1953-1960 CE

City of Clouds —Village of Ash

Asmeret wandered between tents; her head hurt again, yet she could think. Remember. The cavern of gold, the river, the singing of the ghost animals falling, falling, arrrrraaaaaaaaa, the ravens pulling them from the river where they bumped up against her, the zebra, the rhino—bloody stump where they’d hacked off the tip of its horn—climbing the staircase behind the boar. Her. The Great Huntress turning to stone. Bow on her lap. Golden orb in her arms. The gift. Hyena, the most magnificent creature she’d ever seen. Could the fortuneteller see all of it too? Read her mind? Would that make it real? Make it believable? 

Princess Asmeret and the hyena sat on the edge of the plateau watching the ghost animals bow to their queen, return to their full splendor and leap into the abyss. Transmute into silver wisps of smoke curling through a hole in the roof.

When he found her she was unconscious, slumped behind a tent at the edge of the market where it met the alleyway that ambled past the back door of his flat. A beggar? A drunk? He pulled back the hood and looked. Touched her face. Staggered backward at the beauty of her, the radiance of the blue-black-blue skin under the white sun, though she looked half dead at the same time. He lifted her in his arms, a bundle of rags, and carried her to the empty room meant for a servant. Spooned broth past her lips.

When she awoke she thought him a ghost, his skin was pale, hair straight—the color of sun-scorched grass—and eyes so light blue they got lost in his face. When he spoke, asking her name, she knew he was no ghost but wished that he was. English. A soldier, she thought, thinking of her father and his admonishments. She looked for a white coat and felt small relief when none appeared. The man fed her hot soup that tasted of the marrow of bones, with small slivers of liver—did he somehow know? Her mind searched for other things than her favorite food. It was empty of anything but this moment. This room. She told him her name was Asmeret, and when she spoke it aloud it didn’t feel right.

Asmeret. He translated in the common language of this region—a name given one destined to unify, to re-bind, re-tie. She had the bone structure and skin color of the ancient kings and queens. The cape was filthy, though still a glorious artifact of the tribes that had been great hunters once, but now mostly foraged and farmed what they could in the lowlands between the mountains and the Red Sea. What was she doing in Asmara, so far from home? She was still a girl, though nearly a woman from the looks of her. He’d felt guilty for a moment taking her pouch and pouring the contents out on the dining table, but it was his work, he couldn’t help himself. She must be a healer, a shaman-in-training of some kind. He was intrigued and berated himself. Bloody mumbo jumbo—more harm than good.

He told her his name.

She never once spoke it aloud.

When he asked if she would stay, work for him for wages, she’d asked, doing what with an edge in her voice. Housekeeping, going to market, errands. Your English, he’d said. It’s remarkable really, how did you learn, and she’d told him. My father. He was a chief. Educated here, in this city. When he asked her father’s name, she told him, Chief Anbessa. Asmeret didn’t notice the look on his face, didn’t notice how he stored the information away, didn’t know that he kept this thought to himself—I knew him, once.

When he asked how she’d got here she simply said, train.

The lion cape hung in the small closet next to his gray, wool overcoat with the brass buttons. Her hair grew in—tight springy black—though she kept it short. She wore the clothes he selected for her—costumed as a university student or young office assistant she looked much older and drew no extraordinary attention.

For two years, Asmeret stayed and worked with the ghost, scanning the market every day for her brother (avoiding the red tent for reasons she wouldn’t contemplate), walking every street in Asmara, methodically, asking, when she could get up the courage, have you seen a boy, nearly a man, the color of me?

Asmeret quickly moved from doing housekeeping and errands to assisting him in his work as an anthropologist at the Museum of Culture and History. Paperwork. Shelving books. Eventually a bit of research and translation to and from a stunning array of languages—she was as surprised as him at her skill, picking up even the most obscure dialect with nothing more than a bit of reference text for a primer. Her favorite part was the library, her favorite books the ancient myths and fairytales. Greek, Russian, Asian, African, Mayan, European, Nordic, which she translated into the common language at night in her bedroom, filling notebooks she hid under her mattress. She noticed how they all told the same stories beneath the strange clothes and costumes and names. It was the same with the stories the priest told at mass, Asmeret sitting so still in the pew next to the ghost, staring at the white-marble man hanged on a cross, trying to make sense of this son-of-a-god’s sacrifice.

