Shan Sa - Alexander and Alestria

When dawn broke, my beloved was dressed and I helped her straighten her veil. I watched her leave along the damp alleyways of a deserted marketplace. I never saw Salimba again. The following year I heard that she had had a sumptuous wedding and was expecting a child. The year after that I was told that she had borne a daughter, and that she was with child again. The next year her name was no longer spoken; she was dead.

We frequently came across corpses on the steppes. They might be our sisters or our enemies, and any one of them could have been Salimba. I addressed to each of them a prayer to appease their soul, wishing them a happy incarnation in lives to come.

"Tankiasis," I said, "we cannot form an attachment with a man and give him a child, but why can we not wed a woman and conceive with her? Two women together make girl children, and they in turn would have girl children who love horses."

She laughed at this.

"It is not your blood that has to run in your child's veins," she said, "but your spirit. Ordinary men and women beget life by combining their seed. They abandon themselves and then their children. Every day babies are left alone in the cold to cry and die. The girls of Siberia do not beget-they save lives and give life."

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 Tan-kiasis, 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:

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!