Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Momma squatted down beside her. Momma said, ‘My sister, you are bringing a baby into a changing world, and I am scared.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Sinidu said quickly. ‘You have already brought your own babies into this world and I think you should do a better job of getting them ready for it. Just exactly the way you get me ready for it. Also you have not answered my question.’

  ‘The emperor is going to offer payment to the Italian government for the man killed. He doesn’t want war. There is still a troop of his soldiers waiting for water at the well in Wal Wal, and the Italian fort there still won’t let them drink. So maybe a beautiful apology will make them happy. But I’m scared. I’m scared it will all turn into fighting and people will be killed. I’ve seen enough death on the ground to last me a lifetime.’

  Momma kept her voice level as she said it, and it sounded like she was talking about the Great War. But I was pretty sure she was talking about Delia.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Sinidu, ‘I would teach my children to fly.’

  Momma swung her head around swiftly to look at her, as shocked as if she’d been slapped. She’d definitely been thinking about Delia.

  ‘I am never going to teach my children to fly!’

  Sinidu sat back on her heels. She looked shocked too. ‘You have taught me to fly, you strange ferenji woman! Why would you not teach your own children?’

  Momma blushed. ‘You were persuasive,’ she said.

  ‘Well, let me persuade you some more.’

  Teo and I listened hopefully and fearfully – worried because Momma was worried, but also pretty sure that once Sinidu got to work on her she would change her mind.

  ‘You are a fool to keep them on the ground. Make their lying stories into true stories and teach them to fly! If there is war, Teo will be called on to carry a spear. What happened in Gondar – one Italian and three of our own killed, and we must apologise for it? If there is fighting, you do not want him to be an Ethiopian soldier on the ground. Put him in the air where he’ll be safe! Do it now before it starts!’

  ‘Safe in the air!’ Momma exclaimed. ‘Now that is provincial ignorance.’

  Sinidu laughed. ‘And I have already said you are a crazy foreigner! This is not Europe! How do you think the emperor won his last battle over his rival before his coronation? He sent an airplane to drop fire on them from the sky. Teach your boy to fly and he will be safe from spears and antique rifles.’

  ‘I don’t want him to go to war at all!’

  ‘When it comes, you will have no choice. The only way to save him is to lift him above the crowd.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Momma said.

  We did not think she meant it. But she did.

  On the way home from the clinic that day we had to trot to keep up with Momma. She was walking at a determined pace, hands deep in the pockets of her khaki slacks, frowning a little so you could see the dent between her eyebrows. Her shamma needed washing and Sinidu had told her so. Sinidu said she would be embarrassed to see that grey flag waving in the air next time Momma landed at Tazma Meda.

  Momma muttered to herself the whole way. ‘Old enough to carry a spear! Jiminy Christmas. How about a rifle from the last century, like all the other progressive Tazma Meda kids who’ve spent a couple of years learning to read in the new village school? Shooting up at Italian aircraft with handmade bullets. What would Delia say? What would she say to me? What would Delia think if she knew that’s what I’d raised her boy to do? Over my dead body.’

  She jogged along like it is easy to talk and drop emotional air torpedoes and run at the same time.

  ‘Momma, I won’t –’ Teo panted, jogging alongside her.

  I burst out in gasps, ‘What is – what is all this hokum – all of a sudden – about Teo carrying a spear?’

  ‘You think there will be war?’ Teo asked. ‘You think the Italians really are going to invade?’

  Momma didn’t answer, but she stopped muttering about Delia. I was pretty sure she was still carrying on about sending Teo to war in her head.

  ‘Why are we running?’ I panted. It felt like we had hyenas behind us – like we were running away from something.

  ‘I want to be in the air before it gets dark.’

  ‘Do you have to go back to the city?’ Teo asked, racing alongside her. My legs are still longer than his, but he’s faster. ‘How come?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. Sinidu is right. If you’re old enough to carry a spear you’re old enough to learn to fly.’

