FICTION
By Ana Ortiz
Disclaimers: Xena and Gabrielle don't belong to me. Nor do The Lone Ranger,
Tonto, and Superman. The beach ant belongs to itself. I have used substantial
backstory material from the series X:WP. No copyright infringement is intended,
and I sure won't profit from this.
This is an ALT story. There's a bit of sex, a mention of violence, and lots
and lots of sand.
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed. I Corinthians 15:52
I laugh as cool salt water, thickened with clots of soft sand, dribbles from
my right ear and runs down the side of my face. So much for hearing the rhythms
of the ocean, or for receiving messages from some other part of the universe,
known or unknown, through the medium of the large pink conch I just managed
to wrest from the surf. I should have known that like everything else in this
space, the shell and its properties would be simple. Manipulating it has triggered
no greater adventure than having to lean over and strike myself on the head
- hard - to get the water out of my very ticklish ear canal. I am the Warrior
Princess, I laugh to myself, I've got to get my licks in somehow.
The worst injuries I will probably garner here will be blisters on my bare feet
if I stand too long on the un-shaded, dry stretches of sand between the sea
and the rushes at the edge of the dunes. And if this tragedy should come to
pass, the burns would heal by the time I returned again, anyway. There is a
reassuring banality to the dangers of this landscape. I wince as a jagged fragment
of shell slices into an un-calloused spot on my left heel. “Watch out for
the Warrior Princess,” I mutter in mock anger at the scattering of sharp
little bits of dead sea life littering the shore, at the sand flies and the
ticks that rest on the rushes, and at the gulls that threateningly approach
the two sacks of raspberries I've left covered under a stand of sea pines at
the near edge of the dunes. Nothing seems to be very scared at the revelation
of my identity. I will lose most of my battles here, except perhaps those against
the gulls, if I am vigilant.
This is the place I found for myself once I gained some Understanding of what
I really was. It's not often that I can rest here. I know now that sleep must
have taken in its grasp the imaginations of my masters, or that some pressing
event in their own lives must hold them sway, of such proportion that they refrain
from sparing me much thought, that they pause from putting me to the test in
still another novel way. Once I Understood well, the privacy of this place and
its quiet predictability became precious. Only one other comes here, and I hope
she will arrive soon. I know from experience that because we are yoked together
in our toil, our rest times often coincide. So far, I have been fortunate that
she has chosen to join me when she can. She comes here, where we can enjoy the
seaside and – as best we can – create ourselves in each other's eyes.
The cut on my foot is smarting a bit, so it seems that defending my berries
is the better part of valor, rather than continuing down the stretch of beach.
Besides, she will seek me up near the pines, by the place I always store her
treats and our camp supplies – I would not have her come, take a cursory
look, and think that it will be one of her solitary times. As I strip off my
armor and leathers, rolling them into a loose bundle that will serve as my pillow,
I see a lone ant making its way off the sand with a piece of seaweed thrice
its length clasped in its jaws. I carefully lay myself down and, turning on
my side, watch its deliberate progress. “Admirable effort, little one,”
I whisper to my insect companion, “But wait a minute… what if none
of this is really happening – and, like, we're all in somebody else's head,
and they're making us up.” I laugh sourly at the familiar joke, as I dig
my elbows down to the cooler layer of sand. It does feel wonderful to stretch
out my legs, and have the warmth rise up out of the ground and creep up into
the muscles of the small of my back. My hand starts to fall asleep from holding
it up to block the sprinkles of sunshine that come through the pine branches
from my eyes. I surrender to the impulse to close my eyes, for if sleep should
take me, I can rest assured – here, no other place – that the constellation
of my emotions and thoughts will be much the same when I awake.
When back on that endless day in that perpetually feuding village, Joxer first
uttered the fateful words I directed to the persistent ant, I thought I had
just been regaled with another example of the extremes of stupidity that only
he seems capable of. How the gods had wasted good air and water on that distant
approximation of a human mind! Gabrielle is also given to metaphysical speculation
but, even on henbane, Gabrielle's imaginative ramblings never sink to such pathetic
circularity. Ah, but Joxer would have enjoyed the last laugh had he ever Understood.
It took me so long. Over the years I had to systematically discard alternative
explanations: the Fates, diverse malevolent gods, madness, a particularly effective
form of torture assigned to me in Tartarus, or –my recurrent favorite –
an extremely capricious and anti-social personality that I could not alter and
that I imposed with the cruelest fervor upon those who loved me best. I suppose
some of those discarded options could be worse than the truth.
