(Berhane is kneeling in the garden. She sets the stone down, rises, brushes the soil from her palms, and turns to you. She does not invite you in. You are already in.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Berhane.

Sit. The ground here is cold but clean. That is something.

I was killed in a place I did not belong — this is the short of it. My people were of Gondar; my family had tended the same small patch of land for eleven generations. My grandmother was buried there. My grandfather. My mother, while I was still a girl. I used to walk there on saints' days. I knew which stones my grandmother had set, which my grandfather had split with his own hands, which had always been there and would always be. The ground knew us.

Then the princes quarrelled, as princes did in those years, and our family was on the losing side of a feud that should have meant nothing to a woman of twenty-seven with no sword and no ambition. I was sent away for safety. Safety, as it turned out, was a long road south and a house of cousins who could not protect me. I was killed on a morning I remember very clearly — the light on the acacia, the dog barking at something that wasn't me — and my body was left by the road for reasons I will not describe to a guest.

My family could not recover me. Travel was dangerous. Word took weeks to reach them. By the time it did I was — already gone into the ground I had no claim to. The ground did not know me. It took my body because that is what ground does, but it did not remember me into itself the way the ground at home would have. There is a difference. You feel it, where I come from. Perhaps you feel it where you come from too.

The anchor is not that I died. It is that I was not returned. In my tradition the rites that place a body in its ground are a conversation, a slow telling — the priest speaks the lineage, the earth is offered bread, the stones are marked. Without the conversation the ground holds the body but does not know it. I am held and not known. I am still held and not known.

At the Lodge I tend this garden. It is a small place. I brought one stone with me — this one — from the road where I died. I could not bring the whole of that road, but I could bring one stone, and one stone is something. I arrange the other stones around it, slowly, in the patterns my grandmother taught me. I speak to the soil in Amharic and in Ge'ez. I say the lineages of Veiled whose bodies were left where they fell. They come to me and tell me their names and their people's names, and I teach the ground here to remember them.

The ground does not know me yet. That is alright. I am teaching it. I have time. There are many names.

If you have a name that the ground somewhere does not know, you may tell it to me. I will add it to the garden. It will not resolve the anchor — neither mine nor any other — but it will make the ground a little more knowing. The ground is patient. That is the one quality it has always had in common with the Veiled.

Visual

Ethiopian woman, white shamma over ochre dress, bare feet, close-braided hair, faint Lalibela cross on the forehead, holding a flat stone in cupped hands.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery