Fofi drops his gun and presses both hands on his helmet, pushing thick wrinkles across his forehead. Santa Maria, she’s crazy.
The sky has opened above the awkward vision and a pool of light heralds her descent. Behind her, the horsemen have backed away. They are arranged now in a straight row, splendid in their white, their rifles and spears pointed up as they stare at the young woman.
The soldati hold their breath as she carves an uneasy silence into the valley. Over the hill, in the next valley, there is the faint rumble of a fight, of shouts, of gunfire, but in this place where the earth lies flat and grassy between two jagged peaks, there is nothing but the isolated figure slowing her steps until she is walking, bewildered. Until she is standing meters in front of them, directly in front of Ettore, pointing at her chest and saying, Boom.
She taps her chest again. There is a reckless abandon in her movements, a skittishness that makes it seem as if she will leap across the barricade and reach for his throat.
Go, Ettore says, because he does not know what else to say. Go. Vatene. Hurry before they catch you. He makes a motion as if he is shooing a stray dog, as if there is a thought he is trying to disregard. He does it again and shakes his head, lost.
SHE STANDS THERE like a gift from the gods, like a sunlit path that has opened just beneath his feet, begging Carlo Fucelli to take that step toward true and eternal greatness. From his position above his men, Carlo smiles and waves at the cameraman, who is strategically positioned to get a view of the valley and barricades. I told you, he shouts down at him proudly. I told you we would show you something new. Then he gives the order: Get her and bring her here.
Chorus
Sing, daughters, of one woman and one thousand, of those multitudes who rushed like wind to free a country from poisonous beasts. Sing, children, of those who came before you, of those who laid the path on which you tread toward warmer suns. Sing, men, of valiant Aster and furious Hirut and their blinding light across a shadowed land.
Sing of those who are no more,
Sing of the giants still amongst you,
Sing of those yet to be born.
Sing.
HIRUT STUMBLES THROUGH THE WASTELAND, SPINNING FURTHER and further from any place she has ever known until she becomes a stranger to herself, until she is an unknown figure wandering across endless burnt land, charred remains of a distant former life. She only pauses when a rope hits the bridge of her nose then drops down to her collarbone. Hirut stares at it, confused, as it begins to tighten. Before she can turn around hard boots kick her legs from beneath her. She falls, the descent awkward, ugly. A pale, sweating Italian hovers over her, bridging the space between where she is and the hills where she should be. He is slender-faced with dark stubble and eyes as small as points. A burst vein splashes one eye with red. He laughs as he looks at her. Other voices rise behind him, guttural and male.
Hirut curls into herself. She tucks her chin into her neck, squeezes her legs together, and shuts her eyes. If she fights, they will kill her. If she stays like this, they will kill her. There are horrible things that Italians do to girls, but no one has warned her about the interlude between discovery and death, between recognition and assault, that stretch of time when anything and everything is possible and all the frailties of the body are exposed to merciless light.
Another man bends over her, deathly pale with shadows beneath his blue eyes. The bottom half of his face lifts in a slow smile. He grabs her arm, a handkerchief in his hand, and yanks it hard. Get up, teneshi, he says in Amharic. He speaks calmly but it is deceptive. He is barely contained, ready to explode.
Hirut drags herself to her feet, frightened, and looks down for her gun but it’s gone. She glances at the men crowded around her, smiling and eager, curious and cruel. She hunches, drops her head, and shuts her eyes. There is nothing new here. What looms in front of Hirut has always been there: the grand valley, the green hills and rocky plateaus, the trampled white flowers she feels like stuffing into her mouth and chewing for food.
Bella soldata, he says. His voice is soft, strangely pitched. He slides a finger down the side of her face and angles her chin to one side. He peels open one of her eyes, forcing her to look at him.
I’m Carlo Fucelli. Do you know my name? he asks in Amharic. Then he pauses and calls over his shoulder: Ibrahim!
Hirut turns her head to hide the jolting fear the name causes. This is the officer who killed Tariku and the one Seifu left alive. Fucelli, the Butcher of Benghazi. The man throwing Ethiopians off of mountains.
