The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

  Kidane picks up one of the guns. He weighs it in his hand and pretends to aim it. He sets it down gingerly. They’re too expensive, he says. I used all my credit on the last batch, and he’s gotten more expensive. Kidane shakes his head, and his glance toward Aster is confused, full of remorse.

  The ferenj stares at the couple, both satisfied and curious. Then he leans in and whispers into Kidane’s ear. He grabs his arm when Kidane tries to jerk away, and keeps talking, insistent and loud.

  What’s he saying? Aster asks.

  Leave, now, Kidane says to her. Take the girl with you.

  Aster stares at him, surprised.

  Get out! Go! All of Kidane’s exhaustion has given way to an explosive rage.

  Jacques shuts his eyes and slips fresh leaves of khat into his mouth. He chews contentedly, sighing softly with his hands in his pockets. Hirut watches him, confused by his casual air, the disregard he shows for the argument happening because of him.

  His eyes snap open, startling her, and he smiles. What’s your name? he asks in Amharic. His intonation has the same hissing sound he uses when he speaks French. His accent is strange, the rhythm of the words soaked in spit. I’m Jacques Corat, he says. Do you like me? His mouth parts again in a grin, revealing more of his stained teeth.

  Aster looks at him, puzzled. He wants the girl?

  Hirut looks quickly at Kidane. When Aster holds out her hand, she takes it and grips it and moves closer to the woman.

  Jacques gathers the netela by its ends and lifts the bundle of guns. His mouth swings into a lopsided smile, one cheek full of the leaf he’s stuffed into it.

  Kidane pushes between them and points toward the camp. He speaks in a soothing, coaxing voice. Jacques shakes his head.

  Kidane turns to Aster: Get my father’s cape. Bring it and the necklace.

  Jacques shakes his head. I don’t want an old cape, he says in perfect Amharic. I’ve got enough gold.

  Over her shoulder, Hirut can hear the cook’s heavy wheezing sliding around the bend, settling into the tense silence between them. Berhe is whistling, that same tune he always tries to perfect while he works. From beyond them, more gunshots: Kidane mutters a curse and Aster flinches. But they are frozen in place, like one of the newspaper photos in Kidane’s office.

  Go get the necklace, Kidane says again.

  By now, the cook and Berhe have come closer and they stare, confused, at the foreigner.

  I’m not giving it to this ferenj, Aster says.

  The cook stares at the rifles. She looks from Jacques’s face to Kidane’s and when her eyes stop on Hirut, there is a knowing in them, a faint glint of disgust. The girl is useless, she says.

  Aster opens her mouth but Jacques interrupts her. No girl is useless, he says. He winks at Hirut.

  Take her and you’ll just have another burden, the cook continues. She’s not strong and she gets sick a lot. Look at her chest, are you blind?

  Why don’t you shut up, Aster says. She speaks through her teeth.

  Then go get your precious necklace, the cook says. Go on, it wasn’t meant for you to begin with, you didn’t earn it.

  The ferenj blinks slowly at the cook, his eyes red. He looks at Kidane. I’ve got ten more rifles. These peasant Italians will steal gold. Give me the girl. Fifteen rifles.

  Kidane looks at Hirut, then Aster. He stares at his empty hands then looks back at the ferenj.

  You’ll come back, Jacques says to Hirut. I’ll bring you back here, it’s no problem. I move through this area often, two weeks, three weeks from now, we’ll be back. He looks at Kidane and adds, Think of how many of your men you’ll save with these guns. With these rifles, they’ll kill Italians and take their rifles.

  One week, Kidane says.

  Jacques shakes his head. It’s tougher to move easily these days, they’re getting closer to Gondar. I promise I’ll take care of her. She’s a relative?

  You wouldn’t, Aster says softly to Kidane.

  Hirut turns to the cook. Just over her shoulder, the grassy valley expands in the arc of sunlight spilling through feathery clouds. Not far away is a river, and she and the cook should have gone there together to get water.

  I’ll go, the cook says. Take me.

  The ferenj looks at her and chuckles, then he keeps laughing. Never, he says.

  The cook turns to Aster. I’m leaving, she says. It’s time and I’ve had enough.

  The ferenj stares at her, shocked. I don’t want you. I’m taking her. He points at Hirut.

