now in charge. Doro finds it necessary to use his ability, instantly killing and wearing the form of a young child to terrify the new leader. He finally kills the leader himself to wear his form. Anyanwu is terrified by Doro’s show of power. “I wanted to leave a man here who had authority and who knew me, but this man would not learn,” says Doro, regretfully (37).

They take a canoe and leave the village. Soon they reach an “evil place,” in Anyanwu’s reckoning. It is a coastal market where slaves are processed and branded by an Englishman named Bernard Daly. They are then sent off on slave ships toward the New World. Daly recognizes the slaver’s body, but also recognizes the presence of Doro when he speaks through the slaver’s mouth. Daly, a white man, has a sensible understanding of Doro’s power, having once lost several men to it himself. Though Daly’s attitudes are virulently racist, he is pliant to Doro’s will. Doro asks after the people of his abandoned village, describing them as psychically gifted, but “abnormally quick to anger, vicious, and intolerant of people unlike themselves” (49). Daly says he has not seen Doro’s people.

Anyanwu recognizes one of her own kinsmen, Okoye, and pleads for Doro to have him freed. This happens quickly. Okoye is slower to recognize Doro’s power and upbraids him for his role in the slave trade, but soon backs off.