She had been labouring for two days already, and the priests had been reading in turn, from the Dirsanè Ruphael, and now from the Miracles of Mary.
‘AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT, WHEN THOSE WHO HAD TAKEN FLIGHT ARRIVED AT THE SEASHORE, SHE STRETCHED OUT HER HANDS, AND RAISED HER EYES TO GOD IN HEAVEN, AND MADE SUPPLICATION TO OUR LADY MARY WITH GREAT OUTCRY AND WITH MUCH WEEPING AND LAMENTATION.’
Her husband, appalled by her labour, had remained in the room – the receiving room, this time; so many people were attending this birth there was no space for them in the main house. He bowed to the ground in prayer and wept so much he asked for a cup to be brought, a dark cup, hollowed out of cow horn. His tears dripped into the rough bottom and when he had collected a finger’s height he handed it to one of the women. Give her this to drink. Maybe it will hasten the birth.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
As dusk drew in on the third day she slipped, exhausted, into a state between sleeping and waking. And in that state it seemed to her that she had gently taken leave of herself, but was watching herself at the same time, that she lay quiet on her side near the fire, and that a young girl approached her, a girl of about six years old. The child was beautiful. She had an oval face, with perfect skin and a small straight nose, full lips, and tumbling, glossy hair. Silver chains spilled down the front of her long dress. The child came close and stretching out a small hand stroked her belly and her straining back. And it seemed as though her loins responded to the child’s touch, easing and calming, and to the child’s voice, which felt as if it came both from outside her, and from within her own heart. ‘Ayzosh. You will be safely delivered.’ But when she turned to give her thanks the child was gone.
‘THEN WHILST SHE WAS IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA THE PAINS OF CHILDBIRTH TOOK HOLD UPON HER, AND OUR LADY MARY TOOK THE CHILD FROM HER WOMB; AND SHE GAVE BIRTH TO A FINE BOY. AND HIS MOTHER CALLED HER BOY “ABRASKIROSPAS” [WHICH MEANS] IN GREEK AND HEBREW “THE HAND OF MARY TOUCHED HIM AND BLESSED HIM IN THE WOMB OF HIS MOTHER”. NOW NEITHER PAIN NOR FLOW OF BLOOD CAME TO HIS MOTHER.’
At midnight, in the third night after the third day, the baby, a boy, was born.
He was completely silent. His eyes were closed, and there seemed to be no life in him. Memories of the last death twisted through her and she cried to the midwife, Madam, have I laboured and laboured in vain?
‘Quiet,’ answered the midwife, sharply. Then, more kindly, ‘Ayzosh. He’s probably just tired.’
A big bowl was filled with water, and soap brought, and clean clothes to receive the child, and the room stretched taut with watching. As soon as he touched the water he heaved a great sigh and began to suck his fingers. And it was as if her spirit flowed back into her body, as if she had suddenly come back to life herself.
‘AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT, WHEN THE SEA RETURNED TO ITS OWN PLACE, AND THE WATERS THEREOF BECAME QUIET, AND THE WAVES WENT DOWN, THE WOMAN WENT FORTH FROM IT CARRYING HER CHILD IN HER ARMS. AND WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW HER MANY OF THEM MARVELLED AND BECAME SPEECHLESS BY REASON OF THIS GREAT AND MIRACULOUS THING.’
For three days after her son’s birth she slept on the floor, on a thin pallet surrounded by strewn grass and tracked-in rainy season mud, welcoming the cold wind that gusted under the door in the darkest hour before dawn, offering her body and her comfort to Mary, who had heard her in her greatest distress.
When forty days had passed and he was taken to be baptised she would name her first son Edemariam, or hand of Mary, but in the meantime she reached for him and held him close. Looking down at the flattened curls of wet dark hair, the breathing, fragile skull, she knew suddenly that this too was a kind of salvation; that these small forms that emerged from her buffeted body might be an answer to her loneliness, the depth of which she was only now beginning to comprehend.