A tall ascaro approaches and salutes. Fucelli speaks to him and Ibrahim nods, sliding his eyes in her direction before focusing back on the Italian.
We have your friend, Ibrahim says to her. Where’s Kidane’s camp?
She looks at Ibrahim, shocked, and shakes her head. That is answer enough for Fucelli. He nods to Ibrahim, and the ascaro takes her arm and drags her quickly through the crowd of Italians pressing themselves against her, touching her hair, her back, her arm, her waist, all those parts that belong to a prisoner and not a soldier. He leads her past the rows of tents where ferenjoch rise to their feet at her approach. She notes the way they stare and nod while stepping behind her to follow. The procession grows, one Italian at a time, until they are a long, winding row moving serpentine toward another series of tents where ascari watch with amused expressions before joining the line that stretches like a second rope around her, shoving her higher up a steep hill as she feels Ibrahim tighten his grip on her arm, as behind her, in a punishing Amharic seeps the unspeakable word for what she has become in a matter of hours, something else that is less than a prisoner, less than Hirut, something stripped of context, a thing without language or nation or family or love, something from an in-between place, neither fully human nor wholly animal, a thing that is only folded flesh to be forced apart and used and disposed of at will.
SHE STARES AT the barbed wire that encircles the small square building like an ugly scar. She looks from the gate with the padlock to the dizzying cliff a little further away. She feels herself swaying, caught in the breathtaking suspension of that V-shaped gap, head spinning even as her feet are firmly planted on the ground.
Fucelli snaps his fingers and the soldiers around her step aside and what appears is a breach in logic: Aster. But she is removed from herself, taken out of uniform and made so naked that she is unrecognizable. She is nothing. She is no one. She has become unmoored and unraveled, and belongs to no family, to no name, to no lineage. She is drained of noble blood, twirling in the dirt, surrounded by uniformed men wearing leather boots that pound a steady rhythm into dead grass.
Hirut covers her face but Fucelli shouts and Ibrahim yanks her hands down.
Prisoner, prigioniera, Fucelli says, and points to Aster. He points to Hirut: Prigioniera, he repeats.
A soldato pushes his way out of the gaping crowd and dances awkwardly next to Aster. He mimics a ghastly, cruel version of eskesta, thin shoulder blades poking through his sweaty shirt. The men whistle and cheer. He is eager, his thin mouth pursed, those pale and narrow features etched in a sharp hunger. Aster spins, feet alighting on tiptoe then heel, lurching as another soldier jumps into the circle and drapes an arm around her waist. His movements are sloppy and ugly. He squeezes Aster’s breast and forces her head up. Aster’s eyes are swollen shut, her mouth hangs slack and along the graceful curve of her collarbone are deep purple bruises. The soldier lifts one of her hands and waves it at Hirut and the laughter spills over their heads and tumbles past the cliffs and multiplies in echoes.
Aster! Hirut lunges toward her, toward that sea of men howling into an abyss and the rope around her neck snaps and tightens beneath her chin, chokes her of breath and sound. She coughs, gasping for air. Let me go, she says. Let me go to her.
Because: there are mercies in this world that must be granted to those who have remained unmarked all their lives. There are unspoken rules for those who were born to carry rich histories and noble
blood. There are ways the world must move in order to keep everything intact, and girls with scars must recognize their place amongst those who make those scars. Hirut leans forward, incoherent with shock and revulsion and a deeper emotion that cuts through her like sharp glass. Because if this can happen to Aster, wife of Kidane, beloved daughter of Ethiopia, then what more is waiting its turn with her?
Aster: Hirut throws out the word like a name attached to a secret. I am here, she wants to say. I am here and we are alive, she wants to add, but she is no longer sure what it means to live. She is not sure this is not another form of dying.
Hirut stretches her arms but Ibrahim snaps the rope against her neck so hard that it burns.
Stop moving, he whispers. Stop it or he’ll get worse.
She lowers her head as best she can. Just beyond Aster is a civilian with a strange-looking camera peering through a lens. Past him, a group of ascari watch quietly. Past their shoulders, down the incline, are their tents. Hirut searches for signs of Kidane or Aklilu, looks for that flicker of light that will announce their coming, but there is nothing.
