Gosh, Teo is a good pilot. And now everybody knows it. He loved trying out those aerobatics. Momma is holding him back. I bet he is a better navigator than he thinks he is too.
I am scared he is going to end up shot out of the sky by an Italian fighter plane before the next Timkat.
‘Momma doesn’t know I have Mrs Sinclair’s gun,’ I told Teo as we walked back alone through the dim streets to Mateos’s house. It was nearly sunset when Cooper dropped us back at the Hôtel de France. That is the closest you can get to Mateos’s house in a car. In most of Addis Ababa you can’t even drive.
‘I figured she didn’t,’ he said. ‘I’m worried she’s going to beat us home. What’s our story for her going to – Oh!’
The gasp came out of Teo like an eruption and I gasped too as a heavy arm clamped down across my shoulder. A man had come up behind us and now held us both fast, one on either side of him.
‘Hush, Teodros – Emilia,’ he said gently.
It was Mateos, of course, but he scared the pants off us. He is unbelievably quiet. Even by Teo’s high standards of invisibility, Mateos is hard to beat.
‘Hush,’ he said again, like he was telling us a secret, so we shut up.
He steered us. He turned us sharply to the right, and zigzagged down pathways even I didn’t know were there. He got me lost in thirty seconds. I was mad.
‘Mateos! What –’
Then he was wrapping Teo’s shamma around my shoulders and up over my head like a veil. I hadn’t even noticed when he made Teo take it off. Mateos hissed in my ear, more urgently this time, ‘It’s all right, just be quiet.’
He’d followed us from the steps of the hotel where Billy Cooper had dropped us off. I had no idea Mateos could be so secretive. Teo was behaving himself, so I did too.
We passed a house full of barking dogs – more barking dogs than should have been in a strange house. There wasn’t any other sound or any light. Mateos hurried us past, absolutely calm, absolutely silent. And fast.
For half an hour we wove through streets where we’d never been before, one of us under each of Mateos’s arms. It made you feel safe and completely at sea all at once. And then we were turning the corner around the stick fence into the little garden of his house, with the white goat like a ghost nestling under the dark curtain of the flowering banana trees. There was a yellow flickering light waiting for us and Momma drinking coffee, without a ceremony like the ignorant American that she is, by boiling up leftovers on the brazier.
She’d heated supper for us too.
‘I flew a Beechcraft Staggerwing today,’ Teo announced, taking off into the wind which is usually the safest thing to do.
Momma looked up at us, but in the light of the brazier and the one lamp you couldn’t see into her eyes. I think we were both a little scared of her reaction.
And she nodded. She gave Teo the Nod, the Delia Nod. All right. Ready to go.
She turned to Mateos. ‘They OK?’
‘Your truants are fine.’ His bright smile came and went and then he was serious again.
‘Kids, you can’t wander around Addis Ababa on your own,’ Momma said quietly. ‘I didn’t really think you needed telling.’
She wasn’t angry. She was just still and serious, as though the cloud of silence that surrounded Mateos was contagious and she’d caught it.
‘Momma, we wander everywhere on our own,’ I pointed out.
‘Not at night in Addis Ababa! Anyway, now the Italians are evacuating their legation,’ Momma said. ‘You hear me? The Italians are leaving the city. That’s so they don’t get attacked by Ethiopian soldiers. Everything’s a mess. You two are ferenji. And Emmy, you are an Italian flyer’s daughter, and anyway you stand out like a sore thumb. Use your heads!’
‘You have to assume the streets are safe for no one at the moment,’ Mateos put in calmly. ‘Ferenji more than habashat, foreigner more than Ethiopian; and I have been ordered by Ras Assefa to give you his protection.’
‘Protection?’ I said bitterly. ‘Ras Assefa is Ras Amde Worku’s brother.’
‘Protection and guard.’
‘Don’t,’ Momma warned wearily. ‘Just stop.’
‘Are we important or just valuable?’
‘Emilia, stop it!’
‘Both,’ said Mateos.
So he did know.
The Big Rains have come to Tazma Meda.
