by Shan Sa
Tankiasis had not understood what I meant.
“But I want to make children in women’s hearts,” I insisted. “I want to inseminate all the women who put down the burden of their existence and become warriors!”
“You dream too much, Talestria,” she said with an indulgent smile. “One day you will meet the girl child destined for you, and she will be your heir.”
I had never confided in Tania about these torments. Just like her mother Tankiasis, Tania loved me but did not understand me.
I let my dreams gambol over the steppe and spread through the sky. They were my flocks, and I let them graze among the stars.
IN OUR TRIBE when a warrior was struck down with the incurable illness of old age, she rode out of the encampment and set off across the steppe without a backward glance. She stopped when she came to a river, lay down in the grass, and let the predators and scavengers devour her.
Tankiasis followed these ancestral directives. She had raised me, and now she left. The elders covered up her departure, telling Tania and myself that she had gone to collect weapons from the whale hunters. When her horse returned, I understood the real reason she had gone, and galloped across the steppe for three days in the hopes of finding her.
Tankiasis had vanished. The tall grass undulated, revealing a bird’s nest, a stream, a pile of stones marked with dragon’s footsteps. The God of Ice had given me a mother and wanted to take her back from me. I challenged his power, resuscitating Tankiasis, who now galloped across the internal steppes of my mind. She had become immortal by my wish, and now she watched over me tenderly and sang to me:
The evil done to you is a force for good.
The good done to you could be evil.
Reacting to evil turns it to the good.
Reacting to good turns it to evil.
You are not indestructible.
You are destructible if you persist in seeing good in evil.
Wonderful things will happen.
You must neither close your eyes nor block your ears.
My mother, Queen Talaxia, had told me that the words of our tribe contained magic. They could make the invisible appear in the visible and transform legend into reality. Tania and I had begun writing a book in secret: at night, lying in the grass, I read the stars and dictated the story of Alestries to her. Tania believed the stars were whispering in my ear, when in fact I found the words already sown in my heart.
Alestries was a little girl who was abandoned and brought up by wild horses. A goddess took her into her celestial meadows and taught her to wield two sabers. At twenty she left the clouds and returned to earth to do battle with monsters. Astride her white mare she knocked at the door of dark shadowy kingdoms and released women chained in palace dungeons. She seduced princesses dying of boredom, dethroned grasping kings, and drove out evil spirits, which metamorphosed into panthers, snakes, birds, and beautiful women with ample bosoms and rounded bellies.
This book writing was interrupted by an alarm signal: a frontier guard to the southeast had lit her beacon. Columns of smoke, relayed by other beacons, spelled out this message: a troop of thirty armed nomads was riding toward us. I asked Tania to lock our book away in a cave, and I raised an army of thirty girls. We galloped for three days to confront the invaders, and a band of tall warriors covered in armor appeared on the horizon. We put on our metal-plated wooden helmets and launched a hail of arrows at them.
A WOMAN ON a huge white horse rode at the head of the warriors. Long scarlet feathers bobbed furiously on top of her helmet. She looked over my army, and her eyes came to rest on me. My head swam—she had singled me out. Casting aside our arrows with her shield and lance, she bore down on me, and I rode on to meet her despite the knots of emotion in my stomach. Our weapons met, sending out sparks. The point of her lance slid over my shoulder, and I shuddered with pleasure. With one hand I swung my bludgeon at her chest while I twisted my sickle through the air. She spun her horse round, driving back the bludgeon with her lance while my sickle cleaved her shield apart. Her horse leaped and charged again. The warrior woman had unsheathed her sword and swiped the feathers from my helmet.
But I knew this nomad woman!
I drew right up to her to cave her head in; she pushed me back to slit my throat. I opened my arms wide to threaten her; she lunged her lance and drove in her sword; I threw myself forward, she withdrew; I withdrew, she advanced. She hurled herself at me with both weapons drawn like an eagle’s steely talons. I fell backward, twisting my sickle around her sword and jabbing her lance with my bludgeon. The sky and our weapons spun in confusion, and in the flashing of those blades her eyes shone, sometimes with fury, sometimes with a smile.
