by Shan Sa
One beauty erases another; they are all ephemeral.
Talestria is queen of the Amazons. I knew that this name, like all other names I had been given, would be short-lived. I wore it like a piece of armor to go into war. One day I would leave it just as I came to it, anonymous and without weapons.
Our tribe was made up of girls without a past, all of them abandoned orphans. Each taken in by the warrior tribe, we in turn became women who feared nothing: cold, war, and famine were the three eagles sent to us by the God of Ice to guide us to the summit of Siberia.
“The greatest good comes through the greatest evil,” my aunt used to say.
That is why my life started so badly: a little girl with no name who slipped into every name she was attributed. Her face was dirty, her features hard, her lips wizened with cold and thirst. Her hair, which was never cut, looked like a swallow’s nest with locks trailing over her face, hiding her fierce expression. She strayed through the marketplace, her cracked, bleeding hands stealing the occasional piece of fruit or biscuit, or squeezing a goat’s udder for a mouthful of milk. She threw stones at children who laughed at her, and hid under carts when dogs chased her, lying in manure and beating their snapping jaws back with a stick. But adults were more dangerous and cruel than dogs, dragging her through the dusty alleyways and whipping her. She suffered their blows without a sob, sometimes even laughing to please them. She wanted to live and to avenge herself; that is why she disguised her rage and chose to appear docile.
She wandered around the marketplace, not knowing where she came from or who her parents were. She let families adopt her, and for a couple of seasons she played the role of a good-natured, servile slave. They would give her a name, a plate, and a blanket that she shared with sheep, calves, and fleas. Then she would run away and escape to the steppes, running through the grass that was taller than she was, diving into rivers and letting the currents carry her off, floating on her back watching clouds and birds go by. At night she shivered, hungry and exhausted, with only the howling of wolves as comfort; she knew how to call to them to warm her and lick her wounds.
A new family came on horseback and took her. One evening, beside the fire, she heard the legend of the Amazons. The following morning at dawn she stole some food and slipped out of the tent. She crossed the steppe on foot, walking into the wind and the snow, following the stars, which sang to her:
Night is the light of day
Night is the light of the earth
Night is the key to treasure
You must come through the night to reach the day
You must follow the stars to reach the sun
Every footstep takes you toward the white cranes with crimson heads
Every night of walking brings you closer to the warrior woman brandishing two weapons
Every day counts
Days are counted
You have to want
Walk and you will see
Count the days to give yourself strength
Count the days when you weep
When you are happy forget about time
When you suffer count the days
Bird of the glacier, fly toward the light!
Bird of the Glacier, fly toward the sun!
Fly toward your god!
My name is Talestria. Talestria, meaning “the joys of combat.”
My mother’s name was Talaxia, “scarlet feather.”
I am queen of the girls of Siberia, who thirst for happiness: laughing makes us forget death.
I know nothing of tiredness.
I would not weep if my beloved sisters died tomorrow.
Suffering has carved a deep pit in my heart for life to pour its loveliness into.
War is an evil; happiness is my combat.
The girls of Siberia love war; they also love to enjoy themselves and laugh.
Sadness would wash over us after nightfall when, in the middle of a rowdy feast, the girls started to sing. Our god was music; he had engendered words, words had engendered thought, and thought had set women free. Our songs were earthly melodies that had to reach for the skies like birds. I would weep; all the girls would: music reopened our wounds and resuscitated our dead.
War purified us; our enemies’ blood wiped from our breasts the memories of little girls crying in despair.
Why was I chosen by the warrior women? Why was I their queen? Why, when my mother took me in, did she appoint me as her heir? Everyone here believed it was my destiny. Everyone except for me.
I bore a scar on my left breast. All Amazons bear a deep welt on one of their breasts to position the leather strap of their bows. Mine was a wound, but I no longer remember how it happened.
I wanted to remember only happy moments from my previous life: running through the market holding steaming hot bread in my hand; jumping up to catch a dragonfly; dancing round a fire while in the shadows eyes watched me and hands clapped out the rhythm as I spread my arms and twirled, flew, reached the very stars.
I, Talestria, was born and became queen the day my mother Talaxia’s body was brought back to the camp. In her left breast was an arrow topped with blue and green feathers.
I was brought up by my mother’s servant, whom I called my aunt. Her name was Tankiasis, “the fragrance of white chrysanthemum.” She was strict and gentle, recounting old legends to me while she rocked me in her arms. The first time I rode a full-sized horse, she made me gallop for days on end. On my first birthday, a year after my mother had died, she gave me more weapons honed for the survival of our tribe: the language of birds, the writing in the stars, the magic of numbers, the gift of healing.
She had a little girl with white skin and golden hair. My mother, queen Talaxia, had told me:
“Tania is your sister; she will be your servant when you are queen. You will make war, and Tania will watch over the flocks. She will raise your child and will be your regent if you die in combat. She will raise a servant for the new queen and will disappear when the two little girls have become women.”
