Pharaoh hardened his heart
II – Unsettling circumstances
High in the Bale mountains, in the lawless zone between Egypt and the Sultanate of Mogadishu, 1465
The second winter was even worse. By now all the food we had brought south was gone, and while barley had grown well, millet just would not grow this high. We had found out too late. The hunting was not good, either, especially when dared not venture out of sight from the farm. Father and mother ate at little as they could and kept the best for us, and still we suffered. Eventually it got so back Father had to slaughter our three goats, then our hens, and finally poor old Blackfoot. “Maybe he’s the lucky one,” he said after slitting the donkey’s throat. Little Aicha wept, but we were so hungry we all ate.
As soon as it got warmer Father planted what he could, and not soon after the carrots sprouted again and we could harvest tiny, stunted taproots that tasted better than anything we’d ever tasted. Leila could trap hyraxes on the slopes above the farm, never straying out of sight for fear of the black men.
A party of them came to the farm once, tall, shaggy and almost naked. They approached calmly, peacefully enough, but still father made us go in the house and we peered at them through the slit as they talked by the dry stone wall. They wanted to bargain but by then we had absolutely nothing to trade, so they left. They never came back.
The closest farm was a long day’s walk downstream. Father would go there every few weeks, and every time he looked at us too long while saying good bye. “Take care of them,” he would tell mother. When he came back he would say, “They don’t seem to be doing much better than us.”
Then one morning we could see a column of soldiers, Egyptian ones, crossing the pass up in the mountain range. The next day they were camping by our farm, two hundred or so, and the officers slept in our empty barn. Father looked at them warily, saying they were not much better for us than the black men, and many more. When the captain invited himself to our table, he tried to hide how bad things had gotten, but he saw through it and made a great show of giving us a sack of rice and another of chickpeas, “even though food was scarce for them too in the army, with the latest restrictions”.
“We’ve had reports of kafir savages assembling down there south”, he said after asking a few polite but pointed questions. “Heard anything about that?”. We hadn’t.
“Well,” he went on, “Maybe it’s nothing.”
That night I heard Mother and Father whisper.
“I wish we had drawn the lot for Mahe, in Captain Venkat's plantations.”
“Me too. Allah did not will it.”
“You know I wonder, sometimes,” Father said, “I’m not saying we should go back, but…”
“We’ve lost too much already. We can’t. If we went back…”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. It would all have been for nothing.”
They had given so much, the last of their coin, mother’s beautiful hair, hours and days of labor and starvation, blood, sweat, and Ali. They could not go back with empty hands to their kin in Massawa. Father could not look his own father in the eye and tell what had happened to his brother, for nothing. So we would stay. Leila, little Aicha and I, we were only kids but then, kids had to learn fast and grow fast. We would stay too.
The next day went as usual, with chores and drudgery and vague, dull fear that we would not have enough to eat the following month, or that the black men would descend on the farm and kill us, or ravish one of us girls to torture and marry. Then that night, after bedtime, there were violent knocks on the door.
Father was up at once with his hatchet in hand; Mother lit a tallow candle. Leila took one knife and gave me the other, while little Aicha huddled under the covers.
When mother opened the door two soldiers walked in, bloody and disheveled. One, with a short red beard and no mustache, had a nasty gash through his scalp and seemed mostly unconscious. His arm was slung over the shoulder of his bald mate, who drag more than he supported him.
“Dead. They’re all dead. We’re all dead.” The bald soldier said.
It turned out the tribes had ambushed the Egyptian army in a gorge, falling on them from all sides at once. Our soldiers were untrained, badly commanded, and not all of them brave. Our two guests, for example, had managed to play dead and then scurried away as the fight went past them. They fled to our doorstep, turning only to see the others massacred by black men.
“But we can’t walk much farther. He can’t, at any rate.”
Father was thinking more than he was listening. Mother asked if they would be here this night.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It happened this morning, so by now it’s over. They’ll be raiding the settlements with impunity. But yours, well, it’s a long way up and nothing much to raid, beg your pardon. Then again, if there are other survivors who manage to flee, they’ll have gone this way, so if the tribes pursue them…”
“Or you.”
“I don’t think they saw us. I really don’t.”
“They’ll disperse in small bands now that the battle is won,” Father mumbled.
“That’s for sure, the bald soldier said. I figure they will. Maybe Somewhere between five and twenty kafir braves, roaming the country.”
“So if one of the smallest parties come upon us… We stand a chance.”
The bald soldier looked at mother, at us, as his wounded mate who was getting a bit better or at least more conscious, and then at father again.
“Are you crazy, man?”
“No. there’s three of us men, and my wife is tougher than me. And my girls, the two older…” His voice trail. “I figure the best way is to remain in the dark, pretend like the farm is abandoned. Then they either ignore it or, when they come in, we fall on them by surprise. Do you have a better plan?”
The soldier was staring, but he shook his head.
“No.”
We gathered all we would need, then blew the candle. We had the soldiers’ two swords, our hatchet, two staves, two knives, and father’s bow that would not do much good in the night. Father sent Leila up by the ridge, to see if she spotted anything. If she did she would not cry out, but run down to us and warn us.
“You’re a brave girl,” Mother said as she hugged her. “I know you are.”
And then we waited for the dawn or black men come to kill us. The bearded soldier could now hobble around nervously. He argued with his mate about what had happened, while Father and Mother stayed silent and little Aicha sobbed in my arms. There were stories about what they would do to the women and children they captured; I do not even remember where we’d heard them, certainly not from our parents, maybe from uncle Ali? After a long while our eyes adjusted to the darkness and we could almost make out one another’s features. Scare shortened every breath, prolonged every moment. The hobbling man asked why we would stay inside and not by the drystone wall outside; Father explained there were not enough of us to cover the whole wall. Hidden inside, we had the element of surprise. The hobbling man nodded pensively, but his bald mate was growing restless.
