Note: As you’ll notice when you scan the text, this piece is written in a first-person perspective.Disclaimer: Xena Warrior Princess and its characters are the properties of Renaissance Pictures, Studios USA and MCA/Universal. This text is a strictly non-commercial piece of fan fiction inspired by and celebrating this wonderful show.
Spoiler Alert: There are a couple of slight spoilers from season 5.
Sex & Violence: The tune is different from the heroism of the series. It is about evil. Although the violence isn’t more frequent here, it is presented in a somewhat harsher manner. There are also allusions to deviant sexuality (deviant as in deviating from what most of us believe is healthy to all involved). It has is no great part of the story, word-count wise, but it is there.
Altitude
by Christopher Härnryd
I have hated before. Many times. But I wonder if I have ever hated like this. It is intoxicating. My mind is boiling. I see rainbows and vomiting volcanoes as my spirit tumbles in the wind between the worlds.
I am dead now, and I believe that I hate the one responsible for it more than anyone has ever hated anyone else. The ones who hate themselves excepted, of course. Only if you know someone completely, can you hate completely. But I came to know Xena quite well, and my revenge will be accordingly intimate and diabolical.
As a matter of fact, I am grateful for the hatred. The ordinary, mundane world of flesh and stupidity is a realm of mixtures. Nothing is pure, everything is diluted and mixed up with other things. They say the strongest metals are alloys, that the best bows are laminated by many different woods and bones. Gluttons in faraway Rome bring all kinds of food together from all the corners of the world and compose the feasts of their dreams.
Oh, many a hunter will say that nothing tastes as sweet as clear water from a mountain stream. After they have thirsted for days, that is.
In the world of the living, the mediocre prevail.
But beyond that world…
In this spiritual realm, my hate gives me strength. The purer my emotion, the stronger the force I have to command. I must nurture that hate: sustain it with memories, use future hopes to fan it into a forest-fire that will carry me to my goal.
But will hate alone blast me through the barrier to the realm of the living? I do not wish to return simply to wreak my revenge. I want to live.
But what is this?
Is there another here in the limbo with me? There is something…an essence…
“Go away,” a voice says, childlike.
“And who are you?” I ask. This is after all a region that is neither for the living, nor for the dead. It is for transition. Yet, this being lingers here, caring not to conserve integrity, letting the precious self leak out and disappear into nothing.
“No one. Soon. I said go away.”
I imagine I look like a shimmering wisp in the image of my living appearance. The other one, she is a she. In the same manner, her form is visible. A young girl crouching, hugging her knees. But there is a cloud around her, a cloud of power. A nimbus. She is no ordinary mortal ghost.
I need power if I am to return, and here she sits, wasting her vast (incredibly vast) reserves. I look at her closely. She is older than I thought, a young woman. Her spirit self seems used to wearing armour.
“What a waste,” I mutter.
“Yes, isn’t it!”
Venom. Interesting.
“You can go back, you know. Why don’t you?”
Now her head snaps back and she stares at me. Dark eyes with a hint of hellfire:
“Now listen to me: all my life I’ve wanted this, a release from the pain. Release and revenge. I got my revenge, at last, and watched her lose the one she loved the most. And I managed to get killed. Now, leave me alone.”
“And that made you happy, did it? Getting killed? It isn’t that hard for many people…”
“It is if you’ve become a god.”
“Really?” I comment; my astonishment in no way faked. I don’t believe in gods, but there are certainly extremely powerful spirits who thrive on flattery and sacrifice. I get the feeling that she likes neither. “How come?”
“Why did anything happen in my life?” she answers with a sarcastic sigh. “Xena made me a monster. Xena made me a god. Xena killed me.”
“Oh? Then we have something in common.”
“Don’t tell me,” she sneers. “Xena killed you too.”
I find that I like this woman. We would have been a great pair.
“I made her,” I answer. “So, in a sense, I’m your grandmother.”
“Don’t you say anything about my family,” she growls.
She is clearly Greek. I search for a better analogy she can appreciate:
“Your faerie godsmother, then. You see, I can grant you a wish or two.”
She shakes her head slowly:
“Hardly.”
Time for some lies:
“You said that you wanted release. Have you found it?”
A suspicious stare.
“She killed you, true, but now you’re sitting here, with nothing but painful memories to keep you company. Do you call that release? You want oblivion, don’t you?”
She frowns. Well, she has frowned continuously, but now it deepens. Her face is small and full of expression. She is very good at frowning. And I hope I am giving her a good reason to. I continue. Prodding her like a sluggish yak, even though she is more of a sabre-tooth:
“An eternity in solitude, better than nothing?”
I ‘sit’ down beside her.
“For the last time: go away,” she commands, and there are eddies in the mist around her fingers suggesting the concentration of power. Can she have enough power to attack me here at the very outskirts of the realms of reality? My plan seems more plausible every second.
“How about me helping you to get true oblivion, and at the same time helping me get my revenge on Xena herself, not some bystander?”
Hesitation. I goad on:
“That person so well loved by Xena, she didn’t happen to be a blonde girl?”
“Your guessing isn’t helping,” she mutters.
“Well, I just thought you wanted to know that if she is the one, you didn’t kill her.”
That gets her attention. I explain a little about the vision I conjured of Xena’s future. This interests her. She opens up a little. We chat, about life and death. She seems unsure whether to trust me, as well she should be. But there is plenty of truth I can show her. To give her a taste of what drives me, and how I came to know Xena, I decide to open up to her.
In this realm of mind, memories are nothing like the murky pools of common man. Here, they sparkle and surge with blinding clarity. A trained mind, like mine, dead or not, can invite another to ride the memory rivers. There can be no falsehood there, because of their intimacy. A visitor immediately realises that.
