Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  When I finished drawing my own feet, he reached out and touched the pencil.

  I looked up – straight into his face. He looked away quickly, but closed his fingers around the pencil, tugging at it.

  I gave it to him.

  He leaned over the map and very carefully, studiously, inside my small sketch of Mary of Zion, he drew a tabot. It looked just like the picture of the Ark of the Covenant in the comic-strip paintings on the walls of St Kristos Samra at Beehive Hill.

  Then I realised that if this was the tabot in St Mary of Zion in Aksum, it was the Ark of the Covenant. The real one. Or as good as. As good as. Because that’s what people think it is.

  The boy patted his picture gently with the tip of his finger, like he was telling me I shouldn’t have left it out.

  But also he was showing me that he understood what I was telling him. He knew I was showing him Aksum and its place in the world in a very tiny picture on a piece of paper.

  Then he started drawing again. Inside my little chapel, next to the tabot he’d drawn, he made a little cartoon picture of himself.

  He was copying the figure I’d made of me. He drew the robed figure of a boy staring out of the page, as if we could look at each other on paper, but not in real life. The figure of him was just like the figure of me, except that instead of a flying helmet the little person wore a priest’s crown. And instead of standing next to a plane like he owned it, he was standing next to the Ark of the Covenant.

  When he’d finished, he tapped the end of the pencil against the priest in the picture and then tapped it against his chest. Me, the picture said, in picture language. That’s who I am, he was telling me. Maybe he didn’t speak Amharic. Or maybe he just didn’t dare to say this out loud.

  I looked at the picture and took a long, deep breath.

  This boy was the guardian of the Tabota Seyon, the Ark of Zion.

  I still didn’t know where we were going. And I didn’t know how to ask.

  But the guardian of the tabot was one step ahead of me. I’d given him a way to speak.

  He held the pencil in a funny way, but he knew what to do with it. First he scratched out the picture of the tabot in St Mary’s. Then he drew a new tabot on top of my little plane, right on the nose in the front – like a figurehead on the prow of a boat.

  I sighed in frustration. I knew that’s what I was supposed to do – carry his treasure in my plane – the problem was that I didn’t know where to go.

  But then he began to transform the landscape around the plane. I watched, frowning. He is good. You don’t get that good without practice. He must do a lot of drawing. Maybe he doesn’t have much to do with himself most of the time – pray, burn incense, watch over the nation’s treasure, draw pictures in the dust and on the walls.

  He drew a wavy line underneath the little airplane I’d sketched. Now the plane was sitting on top of a hill. He drew a door with a window beside it, both arched with crosses on top, into the curve of the hill beneath the plane. It looks exactly like the front of the chapel on Beehive Hill.

  Then next to the plane he drew a tree, a quick outline of a crooked, flat-topped acacia. And hanging by a thread from the tree he drew a beehive.

  Below the crest of the hill he drew another tree, with another beehive hanging in it. Then he drew the same thing next to the door of the chapel.

  My map was covered with blue bee trees now.

  Then finally, beneath everything, he drew the patterned cells of a honeycomb. He drew them to fit exactly in the contours of the hillside.

  And for the first time, I understood that Beehive Hill is not named for the beehives hanging in the trees.

  When Habte Sadek and Sinidu talk about ‘the honeycomb’, they don’t mean what’s inside the hives.

  They mean the hill itself.

  Beehive Hill is itself a honeycomb of cells, and golden treasure hides in the hollow hill like honey in a hive.

  The boy put down the china pencil and waited.

  His directions couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d told me in English: Take me home with you.

  Well, maybe he doesn’t know I live there. Maybe he doesn’t know where it is, but just knows what it is – a place of peace and safety and secrecy. But there is no doubt about where he wants me to take him.

  When he first showed me, I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t take it in. I stood shaking my head in bewilderment. How could he know?

  But of course, Habte Sadek’s brother had told the priests at Aksum about Beehive Hill nearly seventy years ago.

  The boy tapped the page with light fingers, then raised his hand and tapped me gently on the chest, just over my heart. He’d told me again, given me a clear message I couldn’t fail to understand: Take me home with you.

