Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  That’s when I started to cry.

  ‘Come on, everybody, Em is tired. Help her out here.’

  There were six of them, four girls and two little boys. The boys had spears twice as long as they were tall. Hana had a rifle over her back. They all lined up with me, three on each side of the plane, and boy was it easier to push with their help.

  ‘My father left the gun for us when he went to join the emperor’s army,’ Hana told me. ‘He took spears and a knife, but said that we could have the gun. Did you see me shooting at you when you came around Beehive Hill the second time? We thought you were the Italians coming back with more air fire. Why are you flying an Italian plane?’

  ‘I stole it,’ I said proudly, wiping my nose.

  Hana shook her fist at the sky. ‘Beautiful!’ She gave a ululating cry of triumph, and me and all the girls joined her. The boys shook their spears. It felt good to be with people again. It felt good to know I’d taken down the Regia Aeronautica by one plane myself.

  ‘What happened when the planes came the first time?’ I asked.

  They told me about the bombing. Hana’s mother and her grandmother were killed. Her mother and grandmother were killed here in Tazma Meda, by bombs being dropped on the clinic. Hana didn’t tell me this. She walked a little way away from us and wailed while the others told me what had happened. They still haven’t dug them out from under the rubble.

  ‘Anybody who has no other place to stay has gone to St Kristos Samra,’ Hana told me afterward. ‘You can stay there too.’

  ‘What happened to my mother’s flying machine?’ I begged them to tell me. ‘What happened? What happened to my brother? Please –’

  I waved at the crisped Romeo full of empty birds’ nests, feeling like I was about to suffocate with panic. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Teodros is fine. He came back here four months ago, long before Woyzaro Rhoda. But now they have both gone with Ato Ezra to be battlefield doctors. They have transported all the Red Cross equipment to the northeast, where the emperor is gathering his army.’

  I started to cry again.

  Teo and Momma are both all right.

  This time the kids all piled around me, squeezing my hands and stroking my hair.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ Hana crooned, and then I felt terrible, terrible, that she had to comfort me when my mother was alive and hers was dead. And also, I realised suddenly, Hana’s mother is Sinidu’s sister. That means Sinidu’s sister and mother are dead too, and she doesn’t even know it yet.

  But when Hana told me about Teo and Momma, I was so overcome with relief that for a few minutes I couldn’t do anything but sob.

  When I’d stopped being a baby I tried to get the Tazma Meda kids to tell me more about the crash, but none of them knew what had happened. No one had come running up to Beehive Hill Farm to give Momma’s Romeo a reception the way they did with my Disperata Romeo, because Momma’s plane is ordinary and they see it flying in all the time. Zere says he heard the explosion, but he is very little and was scared to come and look. Much later, Sinidu found Teo sitting on the airfield, staring dazed at the smoking shell of the plane, and took him down to stay with her and Ezra and the baby.

  That was four months ago, long enough for Momma to give up waiting for Teo or me to come back for her in Aksum and so she walked back to Tazma Meda. I can’t believe she walked here. But she said she would, and I guess if Ras Assefa’s soldier boys can do it and Habte Sadek could do it when he was twelve, there’s no reason Momma can’t do it either. That explains the worn-out boots in Fiona Sinclair’s bedroom! Momma must have pilfered Fiona’s riding boots to replace them. She will never speak Amharic without an American accent and she will never master the Ethiopian art of going barefoot.

  Hana and the other Tazma Meda refugees are staying in the shallow caves up on Beehive Hill, just around the corner from the entrance to the St Kristos Samra hermitage. I came up here with them for tonight. The only place I could bear to think of sleeping in Tazma Meda is the aircraft shed, but it’s standing out there in the open next to the airfield and could make a good target if the bombers come back. Up here we are hidden away invisibly.