“I think we should try to go for the pass. Take some advance on them. They’re on our tracks, that’s for sure…”
“You’ll break your neck in the dark,” Father said curtly.
“And here? Here THEY’ll break our neck, that’s if we are lucky. That’s for sure.” He looked at me. “You heard what they do to…”
“We should stay silent,” Father said.
“That’s for sure. But still, I can’t, it’s like, I’m fretting. I would rather be walking, or running.”
“I think you would,” Father said.
Hours passed, agonizingly slow, but we were not past midnight yet.
“We should leave,” the bald man was repeating. “What’s the point of staying? We’re leaving tomorrow anyway.”
“I’m not,” Father said.
“What, you’re not? You’re crazy.” He looked at mother. “You’re staying with him?” She nodded. “Well you’re crazy. Have you thought of your children?”
“You will take them with you.”
Aicha and I stared at him, horrified. He was looking ahead, not at us.
“I suppose we could. We’re leaving tomorrow, that’s for sure, though. At first light. Is it dawn soon, you figure?”
“Not nearly.”
Hours passed with nothing but darkness around us.
“What of your girl up there? What if they caught her up there? You think they can’t?”
“I don’t know,” Father sighed.
“Then they’ll fall on us by surprise.”
“We’ll hear them. If you shut up.”
“That’s what you think. We never saw them coming, or heard them. They caught us completely unaware, that’s for sure.”
Father did not answer. Mother craned her head at a noise only she had heard, then hunched again. Whenever she caught us looking at her, she gave us a smile. It was meant to be reassuring, but…
“What do you think?” The bald soldier asked his mate. “Do you think we should leave now?”
“It’s more prudent to wait,” his mate answered. By now he too seemed annoyed with his companion, but the man had saved his life, so, there was that.
“It’s a subject we should discuss, though, not just dismiss out of hand, like that. I’m putting it for discussion that we should just leave, all of us, now. We should leave them as far behind as we can, or they’ll kill us as soon as they find us, and they’ll find us. It’s their land.”
“No.”
“What?”
"It's my land. MY land, you hear me? I settled it, I planted it, I worked it till my fingers bled. My brother's buried there! It's my land, and my children's after me. Not theirs. Not anymore. We'll make a stand here, and you're supposed to be a soldier, so calm down. And shut up."
Aicha was weeping silently. The soldier stared at father, incredulously.
“Fine. I’m just saying.”
“One of us should check on Leila,” Mother said.
Father started to raise but then looked at the bald soldier and changed his mind. For the first time of the evening he looked at me.
“Sirah,” he said.
I just nodded and went out. It was cold and dark as in a bad dream; all I could really see against the cloudy sky was the outline of mountains around the farm, and, closer to me, the ridge. I hastened over the familiar path, making as little noise as I could. When I got closer I bent down and listen. Not a noise. Suddenly I realized I was even more frightened than I’d been.
“Leila?” I whispered.
“I heard you.”
I climbed near her, absurdly reassured to be near another human being. “Father was worried. Well, we were.”
“I’m fine. I haven’t seen anyone.”
The clouds had cleared a little, and I looked around the land around. People now will tell you that Afder is a deserted backwater, but they do not know, cannot know the absolute solitude it was then. Everything was a cold, lifeless ocean of naked stone and low grass as far as the eye could see. Not a single fire, not a building in the moonlight to indicate men and women might have lived there.
“You should go tell father,” Leila said. “You said he’s worried.”
“You don’t want to go back? I can watch, you must be tired.”
“No, I’ll stay. You go.”
So I ran back home, the dry grass whipping my calves, and explained there was nothing to see, which lessened the tension a little, and we waited for more and more hours. And then the day after, the captain’s column was back, badly battered but alive, commanded by the captain with his arm in a splint.
It turned out at the last moment the Egyptian army had rallied, stood its ground in a gully against the mad black hordes, and finally pushed them back with heavy losses. Riders were now hunting the last of them down, while the captain’s troop, who had taken some of the worst of the fighting, was sent back to the fort for resupply and reinforcement. That meant the two soldiers were now deserters, so they hanged them from our barn’s roof beam. And when the regiment was gone, Father took them down and buried them near uncle Ali.
The third winter was not quite as bad.
So I got that mission to colonize Mahe, which was something I was planning to do anyway. So I did it and got a nice modifier to my settler increase as a reward. And then I got one of my classic false good ideas: since the settler increase bonus was across the board, and therefore a good +10 settlers by colony, the more colonies I built by making my colonist jump around, the more better its effect would be! I promptly removed him from Mahe and started settling Afder and Ogaden, to open wider the door of west Africa to my Egyptians.
The rationale for the mission reward settler bonus I guess was that I was letting folks believe they’d go to a sunny tropical island in the Indian Ocean with no ferocious natives, subzero temperatures, drought, wolves, lions, or sleeping sickness, and then once they signed up their indenture contracts, oh, did I mention it’s in the Ethiopian highlands? It’s in the Ethiopian highlands.
Anyway I got my comeuppance for false advertising when it turned out colonies are increasingly more costlier after the first one and suddenly my budget was in the red but, like Sirah’s father (meta-narrative! Pomo!), I was in too deep to go back. So I took loans and started cutting corners. Remember I was already cutting corners to pay for my wonderboy inquistor? Well the good thing with cutting corners is that for every one you cut, it gives you two more, so you can go on, only with diminishing returns.
Eventually my military upkeep got so low that even a native uprising could fight the force guarding my colonies and threaten to win the battle.
But now everything is getting better! Sort of. Live and learn.
