‘I have asked my men to erect a thorn fence around this place against the night-time hyenas,’ Ras Amde Worku told us. ‘I will leave you a guard, as well.’
‘Thank you,’ Momma murmured. She wasn’t really paying attention and she wasn’t scared of hyenas. She bent over the table, looking closely – looking for anything. She moved on from the table to the back of the shed. ‘Here’s where the cargo load was resting,’ she said, kneeling in the light coming in through the open door and rubbing damp dirt between her fingers. ‘You can see how the ground’s pressed flat. Ras Amde Worku, give me something.’
‘Secrets rest in Aksum,’ Amde Worku said. ‘There is a great treasure kept here. Surely you know what that may be, if you put thought to it. Maybe the Italians know too. We cannot risk them coming here as an invading army and taking what they find.’
Suddenly he sounded like Habte Sadek.
There is only one great treasure in Aksum that Habte Sadek has ever talked about, and that is the Tabot of Zion.
Did Teo have any idea what he was doing?
It makes The Adventures feel so babyish.
I squatted down beside Momma, staring at the voiceless markings on the dusty floor.
‘Have they taken it to Debre Damo?’ Momma asked. ‘To the monastery there, the one on top of the cliff? Ras Amde Worku, they should have asked my advice! There are Italian aircraft on Amba Kwala within a twenty-minute flight of Debre Damo. They will fly from Amba Kwala to Debre Damo with bombs and guns if they think it’s worth it. You saw the planes yourself when I flew you there.’
Amde Worku assured her again, soothingly, ‘Our boy is going to be safe, Rhoda.’
That’s when I saw it – Teo’s picture in the soft earth. He’d drawn it under the table.
Even with the door open it was in shadow. I can’t believe he’d been able to see what he was drawing. He must have done it blindly. But he’d used big, bold strokes – he could have felt them in the earth, like a sculpture. Like Habte Sadek showing us how he made maps for his friends when he was a boy. And I could tell what Teo’s pictures made.
There was a hill with trees on it. He’d done two trees, quick, jagged, lightning sweeps across the ground with the flat of his hand for treetops, crooked trunks and a rounded handful of earth for a hive dangling by a thread from each tree. Just below the top of the hill, set in the hillside, was the arched door and window of a chapel.
At the bottom of the picture was an airplane – a biplane with three cockpits. Our Romeo Ro.1. Outside the plane were two faceless figures. One of them wore a crazy hat that might have been a flying helmet. The other wore a priest’s crown, like the ones Habte Sadek rescued from Magdala. And between them they were carrying a tabot, heading away from the plane.
So he did know what he had taken with him.
And I knew where he’d gone.
Down at the edge of the drawing, outside the rest of the picture, was a thing that looked like a big bowl with two little people in it.
We are in the soup together.
It was a message to me. I couldn’t let Ras Amde Worku see it.
I leaned against the table and swooshed one foot back and forth across the drawing. The damp ground was cool and smooth against the sole of my foot. It felt exactly like the smooth, packed-dirt floor of the chapel at St Kristos Samra.
Fortress of Clarity
I’m sick of it. I hate it. Fortress of Pitch Darkness. Fortress of MUD.
I CAN’T WRITE A STORY WITHOUT TEO.
I keep trying but it feels so petty. Real life is ruling me. I want to escape it by writing, but all I can write about is what just happened. And up until the God-awful battle yesterday, the past three days have been unbelievably, unbearably boring – boring and upsetting at the same time, just waiting and waiting for Teo to come back, but he never does. No news from anybody about anything. We get our meals cooked by a girl named Miniya, who is younger than me. She drops her face into her shoulder with absolutely unbearable shyness when we talk to her. Nobody has ever made me feel like such a crazy ferenji without even trying.
