Alexander and Alestria

Chapter 6

My name is not Alestria, it is Talestria: the T represents the tribe of Amazons, the women who love horses. I do not know when I was born.

I like red, the color of leaves burned by the sun, the color of blood.

I do not know who my parents were.

On the steppe countless men and women love each other for one night and then part without the promise of meeting again in another life.

On the steppe, every encounter has the intensity of a fleeting moment, for it is as easy to be born as it is to die. Life is as brief as one passing season, spanning one torrential rainstorm, the tiny moment it takes a bird to reach the clouds.

One beauty erases another; they are all ephemeral.

Talestria is queen of the Amazons. I knew that this name, like all other names I had been given, would be short-lived. I wore it like a piece of armor to go into war. One day I would leave it just as I came to it, anonymous and without weapons.

Our tribe was made up of girls without a past, all of them abandoned orphans. Each taken in by the warrior tribe, we in turn became women who feared nothing: cold, war, and famine were the three eagles sent to us by the God of Ice to guide us to the summit of Siberia.

"The greatest good comes through the greatest evil," my aunt used to say.

That is why my life started so badly: a little girl with no name who slipped into every name she was attributed. Her face was dirty, her features hard, her lips wizened with cold and thirst. Her hair, which was never cut, looked like a swallow's nest with locks trailing over her face, hiding her fierce expression. She strayed through the marketplace, her cracked, bleeding hands stealing the occasional piece of fruit or biscuit, or squeezing a goat's udder for a mouthful of milk. She threw stones at children who laughed at her, and hid under carts when dogs chased her, lying in manure and beating their snapping jaws back with a stick. But adults were more dangerous and cruel than dogs, dragging her through the dusty alleyways and whipping her. She suffered their blows without a sob, sometimes even laughing to please them. She wanted to live and to avenge herself; that is why she disguised her rage and chose to appear docile.

She wandered around the marketplace, not knowing where she came from or who her parents were. She let families adopt her, and for a couple of seasons she played the role of a good-natured, servile slave. They would give her a name, a plate, and a blanket that she shared with sheep, calves, and fleas. Then she would run away and escape to the steppes, running through the grass that was taller than she was, diving into rivers and letting the currents carry her off, floating on her back watching clouds and birds go by. At night she shivered, hungry and exhausted, with only the howling of wolves as comfort; she knew how to call to them to warm her and lick her wounds.

A new family came on horseback and took her. One evening, beside the fire, she heard the legend of the Amazons. The following morning at dawn she stole some food and slipped out of the tent. She crossed the steppe on foot, walking into the wind and the snow, following the stars, which sang to her:

My name is Talestria. Talestria, meaning "the joys of combat."

My mother's name was Talaxia, "scarlet feather." I am queen of the girls of Siberia, who thirst for happiness: laughing makes us forget death. I know nothing of tiredness.

I would not weep if my beloved sisters died tomorrow.

Suffering has carved a deep pit in my heart for life to pour its loveliness into.

War is an evil; happiness is my combat.

The girls of Siberia love war; they also love to enjoy themselves and laugh.

Sadness would wash over us after nightfall when, in the middle of a rowdy feast, the girls started to sing. Our god was music; he had engendered words, words had engendered thought, and thought had set women free. Our songs were earthly melodies that had to reach for the skies like birds. I would weep; all the girls would: music reopened our wounds and resuscitated our dead.

War purified us; our enemies' blood wiped from our breasts the memories of little girls crying in despair.

Why was I chosen by the warrior women? Why was I their queen? Why, when my mother took me in, did she appoint me as her heir? Everyone here believed it was my destiny. Everyone except for me.

I bore a scar on my left breast. All Amazons bear a deep welt on one of their breasts to position the leather strap of their bows. Mine was a wound, but I no longer remember how it happened.

I wanted to remember only happy moments from my previous life: running through the market holding steaming hot bread in my hand; jumping up to catch a dragonfly; dancing round a fire while in the shadows eyes watched me and hands clapped out the rhythm as I spread my arms and twirled, flew, reached the very stars.

I, Talestria, was born and became queen the day my mother Talaxia's body was brought back to the camp. In her left breast was an arrow topped with blue and green feathers.

