The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

  I’m keeping it. I’ve earned the right, she says.

  Kidane’s laugh is mocking. The right? Who gives you the right to take what’s mine? He runs his hands through his disheveled hair and drops to his haunches, his arms draped over his knees. He sits like that, staring at the garden in frustrated silence.

  I have a right, Kidane. She looks down at him. Who do you think has been getting these supplies ready for your men? Who’s getting the scarves and blankets and water for you? She stops and swallows. I’ve been earning this for a long, long time.

  It has been raining and the air is damp. It holds Aster’s last words suspended in the space between the couple like broken leaves in search of rest.

  What has she earned more than the rest of us? The cook mutters under her breath. Who’s doing all the work?

  My father bled on that cape and you’re mocking his sacrifice for this country. Kidane shoots to his feet and points in her face. He is furious, dangerously close to lunging at her.

  I have bled when I shouldn’t, she says. She takes a step closer to him as if she wants to push her head against his chest. She is speaking in that steady, quiet tone she has used since she put on the clothes. It is the same tone she used when ordering Berhe to open the gate so she could leave before dawn yesterday. The same softness with which she spoke to the cook when, coming back, she said, Why don’t you ever sit with me and eat, like we did as girls? To Kidane, she adds, Did you think I’d let you forget?

  She never sees anyone but herself. The cook pushes a fist into the beans. Things don’t change just because she wants them to.

  Kidane shakes his head. They say you were in the mountains with Buna, that you’re trying to mobilize on your own. He bends so their faces are close. You can’t be that foolish, can you?

  He looks both worn out and predatory beneath the light falling against the window to reflect back on his face.

  Aster contemplates this man in front of her. Finally, she speaks: I’ve been doing what Empress Menen asked of me and every other woman in this country. Shouldn’t we be doing something too? Or is this only your country? I got two new guns for you. The cook made extra medicines. Other women are bringing more donkeys and baskets. Isn’t that what you need?

  New guns? From where?

  The Mauser, my gun that I came with when I married you, Aster says. Where is it? My father taught me to shoot with that gun. My mother made bullets for it in the last war. Give it to me.

  The cook shakes her head and laughs softly. You see, she says to Hirut, he did it to her first.

  Kidane raises a hand to strike her. I haven’t beat you in a long time, he says, but I’ll do it now.

  She grabs his hand and flattens his palm to her cheek. Do it, she says, her voice growing louder. I’ve earned this cape, you can’t tell me I haven’t, you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten everything, you can’t tell me those things didn’t happen. I’ve earned this, that’s why you’re still in my bed, that’s why you love me, that’s why you keep coming back after all those others you think I don’t know about, because you know who you married. And you haven’t even asked me about our son’s grave. I went there, and I slept on his grave for three days without you, alone. You couldn’t even remember it was his birthday, his second. Just like you couldn’t even make it back from one of your precious meetings with the emperor to see him die. I was the one who went to the church alone, on my knees, begging God for him to live. Just like I was alone the day he died. I’ve earned this cape, I’m not giving it back. Hit me. Go ahead and see what I’ll do.

  She stops, breathless, draped in that deep blue shade of early dawn.

  Kidane cups her face in his hands and raises it toward his. He speaks low but the voice carries: You can cry about the past but those Italians are near the border. Dress up like a soldier all you want, but it doesn’t change anything. You’ll serve my men like the cook serves you. You’ll be an example to the other women. You’ll follow my orders. You’ll carry my wounded and bury my dead. You’ll take care of those men who trust me to lead them, those men who’ll die for me. You’ll go out there and do it again and again until I say you can stop. Everything I owe to anyone, everything, goes to my men. From now on, until the day I die.

  Kidane drops his hands, spins on his heels, and walks into the house. Soon, the light comes on in his office.

  THE FIGURE APPEARS first as a dot between the two lines of the horizon, a twist of wind and dust that slides across the valley. There is nothing in what Hirut sees that speaks of a man running so hard his heart might burst. There is nothing that speaks of bone and flesh and all those things that weld a body to the earth. And so Hirut, filling jugs of water at the well, only watches, curious, while he comes closer.