So I invite her, and she accepts.
There is only one drawback. As she experiences my memories, I relive them too…
The drop lands with a splat just below my left eye. The sound is very much like that of a slap. It feels almost like one, too. Nortuma’s face hangs like the moon in my sky, her dark red curls dangling and bouncing in the evening wind. Her face is angular, almost like a rhomb. She is very beautiful, just not right now with her features all bulging tendons, bared teeth and blazing eyes.
“How does it feel?” she hisses, breathing heavily, “Knowing that you’ll die slowly?”
How does it feel? Terrifying, of course! I am numb and burning all at once, dreading what will come, but I keep my smile in place. I know that it hurts her to see me smile. She hates me more than anything and has done her worst to me, and here I lie and smile up to her as if it does not matter. It takes every ounce of my force of will to do it, but it is my only weapon, so that is what I use. Caught in the web, the fly laughs in the face of the wary spider.
She moves her mouth to spit on me again, but another one enters my line of sight and puts a calming hand on her shoulder. Blond hair, firm jaw. Cyane.
She is not the Cyane. Not yet at any rate. It is a nickname, gained shortly after she joined the tribe. She acts like a queen, wise, mediating, decisive, brave, compassionate, powerful in spirit and body, swift in battle…
Forgive me for not bowing to the ground, but my bonds are in the way, see? You put them there, remember?
Thus our tribe has two queens. One old and weak, one young and powerful. It is only a matter of time before the nickname becomes the honorific. Time I for one do not have.
Nortuma calms down, slightly, and looks away from me abruptly and leaves. My arms are stretched to the sides, and this makes it difficult to turn my head, but I hear the thuds of boots on hard earth, receding, until it becomes one with the rustle of the patches of stout grass I know are scattered all over this place.
Cyane looks to the side for a while. The many thongs dangling from her sleeves echo the waving of her hair, still nearly white against the ruddy and purple sky. I cannot see her focus, but the look in her eyes speaks long sagas. Her feelings for Nortuma may be unknown to the blinder members of the tribe, but for me they are obvious. The amusing part is that they are not returned. Nortuma’s heart belongs to another. Belonged to another.
When Cyane is done silently pouring love and pity after the retreating back, I expect her to give me a final look and a comment before leaving that will clear her conscience of the burden of putting me here, and state that it was all for the best. Instead, she crouches down at my side and stares at me, her habitual slight frown in place.
As for me, I wear my smile as a mask now, a thing separate from me, a carved kurgan at what will soon be my tomb. The spittle is drying on my cheek, straining my skin and itching like Hell.
“I don’t understand you,” she says finally.
No, you don’t.
“No, you don’t.”
My voice rumbles in my own ears, but I sense that it comes out weak to other ears. I did not mean to speak, but an invitation to a debate was the last thing I expected right now. Literally.
“I know our way isn’t for everyone,” she continues. “But why this? Why didn’t you simply leave?”
I almost laugh for real. For a single moment I forget my circumstances. Then I remember again, and my forced inactivity becomes intolerable.
“I followed my will,” I say.
“Everyone does,” she responds, impatient puzzlement in her eyes and voice.
“Do they? Seems to me that everyone does just the opposite.”
The dark line between her eyes fades. She thinks she understands, and she says so, and continues:
“We all have dark impulses, but all have to learn to control them.”
“They aren’t impulses,” I answer. “They ARE the will. The will is a river and you can swim upstream or downstream. What did you feel when you found Salka’s body? What did you want to do to her killer?”
She blinks, but the furrow does not reappear. As for me, my outstretched arms prevent me from catching my breath properly, making me breathe hard even after a few sentences. But before she can say anything, I continue anyway:
“You try telling me that ‘impulses’ like that are for animals. You try telling me a wolf plots revenge when her cubs are killed. A wolf hasn’t got the will to do it. Humans do. That IS what will is about, doing what you wish.”
My smiling mask actually matches my feelings now. Cyane, she shakes her head.
“There’s no strength in that. Strength comes from working together. As long as everyone serves one another, you have the strength of everyone else.”
“Strength to do what? Build yurts?” I snarl. Contempt blasts my smiling mask to pieces.
She stands.
“Swimming for too long in that river has made you numb,” she states and leaves me.
So much for metaphors.
And now I am alone with the night. I wonder why Cyane would not let them stake me for real. It is not as if it is comfortable to lie on the hard ground with your arms and legs stretched out and bound to sturdy poles driven deep into the ground. The same poles piercing my wrists and ankles would likely have speeded up my death. But I am not being punished for the murder of Salka.
This is for delving into the Black.
It is because of what I tried to do with Salka’s dead soul that I am being left here to die, instead of just being expelled, or even killed outright. But their fear of the Black is so great that they treat even a beginner in that side of the dance as if she is a true master, capable of crossing over from life to death and back again at will.
That is why not one of them must kill me. There can be no single person for my spirit to focus my revenge at. The whole council judged me guilty and named the sentence. And it is up to the cold and the thirst to kill me. And of course, to the wolves and foxes.
My muscles twitch and vibrate with cold. They left me my clothes, but no one can lie still on the ground for this long without freezing.
Of course I fight for a while, tensing my hands and feet against the bonds until blood is smeared on the coarse ropes that hold my limbs.
Do I scream? I do not think so. It takes too much effort. But I hear the screams of others. Echoes from long gone agonies. The spirits of others who have lingered and died here. They shout at me with all their strength through the ages, commanding me, begging me, to let them free or at least kill them quickly. They are faint whispers in my mind.
I will join them soon. We are all bound to this place.
