Makeda defeating the serpent
At a Glance
- Central figures: Makeda, queen of the southern kingdom centered at Aksum, and Arwe - called also Waynaba - the great serpent who ruled the land before her dynasty and demanded tribute in flesh and cattle.
- Setting: The highlands of northern Ethiopia, in the region around Aksum, before Makeda’s journey to Jerusalem; drawn from the Ethiopian oral and chronicle tradition that precedes and surrounds the Kebra Nagast.
- The turn: Makeda, still a young woman and not yet queen, devised a plan to poison Arwe when her own father and his warriors could not kill the serpent by force of arms.
- The outcome: Arwe died from the poison Makeda fed him, and with his death the people of the land were freed from the tribute of their children and livestock. Makeda was raised to the throne.
- The legacy: Makeda’s defeat of Arwe established her right to rule and began the line of queens and kings from which the Solomonic dynasty later claimed descent through her son Menelik I.
The serpent had ruled longer than anyone could remember. He lived in a place where the ground was bare from his coiling and the trees had been stripped of bark by the scraping of his sides. The people of the highlands called him Arwe, and some called him Waynaba, and the elders said he had been there before the first houses were built.
Every season, the tribute came due. A firstborn goat. A young bull. A girl or a boy. The families drew lots, and the family that lost brought their child to the edge of Arwe’s ground and left them there and walked away without looking back. No one had ever tried to fight the serpent. Or rather - men had tried, and their bones lay scattered among the bare trees, and the serpent had eaten their offerings anyway.
The King Who Could Not Kill
Makeda’s father was a chief of the region around Aksum, and he governed a proud people brought low by this single fact: they fed their children to a serpent because they did not know how to stop. He had consulted warriors and priests. He had sent men with spears and shields of hippopotamus hide. They came back fewer than they left, or they did not come back at all, and afterward the serpent ate what was owed and waited for the next season.
Makeda watched her father age around this failure. She was young - the chronicles do not give her age, but they say she was not yet married, and that she listened more than she spoke. She sat in the back of councils where her father’s advisors argued about whether to flee the highlands altogether or to send a larger war party. The war parties had not worked. Fleeing meant abandoning the fields and the cattle and the graves of their ancestors.
One evening, after the council dispersed with nothing decided, Makeda stayed behind and spoke to her father.
The serpent eats what you bring him. So bring him something that will kill him from inside.
Her father looked at her for a long time. Then he asked what she meant.
The Goat and the Poison
Makeda knew the plants of the highland country. She had watched the herders avoid certain shrubs that would sicken cattle, and she had seen what happened to animals that ate from the wrong ground. She gathered the leaves and roots of a plant the chronicles name only as bitter - a highland poison that worked slowly, through the gut, and that could be mixed into fat without changing the smell.
She took a goat, a large one, and she fed the goat on good grain for several days until it was fat and calm. Then she slaughtered it and dressed the meat and packed the belly cavity with the poison, mixed into rendered fat and wrapped in the goat’s own entrails so that nothing leaked and nothing smelled wrong.
Her father’s men carried the prepared goat to the edge of Arwe’s ground at the time the tribute was due. They set it down where they always set the offerings and they withdrew. This time Makeda did not withdraw. She climbed a fig tree at the edge of the bare ground and she waited.
Arwe’s Last Meal
The serpent came at dusk. The chronicles say he was vast - not in the way of tales where everything grows larger with retelling, but vast in the way that a python of the lowlands is vast, only more so, scaled to the highland plateau. He moved without hurrying. He had never needed to hurry. The tribute was always where it was supposed to be.
Arwe took the goat in his jaws and crushed it once and swallowed it. Makeda watched from the tree. She did not move. The serpent coiled back into the bare ground and was still.
She waited through the night. Toward morning, the serpent began to move strangely - not the smooth coiling she had watched from a distance all her life, but a jerking, uneven motion, the body working against itself. The poison was in him. He thrashed. He tore the ground open with his weight. The bare trees around his lair cracked and fell.
By the time the sun was fully up, Arwe was dead. His body lay stretched out across the clearing, longer than Makeda had imagined, the scales still gleaming in the early light. She climbed down from the fig tree and walked to where he lay and put her hand on the side of his head to be sure.
He was cold.
The People Come Out
Makeda sent word back to her father’s settlement. The people came - not all at once, but in small groups, cautious, the way people approach a thing they have feared for generations. They stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the dead serpent and did not speak for a while.
Her father came. He looked at the serpent and then at his daughter. The chronicles say he knelt, though whether this was grief or gratitude or exhaustion the text does not explain. He simply knelt.
The people burned the body of Arwe. The fire lasted a long time because of the size of him, and the smoke rose in a column that could be seen from distant settlements. When it was finished, the ground where the serpent had lain was black and bare, and for years afterward nothing grew there.
Makeda Takes the Throne
In the time that followed, Makeda’s father died - of age, the chronicles say, not violence - and the people of the highlands raised Makeda to the throne. She had killed what they could not kill. She had done it not with spears or war parties but with patience, with knowledge of the land, and with the willingness to sit in a tree through a long night and watch.
She ruled from Aksum. She governed well. The tribute of children ended and was never renewed, and the families who had lost sons and daughters to the serpent kept their grief but no longer kept their fear.
It was this queen - Makeda of the highlands, the serpent-killer - who later heard from her merchant Tamrin of a king in Jerusalem whose wisdom was spoken of in every city between the Red Sea and the great river. She sat for some days after hearing Tamrin’s account. Then she ordered the caravans loaded and the road north prepared. But that is another story, and it begins in Jerusalem.
The serpent’s clearing, the chronicles say, eventually grew back. Trees returned. Grass covered the scorched ground. But the people of Aksum remembered what had been there, and they remembered who had ended it.