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4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Aida Edemariam 2018

Cover photograph by Kazuyoshi Nomachi

Aida Edemariam asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007459629

Ebook edition: February 2018 ISBN: 9780007459612

Version: 2018-12-20

DEDICATION

For Rahel

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

PAGUMÉ: The Thirteenth Month

BOOK I: 1916–1930

MESKEREM: The First Month

TIQIMT: The Second Month

BOOK II: 1931–1941

HIDAR: The Third Month

BOOK III: 1942–1953

TAHSAS: The Fourth Month

BOOK IV: 1953–c.1958

TIRR: The Fifth Month

BOOK V: 1959–1989

YEKATIT: The Sixth Month

MEGABIT: The Seventh Month

MIYAZIA: The Eighth Month

GINBOT: The Ninth Month

SENÉ: The Tenth Month

HAMLÉ: The Eleventh Month

NEHASSÉ: The Twelfth Month

PAGUMÉ: The Thirteenth Month

Chronology

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

MAP

PAGUMÉ

THE THIRTEENTH MONTH

Rains broken by occasional sunshine. Examination of boys in church school to decide who will be deacons. End of fiscal year. New Year’s Eve.

Four coals huddled into a low clay pot, glowing red through their films of ash. My grandmother reached in among the folds of her shawl and drew from a small pouch a kernel of frankincense. She dropped it among the coals and at once it melted, hissing, releasing sweet smoke that rose and tangled with the smell of roasting coffee, of rain gathering beyond the open door, of unfurling earth.

If it rains on Ruphael’s Day, my grandmother said, the water is holy. When we were children we’d tear off our clothes and dance through it singing. And if there was a rainbow it was as though Mary’s sash had been thrown across the sky.

Above our heads, on the corrugated-iron roof, the rain began. Thud. Thud. Thud-thud. Each drop carrying with it a sense of great chill distances travelled, of interrupted speed.

And all through Pagumé anyone young went down to the rivers before dawn, said my grandmother. You had to get to the water before the birds could taste it. She held the round-bellied pot high, so the coffee clattered into the little porcelain cups. Added sugar, or salt, or tiny tear-shaped leaves of rue, passed the cups around. I’ve never liked rivers, though, nor lakes, she said, not since I was a small child.

But even though I was afraid I begged to be allowed to go. I was staying with my grandmother. She was kinder than my aunt, especially when I wet the bed. She’d just turn the jendi over, change the bedclothes. She was patient with me, and loving. Like my mother – and at once my own grandmother was crying, tears spilling into her shawl.

Ayzosh, Nannyé, I said. Ayzosh. Take heart. Yibejish, lijé, she answered. Yes, child, may you be saved. Ayzosh. Yibejish, wiping the wet away. I miss my mother, she said. I know, I answered, I know. So what happened at the river? Steering her back, to distract her as much as anything. Pushing her on, as I did more and more often, knowing many of the stories, but knowing also that there were more, told and retold for decades, shaped, reshaped – or sometimes, when enough time had passed – cracked open in the telling. What did you say? How did you feel, and what do you feel, now?

Sometimes the answers were immediate. Well, I said this, of course, or no, I don’t remember the date, or the time, only that the feast of St John was approaching, and I had so much work to do. Or not now, or I’ve told you that before – though often you could tell it was a rote demurral, that she wanted to continue. Other times the reply was a small smile and a twist into shyness, no, no, those things are not spoken of. When were you happy? I asked once. I’m never happy, came the answer, I’m always crying. All of my life is painted in tears.

The third round of coffee had been drunk, the dregs slopped out into the yard. The smoke drifted into the corners and disappeared. Nannyé held out her hands, palms heavenward. May He bring justice to the wronged, to the poor, to the oppressed. May He clothe the naked and liberate the crucified. May He protect us, and bless us.

I dipped my head. Amen. We watched as sunlight flared through the steam rising from the wet ground, and through the open door. Birds sang.

At last I was allowed to go, she said. We left our houses excited, in the dark, and walked down into the valley. The Qeha had been filling all the rainy season, it moved fast and deep. The other children took off their clothes and jumped in. They cupped the water in their hands and threw it high. They laughed and splashed and wrestled. I edged forward. The water crept toward my toes. I started to move forward again, but I couldn’t bear it. I screamed. And I ran.

She laughed, a laugh that took her over as utterly as her tears had a moment earlier. A complicated laugh, deep and delighted but serious also, for in fact she was still afraid and always would be; because she remembered the child she had been so clearly; because in many ways she was still that child.

BOOK I

1916–1930

Gondar in 1905, from Ethiopia Photographed: Historic Photos of the Country and its People Taken between 1867 and 1935, ed. Richard Pankhurst and Denis Gerard.

MESKEREM

THE FIRST MONTH

Floods recede. Yellow masqal daisies cover the land. New and fallow fields ploughed for cultivation.

AND WHEN THE MAIDEN WAS THREE YEARS OLD IYAKEM CALLED HIS PURE, HEBREW MAIDSERVANTS AND PUT CANDLESTICKS WITH WAX CANDLES IN THEIR HANDS, AND THEY WALKED BEFORE THE MAIDEN AND BROUGHT HER INTO THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY … THEN THE PRIESTS TOOK HER, AND ESTABLISHED HER IN THE THIRD STOREY OF THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY … AND HER KINSFOLK AND THE PEOPLE OF HER HOUSEHOLD TURNED AND WENT BACK TO THEIR HOUSES IN GREAT JOYFULNESS, AND THEY PRAISED THE LORD GOD, AND GAVE THANKS UNTO HIM BECAUSE SHE HAD NOT TURNED BACK … AND MARY DWELT IN THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY OF GOD LIKE A PURE DOVE, AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD BROUGHT FOOD DOWN FOR HER AT ALL TIMES.

– LEGENDS OF OUR LADY MARY THE PERPETUAL VIRGIN AND HER MOTHER HANNA

By the time the attention turned to her, she was in an agony of restlessness. She had tried to concentrate, to follow the familiar shapes of words she did not expect to understand, to feel their practised roll and pitch, to distinguish between the voices, now muttering, now confident and clear. She had tried to stand still; the effort made her aware of each limb, each finger and toe, of her head balanced on her neck, of the netela, so fine it was near weightless, that covered her head like a cowl. If she moved it gave off a faint scent, of sunshine and new-spun cotton, a wide, outside smell that cut across the eddying incense like an opened window.

She wished she was out there now, playing. Sitting on her haunches to throw a smooth round stone into the air, using the same hand to pick up more stones, then intercept the first stone’s descent. Or games that went on and on, till bats swooped and looped through the dusk. Coo-coo-loo! the other children would call, speeding to hiding places. Not yet! she would call back, from her perch on a pile of rocks. Coo-coo-loo! Not yet! Coo-coo-loo – Now! And they would race toward her, vying to touch her skirt and claim themselves safe, making her laugh and laugh. A far better feeling than the time she had ripped up a perfectly good dress to make herself a doll, thinking to strap it to her back as if it were a child. Oh, the whipping she had got then! And the doll had felt too light, lacking the heft of a real baby. It was more fun to play mother with the neighbourhood children. Or weddings, wrapping dolls in scraps of red and green silk and walking them bandy-legged to church.

She shifted, stood still again. The long black cape was lined, the gold filigree around the collar and down the front made it heavy, and it was getting heavier. She hugged herself tight, underneath it. Her stomach was so empty.

The wall of clergy changed position. A book was opened, one wave-edged vellum page at a time. A pause, and a priest looked at her. At once she looked down. Bare toes on a faded, fraying carpet. Hers, theirs. So many of theirs.

Repeat after me. If he is ill – if he is ill. The fact of her voice loud to her. Her breath warm tendrils moving across dry lips, dust swirled along the ground by an afternoon breeze. If he grows thin – if he grows thin. Or darkens – or darkens. If he suffers – if he suffers. Or is in trouble – or is in trouble. If he becomes poor – if he becomes poor. Even if he dies – even if he dies. I will not betray him – I will not betray him. A turn away from her, and another voice, a man’s. If she is ill – if she is ill. If she grows thin – if she grows thin. Or darkens – or darkens. The priest took her right hand and placed it on his cross. Then he took another hand and placed it on hers. I will not betray her.