  If you take me, you’ll never go hungry or thirsty, the cook says. I’ll make sure there’s always food and if you’re sick or can’t get khat, I know what to give you. It’s stronger and lasts longer. I’ll find another woman to take care of your business with you, someone willing and experienced.

  Now Jacques pauses. He feels inside his pocket for another leaf and slips it into his mouth. What is it? I get all the khat I need.

  Not when these Italians come in, khat won’t stay fresh long enough to reach you. I’ll get you astenagir. I know how to make it stronger, I can mix it with other things, you can sell it.

  Slowly, Jacques takes his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket with one hand and balances them on top of his head. He touches the rifles then arranges them on the netela again. He moves as if he has all the time and they will wait. Only the color rising from his neck betrays his tension.

  I want to see it now, Jacques says. Before I leave or else we’re done working together. I want enough for two weeks. Right now.

  The cook nods, pride flickering across her face. Just wait, she says. And Berhe’s leaving with me, he’ll go back to his home. She nods to Kidane, holds Hirut’s eyes in a long, unfathomable stare, then she turns and walks down the hill, moving quickly.

  A Brief History of Jacques Corat

  It is not as if his request were unusual, it is not as if he were asking a price that had not been met before, elsewhere. He had things to give and there were things to take and he wanted to be taking more than giving, aware that transactions are not by their nature inclined toward fairness. He knew what it meant to be taken: to be taken by his mother’s hand from one house into another until a man who was not of his blood bent on callused knee and said, Boy, what I give to your mother is not what I will give to you, and even at twelve years old Jacques Corat was sure all doors to his life had shut right then and would remain so until he found his own way out. Nothing to ask for, nothing to give sir, is what he said. Over the man’s shoulder, the boy would see his first sale item: a worn Charleville 1777, manufactured in Charleville, Ardennes, birthplace of one Arthur Rimbaud, poet and gunrunner. Here are things that Jacques, the man who would roam Ethiopia and Eritrea as Le Ferenj has been known to take in exchange for rifles: silver and gold, ivory and salt, slaves and horses, young girls and slight-boned boys, bundles of khat, and artifacts purportedly belonging to Rimbaud.

  Jacques Le Ferenj keeps an old grainy photograph of Arthur Rimbaud in his front shirt pocket, left side. He takes the photo everywhere, even has it clutched in his aged hand on the straw-covered cot where he will breathe his last, splintered by an illness presumed to be dysentery. That photograph depicts poetry’s enfant terrible standing beneath a palm tree looking into the camera, feet slightly apart, arms folded across his chest. It is hard to know which way the sun angles, hard to pinpoint the exact time of day. The photographic negative has been printed and flipped and printed again as if a life happening left-to-right and right-to-left is the same. Jacques’s copy shows Rimbaud with left foot extended in a pose that Jacques has spent years trying to emulate. The Rimbaud of Jacques’s photo lived in Ethiopia amongst people who understood the left hand as a sign of bad luck, the physical reminder of a terrifying left-handed warrior from the sixteenth century, Mohamed Gragne: Mohamed Left. But Rimbaud’s left foot, stuck out in that photo, seems to depict a man who cared neither for superstitions nor for customs not his own. This is what Jacques admires. This is why he leaves home for Aden, ju
st as Rimbaud did decades before. Each step he takes into new territory, he imagines himself as the great poet. He aches to be ruler of all he surveys. He imagines that everything has a price, particularly young native servants expendable in the homes where they work. Le Ferenj takes and gives, gives and takes, knowing the balance of things will one day come and he will never have to ask for anything again.

  Le Ferenj, Jacques Corat, approximately thirty-nine years of age at the time of his brief encounter with Hirut. Father: deceased. Mother: Jacqueline Arnaud Corat Livin, seamstress. Last known stepfather: Charles Livin, farmer. Born in Bordeaux, that famous city of wines, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and that tremendously profitable harbor where ships sailed for the coast of Western Africa on the Triangular Trade. Triangle: a figure composed of three straight lines and three angles, not necessarily equal.

  LE FERENJ. HIRUT will say it to herself repeatedly while staring at the pile of guns. And Le Ferenj, aware of distance and time and the corresponding decreases in profit, will turn toward the path the cook used, anxious to be on his way. They hear the fresh round of gunshots at the same time, and while Hirut jerks and looks up at the sky, Le Ferenj merely grins and shrugs, aware that every threat and each spent bullet is potential for another sale. Neither of them can guess that at that same instant, three siblings—two brothers and their older sister—are marching at gunpoint toward a large boulder they once climbed as young children, chased by Italians through kilometers of familiar terrain only to be caught close to home.

