Читать книгу The Wife’s Tale - Aida Edemariam - Страница 9

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.