The stars seem to shiver too, up so very high in the cold air. They are bound as well. Transfixed.
Ah. Soft pads on stone, their wearer much to cunning to tread on telltale grass. He is very close when I hear him.
My fear has abated. This is unreal. I simply cannot conceive that my true death-struggle is about to begin already. The night is still quite young. I turn my head with difficulty.
He sits just a spear’s length away, panting glossy-eyed and pondering the spectacle I provide. He is alone. A wolf without a pack. He does not look too well. It must have been many days since he last ate anything. Thin of frame, with lustreless, dark-grey fur.
Maybe…
I listen to him. I smell him. I brush against something with my thoughts. It must be him, and I am nearly able to reach into him. Nearly, but no. If I only could manage to touch him, I might be able to enter him.
I did that with Salka. She allowed me, thought it a funny game. When she realized what I was doing, I already had what I needed and a single hurtful memory stunned her. Then the rest was… not easy, but undisturbed.
No animal can invite a shamaness. But they have so weak wills. With strength, you can easily break through. If you can touch them.
The wolf growls inquiringly. The sound is almost comical. It stands up. Now hot, stinging fear fills my belly, because I see that I might have the chance to touch the wolf soon enough. He sees no reason to kill me, since I am lying still. So he will begin to eat right away. My abdomen, probably, that is where all the juicy stuff is.
But I have a chance. I must be very quick. I must try at the instant when his muzzle makes contact with my body. After his first bite, I probably will not be able to concentrate at all because of the pain.
The wolf trots over, sniffs around a little, and nuzzles my stomach. I strike out, the arm of my spirit amber with fear as it goes into his soul.
I am in! Now, in spiritual time, there is plenty of opportunity to act before he bites for real. His memories are all about smell and emotions. But I quickly find a strong one, a great, lovely chunk of pain, confusion, and fear. I grab it and slam it up into his tiny ‘now’.
Paralysed, he collapses over me, a northern brute imitating the antics of a spoiled Chin lapdog. Breathing becomes hard. But here, on the boundary to the spiritual realm, I still have time. And if I fail, suffocation is gentle enough compared to slow disembowelment. In fact, my disrupted breathing aids my spiritual movements.
I let my spirit flow into his, leaving only an Ariadne's thread for later.
Comedy. There is so much comedy in life and death. Look there, out on the steppe. A woman with a wolf sprawled on top. A sight for sore eyes, funny, funny. Now the wolf tries to stand, swaying as if after a barrel of fermented mare’s milk. Hilarious how the wolf staggers around, tongue hanging, eyes rolling. He falls, and comes laboriously to his feet. He begins chewing at the ropes binding the woman. It takes four eternities, one for each rope. Then the wolf collapses a final time. The woman convulses, once, twice. Then she struggles to her knees and begins to pant like the wolf. The panting turns into a throaty stuttering, then into laughter, and then into a full-blown scream that goes on for a very long time and fades very slowly.
The web is torn open. I loathed being bound to it so much that I even killed my best friend to find a way out. I failed anyway. Or did I? Without that, I would not have been staked out, and I would not crouch at a sparkling rivulet of molten ice with drops of water clinging to my chin, my thirst slaked.
The ordeal has weakened me, but only a little. I was not really staked out for that long. But I need to get much stronger if I am to do something else than hide for the Amazons for the rest of my life. It is not about retribution. They are simply too afraid of the Black, and its practitioners. Of me. If someone fears you, you have power, certainly. But you have to manoeuvre away from those stronger than you, before you can use that power.
Am I a shamaness now? Yes. I was not until they caught me. I was simply the apprentice of old Otere, and she had stopped teaching me things when she found out my nature. Ironic. She also confused being ruled by your nature with BEING your nature. She talked a lot about the White. Of how dangerous it was to try to be both black and white. I agreed wholeheartedly. There is no such thing as balance, except for very brief moments. Instead, there is struggle, everywhere. It does you no good to have that struggle within you all the time. But the White, what is that? It is up there. It is about fighting your nature. It is about denying what you wish, to try to fly like a bird. She did not want to listen when I talked back. I simply said what was obvious, all around us. We are all drawn towards earth and darkness. The Black. Even dead things fall to the ground. They do not soar towards the heavens. Oh, after death, the true Amazons say their holy word and get let in to the Light, where all is white. True Amazons, who have lived a life of denial. Is it worth it?
I asked her that. It was an honest question. She had no answer, although she pretended to have. When I no longer bothered to pretend interest in her preaching, I left her.
Amazons are wild about initiations. There are initiations for becoming a member of the tribe, initiations for becoming a shamaness. Ditto for advancing in ranks or assuming just about any position you can think of. Those rites are all about community. They make your place clear to the rest of the tribe, and fix you in place in a firm web of customs and expectations. They are for show.
Since I did not want to strangle myself with lifelong denial just to be able to float in the glaring Light afterwards, they were not for me.
All true rites of passage are for one person only, anyway. There is only you, and the question of whether your will is enough to carry you through to the other side. You can make yourself into a shamaness. You just have to figure out how.
I had figured it out by now. Resolve, that is the basic thing. The will has to be there. I tested myself by killing Salka. To see if I could. She was a way out for me, but only if I would have the guts to do what I did. I do believe I actually cried when I slit her throat over the sacrificial bowl. She was a real friend, and by dying there and then, she helped me.
The next step was trickier. Will is only enough in the long run. At any given moment, you have to have the ability to fulfil your will. Having killed her, I had to capture her soul. Otherwise I would have killed her partly in vain. But it was hard, so hard. The holy word protects the dead Amazons well. I delayed her, but I could not get a proper grip on her squirming ghost until they found me and interrupted it. The wolf was my second chance, and this time I succeeded. No matter that I did not do the same thing as I attempted to do to Salka, it was pure spiritual power, and I prevailed. The wolf and Salka helped me together. Their blood fell like molten iron onto the strong but thin strands that imprisoned me within the confines of the tribe.
