I landed closer to the lake shore than I had the first time. There were dead people half submerged in the reeds or just lying with their faces in the water, fallen where they’d tried to drink or to wash the burning poison from their skin. There were other people lying in agony at the edge of the lake or staggering toward it, more than I could count. I climbed out slowly. Sinidu didn’t say anything. When I got up on to the lower wing to see if she was OK, she handed Erknesh up to me. The baby knew me. She reached for me, doing her cute baby act, and pulled at my goggles. Sinidu climbed out.
The yellow fog had drifted away; the air was clear around the Red Cross tents, and the Regia Aeronautica planes had left before we’d even touched the ground, ignoring us because we were a La Disperata reconnaissance plane.
Babyish sobs slipped out of me.
‘Hush, Emilia, we are going to find your momma. Hush.’ Sinidu was fixing Erknesh more securely on her back again. We didn’t go very fast – we were cautious, worrying about burning our feet, trying to stay out of people’s way. The noise they made –
Well, you have no doubt heard it, Your Majesty. But I hadn’t heard men screaming before. It’s the most terrible sound I have ever heard.
We found Ezra first. He hadn’t been gassed. He’d been shot. He must have been shooting at the planes himself – he was still gripping a rifle, not his own. His face, his hands, all his skin were covered with dust. I ground my teeth together, sucked back a sob and grabbed Sinidu around the waist to hold her back.
‘Don’t touch him!’
She didn’t struggle. She let me hold her back when we found her adoring husband’s body. Oh God, we were both so careful, even in grief; we knew how careful we had to be. I held on to Sinidu and she wailed up into the sky, her eyes closed. Erknesh joined in and then I did too. For a minute or two there was nothing any of us could do but cry.
We weren’t the only ones. The mourning wail was a steady, throbbing, background beat to the moaning and screaming. It is worse than any nightmare horror ever made up in a story. It has died down now, but doesn’t stop. None of it has stopped. I keep wondering what White Raven would do, and then I want to smack myself in the face for ever making up stories about people getting hurt and killed. I have killed people in stories.
Sinidu rested her forehead against my shoulder. I leaned my head against her hair. I could hear Erknesh snuffling and for a moment caught the sunny, sweaty smell of the top of her head. Then it was all faint, ominous garlic again.
‘Come,’ Sinidu croaked quietly at last. ‘Let’s go find your momma.’
I nodded, but didn’t lift my head.
‘Gloves,’ Sinidu said, rousing herself. She took hold of my hand and gently guided me to take a step forward. ‘We need gloves. There are rubber gloves we can wear. We must not touch anything without gloves. The medical stores are in the canvas tent, the one the Swedes gave us. We must wrap our feet –’
We tore my shamma into strips to cover our feet. There were people everywhere, lying, sitting, dead and alive, coughing and weeping. A few were staggering around like us, trying to help.
We got to the supply tent. The flaps were tied tightly shut from the inside. This time we tore a piece off Sinidu’s shamma to wrap around my hands and arms because I had to shove them inside the poisoned canvas so I could untie it.
Inside we found Momma in Teo’s arms, Teo wearing her gas mask.
She’d wrapped him in about five layers of shammas and blankets. They both had gloves on and on top of everything else they’d wrapped themselves together in a tarpaulin.
This time Sinidu held me back, just the way I’d held her back when we found Ezra.
‘Gloves,’ she said quietly, pointing.
Teo raised his head when he heard her talking.
‘Gloves,’ Sinidu commanded in a whisper, and led me, shaking, past what was left of my family. ‘There is water here too. In the sealed cans it should be all right. Don’t touch the goatskin bags. Don’t try to wash anything. Save it for drinking.’
I pulled the rubber gloves on and turned around.
‘Teo,’ I said.
He turned toward my voice. I didn’t know if he could see it was me. It is horrible trying to look through those lenses. He reached an arm toward me.