I thought that if the gods had gifted Joxer with witlessness, they had graced
me with a temperament possessing the consistency of a weathervane at the mercy
of a cyclone. Was I compelled back towards domesticity in the placid Amphipolis
of my childhood, or was this the time for the Destroyer of Nations to drive
the weaker races to the brink of extinction? Was I powerfully called by nature
to be a mother, or were babies just good to encounter during the occasional
rescue mission, a challenge for those of us adept at tossing and juggling less
fragile objects? But the dizzying arbitrariness went beyond merely temperament
to encompass all aspects of taste and skill. One day, I would exhibit a proficiency
in the arts of the bedroom to challenge the most debauched specialist working
in a Phoenician bordello, the next I would find myself receiving instruction
in the most basic mechanics of self-pleasuring from my best friend. The only
touchstone of reliability I could lean upon was my un-failing affection for
my horse.
Then the nature of corporeal existence itself started to shift in frightening
ways for me. I am not speaking here of traveling beyond death, of visiting the
Fields, or Heaven and Hell, and Tartarus and all those lands that lie beyond
mortality. These places and states all made sense to me at the time, although
I Understand now that ordinarily resurrection after crucifixion affords one
greater notoriety than what I have achieved. I suppose in a way I have been
granted a following. I remember the early days, in which I though I had been
elevated to the Olympian pantheon in some fashion, for I was most certainly
being invoked as a presence towards a greater end. Without warning I would be
summoned to the most diverse and strange of circumstances, by the calling of
my name. I learned, though, that my divinity was of the most passive sort, since
I could see and hear the plight of my worshippers but do nothing to assist them.
And what worshippers they were.
The first day that it happened I found myself materializing first amidst a group
of frenetic youths, Nubian, I presumed, from their dark skin coloring. They
were naked save their leather shoes and large breeches, which flapped as they
jostled and jumped, excitedly attempting to gain possession of a large orange
ball. The hard stone court, I remember, was surrounded by the tallest structures
I had ever seen, much taller than the pyramids of Egypt, and blocking out the
natural light as effectively as the if they were the high peaks of Indus. I
smile now to remember how New York impressed my on that, the first of my many
visits. The raucous play of the children drew my attention towards the earth
again, and then I noticed her, a sullen slender figure standing at the side,
a half tunic granting her little more modesty than the boys bouncing and throwing
the ball. “XENA!” she shouted angrily at the knot of struggling players.
“I can jump as high as Xena if you give me a chance,” she insisted
with a fiery determination. And with no further hesitation she indeed flew towards
them, raising up a respectable imitation of my war cry that momentarily distracted
them from their game. In fact, as the scene faded before my eyes and the faintness
took me up, I noted with great pleasure that she had used the disruption and
her speed to her advantage, and now cradled the much desired orb tightly in
her arms.
My next stop was much more troubling, for it brought me face to face with what
I had always suspected was one effect of my reputation and re-known. I was on
a bed, and not alone, that was all too clear. But the one who called me by name
was both alone and with company. I have, in my time, come upon persons who poorly-timed
or ill-placed their solitary efforts at relieving their lust, and have always
averted my eyes and made myself away without drawing notice. On this occasion,
though, I was riveted to the spectacle of a young dark-haired woman – quite
pretty for one not blonde - clearly laboring under her sheets, to bring herself
over the edge of pleasure. It was her incantation that stunned me and held me
in place. “Xena, there …oh… oh, Xena you're doing me good, doing
me good,” she chanted to the rhythm of her frenzied arm movements. Yes,
that's what I do now, I thought to myself in helpless embarrassment, I do good.
I just want to do good. As the spasms of release took her, her words lost some
of their clarity, but I could still make out the grunted pronouncements that
punctuated her hip thrusts: “Oh, coming, baby… oh Xena, your tits,
oh yeah, I'm riding them…I'm coming…XENA!” I looked down at my
chest tentatively. My breastplate was still intact, in place, and mercifully
dry. The woman rolled onto her side, sated, as the nauseating feeling of impending
dislocation once again flooded through me.
