“Well done,” Philip said proudly.
Just past ten, they entered the Private Audience Room, a high-ceilinged chamber in the South Wing. The light dispensed shadows across the modest throne occupied by Queen Victoria. She wore the widow’s weep. Blacks, coals, silk-and-bomberdine bodice, a matching grosgrain ample skirt. The crown was her only embellishment.
Princess Louise and Prince Leopold sat on either side of her. A table had been placed in the middle of the room, separating the royals from the summoned. A long black cloth covered it, but Alamayou noticed the outlines of something beneath.
“Thank you,” Alamayou began, “for—”
The queen cut him off abruptly. “Show him.”
Reluctantly, Princess Louise removed the cloth, revealing a coiled whip and a length of chain.
Alamayou could feel them staring at him, trying to piece him together from what they knew, or thought they knew. A man looks at everyone.
He returned the queen’s fixed gaze.
“This is what’s said of you.” The queen held up a newspaper. “In the Telegraph, and in the halls of Parliament. What have we done to bring this upon our monarchy? We took in a young man orphaned by war, not a monster.”
She shook the paper furiously. “Had we known, we would have left you to your fate.”
“Do we blame Alamayou for his father’s actions?” the princess asked. “He wasn’t the emperor.”
“We are aware,” the queen responded coldly.
The princess fell quiet.
“We don’t hold you responsible for your father’s actions, Alamayou. Only yours. Girl, does he understand us?”
Seely translated.
“Yes.”
“Naismith has recommended that you be brought before Parliament to answer for war crimes,” the queen continued. “He says there are reasonable grounds. It is clear he does not trust you, but we can engage a solicitor and argue you as an orphan of war. We have protected others, and successfully so. We did not cast them out like so many unwanted toys, no matter what you may have been told of us. But the war and your father’s heinous acts complicate things. We are not sorry to have offered you shelter. We want to believe you are blameless for all that happened in Abyssinia. But you must clear yourself with us, and then with them. Or else you are lost. Are you prepared to do this?”
“Yes,” Alamayou said. “But you must promise to keep Philip safe, no matter what happens to me.”
The queen’s face grew red as Seely spoke Alamayou’s words. “Are you demanding from us? You are here by our charity, not by right. You’ve no basis to bargain with me like a fruit seller. Philip serves no purpose, and worse, do we understand he was in jail?”
The prince appeared stricken. A silence like death fell over the Private Audience Room.
Princess Louise reached for her mother’s hand. The queen pulled it away. “How dare you?”
“Then I can’t speak of what you want,” Alamayou told her. “Send me back.”
She sat as if made of granite. “Understand how easy it would be for us to turn our back on you. Clearly, this is what we are renowned for. Had we no heart, you both would be dead in the rubble of your country or the workhouses of ours. We are many things. Colonizer, cold, distant. A mother to regret. But we are not the murderer of your father, and we are not the murderer of your mother. Are you?”
Alamayou remained silent.
“Your insolence will not be tolerated.” She summoned her secretary. “Have their things packed,” she said. “They depart Windsor in the morning. Make the necessary arrangements and inform Parliament that no hearing will be necessary.”
A pall of quiet descended after she left. The hall filled with her absence.
“What have you done?” Prince Leopold gasped as he stood from his chair.
“I fear you have put yourself too far away to reach, Alamayou,” Princess Louise said.
Seely began her dutiful translation. Alamayou turned and left.
“He understands well enough,” the princess said.
§
In an hour, servants under Simon’s careful supervision descended on the apartment. A valet placed two simple cases atop the bed and stuffed Alamayou’s meager belongings inside. When he finished, he set to Philip’s, then left them alone.
“Are you insane?” Philip snapped as Alamayou sat sullenly in a chair at the window. “I don’t matter. Why can’t you get that through your damn head? Why would you do that? I’m nothing! A kaffir. What is my life, Alamayou? What’s it ever been? Do you even know? I’m lower than a servant, and let me tell you of that life. I was born, I’ll eat my way through a handful of days, and I’ll die. And that’s all. I’m not needed, you heard her say it. For you to risk your life for the likes of me, bloody Christ, I don’t belong here in the first place.”