A ring was threaded onto her third finger, another onto the man’s. It would be years before she understood what she had promised. For the moment all she knew was a thickening of the air, a seriousness, a flutter of – what? Apprehension, perhaps.

More prayers. A prayer for the rings, and a prayer over their capes. A thumb slick with holy oil tracing a rough cross onto her forehead, and a prayer over that. Hands bearing cushions, and on the cushions crowns, high straight-sided traceries of gold. A priest held one aloft for a long moment, then settled it on her head. She stepped back under the weight. Felt the figure next to her receive the weight too. The prayer of the crowns, and only then the church service.

After the bread and the raisin wine, taken under a tilting roof of heavy brocade; after they had bowed to kiss the threshold of the holy of holies; after they had walked slowly around it, once, the priest extended his cross for them to kiss. It was cold, and smelled of earth after rain.

Ililililil! cried the women.

The sun had burned the mist out of the cedars and hurt her eyes, so she had to use her feet to search for the steps of the low, humped building.

Ililililil!

Out here the trilling was thin, echo-less. Cockerels crowed, and crows answered. Kwaa. Kwaa.

Ililililil!

The congregation assembled at the bottom of the steps and began a slow procession around the churchyard. Past the bethlehem, with its protective ring of dark evergreens, its nuns picking through baskets of wheat for the eucharist bread; past a young olive tree, leaves quivering silver. A long, stately walk around a central absence: the foundations of the main church were partly covered over with vines and moss, partly naked, as though they had been exposed yesterday. When the circuit was over the congregation settled under trees to listen to the sermon, and to praise-couplets composed for this day. Then, finally, ‘May He bless you. May He multiply your seed as the stars in the sky, as the sand of the sea. May He make your house rich as the house of Abraham.’

Ililililil! Ililililil!

As they picked their way out of the gate and started down the road she noticed that the streets and alleyways, usually so busy, were silent, that doors were shut tight. Wobbles of woodsmoke, the odd dog foraging among the stones and bones, roosters crowing as always, but otherwise an unnatural hush.

She began to see the holes – ragged holes, punched through sturdy mud walls – and to glimpse the homes inside: raised wooden beds strung with leather, pots and pans, dividing curtains. Once she saw directly through to a front door, barricaded against the disease until the house’s inhabitants could fashion their escape. The women noticed her looking. They drew the netela further about her face, and hurried her on.

And then the feasting began. She knew – because she had helped, or been told to run off and play because she was getting in the way – that the women had been cooking for weeks. She had watched the huge earthenware gans of grain in the storehouse deplete, and those of mead and beer multiply, had watched the pounding, the chopping, the sifting, the kneading, had stared as shouting men whipped and dragged five bullocks through the narrow gate. The blood had dried into dark tributaries around the stones in the yard, and now in a corner a dog gnawed at a horned skull.

She was used to eating separately from the adults, to being silent unless spoken to. Silent she was still, but in a confusion of pride and worry. Here was all the attention she had ever wanted – but in such an inversion of her usual state! Everyone made a fuss of her, kissed her, hugged her; even her aunt coaxed her to take sips of mead or, collecting together a little heap of the best pieces of meat, the whitest injera, fed her. She opened her mouth politely, tried not to gag.

Poems again, more joy-cries. Someone beat a drum and was instantly shushed. At this her whole body rose in protest. She thrilled to drums, to music; hearing even the most distant party would slip down the lanes to join in. Why could she not do this now the drummers were in her own home? Her mother noticed. ‘My heart, please understand. It draws attention. If we play the kebero, if we dance, the evil eye will notice us and the disease will come here. It’s killing people. Remember that lady from the market? She said her waist ached, she had a headache, she rattled with fever. She died yesterday. We cannot risk that. Please understand, child.’

She would always remember no one danced at her wedding. And for the rest of her life she would try to make up for it, threading her way into the centre of the room, placing her hands on her hips, crooking her neck and – especially after her husband died – showing everyone how it ought to be done.

The next morning she was given a new underdress. Then another, for warmth and volume. The main dress was a mass of soft white muslin edged in red. A necklace, corded black silk wound round with delicate gold chains, so long on her eight-year-old body that its two stubby gold crowns swung well below her waist. Silver anklets. A wide, light netela, draped generous around her shoulders and chest, up over her head, then around her shoulders again to secure it.

‘Nigisté,’ said her mother. ‘My queen.’

A scatter of hooves, footsteps, a tumble of voices, and then one of the groomsmen, a relative of theirs, bowing in through the door, bowing to the women. How did you spend the night? Well, the women answered, thanks be to God, and you? Well, well, may His name be praised, may He be thanked for bringing us this day, may His honour and glory increase, and she was lifted up, up through a welter of hugs and kisses, prayers and instruction, into the brightness outside.

The elders were waiting. Past the women, first. Past her smiling grandmother, her aunt. Then the men. May you be given a long life. May He watch over you and keep you, rain blessings down upon you. Her father kissed her. May He go with you, child, all the days of your life.

Gently the groomsman placed her on a waiting mule. Then, because she was too young to control it, he mounted too, and, passing an arm around her waist, grasped the reins. Firmly he pulled the animal’s head round; slowly they moved out of the compound, and left her family behind.

At first she concentrated on their mount, on the animal’s rough narrow back, the part in its mane a dark bolt of lightning. The balls of red wool sewn to bit and bridle that shook at every step. The embroidered saddlecloth. The side of its face, unfeasibly long lashes blinking away flies. The uneven rocking as it searched a path through the stony streets.

After a while she became aware of the running children, the women on errands, the yodelling calls of door-to-door salesmen, the compounds whose walls reflected the sound of their mule’s hooves back to them. And the other hooves, too, clopping out a ragged counterpoint. She knew what they carried: narrow embroidered dresses she could wear now; big square dresses, for when she was older; a length of perfectly white, perfectly even cotton; delicate shemmas; thicker shawls edged with wide red bands; fine basketwork woven by cousins over the long rainy season; twelve grey-tinged salt amolés in lieu of silver; gans of dark beer; a case of cured goat hide, just the right shape for a psalter. The slave girl, Wulé, walked alongside them. Another groomsman. And him.

They were led not to the wide das, where, under a temporary roof of saplings and branches, the wedding guests had already gathered, but to the bridal hut nearby. She felt him sit, felt the groomsmen take their places, took her own.

Ilililililililil! Ilililililililil! She recognised none of the women, but the sound was the same.

The noise from the das rose and rose. Rushes of music, a drum – there was no illness in this part of town. Every so often men came to the door, carrying fluttering chickens as offerings to be made into stew for the bridal party; women with fistfuls of pancake and butter, rich food they held direct to her mouth. But she was not hungry. And she still could not trust that she would not wet her bed at night. So she shook her head and refused it all.

The second day. In the das a minstrel sawed at his jasmine-wood masinqo and tossed rhymes like spears into the crowd. Guffaws of recognition only underscored her distance from home. She heard clapping, ililta. They were dancing! Tears dropped onto her hands. The groomsman who had come to fetch her from her family noticed. He caught her small feet in his hands and drew a finger over her anklets. Who bought you these? Do you know how to clean silver? She shook her head.

The third day. Her mouth stuck shut with thirst but she took only the tiniest sips of water, to loosen it. In the das they danced and sang and clapped and cheered but in the little hut, where if she had been old enough the marriage would have been consummated, no one spoke. Then, ‘Listen. Have you heard the story of the hawk and the tortoise?’ No. ‘Shall I tell you?’ A slight nod. For the rest of the day the groomsman dredged his memory: The monkey king. The tortoise and the hare.

