Xau offered Hana his kingdom;
she declined.
The horse lord who ruled her tribe
ordered her to marry Xau.
Hana lay facedown in the dirt
at the horse lord's feet. And declined.
A second king,
father to Xau's dead queen,
took such offense at the possibility
of Xau replacing his daughter
with a barbarian horse-woman
that he unleashed
his assassins.
Not on Hana herself,
honorably, in open challenge--
barbarian that she was,
she would have met them
with bow and knife,
without fear, gladly--
but against King Xau by night,
by stealth, by trickery.
The captain of Xau's guards
yelled at him to flee.
Instead Xau fought
beside his men.
No mannered fencing match, no rules.
In a single minute, five men slain.
Xau himself barely scratched,
but the assassins' blades
sticky with a poison
that crept along Xau's veins
and burned him from within.
He tossed, tormented,
in the moonless country
between death and life.
So Hana rode,
rode to marry Xau
if she could reach him in time,
if he could still mouth her name,
rode though she might be widowed
the same day that she wed.
No man would tell her
whom she would or would not marry.
Not her brothers.
Not the horse lords.
Not the craven King Vihaz
whose name she cursed
as she rode.
Rode with her brothers
and two horse lords
and thirty spare horses.
No tents, no pack animals,
drinking their mares' milk,
six hundred and ninety miles
in four days;
by dawn, day, dusk, dark,
across the grasslands
into the interior of Meqing
with its paved roads
and bricks and peasants
(the peasants abandoning
their wheelbarrows to gawp
at Hana and the others).
Rode,
the horses failing one by one,
until only Hana, her eldest brother,
and six horses remained.
Rode,
not knowing if she would ever
ride again:
if Xau, should he live,
would then, having won her,
wall her up like treasure
inside his palace,
until her heart died
remembering the plains,
the smell and sound and touch
of the horses she rode to reach him.
Rode faster
than the news of her coming,
so that, at the last,
Xau's soldiers delayed her,
blocking her approach to the palace,
to Xau--who yet lived--
until she explained,
four times over,
who she was.
Surrendered her bow, her arrows,
her knife, her past,
her future
to come to the king.
(First published in Star*Line #38.1, Winter 2015)
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