Wilted Rose
Ethiopian Airspace heading toward Dar Es Salaam.
Taytu sat in a plush seat thirty thousand feet in the air. In front of her was a plastic desk, where a fat stack of documents sat neat and organized next to a half-drank glass of dark red wine. She had been reading the evacuation plan for Djibouti with partial disinterest. It was important, she knew, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about her brother, and how she had left him. She knew Yaqob was disappointed that she would not go to China, and that bothered her. This visit to their neighbors in the south was no routine call. She was fleeing their enemies, she knew, and leaving Yaqob to face the storm alone. It made her feel... lesser, somehow. She was a partner to her brother in this government that they had made. To flee it could not be right. If she hadn't left at the order of her brother, she would have considered her flight treason.
She wore a long open crimson coat trimmed with intricate embroidered golden knots. Below that she wore a more modern black pants suit. Her hair was pulled back along her head in tight ridges and tied so that a wiry thicket of hair seemed to explode from the back of her head.
Buses will take the refugees of the city to a meeting point outside of the city. the document read, From there, further transportation will take the refugees to centers in Harar and Addis Ababa.
This move was wasted energy. She could not help but think of it any other way. It was a noble waste, to be sure, but the Spanish were not simply taking the Red Sea so that they could bomb Djibouti and leave. The people who fled from Djibouti now would just be fleeing again in a month. Where would they go then? Africa was big, but even big places could lack a place to flee to. The villages and sparse towns that dotted the land between Addis Ababa and Kinshasa could not care for so many people.
And besides that, it was all too short term. If they managed to save half of the population of Djibouti, that would be an astounding feat.
She rubbed her head and flipped the document off of the stack. The next one was a report on the British invasion of Africa. That would be a sticking point in her talks with Dar es Salaam. Nobody knew what the British intended to do here, and Tanganyika-Mozambique's southern border touched embattled South Africa.
They had too little information to make any sense of South African conflict. There was a single photo, taken in black and white from the shoreline near where the British had made their beachhead. It was fuzzy and difficult to interpret. Somebody had written 'British frigates at Cape Town, Battle Of' across the top of the photograph in a bold, thick-lined hand. That wasn't what she saw. To her, it did not look like a British invasion. It looked like beetles crawling across grey grained dunes. Or maybe stones rolling down a hill. It was hard to tell. She stuck it back in its file and leaned back to stretch.
Outside the porthole window, she watched thick fleece clouds pass across a sunset sky the color of marmalade. On the ground below, she could make out the rolling savannah of Swahililand framed by tangerine haze like a mirage sitting on the floor of the sky. They were somewhere near Nairobi, she assumed. It would not be long now and they would be in the airspace of Tanganyika-Mozambique. She was sitting on the left side of the plane, and it dawned on her that she was looking east now. East, toward Somalia, and Persia, and China. That was where her brother had wanted her. That was where her adopted son Olivier was now.
Had she abandoned him, her child? The thought made her feel unclean. It was true she was often too busy to be a parent to her adopted son, but that could not be helped. She had hired nanny's to care for him when she was away. He would have the Queen with him now, Taytu's own sister-in-law, but that did not make her feel any better about it. Had she saved the child from the mess Hassan made in Katanga only to abandon him half-way across the world? She had to shake this line of thinking. He was fine, she told herself, and she had work to do. She reopened the British file and pulled out a map.
The map showed the extend of the British Empire before it began to crumble after the First World War. This was land, she knew, that the British could threaten to claim. It included South Africa of course, and Botswana and Zambia as well. Ethiopia had no innate responsibilities to any of those countries, but that was not what disturbed her or her office about this information. Sudan had once been a British colony, as had Swahililand and some parts of Somalia. There was a strong danger that the British would align with Spain and make an attempt to reclaim that territory.
But would the Spaniards chose to share? That thought was where their best hope lay. Spanish hegemony would be challenged by an ascendent British Empire. If Sotelo wanted the Pan-African Empire as a Spanish colony, what was the chance they would share?
The rest of the file were reports on the economic and technical capabilities of the British Empire, or at least as much as the Walinzi were able to discover.
