Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Today Momma confronted Capitano Adessi about the mustard gas, and this is what he said: ‘Oh, we would never use that in combat. It is against the Geneva protocols for war. But the iprite, this gas, is so difficult to dispose of that we have to guard it carefully, which is why we have brought it to Aksum, where there is so little resistance to our occupation. Please do not judge diplomatic policy by the evil weapons you see stockpiled on the ground.’

  He paused, lowered his buggy black glasses so we could see his eyes and beamed at us.

  ‘Listen! Here is better, happier news. Il Duce Mussolini announces today the complete abolishment of slavery in Abyssinia. As an American you will be overjoyed to hear such progress, not two weeks since the occupation began!’

  I don’t know how Momma reacted, because this time I couldn’t sniffle the tears back. I burst out crying and ran away.

  I started out trying to escape into writing The Adventures and wrote all this instead.

  I should be happy, I guess. The Italians have arrived, full of good intentions, and Teo is no longer a slave. That was easy, right?

  Except he’s already gone and he doesn’t know it. He is doing whatever he’s been told to do because he missed the announcement by three days. How can it make any difference now – especially if he’s working for the emperor? Just because Mussolini has made some proclamation after invading Ethiopia doesn’t mean he can change the rules here. Although maybe it will help Teo if he’s taken prisoner by the Italians – maybe they will forgive him having to do something that he was forced to do as a slave. Unless of course they decide to figure out what he did do. Then what?

  Oh God, oh God, I can’t think about him being a real prisoner. It makes me sick to think about the Black Dove prison stories I’ve made up.

  Waiting for Teo is terrible. The longer we wait, the more I’m sure he has been hurt or killed. But the longer we wait the more I hope he won’t come back. More and more I think the Italians will just shoot him the second he climbs out of his plane. There are two Romeos here, two-seaters that they use for reconnaissance, and they have been going off on exploratory missions and coming back again all day. Every time I hear one flying in my heart soars for a second because I think it might be Teo, safe and alive. And then a moment later I start to pray that it isn’t Teo.

  It never is.

  Oct. 22/Teqemt 11

  Amba Kwala, or should I call it the Fortress of Clarity haha,

  Day 3

  I am going a little crazy now. As far as I can tell, my father is not as important an officer as his friend Capitano Gianluca Adessi, and he has not been able to take a vacation and spare fuel from his invasion activities to take me somewhere safe, like an airmail package. In fact, I think I’m pretty safe here, in terms of not getting shot at or taken prisoner, or whatever else happens to an American girl who’s supposed to be neutral, but who is caught up in the spiderweb of someone else’s war. In real life I think I am already a prisoner.

  I am trying to escape. There must be a way down over the side of the amba. The goats do it. A few of them are not penned and they disappear over the edge and you never see them again, but there aren’t piles of dead goats lying around at the bottom of the cliffs so they must go somewhere (although now that I’ve followed one of them all day I know it just came back up in a different place). I have found a bearded vulture’s nest big enough to hide in if I needed to. Papà Menotti has no idea how far down the side of that cliff I have made it.

  But I’m going to have to pilfer some rope if I want to get any farther. I am scared to do it. I mean, I am not scared of pilfering things – I pilfered binoculars from Adessi’s plane and he didn’t even notice it because I was using them like they were mine. And I pilfered his map by accident because I was holding it as I got out of the plane when he stuck me here. But I am scared of climbing down the amba. Without rope I can get a short way down and back up, but with rope I am pretty sure I’ll only be able to get a long way down, and if I get stuck halfway down I won’t be able to get back up.

  I guess I should be frightened of what will happen to me once I do get down and am on foot in the middle of nowhere. But that doesn’t scare me so much because I like being on foot in the middle of nowhere. And I still have Mrs Sinclair’s revolver, and the compass Papà Menotti gave me.

  I wasn’t worried to begin with because I never thought I’d end up stuck here. But now I am beginning to think that they did it on purpose. I’ve been kidnapped. That sounds ridiculous, but I bet it’s true.