  I won’t stay though. I am going to suffocate here. The only reason I didn’t already take off and go after Momma and Teo is because it’s about to get dark. The kids are going to go with me to help me get the plane out first thing tomorrow morning. We siphoned all the fuel out of the Sinclairs’ generator to fill it up. Also we raided Mrs Sinclair’s tins with complete impunity. I don’t think she is going to care this time. Honestly, that empty house gives me the willies. The piles of skulls in the cliff walls next to me are less creepy, and I can understand why no one is staying on Beehive Hill Farm even though it’s huge and completely empty. I don’t want to stay there either.

  In the little rock crevice on the other side of me is the mother of that baby who had whooping cough last year. She is part of the coffee cooperative. Her face was grey, literally grey – covered with dust, with her eyes red and wet in the middle. She sat up straight when she saw me and reached out an arm – too stunned for a hug. She didn’t have her toddler with her and I didn’t ask why. I just kissed her. My lips left a wet print in the dust on her cheek. Everything about her fills me with despair.

  I wonder if Momma and Teo came up here – if they had to burrow away in this haunted honeycomb of a hill, like me, before they left to go to war. I guess they didn’t though because they’d have been in our house together, and it wouldn’t have felt so full of ghosts to them.

  My house, my house, our beautiful stick-and-thatch house that the coffee cooperative people built for Momma when she came here, my home is lost to me. It is standing there whole and unharmed, but I can’t go back to it. It will never be home without Momma and Teo in it.

  So I have to leave home too.

  But also I am full of hope. Because Momma and Teo are together and alive. They are doing something important, really helping. The sun is setting now, but I will fly out to find them when it rises again tomorrow morning.

  Your Majesty, this is the last part of the story I have to write. I haven’t got an ending yet, and Teo is not going to come up with one for me. So maybe you can do it yourself.

  I am writing it from the Red Cross field hospital here in Koram – or what is left of it.

  The sun came exploding straight into my face in the Beehive Hill cliffside on my last morning in Tazma Meda. It is unbelievable how well I slept in that hermit’s hole next to the skulls. Four months’ worth of exhaustion plus a small dose of hope and confidence are a good way to knock yourself out, even when your bed is haunted and uncomfortable.

  So it was broad daylight by the time I took off.

  I headed back north, but I hadn’t seen any fighting on my way to Tazma Meda, and I wasn’t seeing any now. After about half an hour I started to zigzag off my planned route; I had an idea where to go, but I didn’t actually know. After an hour and a quarter I started to get anxious about the pointlessness of flying around trying to find two people somewhere in the whole of Ethiopia. I hadn’t started with full fuel tanks and there wasn’t any more to raid from the Sinclairs if I went back.

  I flew higher, up where it was cold and the air got thin, trying to get a better view.

  That’s when I saw the Disperata planes coming toward me at an angle.

  Oh God!

  I was high above them. Maybe they didn’t see me. I couldn’t climb any higher and still be able to breathe. If I turned around I’d lose the distance I’d made and I wouldn’t have enough fuel to do it over.

  Then I realised that they were heading exactly where I wanted to go.

  I made a decision I didn’t want to think about too hard. I figured I’d look suspicious if I followed them from a distance. So I joined them.

  I set my course to meet them, hoping they were from the Asmara base and not the Amba Kwala one, praying that radio between airfields is as much of a sorry excuse for communication as it is anywher
e else in Ethiopia, hoping they would think I was just another Disperata Romeo tagging along.

  I didn’t get too close. I don’t know how to fly in formation. One of the Fiat fighters broke away from the rest of them to check me out. He gave me a friendly wave and I waved back.

  Well, what else was I going to do?

  They weren’t flying very fast – just taking their time and saving their fuel, knowing they had the total advantage of anything on the ground. It was easy to keep up with them, easy to fly with them, as long as I didn’t get too close. Well, I didn’t want to get too close anyway – I didn’t want them to pay too much attention to my stolen plane’s markings. They knew where they were going and I went with them.

  When I saw the tens of thousands of soldiers gathered at Koram, the first thing I thought was, How could I possibly have missed this?

  It went on forever. It looks like Addis Ababa from the air, like a city, without the new government buildings that don’t seem to belong there anyway. I hope that isn’t rude. This is how it used to be, in ancient days, when the capital moved around wherever the emperor was. That’s almost how it is now. Back then, though, the sky was safe.