  I turned around to look at the cargo he was bringing with him.

  I think it will fit in a cockpit. It can’t be that heavy, but it is an awkward shape. I want to wedge it in the back and strap it down. It sure isn’t going to be stuck on the nose like a figurehead. The plane must still be flyable.

  I’m still staring at the box-shaped object sitting there in the gloom. Now that I think I know what it is, it spooks me a little. How old is it? Older than the skulls of the priests in the cliff walls on Beehive Hill. Older than the crumbling monastery on Debre Damo. Older than the mysterious grave markers in the Aksum Necropolis. Thousands of years older.

  The boy is drawing again.

  Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion.

  None of this is magic at all. None of it is coincidence. I’m here because I am from Tazma Meda. That is where the only church treasures rescued from Magdala ended up. That’s where Habte Sadek, Sinidu’s great-uncle, the soldier deacon from Magdala, grew old. There is an airstrip there and I am the Ethiopian boy who knows how to fly there. I am the legal property of the richest man in the district and I’ve been given a pilot’s licence so I can take my nation’s holiest object to the perfect hiding place. It is not destiny, but it has all been planned. It’s like the tabot itself: it doesn’t matter whether any of this is true or not, destiny or not. Maybe it isn’t the real tabot. Maybe it’s a decoy. What matters is what people believe.

  I am still scared – scared of being in charge of the plane, scared of the priest and the Ark of the Covenant or whatever it is – and I still have to fly back to Tazma Meda on my own. But at least I know where I’m going now.

  I have landed again on Delia’s Dream. It is almost halfway between Aksum and Tazma Meda. I knew it was going to get dark before I made it home, and I didn’t want to waste fuel looking for a place to land. And I didn’t want to land any place as public as that airfield in the Takazze valley. The wind was in the right direction this time – so I landed here. I am parked right in the middle in case the wind changes overnight. We are sleeping beneath the wings of the plane, one of us on either side of it.

  I dreamed about birds. I dreamed the damn Ark sprouted legs, scaly bird legs – chicken legs, not anything beautiful. They were kicking and struggling against the ropes tying it into the plane and I knew I couldn’t fly with that thousands-of-years-old creepy thing wriggling around right behind my head in the plane, so I cut the ropes. It hopped out of the cockpit on its scrawny bird legs and went scampering away across the ridge and disappeared over the edge.

  I woke up with my teeth chattering.

  But we are safe here. We are invisible. That’s what Black Dove does best, right? No one can see us here. No one can come up here. I guess now I’m feeling responsible for this fellow.

  And the thing he’s guarding. Although I kind of hate it. It scares me and spooks me. I hate being responsible for it – the greatest treasure in Aksum. Maybe in the world. I’m pretty sure the Italians would agree with the Ethiopians about this one thing.

  But I don’t mind being responsible for the guardian. Isn’t that weird?

  After I woke up from that horrible dream I moved to be on the other side of the guardian so I could put him
between me and That Thing. After all, he has learned to live with it. It doesn’t bother him.

  I wonder if he has a name.

  I landed here about an hour and a half before sunset, and there really hasn’t been a thing to do except write. We couldn’t build a fire – there’s not a stick of wood up here. So once it got dark we could only go to sleep. I am writing now with the flashlight, but I’m worried about the batteries so I guess I’ll stop in a minute. I can’t even take a walk – it’s so dark that I’d risk walking right over the edge.

  But then I’ll have to think. The stars are beautiful, but no more beautiful than at home when all the lights are out. I am hiding from them, under the lower wing of the Romeo because I don’t want to think about space. Or rockets. I don’t want to think about why I’m here, what I’m doing, what I’ll do next. If I really were Black Dove, I could count on White Raven to come and rescue me. But Em is stuck in Aksum till I get back. I am on my own. I will have to figure out a way to rescue her when I’m finished with this.

  I don’t know if my mother – I mean Delia, my real mother – would be proud of me for doing such an important job, or devastated that I owe anyone such a debt. I guess I don’t care what Delia would think any more. She is dead and Momma and Em are alive, and they are the ones I care about. They are the ones it’s agony to leave behind.