There are different ways of being a prisoner. I’ve been thinking about it since that Glassland episode where I had to rescue Black Dove from the Fortress of Clarity. All these invisible prisons. Us being stuck here because of the rain – Momma says it’s the wettest rainy season she has ever seen since she came here. About an inch a day falls, according to the rain gauge by the Romeo’s shed, and there have been rockslides mile after mile on the Gondar road and another on the track up to Tazma Meda, so no one can get in or out. So that is one kind of prison.
But I also feel imprisoned by things like having to wear Fiona Sinclair’s hand-me-down girly dresses. I bet Bea Sinclair feels like she’s in prison in an English boarding school without her gun, having to wear shoes all the time. Baby Erknesh tied on Sinidu’s back stares longingly at Teo’s die-cast Spirit of St Louis hanging out of reach from the clinic ceiling. Me in the pilot’s cockpit of the Romeo. When I climb out of that plane after I’ve landed, it always feels like I just made a jail break.
Not that anyone has been flying the Romeo since the Big Rains started. And Habte Sadek is a prisoner too. Incredible to think that he has been sitting in that same shady cave and on the same narrow ledge in sun and rain for nearly seventy years. And he is still sitting there, but now it feels like he’s a prisoner and it didn’t used to.
Habte Sadek fell and broke his collarbone just after the rains started, and Ezra thinks he also cracked something in his pelvis, but of course no one can tell what’s wrong inside him. The big slab of rock in front of the door was wet and slippery and he missed his footing coming out of the St Kristos Samra chapel and just fell down the step. Now he can’t lift his arms over his head and is obviously in a lot of pain when he tries to walk. But the worst thing is that he’s got these scrapes on his legs that won’t heal.
Ezra said to Momma: ‘Rhoda, I love you and I love your children, but you are raising Teodros to be the most idle young man in the nation. You can love and pamper children without making them lazy! I want Teodros to go up to the hermitage and change the dressing on the old priest’s wounds morning and evening. I can’t trust the deacons to do it well, and your boy is not doing anything else worthwhile.’
This is unfair to Teo, who attacks projects he cares about with the power of a steam roller and who is never idle inside his head even when he’s asleep. But Ezra does not think much of filling empty school notebooks with comics and made-up stories, or sitting in the rain on Beehive Hill watching birds for a whole morning and then spending the whole afternoon sketching different wing shapes. Teo and I have also been helping Momma with the Romeo’s annual beauty treatment, which involves an unbelievable amount of fiddly knot-tying where the canvas needs replacing. Though Momma complains Teo is too artistic with his bows and she has to check everything twice because he’s careless and leaves them out here and there. We are repainting the plane too, ochre, which is all there is, the most boring colour in the world. And Teo has his usual rainy season writing project, which is to keep going on his translation of the Romeo’s dang maintenance manual with the help of an outdated English-Italian dictionary that does not include any aviation terms.
I’m not accused of being lazy because I’ve been helping Sinidu and Hana take turns with the sewing machine to stick gigantic red crosses on to canvas to make tents in case we have to become a field hospital. But nothing Teo does counts as work.
‘It will spare the rest of us for other tasks,’ Ezra continued, ‘and Habte Sadek likes Teodros.’
That has a lot to do with it – us being Sinidu’s special friends. Habte Sadek would not let just any old
foreigner mop up his legs. I’m not allowed to do it anyway because I am a girl and Habte Sadek is a priest, and getting your oozing wounds mopped is kind of a private thing for anybody.
So we’ve been going up there twice a day so Teo can scrape off the gunk and dab iodine on. It is awful seeing Habte Sadek becoming so frail. He has always been so fierce and proud and strong. His wounds haven’t got any bigger, but they don’t get smaller either. They are just there, festering, making everyone miserable. They have been there for six weeks. Maybe when the rains end they’ll get better.
We go up in the early morning, when it is misty but not raining, and again just before sunset. You can’t see more than a hundred feet down the mountain because it looks like everything is draped with one of Delia’s grey silk scarves. The mist gets in your hair and even clings to the little hairs on your arms and legs, until you feel like a sponge – not dripping wet, just saturated. Every now and then the Big Rains remind me of spring in New Marlow, Pennsylvania. It smells like spring in New Marlow, PA.