Alamayou removed Philip’s clothes from the case. “You don’t leave. Only me. Write for me. Write to her.”
“Don’t do this,” Philip told him. “Not for me. It’s not worth it, Alamayou. This isn’t my home. There is no home.”
“Write.”
Seely spoke Alamayou’s words while Philip quilled them to paper, then they walked to the closed door of the Blue Room.
Alamayou rapped softly. “Please,” he said to the wood, before slipping the letter under the door.
7 December 1868
Forgive my words. They come too fast and in fear. There are things I can say and things I can’t.
I’m scared to go back and die, but I will if I have to. Philip must be safe. He saved me. He brought me all the way here to a new life. He’s the only one who cares for me.
Say whatever you want of me. Monster. Murderer. But never say Philip serves no purpose. That he doesn’t belong. He belongs where he can live, and I can know he lives.
Please see to him and I’ll do whatever you ask of me. I was a stranger before him. He took me in.
Alamayou
They went to the great hall and sat beneath Alamayou’s portrait of two princes. The light of the hearth cast shadows that found its ornate chestnut frame.
The hours left them. In time, Alamayou and Seely fell asleep and Philip watched over them. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, when he’d tried to imagine the moment he and Alamayou successfully bridged that damned ocean of language and were finally able to understand each other. Not this day, certainly. A runaway slave, talk of love, and defying the bloody queen of England.
Least of all, that Alamayou’s first words before the queen were spoken to protect not himself, but me.
§
The queen came to the hall deep in the night with Princess Louise in tow. She wore a simple dress of gray that flowed across the floor and small leather shoes that made a whisking sound with each step. On her chest was an unusual talisman of a brooch, Tartan ribbon, thistle fashioned from gold, and a pair of strung animal teeth.
The princess guided her mother to a simple chair beneath the portraits.
“Whatever happens,” the queen said, “you will stand before us. You will tell us the truth. And we will see to it, no matter the outcome, that Philip Layard is safe and provided for. Is that sufficient for you and your sense of grandeur?”
“Yes. Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“He’s that important to you?”
“Yes.”
“More important than your own safety.”
“Yes.”
The queen stared at him, though her eyes seemed to go straight through him, through the walls and on into the world, to a place no one else could see.
“Then it’s time, Alamayou.”
Alamayou turned to see Philip. He wanted to be sure of him now.
“I’m here.” Philip held out his hands, one against the other.
“Not alone.” Alamayou smiled.
“Not alone.”
Alamayou closed his eyes. Abat, anat, I’ve held you for too long. I can’t carry you anymore.
“Know this,” he said as Seely began her translation. “God did not make me like them.”
Chapter Twelve
7 December 1868
“My father loved you, Your Majesty. He called you his Christian sister.”
The royals listened intently as Seely kept up with him. The queen’s secretary wrote it all down.
“But my father wanted guns,” Alamayou continued, “and cannons, and men who knew how to build them. He was always at war with the Moslem hordes in Egypt and the Red Sea lands. You said no to him. You sent men to tell him, no. He killed the man who spoke and made the rest prisoners. He let one Englishman sail away to tell you, so you’d know how strong he was. How he wasn’t afraid of you. He hated you then.
“After that, there were a few years of quiet. No one came from England. I didn’t trust the silence from the English. No one did. In those years my father was mad with rage, always. You ignored him.
“I was fourteen. I knew my father’s anger very well. I knew what it could make him do.”
“We embarrassed him?” Prince Leopold sat back in frustration. “He steals away two years from innocent diplomats sent on our behalf in friendship, and we take back his son. Mother, I’m sympathetic, but we can’t go before Parliament with this.”