Who are you? Are you that little girl with lily-white skin who ran through the market stalls with me and who was enslaved by the leopard hunters? Are you the little girl with green eyes who shared her gourd of milk with me for one whole summer?
The warrior seemed to hear the questions buzzing inside my head. Her iridescent eyes communicated gusts of unspoken words to me, and those words homed in on the wound on my breast, hurting me.
I sat back up and struck out again. She pushed my arms apart with hers, and our wrists touched. “If you love me,” I told her inside my head, “put down your weapons!”
Our labored breath mingled, our pulses raced in time, sweat gleamed on our brows and formed beads on our cheeks.
“Lower your weapons, love me!” I ordered her, still in my head.
She moved quickly.
“No.” She rebelled.
My bludgeon broke her lance. Her sword struck my breastplate, which roared loudly. The earth was trembling, the sky breaking open. I was overwhelmed with joy: She’s mine! She will be wild with love for me!
I feigned weakness, inciting her to follow me and drawing her away from her tribe. I escaped Tania, who watched over me jealously, and we rode for days on end, the warrior woman never letting me out of her sight. She followed me, her desire roaring within her, the constant thud of her horse’s hooves in the grass, an echo of her body’s impatience. The birds flying up in front of my horse, the grass bending aside to let us pass, the clouds drawing closer to protect us from the sun…everything sang in chorus: Talestria! I am coming with you. I am yours!
One night as I lay in the grass I heard her voice, deep and rich, rising slowly in the air and wrapping itself around me. With that song in a strange language she communicated to me her loneliness, her melancholy, her quest for a companion in war, on horseback, and in embraces that drive away the wind, the snow, and the cut of a sword. Gazing at the stars, I too began to sing. My song had no words; I followed the intonations of her voice and improvised a tune that made her song stronger and more lovely. Our voices rose, and with them, my soul flew up to the stars. This is Alestries, whispered the ether; this is the heroine who took up residence in your heart before you even met her.
A gentle warmth spread through me: Alestries was not an illusion, she alone was capable of following me in full gallop, in flight, at the speed of light. She alone could slip into my life by way of the stars. I stopped singing and wept in silence. I, the vengeful little girl, the orphan who had crossed the steppes to become an Amazon, I who rested from bloody battles by taking refuge in the legend of Alestries, had just received happiness I was not even seeking: a warrior woman had come to join her sorrow and hope to my own.
I would lose her! Like Salimba, Talaxia, and Tankiasis, like the little girls I had become attached to, like the tribes that had adopted me, she too would disappear and die. Beauty is short-lived on the steppes. The lives I grasped became shooting stars, leaving only darkness in their wake. I dried my tears and curled myself up tightly. As I slept, I heard Tankiasis singing: You are destructible if you persist in seeing good in evil. Reacting to evil turns it to the good. Reacting to good turns it to evil.
DAWN BROKE, AND with it came strength. What of the suffering of separation, what of the pain afforded when the beloved is pierced by a
rrows…I was determined to be joined with Alestries and to experience with her all the madness of our meeting.
But Alestries was a man! I fled—saddened, furious, and in despair—and would have galloped all the way to the ocean had I not been stopped by a river. To us a river is God’s revelation: my god had decided to put me to the test, for the greatest good comes from the greatest evil. I was meant to love Alestries despite his body, I was meant to abandon myself to him without counting the time we were granted. Loving is more difficult than waging war: loving is fighting the past and secrets, and everything impossible.
The bolt of light was more dazzling than summer lightning when it struck me, making me tremble to the very tips of my fingers. It knocked the breath out of me, leaving me struggling to compose myself on the inside. Any woman would have been burned out by the flames of a female warrior soul in a man’s body. I loved it even more for the suffering it inflicted on me because Talestria, queen of the Amazons, draws strength from pain, making her light shine still brighter, red on the outside and yellow in the center.
