Alamayou’s brow furrowed. He was trying to understand, to piece it all together, but Philip’s hands weren’t making anything. They just rose and fell with his words.
“I’m no help to you,” Philip said tiredly. In the ballroom, he’d held back. From the expression on the princess’s face, she knew he was keeping something secret. She might ask him. Certainly, she’d ask about him. So would Naismith. His tone made it sound as if he’d already done so.
They would ask and they’d find out about him. His life before Abyssinia. They’d learn where he’d met Marcus Baker White and why he was there at Newgate in the first place.
In the ballroom, before royalty, he’d objected to Naismith’s allegations against Alamayou without thinking how stupid, how childish it must have seemed. He knew nothing of Alamayou before the fire. He wasn’t anywhere near Alamayou until that moment. Why should anyone believe him? He was nothing but a kaffir, a colored sticking up for the only other colored in a castle that didn’t want him. That’s what they all saw. And when they learned more about him, well, it would be clear.
His very presence endangered Alamayou.
“Someone’s coming who speaks your language. Then you tell them you didn’t do those things. Even if you did. You get through this and take the life they’re offering you, right? No more thinking of it. No standing at fires or rails, thinking of dying. You hear me? No mamot.”
“No mamot, Philip.”
“I don’t matter. You do. Not because you’re a bloody Abyssinian prince. I forget about that, isn’t it funny? It’s easy, being here with the lot of them, to forget who you are. They’re always going to matter more than us.”
At the fire, Philip thought, there was the moment before I saw you, and the moment after. All they want is what happened, were you held or were you holding someone in it. Chains, whips, bloody hell, I only remember you, the fire around you, your good hand out to me.
“Philip, eyes.”
“I know. Be quiet, would you?”
He wiped his tears, then took Alamayou’s brush and a fresh sheet of drawing paper. “This is going to look like shit.”
When he finished, Philip turned the crude image so Alamayou could see. A square, bars, a tiny, smaller square, more bars. “Prison,” Philip told Alamayou.
Alamayou studied it. It reminded him of the cages in his father’s fortress, where he kept his prisoners chained to the stone walls.
“Ansara,” he told Philip.
“Maybe you understand more than you let on. I want you to know me, Alamayou. Because I won’t always be here. I won’t always be with you.”
He pointed to the image, then to himself. “I was there. Prison. Ansara.”
It came back in a flood, the rusted bars, the trembling cot and the cold stone beneath his bare feet, the fetid smell in the prison corridors and the cell across from his where a drunken old white man passed the time talking loudly of medical procedures he’d done, legal and not. One day the old man introduced himself as Marcus Baker White and told the only man he could see that he was getting out at last thanks to a wartime need for doctors of all stripes. All he had to do was give up a year of his life to go to Abyssinia.
He said he needed an assistant. “Just so I know,” he’d asked Philip through the bars, “you’re no spring-heeled Jack, are you? What did you do?”
“Why ansara?” Alamayou asked him.
“Because there’s something wrong with me that’ll keep me alone all my life. It’s ugly. It’s not love. I wish I were different. And when they find out, I’ll drag you down. So I’m talking to you about me, because I want you to remember me.”
He spoke for a long time, about nothing Alamayou could understand, but he still listened as Philip spoke of ansara. Philip had been in a cage, he understood, or he was going to be, or they were both going to be. Because of the man they called Naismith, probably. The princess seemed good, and the prince seemed sick, and the queen, she’d known his heart for one brief moment, one night. She’d seen two princes, one lost and one who still could be saved. She’d understood him.
Whether Philip’s words were good or bad, safe or dangerous, Alamayou just wanted to stay where he was and listen. After a while, when theirs was the only lit apartment in the ward and Philip had run out of words, Alamayou took his turn. He began to talk, and Philip listened to the Amharic words, about how beautiful Abyssinia was before the war. How Alamayou woke to thunder one day. It was on the morning he and his mother were sent away to Amba Geshen. The day was warm and the blue water of the sky was filled with clouds and birdsong, and the soldiers in his father’s camp, some forty thousand strong, scuttled over the plains below the lip of the cliff to take up spears, muskets, and maces, tie their possessions to their pack animals, and swing themselves atop their mounts. Their grass huts already crackled with the fires they had set to their own homes. It was what his father demanded of his army when he called them to war. Burn where you come from. You’re never coming back. The field should burn, the ashes should turn in the wind and settle to make the soil fertile, and a new crop would grow, and new boys would grow into men who would build new huts until the day they marched off to die, leaving fires in their wake.
He told Philip that his father expected him to be one of those men, but he was too unskilled and too terrified.
“Only my father and mother knew that about me,” Alamayou told him. “Now you hear those words. They hated me for being what I am. I hope you don’t. Because I feel like maybe you know it, too.”
They sat together most of the night. First one, then the other, they took turns listening to the other’s words, sifting the melodies of their voices and the shapes their hands made for meaning, searching for each other in a language they were beginning to understand.
Chapter Ten
6 November 1868
The castle coach brought Alamayou and Philip to the docks at Wapping for the auction of Abyssinian treasures. By the time they arrived there was a line stretching past the shops, down to the street.