God, not ‘a god,’ the ghost corrected her. She chose not to argue. If, after reading all of those books, that was his view, she didn’t see what she could do. The priest railed against thieves and charlatans and fortunetellers from his place at the head of the church and the ghost agreed with him over luncheons then picked up the check. Asmeret joined them, keeping her thoughts to herself, which is not to say she wasn’t thinking, just the opposite. Her mind was on fire, while the rest of her had grown cool and numb.

When they became lovers, the act was perfunctory, an extension of her duties. Which is not to say that he paid her for sex, but that when he asked she responded in the same way as when he asked her to get a cut of meat for their dinner. She acquiesced having nothing else in her mind, or her heart, to do.

Beneath Tree

Asmeret recounted her time in Asmara as best she could. Although accepting the grace Hestia and the ancestors offered was terribly difficult.

“I let the ghost desecrate me—bring shame on me and my family.”

“No, Asmeret. Tell it for Theia,” Hestia’s voice urged.

Asmeret hesitated, then began again.

Princess Asmeret brought the source of all light back to the world. When the child was born, a girl with tea-and-cream skin, pale blue eyes, and wavy, ash-blonde hair, Asmeret named her Theia after the Titaness who gave birth to the sun, moon, and dawn. Titaness Theia, the story went, gave silver and gold their lustre.

The ghost loved Theia and tried to marry Princess Asmeret, to claim them a life, though it would be hard—this was not a place or a time that tolerated the familial mixing of races. She never said no to his proposals, only grew more distant, stronger, and steadier on her own.

Finally, one night, he became enraged at her indifference. Became violent, though he didn’t harm her or the baby. The next morning Asmeret readied Theia, who was nearing her first year, put on her cape and bought passage on the train. He followed her to the platform. Begged. Handed her a bundle, tied up in string—a gift, please take it, please. For Theia.

The train chuffed through the clouds, down the mountain.

The ghost disappeared.

Asmara

The boy-nearly-a-man with blue-black-blue skin and the bones of kings stopped in every village on his route north and asked, “Have you seen a girl-nearly-a-woman the same color as me?” After some weeks, a man with only one tooth left in his head said, “Go to Asmara, boy, they have people of every shade there.” The City of Clouds, the capital of their country.

It was as much a sign as anything else so he did as the grandfather said.

Asmara paid a couple to ride in their cart up the mountain, through the clouds. As it happened, they were farmers bringing goat’s milk and cheese to sell, so Asmara found himself carried straight into the square filled with white tents. His heart pounded hard at the luck, even while he chided himself: So stupid to think she would be here. Isn’t even the same city, far from it. He walked through the market, which was full of not only food but of amazing contraptions, clockworks, tools. He reminded himself to focus. To look for her. Though they were years older now, he felt sure he would know her at once. He passed a red tent, the sign of a fortuneteller swinging overhead. Perhaps the gypsy inside could tell him where the girl was, for a price. He felt in his pocket for coins. A woman brushed past him. The smell of her, the long raven hair that floated on the air like wisps of silk, pulled him in her wake. She slid into a vendor booth after endless twists and turns in the maze. Asmara stopped suddenly, jolted by memory. The raven-haired woman selling rosemary cream. Her—here! If she remembered him after all of these years, she didn’t let on but flashed kohl-ringed eyes at him and dipped cream-covered fingers in his mouth. She didn’t say, bring your mother to buy a jar to take home. He knew he looked older than his years to her, to every woman whose eyes tracked him when he passed; his body quickly abetted the misconception.

They rarely left her bed for the next two years. When he did it was to haunt the construction sites and machine shops—dirty his hands, learn their tools and their tricks. When people asked his name, he told them Ari, quickly tiring of the looks on their faces when he said Asmara—as if there had been some mistake in their hearing or in his naming—and the waste of his time teasing it out. The men he spent his days with didn’t know, or much care, which colors and bones spoke of the kings and the woman he spent his nights with simply crooned over the shape of him. The way he moved. Called him “beautiful one,” cried out “my prince,” when she arched her back and clutched at the sheets on their bed. That he didn’t love her, barely looked in her eyes, didn’t seem to bother her at all. He suspected she had had many men, perhaps women too, and knew what to do with them. He suspected most of them hadn’t known what to do with her. His skill surprised them both.

He worked for a time in the hellfire pit of a forgery molding bullets from gray and red molten lead, like lava, he thought, hardening to the size of a fingertip. The bullets could crack through a man's chest plate and stop his heart.

