(He really did talk like that.)
‘– And does the new emperor not dream of an Imperial Air Force of young Ethiopian men born to the skies? The Black Dove’s son is destined to follow his mother into the air and fly for Ethiopia!’
(As it happens, we’ve been here for four years and we still don’t know how to fly and we are fifteen years old now. It is an itch that I have learned to ignore. I know I will not be in Tazma Meda forever. Em will tell you I can be very persistent and very patient.)
‘Colonel Augustus,’ Em said with a winsome smile, ‘don’t you owe Momma and Delia a favour? Don’t you owe them twenty-five dollars for putting your name on their poster?’
I couldn’t believe she remembered that. She was being White Raven, distracting the enemy so Black Dove could go invisible again. I did Mateos’s trick of looking off into an empty corner of the ceiling, while Em looked Colonel Augustus straight in the eye.
‘You should take care not to look a person in the eye here in Ethiopia,’ Colonel Augustus warned her gamely. ‘You must never look your elders or your superiors in the face. And when you meet the new emperor –’
Neither of us had ever met such an expert at changing the subject. Em’s mouth dropped open.
‘Meet the new emperor? Really?’
‘If you meet him, remember what I’m telling you now. You must bow three times.’
‘Like this?’ Em slowly closed her eyes. ‘I’m not looking in your face.’ She gave three big nods. ‘I’m bowing three times.’
Colonel Augustus laughed. ‘Just like that!’
‘Let me try again.’
I nodded along with her. If she was being White Raven, working on The Adventures in her head, my job was to back her up invisibly so I didn’t give away her game.
From behind, Momma suddenly pulled me against her and held me tight.
‘Oh, oh, my beautiful kids.’
‘What do you think?’ Em whispered to me in private after Grandma and Momma had tucked us in under the mosquito netting in a dark, strange hotel room. ‘I don’t know about Momma.’
‘Me neither,’ I agreed. ‘It will be nice to have her to ourselves. Right now she belongs to too many people and she isn’t really ours.’
‘Yes.’ Em paused. ‘We will miss Grandma and Grandfather.’
‘And Aunt Connie.’
‘Yeah, but we’re OK without them mostly. We won’t miss those awful Sunday Quaker meetings,’ Em pointed out softly. ‘Or the kids at the New Marlow School.’
‘I’ll say so!’ I agreed.
Em reached up to poke at the mosquito net on her side of the bed. On my side it was already all untucked where I’d kicked it by accident. ‘Teo, you’re such a slob. Be careful with it.’
‘We could use something like this in the game. A raincloud disguise,’ I said.
‘I thought that too!’
Momma and Grandma and Grandfather were sitting in the next room with a kerosene lamp, and the door was open a crack so there was just enough light for us to see the gauzy shadow of the mosquito net making a tent around us.
‘We can still go home with them if we want to,’ Em whispered disloyally.
I nodded. After a few seconds Emmy grabbed my hand and squeezed three times: Are you scared?
I am not scared, I squeezed back.
For a while we lay in the dark, listening to the rise and fall of Momma’s low, excited voice, and Grandfather’s occasional chuckles peppering her plans. I thought of Momma pulling me against her.
Oh, oh, my beautiful kids.
‘Momma is OK,’ I said. ‘It’ll be OK with her. I think she is better.’ It felt risky to even say it out loud.
Em laughed softly. ‘The glue is dry,’ she whispered.
‘They were holding the jug by the handle too, talking about Delia like that in the restaurant tonight. I guess we ought to stay.’ She repeated Momma’s motto: ‘“Ethiopia is what Delia wanted.”’
‘It’s what Momma wants now,’ I said.