  By the time he gets to her, he is breathing too hard to speak. He taps his bony chest. Dejazmach Kidane, where is he? he asks. He has the gaunt, hungry look of a fervent priest. He bends over, coughs. Where is he?

  He left this morning with his men, she says. They’re training, she adds.

  And then they hear the drums, deep, booming thuds ricocheting from valley to sky to mountain to sink between them, crackling with insistence. The drumming is syncopated, spaced in increments that tell Hirut they were relaying a message she has not yet learned to decode.

  Go home, he says. If you see him before I do, tell him Worku’s looking for him, it’s urgent.

  There comes another drumbeat, this one so loud it is a monstrous roar in a swirl of echoes.

  There’s raw panic in Worku’s narrow face. Tell Weizero Aster and everyone else to get to the mountains. Go to the armies, they’ll protect you. Find Kidane’s men. Hurry. And don’t forget to tell them you heard it from me. My name is Worku. Then he turns and rushes back up the hill and disappears.

  She rushes back to the house, propelled by thunderous sound.

  I HEARD IT, but I can’t believe it. Is it true? Aster strides through the compound, still dressed in the cape and jodhpurs, moving into the stable, then the courtyard. We have to tell him, she shouts. We have to find a way to let him know. They’re here! They’ve crossed the border!

  Hirut stands in the courtyard watching Aster spin and call for her husband. In her head are the words she cannot dislodge: The war is here, the war is here, the foreigners are coming. Her heart hammers violently.

  It’s true? The cook dashes out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her dress. She rushes to Hirut and shakes her. Is she right? Worku came?

  Hirut nods, blinking back the sunlight. She passed frightened groups of boys and girls to get back here. She passed vendors hurrying from the mercato, children scampering back to their homes, women dropping their firewood and water gourds, plows and sticks, to race into their huts. She passed old men with spears and rifles running toward the mountains near Debark where Kidane is training his men. She passed young boys and girls skipping toward the river with their slingshots. When she burst into the compound, there was Berhe staring wide-eyed at the gate, a rusted spear in one hand, his walking stick in the other, ready to attack.

  We have to go to him, Aster says as she takes the cook’s arm. She looks around, sliding her hand down to grip the cook’s. It’s come, she says, intertwining their fingers. You’ll stay. Her voice grows steadier. Her gaze on the other woman is firm now. You promised, do you remember that day? I need you here. Her face suddenly crumbles around a thought. They won’t treat you well. Then she turns toward the stable. We have to pack up and leave now!

  I’ll get Buna ready but you can’t ride her, the ground’s too wet from the rain, Berhe says.

  It’s dry, Aster shouts over her shoulder as she races to go into Kidane’s office. It’s dry or else these ferenjoch wouldn’t have been able to cross into our country. It’s not wet. Get her ready.

  And then the cook is dragging crates and bags onto the veranda, and Hirut is staggering under a large sack of grains she is taking out of the kitchen.

  They crossed the border, Aster repeats, stunned. So
the war is here.

  Interlude

  Time has collapsed and there is only this: an invasion. Haile Selassie reads the telegram again and stares into the stunned face of his adviser. He doesn’t want to ask, How? He cannot bring himself to say, Like this? He can only look at the piece of paper and say, The Gash River was where Menelik marked the border with Eritrea forty years ago. This is what Italy remembers when it thinks of her defeat forty years ago. He thinks: My father took me to this river and pointed to it with pride and also reminded me that some called it the Mareb. I was once a small boy standing at its edge, looking down at its brown waters, bored. He looks up and he folds the telegram and creases its edges shut.

  Leave us, he says.