Freedom, at last. And danger. But there is always danger. Not even the formidable sisterhood of Amazons can protect its members totally. Freedom is always uncertainty, and uncertainty is danger. The trick is to transform that uncertainty to accommodate your wishes. To impose your will upon the chaos of the world and light your own brand in the darkness to follow. Will. And will I have. My actions have proved that to me and to the world.
The next step is augmentation. I must steep my will in power. Sooner or later, they will come after me, my sisters the Amazons. Nortuma will come, because though Salka was my friend, Nortuma shared an even stronger bond with her. And Cyane will come, the new one at least, because she feels responsible, and because of Nortuma.
Power, then. Power to survive. And then power to dominate.
By listening carefully to what Otere did not say, I learned of the other way. The usual way for the shamaness is to travel the spiritual world. But there is nothing I can gain there without having to expend power I do not have in abundance yet. But there is another way. It is not light and airy, and there is no pathway to the Light from it. Quite the opposite.
The comatose old wolf will do nicely. I have found a splinter of an old bone that will serve as a knife. I use it to open the veins of the wolf. The blood looks purple, almost blue, in the weak light of the morning sun. I kneel beside the animal, waiting for its life to drain away. I can feel the hot soul steaming away bit by bit from the open wound. I claw slowly at the earth with my hands, scooping up lumps of dirt. I chant the chant of crossing over, but not for me, for the wolf, all the while slowly smearing my face with the dirt, tracing lines echoing the shallow furrows made by my nails.
I let the day pour over me while I enter slowly into the trance. As the sun sets, my trance deepens.
Then I take a handful of dirt and tear a sliver of still warm flesh from the opened neck of the wolf. I get up, and begin to dance, a slow dance. Heavy steps, my feet reluctant to leave the ground, and joyous to tread it again. The beat is the beat of my heart, and the echo I feel of the dead wolf’s pulse. With one fist around the dirt and one around the sliver of flesh I pound at the wolf’s spirit, chasing it away. It wants to linger, uncertain of death and life. I scream at it, and it sets off into the setting sun. It leaves its carcass behind, passing it over to the earth.
Immediately, I sense how it begins. The cold of the earth enters the cooling fur. Blind worms from afar begin to crawl towards the feast. What fluids still remain in the tissues seeps down, down, down. Already the wind has some difficulty in making the stiffening hairs wave. Earth is coming to claim its due. The power of the Black is rising and the yearning of the dead cadaver to join it becomes more palpable. I feel it. I embrace it. Smashing my hands together, I grind the wolf-flesh with dirt. Dust to dust. The resulting lump trembles with earth-power. It wants to fall, to go down, deep. I thrust it into my mouth. As specks of sand crunche against my teeth and mud and raw flesh clogs my throat, I let go of the air and fall into the ground.
This is the power of earth. Of Black. Of death. For a moment, the shock of the impact jars my bones and the blood in my mouth is my own. But it drifts away, like the ripples from a fall in the water when you sink down from the surface. I follow the weight of death. All things want to fall, and the earth is where they want to go. Only in death do we all finally realise that. As I sink down through the earth, death grows in me. My bones harden and become stone. My lungs fill up with mud. Gravel crunches in my joints, and worms crawl in my veins of soil. The roots of still-living plants lash at my passing, but my skin is a petrified crust.
I can sink for ages, maybe never reaching a halt. But I can choose a destination instead. With dull gems for eyes, I begin to make out differences in the darkness. There are streams here, sluggish, sunless streams tunnelling through the stratas of the packed deaths of ages. I can follow them. They go from sites of great slaughter, battlefields, hecatombs to dread lords of darkness, the wakes of deadly plagues. The souls of the dead rise up, up to the spiritual world. The bodies follow the way of death, down, down here. I sense the streams joining into great chthonic cataracts. Great arteries of seeping death, fed by lethargic pulses of the newly dead.
I know where they all go, but all the way there, I am not yet ready to follow. But I flow with them for a little while, only to the point where they all converge, into a titan shaft of entropy, so black and yet so glittering with negativity that it grinds the soul just to sense it.
I nearly miss it. It is so thin and the final river of death is so vast. But now I see it. A pale strand in the middle of all that flowing blackness. Like a string of marrow in a colossal spine. It runs the other way, up against the crushing relentlessness of the flow of death.
That, I follow. Up from the abyss. It is a rivulet, much like the one I drank from. It carries an aspect of death that is most peculiar. The promise of life. To a certain group, as well as (now) to me.
Now, the rivulet is long free from the darkness that brought it forth. It trickles on its own through the earth. And here it begins to diffuse. I reach a delta of sorts, where the flow dissipates and moistens the earth, charging it with the capacity to bring life. And I know what must be near. As I seek it, I find it.
There are roots here. But not the limp strands that greeted me when I descended. These are long and firm, glowing with promised life. They are a great many. I cannot see where they converge, but I know well what it is. This great tree may have its roots in earth, but nowhere does it pass the middle world of men and beasts, but instead it blooms directly into the spiritual air. The fruits that hang on the unseen branches high above are precious indeed. And here, in the earth of death, is whence their strength to grow and burst into life springs.
I grab the end of a root, like the tail of the splendid albino serpent that guards benevolent treasures in the faerie tale.
