It wasn’t anything like being on a horse, whatever Momma made it look like.
She glanced back at me and gave me a thumbs up. I thought of the four hundred times I’d made White Raven do exactly the same thing.
If I’d known why Momma thought it was so important for us to swap seats in mid-air I’d have tried to do it faster. But I was so darn scared that the only thing that made me move was knowing that if I didn’t, and Teo crashed, it would be all my fault.
I got my legs out and began to crawl backwards.
It is nothing like a horse.
This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I did it with my eyes closed. I couldn’t see where I was going anyway. I kept my head tucked in, like Momma did, trying not to catch the wind full in my face. It felt like it took forever because I was so worried about running into the windshield of the rear cockpit and getting knocked off balance. I felt for it with my feet, kicking behind me – I couldn’t believe it was so far away! But it wasn’t as high as I thought it would be, and I got to the windshield in such a mess of gratitude and relief that I just kind of poured myself over it and into the third cockpit.
I sat on the binoculars. Momma had left them there for me on her seat. That meant she wanted me to be the lookout.
Doing the thing you are scared of is much harder than not being afraid of anything. It is easy to be brave. It is not so easy to be scared and do a brave thing anyway.
I opened my eyes. I could see the back of Momma’s head safely in front of me – she’d climbed into her seat while I was climbing into mine. She beat me to it and she’d already taken over the controls from Teo. She was flying while I was still strapping myself in.
I started to scan the sky outside the plane. I spotted the Italian bombers. They were a lot farther away than they had been before we’d turned away from the wind and speeded up. They were still on their way south, and I made a little mental calculation about which direction we were going and what we needed to do to get back on track for Aksum. Of course I’d left my map and china pencil in the middle cockpit, but I had the stub of another one in my blouse pocket like a good little aviatrix, and Momma had left her own notebook shoved down the side of the seat. I grabbed it and let it fall open across my knees to a blank page.
I wrote down what I thought our heading was. There is a compass on the dashboard of the middle cockpit, but not in the back. Luckily the one Papà Menotti gave me was in my skirt pocket. I struggled around in my seat to get it out, and when I found it I looked out at the sky again, and that’s when I saw the two Italian planes that were racing after us.
They were as high as us and smaller than the big triple-engined Caproni bombers which were disappearing in the distance. Momma must have seen those fast little planes as soon as they started chasing us – the time it took for us to swap seats.
The last time we’d met a plane in the sky – less than a year ago – it had also been an Italian plane, and we’d waved our wings at each other. Selam! Everybody friendly and the pilot, it turned out, was my own father. So I didn’t expect there was anything different going on now, until the Regia Aeronautica planes started firing their machine guns.
They were Fiats – Italian fighter planes – and faster than us. They should have recognised our plane as Italian too, but we had just finished giving it a fresh coat of paint and the ‘I-STLA’ is painted over and hard to read. The plane looks like it is in disguise, and Romeos are built to the same design as Fokkers, which are Dutch. We could have been anybody. Those Fiat pilots thought we were their enemy. Scouting or taking pictures or something. Not that we’d ever do that, right?
‘Hang on –’ Momma gasped, and lowered the nose. We dived so fast my stomach seemed to leap into my brain. It was worse than Billy Cooper’s aerobatics.
The two Italian planes came diving after us. They kept firing, and you could feel the sound. It rattled in your blood. But we kept on flying smoothly and I only knew we’d been hit when I saw the edge of the upper wing burst into flower in three places as the bullets and wind tore through the canvas above Momma’s head.
The fuel tanks are hidden in the upper wing.
I stared at the bullet holes, trying to see if anything was leaking, trying not to think about what would happen if the fuel tanks caught fire in the air.
‘Keep your heads down!’ Momma screamed.
But I wanted to see what was going on. She knows me so well that she checked over her shoulder.
‘Em, you’re a target. GET DOWN!’
