Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,67

one of the other slaves told her. Well, I suppose it would be surprising if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. For her sake, I’m glad she miscarried.

And Dan had somehow found her, rescued her, and brought her home in spite of pursuers chasing him right down into our valley. How had one 15-year-old done so very much?

And in the end, what would it cost him? In the end, did that matter?

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2033

“This is no way to live,” Bankole said to me when he came in from tending Dan and Nina this morning. He sat at the table and put his head down on his arms.

I had taken his watch, as I promised, to free him to do what he could for Dan and Nina. Allie and May were helping him, since they have all but joined the Noyer family by taking care of Kassia and Mercy for so long.

Bankole had spent most of his time with his two patients, and had once again found himself fighting for Dan’s life. The boy stopped breathing twice, and Bankole revived him. But at last, the young body, once strong and healthy, just gave up. It had taken an incredible amount of abuse over the past few months.

“His heart just quit,” Bankole said. “If I had more modern equipment, maybe… Goddamnit, Olamina, can you see now why I need to get out of here and get you out of here?”

“He’s really dead?” I whispered, not believing it—not wanting to believe it.

“He’s dead. It’s obscene! A young boy like that.”

“What about his sister?”

“She wasn’t as badly beaten as he was. I believe she’ll be all right.”

Would she, after all that had happened? I doubted it. Bankole and I sat silent for a while, each of us thinking our own thoughts. What would it have meant to Dan that he had saved his sister, even though he had not been able to save himself? Did he ever imagine such a thing? Would it somehow have been all right? Enough?

“Where’s the other sister—Paula?” I asked. “What happened to her?”

Bankole sighed. “Dead. Some trouble on the road up north around Trinidad. Three men tried to steal her. They got caught. Her owners and the thieves shot it out, and she was in the middle. Nina says her owners just cursed her for getting in the way and getting killed. They left her body lying among the rocks by the sea. Nina said Paula loved the sea when the family saw it for the first time last year. She said she hoped the tide came in and carried her away.”

I shook my head. Bankole got up and went to lie on the bed.

“But Dan did it,” I said more to myself than to him. “He found his sister, and he brought her home. It was impossible, but he did it!”

“Shit,” Bankole said, and turned his face to the wall.

Now the long day is over.

We’ve cleaned up the hillside battlefield and thrown ground pepper over parts of it so that any smell of blood that still clings to it wouldn’t hold the attention of wild dogs.

We’ve collected the dead, searched their bodies, then after dark, surrounded them with scrap wood, soaked them in lamp oil, and burned them. We do a thorough job, and the smoke is less noticeable at night—less of a lure to scavengers and to the curious.

I hate doing this—burning the dead. Of course, whether they’re our dead or someone else’s, it has to be done, but I hate it. We burned Dan separate from his attackers. I set his pyre alight myself. Allie chose the verse and spoke it. We’ll have a full service for Dan when Nina is well enough to attend. For now, though, I think Allie made a good choice.

“As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God

Is Infinite Potential.

God

Is Change.”

The other dead—the intruders—were four men and a woman, all in their twenties or early thirties. They were dirty and scratched up, but well-dressed, well-armed, well-heeled. They had plenty of Canadian money in their pockets. Were they slavers? Drug dealers? Thieves? Rich kids slumming? Even Nina wasn’t sure. She and Dan had escaped from their original captors and had been on the highway, headed for Acorn when this new group spotted them and came after them.

The intruders weren’t carrying identification or even a change of clothing. That means they had homes or a base of some kind nearby. We thought about that and decided to burn their clothing