The fourth day. ‘A cat and a mouse were getting married. On the day of the wedding the cat’s groomsmen gathered and together they made for the bride’s house, dancing and singing in anticipation of a feast. The mouse, like all brides, waited amongst her kinsfolk to be taken away to her new life. Then one of the other mice piped up – “You know, cats can’t be trusted. Let’s dig holes in the ground, just in case.” So they set to it, scrabbling out deep tunnels with hidden entrances. Finally the cats came into view, chanting “Ho – pick one up here, ho, pick one up there, ho.” When the mice saw them approaching they turned as one and plopped into their holes. And the cats, who thought they’d been so clever, didn’t catch a single mouse.’ His laugh wilted into the silence.

The fifth day. ‘Aleqa Gebrè-hanna, the famous wit – he was also leader of the church in which you were just married, did you know that? – was walking along the road when he met a donkey-driver. He greeted the peasant with unusual politeness for someone of his high status, even bowing low. In the mead-house later that evening the donkey-driver regaled his friends with his tale of a grand personage who had deigned to speak to him so kindly. But his friends were sharper than he was, and asked for the scholar’s precise words. “How are ye?” he repeated, realising, as he did so, that he had been included with his donkeys.’

She laughed. Her head tipped back, her veil slipped off, and for the first time she saw properly the man who had sat there all along. Pure white jodhpurs, wound tight around his calves. A wide sash around his waist. A cape of thick black wool falling from thin shoulders in generous folds. And under the white turban a small dark face and a tiny, straight nose. Awiy! she said in a low voice to the groomsman next to her. When I have children they’re going to look like that! He laughed, but she was serious. She dragged the material back over her face.

When, after nearly two weeks, the feasting was finally over, the little party left the bridal hut and walked into the das. It smelled of incense, of food and stale beer. The reeds and wildflowers that had been strewn across the ground were bruised and limp. Even under her netela she felt the expectant eyes; when it was lifted away so the guests could see her it was like a blinding.

AND HE TOOK THE MAIDEN TO HIMSELF, AND HE SAID UNTO HER, ‘BEHOLD, O MARY, I HAVE TAKEN THEE FROM THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY OF GOD, BUT I WISH TO GO ON A JOURNEY. TAKE CARE OF THYSELF UNTIL I RETURN TO THEE, AND I WILL ASK THE LORD GOD TO PROTECT THEE AND BE WITH THEE.’

– LEGENDS

The tree was a green cave, full of shifting underwater light. And so quiet. She drew bare soles along the rough branch and resettled her spine against the trunk. In a minute she would climb down, hugging a bounty of peaches in the lap of her dress. But in a minute. First she wanted just to sit here, in the bird-sewn silence.

When, inevitably, she heard her name called, she didn’t answer. Maybe if she was really still – but the calls came closer, till they were beneath her feet. ‘Come down. Please come down?’ A pause. ‘You’re the wife of a big man now. You must come down.’

But he’s away, she replied fiercely, though only to herself. And I wish he’d never come back.

‘That’s right, careful.’ She shrugged away the proffered hand, and made for the house.

They were preparing for a visit from her father. Her aunt, Tirunesh, presided. Woizero Tirunesh, in her layers of white shawls, sitting stately, giving orders. Woizero Tirunesh, with her ever-present horn of dark beer, stirring up yet another domestic storm.

She was ambivalent about her father, Tirunesh’s younger brother. Mekonnen Yilma was proud, tall, a fast walker, a fast talker, a natural soldier. A good storyteller, too, and committed to witty conversation. Listening to the thrust and flash of his talk, his quick laughter and tight puns, or watching him settle himself onto a stool, take a sip of mead, then lean into his high ten-string lyre to sing slow low Lenten songs, she could almost forget she was afraid of him; almost forget the terror with which she watched him punish the other children, the spell of the thin hide whip curving through the air and kissing the backs of their legs.

Her father was proud, yes, but not too proud to beg. Over the years, from story after story – not all his – she had pieced together how she came to be. When Setechign – pale, beautiful, much-sought-after – first married Mekonnen the expected children did not arrive, so Tirunesh had taken herself off to church to have words with God about the situation. A boy was duly born, and named Nega, for the dawn.

Then Setechign left. No matter that Mekonnen was now a customs officer on the long lawless border with the Sudan. No matter that his immediate master was married to the empress’s sister. No matter that he regularly returned from military skirmishes laden with trophies and prisoners of war who often became valuable slaves, and that to this was added the tithes of the peasants who farmed his lands. Nor did it matter that – as Mekonnen, fond of genealogy (particularly his own) and possessed of a preternatural memory for names, made a point of reminding her – he could claim descent from at least three emperors and an empress, Taitu, and would thus give her offspring royal blood. No. His family was too big, there were too many hangers-on, it was all too much. So Setechign went.

He pleaded. He sent emissaries: his sister, his mother, elder after elder. They applied all the subtle pressures of home and hearth, and it took a couple of years, but eventually she returned, and they conceived a daughter.

In gratefulness Mekonnen plied his wife with gifts: trains of donkeys laden with wheat, barley, the whitest teff; pots of spiced butter, baskets of deep-red dried chillis, of cardamom, frankincense and rue.

Their daughter arrived the day before Christmas, on the feast of Ammanuel. There was no disagreement about what her baptismal name ought to be – Weletè Amanuel, daughter of Amanuel – but her daily name was another issue altogether. Her maternal grandmother favoured Genet, for the garden of Eden; her paternal grandmother Gedamenesh, or my sanctuary; while her mother called her Nigisté, my queen. Tirunesh and her father, however, chose Yetemegnu, or ‘those who believe’, and it was they who prevailed.

Again Setechign left. Distressed and in spiritual need she walked to Infiraz, where she had heard there was a great zar doctor. Perhaps he could heal her. But when she met him she was afraid. A huge, powerful man, he had once, when he was nineteen, crossed the high Simien on foot, scrambling down gorges and tramping over plains looking for his own mother, who had been abducted by a Tigréan lord. He found her, but could not release her, and on his way back had become possessed by a spirit that had never left him. He had learned instead to control it, and now his home was filled with incense and the smell of roasting coffee, with women speaking in tongues or stamping out their individual spirit dances; dancing, often, to his personal bidding too.

And this particular woman, with her tight-braided hair and neck so long it could take seven rings of tattoos – the zar doctor liked this particular woman. And the more Setechign fought him, the more she hated him, the more he liked her. She hated him so much that when she became pregnant with his child she tried to kill it, standing for hours under a waterfall in the hope of dislodging the growing thing. But it would not leave before it was ready and when it was born she called the boy ‘imbi alè’, or ‘he said no’. Not until he went away to school was his name changed, to Gebrè-Selassie.

Only Setechign’s third union, to a rich trader, gave her a measure of calm. The home she made with him was a place of dancing and honey wine, where an animal was slaughtered nearly every week, and parties included the neighbourhood poor, invited to eat their fill. Of warmth and love, where special meals were cooked for a shy daughter who basked in the unaccustomed glow of feeling singular, precious; who had gently to be encouraged to eat and was seldom allowed to stay. Yetemegnu made little protest, but every time she was taken away the grief curled deeper into her heart.

At her aunt’s there were fewer parties. Tirunesh was pious and severe, a disciplinarian who had little patience for a child who lost herself in games and dreams. But she made sure Yetemegnu learned to spin, and to cook. Every morning the child was required in the kitchen, to watch and to learn, and at last to try a few things herself – to feel the exact point at which it was best to add spices to onions and garlic turning gold in the pot; to judge just how thin to make the sourdough, so the injera would be delicate and light.

Their work was accompanied by a drone of words, but Yetemegnu never listened in any conscious way. Nor did she take much notice of the slight deacon who appeared after church each day, read from the homilies of Ruphael or of Mikael, then, having been fed, slipped away again, while the women turned to drinking coffee and pronouncing on the generally disappointing ways of the world.

Tirunesh had been watching the deacon, however. She questioned him about his education, his ambitions, and liked his considered answers. ‘If I had a daughter,’ she said to her husband one day, ‘I would marry her to this man.’

So when the deacon’s patron, a friend of hers, approached her with the news that the deacon was nearing the end of his training and looking for a wife, the suggestion that this wife be Yetemegnu fell on receptive ears.

‘He’s just another student from God knows where,’ said Mekonnen, disgusted. ‘Able, maybe, but so what? There are hundreds like him, cluttering up the churches. Absolutely not.’