We were in the Hôtel de France for about a week, just as Ethiopia finished preparing for the man who had been known as Negus Tafari Mekonnen to be crowned as the emperor Haile Selassie in 1930. We went on a mule ride up into the hills to see the dead Empress Taitu’s old palace (not the empress who’d just died, but the wife of the emperor before that). We had a tour of the new part of the city, which looks like buildings from Washington DC in the middle of a farm that has been taken over for a soldiers’ camp. We did not see any electric lights the whole time we were there. We went to a glorious but baffling church service which lasted three hours (Em and I both fell asleep – just like in Sunday meeting) and we toured a school and the Menelik Hospital. We went to the American Legation to get our names put on Momma’s passport. Then we saw a show at the British Legation, which was all done by men in kilts, and we got to shake hands with the king of England’s son, the Duke of Gloucester, and the cousin of the king of Italy. We saw Ethiopian dancing and got served the best injera and wat I have ever eaten, even now. Momma swapped some empty film canisters for pretty carved eucalyptus twigs to brush your teeth with. Em and I were so impressed with all the cloth merchants working in the middle of the markets with their portable sewing machines that we wrote a story later called ‘The City of Tailors’.
It was magical. It was worth waiting for. It was kind of exhausting too, but mostly it was magical. Who needed electricity and baseball games when you had a city full of flames and stars and camels hauling salt blocks out of the desert?
Then we went to see the flying show.
It was supposed to be a private rehearsal for the coronation, but it seemed like the whole city knew about it. Everything about Negus Tafari Mekonnen’s regency had been focused on change, and on making things better for people, and one of the modern things he’d been working on was putting together an air force. Now he wanted to show it off.
Getting through the crowd to the place where we were supposed to meet Mateos to watch the flying display, you’d never have guessed we were in the twentieth century. It could have been five hundred years ago for all we knew. The strange crowd of yodelling women in white cloaks and men in lion’s fur collars carrying medieval-looking spears was like a rip tide carrying you along. I hung on to the back of Grandfather’s seersucker jacket with both hands – Em was attached to Grandma. Momma pushed ahead of us because people let her past when they noticed her – of course she was the only white woman wearing a shamma and a sun helmet in the whole crowd.
Then Grandma disappeared.
‘Rhoda!’ Grandfather yelled at Momma.
Momma swung around. ‘Just over there – they’ve got a barrier up and we need to be on the inside. Mateos will meet us there. It’s only a piece of rope –’
‘I’ve lost thy mother!’ Grandfather cried.
‘And Emmy!’ I said.
‘Oh –’ Momma’s first gasp was one of irritation. She glanced around over our heads. I don’t know what she saw, but I was just eleven and I couldn’t see anything but people’s chests and arms, white cloth and animal-skin belts and the occasional rifle hanging across someone’s back. Momma yelled, ‘Come to the meeting place. Wait there and I’ll find them. I don’t want to lose you too.’
She led us on, fighting her way to the lines of rope barriers around the race track they used for an airfield. There were Imperial soldiers guarding the barriers. They were barefoot – khaki uniforms and sun helmets, but barefoot like everybody else except us. People were crowding around us as though they were trying to get on the last trolley home from the ballpark. Momma took hold of one of the ropes, lifted it up and held the gap open for us to step through. There was a crowd on the other side of the rope barrier too, but at least we were on the inside now.
‘Now wait. Don’t move. I’ll come back.’ She turned to go and there was Emmy leading Grandma by the hand, making her way toward us along the string of ropes. Momma’s and Grandfather’s mouths dropped open.
‘Oh!’
Momma gasped.
I linked my thumbs together to make my hands into a flying bird, and greeted Em with the secret sign of Black Dove and White Raven. Em grinned at me.
‘Emilia is amazing!’ Grandma exclaimed. ‘She knew exactly where we were going the whole time. Every time I’d start to fret she’d squeeze my hand four times and tell me that means I – am – not – scared. So confident! And this crowd –’
Em shook her head in disgust at the commotion Grandma and Grandfather were kicking up. ‘Honestly. Momma said we were supposed to meet Mateos here. It isn’t hard.’
‘Oh, thank heaven,’ Momma breathed and, as the little dent of worry smoothed out between her eyebrows, I suddenly realised how scared she’d been.
I’d seen her angry before, and I’d seen her miserable. But I’d never seen her scared.
We were supposed to be safe, here, right? So what was she worried about?