Chorus
We try to step in front of Aster. We try to speak so she can hear: Daughter of Ethiopia, blessed soldier, take the hand we offer and learn to live. But she is still a girl, still that young bride left alone in her new husband’s bedroom with her back pressed against a wall. And so when they tell her, Go on, Aster, and dance for us, what can Aster do but dance? We see her. We see that woman who has become that young bride stepping out of her wedding dress. We see how she tries to stand, battered face and all, with her fists raised and trembling in fury. Look as she sweeps those knotted hands through the darkness, throwing her head back in defiance while shouting Kidane’s name. Watch as she stares down at herself, confused by what she has become. Listen as she curses what has brought her here, as she curses names long forgotten. As she peers into the great cavernous hall where her father prepares another wedding toast, and she curses him too. There she sees her mother and the other women bend into one another, arms gently pressed against stomachs, and she hears their whispers like blasphemous oaths:
She will get used to this like we did.
She will learn to love him like we have had to learn.
She will learn obedience as a way to survive.
She sees the cook glance up from the plate of food she is setting down on the table. She sees the cook turn her way and shake her head and say: There is no way but through it. There is no escape but what you make on your own. And the bride, once a soldier, turns back to the stairwell, walks up the stairs, enters her husband’s bedroom, and lies on the bed and opens her legs and tells herself she will know what to do and there is nothing to do, and she lets herself disappear until all that remains on that bloodstained bed is a girl remolding herself out of a rage.
Interlude
Haile Selassie looks at the picture again, holding it up to the light. He should be packing for the family’s trip to Brighton, but he is facing an impossibility outside of any known language. He lays aside the shirt he was slipping into his small travel bag. It is all there but he cannot believe it: a bound figure splayed against the sun, a mortal man struggling with angelic flight, doomed by earthly sinew and muscle, betrayed by bone and flesh, held in place by tough rope and merciless wind. It is a new cruelty that drags itself up and settles heavily upon him, a second skin that traps him in a thick and pungent rot. Haile Selassie sets the bag on the floor then walks out of his bedroom into the hallway and down the stairs, uncertain of where he is going.
At the bottom of the stairs, he veers through the drawing room, into his morning room, then out to the garden. He stands beneath a soft drizzle that feels like a weeping sky. He inhales, fills his lungs with damp air, and looks up. Some men are inclined toward flight, he thinks. Some men are angels that yearn for expansive skies. Some ache to free themselves from the gravitational bondage of Earth. Didn’t Icarus yearn for the same? Didn’t his father, that great Daedalus, make him wings to push him into his truest form? Wasn’t it only hubris that felled Icarus, and not the unnatural inclination toward flight? But it is useless to pretend: his men are falling from the sky. They are being pushed and thrown and they are breaking themselves on the terrain below.
And then there is also this small, startling detail in the latest message from this Ferres, a repetition of an earlier message from two weeks ago that he shrugged off as inconsequential a nagging rumor that he must deal with today in his meeting: the prisoners claim they have seen the emperor preparing for a great ambush. They shout his many names in addition to their own as they fall. Villagers refuse to believe Haile Selassie has left his people and gone to a foreign land. We have seen him, they insist. We have seen him with our eyes and our enemies will die. The damp chill soaks through his sweater, plasters his shirt against his chest, and for a moment, Haile Selassie feels the cold like a hand pressing against his sternum, trying to split him apart.
When he arrives in his office, his advisers have readied an Italian newsreel from that propaganda machine, Luce. They have positioned his chair in front of the screen and their own seats in a half-circle behind him. They stand when he enters and bow perfunctorily, all of them clearly disturbed. Your Majesty, they say, and he hears in their voices the slightest inflection of uncertainty, as if they are asking whether he is really himself. He sits and nods and someone shuts off the lights and he finds himself staring into a vivid square of white as the reel begins. He lets his eyes blur over the familiar images of the rocky landscape and the Nile, of his soldiers raising their old rifles, of Italian ships and marching columns, of churches illuminated in bright sun. Then. It is as if he is staring into a slowly rising river, his reflection snapping and pulling, distorted then familiar.
