This is not a fairy tale.

Somewhere on the Steppes that stretch from Kazakhstan to Siberia, under a small and tidy hill, a a woman lay for 2400 years in a Scythian grave.  We have no idea what she looked like, except that she bore the tattoo of a ram on her shoulder, cared enough about her looks to be buried with her mirror and her jewellry, and wore...armour.

Not for show either.  Arrows and a battered shield, skin on her freeze-dried fingers stressed and torn on a bowstring, legs bent on the sides of a horse.  A man of about the same age lies under the same circle of stones, arm curved around a child, and their steeds are buried between their graves.  They were buried in June.

Meet the Ice Maiden.

She was one of a tribe that Herodotus described as warriors and man-killers, and when the Scythians approached them and negotiated with them to marry and breed a race of warriors, the Amazons agreed, on the condition that they move elsewhwere, claiming, according to Herodotus, "We would not be able to live with your women, for we do not share the same customs with them.  We shoot the bow and throw javelins and ride horses.  Your women do none of these things, but stay in their wagons and do women's tasks, never going on the hunt or anywhere else."  The Scythians agreed, and they travelled together beyond the Tanais River .  The Sauromatians soon appeared there, whose women followed the customs of their mothers.

The Silk Road carried her people from the civilized West to the Wild East; the Silk Road brought them gold, and the Silk Road left them behind, burying them and their horses beneath the trackless grass.

They were remembered dimly by the Greeks and Romans as Amazons and as centaurs, but she was just a woman, a foreigner who loved a man and the thousands of destinations indicated by the leagues of grass and wind.  In the ornaments of her grave Hellenized hair ornaments and tribal shamanist animals contort, dancing together as uneasily as reason and instinct.  The Tree of Life clasps her skull and her belt.  She bred warriors, loved a man, lost a child and her life, and was buried like a woman honored bravely and held dearly.

She once rode the Steppes, and for 24 centuries, the Steppes gallopped past her, using her kurgan as a guide to the grassland.  The frost and ice had made her strong while she lived, and praised her by preserving the skin in which she'd existed.  Deep in the hill, the caribou still rode across her back, the bracelets gleamed, and she, her horses, and her family lay together, beside the path to History.

The Macedonians, the Persians, the Medes, the Horde, the Hun, the Han, the Turk and the Slav met and battled and bred at her crossroads.  And last week, they all hurled an arrow skyward over her grave and reached to touch the stars.

8:45:20 PM