I bite with granite fangs and grind the fibres apart. Then I suck the sap that oozes forth. As I drink in ecstasy, I feel the slight swaying of a branch, high above, when a shining fruit dislodges and falls before its time, not yet a bird ready to fly, bursting open when it hits the ground. Somewhere, far beyond in the middle world, a woman awakens, sensing the change, and as her body blindly goes into labour far too soon, she knows that it will be for nothing, and her cry is hot in my brain.
To stifle that cry, I reach for another strand, and a greedy thirst for life engulfs me. I drink another life into oblivion.
I am thrice alive. The feeling is indescribable. I am invincible and I know it. But even now, I caution myself. There are those who guard the unborn. To fight those would take too much. My journey in the Black would have been for nothing if all my new power must be spent like that. I kick away from the roots of life and death, reluctant, but giddy and smiling.
Exhilarated, drunk with pure force of being, I float laughing towards the middle world, arms outstretched in triumph.
When I awake, I follow the setting sun. For many days I go west, away from the Amazon lands. It is a great game I am about to play, like that king-game they play in the land of Indus. I am my own queen now, but I need pawns to sacrifice.
Black makes its move.
I have not bothered with a charm ring for a long time now. Nothing makes you stand out as much as a black shadow against the white snow. The Amazons have discovered that I have escaped my execution. They must have gotten glimpses of my journey west. I have felt them probing. It is old Otere who is their spearhead. All the others gather in spirit dances and channel their strength to her. She roams the spiritual sky like a shining eagle, and very little escapes her gaze. Had I disappeared totally, they would have whipped themselves into a frenzy and left no stone unturned in the frantic search. As it is, they believe that I have fled to the west and taken refuge among the Pohjola. After all, they have seen it with their scrying. They believe that I am gathering an army for myself, to attack the Amazons.
What they might have disregarded is that by allowing myself to be seen, I can look back. You cannot look at something without having some essence of what you are looking at affecting you. It is simple enough. No one is unaffected by watching a violent death, or writhing sexuality. Even if you distance yourself, that too is a change in you. This holds very true for shamanism. If you send your spirit to probe something, that something can probe you too.
I probe Otere. Not much. Just enough to get an idea of her pattern. She is not searching randomly for me. There is a system, and I have glimpsed it. She is pinpointing me for a strike. And I am positive that Nortuma and young Cyane are a part of that strike. They hope to catch me before I can raise my army. They know that they can best any normal group of guards or thugs. They are, after all, Amazon elites. They know too, that a purely spiritual duel with me is to their advantage as well, since they can call upon the spiritual power of the whole tribe, channelled by dear Otere.
They had to kill me, but nobody dared, so they left me for the wilderness. Now, they must dare after all. So great is their hatred for me. It is indeed a powerful force.
What they do not know, is that I want them to come. They hate me and fear me and will try to destroy me. So, I must defend myself. But by choosing the time, place and the weapons used, I have a chance. I am not raising an army, though the Pohjolas will probably fight for me if I put some effort into it. Instead, I am grooming a champion. Just one. But with a twist.
I am no fighter. Much. However, all Amazons can fight to some extent. The emphasis is on technique, not strength. The tribe I have come to now has a lot of brutish killers, with lots of muscle and very little finesse. So, even a few basic tips, indifferently absorbed from Amazon teachers, are significant improvements for my chosen champion. But that is not nearly enough. He needs an edge (apart from that on his poleaxe). So I intend to make him immune to pain. He might very well die in a direct confrontation anyway, but if he does not react to pain, he can continue to fight until the last instant. He is a resource, and I intend to use him as much as possible. I have a draught made from a variety of mushrooms. It dulls pain effectively, but too much also dulls perception. I cannot give him enough to make him totally immune to pain. If I do, he will be virtually blinded, and of course chanceless in the coming confrontation. But there is another way to make someone’s pain go away. By accepting it yourself.
I went out alone into the hills and found a dead bear. From its skull, I have made a helmet. The leftovers from the inside of the skull, cartilage, rotted threads of brain and sinew, thin shards of bone, I knead to a pulp under the staring moon. With it, I will be able to channel to and from the helmet’s wearer, as long as the canines prick his skin and are moistened by his sweat and blood.
But now, something happens. Some warriors return from a raid to the south. They bring some inconsequential loot, and a girl. I am passing from the crude wooden cabin I have claimed as my own to the chieftain’s hide-covered longhouse. I see them drag their canoe ashore. One of them drags the girl in much the same manner, by the short hair. Oddly, she does not seem to react very much to the pain, which must be considerable. I can tell that the man dragging her disapproves of her glazed expression. Come nightfall, he will probably do his outmost to make her scream and fear. The others will help him.
Compassion. It is something that only the very weak-willed exhibit. Those who are unable to help themselves and so look desperately until they find someone even worse off than them. The sickening thing is how this inflates them with pride. They do not even realise how pathetic they seem to the rest of the world. They do not understand that they expose their weakness for all to see, a pale campfire in a night of predators.
Compassion. It means: come piss on me.
But the girl will make things much easier for me. And if Otere is watching, it will give her something to discuss frowning in the bunya.
So I step up to the eager warrior, so bursting with lust that he hardly notices me until I am right in front of him.
We cannot have that.
As I command him to release the girl, I lock eyes with him and let my will surge forward. He has no training or talent whatsoever. I might as well try to initiate a spiritual duel with a rock. But he senses something, a woodlouse squirming in the sudden light.
He lets go, but reluctantly and with a show of sneering indifference. Good. That gives me a reason to send something into his hut this night. Something cold and slithering with questing tongue and poison teeth.
There are no coincidences. Only the will to use what is available, or the weakness not to.
A week passes by. I have an obedient and faithful slave. She is grateful because I saved her, and she misses her dead parents enough to want to see me as a mother. I begin to feed her tiny bits of the dough, to attune her. This will make it easier to transfer my champion’s pain to her, instead of to me.