At first I thought there must be some danger she hadn’t told us about – bank robbers or ravenous wild animals or poisonous snakes. But now I think it was simpler than that. She was just worried about losing us again.
Mateos seemed to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly he had his arm around my shoulder, and was leading us to the front of the crowd as effortlessly as a starling cutting through the sky. He called out lightly, ‘Woyzaro Rhoda – Mrs Rhoda!’
Under Mateos’s guidance everything suddenly became easy. He moved quietly and quickly and somehow managed not to bump into anyone, clearing a little pathway with the butt of his spear. Within seconds we were at the edge of the field.
Here they’d put up another flimsy fence of ropes hung between stakes in the ground. Ramrod-straight soldiers with expressionless faces kept pushing people back from the ropes with their spear shafts. Grandma hissed through her teeth as though she’d got a paper cut every time she saw someone shaking a spear. Mateos flashed that smile which was so much like mine, and made a quick gesture to the soldiers with one hand – he didn’t even say anything. They let us pass along the barriers until we were standing unbelievably close to the new emperor’s private box. Then Mateos gave us another grin, a quick wave and disappeared in the crowd on some other official business.
Now the only things between us and the imperial grandstand were mats of woven straw overlaid with a long, dark red silk carpet that nobody dared to touch. It was like the Yellow Brick Road leading to the Emerald City, only blood-red. The soldiers let me and Em stand at the front, right up against the carpet, because we were so little.
Guess who poked her foot out when she thought no one was looking, so she could touch the glorious red silk with her bare toe sticking out of her sandal. That’s right – Em touched the private carpet of the man who was about to become Emperor Haile Selassie. She is such a sucker for pretty things.
‘Oh, Teo, try it!’ she gasped.
I slipped one foot out of my tennis shoe and edged my toes out on to the red silk.
This rug was absolutely the most beautiful, out-of-place thing we had ever seen, laid across the dirt of a temporary airfield. Our toes were side by side on the bright silk for about two seconds. When Em pulled her toe back I looked up, following the carpet with my eyes to the point where it met the Imperial grandstand. I didn’t have a choice about where to look. That’s where my eyes had to go.
And the new emperor was looking at us. That was the first time I saw him, and the only time I have seen him, but I knew right away that I was looking at the Negusa Nagast, the king of kings of Ethiopia, the man who was going to catapult this glorious medieval festival into the modern world. And he was looking right at us.
I snatched my foot back.
He sat alone, on a sort of raised platform decorated with the Ethiopian flag and bunting in the flag’s colours, red and gold and green. There was a space of a few feet between him and his closest guards and ministers. He was short – not a lot taller than me, and I was only eleven years old. Momma would tower over him. Most of the men standing near him would have towered over him too if he hadn’t been sitting above them.
He wore a white European suit under a black silk cape and a white sunhat, and just behind him stood a servant holding a red silk parasol with gold fringes. A man with a white shamma over his uniform held a pair of binoculars ready for use. Another man stood carefully watching a pair of young lions which he was holding on leashes. Everyone else in the box was watching the other end of the race track, where the half a dozen French fighter-bomber aircraft of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force were taxiing out of their big shed. The emperor-to-be, though, was looking straight at me and Emmy.
‘Don’t look him in the face!’ I gasped, remembering. ‘Bow three times!’
And I did. A moment later, copying me, Em did too.
And he laughed. We both saw it. Then just one second of a smile as he turned his head away again, dismissing the outrageous foreign children who were watching his coronation rehearsal. He took the binoculars from the other man, and focused on the field where the planes were taxiing in their plumed trail of dust.
‘This is the first time these planes have been flown by Ethiopian pilots,’ Momma said proudly. ‘They’re all young men who got trained by the French flyers here, and by Colonel Augustus. It’s the first time they’re giving a display. There we go!’ The first plane lifted into the air, and the little crowd around us began to cheer.
‘She still likes flying,’ Em pointed out to me quietly.