  Three days ago, back in Aksum still waiting for Teo, Capitano Adessi lured Momma away from me by asking if she’d like to try flying one of the Fiat fighter planes.

  Of course she said yes. Any flyer worth her salt (except me) would have said yes. I’m sure Teo would have.

  The Fiats only have one seat so she couldn’t take me with her, and Adessi must have felt pretty sure that if I was on the ground without Momma she wouldn’t, say, try to steal the plane. He must have been certain that not even Rhoda Menotti would be batty enough to leave her sixteen-year-old daughter alone on an airfield full of Italian soldiers in a remote city in the African highlands. I never for one second believed she’d be batty enough to do that either.

  What she did do was take the plane so high into the blazing blue sky that we couldn’t see her, and then came roaring earthward in the most incredible display of aerial daring that I’m sure most anybody on that airfield had ever seen. Even though I never believed she’d fly off without me, again I started to worry that she was going to kill herself. Accidentally if not on purpose.

  She threw the plane over and over itself and then she came plummeting toward us in a dive, but she straightened up about twenty feet above the ground and screamed away into the sky again. Everybody, including me, stood there with our mouths hanging open, gaping as she climbed. But instead of coming back for another dive or loop, she suddenly levelled out, three thousand feet above us, and tore away toward the south.

  Capitano Adessi put his hand on my shoulder and I jumped about a mile.

  ‘Shall we chase your mother, Emilia?’ he asked. ‘Shall we take a Caproni and go after her?’ And I said yes.

  The thing is, I knew what she was doing. She was taking the opportunity to do a little scouting. If she flew for twenty minutes in the direction of the first heading Teo took, she might see if he’d landed or crashed anywhere along the way. Of course we both knew he was more likely to do either of those things later in the trip than in the first twenty minutes after taking off, but I didn’t blame her for wanting to try.

  So I knew she’d come back – if she didn’t spot our wrecked plane lying on a mountaintop somewhere – but I also wanted to chase her. I wanted to ride in a Caproni bomber. It’s true that I hate landing so much that my fear of it has spread like poison into all the other things that go into taking control of the Romeo, but I still love being in the air. And when was I ever going to have another opportunity to fly in a Caproni bomber? I imagined waving to Momma out the panelled glass window of the huge enclosed cockpit. She’d be proud and a little jealous.

  It took us twenty minutes to get going, check the fuel, and make sure nobody cared if I came along. The waste of fuel should have made me wonder, I guess, but it’s hard to think of everything, especially when your mother has just disappeared into the sky and you are alone with the skull-and-crossed-tibia Desperate bugs.

  So we got strapped in, with me in the navigator’s seat of the most gigantic plane I’d ever climbed into, and we took off and roared away south in Momma’s direction. Capitano Adessi handed me a map. It was in Italian, but mountains are mountains.

  Adessi didn’t talk much. It was too loud to gab anyway, and my helmet doesn’t have an intercom connection in it. After a while he leaned over, peeled back the side of my helmet and shouted into my ear, ‘Want to fly?’

  I thought he really meant it! I thought he was going to show me how to use the three tall throttle levers between our seats and how
to make the three massive engines purr in a trio!

  I knew that he’d grab the controls right back if I did anything wrong and he’d just laugh it off and it wouldn’t matter. And then I could tell Teo I’d flown a Caproni.

  Captain Adessi lifted his hands from the flight controls – the plane was in trim, so of course it just kept flying itself. He didn’t realise I had the first idea of how to fly a plane – he was just being nice.

  I nearly said yes. But then he took the map out of my hands and turned it around.

  ‘Wrong way up,’ he yelled jovially.

  I had it upside down on purpose. I’d flipped it so I could follow our course. I hesitated, because it was hard to explain how I read a map, let alone shout it to someone who was flying a plane with three engines over wild mountains.

  He pointed to a place in exactly the opposite of where we were heading. ‘Turning here!’

