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."
Tankiasis had not understood what I meant.
"But I want to make children in women's hearts," I insisted. "I want to inseminate all the women who put down the burden of their existence and become warriors!"
"You dream too much, Talestria," she said with an indulgent smile. "One day you will meet the girl child destined for you, and she will be your heir."
I had never confided in Tania about these torments. Just like her mother Tankiasis, Tania loved me but did not understand me.
I let my dreams gambol over the steppe and spread through the sky. They were my flocks, and I let them graze among the stars.
In our tribe when a warrior was struck down with the incurable illness of old age, she rode out of the encampment and set off across the steppe without a backward glance. She stopped when she came to a river, lay down in the grass, and let the predators and scavengers devour her.
Tankiasis followed these ancestral directives. She had raised me, and now she left. The elders covered up her departure, telling Tania and myself that she had gone to collect weapons from the whale hunters. When her horse returned, I understood the real reason she had gone, and galloped across the steppe for three days in the hopes of finding her.
Tankiasis had vanished. The tall grass undulated, revealing a bird's nest, a stream, a pile of stones marked with dragon's footsteps. The God of Ice had given me a mother and wanted to take her back from me. I challenged his power, resuscitating Tan-kiasis, who now galloped across the internal steppes of my mind. She had become immortal by my wish, and now she watched over me tenderly and sang to me:
My mother, Queen Talaxia, had told me that the words of our tribe contained magic. They could make the invisible appear in the visible and transform legend into reality. Tania and I had begun writing a book in secret: at night, lying in the grass, I read the stars and dictated the story of Alestries to her. Tania believed the stars were whispering in my ear, when in fact I found the words already sown in my heart.
Alestries was a little girl who was abandoned and brought up by wild horses. A goddess took her into her celestial meadows and taught her to wield two sabers. At twenty she left the clouds and returned to earth to do battle with monsters. Astride her white mare she knocked at the door of dark shadowy kingdoms and released women chained in palace dungeons. She seduced princesses dying of boredom, dethroned grasping kings, and drove out evil spirits, which metamorphosed into panthers, snakes, birds, and beautiful women with ample bosoms and rounded bellies.
This book writing was interrupted by an alarm signaclass="underline" a frontier guard to the southeast had lit her beacon. Columns of smoke, relayed by other beacons, spelled out this message: a troop of thirty armed nomads was riding toward us. I asked Tania to lock our book away in a cave, and I raised an army of thirty girls. We galloped for three days to confront the invaders, and a band of tall warriors covered in armor appeared on the horizon. We put on our metal-plated wooden helmets and launched a hail of arrows at them.
A woman on a huge white horse rode at the head of the warriors. Long scarlet feathers bobbed furiously on top of her helmet. She looked over my army, and her eyes came to rest on me. My head swam-she had singled me out. Casting aside our arrows with her shield and lance, she bore down on me, and I rode on to meet her despite the knots of emotion in my stomach. Our weapons met, sending out sparks. The point of her lance slid over my shoulder, and I shuddered with pleasure. With one hand I swung my bludgeon at her chest while I twisted my sickle through the air. She spun her horse round, driving back the bludgeon with her lance while my sickle cleaved her shield apart. Her horse leaped and charged again. The warrior woman had unsheathed her sword and swiped the feathers from my helmet. But I knew this nomad woman!