After Teo has finished playing doctor, I make coffee, because of course that is something only a girl can do, and it’s a good way to make peace. I do this almost every morning. The first couple of times nobody drank any. Habte Sadek tried, out of politeness, but the doctoring made him so whacked he could hardly sit up and Teo absolutely didn’t eat anything for about three days in the beginning and I don’t blame him. Now they are both used to the awfulness of the cleaning routine and they look forward to coffee and popcorn afterward.
One of my jobs is trying to get Teo to learn to read Momma’s maps, and that is one of the things Habte Sadek is in fact very good at. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Habte Sadek is passionate about Momma’s maps, now that he knows they exist.
‘Had I this knowledge all those years ago –’ he says with anger in his voice, then stops and laughs. ‘But no matter, it would have made us faster perhaps, but no more determined. You are lucky to live in this age of shared knowledge! Look – here is the way we came from Magdala,’ he tells us. ‘And here, the way through the mountains. And here is why no one followed us –’
One time Teo complained, ‘I can’t picture it. That’s my problem with maps. I don’t understand why a painting makes sense to me and a map doesn’t!’
‘Think of it in a different way,’ Habte Sadek told him. ‘Here is how we made a map, when we were travelling from Magdala so many years ago. You see these lines on the page? You can build this shape with your hands.’
Sitting on the stone step in front of the carved cave chapel, Habte Sadek scooped together a pile of damp earth and modelled it into a miniature Beehive Hill. His hands are bony and dark and still strong – they don’t shake at all.
‘If you do it enough with your hands, you’ll learn to see it in your head,’ he suggested. ‘Look! I’ll make a map with my hands and you put it on paper. That will help. There is always another way of making a map.’
We talk about what we hear on the radio. One of our patriotic chores is to carry the accumulator for the clinic radio up to Beehive Hill Farm so we can charge it by hooking it up to the battery in Momma’s plane or the Sinclairs’ generator, since there is no other electricity in Tazma Meda. It’s not like last year, when there was nothing to listen to. Now Haile Selassie talks to us on the radio almost every day. We hear about Mussolini telling his Fascist Black Shirts that he will conquer Abyssinia totally – not even pretending to introduce colonial reforms any more. Partly he wants to show off how strong he is to the rest of Europe. Partly he says it is the ‘new frontier’ for Italy, like the Wild West, ‘a place in the sun’ for Italian pioneers to move in and take over the abundant farmland. It will bring the Italians jobs and prosperity. He does not mention what will happen to the farmers who live here already.
Then we get more polite and pointless wrangling in the League of Nations. Tekle Hawariat, who is Ethiopia’s League of Nations delegate, says that all we want is to be able to defend ourselves, and then the Americans make themselves a law that means they have to stay neutral on anything to do with international conflict. So they won’t sell us any weapons. But they’ll still sell fuel to anyone who wants it, i.e. the Italian army. Everybody in Addis Ababa is buying guns like they are some kind of all-the-rage, popular modern convenience.
This morning Habte Sadek said to Teo, ‘When the rains end, and the emperor announces his call to arms, I will find myself cleaning my own wounds.’
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I told him firmly.
‘Teodros is old enough to carry a spear, and I have seen to it that he knows how to.’
Teodros is not going to walk off to war carrying a spear. That just will not happen. But there is that ‘requested act of recompense’ hanging over our heads. So Habte Sadek is probably right. Sometime, soon, Teo will not be here to clean his wounds.
I wish everything would go back to the way it was two years ago.
Habte Sadek can hobble about now, but he can’t reach down to his feet. The rains are going to end in less than two weeks. It’s already the new year, 1928. The Ethiopian new year, I mean. It is September 1935 in the United States.
Teo swallowed. ‘Ezra will show Yosef how to change the bandages.’
‘Yosef and the other young deacons will go off to war along with you. I would go again myself if I could walk.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t do that,’ Teo exclaimed. ‘You are a man of peace! You’ve dedicated this chapel to Kristos Samra! Who would guard the treasures you rescued from Magdala if you left?’
The old priest grinned. ‘All is safe here. Why did we bring it to this place of all places, if not to keep it safe? My brothers and I saw to that when we first arrived. There will always be peace and safety here.’