  It was like being struck by lightning – it actually made me shiver all over. I couldn’t believe she finally, actually meant it. I spluttered, ‘But you – you said –’

  ‘You said never!’ Teo burst out.

  ‘I changed my mind. Sinidu is right.’ Momma always repeats things that she wants to believe and doesn’t quite. ‘I’m not watching you march off with a spear over your shoulder as if it’s the sixteenth century. If you learn to fly you’ll never have to carry a spear.’

  ‘You’re going to teach Teo to fly?’ I gasped.

  ‘I’m going to teach both of you to fly, of course,’ Momma said matter-of-factly. ‘You’re not going to be stunt pilots. You don’t need to know how to do loops and rolls and spins. But you are going to be competent, safe flyers like Delia was.’ She added fiercely, ‘Yes, she was. She got killed by the worst luck in the world, but she was safe.’

  ‘Oh, Momma!’ I breathed, stunned.

  Teo stopped her in mid-stride and knocked her off balance by throwing his arms around her. It was like the moment when she’d told us we were going to go to Ethiopia – confusing, frightening, but wonderful.

  ‘Delia was safe!’ Teo exclaimed.

  Momma stumbled, then righted herself.

  ‘Of course she was safe. Just a damn prairie falcon got in her way.’

  The thrill of learning to fly went a long way toward making me not worry about war. ‘You’re really going to teach us!’ I repeated, trying to make her say it again, just to make sure it was true.

  ‘That Shore woman was hopeless,’ Momma said chokingly, trying to hide her emotion. ‘Got to educate you somehow.’

  ‘Keep a record of every lesson,’ she told us. She has told us this before, but she said it three times today at least, so I’m doing it. We have each dedicated one of Miss Shore’s never-ending supply of theme books to keeping a flight log. ‘I’m not qualified to give you a licence,’ Momma said. ‘So you need to have a record to show an examiner.’

  I went first. Momma did the take-off herself. We haven’t raked the airstrip recently and it’s getting bumpy. I watched the farm get small again. It looks so nothing from the air, a spilled toybox of little cabins made of twigs and a few piles of matchsticks (the twig cabins are the English-style house and stable and the piles of matchsticks are the Ethiopian ones, including ours). Then Beehive Hill below us, the slopes dark green with coffee and juniper. Goats browsing in the bush like white bugs – so far below us you couldn’t see them moving. Everything is so little from the air. On the other side of Beehive Hill was the Beshlo River gorge, and the flat Tazma tablelands all around us and the Simien Mountains in the distance. Momma turned the plane so we were heading south and the river joined the Blue Nile.

  When Momma yelled, ‘You have control!’, at first I couldn’t even tell she’d let go of her own control column – she was behind me, in the second cockpit, and I couldn’t see her. And the Romeo was perfectly in trim, flying itself.

  Then I grabbed the control column, but I was so jittery I kept letting go. We wobbled like Jiminy. I hated it. I have wanted Momma to teach me to fly my whole life long and it turns out I hate it. It turns out I am nothing at all like White Raven. It makes me want to cry, but I won’t cry. I won’t. Through the speaking tube I heard Momma shouting at me to relax.

  ‘Let go, Em! I’m flying. Just take a deep breath!’

  I thought of Delia putting my hands in Teo’s. I. Am. Not. Afraid. White Rav
en and Black Dove are always supposed to be in the soup together. But now Teo was a million miles behind me in the third cockpit. I had to do this myself. I thought of Momma, letting go of the controls so I could learn to fly, doing the thing she was most afraid of in the whole world. And I ground my teeth together and took the controls again.

  I am definitely going to have to write something else for Momma to read. Ugh. I am never going to tell her how scared it makes me to take the controls.

  I got to fly for about an hour – just straight. Not up, not down, not turning – just straight and level, halfway to Addis Ababa, following the Blue Nile gorge. If I focused on the river below me, which was beautiful, it wasn’t so terrifying. Momma could tell how tightly I was hanging on to the controls – she could feel with her hand on the wheel in the second cockpit. She told me to let go when it was time to turn back.