So I try to think about The Adventures, try to think about me and Teo being Black Dove and White Raven and how it all comes out right in the end of every episode, but I just can’t do it. I can’t even think about it. It feels so wrong to try to make up these stupid, pointless stories when real people are dying all around us. When our real life is like that last episode of Buck Rogers that Grandfather sent us last year, where Wilma is stuck being lashed three times a day in the beryllium mines on Jupiter and we still don’t know if Buck gets out of prison so he can rescue her. I mean, I guess he does. He always does. But I don’t know how this time. And we’ll never know for sure.
I didn’t write that whole so-called flight log entry on the date it happened. I wrote it over the past three days because nothing else was happening and I had to do something or shoot myself. The first night of waiting – the first night on our own in the shaky little not-a-house shed – I lay there with Momma, rolled up in our shammas on Amde Worku’s fancy rugs. Everything was crisscrossed with shadows and moonlight through the thorn barrier and the gaps in the stick walls as we listened to the hyenas yipping in the distance, and it was like that first night she came back from the hospital after the Bird Strike. She was just like that. She lay with her back to me and she didn’t even cry. It was like I wasn’t there.
‘Momma, I know where Teo went,’ I whispered to her back.
After a moment or two she rolled over to face me. I couldn’t see her in the dark.
‘How?’ she whispered back.
‘He drew a comic in the dirt under the table. I rubbed it all out so Amde Worku wouldn’t see it. He’s taking –’
She shot her hand up fast and clamped it over my mouth. ‘Don’t tell me! For God’s sake, don’t tell me.’
‘But –?’ I thought she’d be overjoyed.
She took a deep, shaking breath, and rolled on to her back this time, staring up at the tin roof in the dark. ‘When the Italians get here they might go looking for whatever he is supposed to be hiding. No one can get it out of me if I don’t know. Don’t let anyone know you know.’ She took another deep breath. ‘You think he’ll be OK?’
‘If he doesn’t get lost, I’m sure he’ll be OK,’ I swore.
I believed that when I said it three days ago. I am sure I know where Teo went. But I don’t know why he hasn’t come back for us yet.
Right smack in the middle of breakfast yesterday we heard engines. It was a distant sound at first, like a swarm of bees. A long time ago, when we first came to Tazma Meda, the bees did swarm once, and it sounded like that – a droning hum that grew slowly louder and louder – and Momma made us all lie under our shammas for an hour even after the noise stopped.
This only sounded like bees for a moment or two, and then we knew it was airplanes. Not just one airplane, not the plane we were hoping for. This was so many planes roaring closer that we couldn’t tell how many it actually was.
We were sitting outside our hut, watching Miniya fry injera for us. Momma tilted her head, listening. I could see the little dent of alarm between her eyes getting deeper and deeper.
‘Oh, Jiminy Christmas,’ she gasped. ‘That’s the Italian Air Force coming to invade Aksum.’
She stood up in the sunlight, shielding her eyes with one hand as she scanned the sky.
‘Maybe nobody will speak English and we won’t have to talk to them,’ I said hollowly. ‘Momma – did you do anything for them besides take pictures?’
‘Nothing! Nothing, Em. I took pictures of mountaintops, just what I’ve always done. That’s what they asked for, and they let me keep the plane. I made sure the emperor got copies of every photo that I took for them. The Italians never even paid me!’
‘The Ethiopians did! You are a dirty double-crosser!’
It was as close as I could come to saying Everything is all your fault. You are our momma and you are supposed to protect us.
‘I never double-crossed anybody,’ Momma snapped. ‘I am just feeding you kids.’
That’s the other thing mothers are supposed to do instinctively – feed their kids.
I can still remember Delia saying exactly the same thing.
‘Cross my heart, Emmy,’ Momma added, sounding kind of desperate. The noise of the planes was getting louder. Momma gasped in frustration, ‘Oh, where are they coming from?’
