The news traveled like a fever through the hills and valleys: Harar now made rifles and cloth. It fed mouths and clothed backs. It kept bandits at bay. It taught children to read. For many it was miracle; for others, a threat.
In Addis Ababa, the palace corridors filled with a different sound — not the rhythmic hammer of forges but the low, urgent whisper of men in fear. Officials clustered in shadowed antechambers. Envoys leaned close and spoke in clipped tongues. The Rifles of Harar had become a subject no courtier could ignore.
Ras Welde paced the marble gallery with his cloak flung back, his face hard as flint. He stopped beside Ras Gugsa, who regarded him with slow, cold amusement.
"They come to Menelik now with cloth, grain, and guns," Welde spat. "A boy makes soldiers of peasants, and the peasants cheer. Do you see what that does to our houses? Our men—their influence—our pride?"
Gugsa lifted an eyebrow. "You sound like a man who has been outbid at the market. This is something greater than coin, Welde. It is power, reorganized."
Welde's voice dropped. "Power that kneels to Harar will not long remember its betters. We must act before the boy becomes a banner."
Empress Taytu listened in the shadowed recess beside Emperor Menelik, her fingers entwined in an old prayer bead. The empress's eyes were lit by a flame that was not wholly pious.
"Menelik," she murmured, "we must not let a provincial prince remake the nation behind our backs. He gains the people with bread and stirs soldiers with steel. Today Harar; tomorrow — what? A court of his own?"
Menelik regarded the distant smoke of Harar on the horizon, the map of his realm spread before him. He was a man of victories and calculation, but age had softened edges once sharp as spears.
"Taytu," he said without haste, "we will not smother genius out of fear. Our problem has always been blunt instruments — poor roads, poor food, poor arms. If the boy feeds his people and builds wagons, it may strengthen us. But any man who makes himself a state within a state must be watched."
Taytu's eyes narrowed. "Watched, yes. And, if needed, contained."
In a private chamber, a diplomat from Rome fanned himself politely but spoke poison behind his sugar smile. "Emperor Menelik," he said through a translator, "we hear troubling reports. An industrious prince is no problem — unless he begins to arm your people against your friends' interests. Italy believes in mutual benefit. But should Ethiopia arm itself in secret, Rome must reconsider its approach."
Menelik's jaw tightened; he had balanced foreign hands before. His reply was measured. "Tell your government I prefer honest trade to secret networks. If Italy values friendship, it will not buy the loyalty of my lords."
The diplomat's smile did not reach his eyes. He left with the curl of a threat disguised as civility, and in Rome the reports would be read and re-read.
Meanwhile in Harar, Tafari moved like a man with the patience of a river and the ambition of a mountain. The counterattack the nobles feared was not to be direct: it would be to choke him with law, to cut his commerce, to paint him dangerous in the eyes of the emperor. Tafari, anticipating both menace and opportunity, accelerated two things at once — the practical and the symbolic.
The practical first. The forges hummed in a dozen small workshops across Harar's hinterland. The initial bolt-action design that had fired the clay pot was adapted and refined by the craftsmen — not copied mechanically but inspired. Tafari had seen the paperwork, the blueprints of foreign designs in his past life; he knew what made a reliable rifle: a sound bolt, a decent barrel, a stock that fit the shoulder. He did not teach the men formulas on paper; he set them to work: measure, file, temper, test. The vocabulary of gunsmithing spread through the town — but always hand-to-hand, man-to-man, not in a classroom for spies.
"We will not attempt to mimic foreign names," he told Gebre and the master smiths. "We adapt what works and make it ours. The shape matters less than the discipline it will teach our men."
They called the new pattern simply "the Harar bolt" in secret — a practical weapon that could be made with local tools, serviced with local parts, and taught to peasants and townsmen who had once only held hoes.
The symbolic moved in parallel. Tafari used the textile halls to produce not only cloth but uniforms. He combined the weavers' bolts into tunics, the dyers' vats into common colors. When the first company of Harari militia mustered, they were clothed not in noble finery but in serviceable, matching garments — the first time many villagers had stood in a uniform that symbolized more than a master's whim.
Training followed. Tafari did not believe a weapon alone makes an army. Discipline, logistics, and the slow work of organization were what made a force endure. He organized companies with cooks and quartermasters, not merely men-at-arms. Wagons were built along the new roads; leather harnesses were stitched in the textile halls; a rudimentary supply train was formed that could move grain and powder in the same convoy.
"An army eats as it marches," he told the captain of his new company as they drilled at dawn. "If you cannot feed your men, you cannot expect them to stand in a field. If they cannot fix a broken wagon, you will lose time and lives."
The drills were sober and relentless. Men learned volley fire with the Harar bolts, then the harder lesson: stop shoulder-to-shoulder and reload with speed, then move. Discipline replaced the chaotic bravery of the past. Tafari watched as his makeshift companies became steadier, more reliable, their volleys echoing with an order their enemies had not expected.
But every advance demanded a response. In Addis, Ras Welde's men fanned the embers of suspicion. They composed anonymous letters accusing Tafari of fomenting rebellion. They suggested to wavering nobles that if the emperor did not curb Harar's independence, foreign powers would do so for him. They spread rumors about secret arsenals and plots to overthrow the throne.
In Harar, Tafari received word of the letters and the whisper-campaign not with fury but with cool calculation. He wrote to Menelik, not in flight but in fact: a list of granaries, of schools, of waterwheels. He invited the emperor's inspectors, not as a deflection but as an instrument. Let the emperor see the mills and the mills' ledgers. Let Menelik touch the grain. Let men judge with their eyes.
When the imperial inspectors arrived — a small party sent under cautious imperial commission — Tafari welcomed them to the mills and the schools. The inspectors tasted bread, watched children recite letters, and walked the forges. They found order, sweat, and evidence of industry. Menelik received the inspectors' reports with the same deep silence he had always worn; the emperor was a man who preferred proof over intrigue.
The political saw-tooth sharpened on both sides. Nobles plotted, diplomats from Italy whispered threats, and Tafari spun industry and literacy into a shield. The Harar bolts multiplied, the mills ground, the schools taught arithmetic. Every village that stored grain in a new granary and sent a son to a schoolhouse was another stone in Tafari's bulwark.
At dawn one morning as he watched a company march along a new stone road — rifles slung neatly, uniforms clothed in the same homespun blue — Tafari felt a surge that was not hubris but heavy responsibility.
"Power," he thought, "is a thing that must be grown like a forest: planted carefully, tended daily, and defended against every hungry flame."
Behind him, Abebe tightened a strap on a cart. "They will come harder soon," he said.
Tafari nodded. "Then we will be ready," he answered. "We will not only meet them with steel. We will meet them with stomachs full and minds awake."
In Addis, in Rome, and in the dusty lanes of Harar, men set their pieces on the board. The game had moved from forges and fields to crowns and councils. The next moves would decide whether a boy's vision became the nation's shield — or a thunderbolt that breaks and burns all it touches.