The Italians came back to Adwa exactly a week ago – the place where the Emperor Menelik II led the Ethiopians to defeat them in 1896. The Italians were not defeated this time. They came with planes, just as we knew they would, and this time they bombed Adwa. When all the Ethiopian soldiers had retreated, the Italians marched right in and shook hands politely with the local priests.
We were going to go to Addis Ababa ourselves to pick up my new passport, which is supposed to be ready now, and to try again for Teo. But three days ago, before the airfield was completely dried out, a plane came and circled low over the Beehive Hill Farm until most of the village came running out to see what was going on.
Teo and I were there before Momma, who had to come up from the clinic. She thought the same thing we did – that someone was finally coming to take our Romeo away. When our plane goes, we really will be trapped. We’ve been dreading it all year, then dreading it even more when it stopped raining, and then when we heard that Ethiopia really had been attacked and invaded. Nobody trusts an Italian airplane any more.
But it wasn’t an Italian airplane. I couldn’t tell, but Teo knew right away.
‘It’s the Staggerwing,’ he said. ‘It’s the emperor’s new Beechcraft Staggerwing, the one Colonel Robinson ordered from America. The one Cooper showed us – the one I flew. Beautiful!’
‘What’s it doing then? Why’s it circling like that? It’s not going to bomb us, is it?’
‘Em, you goof. The field is soaking. Whoever’s flying it is looking for the best wind direction and the least puddles.’
It took the pilot so long to decide that it gave everybody time to gather in a big crowd to welcome him.
The white-and-red Staggerwing landed and everybody could tell it was an Ethiopian plane because of the Lion of Judah painted on the side, so everybody cheered, except me and Momma and Teo.
Cooper sat in the front of the cockpit. But the engine kept running while he got out, and we realised that he was flying as the second pilot. Johnny Robinson was the pilot in command. Robinson didn’t get out and he didn’t look at us. He was focused on two things: holding the brakes while Cooper conducted his business with us, and leaning back in the cockpit to talk to the two passengers sitting behind him.
Billy Cooper stood outside the plane now, waving widely and beckoning to us. Momma loped across to meet him, and Teo and I followed more slowly. The engine ran idling the whole time we talked. These visitors weren’t here to stay. They were on some other important Imperial mission, and Tazma Meda was only a detour for them.
Cooper shook Momma’s hand and then beckoned to her again. She stuck her head in the plane’s open door, half kneeling, and spoke to the two passengers sitting in the back. When she stood up again and backed away out from under the wing, Cooper shut the door to give the passengers privacy. I heard him ask Momma, ‘You still got your own plane?’
‘Yes! We thought at first that you were the Italians, come to take it away!’
‘Can it fly? You got fuel? Is she ready to go?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘That’s great. That’s really great. I thought we were going to have to take the kid back with us to Akaki and let him fly one of the Potezes –’
I wanted to grip Teo’s hand, but we are too old to do that when people are watching. This was it, we were pretty sure. This was Teo being taken away from us as a soldier – as a slave? To shoot at Italian aircraft? To be shot at by them? To do what else?
DAMN. DAMN. DAMN.
‘Well, this is better anyway,’ Cooper went on. ‘Your own plane is an Italian design and maybe it will go unnoticed. Teodros has to go north to Aksum to get his marching orders. You can fly him there yourself. That’s a command from the emperor to his subjects, OK?’
‘The emperor already told me himself where he wants Teodros to go, and I’m not his subject,’ Momma said coldly.
Cooper nodded in apology. ‘I mean your boy is his subject. Your boy’s an Ethiopian citizen, right? He’s being mobilised to Aksum –’ All the colour had leaked out of Momma’s face by now. I’ve never seen her look so bleak and defeated. It was the way he said ‘mobilised’, like Teo was already enlisted in some military outfit.