‘He would be a good husband, perhaps the best she could have.’ To Mekonnen this was patently untrue. He could not believe his own sister could so easily squander their lineage on a nonentity; a nonentity, moreover, from Gojjam, an entirely different province, and thus foreign. ‘We don’t know anything about him. We don’t even know who his father is. No.’

‘Setechign,’ said Tirunesh on a visit one day, as gently as she knew how. ‘Isn’t it time your daughter was betrothed? The deacon who reads to me –’

‘She’s a child. She’s barely eight years old. I will not give my daughter to a man of thirty who has no women in his household, no mother in evidence, no nurse to care for her. How can you think of such a thing?’

Tirunesh turned to the elders. Deputations arrived at Mekonnen’s house, bearing blandishments, arguments, testimonies of character. Mekonnen listened, resisted all of them.

‘Look at me!’ cried his sister. ‘Look at me! I’m barren. Is that what you want for her? I’ll curse you for your cruelty!’

‘Now, now, no need –’

But she would not hear. ‘If you do not marry her to this man I will hate you forever. As Mary is my witness I will never visit your graveside. And you will never stand at mine.’

It was the strongest threat in the armoury, and her brother acceded with an angry sigh. ‘Very well. She can marry the student.’

His relenting made it harder for Setechign to hold fast. And different arguments were used with her. Of course the girl was young, but that was common and had its advantages: she could be moulded to her husband’s ways, she would grow up in an educated, pious house. It would be good for her. As for the lack of nurturing women, a nurse could be hired, servants, she could be given an experienced female slave.

No one told Yetemegnu what had been decided. Why would anyone bother to tell a girl child?

COME, O JEREMIAH, AND MAKE A LAMENTATION FOR MY MOTHER HANNA, FOR SHE HATH FORSAKEN ME, AND I AM ALONE IN THE HOUSE OF BRASS. WHO WILL POUR WATER ON MY HANDS? AND THE TEARS START IN MY EYES.

– LEGENDS

Before her husband left for Addis Ababa to petition for a parish, he had gone to see the governor of Gondar, to tell him of his marriage, and through his marriage, of his promotion both in Gondar society and from deacon to priest; to tell him that his wife was young and he a man who owned nothing. The governor had responded as the new priest hoped, awarding him a salary of twelve quintals of grain, teff and barley, a quintal of chillis, a generous measure of butter. Every month these things arrived on donkey-back and were received by her maternal grandmother, into whose care she had been returned. Here, too, they sometimes reminded her to put away childish things, but her life was really not so different from that of other children her age. She settled in quickly, helping around the house, visiting neighbours, family friends, sometimes forgetting, for hours at a time, that she could not stay. Now she really learned to dance, watching women at the weddings of her grandmother’s friends and relations, then slipping in among them and echoing every move. And when they saw how she loved it, how well and naturally it came to her, they circled her, and clapped and trilled and sang, encouraging her, laughing as she responded with tighter, more demanding movements, improving from day to day until she was nearly as good as some of the more accomplished adults.

One day she was passing the receiving room when she saw her grandmother had a visitor. This was nothing more than routine – incense, roast chickpeas, coffee, questions, how are you, and how are you, and well, thanks be to God. But something made her hesitate in the doorway. The visitor looked at her and set down her cup. ‘Your mother is tiring. You must come at once.’

Setechign had been ailing for months. On Yetemegnu’s last few visits she had sat by her mother’s bedside, trying to manage the fear that rose through her body when her mother complained of what felt like knives cutting through her stomach and refused to eat. Then, three weeks ago, her brother Nega had taken a month’s supply of food to their father Mekonnen, who, having come off worst in a dispute with a rival, was imprisoned in Debrè Tabor. On the way home the boy had had to swim across a river; that night a fever clenched his teeth and threw his head back in a rictus of pain. Holy water, administered in dousings and drenchings and trickles through rigid jaws, did not help, and he died the next midnight. The governor took pity on his prisoner and released Mekonnen so he could mourn his son. For three days Mekonnen had sat with his lyre, weeping, singing of his beautiful swimming boy. Setechign simply weakened, disappearing further and further into the hollow under the blankets.

Her mother’s house was full of people when Yetemegnu arrived. They cried in the corners and wept through the receiving rooms. They held her, and led her into the bedroom.

Setechign had already been washed and laid out. Her big toes had been tied together, as was done for Lazarus, and her thumbs, so her arms ended in a spear-point aimed at her feet. She had been wrapped in a winding sheet of rough white cotton, and then in a palm shroud. The child drew near, and stood by her mother’s head. The hair was glossy, the eyes closed. They would not open – decades later Yetemegnu would remember and weep as if it had just happened.

After the short service, and the first prayer for absolution, scores of people – priests and deacons, relatives and neighbours who had eaten Setechign’s injera and drunk her mead – followed the bier out of the house and down the road toward the church. The bearers had not travelled far, pacing slow, leading a low hubbub of gossip and care, when they set her down. At once the chat stopped, and the crying began again, the women leading. The deaths Setechign had suffered, the lives she had brought into being. Her loves, her lineage, her generosity, called out, rhymed out, echoed in chorus. Then the deacons sang another prayer, the bier was lifted, and they carried on. Seven times, so all the thoroughfare knew of her passing.

In the churchyard she was set down while her male relations dug into the ground. A smell rose, of loam and of rain. Yetemegnu was brought to the front. Now she could see the priest who clambered into the shallow grave; see his censer swinging, one corner, another, another, overlaying earth with pious perfume. Hear the final prayers. Watch the bending backs lower their freight into the ground, head to the east, feet to the west, feel, like a blow to her own body, the first handful of soil land upon her mother.

In the waning years of the Gondarine age, when emperors became puppets and warlords danced them on and off their thrones as mood and circumstance took them, Emperor Teklè-Haimanot II, godly, handsome (and not a little vain), tried to live up to his name by planting seeds of piety wherever he went. By the end of the eighteenth century, when he was ushered into a monastery by a brother eager to take his turn as puppet-in-chief, he had established six churches, among them a structure he at first called Debrè-hail-wa-debrè-tebab, mount of might and mount of wisdom, and then, because it was consecrated on the feast of Mary’s Presentation to the Temple, Ba’ata Mariam.

Ba’ata was, from the beginning, well endowed. Teklè-Haimanot settled upon it fertile lands that stretched down into the Bisnit and Qeha valleys, into Gabriel, and even to the districts of Dembiya and Deresgé, a whole day’s journey away – lands from which a fifth of all harvests flowed back to the church. A spring was discovered and designated holy. Ba’ata’s tabot, its life-giving replica of the Ark of the Covenant, was of marble, and the emperor commissioned the best of fresco-painters to illuminate its walls. By the early 1800s Ba’ata was among the richest, most powerful, and, some said, most beautiful of the forty-four churches in Gondar. Students walked for days to study under its dark trees, learning the syllabary, the psalms, the homilies of Mary, and especially the aquaquam, the slow dance of David before the Ark, of which Ba’ata claimed 276 masters.

When, some fifty years later, Emperor Tewodros II’s chronicler described the capital’s priests as debauched occultists (and his liege, of course, as the opposite of these things), there was perhaps something in it. Certainly they were not accustomed to being gainsaid, and especially not by a brawling upstart they mocked for being born to a mother so poor she’d had to sell purgative kosso to survive; so poor, one story went, the priests of Ba’ata turned her away when she brought her son to be baptised: she could not afford the two jars of dark beer, two bowls of stew and forty injera they demanded in payment.

But they would have done well to remember that this so-called upstart had also defeated lord after warlord to become emperor in act as well as in name, because they soon found that the churches, with their vast tracts of land and internecine theological disputes, were next. Five years later Tewodros stripped Gondar of its status as capital; ten years after that he seized from its churches any land he deemed surplus to requirements; finally, on the sixth day of the third month, when, wrote his chronicler, the very stars ‘began to fly about as though struck by fear’, Tewodros sacked the sanctuaries and set fire to the city. Castles, homes, churches – everything burned. Bells, chalices, drums, censers, crosses, manuscripts were torn out of their places and taken for his treasuries. Priests who fought to keep them were fed to the pyres.