I was brought up by my mother's servant, whom I called my aunt. Her name was Tankiasis, "the fragrance of white chrysanthemum." She was strict and gentle, recounting old legends to me while she rocked me in her arms. The first time I rode a full-sized horse, she made me gallop for days on end. On my first birthday, a year after my mother had died, she gave me more weapons honed for the survival of our tribe: the language of birds, the writing in the stars, the magic of numbers, the gift of healing.

She had a little girl with white skin and golden hair. My mother, queen Talaxia, had told me:

"Tania is your sister; she will be your servant when you are queen. You will make war, and Tania will watch over the flocks. She will raise your child and will be your regent if you die in combat. She will raise a servant for the new queen and will disappear when the two little girls have become women."

Tania was silent and shy, calm but always worrying. She would back away and scream if a frog leaped up, a bird flew off, a snake spat, or a caterpillar was simply too brightly colored. She was haunted by a nightmare and she wore its terror like a tattoo: she saw herself sleeping in a bed, surrounded by soft cushions and glittering cloth, and a white breast came toward her to give her milk. When she tried to look up at the face of the woman nursing her, men loomed into view, slicing sabers through the air. Their bellowing was like the roar of thunder. One of them tore her from the breast and threw her from the window.

As Tankiasis had for Queen Talaxia, Tania and I constituted day and night. Where I was courageous, she was fearful; where I was impulsive, she was cautious; where I advanced, she retreated. In areas where I felt weak, she found her strength. Every queen of Siberia has a servant, a sister, to complement her wisdom and perfect her virtue.

For a queen must never make a mistake.

She is the survival of the tribe of warrior women.

In the terrestrial world, war is an evil. But evil applied to evil forges good.

One night I was woken by muffled screams. The pine trees outside were in flames, and sheep ran hectically past my tent, bleating in fear. Some of my sisters beat drums to warn of the men's attack, while Tankiasis was already launching herself at the warriors with a weapon in each hand. One after another the girls threw themselves into the flames. I would have liked to follow them, but Tania had been given orders to take me to a shelter dug into the ground, and all through the night we listened to the clash of weapons and whinnying horses.

Tankiasis woke us at dawn, covered in blood, wild-eyed, and stinking of warfare.

She took us by the hand and led us to the battlefield, where bushes were still burning and the ground was strewn with bodies. She ordered us to kill any man still alive.

I found a young warrior still breathing; his clothes were lacerated, and his right shoulder was completely missing. He was slumped against his panting horse, gazing at the sky as if it were the most beautiful view. When he saw me coming over, he smiled at me; he had the darkest eyes and a face as pale as a lily. He was so ravishing, with his curly hair and the blood emptying peacefully from his body! I put one knee to the ground and drew my dagger. He stared at me intently, his eyes caressing my face and carving into my heart.

In a flash I sliced his throat: his body twitched, his lips quivered. Little flames flickered and then expired in his horrified eyes. Where was he from? What was his name? What was his horse called? How often had he ridden out across the steppes?

Death is not beautiful, but there is beauty when the warrior spirit leaves a body.

I had killed my first man. I had become a woman. I too was ready to die in battle.

Men, we called them zougouls! I was obsessed with them!

As I walked along the banks of the Iaxarte, close to my mother and holding hands with Tankiasis, I no longer thought of men simply as adults who beat children. Now that I was an Amazon, I had learned to see them as haughty and cunning horsemen.

"When you grow up," Talaxia told me, "you will be stronger than these men."

"Males have no udder to feed their young," Tankiasis added. "They have no bellies to bear young. That is why they constantly chase females to make them bear their progeny."

"Yes," said Talaxia. "They're like walking cuckoos, laying their eggs in other birds' nests."

"Except ours!" Tankiasis laughed. "The girls of Siberia drink magic infusions. They don't lay eggs, they fly away."

Many men approached my mother, and when she spoke to them they were the ones who lowered their eyes in submission. When they fought with her naked, she was the one who forced them to the ground and mounted them.

The wind blew through the doorway, and the moonlight drifted in and out. I was fascinated by men's muscles and swore mine would be like theirs when I grew up. Talaxia was not afraid of a man taller than her; she seized him bodily, handled him roughly, turned him round. With her long hair swinging in the silvery moonbeams, a distant smile playing on her lips and her eyes pinned to the top of the glacier, my mother made the man howl, begging her to love him again.