‘– That’s where his father comes from,’ Cooper went on. ‘He’s been called up by one of the emperor’s generals who’s based up there, so that’s where you have to take him. And when he gets there, he’s got a job he’ll need a plane for. If he can use your Romeo, that’ll be the best camouflage he can get. They say you agreed you owe the fella in Aksum –’
Momma sucked in her breath between her teeth as Cooper finished the sentence.
‘– You owe him a – a “requested act of recompense”.’
‘I know what I owe him,’ Momma said.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Menotti,’ Cooper said, ducking his head again in embarrassment toward the cockpit of the Staggerwing and its passengers. ‘It’s not my agreement.’
‘Do you know what the agreement is?’
‘Of course not!’ Cooper sounded shocked. ‘Military intelligence, right? How would I know that?’
Momma chewed her lip. Then she burst out angrily, ‘Would you work for a slave owner, Colonel Cooper?’
‘You know Haile Selassie is not a slave owner!’ He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the passengers. ‘Mrs Menotti, this isn’t the time or place –’
I could see the other American pilot, Colonel Robinson, up front, and I could see the two passengers in the back, side by side. The one nearer to us was a white man, a lot taller than the other. The shorter man was in the shadow of the enclosed cockpit and his face was hidden by his sun helmet.
Momma let out an angry, defeated sigh. ‘Yeah, I can see that. I’m sorry I said anything.’
It was Haile Selassie sitting in that plane – the emperor himself.
I don’t know why it took us both so long to recognise him. Momma had known him right away. That’s why she’d knelt by the door. She’d spoken to him. She wasn’t going to take on the issue of Ethiopian slavery reform here on the Tazma Meda airfield – none of us were. I guess I have discovered another limit to my own so-called bravery.
I gasped aloud to Teo, ‘Don’t look him in the face!’
Teo looked away quickly. Then he slowly bowed his head three times, just like we’d done at the coronation rehearsal. I started to kneel, but Teo pulled me to my feet.
‘You’ll make people notice him,’ Teo hissed. ‘He’s trying to stay invisible.’
The emperor looked away from us then and said something to the white man sitting next to him. But he’d seen us. He wanted Teo to do something for him. He knew who we were.
Cooper handed Momma a little cardboard envelope. She backed off like she was expecting a viper to shoot out of it and sting her to death.
‘It’s your boy’s pilot licence,’ Cooper said. ‘I tested him when I met him in Addis Ababa in June. I know he won’t turn sixteen till next week, but no one’s going to care.’ He held out the cardboard envelope.
‘It’s a command from the emperor,’ Cooper repeated softly. He gave a nod over his shoulder at the people in the plane. ‘His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God.’
Cooper glanced back at Teo.
‘Your boy is one of maybe fifty licensed Ethiopian flyers, and the only one with his own aircraft available. Let him decide for himself if he wants to take your plane or borrow one of ours.’
‘Momma,’ Teo said as quietly as he could and still be heard, ‘don’t make me have to fly on my own from Addis Ababa to Aksum in a strange Potez. Fly me up to Aksum and let’s find out what I’m supposed to do.’
Teo’s licence is an actual Fédération Aéronautique Internationale licence issued by the United States of America. That doesn’t mean he is a citizen of the USA – it just means that, whatever he is, the USA issued his license, and he can fly as a pilot anywhere in the world. As well as
being signed by the Chairman and Executive Vice Chairman of the National Aeronautic Association, it is also signed by Johnny Robinson. Billy Cooper’s word is the only thing that anyone has to go by to tell them that Teo is a competent pilot, but obviously Billy Cooper’s word counts for a lot. We had to stick a photo in ourselves. Momma put in a copy of ‘Abyssinian Shepherd Boy’. It is ridiculous.
So now Teo has actually got an official identity document with his name on it. At least one of us does.
Momma made me do the packing. She took Teo up to the Big House so they could use the Sinclairs’ dining-room table for planning our flight to Aksum. She made him do it all himself so he’d get practice in case he had to do the next leg without help. She was trying desperately not to show us how scared she was, but that worry line is making a trench between her eyes. Her face is going to get stuck that way. Maybe mine will too.