Countless men had been decapitated before they could even touch me. This man Alestries was not afraid of me; he held me to him, his hands caressed me to my very marrow, and mine made him moan. The two of us loved each other over and over again until we could no longer see or hear, until his seed mingled with my blood and my seed spilled inside his head.
I was naked; he cannot have failed to notice the scars over my body. He touched the wound deep in the flesh of my left breast, and I sat up with a start. He caught me by the leg and pushed me to the ground, pinning me down by leaping on top of me.
Alestries made a long declaration of which I understood not a single word, but the name Alexander came back again and again. A terrible apprehension chilled my limbs.
“Are you Alexander?” I asked in Persian.
His face lit up; he spoke Persian too. His voice sounded even more solemn in that language.
“We do not know each other,” he was saying. “But we have always known each other. There is no point wasting time, all the years spent without you were wasted. No seductions, I hate seductions. No oaths, I hate oaths that are so easily broken. No ceremonies, I have held too many ceremonies. No speeches, I despise the speeches I have given. Nothing official. There is no one here, no one watching us. I give myself to you. You are mine. Alestria, my kingdom is yours. It is proof of my love.”
I looked away, uttering not a sound. I wanted to reject him and flee. I had known only treachery and violence from men. Alexander’s declaration hurt me: he was lying!
This warrior who had subjugated the world by strength could not know anything of love. He wanted to show off the queen of the Amazons as his proudest trophy on his horse’s rump. He was not Alestries, I was wrong. I was about to get up, to gallop off, to exile myself far from him, far from his conquered lands…when he rested his head on my heart. His silence pierced right into me and filled me with joy and sadness. His calloused hands stroked my wounds. He kissed me. I faltered, and regretted giving myself to him the previous day as my arms disobeyed me, my mouth reached for his, and my thighs wrapped around him.
“I have searched all over the world,” he said in my ear. “Be my wife.”
I gave a hoarse involuntary sound:
“Why me?”
“Because everything was written here,” he said, stroking the crook of my left breast.
Marrying a man, handing herself over with lowered arms…would be a defeat for the queen of the Amazons, who had never been beaten.
“Alexander and Alestria.” He spoke our names gently. “We shall conquer the world and join the sun.”
The sun!
I, the queen of birds, horses, and grasshoppers, I have people waiting for me: Tania, my sisters, aunts, and girl children. I carry within me the curse of the Amazons, which forbids me to love a man. Marrying Alexander means leaving Siberia, abandoning my kingdom, fleeing with him like every other Amazon in the past who has fallen for a man.
“Come, Alestria! we shall climb mountains and take citadels by storm. We shall fight dragons and monkeys and elephants driven by warriors covered in pearls and diamonds. Be my queen, Alestria. I offer you magnificent lands, thousands of starlit nights, riding alongside one hundred thousand men beneath the sun, in water and sand, through forests and deserts.”
Alexander’s voice shook me, and I felt I was waking from a long sleep. God had just spoken to me through his words. I should no longer take my revenge on men, I should love the sun! I should lay down my weapons and gallop alongside Alestries!
Alexander’s scars rubbed against my own. The man who wanted to conquer the queen of the Amazons held me in his arms, and I had nowhere to hide. He forged himself a path in my belly, worked his way up my blood vessels, found my heart, and broke the wound that acted as my shield. He found his way onto my internal steppes, where Talaxia, Tanikiasis, and Salimba lived along with all the other beauties who had grown immortal through the force of my memory.
Darius, the king of the Persians, had offered me cloth, palaces, mountains, and precious gems. I preferred the wind, storms, blood, and victory promised by Alexander.
For that, for him, I must die and live again!
“Come, Alestria, it shall be for life and for death,” he said.
How could he read inside my head? A burning torrent made my legs weightless, flowed through my chest, and spread down my arms. A beam of light struck my head and burst inside my body, transforming itself into the Milky Way. I have no more questions. Alexander has defeated me. I am his.