In the silence after Tewodros and his soldiers were gone, as embers flickered against the dark like so many more burning towns, Ba’ata counted its blessings. The grand outer circles, the frescoes and the holy of holies smouldered and smoked, but the tabot, being marble, had not been consumed, and so the heart of the church was intact. The vestments encrusted in gold and silver, the sistra and the drums, the illuminated manuscripts, had been hidden underground, in a chamber below the holy of holies, and they too had survived. The priests built a temporary hut in the grounds and continued their ministry.

But they were again besieged. ‘Oh master!’ they wrote to Tewodros’s successor, Emperor Yohannes IV, borrowing from Psalm 79, ‘The heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Gondar in heaps.’ But Yohannes was already occupied, leading an eighty-thousand-strong force against Italian armies threatening to take the Eritrean highlands, so he asked Menelik, king of Shewa (and his chief rival) to intercept the Sudanese Mahdists advancing on Gondar. Menelik did not arrive in time: the jihadists razed nearly every remaining church to the ground. Only two escaped – Medhané-Alem and Debrè-Birhan Selassie, the latter protected, people said, by a swarm of holy bees.

By the early years of the twentieth century, when Tsega first followed his teacher of scriptures through the fields and thick woods, Gondar, which at its zenith had held up to seven thousand souls, was home to less than a tenth of that number. The castles, once hung with silk and ivory, chalcedony and Venetian glass, were bare and cold, fluttering with bats and pigeons. Thatched huts huddled as if for warmth against the outer walls. Only on Saturday, market day, did the town manage to summon up something of its former bustle.

Though Ba’ata, just up from the main market, had suffered an inevitable winnowing of its congregation, the itinerant students came still, and Tsega joined them. In the little village in Gojjam where he was born he had gone to church school with all the other wide-eyed boys, learning his alphabet in sing-song call and response. He had learned to write, shaping his letters so they fitted onto the bleached shoulderblades of sheep, because these were plentiful, especially after feast days, and vellum was not; and then he had been taught how to scrape and cure sheepskin to make his own parchment. He enjoyed all this, and found it easy, until one day his father, a priest, came upon him and a young male relative, a chorister, concentrating on a long scroll held down between them: crude archangels, demons, horned women; spells in angular letters, all red. How dare you! His father’s hand had twisted his ear until it burned. How dare you corrupt your learning, your soul, with – this, this dragging of Satan out from where he belongs! I forbid you to pick up a pen and write, ever again. May curses rain down upon you if you even think of tracing anything other than your name!

All the students had to learn most things by heart, but after that Tsega had to commit everything to memory: the divine offices and the book of hours, the antiphonaries, all of David’s psalms. When he graduated to the school of qiné, church poetry, he pulled his head through a rough sheepskin cape, picked up his leather book case, and left for a nearby village, where he had heard a respected teacher was working. A handful of others had done the same, walking in through the valleys and the mountain passes, choosing mastery of poetry in Ge’ez, the church language, over homes that they often never saw again. For five years the sun rose to find them gathered around their teacher, listening to him describe stanza forms, explain particularly pleasing metaphors, recite useful examples. They memorised model qiné and with his help peeled back their punning layers, looking for the gold hidden within the wax mould, the meaning nestling at the centre like the dark hard core of an olive tree. The church told them they were training their minds and souls, opening themselves up to apprehensions of divinity, but Tsega was learning worldlier things too: how to smuggle deniable meanings into seemingly innocuous conversation; how, because qiné carried with it so much prestige, it might be a way for a village boy disinclined to soldiery to chase social advancement.

During the day the students scattered across the countryside, composing their own poetry and begging, as the church provided no food. Tsega hated this aspect of his calling. He was proud, afraid of dogs, and quickly resorted to tall heart-tugging tales. In the late afternoon the students returned to their teacher, who listened to their verses, then easily, deflatingly, disassembled them. Near the end of the five years Memhir Hiruy, famed throughout the country for his skill with qiné, visited the Gojjam school to teach. The students vied amongst each other to impress the master, who after a couple of weeks singled Tsega out for praise. Would he like to come to Gondar to continue his studies? Of course he would. And, ignoring the protestations of his mother, he went.

Not long after they arrived at Ba’ata, the priests asked Memhir Hiruy to perform a qiné. ‘Ask him,’ replied the scholar, pointing to his new acolyte. They were insulted. Recent experience had only confirmed their deep suspicion of outsiders. And who was this anyway? A youth from the sticks – from Gojjam, no less, where everyone knew the evil eye flourished. Why was he here, assessing them with his noncommittal gaze, threatening them with his very presence? Why, he hadn’t even finished his studies. But after a glance at Memhir Hiruy for reassurance, Tsega stepped forward to puncture their scorn.

When Memhir Hiruy left for the new capital, Addis Ababa, Tsega stayed, learning the recondite church dances and committing to memory all the books of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, their interpretations and commentaries, and the books of the Fit’ha Negest, the law of kings handed down from Byzantium and from medieval Egypt. He became a teacher himself, and, ambitious in the way of people who know they have only themselves to depend upon, quietly but steadily made connections, travelling across the city after church services to read to the families of increasingly important personages; for Tirunesh’s husband, among them, and for her oblivious niece.

Less than a year after his wedding, Tsega deposited his young bride at her grandmother’s house and was on his way south. The mules were watchful on the long trek down into the Lake Tana basin. Their riders, too, looked around, into shaded copses, up at the lips of ravines, and once they had arrived at the Blue Nile gorge and were picking their way down its steep sides, into anything that even suggested it might be a cave. Everyone knew, from childhood stories, from scarred survivors, that this fertile country ran with bandits who regularly stripped mule-trains of their valuables then pushed off in low reed boats, poling them through the mud-coloured lake to islands and promontories, or disappeared into caves. They were all grateful when they scrambled up onto the wide cool highland plateau and then down, through aromatic juniper and newly imported eucalyptus, down into Addis Ababa.

Once there her husband took his time, acclimatising, visiting Memhir Hiruy, attending services, listening to gossip about the empress, and especially about her subtle regent Ras Tafari, who had recently returned from an extended tour of Egypt, Jerusalem, and the European capitals (where, among other things, he had wisely declined to sign a treaty that would have allowed Italy to build roads, rails, and a port into Ethiopia). The regent also managed – daily, it sometimes seemed – to announce the institution of new-fangled things: a modern school, a printing press, a newspaper. Every decision of any importance passed through his hands, which was a useful thing to know, but for the moment was not what most interested the new-minted priest. Tsega presented himself at the head offices of the church, and was given the care of a country parish called Gonderoch Mariam. He travelled the city to read aloud in the households of great men, among them Ras Kassa, the regent’s pious cousin. And he joined the throngs that arrived daily at the palace, looking for an audience with the empress.

Menelik’s daughter Zewditu, crowned after the brief reign and ruthless deposition of Menelik’s grandson Iyasu, was phlegmatic, conservative, uncomfortable in the presence of men and overwhelmingly pious, and had only once bowed to pressure to preside at the courts that operated in her name; she had hated the work, and never returned. She preferred, wrote her chronicler, kindly, to confine herself to ‘spreading spiritual wisdom by fasting, prayer, prostrations, and by almsgiving’. She read the histories of the female saints, ‘and a spiritual envy [to be like them] was stamped on her heart’. Each day she rose early and prayed into the afternoon, eating nothing, outdoing many of her monks and nuns.

Zewditu’s self-denial was matched by generosity – socially required, an expression of pride and status as well as charity, but prodigal nonetheless. Hardly a month went by without a banquet given to soldiers, to clergy, to the nobility or the impoverished laity, and late one November, after Tsega had been in the capital for nearly two years, he was invited to one. The floor of the great hall was laid with hundreds of carpets, some of wool, others of silk. Guests filled the vast space, seated according to their rank: the empress, her regent and senior princes of the blood on a raised platform at one end, surrounded by curtains, then, when they had eaten, the curtains drawn back so they could look down at long low tables filled with lesser notables, ranks of clergy in high white turbans and glowing white shemmas, straight-backed soldiers. Crosses blinked in the lamplight, phalanxes of servants and slaves brought horns of mead and baskets piled high with injera. The smell of dark red chicken stew; of zign, beef in ginger and cardamom and bishop’s weed; the sight of entire sides of fresh-slaughtered oxen carried on poles balanced on the shoulders of slaves so anyone could take a knife and help themselves, made him ravenous, but he ate nothing at all.