  He turns to face the window and watch the sun push darkness aside. He knows the Gash. He knows that it is an insignificant body of water that begins near Asmara and borders Ethiopia. It is 400 kilometers but it is not the Nile. It is not the Red Sea. It is not even a major tributary binding trade routes and merging cities. It is nothing. No more than a trickling stream in wet seasons. It is Emperor Menelik’s forty-year-old demarcation separating Eritrea from Ethiopia. But it is just a feeble line, worth no more than the dirt around it. It is nothing, the emperor tells himself, trying to believe it as he watches dawn filter through this black night. It is nothing.

  Just beyond the emperor’s office door stands a guard who has pledged his life to protect him. His wife waits in their room, praying. His advisers are in the conference room gathering information. He is alone, there is no one here. But it is 3 October 1935 and at five a.m. of this long day, Emilio De Bono entered Ethiopia by crossing the Gash River. It is now five twenty and his three columns have been marching on the emperor’s land for twenty minutes. There are reports of planes dropping leaflets telling his people to rebel against him. Those leaflets say that his cousin, Iyasu, is the true emperor of Ethiopia. Those leaflets call him, Haile Selassie, an impostor and a lie. Across his country, his people are stepping out of their homes and gathering paper scattered like errant seeds. The war is here. It has crept in. It is marching toward him without so much as a formal declaration. The humiliation is a thick-boned, heavy-fleshed intruder. It holds him tight and he cannot breathe.

  Photo

  Half his uniformed body is cut out of the frame, so no one will ever know that in his disappeared hand, Ettore, too, holds a camera. The photojournalist includes, instead, the endless columns of other soldiers who march just behind Ettore, their eager faces beaming beneath their helmets. All are waving at the camera while squinting, the sun flaring in translucent bubbles over their heads. All have knapsacks and rifles, thick ammunition belts are strapped across their chests. They are the image of youth and earnestness, their cruelty still hidden by enthusiasm and patience, submerged by gleeful captions. On the back of the picture, Ettore has written his name in sturdy block letters, then: l’invasione. And the date: 3 ottobre 1935, XIII. In faint pencil, erased but not completely, he has written: Guerra!

  The newspapers claim that one hundred thousand ferenjoch crossed the Mareb River in the predawn dark of 3 October 1935. That they marched in a three-column formation, infantrymen followed by mules, then construction workers, then lorries with supplies. The newspapers say that planes flew overhead and dropped leaflets telling villagers to surrender peacefully and be treated as allies. The newspapers say the soldiers marched to Axum and took the city without a single fired bullet. They like to say that all who led Ethiopia’s armies were obedient to their emperor and let the ferenj invaders trespass further onto sovereign soil, a symbol of Italian aggression. They claim that after forty years of humiliation, Adua was finally, proudly, taken by the Italians on 5 October 1935 and the tiny, nondescript village welcomed the invaders with bowed heads and ululations.

  This is the way it has been written, so this is the way it has been remembered. But what Hirut knows, sitting in that train station so many years later, shifting to move further into the shrinking afternoon light, is that when those carnivorous invaders crossed the Gash River to make their way toward Axum, the three-column formation separated, and the lines were broken and in between those spaces, Ethiopians stepped in and began to fight. Because what the newspapers and memory have failed to say is that you do not bring one hundred thousand men into a country in graceful strides. You do not send hundreds and hundreds of donkeys and lorries and laborers to follow them without incident. Because one hundred thousand men, however ravenous they might be for this beautiful land, can never total the numbers of Ethiopians intent on keeping their country free, regardless of mathematics.

  KIDANE TEARS OUT THE ARTICLE WITH ITS BLAZING HEADLINE AND photograph from the front page and holds it closer. The picture depicts the Italian army as a single mass of camouflage and steel. The invasion it announces is a deliberate performance meant to be seen, meant to watched, meant to serve as visible proof of a braggart’s strength. Kidane looks down the hill on the outskirts of Kossoye where he has based his camp, gazes toward a series of huts still tranquil in the early-morning fog. Ethiopia’s men are fighters, but they are being told not to fight as these Italians cross the border onto soil Haile Selassie says is no-man’s-land. They’ve been told by the emperor to let the enemy in so the world can see which country is the aggressor. Those are his orders, but in his father’s war, the kind of war Kidane was trained to fight, the invaders would have been attacked immediately. They would have fallen beneath bullets and spears, their bones broken by the hands of vengeful men. There would have been no time for them to bomb the cities of Adua and Adigrat and kill women and children.