So that day I thought myself a goddess. But a goddess of what? Of children's
games? Of stolen pleasures? Of course, this was early on. There's very little
to surprise me left under the sun anymore. Such naughty minds at work! But also
such a need for the hope of overcoming adversity: that young lass who threw
herself into the athletic fray against the odds remains in my memory as much
as any of the elaborate orgies prepared for me over the past seasons. Of course,
I'm not a goddess. I Understand that now. It wasn't until that afternoon I took
a fit and nearly killed Gabrielle that it all became clear. I looked over my
shoulder, watched the battered body of the one I loved as it skipped over the
rough terrain, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why I was compelled
to smile and drive on forward, instead of stopping the damn horse and tending
to her. I mean I had gotten the tantrum out of my system the moment Ephiny's
arm snapped – everything else was such excess. Then the cliff edge. Then
Illusia. It was sometime between the moment I found myself singing plaintively
on the cross, and the moment I watched my doppelganger, poised to stab Gabrielle
as she lay bound to a simulacrum of Dahak's altar, explode that I had my epiphany.
Gabrielle was singing? I had just tried to murder her several times? Someone
out there could make us do anything they wanted to. We were pawns for someone's
amusement, and given some of the predicaments the Oympians themselves were finding
themselves in, I didn't think it was them.
With increasing awareness came more contact with the others of our kind. I had
no idea of the worlds made available to me in exchange for my servitude. I derive
no small pleasure from the fact that Alti has yet to figure it out; this is
ironic given her storylines and how I am supposedly the denser of the two of
us. Those of us who Understand know each other's paths and adventures. Sometimes
we watch or read them together in the amorphous common space we can choose to
inhabit between our appearances. I tend to socialize the most with others who
have resisted all this, who have taken a long time to Understand because they
loved their sense of purpose. So I may sometimes have to “work” with
the newer kind, like Buffy and Scully, but I prefer to sit in quiet camaraderie
with the heroes who really thought they were heroes, guys like Superman and
the Lone Ranger. It might be in part because of how gentle and respectful they
are with Gabrielle when she deigns to join in these gatherings. Clark ruffles
her hair and calls her “Xena's little kryptonite.” They aren't going
to try and make her talk about work. They aren't going to make her talk about
anything. These older guys – they know to watch her eyes for anything she
needs to say. By the time she makes it here, she's had enough of words. There
are others who come here sometimes as well: those who really lived but have
since their deaths taken on a veneer of unreality. Those are the ones with the
poorest attitudes, for sure, for they are outraged at the liberties taken with
their lives. You should have heard Lao Tzu after they made him into an oversized
comatose infant in one of his assignments. I guess I have less to lose. And
if those between fact and fiction have some canon of authenticity to appeal
to, to fuel their moral outrage, it is also true that they are that much more
bound to the tenets of mortal reality.
Lao Tzu will never have a place like this beach to call his own. Gabrielle and
I started coming here once we Understood it would always be this way, and that
we would need to use all the knowledge and desires we collected as souvenirs
along our twisted paths to sift out the essence of what rest and comfort might
look like to such as us. The sounds of the surf, the nodding dips of the rushes
as the sea breeze invites them to dance, the hungry gulls wheeling against the
darkening evening sky: these are all our solace and the fruit of our elaborate
conjurings. Here we find pleasure and home. I shake myself into activity, realizing
that the night draws near and that a fire built and a camp well laid out will
delight her. And yes, she has at times mocked my pedestrian methods for providing
us such amenities – they could simply come as part of the landscape –
but I have come to love the simple work of collecting the wood, tapping its
weight against my hand, stacking it, and seeing the flame birthed. And these
blankets – she seldom is here to see me stretch their lengths out, and
shake free the sand – but I imagine that they hold in their weave some
of the warmth I feel towards her, much as the sand stores the heat of the noonday
sun.
I am just tucking down the second blanket roll, my back to the ocean, when a
thick missile of seaweed breaks open on my shoulder with a loud splat. She is
getting better at surprising me, for as she turns to race back towards the surf
with a loud whoop of triumph, I can see that she has already removed her boots.
Such an inpatient one, she doesn't stop to undress the rest of the way before
careening into the waves, arms outstretched as if to hug the dark blue expanse.
I pull my shift up over my head, and throw it to the side – my muscles
tensing in happy anticipation of the chase. In a heartbeat I cover the scant
yardage of beach to the water line, and after a few hops into the bracing coolness,
I am ready to plunge underwater to take her by surprise. I am rewarded for my
efforts by the prize of a vigorously wriggling foot, attached to an equally
vigorously wriggling Gabrielle, who squawks in protest at being upended. I wait
a respectable number of tugs to let her think that her escape is her own doing
before releasing her to the sea.