I tend to my bear-helmeted warrior too. He must have some initiative left to be of use in a combat, so I cannot bludgeon him completely into obedience with drugs and spells. He desires me, but he will have to be content with little Anokin. I participate a little though, both to make sure he does not kill her or drives her insane with pain, and also to have some fun.
I take the opportunity to test the channelling of pain. While he is busy on the floor with her, I open my mind to them both. The glaring difference between the two emotions almost makes me throw up with vertigo. The fishbone leister I hold ready to pierce his skin drops from my fingers and bounces on his tense body. He does not notice, hardly a mystery with his mind roaring with rabid lust. Anokin’s pain is layered, like an old bog, the acute physical pain and humiliation of the moment only partly hide her sorrow and loneliness. She wants me to do anything to her just to make him stop. Fair enough, but first the experiment. There. I have retrieved the leister and poke him with it. The pink blossom of agony is lost in his red pleasure anyway, but it slams into my mind and I feel it for a very long instant before I manage to pass it on to Anokin. At first I think I have failed. She does not react in the slightest… there! A momentary confusion, as a completely new area of piercing hurt explodes. I sigh with relief. It will work.
Life is good.
Correction, life is nothing. I am good.
The rodents squeak with silent voices, as something passes through the area where their skulls hang rattling in the wind. I hear and awaken. They come from the west. I congratulate myself in having anticipated that. For all her pompousness, Cyane the Younger is quite cunning, a legacy from her childhood, no doubt.
I take the congealed lump of cranial scrapings and kneel by sleeping Anokin. With a start, she comes awake. Her eyes nearly glow from fear. Her relief when she sees me and not the champion makes me giggle. I grab her jaw and force a good chunk of the stuff into her mouth.
“Eat,” I command, and then I release her. As she struggles to her knees, hands to her mouth, I can see that she is trying to obey me, though her throat and belly convulse with instinctive loathing at the rancid taste. Suddenly, the Black in it hits her. She collapses. Her body goes limp. Only her face remains livid. She gasps for breath like a salmon on a rock.
“Help me,” she mouths. “Help me.”
“No,” I shake my head, smiling encouragingly. “But you’re gonna help me.”
I swallow the rest.
I ride the phantom bear that slithers like a mammalian snake through the trodden grass of the village. I enter the warriors’ house, and am drawn between the glaring lights of life that snores here, to my champion. At once a sleeping human, and a translucent bear, rampant and roaring. I disengage myself from the serpentine ghost on the ground and enter the full-grown bear. Now I ride the champion. I see what he sees. I feel what he feels. He awakens instantly. His hands grope for the little leather-vial I have prepared with the dulling draught. Then he reaches for his poleaxe, and walks out of the house.
I prepare myself for a long wait. The charms I set up are quite a distance from the village, to give me ample warning…
Something moves above. Suddenly they are everywhere. Like newborn shadows, the Amazons emerge from between cabins, jumping from branches of nearby trees, or from rooftops, or simply vaulting in sight at the end of a silent run. Most of them come from the east, a few from north or south. No one comes from the west. Clever.
Four of them enter the house of the warriors. Three others go to the chieftain’s longhouse. Two more begin peering into tents and cabins. One moves up to the champion.
The moon is half in the sky. Poised. This is a moment of decision.
The Amazon in front is Nortuma. I can hardly believe my good fortune. I know that even if I make my champion immune to pain, and even if he is extremely strong, Cyane the Younger can best him. She fights with total control. As long as she keeps her calm, there is no one who can defeat her. She has one important weakness, apart from that pitiful tendency to care for others. She is so used to being in control, that when she loses her calm, she fights with the skill of a sleepwalking reindeer. If I kill Nortuma, will she still be able to keep her calm?
Nortuma points her curved blade to my belly and advices me to stand still. I nod, fearful, then I mutter some gibberish. This confuses her for a tiny instant, and she is not fast enough when I bury my poleaxe in her side. Her blade flashes over my belly, an imperfect cut. Back in the cabin, my real body convulses, though, but the pain is minor. I don’t have to pass it on, yet.
I have mere instants to act before the others are upon me. The body I ride is very strong. I charge one of them. As expected, she darts to the side at the last instant. Since I anticipated that, I was already turning the long poleaxe to the side, assuring that whatever side she chooses will have at least some part of the poleaxe to hit her with. The pure force of the charge stuns her, and I can thrust the blunt end into her face, crushing it.
But now the others are here, including Cyane. And I discover two things. One is that my champion's bulk works against me. The muscles are simply to stiff and large. They get in each other’s way, so to speak. In short, I am too clumsy. And you need to be very swift indeed to survive for long surrounded by attacking Amazons. The other thing is that Cyane is in control still. Maybe she has not realised that the downed Amazon is her precious Nortuma. Maybe she has learned enough self-discipline to ignore it for the moment.
The first serious strike is to my leg. I sense the tip of the inrushing pain, the briefest of moments before it strikes. I hurl it away from me, straight into Anokin.
Her scream startles the Amazons. The majority disengage, including Cyane, leaving only two to deal with me, the champion.
I try to bypass them, to intercept those running towards the source of the scream, the cabin where my body (and that of Anokin) lies. Abandoning caution, I simply overrun one enemy, earning a deep thrust into the stomach. Anokin’s scream now is surprisingly rough. I am glad I deflected that one.
The poleaxe enters the back of one of those who are running towards the cabin. Immediately after, one of the Amazons I left behind does the same trick to me, with her sabre. Unprepared, I feel the pain crashing into my spine and lungs. The wound in my stomach is probably lethal too, after a day or two, but this promises a far more rapid demise.