  And while Jacques Corat may guess at the many causes of the noise, neither will ever imagine that the soldato who holds the camera to capture the siblings’ terrified stares will one day point it in Hirut’s direction and follow orders to shoot. How can Hirut know, either, that when she looks up and catches a slow wind floating between the trees, one boy, just a child, is pushing his face into that same mournful breeze while seeking salvation? Here: his sister’s smile, offering him much-needed consolation. Here: his elder brother’s hand taking his small palm to his lips. Here: the two brothers and their sister, walking in tight steps hampered by chain and rope. Here: the familiar boulder, now bloodstained, waiting for more.

  Hirut will not hear the women of Amegiagi gather the young patriots’ mother in their arms and weep so loudly that heaven bends. She will never know that there is a father of three dropping to his knees to beg Colonel Carlo Fucelli, famed butcher of Benghazi, to spare his children’s corpses from the added indecency of the gallows. She will not hear Fucelli order both Italians and ascari to form a deadly row in front of the three prisoners. She will not see the surprise in a certain Ettore Navarra’s eyes when the colonel again bypasses protocol and military ranking to say: Take another picture with that camera you always carry, soldato. She will not know that Ibrahim, a proud and trusted ascaro long in the service of Colonel Fucelli, stands stiffly next to his men while a muscle near his eye twitches like a leaf.

  When Kidane and Aster, a few steps away and in private conversation, draw back at another round of scattering shots, they cannot guess at what distance and fate have shielded them from: the sight—both awful and awesome—of a spray of bullets striking three siblings who had failed in their valiant attempt to poison the invading Italians’ well. And no one except the faithful ascari will ever know that on that wretched day, their leader, Sciumbasci Ibrahim ordered them not to shoot, that he commanded his ascari to disobey Colonel Fucelli’s orders, that he staked his life on that disobedience and he swore to kill or die in their defense: he told his men to raise their rifles and aim, and when the order came to fire, they were to wait for a breath and let the first bullets come from the Italians themselves. We kill Ethiopian men, Ibrahim told his ascari, we will not kill their children while I lead you.

  Let us pray.

  THEY’VE BEEN SHOOTING AT OUR ARMIES FOR WEEKS NOW, ASTER says to Hirut as she points down to the crate of discharged bullet casings beside her. Her face is drawn, tense. We’re high enough in the mountains that they can’t reach us yet. She pauses. We have to be ready. One day we’ll have real bullets, real guns, she adds. Did Getey teach you how to make gunpowder? she asks.

  Hirut shakes her head and gathers a handful of the used casings.

  They are standing near Aster’s tent, waiting for more women with the powders and salt that Aster requested. Ahead, a group of villagers eases up the last few steps of the hill, each woman is stooped beneath a backbreaking load of firewood. Two of them wave before veering off to what used to be the cook’s area. Several more are dragging burlap sacks toward where Aster stands, her arms folded, looking imperious in Kidane’s father’s cape. They have been arriving since dawn from surrounding villages, bringing casings and wood, scarves and food for the army. Hirut gazes at the hill then back at Aster. The camp has been in upheaval since the cook left, the disorder escalating amidst the never-ending stream of deliveries. She has looked for signs of the cook’s return every day since she left, but it has been four days now and even Aster has stopped glancing at the horizon while going about her tasks.

  You’ll have to learn how to make the bullets, Aster says. Find someone to teach you.

  This is another one of the things the cook could have shown her.

  Getey learned it from your grandmother, Aster says. They had to know it for the last war, in case the men ran out. Aster pats the front of the cape and tugs gently on the golden clasp. Some things you don’t learn if your mother’s not around, isn’t that so?

  These are used, Hirut says.

  They’ve been picking these up from what the Italians leave behind, Aster says. We just need the casings. We’ll give them back their killings. Aster shakes her head. I’ll teach every woman how to make gunpowder. I’ll teach all of you how to shoot a gun. You have to know how to run toward them unafraid.

