Al di Là della Grande Acqua

Thanks to Oba and Keelàn, slavery was no longer tolerated in the kingdom of the Saliek: women, now free, had exactly the same rights as men. They could read and study and did not neglect the martial training that allowed them to fight with the same chances of success as a man. They could not forget that thanks to their training and the help of the Nimbai, they had managed to free themselves from all previous servitude. Akiria, Keelàn’s mother, along with some former concubines of the royal palace, had governed the kingdom of the Saliek for some years now, assisted by an assembly of sages made up of an equal number of women and men. Her daughter Keelàn had not wanted government positions; her experience had made her a warrior, and a warrior she wanted to remain; perhaps she would succeed her mother, but for now, she did not want to think about it. Her heart, after being born a slave, the daughter of a slave and the king’s concubine, looked far ahead, especially now that peace reigned in those lands. She, a young woman, had not exhausted her thirst for adventure. Oba, her lifelong companion, had also not sought regency positions; she had shared everything with Keelàn to the brink of death, and the spirit of adventure could not fall asleep within a comfortable life; they were women now, but still young and strong, in fact, their training, which they had never abandoned, had reached levels that hardly any man, even a particularly strong one, could have overcome in a duel. Each lived in her own city: Oba in Nimbael with her mother Queen Batai and father King Urilius; Keelàn in Katon, where she was adored for freeing women from the slavery of men. Whenever possible, they spent long periods together. And riding the Vulcanops in flight made the journey from one city to the other decidedly possible and fast. After the victory over Kael’s troops, a garrison of Vulcanops had remained in Katon, while Kripzia, their queen, and Azanio, their king, with the rest of their species, had found a suitable area for them in Nimbael, where the volcanic morphology of the places was more suited to their way of life and caves suitable for housing their family groups more than other types of dwellings; therefore, they had created an alternative homeland to their own, where they stayed more and more often. One day, Keelàn, visiting Nimbael as a guest of the royals, who now considered her a daughter in all respects, showed Oba a painted board on which was depicted a woman dressed in a tattered white tunic, tied to a pole. Below her, a pile of wood was burning. "Look, Oba, look! I bought it at the Katon market from a merchant who sold it as a rarity from the lands beyond the great water; he said it had been found in a chest inside a shipwreck beached on one of our shores. He also had another where a completely naked woman was tied and whipped by a burly man while the people in the square watched with satisfaction the blood trickling from her wounds." "I bought that one too; these images must not circulate, they could stimulate recently dormant desires and awaken old desires in males; I left it in Katon, hidden. It reminded me too much of the whipping with weeds my mother suffered for helping us escape," Keelàn confessed. "Oba, I feel as if those lands are calling me; perhaps the telepathic power of the Vulcanops has infected me, or maybe it’s just suggestion. Whatever the origin of this call, since I saw these images, I can no longer be at peace." "I don’t know what to tell you; I think we should ask Kripzia, the Vulcanops have sensibilities far beyond ours. Whatever happens, know that I am with you; we will live or die together!" Kripzia, the queen of the Vulcanops, loved to talk with them, or rather communicate, since the Vulcanops spoke only through telepathy. The thought that she herself was alive only because those two brave girls had saved her and allowed her to lay the egg from which her only son was born, never left her. The gratitude she felt for them was immense, and when they expressed their desire to cross the Nahari, the great water that divided their land from the unknown one, she became quite worried, thinking it was too dangerous an undertaking that would put their lives at risk; then all their adventures, battles, and direct clashes with formidable adversaries from which they had emerged victorious, and the many times the courageous girls had risked losing their lives and faced danger without caring, came back to her mind. They had something inside them that made them unique, special, and she knew it. They were asking her if it was possible to be transported to the other shore by riding two Vulcanops; their thirst for adventure led them to seek new horizons, new lands to explore, and the desire to defend freedom from the oppression of bullies had taken root in them as a true mission; the thought that beyond those waters there were still women subjected to slavery disturbed them. Even before the discovery of those paintings, they often talked among themselves about what might be beyond the known lands, what peoples lived there, and if women there were also slaves and subjugated as they had been in the kingdom of the Saliek, before their determination and courage changed things.