The machinery was fantastic and while he polished the seams of the bullets—smoothed them to barrel-ready-maximum-velocity, maximum kill—the gears over his head clicked and whined, making a soundtrack to his thoughts. In his head, a jumble of hard, toothy wheels and drive-shafts and chains and belts waited to be reassembled, ordered, and commandeered for a purpose as weighty as the one served by the forge.

The shuff of his file back and forth joined the clacking racket of the machine whose belly he worked in—beat out a rhythm hard on his skin until his heart and lungs and brain joined in.

The ideas started coming, crowding out the girl in the market. Erased the picture of her that haunted him even by day. The forge was carved into the side of the mountain, clouds obscuring the mouth of the cave. Nothing existed in this underground war factory to remind him of the light in her eyes that shone like bits of gold glittering among the river stones.

That day in the market, when she had first woken up, he had seen the whole universe born, her eyes shifting from black to a dazzle of stars swirling and flaring until they cooled to one golden sun—Asmara saw himself as she saw him. He had never once felt seen again. He had become the invisible man.

One day the owner of the metal works asked him if he would take on a job. A delivery. Many, in fact. Accompany shipments that went out by train to the other cities on the line. Ensure the crates got into the right hands and collect payment. Asmara was tall and broad, looked built of steel rods, rock, and sinew with a simmering anger just under that skin, which made him the perfect fit for the work, even at the age of fifteen.

As the train chuffed down the mountain, out of the clouds, he saw the girl from the market in a bird soaring, circling above the tree line on finger-tipped wings; in the kudu sipping cool water on bent knees at the river under the trestle then leaping across the veld, the whole herd at her heels; in the lion skulking in the long grass, ears and eyes and the twitching tip of a tail barely visible, waiting for the weakest of the herd to fall behind. He had no idea what it meant to see her in the birds and beasts.

At every stop the pattern repeated: hire a driver to load the crates on their wagon, deliver the goods, watch them inspected by men with shade in their eyes and white grins on their faces, unearthing guns beneath the first layer of camouflage castings and straw, ammo beneath that, packed in boxes and strung on thick leather belts. The men caressed the metal with their fingers before strapping the belts over their bare chests, striking poses. Collect the envelope of money (or the message, Tell your boss that playing his part in the people’s revolution should be payment enough). Follow the curled finger, full lips, sway of hips to the bed of a woman whose beauty matched his, but nothing else fit. No amount of cajoling could keep him from moving on, leaving his lovers (and his resultant daughters) to watch for his return for the rest of their lives.

In the last city on the line, Asmara purchased a pair of mules and a cart. He moved from village to village, looking for the blue-black-blue skin. He played the part of traveling carnival whose attractions are strange and magnetic and fleeting. In one town a minstrel, a musician who sings and plays any instrument placed in his hands along with a coin and an egg or round of fresh bread. The songs came, unrehearsed, out of his mouth; whatever the villagers wanted to hear, he would make up.

He played the part of traveling tinker who could fix anything mechanical or with moving pieces. He lay hands on the clockworks and their cranky wheels and got them moving again. It's a wonder, a miracle, the villagers said and thanked him, pressing more coins and food into his palms.

He played the part of traveling savior. Where crops had near crumbled to dust, he helped the people to design and build pumps, using the force of the wind to carry water from distant rivers to the withering plants. Where women had torn open during hard births (leaking feces and urine from holes torn inside, shamed and shunned by their husbands and families), he laid hands on their ruined flesh and knew what to do. Where to stitch, what ointments and salves to use. Taught the women who tended births how to reach up and turn the babies, coax them down, ease their passage with herbs and oils.

He played the part of traveling lover. After the songs were sung and the fields watered, after the mothers were stitched and whole, after he laid down under his cart and shut his eyes for one more night, the soft hands came. He opened his mouth to the sweet breath and searching tongues, but they weren’t her. He hadn’t become all of those traveling some ones; Asmara had no idea who or what he was.

Although, one day, he almost remembered.

The woman sat under a tree away from the thatch house her husband lived in, where she could nurse their infant while the waste her body produced, as constantly and naturally as the milk in her breasts, poured on the ground into a small ditch she had dug with her hands. She was beautiful. She glowed. Her eyes were half closed over hard-cut cheekbones and an impossibly delicate chin. She leaned with her back against the trunk of a tree, which was in full flower. White, papery blossoms rained down on her dark, unruly hair. A bird flushed out of the branches at Asmara’s approach.

