Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) by Octavia E. Butler

they would swallow her. Either way, she would find peace. Her loneliness hurt her like some sickness of the body, some pain that her special ability could not find and heal. The sea …
    Hands grasped her, pulled her backward and down onto the deck. Hands kept her from the sea.
    “Anyanwu!”
    The yellow hair loomed above her. The white skin. What right had he to lay hands on her?
    “Stop, Anyanwu!” he shouted.
    She understood the English word “stop,” but she ignored it. She brushed him aside and went back to the rail.
    “Anyanwu!”
    A new voice. New hands.
    “Anyanwu, you are not alone here.”
    Perhaps no other words could have stopped her. Perhaps no other voice could have driven away her need to end the terrible solitude so quickly. Perhaps only her own language could have overwhelmed the call of the distant shore.
    “Doro?”
    She found herself in his arms, held fast. She realized that she had been on the verge of breaking those arms, if necessary, to get free, and she was appalled.
    “Doro, something happened to me.”
    “I know.”
    Her fury was spent. She looked around dazedly. The yellow hair—what had happened to him? “Isaac?” she said fearfully. Had she thrown the young man into the sea?
    There was a burst of foreign speech behind her, frightened and defensive in tone. Isaac. She turned and saw him alive and dry and was too relieved to wonder at his tone. He and Doro exchanged words in their English, then Doro spoke to her.
    “He did not hurt you, Anyanwu?”
    “No.” She looked at the young man who was holding a red place on his right arm. “I think I have hurt him.” She turned away in shame, appealed to Doro. “He helped me. I would not have hurt him, but … some spirit possessed me.”
    “Shall I apologize for you?” Doro seemed amused.
    “Yes.” She went over to Isaac, said his name softly, touched the injured arm. Not for the first time, she wished she could mute the pain of others as easily as she could mute her own. She heard Doro speak for her, saw the anger leave the young man’s face. He smiled at her, showing bad teeth, but good humor. Apparently he forgave her.
    “He says you are as strong as a man,” Doro told her.
    She smiled. “I can be as strong as many men, but he need not know that.”
    “He can know,” Doro said. “He has strengths of his own. He is my son.”
    “Your …”
    “The son of an American body.” Doro smiled as though he had made a joke. “A mixed body, white and black and Indian. Indians are a brown people.”
    “But he is white.”
    “His mother was white. German and yellow-haired. He is more her son than mine—in appearance, at least.”
    Anyanwu shook her head, looking longingly at the distant coast.
    “There is nothing for you to fear,” Doro said softly. “You are not alone. Your children’s children are here. I am here.”
    “How can you know what I feel?”
    “I would have to be blind not to know, not to see.”
    “But …”
    “Do you think you are the first woman I have taken from her people? I have been watching you since we left your village, knowing that this time would come for you. Our kind have a special need to be with either our kinsmen or others who are like us.”
    “You are not like me!”
    He said nothing. He had answered this once, she remembered. Apparently, he did not intend to answer it again.
    She looked at him—at the tall young body, well made and handsome. “Will I see, someday, what you are like when you are not hiding in another man’s skin?”
    For an instant, it seemed that a leopard looked at her through his eyes. A thing looked at her, and that thing feral and cold—a spirit thing that spoke softly.
    “Pray to your gods that you never do, Anyanwu. Let me be a man. Be content with me as a man.” He put his hand out to touch her and it amazed her that she did not flinch away, that she trembled, but stood where she was.
    He drew her to him and to her surprise, she found comfort in his arms. The