Chapter 1
Drop-stepping the mound, trees angle just-so slightly, keeping perpendicular to the ground—swaying branches on windy days, trunks firmly rooted, as though the sky begged to tear that living wood limb from limb, finger from finger, leaf from leaf, disintegrating the weakest of Gaia, swallowing it all into the empty heavens, while the Gods watch from their mountaintop above the ring of clouds (too fragile themselves except for young Hephaestus, wisely living deep inside Mt. Aetna)—Xena and Gabrielle descend finally onto flattened terrain, reaching a clearing where those tortured, twisting trees—feet wringing around dirt to stay planted—thin in number, and then, at last… disappear.
“You know…” Gabrielle huffs, “I don’t know why, but I thought that hill would be a lot easier on the way down.”
Xena merely smirks.
Whenever Xena doesn’t speak, Gabrielle looks at her a long while—not for expecting an answer, but to read in her body what she can’t, or doesn’t, say with words. Not a bit of sweat on her head, Xena’s skin looking as if it had been packed with salt. Incredible, she thinks, as she crawls onto the floor, making a pillow of her arm, I’ve been tasting my sweat for the past half hour, and she looks like she could knock out the whole thing again. But from her new perspective, looking up at her great friend—who now broadens that gently mocking, loving smirk—who now breaks that silence to encourage her, “come on, it’s just through that next thick of woods ahead, we can be in a real bed before nightfall,”—Gabrielle notices her chest, the tight protecting armor raising slightly higher than before, her breasts pushed out, which meant, of course, one of three things: she was attempting to seduce, intimidate, or she was short of breath; she won’t and wouldn’t admit it, but that journey had taken its toll on Xena. Revitalized by their collective exhaustion, Gabrielle allowed Xena to help her up to her feet with an outstretched hand.
As Gabrielle reached her height (as it happened, Gabrielle noticed that one of her sandals had fallen off in her descent to the ground—placed haphazardly on its side further back (had she crawled so far?)—her bare foot resting above and within the grass, toes instinctually digging into the dirt—so far removed from her dreams of gowns and towers looking over rooftops, now Gabrielle finds comfort in the soil, the sea, and the stars), a scream echoes through the field. A figure making itself known through sound, at first hidden through stillness. Gabrielle starts towards the scream and soon feels the hard, bracered arm stopping her momentum, compressing her still sweating breasts into her body, breath half-expelled in surprise, half in pleasure (perhaps some bit of pleasure in that surprise—rough, directing, permitting and dispermitting movement, action, and even in that frustration she sometimes feels, truly feels, her body can’t help but respond with a gasp, a shudder, a sigh). “Xena, we have to help.”
“Put your shoes back on, it could be a trap.”
“But-”
“I’ll go up ahead; catch up when you’re done and stay alert.”
Gabrielle obeys. Stalling to watch Xena cross the clearing—no sign at all of exhaustion anymore, as though exhaustion were a gift she allowed herself to feel only when alone (or with her)—as a murder of crows stormed the sky like thunderclouds from the far side of the forest; maybe a storm was coming, as the whole of the sky greyed and darkened, and the wind picked up—those swaying trees—Gods, how do they stay in place?—rocking harder now, begging to be stolen into the vortex, into oblivion. Xena’s hurried pace was not out of respect or concern for the victim—she was absolutely sure, and Gabrielle was too, to an extent, that the whole thing was a charade—but rather to create distance between herself and Gabrielle, a buffer from attack, hopefully, or perhaps, more generously, to watch the woods (her senses strengthened from being on the road so long with Xena, watching her as she responds to each rustle, each break, each breath discharged around them, and soon she too learned how to spot a tripwire, smell an encampment, hear a potential predator (though Xena still manages to sneak up on her in their little games—frivolous reconnaissance, an excuse to circle back and flank her, pouncing at her shoulders, scaring her to laughter, and it still gets her all this time later, not for ifs but for whens, and each pounce a release, a draining of the anxious buildup, a release, a release…)). Distant chimes of tintinnabulum—it must be a blessing—ring-a-clinging clarity tones offering beautiful air-speckling sounds from phallic effigies. (Gabrielle recalls appraising such an idol with finger and thumb before the temple priest had struck her arm, insisting that her “Bacchic oils” would muddy the ring meant for Hermes on high (both parties had believed their false reverence would be enough with their air of apology, neither one realizing nor believing that Hermes truly stopped hearing the ring from then and there—so few chimes pure enough for his blessing, and fewer still, and dwindling…)
Xena reached the figure, a woman appearing too old to be as young as she looked, too young to be as old as she appeared, before her, leg planted in the ground. A hole. Blood-soaked dirt and darkening, nourishing the soil for mandrake roots to grow and condemn, leaving naught to grow like the kudzu stretching canopylike cross the sweetly scented forests of Qin (Xena recalls her escape from the region, threading through and finding cover in such dense greenery, stumbling over hidden roots to find herself gracefully received by hands of kudzu, imagining Lao Ma’s hands across her back—protect me, she may have whispered so long ago, hoping Lao Ma would hear, would know as she always seemed to, but no, no, that trust had been broken, had died then; now is the time of the living, and the hands of the kudzu are the hands of dependable life—distrust not). The victim’s weak moan now, real pain, unperformed, not overly dramatic, an attempt to regain composure, to not fall into despair in the face of it. “Are you hurt?” Xena asks.