  I was so focused on getting here that I kind of forgot what the other planes had come here for. They didn’t forget. They moved in lower, without even speeding up, and before I realised what was going on I saw the scurrying ants all over again as the Fiats opened fire with their machine guns. You could easily make yourself believe there weren’t any people down there – that nobody real was getting hurt. I think that’s how you’re able to fire a gun or drop a bomb: just pretend it will never hit anyone real, anyone you know. Only I knew Momma and Teo were probably down there somewhere, or somewhere nearby just like this, and all I wanted was for it to stop.

  I couldn’t even take them away with me if I landed. We can’t all fit in this plane.

  But I was determined to do something. Koram is on a wide plain, with Lake Ashenge spreading silver and glorious to the north, and mountains all around. I spotted our tents near the British Red Cross camp, in the open near the lake a little away from the fighting, and I was almost a hundred per cent sure a couple of them were the same tents I’d helped sew the big red crosses on while the Big Rains hammered down on the iron roof of the Tazma Meda clinic. You don’t spend half a month working on something like that and not be familiar with it for the rest of your life.

  I didn’t want to land too close to the troops. It was hard to find an open space there anyway. I landed close to the Red Cross tents, in the flat grassland by Lake Ashenge.

  I knew I was flying a Disperata plane and I knew people were going to hate me. I was pretty much expecting to be shot at and have spears thrown at me. But nobody even tried. Everyone just ran away from me, scrambling to get as far away as possible as I came lower.

  The other planes had sped off – I was flying the only Italian plane in the sky. I wound the end of my shamma around my hand and held it up out of the cockpit so that a tail of it streamed behind me like a little white flag – please don’t attack me, I surrender. I passed low and slowly over the place where I wanted to land, checking the ground, and wanting to let them see I wasn’t going to shoot at them. I’d have to go around a second time before I could land. I can’t land and wave a white flag at the same time. I need both hands. I have to concentrate on landing. But I hoped someone would know what I meant on the first pass.

  Someone did.

  There was one small slender woman who hadn’t run. She had a baby tied to her back and was carrying a fuel can on her head. I could see her clearly as I passed about fifty feet above her. She stood all by herself, shielding her eyes against the bright sky as she watched me. She seemed completely unafraid. She seemed curious. After a moment or two she started to wave wildly.

  It was Sinidu, Sinidu. She knew it was me because she was Sinidu! She didn’t recognise my white flag as a sign of surrender – she recognised it as our Tazma Meda landing greeting. She recognised me.

  I shoved the power on and my heart soared aloft with the plane. The stolen Romeo roared back skyward so I could get in position again to land.

  The second my wheels touched the ground Sinidu was running toward me. By the time I’d stopped rolling she was beneath the wing. The second the propeller stopped turning she was reaching for me. I pushed my goggles up on to my head and scrambled out into her arms. Little Erknesh was laughing her head off, that crazy baby. She loves it when you run with her.

  ‘Tafash! Tafash! You’ve been lost!’

  Sinidu and I both reached up to wipe tears off each other’s faces at the same time. Then we both laughed. Then we both tried to ask questions. She put her arm around my waist and started pulling me toward the tents and, this is true, she hadn’t even had time to tell me where my mother was before we heard the roar of more Regia Aeronautica planes flying low.

  They were flying ahead of a swelling bank of yellow cloud that fogged the entire horizon, the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It blotted out the green of the trees; it blotted out the sandy stone walls and the grey-green mountains ringing the plain. Sinidu and I grabbed each other’s arms again and froze.

  She turned to me and said wearily, ‘Our soldiers will run now. The gas destroys our ranks, every time. And then, ai, so many burns and no clean water. Poor Ezra has burned his own hands just by touching the wounded –’ Sinidu broke off in frustration and despair with a keening wail, like no noise I’d ever heard out of her in my life.