Eventually one of the higher-ranking servants enquired why. ‘Because this is the day the Ark of the Covenant, captured by the Philistines, was returned by God,’ he replied. ‘I am fasting in celebration of Zion.’ The servant, knowing this was the kind of thing that interested Empress Zewditu, told her there was a priest in her hall observing the fast of Zion, and who therefore could not partake of the abundance of meat on offer.

She turned out to be observing it too. She had had fasting food cooked for her, pulses and vegetables rather than meat, and she sent the young priest a portion of it. When he had eaten he stood and addressed to her a qiné of praise he had composed in preparation for just such an eventuality, a poem playing upon the biblical echoes of her baptismal name and lauding her holy magnanimity. She inclined her head in thanks. ‘And what can I do for you?’

This was why he had come to the capital, the moment he had been working toward for years. ‘I would like to lead Ba’ata Mariam church in Gondar,’ he replied. ‘And I would like to rebuild it to the glory of God.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. And she ordered the provision of all the accoutrements the new aleqa would require: a cape worked over in gilt, a tunic with a wide coloured band embroidered at the hem, a sash; bags of Maria Theresa silver.

Half of Gondar, it seemed, came out to meet him, ululating praise of their new chief priest. Aleqa Tsega accepted the celebrations calmly, savouring his sudden leap above those who had denied him welcome, noting the practised tributes from his fellow clergy, the underlying silences, the curdled smiles.

At her aunt’s house a feast was waiting. There too he looked about him – at the told-you-so pleasure of Tirunesh, the reluctant approval of Mekonnen. At the narrow-hipped girl in black who hung back, shaven head held low.

TIQIMT

THE SECOND MONTH

Sunny growing and ripening season. Honey removed from hives. The first barley threshed and winnowed for roasting and beer-making. Children play outdoor games; girls dance and greet storks arriving ‘from Jerusalem’.

She no longer hid as she had before he left, running to the storeroom, burrowing in among the wheat and split peas, the dusty green-smelling, crackling hops. Breathing shallow so no one could hear, crouching down behind a high basket or clay waterpot, willing herself invisible. If he found her he had chastised her, playfully. What, hiding again?

Now, nearly four years older, she did not hide, but still she retreated to the back rooms, to sit on a low stool among the comforting grains and watch the days crawl across the floor. She would have spent the nights there, if she could. She did not look up at him, or speak to him; even if she had been expected to, she could not.

When he was out the servants took charge, bossing her about the house like the child she still was, letting her help, yet refusing to play games with her because, being married, she was no longer a child. So she played alone, making a head from bunched-up cloth, a body from a dress, and rocking the form to sleep. Sometimes she heard children’s voices beyond the walls, whispering, calling – ‘coo-coo-loo!’ – and swallowed the voice that itched to answer.

Other times she sat at the window, craning for glimpses of life. Morose donkeys clopped by, or women doubled over beneath wide loads of firewood. Slaves with high packs balanced on their heads, nuns in yellow caps, children running errands. Once she saw a great lord riding in the direction of Ba’ata. His mule clashed and jingled with embellishments and the sun lit the dull barrel of a rifle. Retainers scurried to clear the way.

How handsome he was. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked the slave girl, who shook her head, and ran to see.

‘Ras Gugsa,’ she reported. Ras Gugsa. Their governor! From her father she knew she was distantly related to him, and even here, shut up among the servants, she had heard the rhymes and the gossip. He was pious, as required, a poet and a fair administrator, but somewhat hidebound, too, and a melancholy and determined drinker. He had been married to the empress, who, it was said, still loved him, but they had been forced to separate when she was crowned; it was no secret he blamed his loss of power on the regent. Just over a year later he would be tricked into battle against Ras Tafari and die on the fields of Anchem, his soldiers having scattered in fear of the regent’s most recent toy, the aeroplane. But for now he carried all the sheen of high office.

When they were first married her husband had hired a blind abba to lead her, singing, through the alphabet, the set texts of early church school, the psalms her mother had hummed to her. She found the abba kind, loving, but soon he was reporting that she was too impressionable, too prone to tears. And too quick to learn, too. ‘If you correct her or do her wrong,’ he said to her husband, ‘she will quote David at you. She will cry to God and God will listen to her. Do not teach her to read.’ So the lessons stopped, and she sat out her hours spinning thread from tight bolls of cotton, twisting coloured yarn around narrow bundles of straw to make serving baskets, or picking crumbs of dark earth out of quintal after quintal of wheat kernels, lentils, teff.

Sometimes, still, in a sudden access of spirit, she would run to the neighbours’, climb up into their peach tree, fill her skirts with the biggest fruits she could find, and slink back to enjoy them. Once she left the main door open by accident. A sheep had just been slaughtered and a dog crept in and got hold of one of the back legs. Heart thumping so hard it seemed it might deafen her, she managed to startle the animal into dropping it.

Other times she acted willingly enough in the play that had been written for her. Not that she necessarily knew the words, or her exits and her entrances. So at harvest time, after the peasants had delivered their tithes – two-thirds of the barley and wheat from the Jews who farmed at Gonderoch Mariam, the smaller church her husband administered; chickpeas and chilli peppers, peas and broad beans and teff from Ba’ata’s lands in Dembiya and Bisnit – she handed skiffs of wheat and barley, balls of butter, strips of beef jerky and cobs of corn out to anyone who looked as if they needed it. There was so much she felt it wouldn’t be missed.

Or guests dropped by. ‘Where’s your father?’ Sometimes she could not help but laugh. ‘Oh, you’re mistress here!’ By the time she turned twelve she was becoming accustomed to being called woizero. Lady. Enjoying it, even.

As such she was not expected to grind grain or collect water, but she was expected to be able to cook, to provide handsomely for the priests, the merchants, the visiting dignitaries her husband brought to the house almost daily. Sometimes, knowing her instruction had been interrupted, he helped her, tasting, suggesting, demonstrating, assuming she knew this had to be a secret held between them lest it diminish his station. Until one lunchtime he criticised her: the fish in the wat had been overcooked and was breaking up, there was not enough sauce. Child, he said, this is a bit dry. But we made it together! she protested, before she could think.

The next time she was brought fish, five fresh silvery creatures from the Angereb river, she was extra careful, stripping them, washing them, removing every bone, rubbing the pieces with spice. The resulting wat was succulent, perfect, and when that day’s guests arrived, and took too long at their conversational preliminaries, Tsega was impatient. ‘Never mind, sit down and eat.’ There was no feigning their enjoyment of what had been put before them. After they left he took her small hands and kissed them, over and over, until she thought he might swallow them.

He took a keen interest in her deportment. It wasn’t enough to wash her hands before and after meals; she had to scrub her arms up to the elbows. When her official mourning for her mother and brother was ended she had begun to grow her hair again and braid it back from her forehead. Other girls put silver rings in the plaits, but he would not allow it. Soon he found even the shining braids too much, and told her to hide them under a scarf.

She understood her new state meant she was to stay at home, but initially she did not understand how absolutely he meant it. She had always previously been allowed to run over to a neighbour’s to borrow pots, or muslin to strain butter, or a few shallots, and she still did so. One afternoon when she returned, however, he was waiting for her.

Come here. Her stomach seemed suddenly to have slid to somewhere around her feet. Come here, I said. He raised a stick, and he did not stint. At first she was so shocked she could not cry, but then the sobs arrived, deep and gusty so she could hardly breathe.

But with him it was as if a tempest had passed. Anxiously he stroked her head and picked at her shawl, straightening it, smoothing it over her shoulders. My heart, don’t cry. Don’t cry. Here. Here’s some money. Pressing silver thalers into limp hands. Get the servants to buy you something nice. Not jewellery, you know I don’t like jewellery, but something nice.

