"His head sits in a cabinet in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, nearly 5,000 km away."

I had encountered the man who had once lain four metres under the kurgan before.

For the shortest, darkest nights of the year I have something very different this issue. This is the beginning of a book called Grave Goods that I worked on for years after finishing The Age of the Horse.

Pazyryk Valley, Siberia, 2019.

Grave Goods

July 2019, Pazyryk Valley, Altai Republic, southern Siberia

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe for the earth to vibrate, and the grey and red rocks to start tumbling down the sides of the half-dismantled cairn. Not cairn – a kurgan, a grave mound so big I could have scaled it like a hill, half demolished and emptied out. An inadvertent cenotaph. I stood a little way off the sandy tourist trail, past the information board in incomprehensible Russian, and at the side of the mound of stones that had once marked the burial place of a man, a woman and seven horses. The other travellers in the group were beginning to drift away, led by our guide, Vladimir. I lingered a little, waiting for something to happen. I had travelled so far.

The small Siberian valley was open as a pan, sloping gently away from me, the path following the curve. It was riverless, tilting down to a greater river valley, part of a taiga plateau suspended like a canopy between the Altai mountains. Larches and pine trees filed respectfully along its fringes where hillocks rose and gathered towards the valley's steeper sides, and the brilliant blue, dazzlingly weighted sky of a Central Asian summer bore down. I could see the three peaks of Mount Belukha in the distance, and a trail of nimbus clouds migrating above the foothills like a herd of white animals. I knew that somewhere to the south east and half a kilometre higher still, near to where the Russian, Chinese, Kazakh and Mongolian borders almost converged, hung the Ukok Plateau – the end of everything, as the locals said, the heavenly pastures.

I had encountered the man who had once lain four metres under the kurgan before. His head sits in a cabinet in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, nearly 5,000 km away. Someone beat him to death with a battleaxe, and then his countrymen peeled off his scalp, cut through his skull and replaced his brain with dirt, larch cones and pine needles. I'd seen the head in December 2016 on my first trip to Russia: a battered, crudely stitched and peeling old football, silver-birch-bark skin with old shellac and gum embalming, nose a lump and a hole, upper lip split to reveal white teeth, half ground down. Two thousand three hundred years old.

I'd also seen the skin from his arms and chest, floating ghoulishly in the neighbouring cabinets. It was weathered to stale, dark yellow and restitched by whoever had embalmed him but alive, so alive, with strange black tattoos: an elk-griffin with antlers that curled back on themselves the length of its twisting body; black-legged argali sheep with spiral horns; a headless dog or great cat with a striped, fat tail nestled around the back of his heart. The animals on his arms twisted like falling cats, trying to land on their feet. A herd of goats ran up the inside of one calf on rocking-horse legs, and his shin had a great, mute fish drawn on it like a greave. Some time after the violence of the axe and the funeral, his head, hands and feet were chopped off. Then, two thousand years or so later, the Soviets took him from his grave, and, because his body could not be saved, peeled off those tattooed strips of skin and kept them, along with his head. I don't know what they did with the rest of him. It's said that because his corpse had no birth certificate, it didn't earn a place in the state morgue, but Soviet surrealism is too close to folk satire to know if that's true. He didn't come back here to the valley.

Where did he think he would go after his own death, when he attended funerals of other clansmen and women? He must have been relatively near the end of life then. He was in his late fifties or early sixties but tall and sturdy, still in combat, although there was a layer of fat over the tattooed muscles. The woman buried with him was over forty, her clothes an elaborate collage of squirrel skin, colt and otter fur, and the soles of her shoes beaded. Not much is left of her either. The same people who hacked up her husband dismembered her mummy to get at her jewellery and scattered body parts about the tomb – one foot still in its leopard-skin bootie – though they left her silver mirror and harp. The Soviets took her clothes and her shaven head. Did the couple realise that their bodies would be preserved for so long, or were they embalmed only because they died when the ground was too frozen to dig? Were they supposed to cross over into an unfathomable afterlife? Or rise again in a long-ago future?