  Until I got here and lined up to land, I’d forgotten how the sides of this ridge are covered with birds! The bearded vultures all came in to roost just as it was getting dark – they are absolutely the biggest birds I’ve ever seen. They seem bigger than the ones at home. The ol’ Ebony Eagle ought to change his name to the Bearded Vulture. It would be more original and it would be Ethiopian.

  Flight Log Entry

  Date: March 3, ’36 (Yekatit 24, 1928)

  Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1

  Number of Machine: 15–22

  Airfield: Beehive Hill Farm

  Duration of Flight: 1 hr 15 min

  Character of Flight: Home

  Pilot: Em Menotti (me)

  Remarks:

  It is so reassuring to follow little rules, like sticking the flight-log details in, as if someone like Miss Shore were going to check what I’ve written and give me points out of ten. ‘Very careful work, Emilia.’ I wonder where Miss Shore is and what she’s doing. I wonder if she reads the British newspapers to her fresh victims and tsk-tsks over the ‘war in Abyssinia’ and shakes her head and remarks, ‘I had a very narrow escape there!’

  Lucky her.

  No one else I know is escaping. When I flew along the Takazze River gorge this morning I kept passing over scattered people and animals and automobiles and tents – not an army, but people on their way to join the fighting, which is farther east. I stupidly went low, risking being shot at (or speared at), but I wanted to see. And what I saw was that everyone was scared of me – scared of my Regia Aeronautica plane. It was very strange watching the shadow of my wings pass over everybody. People ran and it was like ants swarming below me in the valley, only I knew it was people, and I wanted to go home.

  And eventually I was home. I was flying over the Beshlo River. The closer I got to Tazma Meda, the more I recognised the shapes of the mountaintops because they were familiar. A year ago I learned to fly here. For a moment, in a flash of warm pleasure, I was proud of myself. Look what I’ve done, all alone!

  And also – you know how sometimes when you come home and you haven’t seen a place for so long that it seems unbelievably beautiful, and you want to cry because you love it so much you think it’s going to break your heart? I felt like that too. I am home.

  Beehive Hill looked ordinary as I flew in over the ridge. It was comfortingly familiar – the hives hanging in the trees like giant cocoons, the uneven rows of the little coffee groves in the shady woods behind people’s houses. Smoke rose lazily here and there, curling into the sky, making me realise how hungry I was for real food, injera and something peppery, Sinidu’s wat with tons of berbere. I’ve been eating nothing but stale, stolen La Disperata bread for two days. I wondered if I was brave enough to wave the end of my shamma to greet everybody while I was flying in, like we always do when we land at Tazma Meda, and decided firmly that it was a bad idea to try to do anything else other than concentrate on landing safely. I looked for the Tazma Meda radio mast to position myself for landing at Beehive Hill Farm.

  And the radio mast wasn’t there.

  There is nothing but a pile of timber and rubble where the clinic was.

  It was just like looking through the lens of Momma’s camera and changing the focus. Suddenly it all looked different and everything was clear.

  They bombed our clinic. They must have done it to knock down the radio mast. It’s the only radio in the district, the only source of news for a couple of hundred miles in any direction. There isn’t any other reason why they’d bomb Tazma Meda.

  It happened three days ago. The smoke is from people’s houses that are still burning. Tazma Meda is ruined, just like Delia’s sky. There isn’t anywhere else to go now.

  Now I know what they do when they drop bombs, and if they used gas here they would have killed everything – mules, goats, chickens, coffee trees, not to mention people. But I was too high to see how bad it was. There wasn’t anything to do except land anyway. I couldn’t go back, so I just had to keep going. I lined up with the ruined clinic on my wingtip and the solid lump of Beehive Hill ahead of me and got ready.

  I am sure my heart actually stopped when I saw the sooty shell of Momma’s Romeo, like the black skeleton of a tree destroyed by lightning, tipped up on its nose right in the middle of our airfield. Honest, my heart stopped.

