After the door was shut, the queen gave Parliament’s letter to Philip and Alamayou. The room fell silent while Philip read it.
“Do you understand?” the queen asked him.
Outside the apartment window, the morning came in a slow growing violet sheen to the east. Sliver by sliver, the snow-covered garden and the lawns revealed themselves. The light crept into the room, sliding across the floor and to the painting Alamayou had made for Philip.
“I understand very well,” Philip said.
“Alamayou, do you understand what they wish to do?”
“Yes.”
“Then understand this, as well. We are not here to bemoan, but to think. No one else hears of what we discuss. Now, what do we know?”
“We know the staff is already suspicious that Parliament ruled against us,” the prince said exhaustedly.
“You’ve seen them ferrying tea and food to the soldiers at the gate,” Princess Louise added. “We know where their sympathies lie. It’s not too much to presume that one of them might be speaking to a compatriot in Parliament’s service, or to an MP.”
“Which is to suggest what?” the prince asked.
“That if we choose the option of helping Alamayou escape, Parliament and Naismith will know about it and we’ll be crushed under the weight of scandal.”
“Were we speaking of escape?”
“It’s one choice that bears close scrutiny.” The princess poured tea for herself, her mother, and her brother. “Do you not agree?”
“No,” Leopold said. “No, I don’t. I can’t.”
“We could house Alamayou somewhere near, or send him as far away as we possibly can,” the princess continued. “Maybe not here in London. He’d be found. Peharps that’s true of anywhere on the continent, in time. But if he lost himself in a city we may never see him again. Cities have their ways with strangers. Though is it better that way, I wonder? His fate is certain if he’s found. Maybe it would be better that he disappear, for his sake and our own, in such a way that we never know of him.”
“Country before all,” the prince said. “How can you even speak of this?”
“There is fighting them,” the queen said, quieting her children, “and there’s sending Alamayou away. Any other option brings this monarchy down. Make no mistake. And don’t think we haven’t considered assisting his escape already, and may still. But if we come to that, it will be because nothing else has worked, and we then weigh whether his life is worth the end of our reign.”
“Just bloody stop, all of you!”
Philip crushed Parliament’s letter in his fist. He couldn’t stand any more, listening to them speaking of Alamayou as if he were a chess piece to be moved at their whim. The apartment spun sickeningly and he felt his bile rise. Sadness, regret, even guilt, all of it he saw in the faces of the royals. The queen especially. It only made his anger burn brighter, and when the words came flooding out of him, he didn’t try to stop them.
“Why?” he screamed at the queen. “Why did you make him say what he said? For what? Nothing! Send me away. I don’t care. This is his death and I won’t let you take him!”
“We share your sentiments on this—” the prince began, but Philip cut him off.
“Sentiments? Options? You’re murderers if you let them take Alamayou. On that, make no mistake. I saved your life. I could have let you die. I didn’t. He didn’t. This is a debt you all have to pay back. He didn’t ask to be brought here. He didn’t ask for any of this.”
“And where do you think he’d be if we hadn’t?” the prince said.
“This is difficult enough without our being at each other’s throats,” the princess said. “Our solicitor will be here in the morning, first thing. It’s our queen’s intent to explore every option. You’ve heard her on this. Every damn one. She’ll fight and she’s formidable.”
“More words.” Philip dismissed her with an angry wave of his hand. “In a turn of the earth he’ll be under arrest and on a ship bound for Abyssinia, and you’ll be where? In a castle, eating and sleeping with others tending to you.”
The prince jabbed at the air with his cane. “Now see here—”
“Enough.”
The queen rubbed her temples, trying to ward off the merciless pain growing behind her eyes. While they all argued, a deep resonating shame swelled in her chest, and it would surely burst if Alamayou were to turn from the apartment window and just look at her.
But he hadn’t turned.
“Alamayou?” she asked quietly. “Please, you mustn’t give up. We’re standing with you.”
Alamayou walked past her, past all of them, to the apartment door. He opened it and left without a word.
“Wait!” Philip cried. “Let me come with you—”
The queen held up a hand, stopping him. “Give him time. We’ve much to discuss. Let him breathe free of us, a royal family helplessly flailing about.”
“That’s you,” Philp said. “Not me. I may not be as bloody highborn and smart as the lot of you, but I don’t talk. I act. That’s what he needs now.”
He left to go after Alamayou.
§
Alamayou stood at a parapet atop the Round Tower, looking out at the rolling countryside. The soft chiming he’d heard came from the church he’d stopped at. It was so small, so modest, and yet it was capable of holding so much. Even memories of his old life that shouldn’t find a place anywhere in this new world.
Standing on top of the Round Tower felt no different than standing at the parapet of Meqdala and looking out across the gorge at the cottage on Amba Geshen, the way he’d done the night before the attack began. Chained to its wall as the war moved into place around him, in the form of Abyssinian soldiers at the gate and English soldiers across the Falah, he’d tried to pretend that he was a stranger and not part of any of it. The cottage was just a small place where someone lived. It didn’t mean anything and was hardly worth taking notice of, let alone remembering.