He had stopped shouting and lay snoring. My mother called me and put my hand on his sex. It was cold and damp, disgusting.

"Our sex is in our heads," my mother told me. "No one can steal it, no one can take it away!"

My head still reeling with the feel of that man's genitals, I wandered among the market stalls with Tania. Boys dressed in blue and saffron cloth, their heads wrapped in turbans, winked and threw flowers at us. The boldest stopped us and tried to talk to us. Tania panicked and dragged me away, not wanting them to touch me, afraid they might bewitch me. She was happier watching monkeys dancing with snakes, but I broke away from her and slipped into the crowd. She ran after me, calling to me as I weaved along alleyways between bustling customers, and hid among hanging carpets and bolts of cloth. Tania was stubborn as a mule and would not give up.

Tania was afraid of men. I simply did not like them.

I was growing, and my breasts filling out. I used my bow a hundred times a day to dig a deep furrow in the wound on my left breast, and the tough scar tissue forming over it meant I could carry ever heavier bows. I chose bigger and bigger horses, compensating for my small stature with the size of my horse and perfecting my own strengths with my own sacred weapons.

Every queen of Siberia, when she reaches maturity, must travel to the land of the volcano, where she is given a gift of black blades forged by our cousins, the whale hunters. Accompanied by my faithful Tania, I covered a huge distance to reach the forest and then the ocean. I was greeted by the Great Mother of the tribe, who had a beard and many tattoos. There was a special ceremony during which she sang, surrounded by dancing women, and called on the spirits, which had indicated their desire to be incarnated in my weapons. Three seasons later, a sun-shaped bludgeon and a moon-shaped sickle were forged and beaten out on the foothills of the volcano. Two warrior souls came down to breathe life into them: the female soul wedded the solar bludgeon, the male soul the lunar sickle. During my time on the shores of that freezing ocean, the sun darkened in the very middle of the day, devoured by the moon.

"A great queen has come to earth," concluded the Great Mother, studying me closely. "The moon has outstripped the sun: a queen shall conquer a king."

I was not that queen. I would like to have told her that, but I held my tongue. I was not a queen, I was a bird of the steppes.

"The king and queen will come to the land of the volcano," she said, gazing at the glaciers that were now black shadows.

After my return we were attacked by a nomadic tribe. I gave my first orders, and my aunts and sisters followed my commands. Our attackers were ferocious men and more numerous than us, but they fell into my strategic trap. Once they were divided, we struck them down one after the other with our swift blades.

The Amazons decapitated their slain enemies and slung their heads over their horses' rumps as trophies. Some reduced them to the size of an apple and attached them to their headdresses. Others dried out the head, liver, and testicles, ground them to a powder, and used it to make an infusion that gave them strength and courage. They spoke magic incantations and buried the heart, thereby appeasing the suffering of those souls constrained to leave the valiant bodies of an indomitable tribe.

I had no adornment. The only head I would have liked to hang on a length of woven cord between my breasts was that of my first warrior. I carried the memory of him in my heart-he was my invisible jewel.

There were frequent wars on the steppe: nomadic tribes quarreled, were reconciled, stole from each other, and were allied by marriages. One tribe might be exterminated and wiped from the face of the earth; others might appear on the horizon screaming their war cries, having sprung up apparently from nowhere. There was once a tribe in which the men painted themselves blue, but we no longer saw them at the market. Then there were men with red tattoos who brought a new language, but they in turn disappeared. There had been a tribe of bird tamers and a clan of snake charmers. There was a tribe that venerated stones, and another that venerated their mothers.

On the steppes the grasses grow and dry out; men and women are born and die like the grasshoppers; the earth is inseminated by the rain and hatches new lives; war can destroy just as readily as the earth brings forth.

The tribe of girls who love horses had survived the erosion of time; it had survived massacres, the cold, and the wind. It was condemned to perish like the mountain that collapses beneath the eternal snows.

The Amazons fought for death.

Death is the black light of the life.

I wanted the golden light of the sun.

I carried in my heart the immortality of all things loved.

