"Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 119"
The sun blazed over the highlands of Tigray, where ancient obelisks jutted into the sky like stone sentinels and terraced fields of cotton stretched across the hillsides. In a village clustered around a stone church with a rust-red roof, women sat beneath acacia trees, their hands moving in a blur as they wove thin cotton threads into delicate cloth.
Their leader, 62-year-old Weyzero Aster, looked up from her loom, her forehead marked with a white cross of gojo (clay paste) and her fingers stained with indigo. She held up a length of shimma—a cotton fabric as fine as linen, its surface embroidered with tiny crosses and geometric patterns in red and gold. "This is our zehab (treasure)," she said in Tigrinya, her voice like the rustle of dry grass. "It carries the prayers of our saints, the labor of our hands, the history of 阿克苏姆 (Aksum)."
Shimma weaving, a craft dating back to the Aksumite Empire, is a sacred practice intertwined with Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. The cotton is grown in fields blessed by priests during Timkat (Epiphany), when the waters of the Nile are said to have healing powers. It's picked by hand during the meskerem (first month) and ginned using wooden rollers carved with scenes from the Bible. "We spin the cotton at night, by the light of qiddus (holy candles)," Weyzero Aster's granddaughter, 25-year-old Tsion, explained, showing a spindle with a whorl shaped like a cross. "My mémé says the Virgin Mary watches over us—too loose, and the thread breaks; too tight, and it kinks. It's like spinning prayers into cloth."
Dyes are made from plants and minerals found in the highlands: indigo from the koso bush for blue, saffron from wild crocuses for gold, and ochre from red clay for crimson. The indigo vats are kept in the church courtyard, where they're blessed with holy water and incense. "We dip the cloth 13 times for the 13 apostles," Tsion said, lowering a length of cotton into a vat of deep blue liquid. "Each dip is a prayer—rush them, and the color fades like a forgotten psalm."
The weaving is done on narrow looms set up in family compounds, with women working in silence during Lent and singing hymns during Meskel (Finding of the True Cross). Patterns include qene (poetic symbols) and tabot (replicas of the Ark of the Covenant), with each design requiring years of apprenticeship to master. "That cross with four arms? It's the Ethiopian cross, the shape of our faith," Tsion said, pointing to a motif. "We weave it so our children never forget who they are."
Su Yao's team arrived after their Peru project, drawn to shimma's delicate beauty and its link to one of Africa's great civilizations. They brought samples of seaweed-metal threads woven into cotton, hoping to create a fabric that retained the cloth's translucency while adding strength for use in vestments and altar cloths. But when Lin displayed a machine-woven sample with printed crosses, Weyzero Aster's brother, 68-year-old Abba Gebre—a priest with a gray beard and a black robe—clutched his cross pendant. "Your machine weaves without blessings," he said, his voice trembling with anger. "Our shimma is touched by holy water, prayed over as it's made. This thing is a pagan imitation—it would burn in the presence of the tabot."
Tensions erupted when a locust swarm descended on the highlands, devouring cotton fields and stripping the koso bushes bare. The weavers' stored cotton, kept in a stone granary, was infested with insect eggs, and their indigo vats were knocked over by panicked villagers. "The angels reject your metal thread," Abba Gebre muttered as men beat the locusts with sticks, their robes stained with crushed insects. With Genna (Ethiopian Christmas) approaching, when new shimma is used to make vestments for the church, the community faced disaster. "Without pure cloth, we cannot honor the birth of Christ," Weyzero Aster said, staring at the bare fields.
That night, Su Yao sat with Weyzero Aster in her thatched hut, where a clay stove simmered with shiro (chickpea stew) and a Bible lay open on a wooden table. The walls were hung with shimma cloths used in baptisms and weddings, each one marked with the date and the priest's blessing. A small shrine held a candle and a fragment of stone from the Church of St. Mary of Zion. "I know this cloth isn't just fabric," Su Yao said, breaking off a piece of injera (sourdough flatbread). "It's your faith, your heritage, your soul. We want to help preserve it, not replace it."
Weyzero Aster smiled, offering her a cup of buna (coffee) brewed over a charcoal fire. "My gedo (great-grandfather) used to say that even torn shimma can be mended with holy thread," she said. "But your metal—maybe it's a sign. Young people buy factory cloth now, not shimma. They don't know the prayers or the patterns. We need to show them our zehab still has power."
Over the next three weeks, the team worked alongside the weavers. They helped set up netting to protect the remaining cotton, their hands raw from tying knots, and traveled with Abba Gebre to a remote monastery where koso bushes still stood, carrying holy water to bless the new indigo vats. "Amen, amen," they chanted, their voices blending with the Latin and Ge'ez prayers until the rhythm felt like a heartbeat.
Lin experimented with coating the seaweed-metal threads in myrrh oil and beeswax—a mixture used to polish church crosses. "It needs to glow like shimma, not shine like metal," she said, showing Weyzero Aster a swatch where the threads added a subtle shimmer to the blue cotton. Weyzero Aster held it up to the light of the shrine candle. "The saints accept this," she said.
Fiona collaborated with Tsion to design a new pattern: Ethiopian crosses with arms merging into ocean waves, with metal threads outlining the crosses to make them catch the candlelight. "It honors your faith and our sea," Fiona explained, and Abba Gebre traced the design with a finger, then crossed himself. "The sea carried the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia," he said. "This shimma remembers that."
On Genna morning, the weavers gathered at the church, where their collaborative shimma was laid out on the altar, surrounded by candles and frankincense. The fabric glowed in the light: crosses in indigo cotton, their arms flowing into waves woven with metal threads that shimmered like starlight. Weyzero Aster draped a corner over Su Yao's shoulders—a cross and a wave, stitched together with cotton and seaweed-metal thread. "Now you're one of the faithful," she said.
As the team's car drove away, they could hear the church bells ringing and voices singing hymns. Through the window, Tsion was teaching girls to spin cotton by candlelight, the metal thread spooled beside her spindle. Su Yao thought of the new cotton seedlings, sprouting in protected fields, and the way the metal threads had learned to enhance the shimma without overshadowing its holiness—how innovation, when rooted in respect for a people's sacred traditions, becomes part of their devotion.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Peru: Carmen had sold their collaborative wayanaq to a museum, funding a weaving school for Quechua youth. Su Yao smiled, typing back: "We've added new crosses in Ethiopia—your turn to weave something that bridges heaven and earth."
Somewhere in the distance, the church bells merged with the wind whistling through the obelisks, a harmony as ancient as Aksum and as eternal as faith.