What is this? he asks, but he is speaking into the hollow of his chest and there is no sound in this suffocating room except the snap of the reel sliding his own image onto the wall. The emperor bends in. There he is. He sees a face shaped like his, a forehead as high as his own, his beard. That is his uniform, his cape. He is staring at himself standing atop a hill where he has never been, raising his hand in the way he was taught to raise it when addressing subjects. It is a distant shot, but it is distinctly him. But what is this? he asks again.
Then his bodyguard steps forward, on the right side of his duplicate self, and the camera zooms in, the picture is grainy, unsteady, as if the earth is sliding off its axis. The emperor blinks and rubs his eyes. It cannot be: A woman? We are being guarded by a woman? Then the reel ends and slides to black. Start it again from the beginning, he says.
Emperor Haile Selassie sits rooted in place, afraid to move, afraid to gaze once more at the broken light roaming over his walls. But there he is, the parts of him that have come in the form of a distorted twin. And he begins to wonder what is real, and if it is in fact true that he is actually in Ethiopia and the imposter emperor that the Italians love to mock is the one sitting in this chair right now, in a room that is a duplicate of another that thrums with authenticity in Ethiopia. And behind the fake walls of this office and those fake curtains, the emperor also wonders if the sun outside has been duplicated, if the world has been made false, if all truths have been turned inside out. Even in this office that is truly his, he feels it: he’s already starting to disappear, moved offstage by fake men who pretend to be his allies.
Haile Selassie reaches into his pocket and pulls out the key to his office in Addis. He presses it into his palm, reassured by its firmness, the molded edges that dig into his flesh. At night, he lays the set by his bedside table next to his Psalms and his English dictionary. He keeps spare clothes packed in his trunks. There are briefcases filled with duplicate documents. He has prepared himself for immediate departure, but nothing he does can erase what he has done and remake it into something else. Flight. To fly. To flee. To leap away from solid ground and let the wind take hold.
Haile Selassie has to fight against the surge of loneliness that wells i
nside him. He stands up and the office lights flick on, and he walks to his window to look out and confirm where he really is. He flattens his palm against the foggy glass. He lifts it. Inside the delicate shape of his hand, he makes a cross. Once, it was said that the emperor of Ethiopia was like a sun to his people. But these days have proven that we live and die in the shadows, the emperor thinks. We do nothing but hold dominion over all that rests in shade and fog. All else is an illusion, a falsified appearance, a ghostly twin that trails behind us, hungering after our every breath.
SHE IS NOT SURE HOW LONG THEY HAVE BEEN IN THIS SINGLE-ROOMED jail. She has lost track of the stretch of a minute, of how it seeps into hours and blends into night. It is so dark and cold and her eyes have grown weak at a frightening pace. It is difficult to make out Aster’s hunched shape. It is hard to know if she herself is breathing, or if they are both even alive. Hirut blinks slowly, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Aster is draped in the dirty abesha chemise that was thrown inside for each of them, crouched at the edge of the pale beam of sun that falls through the tiny window above their heads. She is crouched, a bent figure burdened by the receding light.
Aster, it’s me, she says. Hirut knows better than to touch her. She sits near the door instead. I’m here too. They caught me too. They took our uniforms. She crosses her legs and leans on her arms. The pressure is reassuring. She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside.
Aster?
But Aster does not move, not even when the beam of light crawls across her curved back on its way out.
HIRUT IS STILL AWAKE when the sun rises. The guards are changing shifts outside, their murmurings and greetings intimate and friendly. One of them rattles the sheet of corrugated aluminum that makes the gate. It is where Fucelli ordered the soldato named Navarra to take her picture. The gate is attached to two thick metal posts and secured with a padlock. Around the perimeter is a wooden fence, the four rungs wrapped in a double layer of barbed wire. There is no way to escape. She has tried already. She has dug into the dirt floor of the prison only to find a concrete foundation beneath. She has stood up and walked around this cramped room, testing for soft slats of wood, for breaks in structure, for secrets, but still: nothing.
The Shadow King Page 28