She heads back towards the beach, casting a teasing look over her shoulder to
check if I am still in the game. Of course I follow, but stop halfway to her
to shake the seawater out of my hair in my best wet shaggy dog imitation, the
one that always makes her laugh at me. She is so amused that she doesn't react
when I resume my pursuit, and she barely has time to turn away before I tackle
her and roll, bringing her to rest in my arms in water just a few hand-widths
deep. Her cheeks are speckled with flecks of dried sand that twinkle in the
reflection of the setting sun. “Your sand freckles are giggling at me,
Gabrielle,” I growl menacingly as I reach for one of the sensitive spots
beneath her ribs and start to tickle. Although I have the advantage as we wrestle
under the insistent beat of the waves, she soon enjoys the satisfaction of hearing
me beg for mercy, my hands retreating to bat hers away from my body. I always
let her win.
I let her pull me up out of the surf and we make our way up to the pines, where
our camp stands out as a fiery oasis in the oncoming desert of night. She scoops
a handful of raspberries into her mouth before shedding her wet and sand-logged
clothing, which she lays carefully atop a pine branch, then meets my eyes across
the fire. It is the moment of questions, and of deciding how much we want to
know. If we have been together, there is the option of trying to make sense
of it together. If we have been apart, there is the option of trying to make
sense of it together. And although it would be simple enough to find out what
the moments since our last time at the beach have held – such information
is easy to acquire for those who Understand – Gabrielle and I have pledged
each other a right to privacy rare among our kind.
“Where were you?” she hazards. “Comedy. Lots of fighting. Sight
gags. Some mistaken identity stuff – nothing out of the ordinary,”
I drawl. I am lying and she knows it, but she lets it pass. There is no need
for me to pollute the evening with the images of my warlord sword plunging into
the belly of a screaming pregnant woman, watching the fetus spill out amidst
the bloody tangle of entrails, and kicking it like so much refuse towards a
waiting hungry pig that was witnessing my enraged reaction to being refused
the keys to the defeated village's treasury. “And you, love?” I force
out, as I invite her to rest against me on the blankets. “Sex with Amazons.
Lots. Pretty good for you not being there,” she teases as she runs a finger
across my check. She's telling the truth and I know it, and I let it pass, accepting
that there are worse things that could happen to her. In fact, I am deeply grateful
that she has been off having sex with Amazons.
It seems to me sometimes that Gabrielle is a magnet for some of the harshest
burdens that are laid upon us. I mean, I am the robust heroine and receive my
share of tortures and losses, but I seem to be confectioned of rubber: my resilience
of body and emotion is exemplary. If truth be told, the arrows – literal
and metaphorical – directed towards me – are all ones I am capable
of catching. Gabrielle, on the other hand… I mean, I don't remember the
last time I was raped, but it's the odd shift that goes by without it unfolding
at least once for her. It's as if it's not quite so entertaining for it to happen
to me because I'll just shake it off. And although we have both lived the kicked-in-the-teeth
sickness of grief and betrayal, there's a way in which it just cannot break
me the way it does her. I never really expected too much from myself or others
anyway: if there was some grace to be found in the world – like the grace
of Gabrielle in my life – well, that was an undeserved gift that I had
no calling to miss if it was taken back. But Gabrielle. Well, I always thought
they were clever to name that kid of hers Hope, because damn if that isn't what
they drain out of her in periodic bloodlettings as a sacrifice for their titillation.
It was hard to miss this discrepancy in how we are treated the last time we
worked together in our originators' playing minds. As the story board neared
the end, I absented myself briefly to the place where my comrades had congregated,
anxiously watching what they expected to be the finest moment in a long collaboration
of wills mortal and ethereal. As the ending scenes unfolded I readied myself
for what I knew would be my inevitable rebound from adversity, an artistic monument
to the triumph of self-determination. But the lines scrolled out to an ominous
“Fade to black. End credits.” Silence swept across the gathering as
they absorbed the severity of what had just occurred. “ I don't get it,”
blankly confessed the Lone Ranger. That guy never could connect the dots. “Their
originators just separated them for good in the back story,” helped out
Tonto, as usual. “It never happens to the couples it should come about
for.” He smiled indulgently at the masked man at his side. “Won't
happen to us, sidekick,” reassured the Ranger, patting the darker man's
thigh. That guy never could connect the dots. “I have to get to Gabrielle,”
I said. And I knew where I would find her.
