The Gulf of Aden
Both the time of the crash, and the event of her coming back to consciousness on the beach, were vague impressions adrift in here mind, and she could not place exactly when either of them had happened. Time had become a smudge of unplaceable memories for Azima, each thought drowned in the deep primal pain caused by the fear that her child was lost. She had not seen a survivor since their plane went down in the Gulf of Aden.
She glided along the beach like a ghost clad in white. The pearl-white dress that she had worn to impress the Chinese was soaked, and it clung wetly to her skin. She had lost the gaudy cheetah pelt that had draped her shoulders, and her shoes were missing as well. The sea had made her skin cool and clammy. It was a sorry state that she was in now, and she felt disoriented and unable to regain her bearing.
"Tewodros!" she heard herself yell. "Tewodros! Olivier! Elani!" she screamed their names as loud as she could, but she did not feel as if it were her that was yelling. She could see herself looking for wreckage, but that did not feel as if that were her either. She was imprisoned in her own mind, with no choice but to watch herself panic.
"Tewodros!"
The sun had set just over the western edge of the sea, but its light had not gone out quite yet. The sky blazed a brilliant red, having swallowed all of the sun's parting light. The earth below was left in the shadow of twilight, where the ocean clamored and sprayed.
She was deeply disturbed by the absence of any evidence that there had been a crash. There was no wreckage, no bodies, and no perturbance out at sea. She was the only living thing that she could see, except for the chattering cormorants that gathered on the rocks and flew away when she came near them. She felt like she was in some horrible limbo, detached from her own life, and suffering the horror of a missing son.
"Tewodros! Elani!" she shouted again.
She tried to recall what happened before their plane went into the ocean. She could remember the enemy, though she never saw him. It had been an enemy aircraft with supernatural abilities. It had appeared as a speck against the overcast skies, and then it was right behind them. This had happened in a single, horrifying instant.
As she came around the edge of a pillar of rock that jutted across the beach, her concentration was broken. She could think of nothing but what she might see on the other side. Anxiety took control of her body, making her bones ache. She jogged ahead, the chilled ocean wind making her cold in her wet dress. What would she see? The other side revealed itself slowly.
There was nothing. Rocks, and more rocks. The white sand was the color of rust in the scant light of the newly absent sun.
Her knees went weak then, but she could not give in. She was angry now. Rage built into a waiting scream in her chest, and she let it all out in a shrill wail that was full of hatred and fevered fear. A spooked cormorant shot up into the sky, chattering a warning to its fellows.
She began to gather herself, little by little.
Azima wanted to fight the ocean. That was her natural instinct, as little sense as it made. She wanted to punish the water that had swallowed her last connection to the world. She wanted to set this island flat so that every corner and crevice that might hide what she sought would be naked to her eyes.
Memories of the attack in the sky returned to her. The screaming of metal as bullets put holes in their plane, the bloody explosion of a young priest's knee as one of those same bullets hit it, and the deadly sputter of the engines as they all failed one after another in response to the stress of the one that had been damaged by the firefight. That was when the demonic attacker disappeared in a flash and thunder.
Was it lightning? The storm - and it had hardly been a storm - was not enough to produce lightning. It had hardly been enough to produce rain. No, it could not be lightning, but what else? She did not have the resources to know.
By now, the clouds were a dark smear treading across the northern sky. The ocean still churned, a tumult the color of a well-rotted corpse. Its roar deadened in her ears, just as it had when the pilot fought to bring them down into the sea without completely destroying them.
The last thing she remembered was holding her son, and watching the priests as they clung to the box that held the Ark of the Covenant. That was the strongest memory out of them all. She didn't know how to describe what they had done. It was not clinging truly. Not like the embrace she held her baby boy in. It had been like something from art. They had been lamenting the Ark, throwing their bodies against it and mourning as gravity assailed the plane and forced them into the blackness of the water. The memory chilled her to the bone.
