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A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.
-- Virgil’s Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles
It begins in battle. Quynh admires the new one’s precise movements, impeccable timing, spear and shield working together effortlessly to attack and protect. The new one is no match for Andromache’s axe, but Quynh can read his time in the phalanx of Alexander’s army in each thrust and dodge, in the fearlessness in his eyes, in the set of his jaw.
“When will you learn that you. Can’t. Die?” Andromache yells, each word punctuated by the clang of her axe meeting his shield. Apparently, not yet. Quynh admires his stubbornness, too, and then looses an arrow that sends him crumpling to the ground.
It continues with his unwavering discipline. The to-do of their meeting in the past, Quynh finds that she does not mind this man’s presence. He is helpful and strong and it does not hurt that he is beautiful to look at. Every morning he rises from his bedroll, dons his sandals and gauntlets, equips himself and begins his calisthenics and drills. It does not matter if the heat has already snuck up upon them, if the wind cuts against their warmest blankets, if the rain lashes the world into submission. Lykon does not submit, his commitment runs too strong. And so, with sleep still in her eyes, Quynh admires the stretch of his abdomen and calves, the steadiness of his thighs, the speed of his spear-work.
One morning in her bedroll, as Quynh watches him move with the devastating power of a river in flood, Andromache’s hand stretches over and plucks at a nipple. As Andromache’s skilled fingers play her body as a bard’s lyre, Quynh arches into her lover’s touch and watches. As she shatters apart, Quynh admires the discipline of a man without an army who still trains as if he is one.
It grows with his loyalty, shown when she least expected it, when it mattered the most. The smuggler had a knife at her throat, her hands bound behind her back, her body pinned beneath his on the dirt floor. Quynh had begun to hope for a quick, clean death when blood splurts all over her face and chest and the man’s weight falls upon her. Her eyes whip around for this new danger when she finally notes his dark form as the spear is wrenched from the smuggler’s back.
“Are you harmed?” He says as he crouches next to her. Quynh shakes her head, strands of hair falling into her eyes. Lykon rolls her to the side, cuts the rope binding her hands with the knife he always wears at his belt. That’s when it hits her.
“You did not have to,” she states, reaching for his hand.
“Yes I did.” He turns, begins to leave her.
“He was not anointed for battle.” She rushes after him, needing to understand, needing him to understand.” You are fastidious about that, about no striking a lethal blow unless--”
He cuts her off with fire in his eyes and gentleness on his face, serious as the whetstone is hard. “For you, I would do it again.”
It culminates with his smile. A twitch of his lip, like a beast shaking a fly, that grows and expands with the tender pink of his lip and the cut white of teeth. Happiness incarnate, slow to arrive but dazzling beyond measure when it does.
Quynh thinks at first it is a siren’s call, forbidden, dangerous.
“Watch your back,” Andromache warns, pulling her horse alongside him.
“That your job, Andromache,” he retorts with a lazy swing of his spear and that smile dancing on his face. Quynh shivers at the exchange, her every nerve alight with battle and blood.
Over time, she learns his smile means triumph, family, success, comfort. All things, the loud and the soft and the in between.
She is drawn to it like a moth darts towards a flame, each time almost burned.
Until one day, in the bath house, bodies wet for each other, she is consumed.
Their lips fall together and their souls intertwined like his fingers wrapped in her hair.
They are unstoppable.