‘She just needed to be able to get in the air again without worrying about us at the same time,’ I said, as if I knew all about what was going on in Momma’s brain. ‘She’ll be fine now. All these pilots admiring her!’
‘Hey, talk about them, where’s Colonel Augustus?’ Em asked suddenly.
Of course Colonel Augustus was such a big man, and his uniform was so gaudy, that we would have noticed if he were in the imperial grandstand.
A look of concern and confusion clouded Momma’s face.
‘Where’s the royal plane?’ she murmured. ‘It should be on display outside the aircraft shed – the new emperor’s planning to take a ride in it for the first time at the coronation.’
There were three planes circling overhead now, and another three were raising a storm of dust as they taxied out to join them. I didn’t see any others.
‘They taxi it out of the shed whenever there’s a parade. It’s a white Gypsy Moth,’ Momma said, frowning. ‘It should be out here now. You’ll know it in a minute – brand new. Prettiest thing on the airfield! It came all the way from England by boat and train and it’s never been flown!’
‘There,’ Em said, and pointed.
The new emperor’s private Gypsy Moth was purring out of the corrugated zinc shed at the far end of the field, and it was, for sure, the prettiest plane I had ever seen. It was a biplane like the French planes already in the air, but smaller and creamy white all over. While we watched, the little plane jumped into the air and skimmed across the field twenty feet above the ground. The white sunlight glowed on its white wings and it passed right in front of us, so close we could see the pilot.
Of course it was Colonel Augustus.
He waved as he passed. I don’t know if he was really waving to us or to the crowd in general, but me and Em waved back like crazy. Momma grabbed our hands, one on each side of her, and forced them down. It was like having a lead weight hanging on your arm – you couldn’t fight it. She was much stronger than she had been when she left us. She was as strong as a man.
She hissed in a whisper, leaning between us so we could both hear, ‘Colonel Augustus isn’t allowed to fly that plane. No one is allowed to fly that plane. So don’t you go looking like you think it’s OK.’
Then she let go of Em’s hand and very quickly, so only the two of us saw her do it, she pointed at the emperor-to-be.
He’d jumped up from his royal seat. He was standing rigid, entirely focused on the little aircraft sailing right in front of his court, still no higher than twenty feet above the g
round. The plane passed the royal box, but for a moment I completely forgot to watch it. I could only watch the new emperor.
I couldn’t see the expression on his face. But I never saw anyone look so shocked in his whole body. He was like a statue, except his head moved. He turned his head to watch the plane pass by and continue across the race track toward the far side. He didn’t respond to the waving pilot.
There was a row of tall, thin eucalyptus trees at the other side of the field. Colonel Augustus, in the Ethiopian royal plane which he wasn’t supposed to be flying, was heading straight into them.
‘Climb!’ I heard Grandfather gasp, not very helpfully. That’s when I closed my eyes.
Em says she watched. I don’t know if I believe her, because I couldn’t. I couldn’t watch a plane crash, knowing it was going to happen. Not a pretty little white biplane that looked a lot like a Curtiss Jenny.
Anyway, Em says she saw it all. The landing gear got caught in the treetops, the plane flipped and Colonel Horatio Augustus had to be extracted from the wreckage with two broken ribs and a broken arm. They took him to the new hospital in Addis Ababa and patched him up. And then they took away his honorary Ethiopian passport and sent him back to the USA.
Momma didn’t watch either. She knelt down beside me and hung on to me in a stranglehold, burying her face. When she heard the crash, she gave a little grunt of a sob against the back of my neck. Grandfather knelt on her other side.
‘He thought he’d teach Teo to fly!’ Momma gasped. ‘Never.’ She sobbed into the back of my neck. ‘No one is going to teach my children to fly. Not for the emperor of Ethiopia, not for Delia, not for anybody. Never.’
Grandfather looked up to see what was going on and I couldn’t help squirming around a little in Momma’s grip so I could look up too. There were people racing out to the aircraft and pulling the pilot from the cockpit, and even I could see he wasn’t killed. And then we quickly looked away again.
Black Dove, White Raven Page 6