I grabbed his hand and squeezed it three times. He squeezed back, and we both started to cry.
Momma was conscious, but couldn’t talk. Her eyes were swollen shut and her breath came in shallow, gulping gasps. She gripped Sinidu’s hands like a lifeline, just the way I was hanging on to Teo’s.
‘Hush, hush, we will clean everything up,’ Sinidu crooned. ‘Would you listen to that baby telling stories to herself! I want to be a baby on someone’s back with nothing to worry about! Ai, Rhoda, it is you and I and our children alone now. Em and I will make you comfortable and then we have to help the wounded –’
Teo took the mask off as Sinidu and I untangled all the wrapping.
‘Emmy,’ he whispered.
‘I’m here! I’m here!’
‘I can’t see!’ he said.
Momma made a strangled noise of despair and I think I did too.
‘We weren’t together when it started,’ he told me. ‘I came running here to find her and she made me take her mask – then it took us a while to get barricaded in.’
Momma’s hands fumbled for me and Teo. The four of us hung on together for a few moments while Erknesh babbled blissfully away to herself. That undamaged baby is like a little star of hope to every single person here tonight.
It is night now.
The blisters have started coming up. They come up hours after the stuff touches you – you don’t realise how bad it’s going to be. I have a big one on the back of my leg from something I brushed against and I don’t even know how it got there. Little ones on my feet where I wasn’t being careful. Teo’s feet are all right – Momma wrapped them up in a rubber sheet. Momma’s feet are all right too, thanks to Fiona Sinclair’s pilfered riding boots. It is her face that is burned. We’ve put some petroleum jelly salve on and tried to wash her eyes, but it’s like she has stuck her face into a fry pan full of oil. Her whole forehead is one huge blister the size of my hand. Another big one across one cheek, swallowing part of her mouth. She still can’t talk. Sinidu has made her drink by dripping water between her swollen lips through an eyedropper.
She is awake. She can’t see or talk, but she’s been writing us little notes.
EM TAKE TEO HOME
‘Tazma Meda has been bombed,’ I whispered. ‘We can’t go home. We have to stay with you.’
She shook her head and wrote:
TAKE TEO HOME TO PA
‘Rhoda, the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Negusa Nagast himself, is here. He is ready for battle, camped in the mountain caves above Koram,’ Sinidu told her. ‘Just like us on Beehive Hill. You are American, you are a pilot – you should appeal to him to get your children out of this country. Aim for the sun!’
A strangled gurgle of bitter frustration from Momma – as if she could move or talk or make a polite request for a personal favour from anyone, let alone the emperor of Ethiopia. I bet she was thinking of that damned civil servant in the US Legation. She wrote:
EM YOU MUST DO IT
TAKE TEO HOME
TAKE TEO HOME TO USA
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TAKE HIM HOME TO THE USA???? Since when is the USA home? But where else are we going to go?
‘OK, I will, Momma,’ I whispered. ‘I will.’
I gave Sinidu my revolver.
She took it without saying anything. She kissed me on both cheeks.
‘Do you know how to use it? Would you?’
‘Yes and yes,’ Sinidu said.
‘I figured.’
Sinidu is beautiful. She has always been beautiful, of course, but she is like what I made up White Raven to be. Much more than I am.
She is running our field hospital. People listen to her because she’s Ezra’s wife. She has no formal tr
aining, but she’s been working for Ezra for ten years and she is as good as a doctor and knows better than Momma how to convince people that she can help them with Western medicine. She is the most sensible and most senior person here who is not hurt. And she is doing it all herself with a baby on her back when she’s working and the same baby on her breast when she’s resting, but she will not eat anything as she is fasting because we are going to bury her husband tomorrow, and her sister and mother are dead.
‘Our soldiers are too honourable,’ Sinidu said with fury in her voice. ‘Pulling down tanks with a dozen men and their knives, throwing spears at airplanes! The only weapon we have in abundance is Ethiopia itself. We need to change the way we fight. We need to sneak up on the enemy in the dark and set them on fire.’