“We will hear it all,” the queen told her son. “Do not interrupt further. Alamayou, continue.”
“When he knew your army landed in Annesley Bay,” Alamayou went on, “he and his soldiers rode to his fortress at Meqdala. He told my mother and me that we weren’t allowed to be there with him. Instead, he sent us to a small cottage on the next mountain, Amba Geshen.
“He banished us. My mother, because she hated him. You have to understand why. I didn’t know the reason until we were on Amba Geshen. I’d always assumed it was because he was what he was. A cruel man. A soldier. But the women of men like my father’s generals wanted those kinds of men, who took power and took them. Or they were given in marriage by their tribes for peace with my father, and they learned to love their husbands, or at least to suffer quietly.
“My mother did neither.
“One night on Amba Geshen, she told me that my father took her from her family, across mountains to his capital at Debre Tabor. At night he tied her to a bed and beat her until she stopped moving. That’s how they made me. She was thirteen. I was her son and I didn’t even know how young she was.”
He glanced at Seely. Her eyes were closed as she spoke his words into the royals’ language. He wondered how it felt for her to translate his mother’s life, and whether she heard her own slave story in the theft of his mother’s girlhood.
“He sent me away to Amba Geshen because I failed him as a son and a prince. I wasn’t a soldier. I wasn’t brave and could never kill a man. When he looked at me, he saw the end of his bloodline. At least, before the war. After the attack began, he came to know me, and then he saw something worse.
“It took us a week of walking to reach Meqdala and Amba Geshen from Debre Tabor. My mother, me, a guard, and a slave. I could see the fortress gate from far off. The fortress overlooked the Jidda Gorge and the plains beneath the Delanta Plateau. The fortress itself was cut from the mountain. A cavern at its bottom was stitched with iron and tied in a gate bearing the crest my father had forged—the David star and the Christian cross. My father created the crest himself. It came out of a dream he had of all the tribes of Abyssinia, sewn together by his own hands.
“It awed me that my father could build something like that. It made my father the man he was. To break and build from stone, you have to know stone, be stone. He told me, ‘Stone holds no life but the dead, hard past.’ That’s what he was. Dead and hard, so his country could be built on top of him and not collapse.
“The guard brought instructions from my father. When we got to Amba Geshen and the cottage where we would live, we found a long pole lying alongside it. The guard erected it near the cottage door after attaching an old oil lantern to its top. When he lit it, the lamp light brushed the tops of the mahogany trees and danced across the cottage roof.
“‘Why do we need this?’ my mother asked him. ‘It’s not inside the hut and its light is too dim. It’s too high to be useful.’ But in a moment we saw a flame as small as a candle ignite in Meqdala, atop the next peak. As it flickered, I saw the shape of a window. Someone there lit it in response to the lamp burning above us. When he saw it, our guard lowered his lamp and put it out.
“The guard gave my mother a note, then brought a great chain into the cottage. He fit a manacle to her ankle and hammered it until it would fit. He ignored her when she ordered him to stop. He was doing what my father told him to do. He didn’t have to listen to the queen anymore.
“My mother read the note, then handed it to me. It was in my father’s writing.
“‘Each day Alamayou will demand of you, “obey your husband, serve him, die for him.” If you say you will do these things, if you say you love me, you can sleep like a woman. If not, Alamayou will beat you and put you in chains. This is a taste of it. Decide if it suits you. The guard shall light the torch to say that this is so. You are my wife now, and Alamayou is my son, or you’re nothing.’
“The guard drove a stake into the floor of the cottage. When he tugged at it, it stayed in place. He fastened the chain to it. It would attach to the manacle that would go around my mother’s leg each night. Next to it he lay a thick length of knotted horsehair. A whip.
“My mother went and sat at the cliff with her legs dangling over the edge. So close to the drop. I went to her and told her I wouldn’t do it.
“From below, white clouds rose as if they were boiling over a fire. They were filled with gray, and with light. They swelled higher, and soon they covered the whole gorge between Amba Geshen and Meqdala, where my father and his army prepared for war with you.