She startled at the intruder. Her baby let loose of her breast and cried out with a squawk louder than you would have thought possible given how small he was—like a little brown bean.

Asmara knew enough of her language to make out her meaning, if not all of her words.

Go away! Her eyes flashed like a snake's, warning off an intruder small enough to kill and too big to eat.

He held back because he wasn't sure why he was drawn to her. He had woken up in a strange bed and was on his way back to his cart when he saw her under the tree.

“Good morning,” he said. You are magnificent, he meant.

She picked up a stone and threw it at his head with a force and accuracy that surprised him, then returned to cradling the bean to her chest.

He walked closer, stopping a few steps short, outside the overhang of white branches, and squatted in the dirt off to the side. Only then did he smell the stench of the stream flowing from under her skirt mixed in with the unbearable sweetness of the tree blossoms passing their peak. He winced, as much from the perfume as the feces and urine. He couldn't help it, he reached out to touch her even though he was too far away.

He stayed there, suspended, the muscles in his thighs and stomach starting to burn with the effort, his arm outstretched like a supplicant at the feet of an angel.

Without looking at him, she said, “Who are you and what do you want?”

He replied something that meant, I don't know who I am, but I know I can help you.

When he had finished stitching the layers and layers of ripped membrane and muscle and skin and rubbed ointment into her wounds, she fell into a fever.

Women came out of the huts, bringing water to pour over her hot body, which steamed and smelled clean. She yowled and snapped her teeth like an animal. When the fever broke, she looked at him. Saw him.

For a moment, Asmara saw himself again through the eyes of the girl in the market. A prince. Asmara climbed back in his cart, determined to find all that he’d lost by the time he was nine.

Oxford

Charlotte sat in the grass watching her son play. His legs were long enough now that she feared he would soon catch one of the hens and not know what to do with it. “Be careful!” she called.

She heard Ben come up behind her. He handed her a jar of cold tea—the glass already sweating in the rare summer heat. “It’s Sunday,” he said, rubbing her back where he knew it ached, “what shall we do? I am taking the day off, no matter what.”

Charlotte smiled to herself. He would be riding the perimeter of the fields by nightfall. He couldn’t help himself.

“We could take a flyer up into the hills. Have a picnic,” she suggested.

“Sounds perfect,” he called over his shoulder, already off to help herd the chickens.

She watched her husband and son tumble in the yard. So content. Full of joy in the moment. She closed her eyes hoping to banish the familiar feeling in her stomach. Why can’t this be it? Why do I only feel like that in the air, or there. Africa, she meant. It called to her wherever she was, and sometimes she answered—gone for months.

No more.

She would make this enough. Ben was a beautiful man. He’d stood by her, seen her through so much.

Charlotte got to her feet, bracing her lower back, so touchy since the pregnancy—Friedrich had been a big baby—and the lifting that came with farming and being a mother. She’d had no idea.

“I’m heading in to pack us a basket,” she said. Ben nodded. Winked at her as he swept the boy into the air. She waited though, watching the man who never once commented or implied that the deep tint of their son’s skin or the black spirals of his hair was unusual.

That night, after their picnic in the hills, Friedrich begged his mother, “One more story, please?”

“Just one, then off to sleep, which?” Charlotte asked, turning the fan in the window up a notch. It was almost dark and still so hot.

“The polar bears that fly!” the boy crowed.

His favorite, Charlotte smiled as she reached for a folder of papers on his bookshelf. No pictures yet. Soon. She hoped to find a publisher for some of Helge’s stories and the illustrations were vivid in her mind. She’d been meaning to hire someone to take it on—Ben wanted her to draw the illustrations herself but she’d put her sketchbook away years ago. She’d think about it tomorrow.

She turned the lights out as she made her way upstairs. Their bedroom door stood slightly ajar. Charlotte peeked in. Ben was already asleep, anxious to be up before the sun. For him, when it came to the farm, tomorrow was yesterday.

She turned on the lamp in her study. Penned the letter she couldn’t put off any longer.

9 July, 1957

Darling Frieda,

I have been remiss in my writing, I know. And I know I am forgiven so will dispense with excuse making. I wonder if you are thinking of her too? It’s been twenty years since Amelia disappeared and I dreamed it last night. I took the boys up in The Amelia today, hoping the dream would come back. You know how it is, when you wake up it’s there and then melts away like sugar on your tongue. Helge was in the dream too, flying beside her on a bay horse. Please do let me know when you will be ready to take Helge’s ashes home.