  Then he steered the plane in a completely different direction to either the way we’d started out or the way he’d told me we were going.

  ‘But –’

  I wasn’t really scared when he set off in the wrong direction without explaining what he was doing. I figured he had a reason for it. It was incredibly loud and hard to talk. Maybe he’d spotted another plane out there and he thought it was Momma – after all, that was why we were up here. Maybe he hadn’t finished telling me something about the map. Maybe he had some other errand he needed to do which he hadn’t told me about, like refuelling or bombing the ancient temple at Yeha. Maybe he wasn’t trying to confuse me on purpose.

  So when he asked me again if I wanted to fly I just shook my head and gave him a thumbs down. If we were detouring to bomb the ancient temple at Yeha I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  We passed over Yeha. I spotted the golden temple walls through the binoculars. We kept going and I pretty much knew where we were the whole time. Through the binoculars I spotted the airfield at Amba Kwala long before you could see it without them, and when Adessi lined up the plane to land I was interested in spite of myself. I held my breath as I watched him smoothly balancing all those gigantic engines against each other. And then, when he shut everything down and climbed back and opened the door, there were all these joyful, happy people racing out to the plane from all over the amba, and one tall and slow-moving, slow-smiling person in the middle of them was Papà Menotti.

  And you know what? I was so happy to see him. I was really, truly happy.

  I leaped out of the big plane and he swooped me up in his arms. ‘Mia bella cara!’ And then in Amharic, ‘Selam! Tafash! Peace – you’ve been lost! Beautiful!’ He speaks a little bit of Amharic now, and a darn good thing he can too or we would not be able to talk to each other. His Amharic is terrible. But it’s better than nothing.

  So then he wanted to give me lunch. I still can’t figure out how important he is, but if he didn’t have his own tent before he’s definitely got one now that I’m here, a good one with two partitioned rooms and a porch and plenty of folding furniture like a little European house. Half a dozen very excited and enthusiastic people all in uniforms helped set us up a really beautiful lunch and then just left the two of us alone so we could have an awkward half an hour of reunion time.

  While we were eating farfalle drowning in olive oil (delicious, delicious) I heard the Caproni’s engines fire up.

  I jumped to my feet and spun around to see if it really was the plane I’d come in, taking off without me. It really was. Then I ran about fifty steps across the amba toward the plane before I realised I’d left my satchel and flying helmet hanging over the back of my camp chair. I stood for a moment, panicking, then ran back for my bag. Momma had made me promise never to go anywhere without it. It had the gas mask in it and Capitano Adessi’s binoculars, and the map he’d given me to look at in the plane.

  But I’d never have caught up with that plane even if I hadn’t gone back for my bag.

  As Adessi took off without me, I stood there waving – still not worried! I thought he was going to do an aerobatic show or something, like Momma. I was sure he was going to come back for me. Sure.

  Then as the hours passed – when it got dark and that stinkbug Adessi still hadn’t appeared – I knew he must have dropped me here to stay on purpose. But I was still convinced he was going to come back in a day or two and bring Momma with him. I was sure she’d come when she knew I was waiting here for her. I am bait.

  Now three days have gone by and she still hasn’t come for me and I am not so sure what is going on.

  I can see out. I can see for miles all around me, across the amba plateaus. I can see all the planes that come and go. They go out carrying bombs and come in empty. Other planes come in and deliver fuel and more bombs.

  Everybody knows I am Capitano Orsino Menotti’s daughter.

  Everybody is very friendly. One or two of them are horribly friendly. But it’s such a small place that there’s nowhere for them to hide away with me, and everybody always knows what everybody else is doing.

  I am with my father and I am safe. And I am miserable. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to pick up the pieces. I don’t know how to get away from this war – to get back to Tazma Meda – to get back to Momma. To get back to Teo.

  It really is like being a prisoner in the Fortress of Clarity.

