Two years passed like a season of storms. Harar — once a whisper of smoke and a single stubborn forge — was now a river of industry. Roads spidered out from the city, packed with carts carrying cloth, grain, iron, and men. Small workshops hummed behind closed doors across the countryside; schoolhouses rang with children's voices at dawn. The work was steady, patient, relentless — and everything Tafari had built in secret had grown louder, stronger, and harder to hide.
He looked older at nineteen. The softness of a boy's face had tightened into a look of someone who slept poorly and thought too much. But his eyes were calm. Two years of waking plans had shown him what the future could be: a country that fed itself, clothed itself, and made its own tools for defense.
The rifles had multiplied. The simple Harar bolt had evolved from that first crude model into something practical and dangerous. Tafari had studied old foreign designs — remembered shapes from books and from the weapons he'd seen in his earlier life — and he had his smiths improve them in a way that mattered on an African plain.
The Harar rifle used a bolt-action like the Italian rifles the world knew, but it fit Ethiopian needs. It was a little tougher where the dust bit, a little smoother in the bolt that a soldier could work by feel, and it took the 6.5-mm cartridges they now made at the secret factory. The stocks were shaped to fit a man standing in heat, not a parade ground — rough hands, thick coats, and long days. Above all, the rifle was built to be repaired in a village forge; parts could be matched and replaced without foreign tools. Tafari did not chase fancy features. He chased reliability.
He named the improved pattern quietly among the men: Harar-1. To those who used it in the field it felt like a friend that did not fail.
The army he trained was not a formal army at first. It began as companies — men who had worked the waterwheels, hauled grains, and woven uniforms — then learned to form ranks. Tafari's lessons were simple and stern: discipline before courage; supply before glory; the rifle in one hand, a loaf in the other. He drilled them to move as one, to get men in and out of formation, to march without whining, to repair a broken wheel under a tree and be ready to fight the next day.
They trained on the new roads he had built. Those roads were the real victory: wagons could move grain and powder together; a single convoy could feed and arm a village and then send that village's militia down to hold a road or a pass. Logistics, Tafari liked to tell his captains, was more important than raw courage. An enemy could win a battle; the one who fed his men would win a war.
And there were battles, small and fierce — skirmishes more than campaigns, but each one a test. Bandits tried once more to strike a caravan loaded with powder and cloth. This time they were met by a line that fired in steady volleys and then charged. The Harar-1s barked and the bandits scattered. A neighboring chief raised a small force to test Harar and found himself outmaneuvered on a muddy lane, his column stopped by a simple ambush on the road, then broken by a volley that came from two sides.
These fights were not glorious by the songs of princes. They were harsh, close, and full of mud and fear. Men stepped in the ditch to reload. Smoke stung eyes. Yet the weapons did their work. They gave a rhythm to victory: hold the line, feed the line, repair the wagons, march again.
The greatest thrill came one bitter night when Tafari took a company of the new militia on a silent march to intercept a band of mercenaries hired by the nobles. The road was thin and the moon was a sliver; men moved like ghosts along the stone track. Tafari had planned the night like a craftsman plans a strike — timing, place, and the sound of a rifle that would tell a story.
They waited in silence behind a low wall as the mercenaries rode by, confident, laughing under their cloaks. When the lead horse passed, a signal flicked like a candle. Men rose, rifles raised, the volley rolled like thunder across the plain. One by one the horses stumbled, the mercenaries toppled, and the rest fled into the dark like shadows with holes in them. The company moved in, seized their weapons, and left without blood on the road to shame them.
Word of the night moved fast. To people who had known only fear, it sounded like a miracle. To nobles it was a warning: Harar could strike where the old men thought only servants could move.
But the expansion brought new dangers. The factories needed ore and coal and copper. Supply lines, even secret ones, creaked under the new demand. That was when Tafari's craft turned as much to diplomacy as to industry. He sent trusted merchants further afield, opened hidden trade channels, and traded Harari cloth and grain for ore and tools. He kept the transactions small and spread among many hands so no single shipment would attract the eye of Rome or other foreign powers.
Two years of hard work also fortified loyalty. The men who worked the waterwheels had stakes in the mills. The women who wove cloth earned coin and knew its value. Schoolboys could read orders and add numbers. The new pride built a chain of small loyalties tighter than any single title at court.
Yet he never forgot the knife at his back. Ras Welde and the nobles had not stopped plotting. They tried to buy men in one district, promising land; they spread rumors in another, saying that Harar would tax the villages to pay for war. When rumor met cold bread and steady wages, the lies withered. Still, the nobles tried sabotage and hired men. Harar learned to counter by patrols along the roads and quiet patrols that watched the nights.
Tafari was not reckless. He did not tempt a great war he could not feed. He used the roads to move food and powder in the same wagons, and he taught his commanders to fight a war that would last — to keep supply chains thin and flexible, to avoid pitched battles unless they could reinforce with grain and men overnight.
At dawn of a weary morning, Tafari walked the new road at the city's edge. Soldiers marched in even columns; girls in the textile yards waved at them; schoolchildren practiced letters under the trees. The Harar-1 slung across a man's shoulder was no longer a secret but a promise — a simple iron answer to those who counted Ethiopia weak.
He breathed in the dust and the sound of metal and smiled, though not without shadow on his face. Two years had given him much, but it had also sharpened his enemies' teeth. He had learned how to turn forges into factories, schools into supply clerks, and roads into the arteries of a nation. The real test — whether a boy's vision could bend a century — still lay ahead.
For now, they had steel that came from their own hands, powder that fired like a thunderstorm and did not rely on a foreign crate, and men who knew to load, aim, and stand together. That would have to be enough for the next nights to come.