Dossouye
Charles R. Saunders
 Dossouye is a fix-up novel created from the short stories "Agbewe's Sword", "Gimmile's Songs", "Shiminege’s Mask", "Marwe’s Forest", and "Obenga’s Drum", the last previously unpublished. Dossouye herself is a woman warrior inspired by the real-life female warriors of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey. Her first stories appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Amazons! and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress, two anthologies designed to increase the number and recognition of female heroes in sword and sorcery fiction. Orphaned at a young age, Dossouye becomes a soldier in the women’s army of the kingdom of Abomey. In a war against the rival kingdom of Abanti, Dossouye saves her people from certain destruction; but a cruel twist of fate compels her to go into exile. Mounted on her might war-bull, Gbo, Dossouye enters the vast rainforest beyond the borders of her homeland, seeking a place to call her own. The forest is where Dossouye will either find a new purpose in life... or find her life cut short by the many menaces she encounters.