There was something dangerous hiding under the skin of these wars. European resurgence was not simply a continent getting back on track. The people of Europe saw themselves as the God-chosen rulers of the world. To them, their decline was not simple economics. It was an insult. It was the barbarians at the gates laughing at their fathers. It was one hundred years of helpless humiliation, and the rage that came from such things. Europe was a bomb set to explode. It was blood and murder in the streets of every people who had taken part in that insult. Death to the Africans, nearby and nearly helpless. Death the the Muslims and the Hindu's. And, most of all, death to the eastern communists. Spain had showed them what Europe could do, but the silence of the other countries did not mean they were dead. Revanchist Britain was only a second taste. Who would be next? France? The Germans with their new King?
Britain was the first nation on the Western Front of the Great War to return to power. Spain had avoided involvement in that conflict, and though Ethiopia had played their part, Taytu's grandfather had used that war to expand the power of their people. Britain's situation had been different. They had lost most of a generation in the trenches of France and Belgium. Their colonies broke away, and a cohort of young widows brought independence to Ireland. The depression that followed the war was worsened by the fact that the working men of Europe were buried and dead. Localization followed. Anarchy. A new dark age.
The last few decades were not but political turmoil for them. Murder and dirty politicking. The monarchs fled for a time, leaving their home shattered and desperate. That world was the world that the current generation of Britons grew up with. Shame, fear, and a longing for the time of their grandfathers. That was the most dangerous thing of all. A good time to be alive is one where a person looks at the lives of their grandparents with a sense that they had built something on top of that legacy. In lean times, they might begin to feel a sort of cross-generational camaraderie with them, feeling like they understood the difficulties of their time. But when men look back at their grandparents and envy them, revolution comes next. This British Invasion was just that. A people revolting against the new world, where the the Empire of their fore-bearers was not supposed to be.
She had fallen deep into her own thoughts, until all that she sensed in the world was the soft creme blur of the airplane's cabin and the low purr of its engines. When she snapped out of it, she felt tired. Pillars of ivory light came through the porthole windows, projecting the flickering shadows of clouds across the cabin. It was peaceful here, so far above the earth. It was the quiet before the storm, she knew, but for a moment she could not help but feel calm. Calm, warm, and tired...
...It was the pilot who woke her up, shaking her by the shoulder. "Princess." he said at first. "Miss Secretary. We have arrived."
She looked out the window and found that it was true. They were on the ground now, a half-lit airport surrounding them. Her orange colored skies had turned a fading purple, and the first few stars had began to appear. Dar es Salaam surrounded it, though it was no more than the scant shadow of a true modern city. She could only see a few short buildings poking up over the brush that surrounded the airport, and those few were dark. Only a handful of streetlamps gave light to the city, and those few burn a dull orange. She could hear nothing of the world outside, only overheard fans blowing soft cool air into the cabin. Next to the pilot stood the single Walinzi agent who had been sent to escort her. He was a broad shouldered fighter of a man, most of his body cloaked by an ink-black trench coat. His hair was cut so short that it looked painted on.
"Let me get presentable." She said, gently patting the puff of hair at the back of her head. She stood up, tugged at her jacket, and slipped into the closet-sized bathroom at the side of the plane. She washed her face and attended to her hair. The room hardly afforded her space to move, squeezing her between the sink, a toiler, and a handful of cabinets clasped shut so they don't open when the plane is in motion. Still, she managed to move enough to adjust her clothes and spritz a small amount of floral perfume before she rejoined her two-man entourage.
When the door hissed open, she felt the humid heat of Tanganyika wash across her face. They descended onto the cracked tarmac alone. That was passing strange. She could see a car waiting for them on the other side of the asphalt, but nobody had came out to meet with them. She couldn't help but feel nervous as they passed across the long stretch of darkness between them and the people who had came for them. Were they being cautious, now that a war was on? As she considered it, she began to feel like coming to Tanganyika had been a better idea that she realized. They must be anxious about their relations with Ethiopia now that the war was on.
"Secretary Taytu" a voice called out from the Tanganyikans, cold and professional. The headlights of an idling sedan glared blindingly behind them, so that all Taytu could see was their silhouettes and the outlines of their faces. There was something wrong here. A sinister tension filled the encounter. Wasn't this supposed to be a greeting. Her heart started to beat faster, and she worried that her anxiety would be painted on her face.
"Friends" the Walinzi agent called out. "Can you dim those lights. I don't want to be seeing dots when I sleep."