His eyes filled, making the church shimmer in his vision as if it were on fire.
I’m not ready.
There have been times when I thought I was ready. I don’t know what comes after. I’ve never believed what you believe, abat. I don’t believe in heaven, God, or angels living in the clouds. I only believed in the clouds I saw, not yours.
I did believe you once, when you said I was a monster. For so long, I thought you had to be right about me. You were emperor of the visible world. You couldn’t die. What didn’t you know?
Since then, I’ve seen things that someone like me was never meant to see. An unimaginable city. Royals of another country. Castles and a life beyond what I knew. Even you never saw what I’ve seen.
I’ve come to know someone who I matter to. Now I’m not ready to die. But I’m going to. I can feel it.
Maybe I should. Maybe you were right about me after all.
He stepped closer to the parapet. It was wide enough to stand in but low enough to climb easily. Up here, he thought, I’m high enough to end everything. No one has to fight for me anymore. They don’t need to risk everything for someone like me.
The world below pulled at him. It wanted to have him. He climbed up.
You were wrong about so much, abat. But maybe you and anat were right about this. Maybe there’s no home for me anywhere.
He held himself steady as the frigid wind lashed at him. It roared in his ears and erased the gentle ring of the church bells. It took away the dream of the life he thought he could have. Long, full of years, alongside another.
Philip.
We can have it, but you have to live, Alamayou.
He hesitated. The noise in his head felt like the war. Two opposing forces fighting for a foothold that would break the other. On one side, his old life telling him he never should have left on a hopeless search like the one he was on
, for a place to belong.
On the other, too soft to be heard, Philip telling him to be a hard son of a bitch and live. Live like you already have been. Don’t you see? What do you think you’ve been doing since Meqdala fell? Surviving. That’s how life starts. You’re born, you breathe, and it’s a struggle. You eat, and it’s a struggle. And on the way, you learn to care, and love, and suddenly you’re living. Suddenly you want to.
He leaned forward, then back, teasing the world below with the possibility of claiming him. I’ve survived, he thought. I didn’t want to be there among them, crossing Abyssinia for months, leaving the shores of my land for the first time in my life to float on top of the sea, all the way here. I didn’t know where I wanted to be. Just somewhere deep and lost.
I was so scared, abat. Anat. The way you always saw me. A scared, weak monster. Men crawled like insects through the masts and ropes of that ship. Blades of cloud drifted by on their journey to other places. Philip told me things I couldn’t understand. “Home.” Philip’s hands couldn’t find a way to make me understand that word, not until they swept the deck of the Feroze, then the ceiling of sky, and then pointed at my heart. ‘Gone, Alamayou.’ He waved it all away. My whole life from then on. Everything.
He was wrong, anat. I didn’t lose everything. I didn’t realize it then, but up here, right now, I see it. If I stayed with you, if there’d been no war, I would have jumped from Meqdala, or the cliffs at Jedda. You would have killed me one way or the other, abat. And anat would have watched. Don’t think I don’t know.
Death stopped for me when I finally left the both of you.
§
When Philip found him, Alamayou was standing near the parapet. Philip’s heart raced, thinking Alamayou was there again. At that place where jumping seemed the only way left to him.
“I’m right here,” he said. “Behind you.”
“I know you are, Philip.”
He joined Alamayou and together they took in the dawning countryside.
“I was afraid when I saw you just now,” Philip told him. “I thought you were going to jump.”
“I still could.”
“Then you’d be dragging my sorry self right down with you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Philip took hold of his hand. “Try me.”
“I have. Twice.”
“That’s right. You have.” He let go. “And I’m going to trust that you make the same decision now.”
As the sun rose higher, it opened up more of the land. Dusty roads frozen over, leading to small clusters of villages with chimney smoke curling into the cold sky. Small writhing dots on the white hills that were herds of cows, searching for green shoots beneath the snow. Tiny figures in carts, making their way.
“I’ve always had fear,” Alamayou said, “since I came here, that it’s a dream and I never really left. I think it started at the rail that night.”
The black liquid shadows of birds passed over the Round Tower, breaking into his remembrance. They flew beneath the rising light, and when they dipped in a mass down to the ground and the church, they resembled falling bodies.
“I was so sick.”
“I remember,” Philip said, wrapping his arms around himself to ward off the deep chill. “You had a horrible fever and I thought you’d die.”
“You never left me, even to eat. I couldn’t understand what anyone wanted of me. I looked to you, as if you could say any of it in words I could understand. You moved your hands and gave me my second English word, after ‘home,’ ‘drink,’ when they brought me medicines. Remember?”
“I do. You were as stubborn then as you are now. Practically had to pour it down your throat.”
“I asked for new words and you would find one that you could make with your hands. We learned. Stars were fingers painting dots on the ceiling. Sleep, eat.”
“That’s how we figured out how to speak to each other. Listen to you now.”