"Tewodros!" she continued to scream. Her feet were numb from the pain of scattered rocks as she climbed from the ruddy beach toward the hills above. He was a strong boy. Had he wandered off, healthy but confused? Darkness was gathering, and she did not know what beasts lived on this island.
"Tewodros!" here voice was becoming hoarse. How long had she been wandering? "Tewodros!"
"Olivier!" she shouted. He wasn't her child, and he was missing an arm. How hopeless was a one armed child in an unsettled sea? "Elani!" she shouted the third name, her mother in law. The older woman was senile. Could she comprehend enough to survive?
"Tewodros!" he was strong. Her boy could live. He must have lived.
"Tewodros!"
"Tewodros!"
"Tewodros!"
She began to worry about the temperature. She knew how to survive in the African bush, but the dangers there rarely included hypothermia. She was not sure if she was in that sort of danger - she was numb from fear and simple tiredness. Her lungs ached, and she was not sure if that was from her screaming or the water she had swallowed before she washed up on the shore.
"Tewodros!" she her voice was dry and parched. She was stumbling across uneven terrain. A fire was needed. She didn't want to stop looking, not for a minute, but her son would need a fire too. He might see the light, or the smoke. It would not only be warmth, it would be a signal!
She began to gather driftwood.
The first piece of wood she tried to lift surprised her. It felt as heavy as iron. Was she that weak now? She wondered if she had lost her survival skills from living the life of an Empress. Or was she simply more tired than she realized? Log by log, she created a pile to burn. Tinder could be found in the dry brush that grew away from the beach. She was nearly ready.
When she had served in her father's early version of the Walinzi, she would carry a knife who's steel could be brought to spark when scraped against a sharp-edged stone, but she had no steel now. That was no matter. A fire was absolutely necessary.
The rocks deposited near the shore by the ocean were rounded like river pebbles. There was no flint nearby as far as she could tell. Desperate, she gathered the best stones she could find and squatted over her tinder.
She scraped and scraped. No sparks. The anger she had wanted to release on the ocean was now turned against the rocks. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Nothing. The sky had faded to a dying purple. She was going to be left in the dark.
For a while, she watched her sad, unlit pile of driftwood with distant eyes. What now? Her instincts told her not to wander the wilderness at night, but her maternal soul rebelled against that. She had to search! Her child was out there! As her eyes began to adjust to the night, she stood up and continued her search.
"Tewodros!" she shouted out on top of her lungs. A new fear, the human fear of unknown darkness, gave her a new wind. She walked gracelessly on bare feet made sore by her wandering.
She saw a shadow that looked like a sea monster thrusting from the base of a jagged cliff face. It was a baobab tree, she realized, who's obese trunk was crowned by wriggling branches. She knew that they could be hollow. If she were a child, that was where she would hide.
"Tewodros!" she shouted again. "Olivier! Elani!"
She searched the tree and found no opening for a child to hid in. Fruitlessly, she knocked on the tree with her knuckles. When she realized how pointless that had been, she wondered if she was losing her mind.
The sharp rises that followed the coast began to plummet as she flitted across the shore. There were places where she could climb into the land beyond the coast. If the priests had survived, or the pilot, would they have led the children inland to find help? The ocean was beginning to make her feel hopeless, and her instincts told her to leave it behind. She obeyed.
Beach sand and tumbled stones gave way to jagged rocks and scrub-land. Strange trees sprouted up across the landscape like coniferous toadstool mushrooms. There were bloated baobabs as well, and smaller bush-like trees that looked similar to baobabs.
When she saw how jagged the rocks were here, she began to think about fire again.
"Tewodros!" she shouted again. Ridges and rocky hills rose on either side of her, enclosing something of a valley that opened toward the sea. Would smoke from a fire be visible across enough land to make it worth while? She could not doubt herself. It was a chance. A pile of ready drift-wood waited behind her, but she could not turn back. There was nothing for her back there.
"Tewodros!" she shouted.