She spun in a slow circle, using one heel as a pivot, trying to figure out the direction of the sound. Horatio Augustus’s men heard the noise too. We hadn’t seen much of them over the past few days, but we knew they were close by, working on building the thorn fence around us, patrolling the landing site under cover of the candelabra trees on the other side of the field. In the distance we could see barefoot men in white shammas carrying rifles and spears and all their gear, and dragging an enormous gun on wheels, gleaming new and probably German, since Hitler is the only European leader who hasn’t come up with some diplomatic excuse not to sell us weapons. Horatio Augustus had forty men with rifles and one big field gun, but that was it. There wasn’t a darn thing he could do to protect Aksum from an air attack. Ras Amde Worku had already told him not to. But he was doing it anyway, hiding with his men in the low ground cover across the field, waiting for the planes to arrive.
Momma suddenly called to Miniya.
‘Go! Go home! Run now,’ she ordered her. When Miniya hesitated, Momma did the unthinkable and gave her a light slap across the back of her shoulders. ‘Go home.’
Miniya ran.
Momma stood still, watching the whirlwind around us and listening to the horrible insect drone of the approaching swarm of aircraft getting nearer.
‘Momma –’ I hesitated. ‘Should we leave too?’
My brain hummed, What would White Raven do, what would White Raven do? She’d disguise her reason for being here . . .
‘We need Meskal daisies!’
Momma shot me a sidelong glance.
‘We have to make it look like we’re expecting them – we have to welcome them!’ I said. ‘You take their reconnaissance photos for them. We have to fool them into thinking we’re on their side. Let’s decorate!’
There were golden asters blooming as high as my hips all around the back of the hut, and I started pulling them up in armfuls.
‘Em, you loony –’
‘Help me, Momma! We’ll tie them around the door – make it pretty – make it girly. People love that. Remember how Delia tied all those red, white and blue ribbons on the Jenny for the Fourth of July when that one fella wasn’t going to let you fly, and the crowd booed until he did? Remember how you’d wear those matching feather boas when you passed around the hat after a show? And your white carnation wreaths on Decoration Day? That’s what girls are supposed to do: make things pretty.’
‘I’m not that kind of a girl,’ Momma grumbled.
‘That’s why you need folks like Delia and Sinidu and me to help you. I’m not girly either, I just like dressing up. You do too! You wore Mrs Sinclair’s blue silk dress when Papà Menotti visited.’
Momma threw heaps of gold blossom over the trampled ground around the entrance to the hut and stuck flowers through the chinks in the walls around the doorway. ‘If they don’t think we’re poor, defenceless, neutral American women, they’re going to think we’re a couple of prostitutes,’ Momma muttered grimly under her breath.
It was so much better. I almost wished Papà Menotti would turn up just so he could appreciate the effort. I started braiding flower stems together to make a wreath for me to wear just in case he did.
‘You want one too, Momma?’
‘I don’t want a wreath. You have to help me think. We need a story for the Italians when they land. We can’t tell them any of the real reasons we’re here – why are you and me here and not Teo? Where’s our plane? How did we get here, how are we getting back and where did Teo go?’
She really couldn’t be a spy or she’d absolutely be the dumbest spy in the world. She can’t make anything up or pretend to be anyone else except Rhoda Drummond Menotti to save her life.
But making up stories is what I do best.
‘Momma, it’s easy!’ I said. ‘Tell them Teo brought us here and then –’ I took a deep breath. It was OK to say this. ‘Tell them he brought us here and then flew back to Addis Ababa. He wants to be a pilot with the Ethiopian Air Force. He is a pilot with the Ethiopian Air Force. He’s old enough to carry a spear, right, so isn’t that just the most obvious? But we got Teo to bring us here because we want to go back to Papà Menotti. Teo wouldn’t take us any farther because he didn’t want to fly in Eritrea.’
The first airplanes appeared over the hill that cradled the airfield.
‘But when he comes back they’ll –’
‘They’ll take the plane away from us now anyway, right? He’ll have to pretend he changed his mind and brought it to them on purpose. And that’ll be OK.’
I grabbed Momma’s hand, because over the hill came three of the enormous Regia Aeronautica Capronis flying in a neat V formation. They roared like big cats in the night, and passed us, making a long turn back to the field because they needed so much space to land in.
