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Americans and the English. Italy fought with Germany.”
    “With Germany? Insanity. Which war is this one, then?”
    Mercado was pulled in two directions. On one hand, he wanted to put the old priest’s mind to rest about all that had transpired in forty years. He actually enjoyed telling it to him. But on the other hand, there was the priest’s own story, which had to be finished.
    He glanced at Purcell, who now seemed resigned to the priest’s recounting of all he remembered of the past and all his questions about the present. Mercado said to Father Armano, “It is a civil war, Father. Ethiopia now owns the old Italian colony of Eritrea. Some Eritreans, mostly the Muslims, want independence. They are fighting the Ethiopians. Inside Ethiopia itself, there are Christians and Muslims who no longer want the emperor. Mostly it is the army that no longer wants Haile Selassie as emperor, and they have arrested him, but he is well. He lives in his palace under house arrest. There are some Royalist forces who still fight the army. There are others who want neither the army nor the emperor. It is a very confused war and there is much unhappiness in this land. Also, there is famine. Famine for two years now.”
    “Yes, I know of the famine.” He asked, “And the Gallas? I heard you mention them. They are not to be trusted. In the last war, they took advantage of the fighting and killed many on both sides. They love fighting. They love it when there is strife in the land.” There was actual anger in the old priest’s gentle voice. He said, “It was the Gallas who attacked the place where I was imprisoned… they killed everyone…”
    Henry Mercado remembered the Gallas very well—fierce tribesmen with no loyalty beyond their clans. He said to the priest, “Yes. I remember from the last war. I was here then. I am from your time, too, Father.”
    The old priest nodded and said, “You must not fall into their hands.” He looked at Vivian.
    Mercado did not respond, but the priest’s warning awakened old and bad memories of that colonial war, and especially of the Gallas. Between 1936 and 1940, they fought the Ethiopian partisans who still carried on the fight against the Italians, and when the British took Ethiopia from the Italians in 1941, the Gallas harassed the retreating Italians as well as the advancing British and the reemerging Ethiopian partisan forces. Wherever there was a clash of arms, the Gallas heard it and rode to it on their horses. This was how they lived; on military plunder. And they didn’t know a white flag or a press card when they saw one. In quiet times, they stayed in the Danakil Desert, near Eritrea, or the Ogaden Desert, near Somalia. But when the dogs of war were let loose, as now, thought Mercado, they were all over the countryside, as though someone had shaken a beehive, and the famine had made them more fierce and more predatory than usual.
    Mercado had suspected and the priest had confirmed that the Gallas were in the area, that the battle in the hills between Prince Joshua’s Royalist forces and the army forces of the Provisional government had drawn them like sharks to the smell of blood. They would sit in a place just like this spa and wait patiently for stragglers from one or the other army. Or if an army was badly beaten and retreating, they would attack the whole force. Yes, Mercado remembered them well. They butchered more than one beaten Ethiopian army and never spared the Western reporters who were with the army, and the Azebe Gallas, who populated this region, and who were neither Muslim nor Christian but pagan, were the worst of a bad lot. They hated the indigenous Amhara passionately, but they saved their most creative torture and death for Westerners.
    The priest was sleeping again, and Mercado’s mind went back to the first weeks of the Italian invasion, which he had covered for the
Times
of London. He’d had the misfortune to be with the Amharic Prince Mulugeta in February