It made my heart ache to hear her joyful voice filled with such bitter anger.
It is quiet now, apart from the moaning and the wails of grief. No one fights at night because that’s not what warriors do.
‘Emmy,’ Sinidu told me, ‘you know about the pictures your momma has given the emperor – you know how Teo’s served him. He knows who you are and he will want to help you, but you have to get his attention for a minute or two. That will be the hard part, because he is here for a hideous battle and it is breaking his heart. You need to make him see you. I know a beautiful present you can give him that will get his attention.’
She took off the canvas satchel she was carrying over her shoulder. I hadn’t even noticed – she is always carrying a ton of stuff, including Erknesh and five-gallon cans of drinking water. But the satchel was Momma’s flight bag.
‘Look behind the maps,’ Sinidu said.
Between Momma’s maps and the back of the bag was a pretty woven mat made of red-and-green dyed straw, and it kept the back of the canvas stiff and flat. Behind it was a pile of paper. I pulled it out sheet by sheet.
It’s a stack of things that Teo and I have written. Momma has been carrying our drawings and stories around with her in her canvas flight bag, all folded up neat and flat, everywhere she goes. Adventures we wrote when we first started school, and ones we sent her when she went away to Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia without us for two years, and stories we wrote after we came here, and some of our essays.
Sinidu thinks that you will like to read them. That they will tell you about us. I’m not going to send you all the dumb comics we drew when we were little, but I have tried to put our themes and things together so they make sense.
These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right.
I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always just a maze to get lost in so you can run away from real life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.
I’ve been thinking about it so much tonight – about Momma carrying these pieces of paper around with her, and about all of us being on our own. Our momma carries us around with her in her heart wherever she goes. But we learned to live without her long ago and I think we can now too.
You know what Sinidu said to me when I took these from her to give to you?
She said, ‘If you take care of Teo, I will take care of your momma.’
Momma isn’t going to leave Ethiopia. She isn’t going to leave Sinidu. Momma is still the crazy ferenji flying woman here, but you know what? I saw what happened to her when Delia died. It might kill her to stay here, but it will definitely kill her to leave. She needs what is left of Tazma Meda more than she needs us. She needs to fly here again, if she ever gets better. There is no other sky for her.
But me and Teo are different. We can fly anywhere.
It will save us to leave. And maybe then we can come back.
We are on our own – Teo and I. We always have been, ever since the first Bird Strike.
There is one more thing I want to tell you. It is about Teo. So I’m sending you one more section from his own flight log, which he probably shouldn’t have written anyway. It will be safer in your keeping than out in the world where someone might find it and make guesses about things that are supposed to be sacred secrets.
He is sleeping now, and I honestly don’t care if he gets mad about me ripping pages out of his flight log, because Momma told me to save him and I am going to.
‘Emmy,’ Teo said to me, ‘do you think God blinded me on purpose?’
‘What the heck, Teo? You got a boatload of mustard gas dropped on you! That wasn’t God! God isn’t like some mean airfield owner’s kid kicking over your Lincoln Log house or scribbling on your drawing because he doesn’t like the colour of your skin! What does God have to do with it?’
‘I saw the Ark of the Covenant,’ he told me.
Date: Oct. 11, ’35 (Meskerem 30, 1928)
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I–STLA
Airfield: N 12° 58’ 10”, 30° 50’ 29” (Delia’s Dream) to Tazma Meda
Duration of Flight: 1 hr 25 min total
Character of Flight: Transport
Pilot: Teodros Gedeyon
I did not look. Not on purpose. I did not touch it and I did not look. The guardian knows I did not touch it.
And maybe Habte Sadek would think this was wrong, but in the moments after the crash it was only the guardian that I thought of. He was slumped behind me and for a moment it looked like the control column of the middle cockpit had been shoved into his chest like a spear. (It hadn’t, though he is badly bruised and I think his ribs are cracked. There is nothing I can do about it, but he is stoic and I think he will be all right.)