She looks up at Xena with brilliant green eyes, her nose tilted up like a snout, soft jawline reaching a perfect point at the base of the head. It was possible that Xena had hardly seen anyone more beautiful, which sent a chill down her neck. (Gabrielle could almost feel it, why do I feel so weird? she thinks as she approaches the scene, slowly, keeping that distance, and slower still now for her guard had been raised.) “The hole,” she answers between breaths, “it’s been barbed with thorns! I can get out… it’s just too much… all at once. Could you lift me out?”
“I could…” she pauses, something like smugness resting on her face, smugness of power, occasionally feeling how masturbatory her altruism can be, hyper-aware of how she looks, and can she rest until she is the perfect good, and would she know when to or when not to act, her moral compass behind her, approaching, Gabrielle, she thinks, where would I be without you? but why was it so hard to resist feeling as good as she did, the wrong kind of good—does one simply become the other kind over time? she may have thought in the past, Gods, what an embarrassment, a small fade in shine, a loosening of the shoulders (Gabrielle noticed before Xena even felt it), and at last, with something almost like sorrow in her eyes, like asking for forgiveness, “…but it’s gonna hurt.”
“It’s either that or I’m here all day, I’d rather just rip the leeches off, you know?”
With hardly a second thought, Xena, too concerned now of the rightness of her rightness, acts without self-analysis, no worry—to have waited a moment longer would have been to wait a million moments longer. The lifting was easy enough, she was in there, and the cuts lined her flesh where her long skirt and skin had ribboned blood-tears and mud (had it rained so recently?), but the scream in her ear briefly too much to bear, so she dropped the woman once she was free from the hole. She landed with an “Ow!”
A long silence followed, as though sound itself has been cast into Tartarus (was there a God of sound? Gabrielle wondered as she paused her steps to appreciate the vacuum, the deafness, not wanting to crunch the grass, the break of life, a scream, a terror), where had that chime gone—has our blessing run out?
The woman stood, up on her feet, the one infirmed leg still running red trailing loose flesh—a tattered scroll with words in sigil tattooed like a curse, slashed like a refusal, each thorn-cut a breaking of chain-link, each new free sheath an identity; Xena thinks she can decipher one with the phrase “ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ɪs ᴀʟᴡᴀʏs ʟᴏᴡᴇʀ” and notices how dry her lips are before turning to Gabrielle, to lick and wet those lips conspicuously, imagining little Gabrielle’s head pressed against her cunt, taking breaths filled with her, and knowing this must be the real (though, of course, now that sigil had been torn). “Thank you,” the woman offers, “you must give me your name so I may express my gratitude properly.” She extends her hand toward Xena with the other hand wrapped around her back. Xena scrutinizes the gesture: posture and pose static; rehearsed, as though it all led up to this, the telos of the plot—unless she’s mistaken, unless this is a royal from an unfamiliar land, with unfamiliar customs—and truthfully, she had never seen such fabrics as the victim’s—light and lacy, adorned with jewels, over a strong, cream-colored skirt and matching corset (standing as she did with arm outstretched, the fabric draping like a wing, the woman most resembled a large insect).
Xena smiles and shakes the hand, but merely offers back, “you first.”
Baring perfect teeth, a sinister grin, the woman answers in a voice low as a rattle—“it doesn’t have to be you”—before a crash of lightning strikes the trees, and almost as quickly as the fiery branch began its descent, the woman brandished a knife from behind her back (crystalline, adorned with pressed flowers, the likes of which Xena had never seen before) and cut Xena—not to kill, but to wound—on the exposed back of her hand. She pulls back before Gabrielle yells the damning name “XENA!” and runs to her friend, the victim now backing up, and is she glowing? Millions of sparkles, a whole cosmos of glittering stones.
Xena looks back in horror at Gabrielle and shouts “No!”
“But that’ll do it, Warrior Princess,” the formless opening groans; a crevasse with wings, drooping head a clitoris, a body-tearing corset like a gaping wound, a portal into the heavens opening, and approaching, and soon it’s all that Xena sees before—it’s gone. She crouches on the ground holding her head, little stars sprinkling rain above her, draped in gossamer spun by the sky. Gabrielle could barely perceive it, but her friend had just been somewhere indescribable, and was coated in the debris of starstuff. Quickly, the rain reached them, and it all washed away, into the soil again.
“Are you alright?” Gabrielle whispers as she holds her friend close, she still collapsed on the ground, inconsolable.
“Is she gone?” whines the warrior, voice hoarse, muffled between her arms.
“I think so.”
“Gabrielle,” she starts, and with a voice exasperated by centuries, “what’s my name?”
With a chuckle, Gabrielle looks around, scanning for the obvious answer to the obvious question, “well that’s easy,” pausing through scoffs, the smile leaving her face, “it’s… well, of course, it’s…” Gabrielle’s face falling, no longer concerned with the question, only in her friend, this friend she has known for so long, her hand pressed to this person’s back. This someone she knows deeply, loves deeply; her love, her family, what was her name?
The warrior doesn’t move. Even as the mud puddle pools to her lips, the warrior doesn’t move.