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"...and I looked for another team leader I could rely on. My choice fell on a girl called Thalestris, a Sauromantian. They have many customs of the Amazons, serving the Moon Maid in arms, and fighting in war beside the men. When first she came she looked very outlandish, dressed in a quilted coat and deerskin trousers, and smelling of goat-milk curd. Her country is at the back of the northeast wind, beyond the Caucasus, and they only undress there once a year. But stripped and cleaned she was a fine girl, a little too mannish for one's bed, but with all the beauties of a bull-leaper. The courage too; for on her very first day she was eying me with envy.

"Liking her spirit, I taught her all I could; and when she was made leader of the Gryphons, she came again for counsel..."

-Theseus of Athens, The King Must Die, by Mary Renault

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Thalestris is a girl of the Sauromantians, a people credited by the Greeks with being close kin of the Amazons of Pontos and the Scythians of the cliffs near the Maeotian Lake. They dwell in the lands beyond the Tanais River; but even so far from the ocean, they still hear the harpers who use the tongue of the Shore Folk, and know their tales.

And if they wish the use of bronze at all, they are still subject to the Cretan tribute. For Minos controls the sea, and if he should stop the tin-ships there would be no way to make bronze; and then they would have bone and stone only for their weapons, like the first Earth Men. So when the Cretans come all the way up the Tanais in every second year, one tribe brings forward their tribute: so many horses, and so much cornel-wood, and so much red dye, and two youths and two maidens of slight but strong build, to be offerings before Poseidon and the Goddess-on-Earth in the bull-dance.


(Appearance note: Thalestris is a bull-leaper as depicted in the Knossos frescoes and in the writings of Mary Renault. Nine times out ten, she will be wearing exactly what all the other bull-dancers wear: boots, hand-wraps, a loinguard or pair of breeches, and an amazing amount of jewelry. In her homeland they wear much more than that, but nobody wears the clothes of their homeland in the Bull Court, let alone in the dance itself. There is going to be a lot of culture clash.)

Thalestris is from The King Must Die, and is the property of Mary Renault. She appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.