  Kidane spits the dust collecting at the back of his throat. Nearly 300 kilometers separate him from the invaders, but the Italians will arrive quickly with their convoys and artillery unless they are stopped. Aklilu and his other men are already surveilling the area, practicing what they will need to do soon enough. They are shielded from view by large stones and shrubbery, by clusters of trees that dot these rocky slopes. Just below him, an old woman stoops over her walking stick, a hand on the shoulder of a young girl in a ragged shirt as long as a dress. There is no way to explain to someone like her that there is a large patch of land in this country that supposedly belongs to no one anymore, a strip of earth called no-man’s-land that cannot be claimed by king or farmer, a ghostly region squeezed between two borders, opening a path to death, like a disease.

  Kidane knows the Italians will declare their first victory in Adua, that city where they were first shamed during his father’s generation. They will try to rewrite the memory of that day forty years ago, in 1896, when they were brought to their knees then forced to prostrate themselves before proud Ethiopian warriors. This is all for Adua, for that place that is more than a place. They have come to rewrite history, to alter memory, to resurrect their dead and refashion them as heroes.

  Kidane looks again at the photograph. Sunlight blazes on a group of men just behind the front columns. They are ascari, those soldiers from Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and even Ethiopia fighting for the Italians. Even in the slight blur of movement, it is easy to see their crisp new uniforms. Those new rifles and ammunition belts. Kidane stiffens. When the time comes, his men will be able to count on speed and their familiarity with the area surrounding Gondar. They can have faith in the benevolence of villagers. They can rely on the monks living in caves, can demand assistance from those hermits who have pledged a life free from human contact. But nothing except skill and surprise can help Kidane and his men against the ascari who know as much as they do about this terrain, who can force villagers and monks into submission, and can bend the same rain and fog in their direction. Aklilu approaches and motions behind him toward the narrow trail that brought them to this plateau. Kidane points in the opposite direction. Aklilu understands. They cannot use even the faintest semblance of a path. Every step they take from now on will have to be erased, their presence rendered invisible to an enemy as calculating as they.

  IN KIDANE’S HANDS
is a message from someone who calls themselves Ferres, and this Ferres is telling him what he already knows, that Adua has been taken. But it says that in Gedebge, only a day’s march from where he has settled his army, a convoy is scheduled to arrive in a few days, and a unit of Italians will be setting up camp. Soon their well will be poisoned. The message is telling him to prepare his men to ambush the Italians there while they are in confusion. It is telling him to protect three siblings who are planning to sneak into the new camp to pour poison into the water supply. It is telling him to attack the invaders as if this were an order from the emperor himself. It is telling him to remember this is war. Kidane looks up at the young messenger, just a skinny, long-legged child with a gap between his large front teeth.

  Who’s this Ferres? Where did you get this? Kidane flips the message over but there is no hint of its author or origin. It is just a scrap of paper.

  The boy points down the hill. Biruk, the blind weaver, gave it to me, he says. I was told to see him.

  The blind weaver? The one who makes all those rugs? The famed weaver trains other blind boys and men, then travels the highlands and into Eritrea selling only to noble families. Aster bought one of his rugs years ago. Kidane often sat on the thick wool holding his son, staring at his father’s sword and shield while repeating stories about those men who came before him.

  The boy nods.

  And why you? The handwriting is strict and neat, the writing of a bookish priest, someone who does nothing else but work on scraps of paper barely the size of a boy’s palm.

  Everybody knows I’m the best runner in the area. The messenger speaks with hurt pride.

  Kidane looks down at the message again. The Italians have their radios and telephones. He has this boy and this slip of paper. Kidane looks over the boy’s shoulder at Aklilu, who keeps glancing anxiously in his direction. Just below this plateau, Seifu and the rest of his men are waiting to hear what to do.