I leave the broken body of my staggering champion. His roar as he suddenly feels the accumulated pain of the multiple wounds is a distant gurgle. Too much blood is entering his throat the wrong way.
I open my eyes to see the door shivering in front of me. More abrupt is the shifting of the sound. The pumping of blood in the champion’s head, the hiss of open air, the rapid steps of the fighters, all of that disappear and are replaced by a barrage of dull thuds as the Amazons outside are kicking and striking the door to break it down.
I need a plan.
Luckily, I find one.
Thus it is, that when Cyane the Younger enters the cabin through broken planks, her wide eyes see me holding Anokin tight. The knife in my hand is pointed to her bared throat, held so close that it vibrates in tune with the rapid pulse.
“Hello, Cyane,” I smile. The smile is faked. I use it to conceal my fear that Cyane will choose this moment to charge me in berserk fury, something I desired only when I was in the body of a hulking brute without the capacity to feel pain. As it is, she can kill me within seconds if she chooses. My knife is my only weapon now.
She reacts quickly, whirling the fingers of her free hand in the gesture ordering her warrior’s to surround the enemy. I don’t hear the Amazons outside, but I have no doubt that they are rapidly taking up positions around the cabin, and probably on the roof as well.
“Alti,” she says panting. “You’re only prolonging the inevitable.”
“Do you mean death?” my smile broadens. “Aren’t we all?”
I hug Anokin even harder. Cyane freezes.
“I’ll tell you why I came,” she says in a calm voice. Accepting my smile for interest, she continues:
“I came to give you a quick death. It was wrong to stake you out to the wolves. No one deserves that.”
“Brave Cyane. Are you perhaps counting on me being so grateful that I won’t haunt you for ever and ever when you kill me?”
She shakes her head:
“No.”
“You could have banished me, you know,” I point out, my smile shrinking a little. “It would’ve spared you the trouble of coming here.”
Someone is aiming a throwing axe at my neck. I can feel it from across the cabin. Side effects of my trance lingers.
“Call them off and I’ll tell you how you can spare the life of this child.”
In this at least, Cyane is predictable. She obeys. When the order has been given, she looks into my eyes:
“Speak.”
“I will leave this village. I will seek my fortune in the Northeast. I never much liked your sickening community spirit, so I’ll leave you alone. The effect will be much like the banishment traditionally given to Amazon criminals.”
“Not to a black shamaness,” she says through clenched teeth.
“True. Does that outweigh the life of this child?”
There is some more bargaining, but finally Cyane accepts the inevitable. Inevitable, that is, if you value the lives of others as if they were your own. I give her my word that I will release Anokin the morning after.
At this point, I evict my new spiritual friend from the story of my life.
“Is that it?” she asks, chagrined. “This has nothing whatsoever to do with Xena or me. If you have a point, make it!”
“Impatient? But that’s exactly why I skip some boring parts. I can tell the short of it, if you wish: time passed. I did indeed travel to the north, and to the east, north of the Amazon lands. Anokin was with me, of course. I use my word as I wish, holding it, flipping it, striking with it, even breaking it, if it serves my purpose. Words are tools for the will, as is everything else. Very few people truly realise that. The Amazons cursed my name, but they did not pursue. They had some battles to fight with the Pohjola, another enemy gained in the pursuit of ‘good’.”
“White. The colour of snow-blindness.”
“Very poetical,” she mutters.
“I was gaining spiritual power,” I continue. ”But I knew I had to combine it with physical force to make it in the material realm. And none of the chieftains and warlords I encountered caught my fancy. It had to be someone special. I was in no mood to waste time grooming another failure.”
“Then I started hearing about Borias and Xena. Borias seemed successful enough, a shrewd strategist with patience enough to win by many means. But Xena…”
“I learnt much and made enemies during that time. I came to learn about the power of the house of Lao in the lands beyond the Great Wall. Someone or something in that family had access to tremendous power. Spiritual power. And I learned that this Xena had lived in the house of Lao for some time. She had had some grievous wounds that had healed somehow during her stay. Before her arrival there, she had been subservient to Borias. Now, they were leading their forces together. And while Xena had quite a reputation for savagery before her stay beyond the Wall, now she was a monster. Thus I learned something very important.”
“Xena’s healing indicated that the spiritual power in the house of Lao was of the White. But Xena had nothing of White in her during her campaigns in the Northeast. So this was someone who had come into contact with the White, and consciously rejected it.”
She interrupts me (a sign of interest):
“Very NOT interesting.”
“I wanted someone powerful,” I reply. “Tell me, if one rock is dropped from a boat and one from a mountaintop, which one makes the largest splash when it lands?”
“Oh, I really love metaphors,” she shakes her head. “All right. Since Xena had been in contact with the good, she was to be an even stronger force of evil. Basic.”
“Yes, basic. Fundamental. True. The more I heard about her, the more I wanted her. She was an excellent fighter, with an unsurpassed harshness, and stunted spiritual powers. There was no end to the uses I could have of her.”
“People tend to say that,” she agrees.
Then I invite her once more. Reluctantly, she accepts, and memories pour down on us once more. This time, I show her most of it. From that fateful day in the yurt when I learned that Xena was with child, to the disastrous spiritual duel of yesterday.
She is silent for some time after that. But it is a thoughtful silence, not a reverting into nihilistic apathy.
“What’s your plan?” she then says, reluctantly.
I explain, the part she needs to hear, anyway. Then I take her by the ‘hand’, and we start to travel.
We are at the very outskirts of reality, beyond even much of the spiritual realm. And we are going to a completely different region. We should not be able to. We are anomalies both. She, an immortal god, recently killed. Me, a dead shamaness with powers and allegiances of unusual kinds.
