Chapter 5
May, 1945 CE
The Village of Ash
Once there was a story and no one to tell it.
As Grandmother spoke, the girl settled herself closer; the pair were excused from the work of women and girls in their village lest their strangeness spoil the bubbling disks of injera as they baked or taint the healing essence of the plants hanged to dry in the African sun.
“Tell about the tree and the bird and the girl by the sea,” Asmeret begged.
The old woman smiled, smoothing the ragged patches of hair left on her granddaughter’s head. May the ancestors steady her hand and quiet her heart, the old woman thought, replaying in her mind the last time she had found the girl crouched behind her hut, wild-eyed, making guttural sounds, and hacking off her own hair with a knife.
Tree knew the story, and gave it to me. The girl on the beach was small, not quite five.
“Same as me!” Asmeret piped up. She too was about to be five and she was small—smaller even than the other girls of her village born in the same season.
“Yes, now listen child, the sand warmed her bare bottom while her feet waggled madly each time the tongue of the sea scrolled up the beach and lapped at her toes. Between the scarred cliff at her back and the lands of her ancestors far across the Red Sea, nothing else stirred.
The girl tipped backwards and writhed like a tentacled thing washed up and left on dry land—shocked to be flip-flopping between worlds. Her skin shimmered blue-black-blue against the pure white of nowhere and everywhere, the end and beginning.
Asmeret flopped down in the dirt, thin arms and legs gone bendy and boneless. Grandmother smiled and waited for the stranded sea creature to stop wriggling.
Lion had gestured for her to wait with a nod of his great shaggy head, while the odd assembly of animals made their way up the long terraced path that had been tromped into the face of the cliff by aeons of feet, paws, and hooves. The route led from the beach to a ledge that jutted out sharply toward the water, forming the south end of this cove, where an ancient tree appeared to have sprouted from a seed dropped accidentally, perhaps by a bird or a mouse. The child was content watching the troupe grow smaller as they traveled toward the stage for their next play. She knew this performance was going to be special by the way the animals had hooted and haruffed and whinnied excitedly, huddled around Lion, planning their roles.
Distracted for a moment, Grandmother glanced across the compound to the hut that belonged to her first son, Anbessa, the Chief of the Village of Ash, though for five winters now his wife, Tigisti, had lived there alone with Asmeret and the invisible beasts who yowled and moaned after dark (and sometimes in daylight).
Her second son was gone too. The war in the north had swallowed them both. His wife, Daniat, lived in the hut next to hers with their daughter, Arsema, who was also nearing five. The war Daniat had started when the men left, quietly at first, threatened to swallow Asmeret whole. They were a village of women and children, wild dogs, and salted lava for soil. How much longer could they go on?
“Zebra was the one she liked best,” Asmeret interjected from where she sprawled in the dirt. “Grandmother!” Asmeret slithered over and cupped the old woman’s cheeks, pressing her cause between tiny, cool palms, “Did you fall asleep?”
“No, child, where was I?”
“Zebra!”
“Yes, he is your favorite, Zebra was stout, round-bellied, and blinked kindly at her through fronds of dark lashes. Once, the beast had let her touch his mane. The hair was stiff, more wiry and darker black than hers; the strands were straight as river reeds and light as pinfeathers. The girl combed the mane lovingly through her fingers. She chattered to him the story her grandmother told about how his kind got their stripes and asked him, “Isn’t that right?” Zebra didn’t answer her directly, of course, but he whisked the tufted tip of his tail at the biting flies on her legs in a fatherly way and she took that as a yes.
While she waited for the performance to begin, the girl closed her eyes and dreamed the saddle of sand beneath her was the back of the zebra. They rode over the sea leaving no hoof prints to follow.
After some time, no one knows how long, a staccato chorus of wingbeats turned the girl’s head toward the top of the bluff. The tree—a silent silhouette inked on the late morning sky—splintered into a million pieces. What she had thought were leaves erupted into the air, fluttering and flapping in wild disarray. As if on signal, every bird turned forming one speckled cloud that hovered, roiling, over the tree. As she watched, the largest of the flock spiraled off toward the north. The others followed as if harnessed together with string—a tempest of ravens, black and wailing.
Asmeret stopped riding her invisible zebra mid-trot and spun to face north. A small slice of the woods could be seen in the distance through the narrow passage between the two huts—the woods that didn’t belong on this wasted, volcanic plain between the mountains and the Red Sea. The woods that held her people’s most terrible secrets and demanded terrible payment to keep them. While the adults knew where they could and could not go in the dark stand of trees, passing through its tangles and archways to reach the old hunting grounds or the road to the City of Clouds, children were strictly forbidden to enter except when escorted there for the rites. So it drew them toward it like a spell, like destiny, despite the stories of snakes draped in the trees waiting to deliver fatal strikes to the backs of tender, bare necks and a witch with a pet raven who brought her lost boys and girls to bake into bread.
Grandmother watched Asmeret’s eyes change from the winter blue of the morning sky to gray, then something like black onyx, dark and slick, with thin veins of gold that glinted and flashed even without the aid of the sun. The child smiled darkly and puffed out her chest.
Only four, Grandmother grimaced, recalling the strange creature she had been at that age, and the price she had paid.
Once a story has a teller, it cannot be stopped, so the elder continued despite the sharp pang in her breast when she thought of Asmeret in a future she herself wouldn’t walk this earth to see, having now reached an age far surpassing any woman in the Village of Ash’s memory. What if I have no power to intervene, she worried now. Despite the gift the girl had inherited from her line—obvious even at not-quite-five—that the child would still hear her voice from the spirit world wasn’t guaranteed, not anymore.
This is the Age of Forgetting, the ancient ones murmured through the heat. Or was it to be longer than an age? An era? an epoch?
It was Grandmother’s turn to rouse Asmeret from her daydream (an acceptable, if not entirely accurate, word for the journeys they took while awake). When they sneer and laugh at your strangeness, tell you you’re crazy or possessed by a witch, tell them you saw them in your dreams, her own grandmother had told her. She hadn’t yet had to pass the advice on to Asmeret.
“You say the next part,” she prodded the child.
Asmeret returned, though her eyes remained dark, repeating the story word for word as she’d learned it and acting it out.
The child got to her feet, so pleased with the way the leaves had turned into birds, she thought to take a closer look. Now empty of ravens, the tree looked like a crown on the head of a stony-faced king who gazed across the Red Sea to the lands he might take for his own. I would like to see what the king sees, the little girl thought, quite forgetting the play the animals were preparing to stage. She skipped down the beach toward the staircase, stumbling some in the wet sand. She didn’t see the wave until it collapsed over her head, knocking her down. A watery hand clenched her in its fist and ripped her backward. The girl disappeared.