I hope your painting is going well and you are content, and safe. It seems as if the whole world has gone mad, all of the fighting over borders and naming of countries. Have you followed the news of Eritrea? I haven’t gotten a letter from Anbessa in months and I fear what role he is playing in the liberation movement against Ethiopia. This carving of territories has always been violent, I know, the impulse is deep in our animal nature, but the bloodshed of innocents and destruction of the land in the redrawing of lines on maps—be it to break the claims into smaller pieces, or force-fit them back together—is unconscionable. Who will stop it? Who has that kind of power, and will, and an army big enough to keep the peace while the land finds its own shape and the people relearn how to live well enough in their allotted space?

Perhaps in Friedrich’s generation, she thought. The mother in her wanted to keep him on the farm, protected from it all, and the other part of her needed him to know his homeland and choose his own path. Someday she would take him there to see Africa’s beauty, unlike anywhere else in the world. She hoped by the time he was old enough to understand the story of his birth, Eritrea would be free from anyone’s rule of law but their own and that of their ancestors and gods and animal guides. She smiled, thinking of Anbessa at the head of some table, calling for a council to listen to the Great Mother in all of her shapes and forms.

Pardon my leaping from topic to topic, dear Frieda, I am afraid it’s how my mind works, or rather doesn’t, these days. When you send the package again, direct it to my department at the College—I’ve enclosed a card with that address. If the authorities believe it is academic material, not some priceless artifacts you are trying to spirit out of India, perhaps they won’t refuse it at the border again. I think you are right that I will have better luck posting the whole thing to America from here—I know you are anxious to move it along, and it may still take some time. See you soon, I hope. Watch for me and The Amelia in the sunset.

Village of Ash

“Breathe deep, let the air pooch out your tummy, yes, now hold it and count to seven, steady. Good, now let go.” The girl was taller and stronger than Asmeret had been at almost-five.

The arrow strayed a bit to the left of its mark, flushing the little black dog from the bed she’d made in the tall grass behind the target. She whuffed and shook her ears, miffed. Theia laughed, a high, sweet trill, then set down her bow and ran to hug the dog around its neck.

Asmeret sighed. The dog was showing her age, the ruff of her neck and the tip of her snout had turned white, it seemed, overnight. Well, not overnight exactly. The dog had been thin and slow when Asmeret and her baby had first arrived in the village. Even so, she wagged her whole body and leaped into Asmeret’s lap, sniffing Theia up and down and licking her tiny toes. That was the start of their love affair, the child reduced to giggles at the dog’s every move and the dog rarely more than a nose length from the girl.

Tigisti doted on the baby and Asmeret, so happy to have her family back. She honored her daughter’s request not to ask questions.

Daniat gave the child a wide berth. The look of the girl—the long curling hair, the blue eyes set in that tiny face, skin a color she’d never seen on a person—made her feel jittery. That Asmeret treated her as if nothing had happened between them, yet kept her distance, made Daniat suspicious. And though Tigisti had no real power in the tribe, she was still a formidable woman, beloved, and Daniat knew it best not to cross her.

“The sun is setting, Theia, time for sleep,” Asmeret called. The girl was rolling in the dirt on her back, following the dog’s lead, legs and arms waggling in the air. “Ask your grandmother to brush the dirt and grass out of your hair before you get in bed.”

Theia scowled, her pretend angry look, which she couldn’t maintain for long, kissed her mother on the cheek and skipped in to the hut with the tin roof.

Asmeret watched Arsema across the way, through the low flames of the village’s communal fire. She was more beautiful now than ever, large with her second child, yet Asmeret alone knew the radiance her cousin was capable of—if she’d been happy. If she’d been seen and cherished and held in hands that truly loved her. That Arsema treated Asmeret as if nothing was happening between them, as if those nights long after the children and Aman and their mothers slept never happened; when Asmeret explored Arsema’s whole body with her fingers and tongue (brought to life all that had been cut away when she was five, when the twin scars on their lips met, burning like scorched earth between them). That Arsema denied it made Asmeret wish she could disappear for good. But then what would her lover and daughter do, here, where no one else understood who and what they were.

 Back in the Village of Ash, Princess Asmeret could hear the earth again but she hadn’t yet learned to hear the ancestors and the gods and goddesses speak. She still refused to believe the stories in her head that felt more like memories than dreams.

“Mother, please, can we open it yet?”