The sun was just beginning to touch the tops of the furthest mountains when they set out, but the city was still in shade, the air clear and chill. She tightened her arms around the baby, and shifted her weight. Breastfeeding had further stripped her already slight figure, and the bright cloth decorating her mule did nothing to soften the saddle. The sound of their mules’ hooves – hers, Alemitu’s, his – echoed against the walls of the houses, but their servants’ bare feet, trotting alongside, made no sound at all. Above them the curved swords of eucalyptus leaves soughed in the breeze, bowed, crossed each other, bowed again.
She leaned forward and grasped the pommel as they began to climb, and watched as the sun slid down the slopes to meet them. It lit the tops of the trees and picked out the straw and pebbles in the mud walls of the houses, which glinted it back. Along the roadside the grass had dried to feathery fringes of pale gold, cool in the dapple of early morning. Woodsmoke rose tentative into the air, and crows argued themselves hoarse over rubbish heaps. Women stood in doorways, beating basketwork clean with branches. Hens scratched at their feet, and cockerels. Her mule’s ears twitched, pointed forward again.
Houses with doorways open onto the street began to give way to homesteads encircled by fences of lashed-together eucalyptus and euphorbia. Flowering bushes crowded in on them, wild roses, creamy yellow crotons. They began to pass women in white shawls returning from church, stepping easy, quiet among the rocks, their long shadows mingling and moving together. When the women saw her husband they came close to ask for his blessing, touching forehead and chin to the cross he disentangled from the folds of the gabi he had wrapped around his shoulders for warmth. May God bless you and keep you. Amen.
At the sides of the path thistle flowers, white and purple starbursts nestled in green-pointed ruffs, drew level with the tops of the eucalyptus trees on the hillside below. Lammergeyers wheeled, then sloped down out of sight. The far ridges of the mountains were grey-blue steps ascending into a sky undisturbed by any clouds at all. The mules’ hooves crunched against the rubble on the path and the sound seemed suddenly smaller, bare, but also hard and bright, as though it could travel forever through the clear air above the valley. As they rounded a bend she turned slightly, and saw Gondar spread out below them.
Ever since the beginning of the dry season, as the ground hardened, the green meadows began to yellow, as the rivers shrank and became passable, she had felt the city change around her. Her husband did not think to tell her much about the wider world, but she saw and heard enough. She knew that in the market there were more people, more strangers, sensed a darker, harsher mood. The servants came in and out with water and wood and shreds of news. Thousands of men and women, their mules, their children, their slaves, were walking in daily from the mountains. They carried muskets, spears, shields, lion’s mane headdresses; grinding stones bent the women’s backs, and great hide-covered food baskets chafed the donkeys’ flanks. At night the mead-houses rang with war chants, with boasting and with burnished memory. The emperor’s cousin Ras Kassa, appointed governor of Begemdir and Semien after Ras Gugsa Wulé’s death, was calling his armies in.
Kassa was as pious as Ras Gugsa had been, and known for his mastery of theology, but though he had fought in the battle of Adwa as a teenager and been victorious against Negus Mikael of Wollo since, he was not necessarily known for his mastery of war. He was steady and loyal, and a trusted adviser to the emperor – even though he had a better claim to the throne. When he became governor he had preferred to stay at the court in Addis Ababa and delegated the administration of Gondar to the eldest of his four sons. She would hear, decades later, that on one of her husband’s trips to Addis he had been charged with a message for the new emperor: Gondar and the provinces of which it was capital were too important to be treated in this way. He had been seriously heard, apparently, but for years felt resented by Ras Kassa’s sons.
They were travelling between scrubby fields now, scattered with yellow stones, the occasional bush a dark jewel set in dry gold land. Now the path was runnelled and gullied, scoured and scored by the daily deluges of the rainy season, and the mules slowed, picking their way along tracks that narrowed sometimes to a single hoof’s width, a steep drop on one side, rough drystone wall or