“At the rail that night, I thought I saw my father and mother.”
They’d been at sea for weeks. On the night before they reached London, the seas were calmer. The Feroze and the other ships had crossed into a different place, one where the air moved in a new way. Fog covered everything. It clung to the tops of the waves.
“I was still sick with the fever and I couldn’t stay in the cabin anymore. I went up into the last bit of light, thinking that maybe I might see the place they were taking me. I thought it would look like Meqdala because I’d never seen anywhere else. It would look like abat’s fortress. The world would look like everything he’d ever built because he could reach that far. Then I remembered, he couldn’t reach past his own death.
“Everywhere was the sea, but I couldn’t tell. The waves swept past and the fog took it all away. There was no end to anything, no matter where I looked. I couldn’t even see the other ships.
“I thought I heard someone calling my name. I know now, it was the last of the fever, making my mind sick the way it made my body sick. But I thought I heard anat. Then I thought I saw her.”
He closed his eyes and she was there again. A shuffling figure struggling to walk across the deck to him, burned to a twist of a human being.
“Alamayou,” Philip said. “You never told me. I would have said it was all the fever. I would have helped you understand.”
“I saw her walk past me to the rail. I followed her because she asked me to. She used her hands to tell me, like you did. I thought it meant she loved me.
“But when I got to the rail, I saw abat in the water. He was waiting for her and for me. The clouds parted; they made room for us. He floated on top of the waves like a piece of Meqdala after the rockets. ‘Come with us,’ they said. It was so easy to believe, Philip. It’s what they’d say to me if they could. It’s what they said in the fire.”
He put his hand on the parapet stone, steadying himself against the feeling of falling. It was still rippling through him.
“I could see how easy it would be.
“But then I heard something on deck, and I knew that the new sound was true. It was real, not the fever. I turned and saw you. You held out your hand for me, the way you did before. The hand that told me things. I saw your black hands, Philip, reaching for me before I went after my parents.
“When I turned back to the rail, they were both gone. There was just a bit of light, and if they’d been real, they would have seen that I stayed behind, on deck. They’d see me choosing the world to come, not them and their white dream.
“I want more time,” Alamayou said. “I don’t want to die.”
“And you won’t. I swear to you. Come inside before you get sick again. God knows what you’ll see then.”
He climbed down from the parapet and they went back to the apartment, where the royals waited for them.
“You look cold,” the queen said.
“I was,” Alamayou told her.
FOUR
Chapter Seventeen
1 January 1901
The English Landscape Garden at Clermont was a maze of crisscrossing lanes, trees, and carefully tended swaths of greenery. Floral sculptures in the shapes of animals, spiraling trellises, and patterns that curled like the chambers of seashells lined picturesque walking paths. A stranger to the grounds could easily lose his way and wander for hours, and Rabbi Ariel was every bit the stranger.
Princess Louise slipped her arm through his and led him around the gentle slope of the lake, every so often breaking the serene quiet of their stroll with a gesture at one of the neighboring estates.
Ahead of them, a cluster of children raced through the trees and around a small pond, sending the geese into panicked, skittering flight across the top of the still surface.
“Orphans,” Princess Louise said. “We bring them here from time to time. A bit of beauty and peace in a turbulent life is necessar
y, don’t you think?”
“I do, and what better place can there be? It’s beautiful here.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
They paused to rest on a bench. “Do you see that estate?” she asked. “It’s home to Helena, my brother Leopold’s widow. Our mother purchased it for her. She’s a good woman. She loved Leo when no other woman would have him. His blood flaw, you know, and how it swam upstream through the royal line. It’s common knowledge now, but not then. Everyone else found the thought of his disease repellant. Not her. They had two good years together.”
She smiled as a valet struggled to catch one of the younger girls, a towheaded beauty, in a game of tag. It only took the valet a moment to pull up short, huffing while the girl rolled on the grass contentedly.
From their spot beneath the lakeside rotunda, Rabbi Ariel admired the scene before him. Across the lake was an amphitheater where old plays were put on by Oxford’s finest thespian classes beneath boughs of ringed tree groves. The lake fed canals and dams and was as quaint as any enchanted forest in one of the children’s bedtime books. Sighing beds of reeds, cattails, and cottony wisps undulated in the gently lapping water. The lake washed to the foot of the grounds and moistened the roots of ancient elms.
All was silent. Rabbi Ariel heard only the wind threading the leaves and the occasional giggle. The children had continued on and were far away across the grounds.
“What will happen now?” he asked.
“Parliament will have its say. And my guess is they’ll demand that their original sentence be carried out, that Alamayou should be sent back to Abyssinia.”
“You do believe it’s him, then. The man who speaks to you from a prison cell, who told you everything from the shape of Windsor to the meaning of an orange. You believe he’s really Alamayou.”
The valet almost had the girl but, clever child, she feinted right and left the helpless man grasping at air. She turned and laughed as the valet took a seat on a bench and pretended to pass out.
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