Then I realised what she meant. I was all alone in the back with my head sticking up. The rear cockpit is the only one not under the wings.
I ducked down.
My windshield shattered.
I was still clutching my pencil in one hand and my compass in the other, and Momma’s notebook was lying open on my lap, wedged against my stomach. Now the pages were covered with splintered glass.
Momma swooped lower. It felt like we were falling. She’s never thrown the plane around like that with us in it, not even making us practise emergencies. I thought we’d been hit and we were dead. I turned my head a little and saw a rocky mountainside rising above us, tinged with fresh green, and I was sure we were about to crash into a mountain. But the engine roared into life again and Momma levelled out, tearing through the sky, hugging the side of the mountain.
She was barnstorming – stunt flying. It was what she did best, or nearly what she did best, and the Regia Aeronautica fighter pilots weren’t flying circus veterans and they’d never done any canyon flying in Idaho and they couldn’t keep up with her.
I had to look. I risked losing the top of my head and peeked over the edge of the cockpit. In front of Momma, Teo kept his head down obediently.
The Italian Fiats were overhead now. But they weren’t as close to the steep mountainside as we were.
Momma dived again, following the side of the mountain to the valley floor. We were harder to see against the land than against the sky, with our fresh coat of ochre-coloured paint. Now I am grateful it’s such a boring colour.
I wondered where we were. I pressed my little glass compass into the ball of honeycomb wax that Momma keeps on the dashboard so you can stick things there and not lose them. The compass needle was still spinning – it wouldn’t calm down till we flew straight and level for a while. The fighter pilots were in just as much danger of getting hopelessly lost as we were, maybe more.
‘You up, Em?’ Momma called. ‘Watch them for me. They’ve stopped shooting. They’re faster than us, but they’re not getting closer. They might’ve lost us. Don’t want to go too far off course –’
The Fiats were getting farther away. If I looked through the binoculars I couldn’t see them at all because I couldn’t find them through the narrow tunnel of the distance lenses.
‘Did we turn around?’ I asked. ‘I bet they don’t know where we’re heading!’
‘Can you get us back on track?’ Momma said.
‘You have to give me the map.’
‘Good girl!’ She reached up to the torn canvas of the wing and felt around for leaking fuel, though I don’t know how she’d have felt it in that wind – it evaporates so quickly. But she gave me a thumbs up so I guessed she thought it was safe. Then she handed me her map, rolled up like a scroll so the wind wouldn’t catch it. Her mouth dropped open when she turned and saw the remains of my windshield.
‘Oh, Emmy!’
‘I’m OK.’
I saw the back of Teo’s head come up in front of her. We were all OK. The plane was OK.
‘Hang on –’ I said. ‘I need a minute to figure out the heading –’
I got us back on track. Finding my way in the air is the one thing Momma has taught me how to do that I am really good at.
Teo isn’t though. Even when he needs to be.
I am not going to think about it.
We went the rest of the way to Aksum without seeing another plane in the whole sky, which is, if you ask me, exactly
how it should be.
Aksum is beautiful at the moment. It is always beautiful, but right now the fields all around are like lakes of gold. The Meskal daisies are in bloom, tall yellow asters blanketing the high savannah with sunlight. They grow all around the landing field too, clouds of gold among the grey-green acacia and candelabra trees.
Just as we reached the edge of the gold where the grass of the landing field was scythed short, we passed right over a group of people who ducked and cringed as we purred groundward. I noticed them because they glittered. And nothing glitters here, except water sometimes right after the rains. I thought these people must have new rifles or spear points – why else would they be carrying anything that reflected so much sunlight? Of course they had to be armed. Adwa, which the Italians took last week, is fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles. It’s nothing. Between the planes patrolling the air and the army on the ground, it is a miracle we got to Aksum before the Italians.
The people below us didn’t wave and I spent the whole of the landing run worrying that they were going to try to blow my head off.