‘Momma!’ I yelled. ‘My story makes sense, right?’
‘It makes sense!’ she yelled back. ‘Except we don’t want to get whisked away to Asmara or somewhere – out of the line of fire.’
I saw the flaw in my beautiful fish story. We were going to have to find a way to stay in Aksum so Teo could come back for us. We had to stay in Aksum to make sure no one tried to shoot him out of the sky when he did return.
I stood clutching Momma’s cold hand and trying to imagine how we’d fake it.
The three Italian planes were lined up one after the other now so they could land. Up close they were the scariest things I have ever seen. They had great big black skull and crossbones paintings on them like pirate ships. Just as the first one touched down, another two appeared over the hill.
Momma squeezed my hand three times.
Are. You. Scared?
And I realised, when she did it, that she was also telling me: I. Love. You.
We’d have a little while before Teo came back. I’d have time to think of a good cover story for him.
I squeezed back.
I. Am. Not. Scared.
Or it could also mean: I. Love. You. Too.
We watched the second plane taxi and the third plane land. More were still flying in. There were ten now in all – the three big triple-engined Capronis, five Fiat fighters and two Romeo scout planes. Aksum already had as many aircraft at its brand-new airfield as Haile Selassie’s Imperial Ethiopian Air Force has in Addis Ababa.
Momma pointed toward the place where the road curved around the hill. ‘Listen.’
I stood still.
There was a different and more terrible noise over there – the roar and rumble of motors on the ground. Hearing it made me think of American cities and at the same time made me realise what an utterly weird and alien sound it is to hear in highland Ethiopia. While we stared, the first light tanks came wallowing up the road to the new airfield, with open trucks behind them full of white soldiers, all in uniform, all carrying the same new rifles. And more cars. The big, ugly, tractory things at the front began to make their way across the field, bulldozing the yellow Meskal daisies in their path.
Over where the procession of priests had gone three days earlier, people began unloading barrels and crates from the three huge planes that had already landed. They were setting up a big canvas tent for storage. The men beneath the planes’ wings scurried like frantic bugs in an anthill that’s got stepped on, and you could faintly hear their shouts across the field.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘They’ve run into Augustus’s men, I guess,’ Momma said. She stared through the binoculars. ‘Why couldn’t he just wait, or follow Ras Amde Worku into the mountains like he’s supposed t
o!’
You could only sort of hear the shouts. But we heard the gunfire like it was right next to us.
Momma threw herself flat on the ground. That was self-preservation taking over from maternal instinct. She’d been fired on in Belgium and Italy in the Great War, and throwing yourself on the ground is what you do when you have heard gunfire and you know what it means. But my instinct was not to save myself. It was to try to see what was going on.
‘Get down, Em!’
In about ten seconds I dragged the table out the shed door and used it to boost myself up on to the roof.
‘Em Menotti!’ Momma roared, jumping to her feet, maternal instinct trumping self-preservation once again.
‘Gimme the glasses, Momma!’ I lay on the warm, corrugated-iron roof and stretched my arms down to her. She heaved the world’s most defeated sigh and threw me the binoculars.
I lay flat. I felt pretty sure nobody would shoot at me, even if I stood up, but the whole hut was incredibly shaky with me on top of it and I trusted the roof less than I trusted the Italian and Ethiopian soldiers wrangling on the other side of the golden savannah field.
It was probably stupid to look. I didn’t think about what I might see.
I saw the Italian men with their rifles. I saw them kneeling, professional soldiers, trained, cold. At first I couldn’t see who they were shooting at. But then a man came out of nowhere, like in a medieval painting, in a white cloak and with a spear, charging like a mother hippo protecting its young. He ran straight at the line of rifles, put his spear into one of the kneeling men like he was killing a lion, and fell in a fountain of his own blood as everybody else gunned him down before he could even pull his spear out of the man he’d killed. He fell over on top of the other dead man, blood spouting out of him like a burst waterskin.
I dropped the binoculars and buried my face in one arm, clinging to the edge of the roof with my other hand.