Chapter Text
Scythia. An ancient land, with rolling green hills, thatched cottages, the rugged Carpathian Mountains. Brown bears, wild boars and lynxes wandered freely. Humans fought the animals, other humans, the terrain. In the twenty-first century, they would call that land Ukraine, build skyscrapers and wire it for technology. But Andromache the Scythian, the Eternal Warrior, would always remember it as being so, so green.
As a girl, she had loved hunting more than her older sisters had, had thrilled to the war cries of the warriors as they set off to fight off the incursions of other tribes on the pastureland they had taken for the season. She had killed her first deer at eight, her first enemy at ten. When she killed two Thracians at fourteen, the women said she was ready to be married, but she told them she would rather fight than wed. When she was thirty-seven, she had taken an enemy arrow to the eye, which had been briefly excrutiating and, surprisingly, temporary.
After that, she led the tribe for centuries, worshipped as a god and followed into battle without question. Her tribe beat other tribes and she hammered them on the anvil of her will to create an empire that beat back the Thracians, the Greeks, and the Cimmerians.
But as the centuries passed and Andromache lived and fought and died and lived again, she knew that there was a reason she had vowed to never marry.
Yes, she had fucked. Of course she had. Many of her warriors were strong and attractive, young and virile. But it never meant anything. She had seen a few pairings among her people each decade or so who seemed happy together, but the fight for survival meant the sort of poetic nonsense common to the chatter of young girls was only a fantasy they built out of their anxiety and their hope.
Long after her parents and sisters had been lost to the ravages of time, Andromache began to long for something else, she knew not what. Scythia was, at its broadest, maybe only 150 leagues east to west, but she had met merchants and other travelers from the Silk Road, and she knew that the world beyond her home was vast. After one or two thousand years, give or take a few decades, she felt a pull away from her people, a yearning to see the rest of the world, to meet other kinds of people, speak other languages, fight more interesting foes.
One night, on the longest night of the year, she packed her tent and her most precious possessions—which were fewer and fewer each century: a few old pieces of jewelry, her labrys, the small cloth deer her eldest sister had sewn for her to sleep with after that first kill, the boar belt buckle her father had given her after she died the first time—and abandoned her people.
In two thousand years (give or take a few decades), her people had not seemed to her to have changed or grown. Surely, somewhere out there in the vast world were people who had more need of her, who had more—or anything--to give her. She would find them.
Surely.
///
Mulan sat in her tent, scrutinizing the map her servants had put together for her from the surveyors in her army. Her regiment had been patrolling a hundred miles west of the wall for the previous year, pushing back against the Mongols, the Manchurians, the Quiang and the Tai. And she was tired, bone-weary, and only wanted to return to her parents.
But the small dragon who accompanied her everywhere sat on the table telling her jokes and attempting to appease her malaise and lift her spirits.
“Do not give up, my general. We are here for a purpose. The Emperor requires our obedience and protection.”
“Ah, Little Dragon, don’t you ever tire of obeying? Always obeying, never simply… taking your pleasure? A nap? A bottle of plum wine?”
“Ever so, my general. But Confucius tells us—”
Mulan roared and pushed all the maps and quills and ink off the camp table. “I am DONE with Confucius! FUCK Confucius up the a—”
The little dragon fluttered to the top of the tent where she couldn’t reach him. “If I might, um, make so bold, my auspicious general of everlasting victory, you might be spending a little too much time with our rough and tumble soldiers—”
Mulan took in a breath to remonstrate, but she heard the guard outside her tent respond to some voices, so she snapped her fingers and the little dragon returned to his place as her belt buckle.
A guard poked his head in, looking fearful. “General! We caught a lurker on the edge of camp who… insisted on an audience. The name he gave is Andromache the Scythian…”
Mulan patted her belt buckle to retrieve her serenity. “Escort him in. No weapons.”
The… person… that they escorted in was no him. Mulan would know. She gestured to a camp stool on the other side of the table, and sat down herself on her side.
“Scythian. You are far from home.”
“As are you, General.”