Asmeret sucked in her breath and held it as if to save the girl’s life, even though she knew very well how this story ended.
Grandmother shook her head in amazement. The child had also inherited the gift of the storyteller. Good. They will accept her in that role at least, as they did me. The other gift, the one the villagers across the lowlands no longer fully understood or embraced after ages of Islam and Christianity guiding their heads and hands, would make her an outsider in her own land. Daniat, especially, would see to that. Without guidance and protection, at best Asmeret would be named a witch to be feared, and at worst . . . she couldn’t bear to imagine. There was no one to teach her after she was gone and only Anbessa could protect her. There had been no sign of his return.
No signs at all. Not since she heard the whispers about the two ravens—one black and one white—dueling over his fate in the faraway sands. He’d lived, that much she could divine. Where and why he hadn’t come home remained hidden to her. She would seek council with the bones again later.
“PHHHEEEEEWWWWW,” Asmeret blew out her breath. “I couldn’t hold it any longer,” she gasped, “your turn, Grandmother.”
Unaware of their girl’s fate, the parade of animals continued up the Staircase of Epochs (so named as one could see in each stair the fossils of animals and plants that had lived when that step was the last on the journey to the top of the world). The animals trooped to the tree, single file, took their places, and began their performance.
They stomped and tossed their heads and their tails to the crash and boom of the sea. White plumes of ash bloomed and burst from beneath, seething like stew in a cauldron as the creatures danced around and around the trunk of the tree, which was so large that the whole menagerie fit, nose to tail, nose to tail (though of course the elephants had trunks, and the spiders no tails). So many were they, and so joyful their dance (none had seen the girl clutched in the watery hand) that the ground beneath them started to crack.
Far from shore, the fist uncurled, dropping the girl onto the very top of an undersea volcano that shook violently as a fiery river surged toward the surface.
She coughed and spit the warm water out of her mouth. Growing warmer it seemed. She remembered the play and searched the shore for the tree where the animals should be.
A dervish of color and light swirled around the base of the trunk as the odd carousel spun faster and faster. A sound like singing swelled from the whirl of noses and tails, echoing like the exhale of an abandoned conch shell out to the girl in her mountaintop chair.
The child started humming along as she watched the show, which was much more exciting than the other plays the animals put on. The scene washed over her, wave after wave. As the animals danced, the sea boiled, and the mountain shook beneath her bare bottom, the girl sensed that the dance and destruction wasn’t out there, but inside her instead, like her dreams—exciting and terrifying at the same time.
She scrubbed at the salty spray in her eyes, starting to wish that she would wake up snug in her bed, when she saw the moon hanging low, just above the tree’s barren branches. The sun came and went, she could feel it now, burning her back, but the moon was a thing she could always count on. And here it was, waiting up, keeping her safe. The girl held tighter to her perch and squinted to see the show better.
The beasts danced so hard that the cliff broke apart. Rocks and soil hailed down on the sand and the king’s stony brow and nose slid off his face. A tangle of tree roots uncurled from their thousand-year bed, naked and flinching at the salty air and hard light. When only a thin wedge of earth remained between the tree and the beach, the exposed roots looked like a reflection of the tree that they fed.
The tree and the animal carousel floated midair. The girl, quite forgetting to be afraid, tried to see how the upside down tree looked if she stood on her head. This delighted the girl, but the sea whipped up in a frenzy and toppled her over. She was still trying to work out which way was up, when the moon flashed bright overhead.
The swaying tree stiffened, the crown of bare branches quivered at the very top, then the massive tree trunk split in half—one great arm twisting east and the other west. The whirling animals froze on their track. It looked as if the whole scene had been shot through with lightning or one mighty arrow from the Great Huntress’ bow.
Asmeret toppled out of a headstand, which she’d practiced for hours just for the stood on her head part. Made Arsema hold her ankles until she got the hang of it.
“It wasn’t the Great Huntress who shot ‘em, Grandmother. That part is wrong.”
Grandmother raised an eyebrow. “Oh? How do you know?” She had added the part about the Great Huntress for Asmeret. The girl had her father’s love of animals, and even so young understood the exchange that happened between hunter and prey. Death begets life—hunter and hunted taking turns in the cycle. This ancient truth used to be taught in the stories and the rites of passage from birth to youth, youth to adult, adult back to the womb, but hunting was no longer their way of life and the Great Huntress’ name was nearly forgotten. She hoped her granddaughter was the one the bones spoke of—the one who would return the goddess’ protection and blessings to the world.
“I had a dream,” Asmeret grinned, offering her grandmother no further explanation.
That grin. Her father’s playfulness showed ear to ear.
Anbessa, away at war. He was alive but the rest was hidden from her—where he was, what he had become. Hunter. Soldier. Not the same things. Her husband, Asmeret’s grandfather, had been a hunter, descended from tribal kings. When he became a soldier, his eyes clouded over to keep her from the stories she might see in their depths. He was blind and deaf by the end of his life. She hoped her son would return, and return able to look her in the eye. Until then, she would do her best to keep Asmeret safe and prepare her for a future that couldn’t be like Arsema’s or that of the other girls of their tribe.
She would keep Asmeret from being cut in the fifth-year-rites. No one would protest—in fact she suspected that Daniat was planning a way to exclude Asmeret already, ensuring she would be unfit for marriage. Less competition for Arsema to be chosen by Aman when the time came. Not that any of the boys were likely to want Asmeret, as strange and sickly as she had always been. Grandmother worried about Arsema’s future too. Aman, the boy who would most likely be chief if her sons had no sons, and would be promised to Arsema if Daniat had her way, was already proving to be a problem. While she couldn’t do much to ensure either of her granddaughter’s futures, she could do this. She made up her mind to speak with Tigisti.
Asmeret’s grin had faded. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course I believe you, my dear,” Grandmother assured her, “Shall I beg the Great Huntress’ forgiveness for my mistake and finish the story?”
Asmeret pondered. “Yes. But I like to tell this part.”
She smiled at the girl, showing the few teeth she had left, “Of course.”
Asmeret hunkered down close, lowering her voice and glowering her eyebrows at her grandmother.
And then the terrible thing happened.
The animals staggered out of the circle, dizzy from dancing.
They stumbled and flailed.
One by one they fell off the ledge.
Or are they flying, you wondered?
For a long time, you could still hear the singing. Then the flying and singing stopped.
Animals dropped to the beach in colorful heaps dotted with nostrils, ears, and teeth.
The sea ran toward the shore, nearly sweeping you from your seat and for the first time in your life the sea failed to retreat. The water rose higher up the Staircase of Epochs, covering the heaps of flesh.
You stood on the tips of your toes to see better.
“She.”
