Chapter XVI
Oxford
“Are you sure you can’t come with us?” Charlotte asked Ben.
“No, look, this is the best time for you and Friedrich to go, while school is out, and the worst time for the farm. I’ll go next time.”
“Promise?”
“Yes,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Honey, it’s okay. It’s not how I hoped our story would go. I love you. I love our son. Let’s not make this seem strange to him.”
“Thank you. Truly, you are my prince.”
Ben flushed to the top of his head. Beamed at her. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”
Eritrea
As The Amelia flew into Africa, Charlotte told Friedrich every legend and myth she could remember from her trips with Anbessa, and Friedrich told her some of his own. They were both terribly excited to live in a real African village for a whole month.
“It won’t be like you read in books and see in magazines and the museums,” she warned.
“I know, Mother. Geez. They’re people, not pictures.”
Charlotte grinned, maybe he was part AraAthena after all, wise for his years.
“Remember, Anbessa is a Chief, and you must treat him with respect.”
“And he is family, right? You said so.”
“Honorary family. Yes. Which can be more important than blood.”
While Charlotte had had her moments over the years, seeing so much of Anbessa in this child, she knew it was ridiculous to think that Friedrich’s father would be a relative. He looked so much like Asmeret though, the High Priestess, she corrected herself. Stupid.
“And there will be other children to play with?”
“Yes, plenty. Anbessa has a granddaughter, about your age. He is going to be meeting her for the first time during our visit.”
“Why has he never met her?”
“Well, you know how sometimes I leave for weeks to work in other places that need my attention?”
“Yes,” Friedrich said, unable to keep the sulk out of his voice or off his face.
“I know, you don’t like it, and you know that I miss you and your pop, awfully much, but we all have parts we are born to play in the world to take care of the whole family, not just the ones we live with.”
“I know.”
Charlotte loved how he did his best to understand the life she had chosen.
“Well, Chief Anbessa has been working very hard to keep his whole family safe—their country is not in very good shape—and he had to make a difficult choice. H hoped he did the right thing in the end. Now he gets to meet her, and we get to be a part of it.”
“So I will be as much his grandson as she is his granddaughter, since we are all family, and he hasn’t met either of us?”
Charlotte laughed. Who could argue with such sound logic? It wouldn’t be long before he was helping her debate the entire premise of the birth and core nature of the universe, most likely debunking what she’d come up with so far.
“Yes. Let’s be that story.”
The reunion was glorious. The trip not without its troubles, of course, Charlotte was truly worried about the brewing war, and for Arsema, whom Charlotte befriended. She could see how deeply she and Asmeret had loved one another as they talked into the nights, sitting at the village hearth. And how lost ‘Sema had become as the years dragged on, trying to survive without the other half of her heart.
Charlotte tried to tell ‘Sema that Asmeret was still with her, in a way. Fighting for her. Loving her. Something like a goddess or ancestor, but the divide between them was too wide. Language. Culture. Their wounds and desires.
She spent time with Tigisti and the girl, Theia. The High Priestess’ daughter, she marveled to herself. They showed her how to make injera. Charlotte couldn’t imagine, no matter how hard she tried, what it had taken for Asmeret to leave her daughter behind. That Theia and Friedrich were nearly the same color, similar in bone structure and hair—and that they were so different from all of the others—made Charlotte catch her breath each time she saw them together.
She had no idea how to think about it, what it meant or what it would mean, but what mattered now was right in front of her: the boy and girl were so happy to have one other person that could understand what it was like to be their particular color and shape, even surrounded by plenty of others who loved them.
On the day before they departed, Tigisti asked Charlotte to do her a favor.
“Anything,” she’d said.
“Can you fly me slow along the coast?”
“Of course. May I ask what you are looking for?”
“I’m not sure. I will know it when I see it.”
When the tree appeared in the distance, Tigisti cried out. A word in her language for Boabab tree, and also for Tree of Air, Tree of Life, and Maker of Myth. Charlotte landed The Amelia on the Red Sea and anchored.
Together, the women rowed the small inflatable boat ashore, and made their way to the crumbling steps.
“Maybe I should land up top,” Charlotte offered.
Tigisti kneeled in the sand at the base of the staircase, running her finger around three entwined circles cut into the stone. “No, this is the way she went.” Approaching Tree, they came upon the cairn where Asmara was buried; it was hard to miss. Tigisti fell upon her son’s grave, keening and weeping while Charlotte sat by her side, stroking her hair and her back.
“Do you want to . . .” Charlotte began, gesturing toward the stones.
“No, leave his bones in peace. I was never meant to have him as my own.”
Daniat had finally confessed, then disappeared—moving far south and changing her name, as some told the story. Others said she went up in a puff of white smoke, bewitched for her evil deeds. Hestia had told Charlotte the true story and said it was time Tigisti knew.
Tigisti had dreamed the tree. Charlotte told her the rest.
They found the tunnel and made their way in. Flashing a lamp Charlotte had in her kit they pulled themselves through to a room where plenty of light filtered through the roots.
The red lion cloak lay on the floor, covered with bones arrayed around the sword, it’s tip plunged into the ground up to the word Will. Nestled next to the blade sat Asmeret’s pouch and the cards wrapped in silk. Four piles of ash ringed the basin.
Tigisti walked the rim of the wheel. She walked in a spiral until she stood in the center. She squatted down and stroked the small, charred bones. “Her little black dog,” Tigisti murmured, then picked up the silk, unwrapping the cards.
“I can show you how she laid them out,” Charlotte offered.
“Thank you, no. I’m not meant to read them.”
“For Theia then?”
“Maybe, someday. But I don’t think so. Asmeret’s gifts were already screaming out to be seen by her age,” her voice thickened. “I just didn’t know what it was.”
“Sometimes that is the way it needs to be, I think,” Charlotte said. “We can only see so much. Only do so much to intervene in their lives.”
Tigisti smiled. “You have wisdom for your age, and for a white lady.”
Charlotte laughed, “I try.”
They left it all in the cavern under my roots. All, except one thing.
As The Amelia left the runway, streaming past the edge of the Asmara plateau, Friedrich asked, “Did you remember to post your package?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said, “but you are a bit late reminding me, young man.”
The boy looked behind his seat again and again.
“What?” Charlotte asked.
“Is it really mine?”
“Yup.”
“What’s Pop gonna say when I bring home a real, true for life sword?”
“I can’t even imagine,” Charlotte grinned.
Oxford
Charlotte clicked the remote on the projector. “Behold the ever-expanding universe. The latest triggering event spurring this research was the unexplained sudden influx of stars in the constellation Ara. Some counts say by over a million newly visible astronomical objects. By calculating . . .”
She stopped, looking out at the downcast eyes of her students.
“Or I could begin this way,” she said, turning off the projector. “So the goddess AraAthena was once a real piece of work. No wonder since her father, Zeus, King of the Greek gods, conspired with his brothers and sisters (all except Hestia who withdrew in hopes of keeping the family together once the dust settled) to murder their parents, the Titans, which started time (which pretty much stinks for all of us). Oh, and he ate A’Thena’s mother for lunch.”
Seventy-eight pairs of eyes looked up from their notebooks.
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