The impact sprained his ankles. I am not sure how that happened. I am so thankful they’re not broken! It was the bustard that nests on the runway, the one I used as an excuse for Em’s bad landing last year. It really does nest there and it really does nest there before the rains. It happened exactly as I touched the ground. The bird just came flying up as though it had been spat out of the earth. I saw it and remembered instantly that Momma had told us to raise the nose, to get hit underneath instead of head on, but of course she meant if it happened in the air. When I raised the nose the plane tried to take off again. We bounced, and there was a terrific bang as the big bird whacked into the Romeo’s belly. We would have been OK if it had happened higher in the sky. But with the bounce, and the nose high at such low speed, I went straight into a stall. I didn’t have time to go for the power, even if I’d had the extra height.
So we bucked and nosedived straight into the ground. I can remember every second of the fall. This is how my mother died. I didn’t have time to go for the power, but I had time to think, over and over, This is how my mother died. And This is going to kill me. And This will kill Momma.
But I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t even bruised. So after the engine stopped and the noise and the fear stopped and everything was still, I realised after a few seconds that I wasn’t dead. But then I looked back and saw the guardian, hanging in his harness straps in back of me, very still, and I was more frightened than I’d been before. Habte Sadek told us a church is nothing without its tabot. But surely a tabot is meaningless without the heart and mind that give it meaning.
He just seemed so important. His warm hands that keep the incense lit on the altar also drew the pictures to show me where to hide the heart of his church.
That’s also when I realised that I would have done this job even without being forced into it at gunpoint and spearpoint and the harness of slavery. They should have just asked me. If Habte Sadek had asked me I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I would be proud to do what Habte Sadek did. I would be honoured.
I untangled myself from my own harness and scra
mbled back through the wires between the wings. I thought the other boy was unconscious, but that was only because he was all scrunched down in his seat. He was cowering forward with his arms over his head. He didn’t have a flying helmet so I’d kind of wrapped him up in his own shamma before we set off, to protect him from the wind, and it had cushioned the blow to his face.
He fought a little, flailing, while I unbuckled his harness.
Words spilled out of me. ‘Peace, peace –’
I saw the lick of flame curling from the crushed engine, over the nose on the other side of the windshield.
‘Stop fighting me! Come!’ I yelled at him, and hauled him half out of his seat. He groaned and grabbed at his ankles. ‘Get out!’ I grasped him under the shoulders somehow and gave him another huge heave backward and that got him out of the plane. I tipped him face first over the edge of the cockpit and jumped down after him.
‘Get away from the machine –’
He didn’t need to be told that because he’d seen the little flames too by now. And also he hated the plane. I’d had a hard time earlier, bullying him to get back in when we set off from Delia’s Dream.
He struggled away as fast as he could, crawling on his hands and knees, me pulling and pushing to get him to move faster. We made it about twenty yards before he gasped and lurched back in the direction of the plane.
‘The Tabota Seyon!’ he gasped. They are the same words in Amharic as in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the church.
We both looked up. The tabot was still strapped in the back seat.
I can’t explain why I went back for it. I really can’t.
But I did go back for it.
I didn’t get hurt doing that either. The fuselage was only fabric, so it wasn’t hot, not like metal would have been. The flames were licking at it like a fire that won’t get started, one you have to keep blowing on to get it to catch. I tore at the ropes and straps until the package fell out of the cockpit and hit the ground. I threw myself after it, bundling the wrappings into my arms with whatever was inside them, an awkward, heavy, shapeless lump of mystery. I ran back to the guardian and thrust it at him and turned back to the plane to watch as it burned to a crisp. There was a roar as the flames found the fuel tanks in the wings. We were close enough for the heat to feel like it was burning our faces, although it didn’t. There was hardly any smoke. The air above the inferno was a writhing column of clear heat.