It was a typical smooth Teo landing – at least, I think Momma handed over the controls to him for the landing – but the airfield is in a dip in the lea of a broad hillside, and after we were down we couldn’t see the glittering people any more.
‘Switch off!’ Momma yelled.
Teo stopped the engine.
‘Out you get, kids. Bet there’s a reception committee waiting for us.’
Momma paused, perching on the edge of her cockpit, and pulled off her goggles and helmet. She looked exhausted. She glanced up at the torn fabric of the upper wing, and touched the jagged edge of my broken windshield. ‘Careful climbing out, Em.’
Teo saw them first – the people crossing the airfield.
‘There they are,’ he said quietly. He didn’t point.
Maybe we were supposed to turn away. Maybe we weren’t supposed to watch. You’re not supposed to stare at people and it wasn’t Timkat.
But it looked just like a Timkat procession. Coming out of the brush at the end of the airfield, emerging from the savannah grasses like a herd of shy mountain nyala, was the group of people we’d passed over as we were landing. There were definitely soldiers with them, but that wasn’t what made them glitter, and they weren’t the fighting force we were expecting.
Four of them were priests in their full robes, wearing crowns. Another was dressed like a deacon, just a white robe and a shamma, but he looked like he was about a hundred years old. All of these people had boys walking next to them, carrying gold-fringed silk umbrellas to shield them from the sun. There were half a dozen soldiers flanking them, four carrying rifles and the two who led the procession carrying spears. It was the crowned priests who glittered, not the armed soldiers.
In between the soldiers and the priests walked four more monks, carrying a shapeless something shrouded in white canvas. They carried it on a litter on sticks over their shoulders. They walked proud and reverent as if they were carrying the emperor himself across the field.
Watching this parade was like seeing the painting on the walls of the chapel in the cave on Beehive Hill come to life. It was like watching Menelik and his royal attendants marching with the Ark of the Covenant straight out of a church decoration and on to an airfield – straight out of how many thousand years ago and into now.
I glanced at Momma, just one quick peek. She watched them with a perplexed frown. The hair around her face was standing on end.
‘Keep an eye on those fellas,’ she said. ‘Here come folks we know from the other direction.’
She pointed. From across the landing field came another group of men, and this time it was a troop of soldiers.
I looked through the binoculars. Leading the soldiers were Ras Amde Worku and Horatio Augustus. Horatio Augustus was still in his sky-blue air admiral’s gear or whatever he thinks he is. Ras Amde Worku looked like a prince again. He was wearing the smart khaki uniform that makes the Ethiopian officers seem as if they are working for the British army, and a lion’s mane headdress and collar over a silk cape. He was the most splendid person there, even more regal than the priests.
I turned back to see where the priests were headed. They’d been really easy to spot from the air, but you wouldn’t have seen them on the ground unless you’d known they were coming, because they hadn’t taken the road.
If you lined everybody on that airfield up and tried to figure out who was the most important person there, based on their fancy outfits, you would not have guessed it was the barefoot boy dressed in someone else’s hand-me-down shorts.
Typical Black Dove.
‘Why didn’t they all turn up together?’ I wondered aloud.
The priests didn’t come anywhere near the plane. They made their way purposefully around the field, keeping their parade as far away from us as they could get. It was a parade; it was like Timkat – but at the same time, creepily, it wasn’t. There were no bells, no drums, no chanting. There was no noise. It was the same procession, important churchmen carrying something as carefully as they’d carry a tabot. But it was the wrong day of the year for a tabot to be taken out, and there was no festival to go with it, and we were the only ones who saw.
On the far side of the field, where the road was and the ground started to climb steeply, there was a little hut made of stick walls with a corrugated-iron sheet for a roof. It was all new – none of it was there the last time we were here. The shed was like our aircraft shed at Tazma Meda, but a lot smaller. While we watched, Augustus and Amde Worku and their soldiers and the priests all met in front of this little building. Two of the soldiers with rifles stood at the door, and the monks with their strange tabot-shaped cargo and one of the priests went inside. Only the monks came back out. Then everybody except the priest in the hut and the guards at the door came trooping toward us across the airfield.