“Why are you here? Are you a spy?”
“Spies don’t walk up to the armies they are observing and announce themselves.”
“Not generally, no.” Mulan allowed herself the smallest of smiles. She liked this woman.
“I am a mercenary. I traveled in Mongolia on my way here from my home. There are things about their army you would benefit from knowing about.” She gestured to her ragged clothes. “And I would benefit from a little money to improve my situation. I can always hunt for meals, but traveling naked isn’t a good idea…”
Mulan went for the kill. “Especially for a woman.”
Andromache scrutinized her, taking her time. Then: “You would know.”
Mulan saw the truth of the woman’s knowledge in her eyes, so she didn’t bother to deny it as the woman undoubtedly expected her to. “I understand why you might have left home. But why choose fighting as your road in life?”
“I was never given a choice. Where I am from, four in five men fight. One in five women fight. I was… very good at it. But my people were… small. And I feel…”
She looked at a loss for words, so Mulan said quietly, “Not small.”
A half-smile. “No.”
“Tell me, Andromache the Scythian. Why should I believe you and what proof do you offer that you are friend and not foe?”
The woman looked wearier than Mulan had ever seen even a great-grandmother. She said, “I have no proof. If you want to kill me, do it. I would welcome the rest.”
Mulan said, “Give me the information you have. If it checks out, we will allow you to join us for a probationary period. If not, you will get the death you deserve.”
The woman gave another small laugh. “Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you?”
And that made no sense at all.
///
Quynh was sharpening her knives in her tent when the general’s aide summoned her. She gathered her bow and quiver of arrows and strode to Mulan’s tent, bowing deeply when she was allowed to enter. “My general? How may I be of service?”
Mulan sighed, rubbing her thumb over the head of the bronze dragon that served as her belt buckle. Quynh had some thoughts about that dragon, but they made her doubt her sanity, so she never examined them too closely.
Mulan said, “A Scythian came to me today offering information about the Mongols. I need you to go and see if there is any truth to these claims. You are the only one I trust to handle this.”
Quynh frowned. “Why are you even trusting him this much? Surely he is a spy or a servant of our enemies.”
“If he were… well, it’s just. I need you to see for yourself and advise me accordingly.”
Quynh took in her general’s exhaustion. “As you wish, General. Of course, I obey.”
Mulan gave her a small grateful smile and dismissed her.
///
Andromache liked the Han woman immediately, liked her serious demeanor and the occasional sudden smile. Together they rode toward the nearest Mongol encampment, but turned aside a few miles away and rode up the side of a small mountain, to a flattened pace near a narrow stream. There they watered their horses, tethered them to a tree, and Andromache led the way around to the north side of the mountain that overlooked the Mongol encampment. Quynh could easily count the tents and gasped.
“They are so few!” She stared at Andromache. “Is this a trick? Do you mean to trick us into attacking them?”
Andromache shook her head. “Quite the opposite. I spent ten days watching them. One brigade left three days ago, towards the Huaisha River. Three days before that another brigade went off in the opposite direction. I think your general is about to be flanked from both sides.”
Quynh swore. “We need to get back. How fast can you ride?”
Andromache grinned.
///
Andromache fought for Mulan for ten years, only dying twice. She hadn’t intended on staying, but there was something about Quynh. When she was around the woman, she felt… things. After that first battle, when Mulan decidedly trounced the Mongols based on the Scythian’s information, the general had given Andromache a scroll of Han poetry. Quynh helped her learn to read it.
I want to be your love for ever and ever,
Without break or decay.
When the hills are all flat,
The rivers are all dry.
When it thunders in winter,
When it snows in summer
When heaven and earth mingle,
Not till then will I part from you.
Andromache looked up into Quynh’s eyes like a starless night and was lost. Or maybe found. She had found what she had been looking for, and she knew in her gut that she was going to lose it, because Quynh would die. And she knew she should care, she should protect herself, she should go now and not turn back, but she couldn’t.