  Your Majesty, I have torn out the part of my flight log that I kept while I was imprisoned on Amba Kwala. I was kept there with my father for four months. More than once he took me with him on bombardment missions. I didn’t have to go, but I wanted to because it was the only way I could find out what was happening in the war. I knew when your army pushed into the Italians at Christmas because I saw it from the air through my stolen binoculars. And I knew that La Disperata sometimes landed and refuelled at Aksum, because it’s easier to bring fuel there than to the Amba Kwala airfield. I thought that maybe if my father and I touched down in Aksum sometime I could sneak off and find my way home, ask help from Ras Amde Worku’s household – anything other than being stuck on Amba Kwala. But my father never landed anywhere else with me.

  One time, when we’d run out of bombs, we flew daringly low over a battle and I saw our soldiers – I mean, your soldiers – charge into an armoured tank with their spears. I didn’t see blood; I didn’t see anyone fall. But the tank stopped, and our warriors in their white shammas swarmed over the top of it. And that was the way the whole battle went that day, and for many days after Christmas, and my father would fly home with his ammunition spent and no one on the amba would talk to each other because they couldn’t believe it. Except me, elated with hope and secret loyalty.

  One time my father’s machine gunner opened fire on a Red Cross hospital tent set up nearly ten miles away from the fighting. It was flying a British flag, and clearly marked with a giant red cross on top of it. It was ridiculous to pretend that the gunner mistook it for any part of anybody’s army. I don’t know why he did it – maybe he doesn’t like the English. I am mad at the English too, because they still let the Italians bring ships full of guns and trucks through the Suez Canal to get here, and like the Americans they won’t help arm us. But what does Papà’s gunner have against hospitals? Papà was very angry with him after we landed.

  The last time I flew with my father, you shot at us.

  I don’t mean your gunners or your army shot at us. I mean you yourself, Your Majesty. You, the Negus, one man alone, Haile Selassie – you shot at us.

  Ordinarily we don’t get fired at in the big Caproni with its three roaring engines, because your army has so few anti-aircraft guns. La Disperata rules the sky alone. But when La Disperata attacked Dessie, you had that single cannon in your headquarters, and as my father dived toward the round thatched roofs and green terraces, I watched you through my stolen binoculars – one solitary, brave man against the world, running up the hill to the gun platform.

  I knew it was you. You were already legendary. I’d heard.

  You hit us. Did you
know that? Because if you know that, if you saw, you’ll know which plane I was in. A Caproni bomber with the middle engine out. A direct hit, in fact. A piece of the propeller cracked off and came flying through one of the glass panels in the windshield right past my head. I thought – if you’ve read this far I bet you can guess exactly what I thought. I thought it was a bird.

  But it wasn’t, and it didn’t hurt anybody, and Papà Menotti calmly shut down the middle engine and flew home steadily on the other two with the wind howling around us through the broken window panel.

  Would you have fired on us anyway if you’d known Teodros Gedeyon’s sister was in that plane?

  Papà tried to give me the piece of the propeller to keep as a souvenir. But I couldn’t touch it.

  After you shot at us, my father wouldn’t take me on another bombardment mission. But it’s not because of being shot at that he stopped taking me. It’s because the bombers have started spreading iprite.

  It started about a week after Christmas. I recognised the canisters. They fixed some of the planes so that the gunners would be spraying mustard gas instead of bullets. There was always at least one plane loaded with gas in the group that went out – it wasn’t my papà’s plane, but he was still flying with them and he had his own gas mask and he did not want to take me along in case something went wrong.

  In case I got gassed.

  And I didn’t want to go anyway.

  Papà explained to me why they are doing it. There was a change of command in the Italian army – Mussolini thought the old commander was moving too slowly. The new one is more ruthless. And they are angry about an Italian airman who was brutally murdered by vengeful villagers. The things that were done to him are terrible, and it’s true that some of your warriors cut ugly trophies from those they slay in battle. We both know this. I can’t imagine anyone in Tazma Meda doing what was supposed to have been done to that unlucky fellow, so I’m not sure I believe the report. But that’s why they are using gas now.