Her search for wood was harder than she expected it to be. Before she could find anything, she spotted what looked like a house. That was it! She knew her son would be there. It was the most fitting place for her search to end. He would be safe there, with a family of loyal Africans! She shuffled toward it in a hurry.
The house was a simple place, she could see. It was a pile of stones with a roof. A thatched grass wall surrounded it. There was no light, and that scared her at first, until she realized that there were no windows either. Where would light come from if there were no windows?
"Tewodros!" she began to yell, louder and louder. She felt a sharp pain stab into her foot, and she recoiled from the rock that caused it, but she did not slow down for long. She did not know if it had drawn blood or not, and she did not care.
"Tewodros!" she screamed. "Olivier! Elani!"
She realized that she would be talking to natives, so she framed her thoughts. Where was she? She hadn't taken much time to consider. This had to be Socotra, she realized at once. Socotra or one of its lesser islands. Those had been the nearest place to where they went down, and the shore she had woken up on faced the north-west. If this was Yemen, there would be no north-western shore.
Her heart pounded as she rounded the house. She came to the door. Her heart sank and fell to pieces. It was abandoned. There was weeds growing on the dirt floor.
Azima screamed and punched the wall. Pain recoiled through her knuckles, but she did not care. What would she do now? A part of her told her to fall to her knees, but that scared her. She couldn't give up. Her child was in this wilderness. Her baby boy.
And so Azima wandered further into the dusk.
She heard what she thought was the air, but when she looked up she realized there were clouds of fluttering bats. Were they following her? She felt paranoid. She did not know what lurked in the wild places of this island. Wisdom told her that she should stay put, and she remembered her fire now, but anger and pain was effecting her judgement. She pushed ahead as the insects came out and began to sing. Soil stung at the wound on her foot. Red dust caked what had been a white dress, and it was fraying at the bottom.
"Tewodros!" she shouted. In vain, she considered for a moment. No. She could not think that. "Tewodros!"
She returned to her plan for a fire. A mushroom-capped coniferous tree suggested easy wood, and she began to search around it. Nothing dead lay on the ground. Unthinking, she moved to another tree. There was a stick. She gathered it under her arm and continued.
"Tewodros!" she yelled again as she found another stick. Fire! That would save her and bring back her boy. Fire!
Another stick, and then another. She found one oozing with a sticky goo that looked like blood in the night, but she picked it up anyway. She couldn't find any of the large pieces that would let a fire burn slow and long, but that did not matter. Sticks would do in a pinch. For kindling, she considering the woven grass and stick fence that surrounded the abandoned hut.
A low, lonely tune played loud across the valley. It sounded like the cry of a cow, but it lasted longer and held a sad musical note. It took her a moment to realize what she had heard.
It was a horn.
"Tewodros!" she shouted at the sound, which could only be played by a human. She heard distant clamor of a dozen voices carried behind the constant song of desert insects. And then she saw the fire.
Not fire. Fires. There were many small fires burning.
They came holding torches, a dozen men in faded brown tunics and simple rough-spun shirts. These were the natives, she knew at once. These were a people long descended from the Yemeni of the Arab peninsula, their blood mixed with the peoples of the African Horn and travelers from distant India. To Azima, they looked like Africans with their deeply tanned skin and wiry messes of hair.
"Queen from the plane!" one man shouted in rough Arabic. "We have come to find you!"
"Do you have my son?" she asked desperately. "The Prince? Have you found him?"
She watched the faces of the men in the flickering torchlight. Cold. What did they know? How many could understand her?
"Yes." the man answered. "We have found the children and the Christians. They are safe."
At that, she began to cry.
They surrounded her like an entourage of royal guards, and the heat from their torches made her feel warm for the first time since she had woken up. She felt intensely excited to see her baby boy again, but she was no longer worried. She was safe.
Azima pondered the words of the man who had spoke. We have found the children and the Christians. Those words nagged at her until she realized what was missing. They had not mentioned the pilot.
And they had not mentioned Elani. What of the Queen Dowager?
Wilted Rose