Sometimes he worried whether she ate enough. Lijé, he’d say. My child. My child is hungry. And at night especially, when there were no strangers about, he would draw her close and feed her from his side of the mesob. The portions were too big, so she would intercept his hand and break them up into smaller pieces, eating what she could, then closing her mouth tight.

Not infrequently he would arrive home to find her in a corner, weeping. Child, he would say gently, why are you crying? Who has harmed you? And at last the answer would come. My mother. My mother is dead.

Ayzosh, ayzosh, he would murmur, drawing her to him. He dipped a hand into a wooden vessel that had held butter from Asmara. When he drew it out it glistened with the remains of the butter, and with it he would wipe away her tears and gently soften her taut and salty face. Ayzosh. I will be like a mother to you.

After one of these moments he seemed to be concentrating on her longer than usual, drawing dark fingers down her neck. They stopped at the centre, traced a spot low on her throat. Are you growing a goitre? he said, almost to himself. She had little idea what a goitre was, so as usual she said nothing, and soon forgot he had asked the question at all.

But some days later a servant came to her to say, that lady the master asked for, she has come. What lady? But she greeted the woman, and watched as the woman set about heating oil-seeds over a low fire, stirring them until they smoked and burned. Watched as she scraped the soot off the sides of the gas lamps and added that to the black residue. A bit of kohl, too, so the mixture glistered and plopped on the heat.

The woman set it aside to cool, then walked over and took her by the hand. ‘Now, sit still.’ She took up a narrow stick, dipped it into the cooling mess, and began to draw a line around Yetemegnu’s neck, parallel to her collarbone. As suddenly as she understood she was on her feet. But the servants held her down as the woman drew another line, and then another and another, and at the ends of the longest, just under her ears, risen suns.

‘Araqi?’ Alcohol would numb her, but she could not assent to any part of this. She shook her head, a sharp snap of refusal. ‘Don’t move!’ She closed her eyes.

When the needle punctured her skin, she exploded, biting and scratching and writhing. But they held her tight, across her body, by her head, so nothing could stir – only her tears, streaming down her face. And her mouth, screaming. What had she done to God to deserve this?

After the scabs had hardened and fallen off, after she had spent two months delirious and burning with infection, she looked and saw she was imprinted with the tracks of her own tears.

In her first pregnancy she slept all the time. They fed her and she accepted it, and they fed her more. And when finally they wrapped her up tight and sent her on slow mule-back to her father’s home in the countryside she felt only relief, to be away from the big house, even though her husband had already left some months before, taking the road south to Addis Ababa as soon as he had heard word the empress was dead.

One morning she felt a trickle down her thighs.

The women gathered, aunts, grandmother, neighbours. None seemed especially concerned, though they did become quite busy. Some raised a dividing curtain across the main room, others began to roast and pound and boil coffee. Charcoal was brought in on a small stand and blown into redness. Incense curled into the rafters. Watchful laughter, and chat.

Yetemegnu, now fourteen, had been told birth would feel something like it did when she went to the grove behind the house at dawn and squatted to relieve herself, so she had thought of it as that painless and that quick. All she could think, as the contractions tightened and tightened their grip, was no, this didn’t feel like that at all. She gasped, and the women’s voices rose to meet her, to share her pain, to distribute it between them.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

Outside the sun shone on fields vivid with young crops, yellow oil-seed, blue flax, the nodding, dewy greens of new barley, broad beans, wheat. The air, washed bright after months of storms, picked out every tree on the hill that rose behind the house, every silver leaf in the eucalyptus brakes.

But inside it was dark with people and smoke and low talk. In the doorway, behind the curtain, a deacon read from the homilies of Ruphael. Listen, the women said. Listen, because Ruphael opens our wombs.

She sat at the centre, on a low stool. One woman stood behind her, strong arms clasped across her narrow chest. Another sat at her feet. They told stories, asked her questions, tried to divert her, but she sank further and further into herself, dreading the next visitation.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

They told her she was not meant to cry out, but she couldn’t help it. Oh Mary, mother of God, relieve me! Ayzosh, they said. Ayzosh.

She made wild and breathless promises, about the prayers, the fasting she would undergo if only this could stop. One of the women laughed. Oh, you’ll forget. And you’ll be having another soon enough.

The deacon read on, a baseline whose timbre changed only when he shifted in his seat, or coughed.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

An endless night, and another day. The women had put down a mattress so she could curl up on her side, but she was now back on the stool. They took turns holding her and drank cup after cup of coffee, but no one ate.

The deacon read on.

Another night, and another day. St Mikael’s Day, bathed in birdsong and sunlight.

Eventually the deacon put Ruphael aside and took another battered book out of its hide case.

‘NOW THERE WAS A CERTAIN CITY WHEREIN A CHURCH HAD BEEN BUILT, AND THE CHURCH WAS BUILT IN THE NAME OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, AND EACH YEAR, ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF THE MONTH OF HIDAR, WHICH IS THE DAY OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, GREAT NUMBERS OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE CITY DID NOT FAIL TO VISIT HIS CHURCH – MAY HIS INTERCESSION AND HIS SUPPLICATION KEEP OUR KING DAVID FROM THE EVIL ENEMY!’

The baby crowned. She was beyond pain, beyond comprehension. She felt her spirit departing, the world about her fading. The women’s voices rose.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

‘AND BEHOLD IT CAME TO PASS ONE DAY WHEN THE PEOPLE WERE JOURNEYING ALONG THE ROAD TO COME TO THAT CHURCH, THAT A MIGHTY ROARING RUSH OF WATERS CAME FROM THE SEA, AND IT BURST UPON THE PEOPLE AND ALARMED AND TERRIFIED THEM EXCEEDINGLY, AND DROVE THEM OUT OF THEIR SENSES; AND THE WATER SURROUNDED THAT PLACE AND ROSE TO THE HEIGHT OF ABOUT TWO MEASURES, AND THE PEOPLE WERE WELLNIGH DROWNED.’

And with a great tearing and an onrush of fluid, the baby arrived, pouring into the arms of the midwife at her feet. She fell back and they caught her and laid her down to rest.

When the placenta had safely followed they took a pat of butter and rubbed the newborn’s head. They pinched its nose, smoothing it, pulling at it, so it would grow long and narrow. And their ililta rose, loud and joyous.

Nine times. A messenger was dispatched to Addis Ababa, to tell Aleqa Tsega his first child was a girl, and that she was named Alemitu.

In her father’s village the feasting began. Araqi and tella flowed like water. Injera arrived by the mesob. Five sheep were slaughtered, and then someone brought four more. All who attended the birth and fasted for the duration ate their fill. But the new mother took nothing at all. They gave her honey, and buttered oatmeal gruel, but she would not touch it. She lay curled on the floor, hugging herself, trying to sleep.

It was only when, decades later, she herself beat through the streets of Addis Ababa in supplication that she began to get an inkling of where her husband had been when Alemitu was born: under a colder sky, walking raw avenues that criss-crossed the bottom of a green bowl surrounded by mountains. The city had been capital for only forty years, and they were still building it. Donkeys trotted through the main streets as they would in any town in the country, carrying firewood, dried discs of cow-dung, baskets for market, but here they also hauled scaffolding, sheets of corrugated iron, drew telegraph poles rattle-bouncing through the dust. Everywhere a new structure was going up, a road being metalled, cable installed, or a ragged work gang being whipped into a semblance of efficiency. Rumours eddied through the thoroughfares: that Tafari was overseeing every detail of the preparations himself; that every day he appeared, a small long-nosed black-caped figure, at a hotel, or the market, or the telegraph office or on the wide sweep of road leading from the railway station, checking on the quality of asphalt or of uniform or of welcome; on the impression his city would make on the foreign guests who had already begun to arrive.