When I was fourteen, I was smitten by a girl I caught sight of at the market. She had a white veil and sparkling black eyes; I could imagine her raspberry mouth, and teeth as hard as little seashells. She was surrounded by serving women, tending to her like the chick of a white bird with a red head.

From the first moment I saw her, I could not bear to be away from her. Despite Tania's supplications, I followed her for days on end, and Tania returned to the camp, exhausted. I carried on hovering around the girl until she eventually spoke to me: when she realized that I loved her, she arranged to meet me in a luxurious inn. I sold my mare to pay for that night.

Salimba undressed before I even touched her, and she threw her curvaceous body and full breasts into my arms. I loved her again and again. Between our couplings she told me she was betrothed to an ugly, cruel, and aging tribal chief, a man who already had ten wives; she would be his eleventh. She said she was unhappy, that her father also had ten wives, and that she was the tenth wife's daughter. She said that she foresaw terrible suffering, that the ten wives would speak ill of her and mistreat her, that she might just earn the tribe's respect if she bore a son, and that her daughters would be sold to men as she and her mother had been.

Salimba wept, suffocated by her fate. And so I spoke to her of white cranes with crimson heads and of our wars against men. I invited her to have a child with me and to become my wife. She stopped weeping, listening attentively with her head resting on the wound on my breast.

"I would have liked to marry you, Talestria," she said after a long silence. "But I am not an Amazon. My belly is flaccid, my legs soft, my arms have no strength, I can barely even lift a pail of water. I know neither how to cook nor to hunt nor to live without perfumed milk, nor to sleep without a thick mattress woven with ewe's wool. Forget Salimba, she is a weakling. Hold me in your arms. Love me once more, one last time!"

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!

One night as I lay in the grass I heard her voice, deep and rich, rising slowly in the air and wrapping itself around me. With that song in a strange language she communicated to me her loneliness, her melancholy, her quest for a companion in war, on horseback, and in embraces that drive away the wind, the snow, and the cut of a sword. Gazing at the stars, I too began to sing. My song had no words; I followed the intonations of her voice and improvised a tune that made her song stronger and more lovely. Our voices rose, and with them, my soul flew up to the stars. This is Alestries, whispered the ether; this is the heroine who took up residence in your heart before you even met her.

A gentle warmth spread through me: Alestries was not an illusion, she alone was capable of following me in full gallop, in flight, at the speed of light. She alone could slip into my life by way of the stars. I stopped singing and wept in silence. I, the vengeful little girl, the orphan who had crossed the steppes to become an Amazon, I who rested from bloody battles by taking refuge in the legend of Alestries, had just received happiness I was not even seeking: a warrior woman had come to join her sorrow and hope to my own.

I would lose her! Like Salimba, Talaxia, and Tankiasis, like the little girls I had become attached to, like the tribes that had adopted me, she too would disappear and die. Beauty is shortlived on the steppes. The lives I grasped became shooting stars, leaving only darkness in their wake. I dried my tears and curled myself up tightly. As I slept, I heard Tankiasis singing: You are destructible if you persist in seeing good in evil. Reacting to evil turns it to the good. Reacting to good turns it to evil.

Dawn broke, and with it came strength. What of the suffering of separation, what of the pain afforded when the beloved is pierced by arrows… I was determined to be joined with Alestries and to experience with her all the madness of our meeting.

But Alestries was a man! I fled-saddened, furious, and in de-spair-and would have galloped all the way to the ocean had I not been stopped by a river. To us a river is God's revelation: my god had decided to put me to the test, for the greatest good comes from the greatest evil. I was meant to love Alestries despite his body, I was meant to abandon myself to him without counting the time we were granted. Loving is more difficult than waging war: loving is fighting the past and secrets, and everything impossible.

The bolt of light was more dazzling than summer lightning when it struck me, making me tremble to the very tips of my fingers. It knocked the breath out of me, leaving me struggling to compose myself on the inside. Any woman would have been burned out by the flames of a female warrior soul in a man's body. I loved it even more for the suffering it inflicted on me because Talestria, queen of the Amazons, draws strength from pain, making her light shine still brighter, red on the outside and yellow in the center.

Countless men had been decapitated before they could even touch me. This man Alestries was not afraid of me; he held me to him, his hands caressed me to my very marrow, and mine made him moan. The two of us loved each other over and over again until we could no longer see or hear, until his seed mingled with my blood and my seed spilled inside his head.

