The forges hummed through the night like a sleeping animal breathing. Harar's workshops glowed with the fever of creation; steel sang under hammers and cloth fell from looms in steady bolts. Yet for all the noise of progress, Tafari knew the most dangerous sound was silence: the hush that fell over men when the stakes rose too high.
They had rifles now — crude, serviceable, born of persistent hands and stubborn minds. But a rifle without cartridges was a promise with no power. For months, Harar's companies had relied on bolts and barrels while the little packets of lead and powder came trickling in through old contacts: a crooked trader from Massawa, a shadowed shipment from the Red Sea, a crate mislabelled and smuggled across borders. It was costly, unreliable, and, worse, it left them vulnerable to blockade.
Tafari had watched those shipments arrive and felt the thin thread of foreign dependence tighten around Harar. He had no wish to barter one foreign hand for another. If Harar was to be self-sufficient, it must make its own cartridges — the small, lethal things that fed the thunder of rifles. And that meant two things keen as knives: metal and propellant.
He spoke quietly to his father that night in the study, the candles guttering between them. Ras Makonnen, who had once ridden into the smoke of Adwa, placed a rough hand on the table and looked at his son in a way that mixed pride and worry.
"You ask the impossible, Tafari," Makonnen said low. "But I know your mind. If you will do this, you will need men I have kept in reserve — men whose loyalty is blood-deep and whose mouths are sealed by oaths."
Tafari met his father's gaze without flinching. "Then I ask you not for soldiers, Father, but for trust — and men who can bend iron into uniformity. We will buy no more cartridges. We will make our own."
Makonnen did not answer immediately. He had seen empires made and undone by a single batch of powder. But the flame of his experience recognized the flame in his son. "You will have my smiths and my steward. But there will be no trumpets for this work. It will be hidden from Rome and from men who would trade our future for silver."
The plan was part clandestine diplomacy, part industrial leap. First, there were the back channels: traders and shipmen who still favored Ras Makonnen's household from old ties. A fisherman's nephew in Massawa agreed to help ferry small consignments — casings, primers, machine parts — hidden among coffee sacks and salt. A merchant from Djibouti offered old, serviceable presses and dies he had purchased at auction, tools once used in distant factories and now rusted with age. These pieces were not the whole answer; they were keys.
In Harar, under the stone eaves of a newly reinforced workshop, master smiths and the quiet men Makonnen supplied set to work. They did not read from books or follow flow charts. They worked with a craftsman's patience and an engineer's eye: measuring, matching, testing fit. Barrels and bolts were one thing; cartridges required a different discipline — uniformity, balance, a rhythm of repetition that left no room for careless hands. The men learned to shape brass into casings, to seat bullets into mouths that fit snugly and true. They tested patterns with measured fire from old barrels and the new Harar bolts, checking for consistent performance.
At no point did Tafari ask for formulas or the secrets of chemistry; that was a line he would not cross aloud. What he demanded instead was workmanship. "Make the shape exact," he told the master smith. "Make every piece a twin of its neighbor. The weapon is only as good as the smallest part inside it." The smiths answered with their calluses and their stubborn refinement of tools, turning imperfection into repeatable craft.
The other part — the powder — was a thornier thing. Propellant was not merely metal and muscle; it lived in the hands of chemists and in the careful stewardship of stores. Tafari could not, would not, summon up a recipe in the courtyard. But he could summon skill. He turned to a quiet figure in Harar — a former apothecary, a man who had spent years working in the Sultan's household before a quarrel had driven him inland. He was not a man of loud claims, but he knew the weight of salts, the temper of mixtures, and above all, the danger of haste.
They met beneath the arches of the granary, where the scent of grain masked other aromas. Tafari laid out what he needed without details, like a priest confessing a sin and demanding absolution.
"We will borrow knowledge," the apothecary said at last, "not invent it." His hands trembled as he spoke of stabilizing mixtures, of drying and storing so that moisture and age could not betray intent. He asked for a sealed room, ventilation, and time. He asked for secrecy. Tafari provided all three.
Out of sight, in a narrow stone chamber far from the forges where the flames could not kindle suspicion, apprentices and the apothecary worked with precise caution. They ground, they sifted, they dried in low heat and winds that carried the odors away from sleeping streets. They did not speak in public about what they did; the men who watched them came with blank faces and left with pockets less full of silver and more full of resolve.
Tafari understood that there was moral danger here as well. He spent long evenings in the chapel and by the granaries, arguing with himself in the half-silent hours. "A nation that cannot defend its children will feed them to conquest," he told his reflection. "But weapons reach hands beyond the righteous. We must build both care and discipline into what we make."
The first cartridges bore the marks of their making: not factory polish, but honest craft. The bullets were soft, properly seated into casings whose rims were stamped with a maker's mark no foreign hand could mimic. The first batch — a few hundred rounds — was racked into crates, each sealed and set aside.
Tafari chose the place of the test with the same care he had used on the first rifle. Under cover of night, on a clay plain away from eyes, he watched as Gebre and a handful of trusted men loaded the new rounds. The bolt slid. The primer struck. The Harar bolt sang once, twice; the bullets flew straight and struck the target with a clean, decisive impact. Faces around the firing line broke into laughter and elation. It was not the roar of conquest; it was the sound of a small nation hearing its own voice for the first time.
Yet even in triumph, Tafari's mind reached for the next danger. He knew Rome would take note of missing shipments and of rumors of smokeless fires. He knew that the nobles would listen to any whisper that could justify a strike. So he sent two carefully worded dispatches: one to his father, blunt and tactical; another to Menelik, a measured report of progress in Harar's stores and forges that framed the work as service to the empire.
Ras Makonnen, reading the lines by candlelight, folded the paper and looked at his son across the room. Pride and caution warred in his steady face.
"You have made us hungry for more," he said quietly. "But remember — a river carved the land slowly, not by haste. Move as the river moves."
Tafari nodded. He had brought Harar out of dependence by craft and secrecy and by the solid, patient work of men who forgot glory for the sake of a country. The cartridges sat in their crates like small promises. He felt their weight as much in his hands as in his heart.
Outside, the night was full of distant stars. In the city below, men slept without knowing that a new sound — the staccato of a rifle firing Harari rounds — had been born. The danger had not passed; it had merely changed shape. But for Tafari, for Harar, for all the small men and women who had given sweat and oath to the work, the night tasted faintly of victory. The future, long inked in his memory, shifted. Now it had new tools with which to be remade.