The water turned below them as they entered from the Thames at Shadwell. A high wall surrounded the auction site, thirty-five hectares in all and nearly four kilometers of it quay and jetty. Warehouses lined the docks. Stone plinths carved from top to bottom in ammonites and other castoffs from the sea decorated their walls.
The courts, alleys, and the low-lodging houses of London’s waterside poor shone in the new light. Ramshackle storefronts studded the path from Shadwell. Every one of them catered to the sailors and the ships that took them away. Their windows brimmed with quadrants, brass sextons, chronometers, and compasses. Meat was tinned and men were in waistcoats, with canvas trousers and black dreadnaughts. They came from everywhere, down to the slowly rolling sea.
A forest of masts rose in the distance. Tall ship chimneys belched coal smoke clouds that drifted over the many-colored flags of nations. Men with painted faces mixed with fine English gentlemen and ladies, with flaxen-haired Germans and Negroes in a pungent haze of tobacco, spice, coffee, and sweat. Around the perimeter of the queues, benches filled with women and children preparing themselves for voyages away from their husbands and fathers, having been found out as immigrants unwelcome in London.
To live in the city, Alamayou thought, is to risk being sent away.
They made their apologies as they moved between bodies to the front of the queue, where they presented a letter of introduction from Her Majesty to the nearest uniformed man. Then they were escorted through the rest of the line, to the annoyance of the lords and ladies at two Negroes given priority.
Ahead of them was an enormous stage at the edge of the dock, filled from one end to the other with Abyssinian antiquities. A placard soared above it, some forty feet long and at least as high, showing maps of the landscapes, roads, bridges, and rails England had built from Annesley to Meqdala to find its way through the country.
&
nbsp; Alamayou recognized a photograph of Sooroo Pass. He and his mother had trekked it on their weeklong journey from Debre Tabor to Meqdala. Over the course of three long days, they ran out of paths and had to cross the Sooroo over ridges of scrap rock so narrow that they were forced to walk in a single snaking line, with thousand-foot drops on either side of them.
As he walked beneath the image, Alamayou felt the whipping winds all over again, the thorny branches of unyielding trees, the stunned peels of pack animals tumbling over craggy cliffs and down through oceans of cloud to die on the hard earth, amid the pale flowering lichen and stone-splitting tendrils that grew from the cracks toward the sun.
At the sign’s bottom was a broad and stunning panoramic photo from the war of the encamped invasion force at Zoola. A vast and terrible landscape of equipment, weaponry, tents, animals, and people sprinkled throughout like rye seeds.
The photograph presented a stilled moment of impending violence to him, and he turned from it to approach one of the displays of Abyssinian artifacts. Beneath his feet, the dock undulated in time with the sea as it wove into the piers and shuddered the anchored ships in the bay.
He found a crown lying under a sack of broken pottery. It was fashioned from gold and alloys of silver and copper. The cresting waves along its surface were vaguely Arabic and delicately pigmented with glass beads and gilded metals as red as Windsor’s autumn leaves.
His fingers traced the carvings. It had been so long since he’d seen it. His father had removed it from his own head on the day he’d sent Alamayou and Tirroo away, and he’d never put it on again.
“Abat,” he told Philip.
His mother’s things were laid out on rugs. Shawls, silver bracelets, anklets, rings, amulet necklaces of amber and leather, filial pins, and Galla chains. Alamayou touched what was within his reach, the hem of a shamma, then climbed onto the stage with them.
Some men gathered to watch him. “A monkey must climb,” one of them remarked to his fellows’ amusement.
Alamayou retrieved some frayed pillows from behind piles of primitive weaponry that his father had collected, the spears and shields and old rifles that had served no good purpose in the war. He made a base of the pillows, then another on top of the first one.
“But what’s it supposed to be?” one man asked.
“A throne,” Philip said. “His father sat atop it at Meqdala.”
“Here, now, I know who you are, the both of you.”
Men came from everywhere, gathering round in anticipation of a fight.
“Let me tell you,” the man said to Philip, “those pillows shouldn’t fetch a cent for him. Not when there’s men coming home with little to show but scars and a paltry wage. He doesn’t deserve anything. Nor do you.”
The other men cheered and applauded. Beneath them, the boards of the docks keened.
Philip’s anger rose like a heat, but before he could do anything, Alamayou touched his arm. “No.”
He was grateful for Alamayou’s calm. Two Negroes standing in the shadow of the built world hadn’t a chance.
“Don’t let your orphan’s days at Windsor convince you of value you don’t possess,” the man said. “You stumbled into a man’s war. And this one’s a spoil of that war. In a different time you’d both be auctioned off, along with the pillows and trinkets.”
Behind them, above the veil of cheering men, the auction of Abyssinia commenced. It took on the air of a festival. The first item bid upon was a musket.
Philip guided Alamayou away from the voice of the auctioneer asking for barter over the carcass of Abyssinia. “I hope you don’t understand any of this. The raised cards, the bidding for pieces of your life. Yet I fear you do, somehow.”
