Saba’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “Is that all?” She clapped her hands. “And it is done.”

He frowned at her playful smile. “Saba…” He fell silent when he felt Makeda’s step on the island. Smelled her scent on the breeze. Sensed her amnis waking within him.

Mate!

Saba’s laughter chased Lucien out the door and down the path. He raced toward the ocean and the scent of her. Cinnamon and citrus. Earth and salt. He raced past stone buildings and lush gardens, the beginnings of new civilization on the island. He leapt over rocky hills and ran down the slopes leading to the harbor.

Makeda stood on the pebbled beach, shaking the water from her hair. Her smile was brilliant in the moonlight.

She raised her face and laughed as Lucien tackled her into the sea.

Chencha, Ethiopia

“Tell me about the princess again,” Lucien said, tickling her neck with the rough whiskers he allowed to grow when he was in the mountains.

Makeda couldn’t stop the smile. “She lived in the mountains in a cave. And all her guards had teeth.” She snapped her teeth at his chin.

“Are you calling me a hyena?” he asked.

“Are you calling me a princess?”

“Definitely.” They slept in the round tukul high in the mountains where the clouds made islands of the peaks. The tukul was windowless and warm, trapping the heat from the wood stove on one wall. Thick cotton and wool blankets covered them, and the rhythmic syllables of her mother tongue dropped like raindrops on dusty ground.

After a year of work in Alitea, Lucien had taken her back to her childhood home. They’d escaped the traffic and crowds of Addis to climb mountains and swim in rivers and lakes, diving with the crocodiles and laughing at angry hippos. She’d rediscovered the birds that had sung her childhood lullabies and the air that smelled of eucalyptus and cedar. She tasted wild honey and mango again.

Lucien and Makeda went to Sidamo to visit her grandmother, who was so old she didn’t question why her American granddaughter only visited at night. Makeda tasted fresh injera and her grandmother’s shiro wat. She sat and chopped onions at her grandmother’s feet, listening to stories she hadn’t heard since she was a child while Lucien roasted meat outside with her uncles. She stored away the memories, knowing that someday, like Lucien, her human memories would fade and all she would have left were the pictures she took with her mind and the old camera Lucien found for her.

One night they walked down the mountain to the twin lakes of Chamo and Abaya and climbed the mountain that rested between them. Lucien settled on the hillside facing east to watch for the sun.

“They call this the Bridge of God,” Lucien said.

“Why?”

He frowned. “I don’t know.”

Makeda smiled. “Really? You’ve never asked?”

He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” He settled his arms around her. “Okay, I will tell you the story.”

“I’m all ears.” She leaned back against his chest and felt their amnis join and dance in the grey dawn air.

“When the earth was newly born, God took many years to create the world and every creature, fashioning each to fit its unique place. But he knew there was something missing. So he wandered over Africa for days and nights, because this land, he decided, was the most beautiful of all his creations, and he loved it very much. The lakes we see today are his footsteps, didn’t you know?”

“Are they?” Makeda watched the sky go from grey to blue while Lucien kept talking.

“They are. God walked up the great valley, his feet pressing into the damp ground, and water filled the holes where his feet had stepped. He walked and he walked until his feet had gathered so much clay he had to shake them off. The mud he shook off his feet made those mountains behind us.”

“You’re a good storyteller.”

“I know. Be quiet and listen.”

Makeda laughed and watched the sky go from blue to purple.

“After walking and thinking for so long, God decided to make humans, mortal and immortal, and put them here, because in the great valley there is everything. There is earth and water. High mountains that touch the air and the fire of the sunrise every morning. That is why every one of us came from here. No matter where we have wandered, mortal or immortal, this place is our true home.”

The purple turned to pink on the edges of the horizon.

“So after God put his people in the great valley, he decided to rest here on this bridge between the two lakes and watch the sun rise, because he knew in all the world”—Lucien’s voice fell to a whisper and his arms tightened around her waist—“there was no more beautiful place than this.”

Orange and yellow clouds lit the sky, nearly blinding Makeda’s sensitive eyes. She shivered in excitement. Being on the hillside facing east as dawn brightened the sky felt like walking on the edge of a cliff. Frightening, exhilarating, alive.

So alive.

Lucien’s arms tightened again. “Sitting here and watching the sun rise, yene konjo, is like watching the world being born.”

She gripped his hands, felt his lips touch her neck.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“If you’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

The burning edge of the sun peeked over the horizon just as Lucien grabbed Makeda and fell back into the earth, closing the world over them as Makeda’s eyes went blind from the flare of sunlight. She saw nothing. She was blind to everything but Lucien’s touch as he carefully formed the soil in a comfortable cave around them. She laughed with wild abandon, her heart raced, and Lucien covered her face in kisses.