"Secretary Taytu." the cold voice said again. "You are under arrest for inciting political disunity. You will be treated cordially, as befits your station."
What? Her heart skipped a beat. Time seemed to stop for a moment. Arrest? Tanganyika was Ethiopia's staunch ally. Shadows moved in from the harsh yellow light. Men who meant to capture her. Her feet told her to flee, but that did not make sense. Tanganyika had been freed from colonialism by Yaqob's dealings in Europe. They were friends, these two brother nations. What had happened? Had Ethiopia already lost the war? Was her brother already in Sotelo's lap? Besides, she was a diplomat.
"I have diplomatic immun..." she began to say. She stopped when she saw the Walinzi agent reach under his coat. A new sense of horror washed over her, more urgent than the last now her life was on the line. She wanted to scream for him to stop, but there was no time. When he reached, men began to shout and shuffle all around them. She felt a man bump into her as he rushed for the Walinzi agent. The air went out of her. And that was when she heard the gun shot. It was louder than she thought a gun could be, like a bomb went off only a few feet in front of her. She felt tears on her cheeks. Tears, but was she crying? Not tears, and not sweat, she realized. Blood.
The Walinzi agent fell to the ground. There was an ugly hole in his temple, and his blood drained out of him so quickly that it looked like red water flowing from a faucet. The pool under his empty face spread quick across the pocked asphalt.
It was his blood on her face, and the horror of that overwhelmed her. She screamed so loud and so shrill that she could feel the force of it scraping violently across her throat. They began to escort her to the car. "I have diplomatic immunity!" she began to chant. "I have diplomatic immunity!"
"Shit, what do we do?" she heard one Tanganyikan ask another. "That man is dead, that man is dead!"
"He reached for his gun." the other man said. "We had every right."
She could still feel the blood on her face as they began to drive. What was this? She still couldn't process it. She had diplomatic immunity. A horrifying thought occurred to her as she sat in the back seat, watching night-darkened buildings go by. Were they delivering her to Spanish agents? Was she going to die tonight? She watched buildings go by, waiting to see if one was flying the flag of Spain.
Taytu sat in a plush seat thirty thousand feet in the air. In front of her was a plastic desk, where a fat stack of documents sat neat and organized next to a half-drank glass of dark red wine. She had been reading the evacuation plan for Djibouti with partial disinterest. It was important, she knew, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about her brother, and how she had left him. She knew Yaqob was disappointed that she would not go to China, and that bothered her. This visit to their neighbors in the south was no routine call. She was fleeing their enemies, she knew, and leaving Yaqob to face the storm alone. It made her feel... lesser, somehow. She was a partner to her brother in this government that they had made. To flee it could not be right. If she hadn't left at the order of her brother, she would have considered her flight treason.
She wore a long open crimson coat trimmed with intricate embroidered golden knots. Below that she wore a more modern black pants suit. Her hair was pulled back along her head in tight ridges and tied so that a wiry thicket of hair seemed to explode from the back of her head.
Buses will take the refugees of the city to a meeting point outside of the city. the document read, From there, further transportation will take the refugees to centers in Harar and Addis Ababa.
This move was wasted energy. She could not help but think of it any other way. It was a noble waste, to be sure, but the Spanish were not simply taking the Red Sea so that they could bomb Djibouti and leave. The people who fled from Djibouti now would just be fleeing again in a month. Where would they go then? Africa was big, but even big places could lack a place to flee to. The villages and sparse towns that dotted the land between Addis Ababa and Kinshasa could not care for so many people.
And besides that, it was all too short term. If they managed to save half of the population of Djibouti, that would be an astounding feat.
She rubbed her head and flipped the document off of the stack. The next one was a report on the British invasion of Africa. That would be a sticking point in her talks with Dar es Salaam. Nobody knew what the British intended to do here, and Tanganyika-Mozambique's southern border touched embattled South Africa.
They had too little information to make any sense of South African conflict. There was a single photo, taken in black and white from the shoreline near where the British had made their beachhead. It was fuzzy and difficult to interpret. Somebody had written 'British frigates at Cape Town, Battle Of' across the top of the photograph in a bold, thick-lined hand. That wasn't what she saw. To her, it did not look like a British invasion. It looked like beetles crawling across grey grained dunes. Or maybe stones rolling down a hill. It was hard to tell. She stuck it back in its file and leaned back to stretch.
Outside the porthole window, she watched thick fleece clouds pass across a sunset sky the color of marmalade. On the ground below, she could make out the rolling savannah of Swahililand framed by tangerine haze like a mirage sitting on the floor of the sky. They were somewhere near Nairobi, she assumed. It would not be long now and they would be in the airspace of Tanganyika-Mozambique. She was sitting on the left side of the plane, and it dawned on her that she was looking east now. East, toward Somalia, and Persia, and China. That was where her brother had wanted her. That was where her adopted son Olivier was now.
Had she abandoned him, her child? The thought made her feel unclean. It was true she was often too busy to be a parent to her adopted son, but that could not be helped. She had hired nanny's to care for him when she was away. He would have the Queen with him now, Taytu's own sister-in-law, but that did not make her feel any better about it. Had she saved the child from the mess Hassan made in Katanga only to abandon him half-way across the world? She had to shake this line of thinking. He was fine, she told herself, and she had work to do. She reopened the British file and pulled out a map.
The map showed the extend of the British Empire before it began to crumble after the First World War. This was land, she knew, that the British could threaten to claim. It included South Africa of course, and Botswana and Zambia as well. Ethiopia had no innate responsibilities to any of those countries, but that was not what disturbed her or her office about this information. Sudan had once been a British colony, as had Swahililand and some parts of Somalia. There was a strong danger that the British would align with Spain and make an attempt to reclaim that territory.
But would the Spaniards chose to share? That thought was where their best hope lay. Spanish hegemony would be challenged by an ascendent British Empire. If Sotelo wanted the Pan-African Empire as a Spanish colony, what was the chance they would share?
The rest of the file were reports on the economic and technical capabilities of the British Empire, or at least as much as the Walinzi were able to discover.
There was something dangerous hiding under the skin of these wars. European resurgence was not simply a continent getting back on track. The people of Europe saw themselves as the God-chosen rulers of the world. To them, their decline was not simple economics. It was an insult. It was the barbarians at the gates laughing at their fathers. It was one hundred years of helpless humiliation, and the rage that came from such things. Europe was a bomb set to explode. It was blood and murder in the streets of every people who had taken part in that insult. Death to the Africans, nearby and nearly helpless. Death the the Muslims and the Hindu's. And, most of all, death to the eastern communists. Spain had showed them what Europe could do, but the silence of the other countries did not mean they were dead. Revanchist Britain was only a second taste. Who would be next? France? The Germans with their new King?
Britain was the first nation on the Western Front of the Great War to return to power. Spain had avoided involvement in that conflict, and though Ethiopia had played their part, Taytu's grandfather had used that war to expand the power of their people. Britain's situation had been different. They had lost most of a generation in the trenches of France and Belgium. Their colonies broke away, and a cohort of young widows brought independence to Ireland. The depression that followed the war was worsened by the fact that the working men of Europe were buried and dead. Localization followed. Anarchy. A new dark age.
The last few decades were not but political turmoil for them. Murder and dirty politicking. The monarchs fled for a time, leaving their home shattered and desperate. That world was the world that the current generation of Britons grew up with. Shame, fear, and a longing for the time of their grandfathers. That was the most dangerous thing of all. A good time to be alive is one where a person looks at the lives of their grandparents with a sense that they had built something on top of that legacy. In lean times, they might begin to feel a sort of cross-generational camaraderie with them, feeling like they understood the difficulties of their time. But when men look back at their grandparents and envy them, revolution comes next. This British Invasion was just that. A people revolting against the new world, where the the Empire of their fore-bearers was not supposed to be.
She had fallen deep into her own thoughts, until all that she sensed in the world was the soft creme blur of the airplane's cabin and the low purr of its engines. When she snapped out of it, she felt tired. Pillars of ivory light came through the porthole windows, projecting the flickering shadows of clouds across the cabin. It was peaceful here, so far above the earth. It was the quiet before the storm, she knew, but for a moment she could not help but feel calm. Calm, warm, and tired...
...It was the pilot who woke her up, shaking her by the shoulder. "Princess." he said at first. "Miss Secretary. We have arrived."
