Читать книгу The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy - Philip Marsden - Страница 24

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After His Holiness Cyril IV left Gondar in 1857, Tewodros marched to Delanta. He defeated a rebel governor there, then crossed the Abbai into Gojjam, where a force had risen against him. He captured the wife of one of their leaders and stripped her naked before having her shot. The rebels themselves he released; some were later captured again, and this time had to be executed. In Gojjam he found a slave market and ordered all the slaves to be freed, and many of them married each other. Then he moved north and did battle with the Agew and captured their leaders. The governor of Wegera rebelled and Tewodros moved his forces west to fight him, but the governor escaped. Tewodros had his prisoners’ hands and feet cut off, and hanged them from an acacia in Gorgora. He then marched to Zur Amba, and to Gondar, then back to Wegera and down to Zur Amba again.

That year, the year of St Mark, turned out like the others. Tewodros drove his men back and forth through the high plains, putting down rebellions. ‘He is coming – he is coming!’ hissed all before him, but the rebellions flared up again as soon as he had left. In three years of rule, nothing he had done had yet become solid: not the defeat of the Oromo, nor the appointments he made from among his own people, nor the alliances with Abune Selama, the Egyptians, or the scheming Europeans. His kingdom was little more than the province where his army was camped, his palace his campaigning tent, his power the last battle he had won. Only his strange record of success bound his territory together, and hope – less the hope in his new reforms than in old notions of peace through power, unity of Church and crown and common cause beneath the tattered Solomonic banner.

Between Wollo and Begemder there stood a mountain. Its dark cliffs were like the sides of a great ship, its flat summits decks on which cattle grazed and crops grew. No man could approach that mountain without being seen; it could be defended with the tiniest force. It was called Meqdela. In time Tewodros saw it as the still point of his turbulent world: ‘Meqdela shall be the storehouse of my treasures; those who love me will come and settle there.’

Only Tewodros would have favoured such a location, surrounded by his enemies. ‘Believing I had power,’ he wrote years later, ‘I brought all the Christians to the land of the heathen.’

Meqdela became garrison, treasury, prison, stronghold and home. Over the years, everything that was most valuable to him ended up on Meqdela – his captured cannon, his precious stones, his looted manuscripts, his most important and belligerent prisoners. Biru Goshu was chained there, also the ‘rightful’ Solomonic ruler Yohannis the Fool, who was always treated with deference by Tewodros. HH Cyril IV and Abune Selama had attended the dedication of the mountain as a place for Tewodros’s treasures, at which there was ‘extraordinary rejoicing’. He erected a church dedicated to his favourite sacred figure – Medhane Alem, ‘saviour of the world’.

Up there too he had sent Tewabach, his beloved wife. He visited Meqdela when he could, and those around him noticed the calm that settled upon him when he was with her. She was one of his ‘guardian angels’, it was said (the other one being John Bell). She prepared his food, read the Bible with him, and though no heir had yet been given them, God would choose the moment in His own time.

That year, 1858, in the early days of keremt, the season of big rains, Tewodros rode up the mountain and was with Tewabach. She washed the dust of battle from his feet. He was still for a moment and went nowhere and sat reading the Psalms – Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that have risen against me … Each day the clouds gathered over the peaks, and after the storm, the sun shone on the plains far below and its web of silvery streams.

While he was on Meqdela, Tewabach fell ill. With each day, the emperor’s anxiety grew. He ate only shurro, fasting food. He spent the nights in Medhane Alem church praying for her. He begged the small group of Protestant missionaries to apply their medicine to her. His army, so used to movement, began to plunder the villages around Meqdela, and Tewodros was forced to drag himself from his wife’s bedside and lead his troops southwards where they were able to attack the Oromo. There they could plunder all they liked.

On the evening of 13 Nehase, the day of Rob, in the year 7350 since the creation of the world, Itege Tewabach died. Tewodros was still with his forces. He returned at once and had her body put in a coffin, and the coffin put on a stretcher. From his fortress at Meqdela, Tewodros took her embalmed body from camp to camp. She lay in her own tent and Tewodros spent hours sitting alone with her. She was taken to another mountain, Amba Gishen, whose flat-topped summit faced the heavens in the shape of a cross. While her funeral was being arranged, Tewodros composed a lament:

I pray, ask her before she goes

If Itege Tewabach was wife and servant

She of such wisdom, such industry, died yesterday

She served me and treated me by ploughing the earth.

Many miles away, deep in Oromo country, was another mourner. Banished to his native province of Yejju, Ras Ali wrote a bitter verse for the double loss of his daughter. He had not seen her since Tewodros had robbed him of his power and driven him into exile:

When I said to her ‘I love mead!’ she brought me honey.

When I said to her ‘I am hungry!’ she brought me my chosen fruits.

When I said to her ‘I am cold!’ she sent me shammas.

Taken by my thief, she is now carried on a coffin;

I grieve not, as long ago she disowned me.

Some weeks before her burial a comet appeared in the heavens. Each night Tewodros went out and sat in the stillness of the mountain to watch the arc streak across the sky. On the fortieth night it was gone. He marched his forces to the Oromo region of Wollo and massacred many people. He captured thousands of animals, and meat became cheaper than cabbage. He appointed a new governor, a loyal man, and went south and killed all those Oromo he could find between Gimbia and Geneta. The children he distributed among his nobles.

In Shoa, someone whispered of the governor’s secret dealings with a rebel. Tewodros had the governor chained and another appointed. That one revealed his treachery before Tewodros left Shoa. He had him chained too. Then he heard that the new governor of Wollo had rebelled. He rode north again, tens of thousands behind him. He rode in silence.