Fly, birds, fly to the skies! Alestries and Alestria are setting off for the clouds. We shall conquer the world. We shall fertilize its vastness, filling it with the purity of the glacier and the strength of fire.
Fly, birds! Beat your wings, do not look back at the bushes you have left. Do not go back to your nests. Beat your wings, brave the wind, look to the sun. Look at that red, yellow, and orange, that fusion of ice and flames.
Fly, birds! Fly ahead of all birds, you who love the ecstasy of freedom above all else!
CHAPTER 7
B ucephalus darted in and out of the green waves, opening up a route through the ocean. Accompanied by the chestnut mare and followed by birds of the steppes, he leaped, flicking his hocks and launching himself into the air. Alestria held my reins and rested her head against my chest.
Blue and orange butterflies, purple-winged grasshoppers, and seven-spotted ladybugs flitted over my cheeks and flew away. Rays of sunlight filtered by the clouds were like golden pillars holding up the sky.
I had lost the lust for battle but, in meeting Alestria, had found it again. My troops, demoralized after eight years of campaigns, would find new motivation now they had a queen who was the embodiment of Athena.
Alestria, warrior woman with two weapons, the bludgeon you wield has shattered the hopes of every woman who schemed to become my wife; your sickle has cleaved the heads of every conspirator who wanted me to die alone or in the poisoned existence of an arranged marriage. By freeing me from worrying matrimony, you have freed my strength.
I was ridiculed as a conqueror because I had no queen; my resonant name elicited as much pity as admiration. Watching me return with my most precious conquest, some would be saddened to see me so happy. All those gleefully pointing out that greatness casts a long shadow and glory requires sacrifice would plead with their gods, asking them why they should be deprived of power and beauty, why Alexander should be granted every gift including a woman’s love. These men and women whose eyes were always trained on my golden laurel wreath would have to bite their forked tongues; their slander would fly away. They would say Alexander had captured a little savage and claim he was mad to make some rootless girl queen of the universe. They would say he was bewitched by a black-eyed sorceress, and would urge his soldiers to revolt.
But Alexander and Alestria would fly above their malicious gossip, paying no attention to rumors spread by the jealous. T
hey would be king and queen like two stars on a starless night, lighting the earth with their flames. And Alexander’s soldiers who so thirsted for light would forget their sorrows and nostalgia, drawing strength from this union of two warriors in order to do battle to the very edge of the universe.
As we rode Bucephalus, I thought of what strategy I would use to introduce my wife to the Macedonian nobility, Greek sophists, Persian viceroys, and barbarian tribal chiefs. I would use cunning to assert her over my empire as I had asserted myself in Macedonia.
I could already hear myself holding forth to my troops:
“Soldiers! Your king has returned accompanied by your queen! Alexander shall march at the head of the army, and Alestria shall bring up the rear and tend to the injured. She shall listen to your wailing and encourage you to overcome pain.
“Soldiers! Your queen is afraid of neither suffering nor death. She challenges the powerful, the rebellious, and the undefeated. She is indefatigable! Be as she is, be better than she is! Be more courageous than a woman; you must not disappoint your warrior queen!”
I WAS NO longer Talestria. I rested my head against Alexander’s chest and listened to his breathing, absorbing his strength and giving him mine. He and I, together: nothing would be impossible.
What reactions would I now face? Who would be the men who welcomed me and the women who busied themselves around me? Alexander was silent, but I could hear the beating of his anxious heart. He was about to make room for me in a life where there was no room for a woman.
Do not worry, I told him in my thoughts. Alestria is not an ordinary woman who has not lived: she is an invincible warrior. She is also the anonymous little girl who has never been afraid of the unknown. I shall respect strange customs and incomprehensible languages. I shall slide into a new world as if it were a new family, learning all its rules and coming to know every member. I shall give the women my support and slaves their freedom. I shall share my joys and keep my sorrows to myself. The greatest army under the skies will not overawe me; proud and brutal commanders will not make me lower my eyes in submission. I shall live for you. I shall die with you.