This story was written as part of a challenge to describe how Eve learned of Xena's death. 

DON'T CRY

Life is a journey taken one step at a time. I've learned a lot about these steps lately. Their length can be barely perceptible when you are in a hurry, which I am. They seem even more deliberate when you have one child strapped to your back and one growing in your belly. I have been everywhere and now I want to get home. Back to my world. Back all the way to Rome. I'd like to make it back by spring, but I'd settle for being in Greece.

At this stage of the journey I am in a small settlement at the base of a mountain range at the edge of a desert. I only intend to stay a few days, but its hospitality and amenities are causing me to delay. I needed to pick up supplies. More realistically I need to find some other travelers with whom I can continue my journey. I am not in any shape to be traveling accompanied only by my child; perhaps I am not in any shape to be traveling.

I sit at a small table outside the inn, relishing the last-remaining warmth of the autumn sun. I spoon their curdled goat milk mixed with honey and sun-dried fruit rapidly into the smiling face of my son. The boy likes to eat. We attract a few stares. It is obvious that I am not one of them. I have come from a distance, but from the East. I am returning to the land of people who look like me. Still the villagers are not shocked by my pale skin, so I wonder if others like me have passed this way before. Perhaps THEY have been here? I don't ask because I am not sure I want to hear the answer.

Rome was my mother. Nothing more was known of my lineage -- that was enough. I was hand selected by Augustus Caesar to receive the best of schooling and best training as a warrior. I did better at the training than the schooling. I even had the God of War for a personal trainer. I never asked for his help, I just took everything he showed me and made it my own. Everything!

" He's a big boy to be riding on your back." A plump older woman comments as she brings him another bowl. "But I guess he'll have to walk by himself soon enough." She glances at my swollen stomach.

" Few more months." I pat the child within me. "He's almost three and can walk if he has to but he likes riding on mom's back." My son smiles, he also likes it when I give him independence. He takes the spoon from my hand and goes at it alone. I lick some of the creamy curds off my finger. It tastes better than the dried lamb on which I have been existing.

" Where are you headed."

" Rome eventually. I've been East, all the way to Chin."

" That's where you got him," she laughed. The face of the Chinese people is reflected in my son's almond eyes, straight black hair and wheat colored skin.

" Yep, my next child will be brown like the people of the Indus."

" Too bad you're already packed, our warriors make fine healthy children. You'd enjoy having one of them." I'm not sure if she is talking about the child or the father.

She seems to understand something that I have had a hard time explaining to my friends. I have selected the fathers not to be my companions but so that the faces of the world will be reflected in my children. When they grow up they may choose to return and teach the lessons of Eli to their own people. I had tried to talk to these people so I know that these lessons are easier to learn when taught by someone who looks like you. I learned so much from the woman who looked like me -- who I finally discovered was my mother.

I still remember the day she returned and tore my world apart. The man I loved. The man I was going to marry. The world I was going to rule. None of them were mine. They were all hers. I was hers. Her daughter. Xena!

The old woman keeps staring at my face. It is as if she remembers the face that was once there, before sun and wind and dust and age took it away. It was a beautiful face, but I like the new one better. It doesn't remind me of Livia. This is truly Eve's face.

" Is your. . . ." she hesitates for a moment and then continues,"name Eve?"

I nod my head with surprise.

" There was a woman who passed through here alone a while back. She left something for a woman she described that looked like you do. Only now you tie the scarf around your shoulders and not your hips."

" A woman?"

" Little blonde thing. Not many clothes, lots of muscles. Strange, almost a . . . "

"Gabrielle? "

" Yes. She said she was leaving these messages throughout the area. She figured it was the major East-West trade route and eventually you'd be passing through." The old woman left and returned a few minutes later with a scroll. "From the way she looked, I don't think it contains good news."

It didn't. I sat in disbelief as I read the story of my mother's death. My mother had cheated death so many times before, I think I might have grown to regard her as an immortal. Like some of her friends. Like one of her lovers. Maybe on foreign soil the protection no longer works.

I'm not sure. Yes, I'm sure she is dead -- Gabrielle wouldn't lie about that. What I am not sure about are the details she included and those she had chosen to omit. It seems that my mother had traveled to the land of Japa, a land where she had been long ago, and discovered a past sin that had cost the lives of thousands of people she did not know. I blame a lot of what I do not understand on Gabrielle's lack of fluency in Latin, or perhaps she does not really want to share everything.

I don't grieve, I don't cry. I was not raised that way. To me death is a part of life.

Everything I have learned and come to embrace in the past few years has not changed that part of me. I still look at death as one of the steps of women and men on their life's journey. The final step to be sure, but certainly not one to be met with tears.

My mother and I had shared tears before, but then I cried because my soul was putrefied. She helped me find peace and love -- a way of life that I never thought would be my way. It was not her way. She befriended but did not believe. I believed and was cleansed. Now she is dead.

I am suddenly in less of a hurry to leave, knowing that I will not find my mother when I return. I have no idea where to begin to look for Gabrielle either, or if she would even want to see me. I am freer than I was when I came to this village, and more alone. There is less need to be anywhere at any time. Still in the interest of my unborn child, I think I should move on.

* * * *

I will leave day after tomorrow, heading west. I have found a group of nomads with whom I can travel until the baby is born. They do not know of Eli, and perhaps I can teach them about him, or perhaps not. Perhaps on this journey I will think only of my children and my mother, who died for the souls of others she did not know. Doesn't sound like her, does it? I can't help but wondering if there was more. Was she tired of the warrior ways, but unable to hang up her leathers and stop? Trouble seemed her constant companion. Trouble and Gabrielle.

Perhaps I could cry for Gabrielle. Her life will be tough and lonely. The choices she made, leaving her family, leaving the Amazons, leaving the Elijians to follow Xena were difficult. But those were her choices. I know what some people thought about her relationship with Xena. I don't really think it mattered. They loved each other as much as two people could love. I think of my son and hope that Gabrielle realizes that there are other people you can love in your life. There are always those who will return your love and in whom your love will grow. I say a prayer for her safekeeping.

But also, I wonder if I could cry for Ares. Do you cry for a god? He was all I had growing up. Not a father figure, that would be too twisted. An uncle? A family friend? He never knew. He never realized who I was. He should have hated me, should have feared me, instead he taught me his ways and in his own peculiar world, loved me. He didn't know . . . why I am not exactly sure.

I never cried when I looked back at those years when he was helping me be Livia. He gave me so much. I gave him so much. Yet when we were finished giving, there was nothing. It all went to Xena. She seemed to relish it. Treat it like a new toy or adult plaything. She never said yes, but she never said no -- and he lapped it up like a baby kitten. Like my son eating honey yogurt. He couldn't get enough.

They played with love; they played with power. He gave up being a god to save my life, and to guarantee her power. He regretted its loss afterwards -- perhaps because even that didn't buy her love. She, of course, got his godhood back for him, saying it was for the benefit of the world, and sent him on his way, leaving him even more puzzled and confused.

I don't know what either of them wanted or thought they wanted.

My son runs up to my side with a small toy that one of the children has given him. It is a doll -- basically lashed together sticks with a dried apple for a head. Strips of black leather are wrapped around its torso and its hair, long and free, is probably that of the mane of a horse. I hold it in my hands, smile and return it to him. His face beams. I look at it again and notice that there is a chakram hanging at its -- her -- waist. Suddenly my face is damp with warm, salty water, coming from somewhere. Perhaps it is just from the dust irritating my eyes.

McJude

July 2003