After that, they were inseparable in combat, fighting back to back. Many times, Andromache threw herself between Quynh and their enemies, and took more than one arrow in the process. Each time, Quynh berated her for it, and they had screaming fights after the battles when the rest of the army was off partying and whoring.
And then came the battle when Andromache threw herself in front of a spear and died in front of Quynh. And Quynh screamed and threw herself into the fight with the Mongols and got sliced to bits.
Mulan’s army was routed, and when Andromache sat up and pulled the spear out of her chest, she saw Quynh’s body and then she screamed. On and on and on.
And that’s when Quynh woke up for the first time, immortal.
Together they dragged themselves off the battlefield, fighting off the carrion crows with their arms. Quynh’s healing was slow, but she leaned on Andromache and they found an abandoned barn and made love all night. In the morning they set off west, back toward Scythia.
///
At first Andromache told herself she wanted to return to Scythia to show her lover her home, but the truth was, she was dreaming of her province, the hills and valleys and rivers, and a boy she thought at first had been her brother. Had she ever had a brother? She couldn’t remember.
The closer they got to the Caspian Sea, the more she dreamed of the boy. When she mentioned it to Quynh, the woman had been startled.
“Wait, we’re having the same dreams now?”
“Tell me what you dreamed.”
Quynh described a tan young man with a round shield and a helmet that gripped his cheeks. Andromache had never seen him armed before and at first thought they were dreaming of two different men. “That sounds like Macedonia, not Scythia. Well, let’s keep heading west, and we will just have to see.”
“I don’t understand. Why--?”
Andromache slid her hands through Quynh’s lovely lustrous black hair. “I saw you,” she said quietly. “For weeks. That’s why I originally came east. To see if my dreams were… real. And then General Mulan sent you and me to the Mongols, and I discovered that some dreams can come true…”
Quynh laughed. “And to think it took me a week to realize you were a woman!”
Andromache sighed. “Don’t feel too bad. I thought I preferred men for about two thousand years.”
///
The siege of Damascus had lasted seven months, and that had been bad, but Lykon was a mercenary and bad was what he did, so he just fought and fought and managed not to die. But then Alexander had taken Tyre, and that was bloody and awful. He hated watching the slave-sellers with the women and children. Then they marched south, but Gaza was even worse. The Gazites had resisted fiercely, and he had gotten a spear in his side, which got infected and they had thought that he had died, but it had turned out to be just a coma—a sentence he never thought he would hear himself say. Today, when Jerusalem finally surrendered, he realized even the scar was gone. Strange, but siege. He had a little on his mind.
Alexander announced that he was going to take Egypt next, and Lykon feigned an illness and stayed with the satrap of Jerusalem. He had been dreaming of two foreign women now for weeks, since his wound disappeared. They felt like something he should pay attention to. His father had always told him to attend well to any dream he had more than once.
He was sitting in a tavern, drinking warm beer when the two walked in. Awake, he would have sworn they were men, warriors, but he recognized them immediately, and they ordered mulled wine, looked around at the clientele and immediately made their way over to his table.
///
At the bar, Andromache muttered, “Nailed it. Macedonian, right by the window. You owe me twenty denari.”
Quynh sighed melodramatically, handed money to the bartender and more money to her lover. “How do you want to handle this? He’s never going to believe—”
“He recognizes us. We just have to have a drink together, then we’ll figure out our next war. Go from there.”
They ambled over.
“May we join you, soldier?”
“Of course.”
He worked with them for more than a thousand years (give or take a few decades). He went down in one of those city-state wars in what everyone would later call Italy, during what everyone would later call the Renaissance.
They had seen him wounded so many times by then and he’d hardly notice, but this time he just went down and didn’t get up again. They tried to close the ugly belly wound, stop the torrents of blood with their hands, but he just looked tired.
“It’s my time, girls. It’s just my time.” He always called them girls, even though Andromache was easily four thousand years old. It was a joke. It had been a joke. Now it was just a farewell.
He looked relieved it was finally over.
And that’s how they discovered that it could be finally over.
Someday.
Eventually.
Between one moment and the next.