Teo and I inched closer to each other, making a flimsy rampart in front of the plane. Momma planted herself squarely in front of us. Our protective instincts are pretty ridiculous.
The ancient person in white seemed to be as important as the priests. The soldiers laid down a carpet right there on the airfield next to the plane. Then they set out a chair for the old monk and laid a piece of brocaded silk over the top of that, and he sat down and someone held a parasol over his head with one hand and waved away flies with a horsetail fly swatter with the other. The priests stood next to him under their own parasols. All the soldiers stood silently at attention while this was going on, even Horatio Augustus, who seems to have learned a thing or two about keeping his mouth shut since he’s come north to lead real soldiers carrying real guns and real spears.
Momma stood and watched with one hand holding the blowing hair away from her eyes. She looked absolutely cranky, like a little kid waiting for a grown-up to give her the go-ahead to talk.
Teo bowed.
Teo –
It was the right thing to do. He always does the right thing. Even when he was a little kid with his sweater on backwards or inside out, he’d always know when to shake hands or take his cap off. He does it without thinking. I can’t ever do the right thing without hating people for having to do it. Is that the difference between Momma and Delia too? I can’t remember Delia well enough to know whether she was as good as Teo is at making herself invisible. Maybe that was why she liked France – she could be beautiful and invisible at the same time.
Oh, WHERE IS HE?
I will just keep going as though I were writing a story. The Adventures of Black Dove and White Raven, Episode 432. The Battle of Aksum.
Teo bowed. After a moment so did Momma, so I did too. The seated old man in white didn’t look at us. He just nodded his head, looking bored and somehow oozing disapproval at the same time.
I still wonder if he could have been Habte Sadek’s brother. He was old enough. Maybe he was. It doesn’t matter.
Ras Amde Worku made the next move. He made a beeline for Teo, and c
lasped Teo’s arms and kissed him on both cheeks. Then the old man said something, but it was in Tigrinya, which they speak up north here and in Eritrea, and we couldn’t understand it. He was obviously not greeting us and he was obviously not happy.
He was probably complaining about there being so many girls around.
Amde Worku answered him reassuringly, dragging Teo forward to make a formal introduction. Teo bowed again.
‘What is going on?’ I demanded in a whisper.
‘Shhh!’ Momma hushed me.
I considered what I’d risk by throwing a fit. Or even just by asking a lot of questions. Maybe Horatio Augustus would have jumped in to answer them. But I didn’t know what I was risking. So I shut up.
I’m kind of glad I did, in fact, thinking back.
Ras Amde Worku said to Momma, ‘Only the boy may go.’
‘He can do the flying. But I need to go along as his navigator.’
Is she bluffing? I wondered. And then I realised she couldn’t be bluffing. She is no good at bluffing. She was still panicking about Teo not being able to find his way.
‘He will go without you. He has his own licence,’ Amde Worku said placidly. ‘So Horatio has assured me, and I have seen a copy of the text. Teodros must be the pilot, and the aircraft will only accommodate one passenger and cargo. We can supply fuel –’
Momma argued tensely for a little while with Ras Amde Worku, with the old man in white making comments in Tigrinya every now and then, and Momma looking increasingly worried, and Ras Amde Worku translating everything the old man said with extreme politeness.
Momma stood unyielding, the wind ruffling her wild hair so that it stood up golden brown like the shock on top of an ear of corn. Then she tried to lay down her own terms, which I thought were pretty reasonable under the circumstances. The circumstances being that she was supposed to give them her plane and her kid to go do some errand that they wouldn’t explain to her, leaving her and me stranded three hundred miles from home and not knowing if Teo was ever going to come back for us.
Black Dove, White Raven Page 22