Alamayou watched as a man standing on the stage reeled words off with the speed of gunshots, his father’s musket raised triumphantly over his head. The audience surged forward, hands waving, calling out words of their own, while onstage the man pointed at them and wrote on a pad. Soon, man by man, their voices fell away to a few, then to one.
The man onstage handed that last remaining fellow the musket. Others made a circle around him as he cried out Tewedros’ name.
“You there!” he yelled, parting the men walling him off from the rest of the dock. They all turned to regard Alamayou and Philip. “Pay close attention now, you kaffirs, you vermin. This is what’s thought of you. Here, come now and see what you’re worth.”
He brought the musket down against the seaworn boards of the dock, again and again until the musket barrel bent and the wooden stock shattered with a dull crack that traveled the air, spoke over the sea and the men, and found Alamayou where he stood.
“Here, then,” the man said as perspiration beaded his brow. He picked up handfuls of the battered musket and handed them up to the stage. “More of Abyssinia to auction off.”
“Don’t look,” Philip said. “Come away before they set their sights on you.”
Alamayou followed him away from the auction and farther out to the pier and the sea. He wondered if it would be far enough.
§
Several ships were anchored in the bay. Small rowers shuttled to the dock, bringing casks, kegs, gifts, and sailors while walking women and the wives left behind waited.
It was there that they met Jonathan, the man Her Majesty’s letter instructed them to find. A mate from the ship Keally Star, he was older, with sun-worn skin and lines around his eyes like the tines of a fork.
“You the translator?” Philip asked him.
“Not me.” Jonathan wandered over to the end of the pier. In the distance, the tall-masted ships gently listed from side to side. “Wait here,” he told Philip. “I have what you came for.”
Alamayou was confused. “Philip?”
“Give me a moment, Alamayou. Just to be sure of what’s happening. Stay here, would you?”
There at the edge of London, Alamayou watched the sea and the small boats bobbing on it. Behind Philip and the sailor that he spoke to so warily was the auction, the photographs of war, and the city. The work of men.
The sea ebbed and made gentle music beneath him, and the men of the dock who’d broken his father’s musket now that his father was safely dead, they didn’t know what he’d come through. The sea looked at me, he thought. The war, England, they look at me still. And I look back.
He wasn’t afraid, to his surprise. He knew the sort of hate that men held for other men. All his life he’d known it. A man looks at everyone, or he looks at no one.
He opened his arms wide to the sea that had brought him where he was. “No sad,” he said, his English words turning Philip around to face him. The new words carried what needed to be said. Philip would understand. “No sad,” he said. “This, enough.”
Remnant echoes of the ships listing into the far docks rose, blending with the call and response of the auction. It all came to them like the water came.
Jonathan walked out to the edge of a stone jetty, holding out his hands for a rope tossed from a small rowboat pulling alongside him. He secured the line around a large boulder and took the hand of a girl climbing out of the boat onto land. The boat returned to its ship while the girl Jonathan helped ashore fell down. He picked her up with little care, and she walked unsteadily behind him as if she’d been at sea too long.
She was dark like them. Young, in her early womanhood, with hair as wiry as a cook’s scrub brush despite efforts to tame it with oil and a band of cotton. She wore a simple English frock in a threadbare nosegay pattern. She was small, spindly, and afraid.
Jonathan brought her to the end of the pier, where Alamayou and Philip gawked at her. He stepped aside while they all regarded each other.
“Tell them,” Jonathan ordered her. “You’re here for the Abyssinian.”
“Servant,” she said. “Wazadar.”
“She speaks Amharic?” Philip
asked.
“Isn’t that why you’ve come?” Jonathan asked impatiently. “To get this one a translator?”
Alamayou touched his chest. “Abisinya.”
She shook her head. “Katanga.”
“She came from the Congo,” Jonathan said. “But she’s been traded many times over. She picks up words, this one. She’ll be of some use. She has been.”
The girl dropped her gaze.
“Traded? How did you come by her?”
“As I said. From the ship out there.”
“You know what I’m asking you.”
“You’re calling me a blackbirder, then. Is that how you came to be here, Layard? From the net to the hold?”
“Look in my pockets and here’s what you’ll find. Papers saying I’m free and papers saying I’m on queen’s business. Unless you’ve got papers of your own that trump me, you’ll be answering to a Negro, like it or not. Now, speak to it. What’s happening here?”
“What’s happening here,” Jonathan said, his face reddening, “is that I’m meeting the task put before me by people the likes of which I never see. All’a them, those prats, they don’t show their faces, do they? They do their business through layer on layer of go-betweens. I can tell you who she is. She’s a black who could see a lot worse if you send her back to that ship out there and you ought to know that better than most, free man or no. She was seized en route from Dahomey, bound for the Indies and the Americas after. The Royal Navy took her under the Act when the ship crossed into our waters. Enough for you?”
The girl spoke up. “Please. I am not go America. Servant. Wazadar. I do for you.”
“Her kin?” Philip asked. “Who’re you taking her away from?”
“Who can say with them?”
“No family,” the girl said. “Me.”
“What’s it to be, then?” Jonthan asked.
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