Is this why she didn’t want to teach him to fly? So he wouldn’t have to go soaring off into the blue on his own and maybe never come back? But this is why she did teach him to fly, so he wouldn’t get thrown into battle as a foot soldier. I can’t decide which is worse.
When we set off from Tazma Meda, when we were still together, we were all trying to make the best of it. We wanted to land back on the ridge Momma named Delia’s Dream, but there was such a strong crosswind we couldn’t. It’s so narrow you can only land along it when the wind is blowing straight from the north or the south. We found it all right – it lay below us, tantalising and beautiful, ours, and we just couldn’t land there. Teo was flying and Momma was in the middle cockpit. She took over the controls for a second attempt, but only got down to about a hundred feet before she shook her head and put the power on and soared away. I heard her shouting at Teo what to do next, but I couldn’t tell what she was saying.
I wriggled around to watch Delia’s Dream get smaller and smaller under the tailplane, feeling like the Delia-shaped hole in my heart was so impossibly big now it was going to swallow me whole.
I wish you could go through life without ever caring about anything, without ever getting attached to people and dreams and inaccessible places. It just makes you sad when you can never go back. White Raven never looks back – she just moves from one adventure to the next, as if nothing that happens ever changes her. The Buck Rogers comics Grandfather sends are like that too. But real life isn’t. Look at Momma. She was the original White Raven once, in a bathing suit and a silver garter, hanging by her knees from the undercarriage of a Curtiss Jenny. Now she is something less showy, but a lot more complicated.
I wish I could be more like Habte Sadek. He is not sad. He’s proud of his past and unafraid of his future.
After all that fooling around over Delia’s Dream, we landed in a valley of the Takazze River near a village where we spent the night. We had to shoo a bunch of little kids away from the plane in the morning. Even with a paid person standing there ‘guarding’ it, there was still a little kid sitting in the middle cockpit yanking the controls around. Momma spent a long time checking to make sure everything still worked. She even took off on her own to do a flight test, leaving me and Teo standing in a crowd of people who didn’t speak any language we could understand.
‘Did you ever tell her about the loop you flew with Cooper?’ I asked Teo.
‘It would have just scared her if she knew I’d tried stuff like that. She was already fit to be tied after that trip to the legation, without me telling her some strange fella was teaching me aerobatics in the emperor’s new plane.’
We watched the Romeo as it turned into a struggling dot against the blue, then flipped over backwards on itself and came screaming earthward at two hundred miles an hour. Everybody cheered.
‘If she crashes and goes up in a ball of flame we will be stuck here,’ Teo said.
‘Yeah, and then you won’t have to go work as a slave pilot for Amde Worku,’ I answered.
Neither one of us said anything as we watched. Now we were holding our breath, worried that Momma might actually be that desperate.
I heard Teo’s long sigh when she landed safely.
‘Are you relieved or disappointed?’
‘Oh, Em.’ It was halfway between a sob and a laugh. ‘What do you think? Someone would have tracked us down eventually.’
Neither one of us is ready for Momma to go up in a ball of flame. Especially if it is pointless.
Momma hopped out of the plane to fend off a couple of kids who were getting too close to the propeller. She looked windblown and exhilarated. She must have enjoyed that.
‘Get in, quick, before anyone gets in the way,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll get her started again –’ That is how we happened to end up with Momma riding behind us in the third cockpit when we set off on the final leg for Aksum – me in the middle behind Teo, and Teo with the map in the front. Momma was more anxious about taking off without slicing anybody in half than she was about figuring out who should sit where. She stood guard while Teo and I climbed in. She would have been more careful about where she put us if she hadn’t been happy with the Romeo when she tested it.
Teo let me take off. The wind had died in the night and there wasn’t any drift. It was perfect for flying.