  The roaring grew louder and we both watched, open-mouthed, as the planes headed straight for our field hospital on the outskirts of the plain where the troops were gathered, still pouring foggy yellow destruction.

  It smelled faintly of garlic. Just how Momma had told me mustard gas would smell. So then we both knew what it was.

  I don’t know how long it took me to get out my gas mask and put it on, but I did, because Momma had warned me and made me promise and that’s what I’d told her I would do.

  After I got it on and I was looking at Sinidu and Erknesh through the glassy, aquarium-goggle eyepieces, I panicked all over again. I remembered all in a rush that there were other people in the world besides me, and if they got killed by poisoned gas it was going to hurt me worse than if I were killed myself. Sinidu, beautiful Sinidu and her beautiful baby standing right next to me – Teo and Momma and my heart out there somewhere underneath the cloud.

  All I could hear now was Erknesh screaming. I couldn’t even hear the airplanes any more. When Sinidu let out that strange, yodelling wail, her baby joined in, screeching at the top of her little lungs.

  It was just like she was yelling to me for help.

  It was hard to see through the strange glassy windows of the mask, and stuffy breathing through the filters. I knew that even with the mask on the mustard gas would still burn my feet and any other skin that wasn’t covered. And Sinidu and Erknesh didn’t even have masks.

  I couldn’t run into that hell to save Momma and Teo. Momma knew what to do. Right? She’d survived the mustard-gas attacks in the Great War.

  But Sinidu and Erknesh –

  ‘Get in the plane!’ I yelled at Sinidu. I grabbed her arm and pulled. ‘Come on!’

  ‘The water!’ Sinidu gasped, struggling out of my grip and grabbing the fuel can she’d put down when she hugged me. And I knew that mustard gas would poison any water it came in contact with too, so it was worth us dragging this one can along with us.

  I boosted her up on to the lower wing and she climbed into the front cockpit, baby and five gallons of water and all. She shuffled everything around so that Erknesh was wedged in next to her and Sinidu was sitting on the water, which gave her a better view, while I scrambled into the cockpit behind her. The sky was full of noise and boiling cloud. I realised I hadn’t started the plane and I couldn’t see anything through the mask if I was going to fly.

  Sinidu yelled back to me, ‘I will hold the brakes while you swing the propeller!’

  Of
course she would. How could I have forgotten that she’s been flying for longer than I have? Of course she could hold the brakes for me, while she sat on the only clean water in Koram with her baby squeezed into the cockpit beside her.

  I jumped out again and started the engine on the first try. I came running back to the cockpit and yelled through the roar and wind of our own engine, ‘I have to get the mask off – I can’t see to take off!’

  Sinidu yelled back, ‘Get in. I will take off.’

  So I did. Sinidu taxied with confidence, turned us into the wind and shoved the power on. The stolen Italian plane lifted over the glittering silver of Lake Ashenge and soared over the low forest and the rocky tops of the surrounding hills.

  I ripped the stupid mask off. I was embarrassed that I’d put it on so selfishly. My face was all sweaty and teary and I couldn’t breathe anyway, and it didn’t have anything to do with the gas. I wiped my eyes with my shamma and pulled my flying goggles into place while Sinidu flew steadily up and away from the destruction.

  For what seemed like ages, neither one of us looked behind us.

  Finally Sinidu yelled to me, ‘Can you take us back? I am not so good at landing.’ She turned the plane in a long, slow curve again over the lake.

  We could still see the pall over the land we’d left behind. I took over the controls with shaking hands. Somewhere down there were Momma and Teo and Ezra – all the pieces of both our hearts.

  I almost didn’t want to go back. As long as we were up here, we didn’t know the worst. Until we landed, there was still some hope that everybody was OK.

  And also I didn’t want to land until the yellow fog started to clear.

  I circled and circled over the lake, the Romeo making a distant dark reflection in the blue of the reflected sky on the surface of the water. It looked like Teo’s die-cast Spirit of St Louis where it hangs, remote and untouchable, from the clinic ceiling. After a while I didn’t have a choice about landing because I was about to run out of fuel.