Asmeret balanced on the tips of her toes, arms outstretched, “She? What do you mean?”
“You are saying ‘you’ instead of ‘she’ in the story. Why?”
“Isn’t the girl you? Why not say so?”
“It’s a mythic story, Asmeret. It is my story, but it is also yours, and my grandmother’s, and hers and hers. The myths tell us who we are and how our land and our people came to be. This is the myth of Tree, and how it came to float over the sea.”
Even as she said it, she questioned herself. Hadn’t her own grandmother told her this story? And yet, hadn’t she herself once been lost for days at that age, then stumbled back to the village covered in ash straight into the circle of women moaning and singing over her death? When they asked what had happened, she couldn’t remember but the tree that floated over the sea, that was real. She had seen it many times while she could still make the journey—still saw it in dreams. What is real and what is memory? What is memory of someone else? Who else’s story could this be?
The answer to her question presented itself almost immediately. The Great Huntress may not have shot that arrow into the swirling herd, but this had been her story all along. Her name and her part had been long forgotten until Grandmother had changed the story for Asmeret.
Grandmother started to speak, to try to work this startling thought aloud with the child, but she stopped. No. The child had to figure out what the story meant for herself. Tree had given the story to the women of her line and now it was Asmeret’s.
Her little nose scrunched up like a rabbit’s, but Asmeret seemed satisfied. At least enough to continue the story.
The sea grew hotter and hotter. The salty brew started to burble and pop. Steam rolled off the surface in great rainbow sheets. The roots of the tree stretched and wriggled and began to drink. The girl watched the colors rise like a tide up the roots to stain the taffy-twist trunks. Soon the tree was striped every color of the animals that had fallen to their death.
Asmeret stopped. “What’s taffy-twist?”
With every telling she questioned more of the words, eager to learn more than their shape in her mouth.
“Taffy is a sweet treat. It comes from the City of Clouds. Your father used to bring it back from his trips for your mother. It is her favorite.”
Asmeret scowled. Perhaps at missing out on the taffy, and perhaps at the empty shape of a father and thin shadow of a mother that haunted their hut. Grandmother continued for her.
The largest black bird the girl had ever seen landed on the highest branch of Tree. The mountain rumbled under her feet and before she could blink, the bird had the girl hooked in its talons, flying her high over the water.
The bird set her down in Tree where the two trunks spiraled out in two directions, like the horns of the wild goats that roam the highlands.
As soon as they were settled, the bird and the girl turned to see a column of liquid fire erupt and dark billowing clouds snuff out the sun. Lava cascaded like red-yellow-gold waterfalls back into the sea, the glowing sheets hissing in protest as they cut through the surface. Clouds sifted ash on the scene; tiny flakes drifted, soundless, making everything the girl could see as gray as the dead animals on the beach.
“I want to say the end,” Asmeret said.
After some time, no one knows how long, Sun returned to the sky and Sea returned to its bed. Wind swept the ashes to the four corners of the earth. The girl fell asleep, safe in the arms of Tree, and dreamed of the animals, gone to meet their queen.
Grandmother touched the pouch she wore at her waist, curious about the part Asmeret added about the dream and the animal’s queen. Before she could ask her granddaughter about it, the girl asked her a question instead.
“Why did the animals have to die?”
Grandmother thought first how Asmeret’s usual questions had shifted, from how . . . How did the girl and the zebra ride over the waves leaving no hoof prints? to why. She was careful how she answered Asmeret’s questions—careful not to cut the world up into hard edges and lines. Why did the animals have to die? The old woman had held this same question in her heart since she was nearly five. She had always thought the story was about Tree, the animals cast as bit players, the child merely a witness to its making—but now? Before she could think of a way to answer worthy of this child, Asmeret answered herself.
“I know why,” she said.
“Oh?” Grandmother asked, not entirely surprised.
“Because their queen is dying.”
“Who is their queen, my dear?”
“The Great Huntress.” Asmeret replied without pause. “That’s why the animals are dying, or . . . no, the hunters are killing all of the animals—more than they need, and killing her too. It’s a slaughter, she says.”
Grandmother grimaced, wherever would the child hear such a word? The pains hit her again, harder this time, taking her breath. She could feel the ash, soft as a silk blanket, cover her skin. It wouldn’t be long now. She needed to be alone with the bones.
“Go find Arsema and play,” she said, kissing her granddaughter goodbye and goodnight in their usual way, one on each eye and the last on her forehead—where the eye that could see both worlds at once shimmered silver-blue in the sun. “And stay far from the woods.”
When the child had gone off to find her cousin, the old woman took the pouch from beneath her wrap. As the contents spilled into her hand, she closed her eyes and invited the ancestors, spirits, and gods to make their wishes known.
The bones, old familiars, rolled out of her grasp into the dirt where the child had left feathery traces of sea-creature limbs.
Singing, but not singing. Echoey, distant. A multiplicity of melodies playing at once, each vying to be heard. A soundtrack to the pictures that flickered, translucent layers sliding over and under one another like a sheaf of thin papers shuffled by ancient hands.
She had grown accustomed to this. Softened her focus. Listened through, instead of to. Let the strands braid together, circles in circles spilling out of the center, finally reconciling into shapes she could name: Red Lion. Cloak. Twins bundled together on the spirit stone—a boy and a girl—Snake circling, keeping them safe. A goddess weeping over her lover, torn to pieces, marble-white hands stained red forever. Weeping over the children she sacrificed to the Village of Ash. River. Rivers, merging far underground, under the sea, nearest the stars. Goddess made of crystal, crystalizing, curling into herself, slowed—shocked, mouth open as her bow falls from her lap. Anbessa buried alive, but alive still, flying through the clouds. Black bird then white. On his way home. Asmeret, minutes old, suckling the life back into her dead mother. Asmeret calling her, calling her in a woman’s voice from a dark place beneath Tree. Fires: four. Moons: three. Asmeret shaving her head. Asmeret standing on a ledge above the fiery sea. Up on her toes. Silent. Still. Ready to leap. Him. Her twin. The grandson Daniat swept away, running toward Asmeret. Falling. Calling to her to wait. Fallen. Not in this life. Not in this way.
Grandmother looked to the sky and whispered the words, “Come to me now.”
Her final vision surprised her. She expected to see a white raven answer her call, yet the bird wafting toward her from the peak of her roof, landing on her chest, shimmered black-blue-black from crown to tail.
The bird stood waiting. A moment, an hour, an era, an epoch.
Silent.
Still.
Ready.
Listening as the woman’s breath rattled through the desiccated husk, gathering all that she had been—every experience, every memory, each one of her gifts. Grandmother exhaled.
Raven dipped his head like a votary of this woman’s singular life, drank her last breath and flew her home.