No one should even be able to find the way. Imagine a fish fighting its way out of a barrel of salt, pushing the lid open, crawling over the furs on the floor of the yurt, out into the open steppe, slithering mile after mile over hard ground, looking for the sea it once knew.
I have left some marks, though. I have killed many just to follow the path of their spirits. I can follow those paths back to the spiritual realm proper. The journey seems to take forever. It is like trying to fall uphill. And gradually succeeding.
But then, we must go elsewhere. This is the realm where dead souls ought to be. That is why I have strived to avoid it. Here, you have few choices, besides moving on to Eternity, or linger to howl unheard in the frozen wastes of the land of the dead.
There is one more alternative, however. You can go back. Not back in the sense that I or anyone else would normally want to. Once your body has passed beyond a certain stage, revivification is impossible, but you can still return to it. You can clothe yourself in the flesh you left behind, but it will remain dead. You will simply stay immobile with your bones forever, sensing nothing but the gentle pushes of maggots as they search your marrow for morsels. Few choose that.
I do. It is our stepping-stone. And my new friend rides me.
Now I lie in a coffin. I knew I could trust Yukagir and his sons to follow my instructions regarding my funeral. I knew I could trust them fearing my revenge from beyond the grave if they did not.
I probe with my sense of touch, and my spiritual sense, in tandem. There is still much of me left. I am not so rotten after all! Time is difficult to judge after our slow journey, but this is a question of weeks, maybe a few months at most, and while the spring is moving on, still the cold runs deep in the ground.
I sense contact with the wooden floor of the coffin. Yukagir refrained from shrouding me, and removed my clothes, as I ordered. Whatever matter leaves me goes down through the wood of the floor (a hard wood but with plenty of cracks, chosen for permeability). I begin to follow the tiny streams of half-dried fluids that seep down, mingling my flesh with that of the earth. This is the way of the Black.
Very slowly at first, my awareness sinks down. The dirt and the pebbles below the coffin welcome me into their darkness. My soul gains weight. It dons a fancy wig of tangled mycelium. Petrified roots become gnarled limbs. Shards of stone form my nails and teeth. I look at darkness through crystal lids and see my companion struggle beside me like a drowning woman.
“Don’t fight it, let go,” I caution. Her strength of integrity is remarkable. She follows me here without transforming at all. A powerful spirit indeed. She will be perfect.
She does not heed my advice willingly. Only when I ask her if she is afraid of dying does she stop, and fold her arms over her chest with her eyes closed. She sinks by me without a word.
I did tell her that we must go and visit a powerful ally of mine. That was a lie. He is no ally. He has no allies. But you can deal with Him, the Enemy of the Lamb. But you had better be ready to pay in a currency He will accept, and pay well.
I do not follow the large, black, rivers of death. His abode is sideways, askew. He has borders both to Eternity and to the rest of the Black. But to walk through the gates of Eternity would doom me, so this is the way I must use to contact Him.
The homogenous pressure down, down begins to change, and fracture, as we float nearer His domain. His is neither the serenity of the White or the stillness of the Black. Here, pain rules. In this state, I (and surely she) can feel it. The earth vibrates, moaning. There is heat here, but searing heat, not simple warmth. Like ruby veins, tendrils of agony unfold against us, trembling, burning. There is no way to avoid the occasional flash of memory, as the minds of the tormented dead overload again and again with unbearable insights and recollections.
The Enemy of the Lamb is a collector. A soul collector. Those denied the White must end up somewhere, and He sets his traps at many places, to make sure that he catches those unwanted by anyone else.
Had my powers been a fraction weaker, this would have been my fate. As it is, I visit Him as I have before, and I have something for His collection…
Are you mine?
The voice startles me, as it always does. It is a voice without breath. The words are figurines of sharp obsidian that tears into the brain and slowly dissolves. But for all its awful terror, the voice makes me giddy with happiness. Because, it means that we are now in His realm. I answer as I usually do:
“As long as you give me the power I want, I am yours.”
Yes.
“I want enough power to conquer those who guard the great tree at the golden navel of the earth. The tree of unborn souls.”
He does not acknowledge this. Unthinkable that He has not heard. But until I make Him an offer, He will not deign to speak.
“Prince of Darkness, are your borders secure?” I ask instead.
This surprises Him. In this realm of His, I sense His emotion thundering everywhere. Not one for small talk, He always takes what you say seriously. And you had better do the same. In the end, He does not answer this either. But I am satisfied. So I make my offer:
“I will give you the soul of a dead god in return.”
The young woman’s fury is frightening. Even were she alive, she would have no way of utilising her powers in His realm. But with blazing eyes and the shriek of some primal (and rabid) carnivore, she lungs for me with hands like claws.
I retreat, but He has her. A red cocoon is spun about her in the briefest of instants. And there is strong satisfaction in his voice as he says:
Yes.
This was the part I withheld from her. My betrayal, of course, but also my dealings with powers such as Him. You have to pay them in souls. Whole souls or part of souls, but their hunger is for corruption. And you cannot corrupt matter. It is already as soiled as it can be. Spirit, now, the spirit can be corrupted. Infused. Digested. Oh, yes.
Had she known the nature of my earlier bargains with Him, she would not have trusted me. Not that she did trust me as it was, but my broth of lies and truths was compelling enough to make her go along just to be certain. After all, if I was right and she was to get neither oblivion, nor revenge, she would have to reconsider her choice of sitting idle at the fringe of existence.
I regret that we never met in life. The world would have been ours and ours would have been the only laughter ever heard.
It was not to be.
Xena, here I come.