Tania was silent and shy, calm but always worrying. She would back away and scream if a frog leaped up, a bird flew off, a snake spat, or a caterpillar was simply too brightly colored. She was haunted by a nightmare and she wore its terror like a tattoo: she saw herself sleeping in a bed, surrounded by soft cushions and glittering cloth, and a white breast came toward her to give her milk. When she tried to look up at the face of the woman nursing her, men loomed into view, slicing sabers through the air. Their bellowing was like the roar of thunder. One of them tore her from the breast and threw her from the window.
As Tankiasis had for Queen Talaxia, Tania and I constituted day and night. Where I was courageous, she was fearful; where I was impulsive, she was cautious; where I advanced, she retreated. In areas where I felt weak, she found her strength. Every queen of Siberia has a servant, a sister, to complement her wisdom and perfect her virtue.
For a queen must never make a mistake.
She is the survival of the tribe of warrior women.
IN THE TERRESTRIAL world, war is an evil. But evil applied to evil forges good.
One night I was woken by muffled screams. The pine trees outside were in flames, and sheep ran hectically past my tent, bleating in fear. Some of my sisters beat drums to warn of the men’s attack, while Tankiasis was already launching herself at the warriors with a weapon in each hand. One after another the girls threw themselves into the flames. I would have liked to follow them, but Tania had been given orders to take me to a shelter dug into the ground, and all through the night we listened to the clash of weapons and whinnying horses.
Tankiasis woke us at dawn, covered in blood, wild-eyed, and stinking of warfare.
She took us by the hand and led us to the battlefield, where bushes were still burning and the ground was strewn with bodies. She ordered us to kill any man still alive.
I found a young warrior still breathing; his clothes were lacerated, and his right shoulder was completely missing. He wa
s slumped against his panting horse, gazing at the sky as if it were the most beautiful view. When he saw me coming over, he smiled at me; he had the darkest eyes and a face as pale as a lily. He was so ravishing, with his curly hair and the blood emptying peacefully from his body! I put one knee to the ground and drew my dagger. He stared at me intently, his eyes caressing my face and carving into my heart.
In a flash I sliced his throat: his body twitched, his lips quivered. Little flames flickered and then expired in his horrified eyes. Where was he from? What was his name? What was his horse called? How often had he ridden out across the steppes?
Death is not beautiful, but there is beauty when the warrior spirit leaves a body.
I had killed my first man. I had become a woman. I too was ready to die in battle.
Men, we called them zougouls! I was obsessed with them!
As I walked along the banks of the Iaxarte, close to my mother and holding hands with Tankiasis, I no longer thought of men simply as adults who beat children. Now that I was an Amazon, I had learned to see them as haughty and cunning horsemen.
“When you grow up,” Talaxia told me, “you will be stronger than these men.”
“Males have no udder to feed their young,” Tankiasis added. “They have no bellies to bear young. That is why they constantly chase females to make them bear their progeny.”
“Yes,” said Talaxia. “They’re like walking cuckoos, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests.”
“Except ours!” Tankiasis laughed. “The girls of Siberia drink magic infusions. They don’t lay eggs, they fly away.”
Many men approached my mother, and when she spoke to them they were the ones who lowered their eyes in submission. When they fought with her naked, she was the one who forced them to the ground and mounted them.
The wind blew through the doorway, and the moonlight drifted in and out. I was fascinated by men’s muscles and swore mine would be like theirs when I grew up. Talaxia was not afraid of a man taller than her; she seized him bodily, handled him roughly, turned him round. With her long hair swinging in the silvery moonbeams, a distant smile playing on her lips and her eyes pinned to the top of the glacier, my mother made the man howl, begging her to love him again.
He had stopped shouting and lay snoring. My mother called me and put my hand on his sex. It was cold and damp, disgusting.
“Our sex is in our heads,” my mother told me. “No one can steal it, no one can take it away!”
My head still reeling with the feel of that man’s genitals, I wandered among the market stalls with Tania. Boys dressed in blue and saffron cloth, their heads wrapped in turbans, winked and threw flowers at us. The boldest stopped us and tried to talk to us. Tania panicked and dragged me away, not wanting them to touch me, afraid they might bewitch me. She was happier watching monkeys dancing with snakes, but I broke away from her and slipped into the crowd. She ran after me, calling to me as I weaved along alleyways between bustling customers, and hid among hanging carpets and bolts of cloth. Tania was stubborn as a mule and would not give up.
Tania was afraid of men. I simply did not like them.
I WAS GROWING, and my breasts filling out. I used my bow a hundred times a day to dig a deep furrow in the wound on my left breast, and the tough scar tissue forming over it meant I could carry ever heavier bows. I chose bigger and bigger horses, compensating for my small stature with the size of my horse and perfecting my own strengths with my own sacred weapons.
Every queen of Siberia, when she reaches maturity, must travel to the land of the volcano, where she is given a gift of black blades forged by our cousins, the whale hunters. Accompanied by my faithful Tania, I covered a huge distance to reach the forest and then the ocean. I was greeted by the Great Mother of the tribe, who had a beard and many tattoos. There was a special ceremony during which she sang, surrounded by dancing women, and called on the spirits, which had indicated their desire to be incarnated in my weapons. Three seasons later, a sun-shaped bludgeon and a moon-shaped sickle were forged and beaten out on the foothills of the volcano. Two warrior souls came down to breathe life into them: the female soul wedded the solar bludgeon, the male soul the lunar sickle. During my time on the shores of that freezing ocean, the sun darkened in the very middle of the day, devoured by the moon.