June, 1945 CE
London
“Charlotte, please try to get up today. We’ve waited so long for this.” Ben tried to cajole her, his voice upbeat, gently stroking her hair, which had grown limp and greasy. It was official, the Germans were defeated. The war was over and Charlotte had said yes to his marriage proposal. Said yes in the thin voice she had left. She had been sleeping mostly these days, not leaving the flat. For months she had been in this slow slide into some dark place. Ben was frantic. “It’s the war, people are never going to be the same. Give her time,” Frieda had advised.
Charlotte rolled over toward the wall, shaking him off. Shuddered under his lips on the nape of her neck. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.
Ben pulled on his boots and went down the three flights to the street. He pushed his way through the throngs of people, everyone shouting and wearing bright colors, as if they’d been shut up for a very long winter and this was spring. The tube was crowded too. Ben got off at the usual stop and sprinted down the street to a brownstone in a pricey part of town. Percival Harris opened the door.
“Why, come in, Ben, we weren’t expecting you until tonight’s party.”
“Yes Sir, it’s urgent. Is Lady Harris at home?”
“You may call her Frieda in front of me, Ben. We’re past all of that, yes?”
“Yes Sir, thank you.” Ben stood tall and shook Percival’s hand. Still amazed at the man’s generous stance when Frieda had come clean about the affair. The Harris’ had invited Ben and Charlotte as a couple into their London and Chipping Campden homes on numerous occasions. Frieda and Charlotte had become close starting that first time Frieda went to talk to her about her plans to fly. Charlotte remained unaware of the nature of their affair, but Ben wasn’t sure she would care. He was afraid she wouldn’t be furious. Unlike Frieda, he wasn’t sure he would know what to do with that kind of response. He felt like he needed to be punished. Maybe this was his punishment. Some awful karma.
In the morning room, Frieda reached out and smoothed Ben’s hair. “You look terrible,” she said. “How is Charlotte?”
Ben slumped over and put his head down on his arms, crowding the breakfast plates. “I can’t get her up. She sleeps. She talks and cries and screams and sometimes I can’t wake her. I’m scared that I am losing her for good.”
“Let me talk to her. Stay here, eat something. I’ll go dress.”
An hour later Frieda sat on the edge of Charlotte’s bed, feeling for fever by pressing her lips to her forehead. “No fever,” she said to Ben, who sat on a chair in the corner of the room. “When was the last time she was out of bed? Up and around, dressed?”
“A couple of weeks?” Ben said. He didn’t want to admit that her lapse into this malaise had started the day after he asked her to marry him. That this could be her reaction to accepting his proposal was something he pushed out of his mind whenever it crept in. It was a battle he fought every hour or so.
“Charlotte, honey,” Frieda crooned. “Percy and I are throwing you and Ben a party tonight, remember? Don’t you want to get up and celebrate?” Charlotte turned away. Frieda shot Ben a look, gesturing toward the door, and Ben stood up.
“I’ll make us some tea.”
The flat Charlotte had taken in London was tiny and the walls thin as parchment. For good reason she preferred it to the house she inherited from her parents. Hadn’t moved back to Maidenhead even after the damage was repaired (a bomber driven by unseen forces off its usual course, payload exploding half of the house—the half where her parents and brother slept). While Ben put on the kettle he could hear Charlotte talking, between hiccupy sobs. He caught fragments and words that made him want to bust through the door, but he had to trust Frieda to do what he couldn’t.
“ . . . many dead . . . evil . . . night . . . murderer . . . never forgive me . . . ”
Frieda finally slipped out of the bedroom. “Take her a cup of tea. Sit with her.”
“Is she going to be okay, what was she talking about? I heard some . . .”
“I can’t explain to you right now, there are some things she has to tell you herself, and she is going to need your patience.”
Ben shook his head. Felt his heart like a stone lodged in his ribs. “She’s not going to marry me, is she.” It wasn’t a question.
“She can’t right now, Ben. Someday, I think. She loves you. But we have to get her back first.”
“How?”
“I’m going to go see Helge, he is the closest thing to a father she has left.”
“I’m coming too.”
Frieda folded Ben in her arms, he could feel the warmth radiating from her; it calmed him some. “Charlotte needs you here. I’ll come back later and we’ll figure something out, I promise.”
Ben slid under the covers with Charlotte. Held her while she fluttered and twitched like a dying bird caught in a brown cardboard box.
Frieda was led into the drawing room of King Haakon’s quarters. “Wait here, please, Lady Harris, Dr. Guldbrandsen will join you presently.”
Doctor. Of course, Frieda thought. Helge must have doctorates in multiple subjects. Charlotte had introduced him as Professor G when Frieda and Helge had met that very first day in the warehouse where they stored The Amelia. He had responded, taking her hands, “Call me Helge,” and she had. Their connection was immediate, an attraction they couldn’t trace to the usual suspects: sex, intellect, common interests, politics.
Frieda flushed when Helge strode into the room. She always brightened in his presence.
“I told him.” Helge said, straight off, then gave her one of his signature bear hugs.
“Who?” Frieda laughed, gasping for breath until Helge eased up.
“King Haakon. The plane is in no shape to fly him back to Oslo. Painted black, all banged up. He had hoped, of course. And I don’t feel like the plane is mine now, anyway. Charlotte . . .”
“Yes, she is in no shape either. Have you seen her?”
“No. I arrived yesterday, spent the day with the king while he prepares to go home. I thought I would see her tonight. What do you mean?”
“The party for Ben and Charlotte is off, I’m afraid,” Frieda said, easing up to the news he hadn’t yet heard.
Frieda led Helge to the round table and chairs, a gorgeous set of Norwegian blonde maple, inlaid with ash in a sunburst pattern. They sat. Frieda stroked the wood as she spoke.
“She’s not well, Helge.”
“Is she sick?” He asked, his voice urgent, rising out of his chair as if to leave at once.
“Yes, no . . . Please sit dear, I have a lot to tell you.”
Frieda reached into her bag and pulled out the tarot deck.
“Are we going to play a card game?” Helge asked, surprised.
“No. Of course not,” Frieda said laying the cards in the wheel. She’d left the key in Chipping Campden, it didn’t seem essential now when she read the cards. “There is a story I need you to hear,” she looked in his eyes, “and I need you to believe what I say, no matter how far-fetched it sounds.”
Helge nodded. “Of course. We’re family.”
The afternoon wore on, Frieda pausing only to ring Percy to do what he could to divert the party guests and tell him where she was.
