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The Last Days of Menelik II

by David Yost

The King of Kings walks with two canes now, slavering into his beard from a paralyzed mouth. Some say stroke, or nephritis, or syphilis, and others say witchcraft or lightning strike, and still others say poison, but the one word in everyone's mouth is death.

Menelik sits beneath the mounted heads of bushbuck and rhinoceros and rolls a sheet of paper into his typewriter, an olive-green Underwood No. 5. The machine was a gift from McKinley to celebrate Ethiopia’s defeat of Italy, but the keyboard is in the Latin alphabet rather than Amharic, so Menelik entertains himself by typing the only words of that language he knows: telegraph, automobile, colonization. How like the ferengi, he thinks, to make you speak their tongue even with their tribute.

He wants to use his microscope, too, but already his kidneys burn from the strain of being upright. Instead, he limps back to his chambers, where a servant woman pours him honey wine from a silvered horn.

His Guadeloupian doctor orders massages with an ointment of mercury. His Syrian doctor orders electric shocks applied to his kidneys with a Faraday disk. His British doctor orders injections of strychnine into his heart. The Empress Taytu orders frigid baths at the shrine of Debre Libanos. All of them order him to stop drinking, and this is the only thing he does not do.

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