  ASTER IS A glorious figure astride her horse, Buna. She has loosened her braids and thick strands of hair fall against her neck and spread like a dark curtain around her sunlit face. She snaps the animal to a trot across the crest of the hill, her cape fanning around her figure, the golden clasp trapping flints of afternoon light.

  Women! she shouts. Sisters, are you listening to me? Her voice rises into the sky: a blade slicing through the valley below, startling the women from their tasks, forcing them to lift their heads and turn in her direction. Sisters, are you ready for what’s to come?

  Ethiopia’s gifted azmari will sing of this day for years: of how the women drop their baskets and their jugs. How they push away their looms and piles of wool. They rise to their feet nearly in unison, unaware of their own glory, and lift their faces toward Aster’s voice. That they pause long enough to listen to the soft tap of distant gunfire is a detail that the songs will repeat again and again. The musicians will make of the women’s frowns a forewarning of what’s to come. The singers will use the women’s gasps and exclamations as signs of their growing strength.

  One azmari after the next will sing these words as they play their masinqo: that first battle cry was already forming in the women’s throats. Aster knew she just needed a way to usher it out. The women were ready but did not know it. There were bullets to be made and gunpowder to mix and rifles to load and enemies to shoot.

  Women! Those who can make bullets, come to me! Aster’s voice carries across the valley before breaking into echoes and scattering into the horizon. She is one woman. She is many women. She is all the sound that exists in the world.

  The women rush forward, breathless, their steps like the swoosh of leaves pushed by rough wind. Hirut sets down the dried leaves she is scooping into small medicine sacks, and watches: Aster descends gracefully from her horse and leads the skittish animal to a nearby tree and ties the rope. As she strides back to the highest point of the hill, she is familiar and strange, someone Hirut has never seen before but has always known to exist.

  Do you remember when we learned to shoot with our brothers and cousins? Aster opens her hand and a hush falls over the women. A few spent bu
llets rest in the center of her dusty palm, bent and singed by gunpowder. Hirut, come help me, she adds, looking across the heads of the crowd that has gathered at the top of the hill and spills down one side.

  Hirut pushes her way through the group, the women so numerous it is difficult for most to see.

  Aster continues: We were taught to run through hills and guard livestock, just like the boys in our family. We shouldn’t forget these things, she says. Our country needs us.

  The thick silence expands and draws them into an intimate embrace. They lean forward, mesmerized. As Hirut approaches, Aster points behind her where a metal pot and a burlap sack sit. Hirut pulls both next to Aster’s feet, surprised by their weight, then steps aside, unsure of this Aster, this woman who seems to shimmer in her cape.

  Go on, Aster says to her, open it and bring me what’s inside.

  Hirut unties the sack and reaches inside.

  A woman whispers from the back: Our country? She’s saying it’s our country? Look at how hard we work while she takes from us.

  Hirut turns toward the woman. She is tall and angular, and clearly agitated. She shifts from foot to foot, her words tumbling out of her mouth in short, angry bursts. She cannot seem to stop talking: Follow her and you’ll always beg for what she throws away. Let the Italians come, they’re better than these greedy people. And look at her, who was her father? Who was her mother? She’s part slave, look at her. At least I’m pure.

  Hirut stiffens. No one has ever dared to say anything like that directly to Aster.

  Anchee, you, stop this: another woman’s voice floats above the stunned silence.

  But it is too late: the effect is immediate on Aster. She flinches and brings her hands to her face, one fist still bunched around the bullet casings. A gasp escapes from her: the sharp breath of someone struck without warning. Her eyes are wide, unsure of what will happen next, because the truth of the woman’s words are undeniable: Aster cannot boast the delicate beauty of Nardos or some of the other women. Her skin gleams in a rich shade darker than most, and her mouth turns up like a ripe flower, full and lush, threatening to overwhelm her face. Her round cheeks and sloping brows accentuate an elusive loveliness, but those lips are what bring the gaze again and again to her face. Hirut has seen her effect on those who first meet her: her commanding presence so jarring next to her unusual looks. Without her haughty air, Aster might appear common, nothing special at all, but she has inherited the arrogance of those born into noble households and it is a fire that burns inside of her, illuminating every feature. It is something the poor are not born with: that way of gliding into large homes and expansive fields as if the ground begged for their footsteps. Hirut smooths her hair and tucks loose strands back into her braids, and braces herself.