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evenings the queen would lie on the ground and read the stars, telling stories that developed as the stars moved across the sky. She dictated them to me, and I, Tania, wrote them down by the light of a lantern. We hid these pages of stone so the other girls would not find them. The queen told me I should wall up our book in a cave the day she died. At the time I could not know that our lives would be so brief and so intense.
    The ink turned white for the stories from the stars.
    That year the queen was fifteen years old, in keeping with our customs. I was a little older than her. I may have been melancholy, but I was a stranger to sorrow.
     
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    On the steppes we were known as the Amazons, which meant the tribe of girls who loved horses. We reared the swiftest, hardiest horses with the most magnificent coats. Like other nomads, we strayed beneath the skies in search of tall grass and limpid water. We were tough, solitary girls, forging no links with other peoples. No one knew where we came from; no one knew of our divinity; no one knew the Amazons, who kept the secret of their origins to themselves.
    Millions of years earlier our ancestors lived on a luxurious mountain called Siberia where the trees blossomed all summer long. They knew how to tame men and horses, and lived in harmony with nature, but one day nature betrayed them and forced them down from the mountain onto the plain. Our ancestors walked and walked and walked. They walked for decades on end before discovering the fertile steppes.
    In those far-off days there was a queen known as the Great Queen. She established the tribe's laws and devised its writing. She observed nature: birds in flight, the intelligence of leaves, flowers opening. Inspired by these moving things that gave life its animation, she invented our written language, which looks sometimes like flowers, sometimes like leaves, sometimes like birds twirling in the sky. The Great Queen was the only woman in our tribe to bear children. There was a tribe on the other face of Mount Siberia and she obtained their king's seed. Before their union the two tribes had never met, for the mountain was almost impassable.
    The king managed to cross the treacherous pass and met the Great Queen on a mountain path. The queen, who was in pursuit of a boar, lowered her bow. She had never seen a man like him in her forest. She knew nothing of him, his name, his origins, his race. Devastated by his beauty, she decided to capture him in a net. She brought him back along with his followers, and paraded them before her women like trophies. The king was taller than the men our ancestors used as slaves, and in his nakedness, he glowed like the sun itself.
    The queen fostered a terrible longing to couple with him. She bathed him and called for serving girls to massage him. She had him thrown into the middle of her enormous bed, a carpet of the most tender grasses, the most fragrant flowers, and the silkiest feathers. She dressed in a veil stitched with bird scales from a species that has since disappeared but that once dazzled with beams of reflected light. She put a crown on her head, a tall arrangement of tree blossom like an invisible forest reaching up to the skies, and she walked over to him to begin her seduction. Fascinated by such splendor, unlike anything he had ever known, the king made love to her for three days and three nights without interruption.
    The queen was so in love that she planted giant bamboo, golden ivy, and venomous flowers around the bed to form a magnificent aviary. She asked the birds to watch over her captive. The queen was so in love that she forgot her duties. She forgot food and drink and the girls of Siberia who wept in her absence. She could think only of her man, of bathing him, suckling him, kissing him, feeding him, and singing him her most beautiful songs. She could not take her eyes off him, or take a single step away from his side. The whole world could have collapsed and she would