“Lightning flashed in the clouds and the air smelled like burning metal. The skin on my arms tingled. A drop of rain hit me from below, then another.
“‘The winds,’ my mother said. ‘They drive the storms like horses. My tribe is Lasa, and they told me stories as a girl. To see it now is a wonder. A dream. My people call it the “white dream.”’
“She said, ‘Whatever happens to us, think of me here where I will always be happy. The clouds take everything away. One day, you will call and I will not answer. I will be gone. Look for me in the clouds.’
“She went inside the cottage, sat on the floor, and put the chain on. She held up the whip for me to take. I told her no. She said she’d never obey him and she’d never love him. I went to the guard and told him I wouldn’t, not ever. I wouldn’t hurt her.
“There was a slave with us. His name was Rassam. He was gentle. Over our time on Amba Geshen, he taught me to draw and paint. I remember the first thing I made, the clouds. I told Rassam about them, the upward rain, the lightning in the gorge below me. I told him it felt like standing on top of a storm. He was in awe. He was so grateful that I’d told him. No one had ever been like that with me, until one was, here. It matters more than I can tell you.
“He showed me how to use a stick of pitch and a torn parchment. While I worked on my first drawing of the clouds, he made a drawing of me. My face in profile and my gaze out to the land. ‘Facing the present and the future,’ he said. Like a prince would. I looked so sure.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone. He knew that. He didn’t care that I wasn’t like other Abyssinian men.
“It wasn’t love. Just…not hate. Just one person who didn’t regret me. Even a slave.”
He looked at Philip as the tears came, and he saw Philip’s kindness, but something more, that made him want to burst with relief. Pride.
“You understand what it is that you admit to,” Prince Leop
old asked him.
“Yes.”
“Mother—”
“We are listening,” the queen said. “Only that.”
“My father found out that the slave—that Rassam cared for me, and that I didn’t kill him for it. He found out that I wouldn’t whip my mother. I thought it was the guard who told my father everything. But I was wrong.”
He smiled, a sad and crooked thing. “Even in chains, my mother hated the thought of me. More than the thought of my father. My father found out about Rassam from my mother. She’d sent the guard to him, to say that I was shaming both of them. On your Easter, just before the war started, my father brought us back to Meqdala. He sent my mother into the fortress and took me to a peak at the edge of the Beshilo Gorge, away from Meqdala, away from everyone. I remember looking behind me at the far point of Delanta sloping down into the valley. Wurq-Waha, like a scar across the land. I saw Meqdala’s peaks hidden by these low, watery clouds. The light was high and the air was clean. Everything was so beautiful, so still and perfect.
“I thought he was going to kill me.
“My father stood on the wide ledge of Selassie peak, holding a telescope to his eye. This was his lookout point. It’s where he waited for your army to come. ‘There,’ he said. He handed me the telescope and showed me the end to look through, and where to direct its eye. ‘There you see the English, come to kill me.’
“What I saw stunned me. I’d never looked through a telescope before. It made a circle that drained the skies of color, like storm times. It brought the Beshilo Gorge to me. I saw your army everywhere.
“To come so far across my entire country and find us, you did things I didn’t know could be done. You had to cut roads and rails into the ground. There were more men than I’d ever seen in one place. You leveled the whole world to kill us.
“I put the lens down. My father asked me what I saw. A sea of red. That’s the only thing I could compare it to. He said he wasn’t afraid, just tired. ‘I’m weary of looking out across my country,’ he said, ‘waiting for God’s hand to make itself known. I haven’t seen it in anything. Why is that? I brought this country under God. But I stand here now, and I feel nothing. No joy. All these years, I’ve waited for nothing. I prayed for a true wife, a true son. Only now do I see God’s hand, and look at what it is. A red vein of ten thousand murderers. No one will ever know me. Only a story with my name in it.’
The Night Language Page 17