Teo was concentrating hard on getting the navigation right. We were high, about four thousand feet above the ground. You can’t go much higher than that over the highlands in northern Ethiopia, because even on the ground in the valleys you’re at six thousand feet above sea level. It is freezing cold up in the air at ten thousand feet above sea level and you can’t breathe if you go much higher. But it’s easier to read the map up there because the scale makes more sense when you’re that far away from earth. Also you can make the fuel last longer, and you don’t have to worry so much about the wind over the mountains. So being that high all helped with Teo’s navigation.
We were only about half an hour away from Aksum when we saw the other Italian planes, a dozen of them, like a swarm of flies in the distance. Teo spotted them first and pointed. They were lower than us and flying in more or less the same direction. Momma sat behind me, staring at them through the binoculars.
‘Caproni bombers – wow!’ she yelled at last. ‘Three engines – huge! Not a fair fight.’
Suddenly Momma cussed under her breath. I don’t know what she actually said. She probably didn’t mean me to hear – it was low and private and I only know it was bad language because of her tone.
Then she yelled gently, ‘Emmy.’
Honest – she yelled gently. She made it sound like it was just supposed to be an ordinary conversation. ‘Hey, Emmy, look around at me.’
I craned backwards in my seat. Momma was leaning forward intently. We stared at each other for a moment, eye to eye through our goggles.
‘Downwind, straight and level!’ Momma yelled at me. ‘Tell Teo to turn downwind, fly straight and level.’
‘He is level!’
‘Downwind!’
She pointed in the opposite direction of the wind.
‘She wants you to fly downwind! Straight and level!’ I screamed at the back of Teo’s head.
‘OK,’ he said, and his shoulders went all tight and hunched, like he knew what to expect, but didn’t want to look behind him to see whether he was right. I bet we were thinking the exact same thing: those bombers are following us.
Teo turned the plane downwind. With the wind behind us, we were going a lot faster.
‘Em!’ Momma called to get my attention again. I looked back. She pointed one finger at herself and then at me. ‘Swap you!’ she yelled.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘Swap seats,’ she yelled. ‘So I can fly.’ She pointed to her eyes one at a time. ‘Watch. I’ll show you how.’
Teo glanced back at me, not sure what was going on behind him.
‘Straight and level!’ I screamed at him, and hoped he didn’t look back again.
Calmly, Momma unbuckled her straps. Then, carefully like
always, without upsetting the balance of the plane, she pulled herself up on the windshield of the third cockpit. When she had her feet on the seat she climbed out, one knee on either side of the plane, hugging it like a horse. She kept her head tucked low to protect her face from the wind. It is absolutely freezing flying at ten thousand feet above sea level.
Momma didn’t talk any more – just pointed at her eyes behind the goggles. Watch.
She crawled over the front of the windshield so she was sitting behind me. Then she crawled backwards, back into the third cockpit, and lowered herself into her seat again to show me how to do it when it was my turn. And then she climbed out again, fast, no fooling this time.
She paused behind me before she climbed over my head. She rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed four times. I am not scared. Then she scrambled over the top of me and perched on the fuselage behind Teo like an owl while she waited for me to give up my seat for her.
I knew she wasn’t doing this for fun, not with Caproni bombers after us, if that’s what was going on. So she must have some good reason for it. She must have seen or figured out something even more dangerous than making me swap seats with her in mid-flight.
Teo couldn’t help but be aware of her behind him. The balance of the plane’s weight shifted as she moved from the back to the front, making us nose-heavy, and we began to sink a little. Teo glanced around wildly and Momma yelled firmly at his ear, ‘Fly the plane.’
He held steady, straight and level, speeding along with the wind behind us. So it was my turn.
I put my hands on the sides of the cockpit to push myself up, just like she had – just like climbing out of the plane when it was on the ground.
This sounds stupid, but I hadn’t realised how windy it was going to be.
That was why Momma had told Teo to turn downwind – to balance the wind behind us with the wind of the plane’s own movement – to make it a little easier for us to climb out of the plane. But when I got up there, sitting on the back edge of the cockpit, my whole upper body just felt battered by the wind. I hung on to the cowling. I still had to get my legs out and then – and then crawl backwards along the fuselage and over the windshield into the empty seat behind me?