“Charlotte is the Princess of the suit of swords, also known as the Princess of Air. I am sure of it,” she said (now deep into the story, having started with the day the news of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance spread across Great Britain). After an initial period of silence—shock, Frieda thought—Helge had started to tell his part in the story, and what he knew of Charlotte’s. The way she had sought him out, chased him down, asked him to teach her to fly. That she had seen the plane on the River Thames on its journey to him. Their fascination with Amelia. That was the strangest part, the way this American woman’s disappearance connected them all.
“What do we do now?” Helge asked. “Can the cards tell us that?”
Frieda sighed. “No, not exactly. They work more like showing you what is right in front of your face, suspect, yet can’t quite touch or name. There is an ending here. A future we need and the way forward, out of times of war. It’s like a story we have always known yet forgotten.”
“And Charlotte? Our Princess of Air? If the cards can’t tell us what comes next, then . . .” Helge sounded exasperated.
“We think, but not just with our minds. We let our whole being listen, then the next step will come. At least that is how I got this far.”
Helge nodded and studied the cards on the table, trying to see them differently.
Frieda closed her eyes, breathing deep and slow into her belly and out again.
After a long time, no one knows how long, Helge said, “Fly us home.”
Behind closed eyes, ATU VI, The Lovers, floated in front of Frieda, then the face of her devoted husband. “We have to ask Percy. He’ll know what to do.”
July, 1945 CE
London to Asmara
Charlotte adjusted her headset again, scanned the instrument panel. This aircraft was like a ship, while she had been flying a tiny sailboat in comparison. There was a seat for a co-pilot next to her, and a cargo hold newly outfitted for four passengers in the rear. No wonder they couldn’t find recruits for this route, she thought. She should have been afraid, instead Charlotte felt calm. Confident even.
London to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea—a small country on the Red Sea recently handed over to the British by the Italians, as simple as that if you believed the papers. Three fuel stops were marked on her map; Zurich, Bari, Cairo. Flight Lieutenant Hugh Dunning of the Royal Air Force had given her a crash course on her instruments and the equipment differences on this plane. He had been visibly relieved, and graciously expressed how impressed he was on her test flight. “A natural,” he’d said. Asked her where she had been, could have used her during the war. Of course Percy had altered her flying history somewhat. Had a friend fake the records. They were desperate though, it seemed, to get this program off the ground. Didn’t ask many questions if you could fly, even if you were a woman. Great Britain was making a big show of escorting soldiers home to the far flung colonies that flew her flag. They’d traveled thousands of miles to serve, some of them, and been trapped in the theatre of this war for years. Thank them for their sacrifice, and all that.
“Who would my co-pilot be?” She had asked.
“Sorry, nobody. Flying solo.”
Charlotte smiled to herself. Perfect.
Apparently three survivors were all from Eritrea, and Charlotte was their ride. “Has to be this week, one guy is a chief of his village and he needs to get home before some ceremony or other,” Dunning had rattled at Charlotte.
“I can do it, no problem, sir.”
“Good. That’s the spirit,” he’d said, a small smile warming his brusque tone. Not that Charlotte needed the pep talk. She was taking this on for reasons of her own. Reasons she lied about in the interview. Serving her country, making a difference in the lives of the soldiers. Just the kind of thing Ben would print in the paper. Chin up for the public. Of course these first flights, the small jumper planes to remote locations, would be kept under wraps, at least until she had delivered her cargo successfully and come back in one piece. If they disappeared en route, well, who was watching?
Ben was and he was mad as hell. He was stunned when Frieda, Percy, and Helge put the idea to Charlotte without asking him first. “It has to be her choice alone,” Frieda had said when Ben blew up at them all in Charlotte’s tiny flat.
It was those words that made her sit up. Her choice. She had chosen to kill all of those men, evil men maybe, guilty certainly, but they had families. Friends. For years she had told herself that she was part of a mystery she couldn’t comprehend, that she didn’t have a choice. She had felt so clear, so driven—obsessed with her night flights, and she was good at it. Who else could make a plane built for water do what she did? And then there were the ravens. That night on the ground watching them harvest the dead still felt like a dream. No, a hallucination. She was awake yet everything shimmered and she could see every detail across the entire field, every feather twitch and the bubbles of spittle quivering on the corpse’s lips. The ravens were doing something, not just scavenging flesh. Their movements were like a choreographed dance. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Then the big one landed at her feet. He was built like a steam engine. They looked at one another, really looked, and saw. What? Each other’s souls? No. It was recognition, though. They were on the same team. She was chosen. Had no choice. Was recruited into something far bigger than herself. Something mythic and ancient.
Fly us home.
She was happy. Filled with purpose. She lied to Ben about her missions—not such a leap after lying to Helge. Flying, yes, taking lessons. Casual outings. A hobby. Where did she go those nights? “Plotter,” she’d said, an occupation one of her classmates at Somerville had snagged. Not a total lie. Women in an underground bunker, processing intel data on aircraft movements and plotting them by hand on huge maps. Preventing secret attacks. She knew enough to fake it when Ben asked her questions. That night at dinner when Ben started to huff about her penchant for danger, Frieda told him, “Give her space, she’s brilliant and needs to find her own way.”
When Ben proposed, it had already started. The cracks in her own story. There wasn’t some ancient myth she was participating in. The ravens? A dream. One she had desperately needed to believe. She had started to fly in wider circles, entering the airspace of other countries. Charlotte could fly undetected and low. She could fly all night without needing fuel. She started to see things that couldn’t be real. People starved and penned like animals. Worse than animals. They clawed at razor-wire-topped fences and moaned. When she closed her eyes at night the corpses, those she had driven from the sky and left for dead, and the undead behind fences, blended together. How were they different? How was she different than the ones who thought it their right, and the right thing, to lock away those people and starve them. And worse. She knew worse had happened than that, she saw it all when she slept. She grounded herself. Stopped flying. Said yes to Ben.
That night he asked her to marry him, it came to her, crystal clear. She wasn’t chosen, she had chosen to kill. To murder. And she had felt thrilled and righteous. How could she marry Ben, have children? Lead the life he wanted on some farm pretending that she was good. Had goodness in her.
When Percy and Frieda offered her the choice to fly away she took it. Africa. She would disappear. An accident on the return flight. No trace. No way the RAF would send someone looking for one girl and a beaten up cargo plane in the African wilderness. Ben could grieve her and get on with his life.
Charlotte ran this all in her head, over and over until they landed in Cairo.
“Sorry Madame,” flight control told her when the refueling truck failed to show up. “Next truck won’t be here until tomorrow.”
Charlotte and the three soldiers from Eritrea stood on the tarmac. Charlotte secured the scarf they’d told her to wear over her hair whenever she landed in an Islamic country and pulled her rucksack out of the cargo hold. She handed her passengers their bags, struck by how little they carried from one life to the next. Then the irony of how heavy her own bag was. “Come on,” she said, “follow me.” They would be sleeping on the floor in the airport and she needed a toilet.