She retched here too, more than once. I could see her shoulders spasmodically
heaving as I walked up behind her as she knelt on the sand. At first I thought
that somehow she had become very ill, for there was blood on her lap, filming
over her hands and wrists, and pooling against her knees. Then I looked more
closely and saw the crimson-tinged feathers clinging to her fingers and skirt,
and the rent pieces of seagull carcass on the ground before her. Bewildered,
I crouched beside her, tentatively placing my hand across her nape. A long moment
passed between us, as I watched tears course down cheeks stained with drying
spots of blood. “Gabrielle, what are you doing?” I managed to ask.
She whispered her answer down to the mess strewn before her. “It was going
to die anyway, Xena. It was lame.” When she finally looked up into my eyes,
I searched in vain in those beautiful green rooms for the solid soul who had
kept me in steady companionship through all the shifting kaleidoscopes of circumstance,
costumes and characters. I still don't fully understand why, because the gods
know we have faced and will face worse fates than that saga of Japa, but she
has never been the same since.
She lies draped across my lap now, her sleepy eyes reflecting the flames of
our campfire into copper. We have feasted on good bread, and the berries have
all but been depleted. I edge down to whisper softly into her ear the promise
that I hope her next day will hold, and the one I can't make true for her. “Someday
they will write a story for you that will just be a day of running on the beach,
with bags of raspberries cached under the scrubby pines past the dune line,
that you can visit as often as you like and eat your fill. And there won't be
any monsters hidden under the surf or poisons in the berries or pirate ships
set to round the end of the bay and stop your play. It will just be running
and berries, Gabrielle, and nothing more.” She smiles and shifts restlessly
in my lap, stretching her arms up so that her fingers tangle in my hair. I wait
to read the direction of her need, since – here – I have become the
storyteller, the cook, the lover, and the instigator of games.
It seems the Amazons have left some vestiges of sexual hunger in their wake,
since she draws me to her mouth for a long kiss that evokes a low moan from
her chest, but these desires are clearly warring with the inertia stoked by
the warm fire and our full bellies. I know I can reconcile both urges tonight,
and pull her so that she sits up against me, her back to my belly, tucked between
my legs. As I snake a hand over her leg and down into the bed of soft curls,
I use the other to impulsively draw up a blanket over us, not trusting that
even from the darkened sea, eyes and ears might not be poised to rob us of this
quiet intimacy. She doesn't last long tonight, and comes hard against my hand,
gasping as I hold her close to me, anchoring her flight. “Right behind
you,” I kiss into her shoulder, and with a few more rocking strokes of
my body against her still-trembling buttocks, I follow her into oblivion. I
allow us to fall back onto our bedding, and almost immediately I notice the
change in her breathing as sleep takes her.
I don't know how much later it is when my body alerts me that she has left my
side, and I awake, full of trepidation. I am relieved to find her still here.
Illumined by the moonlight, she sits at the edge of the blankets fingering the
conch I picked up earlier in the day, running her fingers in spirals against
its ridges, before lifting it up to her ear. “You'll just get sand in your
ear, Gabrielle,” I chuckle. “There's really no ocean in there.”
She reaches across my body to where my gear is laid out, and takes up the chakram,
then hacks at the shell so that the top of the crown is cleanly severed. “Aw,
Gabrielle, you broke it. It was so pretty – it reminded me of you, that's
why I kept it.” “No, Xena,” she smiles, as she grinds down a
few rough edges left on the break with the side of my weapon. “You'll like
this. Those Amazons today – they were in the new lands, in South America.
Their trading partners were maroons, escaped Nubian slaves who live in new,
free villages. They use these to call each other to battle and to ceremonies.”
I am intrigued, for these are more words than she's strung together in some
time, and I hear in her voice just a hint of that irrepressible spirit that
first drew me to her.
She stands up, still nude, and walks a few paces away from me towards the water,
before raising the conch to her lips. When she blows, I am initially surprised
by the noise: it is a magnificent baritone howl that fills the night. Gabrielle's
breath fills the long-dead crevices of the structure, stretching it beyond its
original purpose and form. And then I just sit in wonder and watch my two beautiful
vessels - both irreparably broken – together raise up a cry that reminds
me that I am – here and now - more than my bondage, and less than what
it is possible for me to become.
The End
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