She looked out the window and found that it was true. They were on the ground now, a half-lit airport surrounding them. Her orange colored skies had turned a fading purple, and the first few stars had began to appear. Dar es Salaam surrounded it, though it was no more than the scant shadow of a true modern city. She could only see a few short buildings poking up over the brush that surrounded the airport, and those few were dark. Only a handful of streetlamps gave light to the city, and those few burn a dull orange. She could hear nothing of the world outside, only overheard fans blowing soft cool air into the cabin. Next to the pilot stood the single Walinzi agent who had been sent to escort her. He was a broad shouldered fighter of a man, most of his body cloaked by an ink-black trench coat. His hair was cut so short that it looked painted on.
"Let me get presentable." She said, gently patting the puff of hair at the back of her head. She stood up, tugged at her jacket, and slipped into the closet-sized bathroom at the side of the plane. She washed her face and attended to her hair. The room hardly afforded her space to move, squeezing her between the sink, a toiler, and a handful of cabinets clasped shut so they don't open when the plane is in motion. Still, she managed to move enough to adjust her clothes and spritz a small amount of floral perfume before she rejoined her two-man entourage.
When the door hissed open, she felt the humid heat of Tanganyika wash across her face. They descended onto the cracked tarmac alone. That was passing strange. She could see a car waiting for them on the other side of the asphalt, but nobody had came out to meet with them. She couldn't help but feel nervous as they passed across the long stretch of darkness between them and the people who had came for them. Were they being cautious, now that a war was on? As she considered it, she began to feel like coming to Tanganyika had been a better idea that she realized. They must be anxious about their relations with Ethiopia now that the war was on.
"Secretary Taytu" a voice called out from the Tanganyikans, cold and professional. The headlights of an idling sedan glared blindingly behind them, so that all Taytu could see was their silhouettes and the outlines of their faces. There was something wrong here. A sinister tension filled the encounter. Wasn't this supposed to be a greeting. Her heart started to beat faster, and she worried that her anxiety would be painted on her face.
"Friends" the Walinzi agent called out. "Can you dim those lights. I don't want to be seeing dots when I sleep."
"Secretary Taytu." the cold voice said again. "You are under arrest for inciting political disunity. You will be treated cordially, as befits your station."
What? Her heart skipped a beat. Time seemed to stop for a moment. Arrest? Tanganyika was Ethiopia's staunch ally. Shadows moved in from the harsh yellow light. Men who meant to capture her. Her feet told her to flee, but that did not make sense. Tanganyika had been freed from colonialism by Yaqob's dealings in Europe. They were friends, these two brother nations. What had happened? Had Ethiopia already lost the war? Was her brother already in Sotelo's lap? Besides, she was a diplomat.
"I have diplomatic immun..." she began to say. She stopped when she saw the Walinzi agent reach under his coat. A new sense of horror washed over her, more urgent than the last now her life was on the line. She wanted to scream for him to stop, but there was no time. When he reached, men began to shout and shuffle all around them. She felt a man bump into her as he rushed for the Walinzi agent. The air went out of her. And that was when she heard the gun shot. It was louder than she thought a gun could be, like a bomb went off only a few feet in front of her. She felt tears on her cheeks. Tears, but was she crying? Not tears, and not sweat, she realized. Blood.
The Walinzi agent fell to the ground. There was an ugly hole in his temple, and his blood drained out of him so quickly that it looked like red water flowing from a faucet. The pool under his empty face spread quick across the pocked asphalt.
It was his blood on her face, and the horror of that overwhelmed her. She screamed so loud and so shrill that she could feel the force of it scraping violently across her throat. They began to escort her to the car. "I have diplomatic immunity!" she began to chant. "I have diplomatic immunity!"
"Shit, what do we do?" she heard one Tanganyikan ask another. "That man is dead, that man is dead!"
"He reached for his gun." the other man said. "We had every right."
She could still feel the blood on her face as they began to drive. What was this? She still couldn't process it. She had diplomatic immunity. A horrifying thought occurred to her as she sat in the back seat, watching night-darkened buildings go by. Were they delivering her to Spanish agents? Was she going to die tonight? She watched buildings go by, waiting to see if one was flying the flag of Spain.
is a dude holding his hand out limp-wristed. For the longest time, I thought it was a smiley face and a dildo