“I told you, Theia, when you are five.” Asmeret was determined to keep Theia as far from the fifth year ceremonies as she could, yet the girl had heard the stories about painted tattoos and jewelry and gifts and felt left out. The package from her father had sat like a watchful animal under Theia’s bed for years, taunting her mightily and serving as a reminder of her father’s love.

“Where is he again?” the child asked.

Asmeret answered as honestly as she could, “He works in the city called Asmara, and he loves you very much, but we can’t live there and he can’t live here.”

Theia made her sad face for real.

“Someday, when you are old enough to understand, I will take you to meet him. In the meantime, on the moon and day of your fifth year, you may open the package he gave you when we came down off the mountain. I am very proud of your patience.”

“How many more days?”

“Soon.”

Asmeret sent the girl to sleep with wishes for good dreams and the story of the Titaness Theia, who birthed all the light in the world.

On the morning of Theia’s fifth birthday, Asmeret woke to hot breath on her neck.

“C’mon, let’s go! You promised. Wake up!”

Asmeret smiled and nuzzled the child, then kissed the dog on the snout. “Okay, okay, breakfast first.”

Over liver and eggs, they made their plans.

“The woods,” Theia pleaded, “that’s where the rest of the girls get to go.”

Asmeret grimaced. She intended to reclaim the sacredness of this day, without the savagery of the traditional rite and without setting in Theia’s mind that marriage was her only option. She had spent years reclaiming the woods for herself as a place of dark beauty and mystery. Perhaps she could pass this learning straight on to Theia.

“All right,” Asmeret conceded, “first the tattoos, then into the woods, then the gift.” But nowhere near the sacrificial stone. Asmeret had in mind a lovely clearing where the sun shone through the ancient canopy.

While the morning sun was still low, Asmeret and Theia got ready to go. At the last minute, Asmeret invited Tigisti to give her the chance to see another way and to support her granddaughter no matter the path she was destined to follow.

“Give her the wedding tattoos and also the ones from abo’s ancestors,” Asmeret instructed her mother, who held the pot of ochre in one hand and a brush in the other.

“Why, Asmeret?” her mother asked, breaking her vow to not ask questions.

“Because I want her to know she can choose to become a bride or a chief or both.” Or neither, Asmeret thought, catching herself again saying things to or about Theia that she was really saying to herself. “Get your bow,” she told Theia when the paint was dry. The child glowed with happiness.

“To the woods!” the girl cried, pulling on her grandmother’s sleeve.

Asmeret put on her cloak, filling the pockets with things they might need, and hefted the package from under the bed. She called, “DOG!” almost tripping over the little beast, who was right behind her, and off they went.

Asmeret winked at Arsema as they passed her sitting outside her hut, singing to her bulging stomach in a low voice. Arsema pretended not to see her.

“Doooogggggg,” Theia called after some time walking through the woods.

“DOG!” Asmeret hollered, getting frustrated and angry, the package was heavy and a lost dog would ruin their day. Where could she have gone? They were almost to the clearing when the dog disappeared into a thicket and they didn’t see her come out the other side.

“There!” Theia danced around, pointing.

They followed the dog deeper into the woods, the hind end jouncing just within sight.

“Do you know where we are?” Tigisti asked her daughter in a low voice, making sure Theia didn’t overhear.

“No, not exactly, but it’s starting to look familiar,” Asmeret answered, hoping they were not going to come across the ceremonial stone. Her heart had started fluttering despite the peace she had made with this place.

Theia ran ahead, catching up to the dog and turned back to shout, “A hut!”

Princess Asmeret and Queen Tigisti hurried their steps. There in front of them was the witch’s hut—the same as both of them remembered, which is not to say they remembered it the same.

Asmeret noticed the look on her mother’s face, the way she stopped in her tracks. “You’ve been here before?”

“Once, a long time ago,” Tigisti confessed.

Asmeret didn’t ask any more. For another time, she thought, not wanting to tell her mother yet about the time she had spent here. She wasn’t sure what she would say anyway, none of it felt real, and the images in her mind were blurry. Crabbled hands. A bird. Warm bread. Her left palm started to throb. When she looked, nothing was there. Or was there? She held her hand up in front of her nose, were those circles?

“Mother, Grandmother, come inside,” Theia called from the doorway.

The troupe entered the hut. White coals and ash simmered in the hearth and a loaf of sweet bread sat on the grate. Next to the hearth was the round table with tea laid out on top. Cups, a steaming pot, plates of tiny cakes, and a pitcher of cream.