  I couldn’t land. Even if the field had been clear, I was so shaken I couldn’t possibly have done it. I had to shove the power on full and soar back up into the sky and do a long, wide circle around all the wreckage of my home – the smoking houses, the pile of stony dust that was once the clinic that used to make Tazma Meda special. Then I was back to the beginning of the circle and it was still there, the plane Teo took off in from Aksum, here at home dead. Utterly destroyed, nose down in a pile of ash on the yellow grass.

  I hadn’t cut the power or started to descend or any of the things you’re supposed to do to get ready to land, so I was way too high to dive down safely. I had to make another circle.

  And this time I noticed everything that was alive. There were goats ambling like ants below me on the hillside as there always are; the coffee trees are ready to harvest; and the bearded vultures were doing their slow, spiral dance over Beehive Hill like they always do, getting in my way. I wasn’t scared of them any more. Not after being shot at by Haile Selassie. And when I thought of this, I felt strong enough to concentrate on just the plane, on just the things I have to do to land safely. Because whatever was waiting for me on the ground couldn’t possibly be any worse than that terrible moment in the air when I first saw our plane and knew it would never fly again.

  I had to land beside it.

  It had come down nose first somehow in the middle of the airfield, and by the time I’d put on the brakes and come to a stop and switched off the engine of my own plane, the wrecked Romeo was a little way behind me and I couldn’t see it any more. I took off my helmet and goggles and sat listening to the eerie quiet of Beehive Hill Farm. None of the usual sounds of everyday life. No dogs. No people calling to each other while they worked. Only bugs and birds twittering.

  Finally I gave the control column four firm squeezes. I kind of love that little Regia Aeronautica plane now. It has taken me safely home and it didn’t try to run away or kill me when I had to start it myself this morning.

  That was the most frightening thing I’ve ever had to do. But that was before I had to find the courage to climb out and walk back to Momma’s charred and wrecked Romeo.

  The plane had been sitting there for ages. There were bird droppings all over it and three silvery abandoned sunbird nests, like juggling balls of grass and c
obwebs, hanging in the snapped wires beneath what is left of the wings. There weren’t any bones or decaying bodies lying around, but someone could have hauled off the dead pilot to be buried – it happened a long time ago.

  Probably about four months ago, when the sunbirds were nesting.

  So then I was afraid to go home. I was afraid to cross the airfield and go into my own house and find . . . My head ran wild with the horrible things I might find. An empty house would be the least horrible and I didn’t like the thought of that at all. So I thought I’d go find Sinidu. But then I thought about the bombed clinic and I didn’t want to go looking for her either.

  The safest thing to do was to try the Sinclairs’ house.

  The Big House was standing there with the French doors of the veranda wide open and stuff pulled out of drawers like someone was trying to pack and couldn’t figure out what to take along, and then decided to run away without taking anything. I don’t know what happened there because the Sinclairs left months and months ago. Probably people hunting to see if there were any useful guns left behind – everyone knows the Sinclairs’ house is full of guns. People on the farm, including us, have been using the house since they left, but no one has been living in it.

  ‘Selam!’ I yelled. ‘Peace! Hello! Where are you?’

  There wasn’t anybody there. I checked the girls’ rooms and it felt like nobody had been there since Bea Sinclair rode off on a mule to go to boarding school in England a year ago. But I guess the last people there were us. Momma’s boots were dumped on the floor of Fiona’s bedroom, the soles completely worn through. I couldn’t figure out what that meant, but I didn’t like it.

  I quickly got spooked by being in the abandoned house. So then I spent about an hour trying to pull and push my stolen plane into the aircraft shed. I’m not sure why I thought this was such an important thing to do, but I was very determined.

  Guess who came to my rescue? Tazma Meda kids. They turned up out of nowhere.

  ‘Tafash, crazy ferenji girl. Selam, peace, peace! You want help getting the plane in the shed?’ asked Sinidu’s niece Hana, the one Momma never lets do any work for us. Her beautiful tiny braids were frizzing out around her forehead like she hadn’t bothered fixing her hair since the village had been bombed.