As the coronation neared, the donkeys were joined by horses and mules, trotting footsore in from all across the empire. They carried warriors and their generals; lords of the north, the south, the east and the west, princes who owned more land than the regent, who commanded armies as big as or bigger than his. Princes and priests, priests and more priests, from Aksum and Debrè Libanos and Meqellé, from Sidamo and Harar and Debrè Marqos, or, like her husband, from Gondar, priests in white turbans, black capes, long self-regarding beards; monks and nuns in turmeric yellow, gold-red amber necklaces hanging heavy on breastbones. Prayer sticks and crosses everywhere, crosses of gold and silver, of brass and of humble wood. And Tsega moved proud amongst them, listening to them jostle over the niceties of hierarchy and opportunity afforded by Tafari’s achievement the previous year, of finally beginning to bring independence to their sixteen-hundred-year-old church.

Over sixteen hundred years since a ship on the Red Sea coast was attacked, leaving two Christian boys from the Phoenician city of Tyre to find their way to the Aksumite court where they became companions of Ezana, the emperor’s son. Sixteen hundred years since one of the brothers, Frumentius, now grown, travelled to Alexandria to tell the leadership of the Egyptian church that Christian merchants from across the Roman empire congregated in Aksum and needed a bishop. Frumentius himself seemed best qualified for the job so they consecrated him and dispatched him back to Aksum, where he converted his childhood friend (who, now emperor, well understood the usefulness of such ties with Rome, his chief market for ivory, tortoiseshell, gold, rhinoceros horn). The Ethiopian church had been led, in name at least, by an Egyptian monk ever since, but when Empress Zewditu promoted Ras Tafari to negus, or king, of Gondar, he had moved at once to free it. Assiduous diplomacy produced, within a year, a promising first step – division of the empire into dioceses led by five Ethiopian bishops, among them Abunè Abraham of Gojjam and Begemdir.

Eventually, seven days before the coronation, the milling priests resolved into an expectant phalanx. Serried rows of eyes, her husband’s among them, watched as an honour guard marched through the gates of St George’s Cathedral and up the steps. Rows of eyes watched the reverent handing over of robes, of a sceptre and an orb, of gold rings and spears, of a sword sheathed in gold and diamonds, of a gold-encrusted Bible and two heavy gold crowns. Then, for seven days and seven nights, seven times seven priests sang David’s psalms and the Book of the Praise of Mary, cycling again and again through all their strophes of light.

The words, of course, were familiar to all the men, who had each spent decades studying their order and their intent; so familiar they were all too often muttered and gabbled, boredom taking precedence, minds drifting to other things; but when, in the dark hours after midnight on the seventh day, Negus Tafari and his wife arrived at the cathedral to begin their vigil, it was as though the phrases had been renewed, charged with present meaning. Also that of the past: this coronation drew much of its power from the Kibrè Negest, the Book of the Glory of Kings, in which, as all here knew, it was told how Solomon of Israel was visited in Jerusalem by Makda, queen of Sheba. Solomon, who would eventually number among his consorts seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, was attracted to Makda, but she was a virgin and disinclined to yield, so he tricked her, feeding her spiced food and ensuring the only water in the palace was by his bed.

Solomon and Makda conceived a child, whom she called Menelik. Thus, claimed the chronicles, did the pearl God tucked into Adam’s body at the beginning of the world, the pearl which had been passed down through the children of Abraham to David and to Solomon (and would eventually arrive in Mary, and in her son), pass into Menelik also. When Menelik was grown, he travelled to see his father in Jerusalem. Solomon anointed him king of Ethiopia despite a troubling dream he had had, of a bright sun blazing over Israel then departing south. When Menelik I at last left for home he did so in the dead of night, taking the Ark of the Covenant with him.

As dawn slipped through the high windows and traced bright lines across the carpeted floor, cutting through thick eddies of incense, dispersing the blurred yellow light of hundreds of beeswax tapers, the chanting and the prayer intensified. The deacons danced before their king, before the holy of holies and its sanctified replica of the Ark, as if for the first time; dancing as David danced in the temple of Jerusalem – sistra clashing, drums beating, bare feet stepping, serious and joyful.

Outside the cathedral two open-sided coronet-topped tents had been erected within a far larger tent that held the most important members of the congregation. This tent was filled with alien regalia, for apart from the great rases and court officials, few Ethiopians had been invited. When the priests accompanied Negus Tafari out of the church, they stared amazed into this spectacle. And the spectacle stared back. Politely it looked, and less politely it assessed: strengths, weaknesses, allegiances. Behind puffed-out chests and polished medals, under topis and busbies, calculations in English, Italian, French, German; calculations of land, export capabilities, porosity of borders, military prowess. Many of their Ethiopian hosts knew this, and if they didn’t know, guessed, for how did that proverb go? Oh yes – foreigners enter like thread into a needle then branch out like a sycamore fig. Why, only six years ago Ras Tafari, touring Europe, had had to use Ethiopia’s new membership of the League of Nations to shame Britain and Italy into dropping a plan to divide influence over his country (they drew up another a year later). Italy, surely, should have known better: had it really forgotten Adwa, where, only thirty-three years ago, Menelik II and his empress Taitu had routed the Italian army? No, no one had forgotten that; some sitting here had even fought in that war. The Italians had had to content themselves with retreating to their colony in Eritrea, and with fantasies of revenge.

All the more important, then, that the foreigners should see this show of pomp and power. And that they should be well acquainted with this new leader, who had so steadily extinguished all internal opposition: in war, as had happened with Ras Gugsa; around the council table; by sheer attrition: Empress Zewditu, for all her supposedly final word, and for all her manifest reluctance to promote her busy regent to negus, had eventually found she had no other choice, for he worked as tirelessly and invisibly and patiently as the weather. And then she had died, suddenly.

Now Negus Tafari bowed low, touched his forehead to the stone of the cathedral, kissed it, bowed, kissed, stood. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ A clear, controlled voice, with a hint of a rasp. ‘My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.’ Archbishop Kyrillos moved to the table to begin the coronation proper. ‘Now, according to God’s will and goodness I am going to crown him, and anoint him king of kings, so he will work with all his body and soul to spread religion and increase education, and Ethiopia will rise in wisdom and in knowledge, and her flag will be laid down from border to border. And we charge that you will be ruled by him and help him in this good work.’ When the reply came, in a rumble from all around, from the chairs, from under the trees, from among the graves, ‘May God help our emperor do as you say. Amen,’ he placed his hands on the Bible and turned to the king. ‘Will you, in your authority and power, and in all your works, watch over the people of Ethiopia with patience and compassion, and keep their wellbeing in mind always, according to the law?’ ‘These words shall lead to good works, so, insofar as I am able, yes, I will.’

And so the service, in which each accoutrement – sceptre, orb, spear, ring, crown – was blessed by the archbishop and by a scholar of the north, of the south, of the east and of the west, a service interspersed by the voices of ten deacons handing their chants back and forth, back and forth, unspooled with the solemnity and intimacy of a wedding. (Though no weddings would have been accompanied, as midday approached, by a vast roaring in the sky as Tafari’s beloved aeroplanes swooped and looped in fealty.) As in a teklil wedding the vows were followed by a mass; as in a wedding the ceremony included communion, for which Tafari and his wife were required to return to the sanctuary and replace their rich robes with something simpler. As in a wedding the service was brought to a close by qiné after rich dense qiné, one of which was delivered by Aleqa Tsega. And then Emperor Hailè Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia, elect of God, climbed into a horse-drawn carriage and was driven away.

When at last Aleqa Tsega returned to Gondar his coming was heralded by a warning: you are the wife of a great man now. The emperor has tied a circlet of gold about his head. When most of the foreigners had departed and the daily banquets and firework displays were tapering off Aleqa Tsega had answered a summons to the palace, where he joined whispering huddles of clerics and lords, all wondering why they were there. Promotion, it transpired: Emperor Hailè Selassie, who knew well how favour, generously bestowed, tightened the reins of loyalty and obligation (especially in those of humble birth), was parcelling out authority over sections of his realm. Aleqa Tsega returned a liqè-kahinat, chief of the learned, of all of Semien and Begemdir. But at the time she understood only that she would have been happier if he had not come back at all.

BOOK II

1931–1941

The landscape around Gonderoch Mariam. Photograph by the author.

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