The oldest of the three men, the one with scars crisscrossing his cheeks and forehead in a noticeable pattern, caught up to walk beside her.
“Lady,” he started.
“Charlotte.”
“Lady Charlotte, please, when will we arrive in Asmara?”
“Tomorrow night, assuming they let us take off.” Part of her wondered if the missing fuel truck was some kind of excuse for their delay, the part that had been inundated for years with evidence of the darkest aspect of man.
The man stopped and looked up at the moon, barely visible in the late morning sky. Charlotte paused and followed his gaze. “What is it?” She asked. What did the moon have to do with his rush? “You are the chief, the one who has a ceremony to get to?”
He looked at her surprised. “Yes. A chief. Anbessa.” The man extended his hand. His hand wasn’t large, yet his grip was tight.
“Chief Anbessa,” Charlotte bent her head, not sure of the custom.
“Anbessa is enough, I am not your chief.”
“And I am no Lady, so Charlotte, please. Your English is excellent,” she continued, trying not to sound surprised.
Anbessa laughed, his voice was thick and deep, which belied his size. “I was educated for several years in Asmara in my youth. Chiefs are ambassadors, politicians, emissaries, and need many languages. Besides, I was in London for many years.”
Now Charlotte didn’t try to hide her surprise. “I thought you were a soldier, in the war.” She had thought the platoons from Africa had mostly fought within their own border. “How did you end up in London?” She had been too absorbed in her own concerns to wonder how her passengers had got to the city in the first place.
“I was injured, badly, and sent to a London hospital in 1942.”
“And you stayed?”
“It is a long story, Charlotte,” he said, glancing at the moon again.
“You’re worried about getting home on time.”
“Yes.”
“I will do my best,” Charlotte said. “We’ll see how fast this heap can fly. Now let’s all get something to eat, and I would be honored to hear more, it looks like all we have today is time.”
The porter fetched them bags of food from a nearby vendor. It had been decided it was too dangerous for the foreigners to leave the relative safety of the airport. The other two men excused themselves politely, they had discovered family connections and wished to continue their conversation.
Charlotte and Anbessa unpacked the shish taouk and kushari. Anbessa showed Charlotte how to spinkle the kushari with garlic vinegar and hot sauce. “Not too much,” he cautioned.
“You’ve been to this country before?”
“Yes, this is where our platoon was first sent, after our training, such as it was.”
“When was that?” Charlotte asked, licking her fingers. She hoped it wasn’t rude.
“The spring of 1940.”
Charlotte paused eating. Did the math. She turned sixteen that spring. She had barely known there was a war on. Probably wouldn’t have noticed the blast that destroyed her home, if it had happened back then.
“My wife was expecting our first child when I left, which is why I now need to get back.”
“You were in London in ‘42. Why didn’t you go home sooner? You haven’t seen your child, have you? You were injured, wouldn’t they have let you go?”
“Slow down, Charlotte, that is many questions at once.” Anbessa laughed that deep laugh again. Charlotte loved his voice. “What are you a reporter?”
“No, but my fiancé is,” Charlotte said, then cut herself short. “I get your point. Why go home now?”
Anbessa was thoughtful, eating his food. “It was difficult to go home before this. Now I must. My daughter was born in this moon, July, this is her fifth year. There is an important ceremony for girls who are five and I need to get back before it takes place.”
“To celebrate with her,” Charlotte finished for him.
“No. To stop it.”
Charlotte almost didn’t catch it. “Wait, what? Stop it? What is the ceremony?”
“It will be impossible for you to understand. You will judge my people harshly.”
“Try me.”
Anbessa sat back, cocked his head and scowled.
Charlotte caught herself. She couldn’t blame her rudeness on a language barrier. “Pardon me, Anbessa. I mean, I would like to try to understand something about your people, about you and your daughter, if you are willing.”
Haltingly, Anbessa said, “It is sensitive. The domain of women. It would be improper for me to speak to you of these things.”
Charlotte thought how to coax Anbessa forward. She was intrigued now, and couldn’t let it go. “You don’t know this about me,” she started, “I am a scientist. An observer of natural phenomenon without judgment, in hopes of living a life exploring the unknown. And I am pretty darn smart. Talk in code if you feel more comfortable with that, I will figure it out.”
“Your confidence is refreshing,” he said. “I hope my daughter has as much.” After another moment’s hesitation, “I will try. . . To our people family and God are everything.”
Charlotte felt herself resisting already. Family. God. Ideas that had lost all meaning for her. She breathed deep. Listen and learn, she said to herself.
“A woman is born to be a wife and mother, a man to be a husband and father. Both will be other things too, but these are the primary destinies God has written for everyone. When children are very young they play, they pretend they are wives and husbands and other things too, then when girls have five years, in their birth moons, they are prepared further for their God-given role.”
Charlotte felt the hairs on her neck stand on end. This couldn’t be going anywhere good. She’d heard about barbaric rituals and human sacrifice. Surely he couldn’t mean . . .
“They are dressed as little brides, painted with wedding tattoos, the older girls adorn them with jewelry and gifts.”
Charlotte relaxed a little bit, that didn’t sound bad, like first communion in the Catholic Church, minus the tattoos.
“Then the mothers and aunts and grandmothers take the girl to our ceremonial place in the woods and there,” Anbessa searched for the words, “her body is readied in a way to save her for her marriage bed.”
Charlotte glared, her whole body on full alert, “Readied, how?”
“This is where the procedure is something not spoken of between men and women, it is sacred, and inappropriate to do so.”
“Scientifically speaking?” Charlotte tried.
“This isn’t about science, Charlotte, that is where you will fail to understand.”
Frustrated with Anbessa and herself, Charlotte ran back over all they had said. “Wait, you said you were going to stop it.”
“For my daughter, yes.”
“So you don’t believe in it.”
“No, it isn’t that simple. It is a ritual I will not, cannot, stop for everyone else. I don’t even have the right to stop it for my own little girl, and I must try. If I get there in time.”
“But you are the chief!”
“And as such, I am the agent of the will of our God, and a legacy keeper of our tribe. I am beholden to maintain our beliefs and our way of life, making difficult choices as the world changes around us.”
Charlotte thought about this. “Like King George. Our sovereign.”
“Yes, quite like that,” Anbessa said.
“And this is one of those difficult choices? To stop the . . . ceremony, for your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“You already have, and I will try to answer, although I am not entirely sure myself. I have seen some of the world now, and it invites me to imagine the rest. In London, I have seen women and men in roles God has prepared for them that would be unthinkable in my tribe. Perhaps unthinkable only because we have not seen it before, not because it is wrong, or forbidden. Isn’t our God, their God?”