I was naked; he cannot have failed to notice the scars over my body. He touched the wound deep in the flesh of my left breast, and I sat up with a start. He caught me by the leg and pushed me to the ground, pinning me down by leaping on top of me.

Alestries made a long declaration of which I understood not a single word, but the name Alexander came back again and again. A terrible apprehension chilled my limbs.

"Are you Alexander?" I asked in Persian.

His face lit up; he spoke Persian too. His voice sounded even more solemn in that language.

"We do not know each other," he was saying. "But we have always known each other. There is no point wasting time, all the years spent without you were wasted. No seductions, I hate seductions. No oaths, I hate oaths that are so easily broken. No ceremonies, I have held too many ceremonies. No speeches, I despise the speeches I have given. Nothing official. There is no one here, no one watching us. I give myself to you. You are mine. Alestria, my kingdom is yours. It is proof of my love."

I looked away, uttering not a sound. I wanted to reject him and flee. I had known only treachery and violence from men. Alexander's declaration hurt me: he was lying!

This warrior who had subjugated the world by strength could not know anything of love. He wanted to show off the queen of the Amazons as his proudest trophy on his horse's rump. He was not Alestries, I was wrong. I was about to get up, to gallop off, to exile myself far from him, far from his conquered lands… when he rested his head on my heart. His silence pierced right into me and filled me with joy and sadness. His calloused hands stroked my wounds. He kissed me. I faltered, and regretted giving myself to him the previous day as my arms disobeyed me, my mouth reached for his, and my thighs wrapped around him.

"I have searched all over the world," he said in my ear. "Be my wife."

I gave a hoarse involuntary sound: "Why me?"

"Because everything was written here," he said, stroking the crook of my left breast.

Marrying a man, handing herself over with lowered arms… would be a defeat for the queen of the Amazons, who had never been beaten.

"Alexander and Alestria." He spoke our names gently. "We shall conquer the world and join the sun." The sun!

I, the queen of birds, horses, and grasshoppers, I have people waiting for me: Tania, my sisters, aunts, and girl children. I carry within me the curse of the Amazons, which forbids me to love a man. Marrying Alexander means leaving Siberia, abandoning my kingdom, fleeing with him like every other Amazon in the past who has fallen for a man.

"Come, Alestria! we shall climb mountains and take citadels by storm. We shall fight dragons and monkeys and elephants driven by warriors covered in pearls and diamonds. Be my queen, Alestria. I offer you magnificent lands, thousands of starlit nights, riding alongside one hundred thousand men beneath the sun, in water and sand, through forests and deserts."

Alexander's voice shook me, and I felt I was waking from a long sleep. God had just spoken to me through his words. I should no longer take my revenge on men, I should love the sun! I should lay down my weapons and gallop alongside Alestries!

Alexander's scars rubbed against my own. The man who wanted to conquer the queen of the Amazons held me in his arms, and I had nowhere to hide. He forged himself a path in my belly, worked his way up my blood vessels, found my heart, and broke the wound that acted as my shield. He found his way onto my internal steppes, where Talaxia, Tanikiasis, and Salimba lived along with all the other beauties who had grown immortal through the force of my memory.

Darius, the king of the Persians, had offered me cloth, palaces, mountains, and precious gems. I preferred the wind, storms, blood, and victory promised by Alexander.

For that, for him, I must die and live again!

"Come, Alestria, it shall be for life and for death," he said.

How could he read inside my head? A burning torrent made my legs weightless, flowed through my chest, and spread down my arms. A beam of light struck my head and burst inside my body, transforming itself into the Milky Way. I have no more questions. Alexander has defeated me. I am his.

Fly, birds, fly to the skies! Alestries and Alestria are setting off for the clouds. We shall conquer the world. We shall fertilize its vastness, filling it with the purity of the glacier and the strength of fire.

Fly, birds! Beat your wings, do not look back at the bushes you have left. Do not go back to your nests. Beat your wings, brave the wind, look to the sun. Look at that red, yellow, and orange, that fusion of ice and flames.

Fly, birds! Fly ahead of all birds, you who love the ecstasy of freedom above all else!