“A tea party, for me! What a surprise, mother, thank you,” Theia crowed with a hint of her father’s accent. The dog was already asleep, curled up in a ball, next to the hearth.

“Make yourself at home,” Asmeret muttered at the dog.

Tigisti was the one to take charge. “Yes! Let’s sit and eat and drink our tea, then open your gift, dear one.”

Dear one, that wasn’t like her mother to say. Another voice was in her head.

Asmeret managed to stay present to her family, her daughter and mother, as they ate and drank. When she poured the cream in Theia’s tea, the girl exclaimed, “Look! It’s turned the color of me!”

Asmeret’s vision swam and her stomach roiled. The voices rumbled in her head, two of them now. When the rosemary cream swept over her tongue, she nearly cried out to her mother, You have a son, but swallowed it down. Was her body growing hot? No, no, no, no, not today. Please no, not on Theia’s birthday.

“Time to open your gift?” Tigisti piped up, trying to cover for Asmeret’s obvious distress, clearing a place on the table.

“Yes, yes, yes . . . please,” Theia added, directed at her mother.

Asmeret nodded, setting the package in front of Theia.

The girl pulled at the string, impatient.

“Here, cut it,” Asmeret said, handing the girl the knife she kept tucked in the cape.

Tigisti started to sputter her protest.

“What? She knows how to use it,” Asmeret said.

“It’s books!” the girl shouted. “Lots of them, and look, Mother, look at the pictures!”

Asmeret smiled at the love her daughter had for stories of all kinds, especially the ones written in books with pictures to go along with it. She wasn’t old enough for school, yet she was already reading in the common language and had been thumbing through some of Anbessa’s books, sounding out the English words. Then Asmeret recognized the books, nestled in the brown paper. The ghost must have borrowed them, permanently, from the museum library or perhaps gave them to her in hopes that Asmeret would feel compelled to return them.

Theia opened each one, Property of The Museum of Culture and History: Asmara, she sounded out slowly, not understanding, but grabbing on to one word, “Asmara, that’s the city where my father lives.”

“Yes,” Tigisti answered, “and these books are from where he works. They are very special and he wanted you to have them.”

The books were all fairytales, the ones Asmeret had left in her room off the kitchen, the ones she had finished re-translating. White people on every page. Colorfully costumed ghosts. Theia’s ancestors on her father’s side. Stories she deserved to know.

Then she noticed another package under the books, wrapped in its own paper and string. Theia saw it too.

“Asmeret,” she read, “Mother, this one is for you.” The girl carried the package over and put it on her lap. “Open it, open it.”

“Thank you, my sweet, I will save it for later.”

“Nooooooo,” Theia howled. “Pllleeeaaaaaaaase.”

Asmeret looked to her mother, who nodded with a question in her eyes and also reassurance. She wasn’t alone, not this time.

She cut the string, pulled back the paper, opened the box. Her pouch, lumpy with the bones inside. Larger than she had remembered. And beside it yet another package, this one wrapped in a slip of silk and tied with a thin leather thong. The rings in Asmeret’s palm stormed to life, she shook her hand, blowing on it as if she’d been burned.

“What is it, Asmeret?” her mother asked, concerned.

“Are you all right, mother?” Theia asked with the scared look, the real one.

“Yes.” Asmeret said. No. “Theia, run home with your grandmother and spend the afternoon looking at your books, whatever you want.”

“But what about you?”

“I’ll be home soon, there is something that I need to do.”

Tigisti shot her a look.

“Really, I am fine, my present just reminded me that I left something important that I need to retrieve. Where I used to live.” She shot her mother a look back.

“Asmara? Take me!” Theia begged.

“Not Asmara, no. Where I lived before that. I will be home by dark. Promise. Now go,” she said as cheerily as she could.

As Asmeret turned toward the Red Sea, she heard the long grasses behind her rustling suspiciously. The little dog burst out of the grass, dancing and panting. “All right, come on,” Asmeret said.

Tree

Though a tangle of vines hid the entrance, the little dog wasn’t fooled. Together, the girl-now-a-woman and the dog-now-with-white-snout dug their way through the tunnel, which seemed a bit tighter now, to the cavern beneath the tree.

Asmeret spread the red lion cape in the shallow cup of the floor. After snuffing out each dark corner and finding a small leg bone of a kudu, the dog settled next to Asmeret, contentedly chewing. Only then did she unwrap the silk, though she knew what was inside.