  ‘Em, just hold on and feel what I’m doing, OK? You pull back and the nose lifts and the plane starts to climb. Not too hard – that makes the plane get upset and stall. You push forward, and the nose drops and you go down. Back to go up, forward to go down. Just feel it while I fly.’

  Momma flew up and down in climbing swoops the whole way back to Beehive Hill. It was like being at sea. She took over again to land so Teo and I could swap seats and he could get a turn at the controls. I felt green in a lot of different ways.

  Momma climbed out with us and led us out of the shade of the Romeo’s wings. The sky was fierce and burning blue, and there was a pair of bearded vultures doing aerobatics over Beehive Hill. Momma pointed at them without saying anything.

  ‘They make it look so easy!’ I grouched, shielding my eyes against the bright sky to look at them.

  Momma shook her head and pulled my hand down, and then she took one of Teo’s hands too, so we were all standing there on the airfield, holding hands and looking up at the circling birds. Then Momma swallowed hard.

  ‘You have to be aware of them,’ she said huskily. ‘Keep an eye out. You know how small everything looks when you’re in the air? You won’t see a bird till you’re nearly on top of it. But if you do see birds – if you think you’re going to hit one – pull back. Not so hard you stall, but like you want to climb. A bird’ll do less damage if it hits the plane’s belly than if it hits the – the propeller.’

  She turned to each of us to take a long look deep into our eyes, one at a time.

  ‘Understand?’

  We both nodded, once, her own firm, stern nod. Then she stood real quiet for a minute, and so did we, all of us thinking of how Delia was missing out on the African sky.

  Finally Momma broke the silence. With a shaky little smile, she said, ‘Birds are better flyers than people. They have a better chance of getting out of your way than you do of getting out of theirs.

  ‘Also,’ she finished evenly, ‘you have a better chance of surviving a bird strike than the bird does.’

  And she squeezed our hands four times, giving us Delia’s secret message.

  Then we climbed back into the plane so Teo could have his first flying lesson.

  I think Momma let me go first to make her brave enough to be able to teach Teo.

  Episode from TAMING THE FIREBIRDS

  For the first time in her life, White Raven found that her disguise was not working.

  The young firebirds were not fooled. Maybe she didn’t smell right or something. The three fledglings made a ring around her and took turns pecking at her wings.

  She could hear Black Dove choking a little as he tried not to laugh. He was sitting, invisible, on the edge of the enormous nest.

  White Raven turned around and blew fire at him from the tank that was strapped over her shoulders.

  ‘I guess you think this is easy!’ she said. ‘Why do I have to be the one to enter the race?’

  ‘You’re the one who can fly like a bird!’ Black Dove said as one of the fledglings began pulling the feathers out of White Raven’s wings with his beak, one at a time. The young firebird only pulled at the orange feathers – he left the gold and red ones alone.

  ‘You’re going to have to bring me some more thread,’ White Raven complained. ‘I’m not going to be able to fly with so many feathers missing. This was such a stupid idea.’

  I’m starting again on Ethiopian Culture in a new theme book.

  We are all staying in the Sinclairs’ big British bungalow and looking after it for them while they are away. For the past week we’ve been alone in the Big House, and it feels absolutely weird with just us Menottis being in it. It is nice of the Sinclairs to ask us to look after it, since they will pay us and it is easier money than helping tourists find things to kill, or guiding them around so they can take pictures of beehives or priests or Teo, which is what we usually do at the festival of Timkat.

  Timkat is my favourite holiday, even though I missed the parade the first year we were in Tazma Meda. We’d only been here two months, and I was the one who got so many mosquito bites when we first landed in Africa at the port in Djibouti that I had malaria for the whole Christmas season. There we were, back together with Momma for the first time in two years, and all that Teo and I did for the first few months was make up stories or read Vera Sinclair’s Hotspur and Wizard comics that her grown-up brother sent her from England.