She flew to hell to make peace between God and Satan. That’s what Habte Sadek told us about St Kristos Samra when we first met him, when he told us how he renamed the hermitage when he first came here. I picture St Kristos Samra as a sort of cross between Sinidu and my own made-up White Raven. It makes more sense to me as a story than as religion. None of those Friends’ meetings with Grandfather ever made me realise the beautiful adventures connected with God. Flying to hell! Rescuing treasure from an invading army! Now I want St Kristos Samra to fly back here and get to work on a new peace negotiation between Haile Selassie and Benito Mussolini. Nobody else is going to do it.
Episode from THE LAND OF GLASS
They had not reached cover when the rain began.
At first it felt like fine, cool mist. The glass drops were so tiny you could not see them, but the sun was still shining at the edge of the storm, and the glass mist made the air glitter with a million rainbows. It was too dazzling to be beautiful. Black Dove hid his face in his arm and White Raven pulled him forward, using the homing skills she had learned as a child growing up on Wildmare Island.
Then the sun was hidden by clouds and the rain started falling harder. Now it felt like hail, stinging their arms and faces.
‘Let’s stop!’ Black Dove murmured indistinctly, trying not to open his mouth. ‘We need to build a shelter!’
‘Our tent will be buried when this starts to pile up,’ White Raven panted. ‘We’ll be crushed! Come on, there’s a cliff ahead – I can feel the mountain wind and I can smell a spring. We can find a cave. We’ll be safer in a cave, and we need water.’
The smooth glass plain beneath their feet was worse than a frozen sheet of ice. Its clear surface was slippery and tricked them, growing more treacherous as the hard rain fell. White Raven felt a sharp pain as something pierced the skin at the edge of her forehead. She gasped, and Black Dove said urgently, ‘How far? The raindrops are breaking up.’
He didn’t mean the rain was stopping. It was much more frightening than that. The smooth glass raindrops were falling with such tempestuous fury now that they were smashing each other. Instead of heavy, round, crystal pearls, the sparkling rain was falling as deadly, sharp-edged, jagged chips of broken g
lass. That was what had cut White Raven’s face.
She didn’t try to talk any more. She linked arms with Black Dove and they slid and fought their way through the fearsome rain until they reached the tall green glass shelter of the Emerald Cliffs.
They collapsed, torn and bleeding, inside the mouth of a shallow cave and huddled against the back wall with their faces buried in each other’s shoulders, not daring to raise their heads until the crashing, clattering clamour of the glass storm died away.
Flight Log Entry
Date: Oct. 11, ’35 (Meskerem 30, 1928)
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I-STLA
Airfield: Tazma Meda/Takazze Valley/Aksum
Duration of Flight: 3 hrs 35 min total
Character of Flight: Transport
Pilot: Momma
2nd Pilot or Pilot Under Training: Teo
Remarks:
I don’t know why I’m writing this. Teo should do it himself. He probably is doing it himself, in his own flight log, wherever he is. He’ll be writing exactly the same thing, and that makes us close. We’re doing it together. Now we are big enough that nobody can actually tie us down, we get tied down in different ways. And this is one.
The whole village was glued to the radio in the Tazma Meda clinic all last month. I’m sure we know more about what is going on than most of the rest of the country. And everyone is going to fight – married men are supposed to take their wives to cook for them. (Not that Ezra would ever go anywhere without Sinidu anyway.) ‘All boys old enough to carry a spear’ are supposed to go. If you don’t fight: ‘Anyone found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged.’
Tons of people have left to go to Addis Ababa and join the emperor’s army. Ezra has not, because he is officially working for the Ethiopian Red Cross now. When the time comes he will go wherever the soldiers go, and Sinidu and their baby will go wherever Ezra goes, and I guess we will too. Colonel Sinclair is not back yet, so Ezra has been trying to rally everybody else – mainly unmarried girls younger than me, like Hana and the rest of the crowd of Tazma Meda kids we sometimes run around with – to shoulder the coffee harvest. But who cares about the coffee? Who is going to buy Ethiopian coffee now? The Italians?
Black Dove, White Raven Page 20