The cards were the same size and shape as the fortuneteller’s and the witch’s—slightly smaller than her hand, rectangular, corners rounded off—with the same symbols and pictures and numbers and yet the colorations were slightly different. She paged through the deck, slowly. She had left the firestone in the pouch, hoping the cards would remain only cards and let her think. So far they were quiet. Still.

How did the ghost come by them? Why would he give them to her? For Theia, he’d said, handing her the package. He must have bundled up the books, ready for the girl’s first birthday. Her pouch made less sense, still, she hadn’t seen it since that first day he found her—hadn’t looked for it even. He must have felt he should return her property. But the cards, addressed to Asmeret? That made no sense at all.

The cards had haunted her, hunted her it seemed, since she was a child. This deck was clearly another made by the same hand. Asmeret leafed through the cards. The watercolors were original, stroked with tiny brushes onto a remarkable paper, linen, she guessed. Not mass-produced like the specimens of the Italian tarot decks she’d seen in the museum library, though not hand-drawn either.

She stopped. Mouth open. What? Why? Who would do this, and what did it mean? The Princess of Disks, still hovering over the abyss, is painted with blue-black-blue skin! The long red braids are gone—instead her head is bare under the great spiraling horns of her crown. The white gown skims across her flat stomach; The Princess of Disks is no longer pregnant. The deck tumbled out of her shaking hands. Her eyes caught another card, unlike the rest, not quite the same paper, and full of small, scratchy handwriting in the language of her tribe.

My daughter, I write this to you in hopes you might finally accept this gift, the cards, yes, but more so the sight that comes when they are in your hands—I know this. I ask you to believe me, though I have given you reasons not to trust me. That I regret. It could not be helped. Someday, I hope to be able to explain. For now, I am told, it is more important that you accept who and what you are and make an almost impossible choice.

You will have questions. How did I come by the cards, how did they find you? I was given the cards by someone I met in London and came to love and trust, though she is English and a scientist—the very things I have warned you about. She said the cards were made for you, a gift from the Great Mother, passed on through her trusted messengers, and I believed her—she is family to me.

She is family to me. Asmeret’s stomach lurched, her cheeks grew hot. So it was true, he had another family then. In London. Asmeret swallowed the bile that rose up in her throat and continued to read, stroking the soft fur of the little dog at her side. The wind whistled through the crevices, making an eerie sound.

Then your grandmother came to me in my dreams and told me the cards were to be yours. There is a prophecy—a prediction of sorts. It says you are the one born to read the new story of our times. This tarot deck tells the story and reminds us all of our parts. The story and who we are in it is in all of us, but we have forgotten. The time when that story can come true is running out, the ancestors say. Asmeret, it is a story of great beauty. Of consilience. One in which all can hear the voices of the earth—find what we have lost and rejoice in the reunion. Never feel alone again.

Her left palm burned. Asmeret looked, flexed her long fingers and saw the silver circles etched in her palms starting to turn. She closed her fingers tight against it. Her father’s voice continued, though she was barely able to read the words on the card.

I see this in you. I always have. You can hear the earth like no one I have ever known. The animals tell you their stories, and now the story in the cards has found its teller. You are a great huntress. A chief, not only of our little tribe, but of something much, much bigger. A mother, yes, I know this too. . .

A mother. He watched her? Her father must have been in the City of Clouds. How else would the ghost have gotten the cards? The two must have met. Anbessa had been in Asmara.

Asmeret leapt to her feet, sending the dog rolling, and scrambled out of the cave. She ran to the edge where the tree roots rushed over like a waterfall down to the sea. Screamed. Screamed until she was hoarse. Then fell on the thin ground and wept. He knew. He knew where she was all of that time. Knew about Theia. Knew she needed her father and yet he had chosen not to see her. Then the anger came.

She stood on the ledge. Shouted at the sky, “I’m not sick! I’m not! I won’t make you ashamed any more. Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you come find me? Why did you take them from me?”

The wind was her only answer, arrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. 

Asmeret began spending more days and nights in the tree by the Red Sea than in the Village of Ash. Theia was doing well, she had friends to keep her occupied, and when she asked where her mother was, Tigisti told the girl myths and fairytales from the pictures in her books, making the princess or prince or goddess or priestess’ name Asmeret. She knew Theia could see through her diversion, yet it comforted them both.

The little dog sometimes stayed in the village, burrowing under Theia’s blankets. With the dog’s heavy head on her feet, Theia ran after her mother in her dreams.

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