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insult and in fact shielded me as if I were a daughter. But he would not let me ride or run, and when I reached once to touch the crescent saber mounted above the hearthstone, he slapped my hand. “No, child, this is not for you.”
    I dwelt in the women’s quarter, learning home craft and music, to spin and to weave. Days I studied; nights I lay apart and wept. My heart longed for home—for the sky, which was God, and the wild earth, our Mother. I missed the sweet voices of heaven which spoke in birdsong and the chirrup of the prairie marmot, the spirits of thunder and the flood and ebb of the sea of stars. When I caught scent of the stable, the horse-smell racked my soul. I ached for the Wild Lands, even their pains, for sharp stones beneath my heel, the sting in the nostrils of the frost-bound steppe, and her gifts, the warmth of my Eleuthera’s arms about me in the night.
    There is no word for “I” in the Amazon tongue. Nor does the term “Amazon” exist. This is a foreign invention. One says “the daughters” or, in our tongue,
tal Kyrte,
“the Free.” Eleuthera, as I said, is a Greek word; my friend’s true name is Kyrte.
    Among tal Kyrte, one says not “I,” but “she who speaks” or “she who answers.” To express herself, one says in preface, “This is what my heart tells me,” or “She who speaks is moved thus.” One of our race does not perceive herself as an individual apart from others, mistress of a private world divisible from the internal worlds of others. When one of my people offers speech in counsel, she does not produce this as a Greek might, from his own isolated disseverment from God; rather she summons it from that which contains her; that is, allows it to arise from that ground which has no name in our tongue but is called by the Thracians
aedor
(in Greek, “chaos”) which is the sky, which is God, that which animates all things and inhabits the spaces between things, understaying and undergirding all.
    Before she speaks, one of the free people will pause, sometimes for no small interval. This the impatient Greek takes for slow-wittedness or stupidity. It is neither; rather a distinct and disparate manner of viewing the world.
    In Sinope when I heard people use the word “I,” I experienced it as a thing of evil, recognizing its wickedness at once. Even after I learned the hang of it, and came to use it myself, I hated it and felt it a bane which would consume me if I kept its usage too long.
    The term of my indenture was defined in this manner. When the mare (whose worth was my tuition, so to say) foaled, and that foal grew to saddle age, I might school it and ride it home. I could not wait for this, however, but stole another horse and weapons. I fled home, believing I could put this “I” behind me. But it had sunk its malign roots into my heart and contaminated me, that I might never truly return to the Daughters, not as I had once been, at one with them.
    When one of tal Kyrte misses steppe and sky, she longs not just for their beauty but also their cruelty. For among the free people the foreawareness of one’s death, and heaven’s indifference to it, is the keenest and most brilliant pleasure, rendering all precious. This is the supreme mystery, the fact of existence itself, before which mortals may only stand in silence.
    The city people hated and feared this mystery. Against it they had founded their walls and battlements, not so much to repel invaders of flesh as to hold at bay this unknown, to blot it from their hearing and wipe it from their sight.
    This is why they hate tal Kyrte, the free people. Our existence recalls to them that before which they have flown in terror. If we can live with it, in fact live
in
it, then they must be less than we, to have erected such edifices to its exclusion. That is why they hate us and why they came, Heracles first and then