Charlotte was almost embarrassed to ask, yet she had asked Anbessa to trust her with his life and she felt safe in his company. “I thought in Africa you didn’t worship God, but animals and ancestors and spirits in rocks?”
Anbessa smiled. “Yes, Charlotte, we have many ways of understanding who we are and how to be on the earth. There are many tribes in my land and we have been Muslims and Christians for two thousand years, yet we also have our local, ancient traditions, our ceremonies and rituals, our ways of communicating with the other world. Our God is your God; this I was taught in my studies in Asmara, the place where all of our tribes come together to break bread and make decisions together in the best interest of us all. But I learned it in my years in Egypt and your country too.”
While Charlotte wasn’t entirely sure Anbessa’s God was her god, this hardly seemed the time to bring it up. “And your daughter?”
“Yes. My wife, Tigisti, almost died bringing her into this world and from the few letters it sounds like it has been a hard go. The child is sickly it seems. Has fevers and fits. I believe God and the ancestors may have another path for her, something other than wife.”
“Won’t your wife stop the ceremony?”
“No. Tigisti and my brother’s wife, Daniat, are traditional women, and while together they lead our village in our absence, they have little real power. My mother would have kept her granddaughter from it, I believe, but she is an ancestor now. She transitioned a few weeks ago, and so I must get to my village.”
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Charlotte said, trying to keep the door she kept shut on her emotions from bursting its hinges. She thought of her own mother and father. Her brother. Transitioned. Ancestors. What nice words for dying and dead.
“Thank you, Charlotte.”
She was grateful for his kindness; she was pretty sure saying sorry about death was not part of his tradition. “Anbessa, I haven’t asked. What is your daughter’s name?”
“Asmeret.”
To her surprise and relief, Charlotte was granted permission to take off from Cairo the next morning. She invited Anbessa to join her in the co-pilot’s seat. She enjoyed his company, and talking with him kept her mind off her return trip plan. She hadn’t lost her resolve, only grown weary of her own thoughts.
Once they had achieved optimum altitude and speed, Charlotte asked Anbessa about his previous flight out of Egypt.
“This story also requires more than a scientific account,” he warned her, playfully now.
“More ancestors?”
“Something like that.”
Anbessa spoke for some time, telling Charlotte of the trip out of Africa to Egypt, to the war. When all men and boys had been called from the villages and cities to the capital to be armed by the Italians against the British.
“There were some of us, mostly chiefs, who were educated and had our noses to the wind. We knew what Hitler was, and we would rather die than fight on his side. We fled into the mountains and traveled north until we reached Egypt, unwilling to fight our own brothers and sons in Eritrea and Somaliland. There we gave ourselves to the British, swore our allegiance, and were sent to join an all-black platoon.
Egypt had been difficult and the food strange, making many men, including me, dreadfully ill—a few died at that time. Our platoon stayed together through the horrible battles at El Alamein but we had lost so many by the end that those of us remaining joined another platoon, this one of white men. They were suspicious, yet still took us in. They needed our weapons, our hands. Our sturdiness in the desert sun. I didn’t know these men, and they didn’t know or trust me, so I spent much of my time writing letters to Tigisti and Asmeret, although I knew I would not get to post them. I felt if I put the words on paper, my family might better sense my desire to get back to them. This desire had grown so overpowering perhaps it explains what happened next.
I had slipped into the commander’s tent, hoping to find a map that I could use to make my way home. One that would show me where the fighting was heavy, where the troops were concentrated, no matter their allegiance, so that I might skirt trouble and slip through unharmed and without having to harm anyone more. I come from hunters, I know how to move silently, unseen. I am called Red Lion by my tribe, in part because of this quality.”
Charlotte wondered if the marks on Anbessa’s forehead and cheeks were from a lion’s claws, then berated herself. They were too even, too symmetrical on both sides of his face, and this was no fairytale.
“It was dark,” Anbessa went on, “and I am sure the man saw only my dark skin and assumed I was a local spy, come to steal information. At least that is what I told myself. It happened all of the time, I don’t know why I hadn’t considered this added danger. Before I could react, my own commander had stabbed me repeatedly, over a dozen times they told me later, all through my torso. I was in and out of consciousness then. I remember being dragged from the tent and driven somewhere. I am not a large man, so it was only the commander I think. He could handle me himself. Once he realized I was one of his own, it was best to dispose of me.
I was in sand. The night was cold and windy so that by dawn I was almost covered over, yet I was still alive. I must have dozed off again, I had lost a lot of blood. When I opened my eyes, as much as I could with the sand in them and as weak as I was, two ravens stood on either side of me, one white and one black. They looked giant to me, as tall as grown men, growing taller as I watched. And then they started to battle. To tear at one another and shriek. The white raven terrified me. In my land, when a white raven comes, someone dies. I tried to keep my eyes open, to ward off death, but I couldn’t. I felt myself lifted off the ground, I could feel the talons dug into my flesh. I was able to open my eyes just a slit and saw black. My last memory was thinking the black raven has won, I will live to see my family again. I woke up in Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital in London.”
Charlotte could feel Anbessa’s eyes questioning her reaction, trying to read her silent stare into the glare of the sky ahead. He thinks I don’t believe him, and he couldn’t be more wrong. She knew those ravens. The white and the black. The most she could manage was to nod in Anbessa’s direction. Give a weak smile to show her interest. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry my friend, I need to focus for a bit, rough air ahead,” then succumbed to the dark maze of her mind trying to find a path forward toward life.
“Snake,” Anbessa said quietly, after a while. Charlotte was counting the hours until Asmara, until she would need to choose. Anbessa’s voice arrived like a pinpoint of light.
“Hmmm?” she asked, not even opening her mouth. Still lost in the maze, follow the light.
She felt Anbessa’s eyes studying her, then look back out the window. Charlotte looked out her side window. The Nile glinted below them in the sun. “If you get lost,” Helge had taught her, “look for a river and follow it until you know where you are.” She had instinctively maneuvered them low, and with the sun high overhead she could see the shadow of the plane skimming the water’s winding surface.
“The Great Mother, some call The-One-With-No-Name, sometimes shows herself as Snake. Sometimes flesh. Sometimes water.”
A question formed, pulling Charlotte out of the darkness a bit. In the maze there was no language, only raw, visceral sensation. She struggled to speak. Her words came out jumbled to her ears, she hoped Anbessa could interpret, “Call God yours Mother?”
Anbessa answered without hesitation, “We call The One ‘The Great Mother’ at times and yet we know this is not quite right. It is only it, and until it fills the world again, we must sense more than see. Name as we can, while letting it flow freely through our hands.”
