The silhouettes drew closer, and all at once I realized that Talestria was in Alexander's arms, but her hands were not tied. She was resting her head against the warrior's chest, and he held her close to him. She was holding his horse's reins! She was smiling! She looked radiant! My head reeled. A curse had just fallen on our tribe: my queen was in love!
Both armies held their breath, paralyzed by the sight of their leaders approaching. Alexander's eye swept authoritatively over the stupefied crowd, addressing not a single word to his men. My queen gave no orders. They continued to draw closer, still together, and stepped into the gap formed by the two armies so that we-the Amazons and Alexander's soldiers-had to follow the queen and the king. I, Tania, followed Talestria toward the south, then toward the east, where a huge encampment stood out against the pale sky. Its gates opened: we entered the kingdom of men.
Warriors in short skirts, wrestlers in scarlet leggings, and men in blue and yellow turbans milled between the tents. Women with white, black, or pink skin strolled about with their mixed-race children. Persian merchants prowled up and down, singing the praises of their wares. Aviaries, cages of tigers, and chained leopards were loaded onto carts, waiting for the order to leave. Monsters four times the size of horses, with snouts as long as a boa and ears as wide as a crane's wingspan, filed past, making the ground shudder.
Some women brought us a feast to eat, and a group of men with no hair came to play musical instruments. Slave women arrived with basins, pails of water, and clean clothes. They wanted to undress me, but I grew angry and threw them out of my tent. I sent round orders not to reveal our identity.
I waited anxiously for Talestria, and it was three days before she reappeared, draped in necklaces and rings of gold, her eyes emphasized with blue lines and her head covered with a veil. I greeted my queen with one knee to the ground to demonstrate my sadness and indignation. She sent the slaves away with a wave of her hand, came into my tent, and let down the door.
She threw off her veil with its feather trimming, took off her jewels, and flung them to the four corners of the tent. She tore off her embroidered tunic and asked for pails of water to wash herself. I too disliked the heady Persian perfumes that made her body unrecognizable, and I was quick to pour the water and wash her from head to foot.
"You're angry," the queen said.
"Tania is your serving woman. A serving woman never disobeys her queen."
"I know you resent me," she went on. "Tania, the God of Ice has revealed my path to me: I am not the queen of the Amazons; I shall marry Alexander, but not out of weakness-this is my destiny."
Her words cut me to the core. I clenched my teeth and held back my tears.
"The tribe cannot survive without a leader," she said. "I appoint you as regent and entrust to you the task of finding my heir. Go back to the land of Siberia, Tania. I know your character; you will be unhappy if you stay here."
"Talestria, the indomitable queen of the Amazons, is captive to her own love for a man," I cried, raising my voice. "If this is not out of weakness, then it must be a spell! Tell me Alexander made you drink a magic potion! Admit that he stole your soul and locked it in some evil casket! Wake up, Talestria! The Amazon queens of the past entrusted you with the tribe's survival. You cannot abandon us!"
"I shall never forget them. I shall never forget you."
Tears flowed over my queen's cheeks, but her voice remained steady.
"The queens were wrong. I am not Talestria: she should have been you. Be strong, Tania, be the invincible warrior woman who fears no separation and who does not suffer when she loses a sister. Go back to our country. You must teach the language of birds to the girl children who will be our heirs."
"My queen," I said, beginning to sob, "you have forgotten the warnings of our ancestors! The Great Queen loved a man, she died for him, and the mountain was covered in snow for all eternity."
"I have forgotten nothing," she said, and although her eyes shone, her calm demeanor chilled me to the bone. "I have forgotten nothing. I am not afraid of being cursed. I have faith in my god!"
I spilled a great torrent of tears: my queen was under Alexander's spell. Her life was in danger. How could I leave her?
"So long as you are alive I will not be regent. That is the ancestral rule; there is no point insisting. I shall follow you to the ends of the earth, I shall not go back to our country."
I wept more and more copiously, and the queen, abandoning her reserve, wept with me. The night wore on, and she eventually fell asleep next to me… or perhaps she feigned sleep, as I did.
Disgust, disappointment, and anger alternated with tenderness and regret. Like the Great Queen, Talestria was in love with a man: this meant the end for our tribe; our race was condemned to disappear, such was our fate. How was I, Tania, to whom Tales-tria had offered her braid and her power, how was I to stop the inexorable extinction of a tribe about to lose its queen? Talestria was asking me to cheat the prophecy: to go back to our country and announce that she had died in battle.
How could I appease the anger of our god by hiding the truth? How could I tear myself away from Talestria, the queen of my heart, the sister I had watched over with all my vigilance, the one person my body and soul would fly to wherever I might be? How could I capitulate before Alexander without a fight? Without me, she would drown in an ocean of baubles and precious metals, things that could be bought and sold, and she would wither and fade in a corrupt world where people's faces were distorted with greed, a world where they put birds in cages. My queen had betrayed the tribe. I, Tania, was responsible for this wrong: I had to exile myself with her, to die with her.
I remembered happier times when we lay in the grass and the queen dictated the story written in the stars. I wrote her words down by candlelight and let them transport me to a magic world. The ink I used dried and turned white. But Alexander's arrival had interrupted this writing; we had to pack our things away hastily and set off at a gallop.
I wept and wept and wept again. I remembered Talestria fighting an unknown warrior, both of them crossing weapons, hurtling toward the horizon and disappearing. When they reappeared on the steppe, we no longer had a land or any ancestors. We will never see the white cranes with crimson heads again; we will no longer be called the girls who love horses.
The following morning the queen called the twenty-nine warrior women together in my tent. I, Tania, her scribe and spokeswoman, announced Talestria's decision and said:
"I, Tania, who have acted as her scribe, shall be the firefly lighting her way right to the land of the dead. Who among you will take my braids and become regent?"
Sitting around me in a semicircle, they began to sob. Not one of them wanted to be regent. Not one of them wanted to tell the tribe that Talestria and Tania had died in battle. Not one of them had the courage to lie or to tell the accursed truth: the queen was in love with a man and had run away with him. Not one of them wanted to be the one to go back to our country and announce the arrival of snow for all eternity. They all swore to keep the secret of our origins and to renounce our past.