  Because of the fever I spent a lot of time talking to people no one else could see, including Aunt Connie and Delia – and animals! That’s what I remember most about having malaria. Sometimes Delia really was a black dove, and Teo would think I was talking to him. And Aunt Connie’s pony kept tempting me to follow it outside, and the only reason I didn’t wander off after it was because I couldn’t stand up for more than about five minutes. (White Raven was raised by wild ponies and can speak to them.) Though once I got halfway up Beehive Hill before I had to curl up under a tree and go to sleep. Teo just waited patiently, drawing pictures in the dirt until I woke up, but I was too loony to find the way back and he couldn’t do it without me, so we had to wait until Sinidu’s niece Hana and a bunch of her Tazma Meda friends found us by accident and led us home. And that took a long time too, because Hana’s hair is always done in the tiniest braids around the front of her head, and I kept stopping to poke at them and see how they worked and try to do it to my own hair. It was after dark when we got back. Momma was not happy.

  After that she used to carry me back and forth from the clinic in a little hammock slung over the back of a mule so she could keep an eye on me. I got to curl up in a bed of goatskin and thick cotton gabi blankets and watch everybody coming and going. Teo supplied me with books from Vera Sinclair’s bookshelf.

  At any rate, we did not go watch the Timkat parade that year.

  The next year I put together a truly fabulous outfit in honour of the parade, but Momma wouldn’t let me wear it.

  ‘Take that ridiculous thing off your head right now.’

  ‘It’s a tabot,’ I told her, because Timkat is when the priests all over the country take their church’s tabots out – their Holy Arks, which are copies of the stone tablets which God gave Moses with the Ten Commandments written on them. The priests parade around the town carrying the tabot copies wrapped up in silk on their heads.

  ‘I’m a priest,’ I said. I was a little disappointed Momma hadn’t figured that out.

  Momma’s eyes burned grey fire. ‘Go put on your Decoration Day dress,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you dare be so disrespectful to these people and their church! If you ever say anything like that again, I’ll wash out your mouth with soap.’

  Sulking, I said, ‘You wouldn’t waste it if you had any!’

  ‘Orange blossom,’ Momma said. ‘One face bar. Mrs Sinclair gave it to me for Christmas and I’m saving it for a very good reason.’

  Partly it is true she doesn’t want to be disrespectful, which I understand better now than I did then. But partly she is still a Quaker deep down inside, and she doesn’t set much store by religious ceremony. Funny how we all see it so differently: Momm
a doesn’t like the ceremony because it doesn’t match how she thinks about God; Teo loves it because in his head it is all connected with God; and I love it without connecting it to God at all. But I didn’t want my mouth washed out with orange-blossom soap, so I shut my trap like a coin purse snapping and went and changed into my white parade dress, which was boring as well as being too small. Momma had never told me what to wear before, and hasn’t since.

  I still wish I was allowed to dress up like a priest for the Timkat parade. Their outfits beat anything Teo and I can come up with.

  Timkat is the Ethiopian feast of Epiphany. It takes place in the middle of January and it is the biggest holiday of the year. It makes a good replacement for Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one, and there is usually a houseful of European tourists staying with the Sinclairs at Beehive Hill Farm – they pay room and board to Mrs Sinclair, and they pay Momma to fly them around and help them take pictures. There are no visitors this year because people are worrying about war. There’s no war yet, but it has stopped the visitors. Well, except for the unexpected visitors who arrive because of war.

  People get more dressed up for Timkat than for anything else in the whole year. The priests are in velvet and silk robes embroidered with gold, and tiered silver crowns that look like wedding cakes, and everybody yodels and shakes bells and beats drums, and there are musicians in white shammas with big red stripes around the hem. The priests from the village church, Beta Markos, carry their copy of the sacred tabot around town for everyone to admire (even though you can’t actually see it because it’s all wrapped up in silk), and then they take it up to the St Kristos Samra hermitage on Beehive Hill, because there is an extremely weedy pool cut in the rock there which they use to re-enact Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River. They bring the tabot from the Kristos Samra chapel out too. The churchmen throw the water all over everyone to bless them and some people get really enthusiastic and jump into the pool. The tourists with cameras love all of this.