“A great queen has come to earth,” concluded the Great Mother, studying me closely. “The moon has outstripped the sun: a queen shall conquer a king.”
I was not that queen. I would like to have told her that, but I held my tongue. I was not a queen, I was a bird of the steppes.
“The king and queen will come to the land of the volcano,” she said, gazing at the glaciers that were now black shadows.
After my return we were attacked by a nomadic tribe. I gave my first orders, and my aunts and sisters followed my commands. Our attackers were ferocious men and more numerous than us, but they fell into my strategic trap. Once they were divided, we struck them down one after the other with our swift blades.
The Amazons decapitated their slain enemies and slung their heads over their horses’ rumps as trophies. Some reduced them to the size of an apple and attached them to their headdresses. Others dried out the head, liver, and testicles, ground them to a powder, and used it to make an infusion that gave them strength and courage. They spoke magic incantations and buried the heart, thereby appeasing the suffering of those souls constrained to leave the valiant bodies of an indomitable tribe.
I had no adornment. The only head I would have liked to hang on a length of woven cord between my breasts was that of my first warrior. I carried the memory of him in my heart—he was my invisible jewel.
There were frequent wars on the steppe: nomadic tribes quarreled, were reconciled, stole from each other, and were allied by marriages. One tribe might be exterminated and wiped from the face of the earth; others might appear on the horizon screaming their war cries, having sprung up apparently from nowhere. There was once a tribe in which the men painted themselves blue, but we no longer saw them at the market. Then there were men with red tattoos who brought a new language, but they in turn disappeared. There had been a tribe of bird tamers and a clan of snake charmers. There was a tribe that venerated stones, and another that venerated their mothers.
On the steppes the grasses grow and dry out; men and women are born and die like the grasshoppers; the earth is inseminated by the rain and hatches new lives; war can destroy just as readily as the earth brings forth.
The tribe of girls who love horses had survived the erosion of time; it had survived massacres, the cold, and the wind. It was condemned to perish like the mountain that collapses beneath the eternal snows.
The Amazons fought for death.
Death is the black light of the life.
I wanted the golden light of the sun.
I carried in my heart the immortality of all things loved.
WHEN I WAS fourteen, I was smitten by a girl I caught sight of at the market. She had a white veil and sparkling black eyes; I could imagine her raspberry mouth, and teeth as hard as little seashells. She was surrounded by serving women, tending to her like the chick of a white bird with a red head.
From the first moment I saw her, I could not bear to be away from her. Despite Tania’s supplications, I followed her for days on end, and Tania returned to the camp, exhausted. I carried on hovering around the girl until she eventually spoke to me: when she realized that I loved her, she arranged to meet me in a luxurious inn. I sold my mare to pay for that night.
Salimba undressed before I even touched her, and she threw her curvaceous body and full breasts into my arms. I loved her again and again. Between our couplings she told me she was betrothed to an ugly, cruel, and aging tribal chief, a man who already had ten wives; she would be his eleventh. She said she was unhappy, that her father also had ten wives, and that she was the tenth wife’s daughter. She said that she foresaw terrible suffering, that the ten wives would speak ill of her and mistreat her, that she
might just earn the tribe’s respect if she bore a son, and that her daughters would be sold to men as she and her mother had been.
Salimba wept, suffocated by her fate. And so I spoke to her of white cranes with crimson heads and of our wars against men. I invited her to have a child with me and to become my wife. She stopped weeping, listening attentively with her head resting on the wound on my breast.
“I would have liked to marry you, Talestria,” she said after a long silence. “But I am not an Amazon. My belly is flaccid, my legs soft, my arms have no strength, I can barely even lift a pail of water. I know neither how to cook nor to hunt nor to live without perfumed milk, nor to sleep without a thick mattress woven with ewe’s wool. Forget Salimba, she is a weakling. Hold me in your arms. Love me once more, one last time!”
When dawn broke, my beloved was dressed and I helped her straighten her veil. I watched her leave along the damp alleyways of a deserted marketplace. I never saw Salimba again. The following year I heard that she had had a sumptuous wedding and was expecting a child. The year after that I was told that she had borne a daughter, and that she was with child again. The next year her name was no longer spoken; she was dead.
We frequently came across corpses on the steppes. They might be our sisters or our enemies, and any one of them could have been Salimba. I addressed to each of them a prayer to appease their soul, wishing them a happy incarnation in lives to come.
“Tankiasis,” I said, “we cannot form an attachment with a man and give him a child, but why can we not wed a woman and conceive with her? Two women together make girl children, and they in turn would have girl children who love horses.”
She laughed at this.
“It is not your blood that has to run in your child’s veins,” she said, “but your spirit. Ordinary men and women beget life by combining their seed. They abandon themselves and then their children. Every day babies are left alone in the cold to cry and die. The girls of Siberia do not beget—they save lives and give life.”