Silence. Stillness. Light. “Sometimes it is named Red Lion,” Charlotte said.
Anbessa grinned and laughed, “Yes, and sometimes it is named Charlotte.”
Anbessa narrated for the rest of the flight. The landscape, the people, their customs and stories. Charlotte listened, following his voice and the Nile as they wound through the rose-colored sand, then angled off to follow a branch of the river at Anbessa’s gesture. “Where the Atbarah comes to the mountains, turn due east.”
Anbessa’s voice rose as Charlotte gentled the craft into an easy climb. She had been instructed to seek a high altitude as the peaks of these mountains were hidden by clouds most every day of the year.
“Are you feeling all right?” Anbessa asked her.
“Better, yes,” Charlotte said. “Forgive my silence, I have a lot on my mind.”
“No, not that. The altitude, it makes most visitors to these mountains light headed. Some become gravely ill.”
Charlotte assessed herself, taking seriously her mission to deliver these men home safely. “I feel well. Thank you Anbessa.” In fact, she felt exhilarated. Wide awake, as she hadn’t in months. She was out of the maze, at least for the moment.
“We approach Asmara, past three more peaks.”
Anbessa had taken over navigation once the maps Dunning had given Charlotte became useless. His knowledge of his own country was all that kept them on course. Alive at all, if truth be told, given the lacy cloud curtain that obscured walls of stone. Anbessa had never seen the land from the air, so they all held their breath letting the sound of the plane’s engines obscure their concerns.
“Keep talking,” Charlotte urged. Her own mind suddenly couldn’t be hushed, the beasts that lurked in the maze shaped themselves into sentences: End it now, what matter will three more soldiers’ corpses make competing with fly us home, this in Helge’s voice.
Charlotte closed her eyes, useless as guides, and listened to Anbessa’s voice. Focus Charlotte, she ordered herself.
“We call Asmara the City of Clouds,” Anbessa said, picking up his earlier narration. “It sits both above and below the clouds but above the rest of our country and people. When we hold the Council of Chiefs in Asmara we hear our shared God more clearly.”
“Is that what Asmara means? City of Clouds?”
“No. Asmara means, to unify.”
Charlotte felt the name in her mouth, feeling the similarity to Asmeret.
“It sounds like Asmeret, your daughter’s name.” Charlotte suggested, struggling to keep her thoughts in the present, in the light.
“Yes, in the common language it is the feminine of Asmara, She Who Unifies. Tigisti and I agreed before I left that we would name a son Asmara and a daughter Asmeret; we share a dream for the tribes in our land to be many and to act as one people, with no need of borders, and free from foreign rule. We weave our hopes for our children into their names, to always remind them of who and what they are. To live into our dreams. Anbessa means lion, as I was born to be chief.”
Perhaps he noticed the change in her face. Perhaps he sensed that his life depended on keeping Charlotte talking, “What does Charlotte mean?” he asked.
“Nothing . . . I don’t know,” Charlotte said, tears streaming down the sides of her nose. Charlotte is meaningless. She tasted the salt in her mouth.
“There!” Anbessa sat up and pointed. “Pull up now.”
Charlotte maneuvered them up into the thick underbelly of a cloud bank that ringed the mountain. The men in the back shouted in a language she couldn’t understand. The plane shook with the effort but Charlotte held firm. They burst through the top and into the white glare of the sun.
Charlotte blinked, trying to get her eyes to adjust, leveled the plane, circled the plateau. Was this real or some sort of mirage? In front of her spread a modern city; orderly rows of ice-cream colored buildings, gridded by streets filled with automobiles and carts and people of all colors and shapes. She flew low, skimming over the tops of the highest points; the onion-shaped minarets and steepled bell towers with crosses on top. From the back, shouts of joy.
She laughed out loud.
“What is it?” Anbessa asked, relieved at the sound, relieved to be home.
“I am surprised, is all,” Charlotte replied, “and a bit embarrassed, I guess.”
“Embarrassed?”
“To think I expected, I don’t know, huts made of sticks? Zebras? Elephants?”
It was Anbessa’s turn to laugh. “We have those too. Well, not so many elephants and zebras as they have on the plains. The remote villages still use traditional building materials and methods. Most are very poor in resources and use them wisely. The Italians built most of this,” he gestured.
Charlotte felt as though much was left unsaid, yet she needed to find the airport.
Anbessa pointed to a large British flag flapping in the distance. “There, the airstrip. You will want to approach from the other side. Careful, the winds coming up the mountain from all direction make dangerous cross-currents that can knock a man over walking down the street.”
Charlotte set them down minutes later with hardly a wobble. It was Anbessa’s turn to look surprised.
“Well done,” he said.
With all three men’s gear back in the hands of their owners, Charlotte accepted their gestures of gratitude.
Anbessa held back as the other men walked toward the squat, white building that served as the terminal and main checkpoint for visitors. The moon was rising in the early evening sky.
“Will you make it home in time, do you think?”
“Only The Great Mother knows,” Anbessa smiled. “It is all in her hands, but I hope so.”
“Me too.”
“What will you do now, Charlotte?”
Charlotte breathed deep into her belly. The air was impossibly clean as it streamed into her body, seeming to exit her toes and fingertips when she exhaled. Her head was clear, finally. “I don’t know,” she answered, truthfully.
“You will always be welcome in my village, an honored guest,” Anbessa bowed his head.
“Thank you, Chief Anbessa,” Charlotte said. She looked up at the British flag, and the smaller one, Eritrean, she assumed, flapping beneath it. Glanced at the white plane, shimmering on the tarmac. “But I think I need to find home.”
“Well then, my dear, should you return, ask anyone the way to the Village of Ash.”
“I will,” Charlotte answered, the cross winds blowing the red scarf from her hair. They watched it whip wildly down the airstrip and disappear over the ledge, into the clouds. “I will,” she repeated, this time meaning what she said.
She watched Anbessa hurry toward the gates that led into the checkpoint. When the wind whipped up again, she closed her eyes. Contained in the wind was a low sound, almost like singing, and not . . . aaaaarrrrrrraaaaaaa.
“Anbessa,” she called, over the wind.
He stopped. Turned.
She ran to him. Searched in her bag for paper and pen.
“Here,” she said, as she wrote. “If you ever need a ride, ring me up. This is the London exchange for Lord and Lady Harris, they will know how to reach me.”
“Thank you, Lady Charlotte,” Anbessa grinned.
She leaned toward him, kissing his cheek. She thought of Frieda and the tarot card picturing the winged girl-warrior on a mountaintop above the clouds, the whole deck laid out like a wheel, and the dreams Frieda and Helge and Ben had for her.
“Please,” she said, “my family calls me the Princess of Air.”
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