There are no letters or inscriptions in the tomb, just the grave goods and their corpses. If they lived in anything more solid than a tent that could be packed on the back of a wagon, it was perhaps a log cabin, because they built immaculately fitted-together huts underground for their dead. But there are no settlements to be dug up – only burials. This couple's underground cabin was double-walled, not quite high enough for him to stand up in. The builders had put a deep layer of gravel over the earth floor and covered it with planks. The open pit above had been filled with rows of larch logs topped with potentilla branches. In the winters, the mountain valleys were scoured with wind that chased off even the snow; these people knew how – and why – to fit logs, planks and branches so compactly together. Above the potentilla, earth, and then the heaped rocks I was willing to start trembling.  

Gradually after the burial, water had trickled through the stone mound during the winters and turned to ice, lifting up the hollowed larch trunk in which the couple lay together. It crept over the black felt rug that covered the planks, and congealed around the carved legs of the little tables nearby. It froze the bodies in their larch-tree coffin in clear ice and preserved the sheep bones left on the tables after the meat was gone, chilled the leather bag of cheese, and crushed the earthenware flasks left considerately on the floor. It crept up the six wooden stilts of the stand leaning against the corner of the chamber, covered the copper censer that used to burn hemp and coriander seed as it hung from that stand. When the summer came, the grave stayed cold: the voids between the cabins and under the stones kept the air cool till the ice was over a foot deep in places. It even froze the seven horses lined up in a higher chamber up the shaft. After the grave robbers hacked a hatch into the larch logs, the water crept back again through the hole, in frozen strata of yellow ice striated with bubbles. By 1948, when the Soviets dismantled the grave, there were three mushy, discoloured layers over the first clear pond of ice.

The horses were not plundered. They lay in rows on larch and juniper in a pit behind the north wall, just bones and tails left, but the life that zinged from the man's tattoos was three dimensional here. The cheek pieces and headbands of their bridles were carved from gilt-foiled wood: great cats sitting poised; smiling rams; a hawkish goose head. Their felt saddle cloths showed a griffin play-bowing, a fringe of short feathers running up its shoulder, and a blue elk with a white ruff. One horse wore an extraordinary mask – between its ears was a wild goat, between its horns a bird flew out, its pinions cut from felt and wood. The costumes had been mended in the past, so they had more uses than this death ride, but the chestnut, bay and black geldings had been killed so they could not be ridden by others. 

The scale of the preparation and craftwork astounds. Imagine the labour: the aching muscles that beat the copper nails, hollowed out the larch-wood coffins or shaped the pots; cramped fingers that combed felt for the carpet; the pricked thumbs that cut and stitched the appliqués of elks and cockerels onto the saddle cloths. The pits were dug using mallets made from antlers – they had been discarded, broken, in the shaft, next to a rough trolley. There were hours of skill, too, in the two stags just eleven and a half centimetres high that someone sculpted from wood: each tine on their antlers branched into yet more tines, spreading like trees from their raised foreheads. Think of the freight of all this myth and symbolism too, and how overwhelming it must have felt to crouch in the space among the grave goods. 

The Pazyryks existed between the fifth and third centuries BCE, and the kurgan in front of me dated from the end of that period. They are believed to have been semi-nomadic herders who travelled between familiar pastures with the seasons. They were part of what many archaeologists picture as a loose-knit fabric of “Scytho-Siberian” cultures that left those snarling, curling animals as gold belt buckles, tattoos, and grave goods, that harnessed its horses elaborately and that fought with battleaxes and recurve bows across a vast 3,500km territory from the Black Sea to the Altai mountains. The area around the Black Sea was the homeland of the Scythians proper; the Saka, among whom the Pazyryk were included, lived in Siberia and Central Asia, along with many more cultures like the Issedones or Massagetae whose names have reached us only via outsiders. They are named "Pazyryk" after the nearby village that is, in turn, named for the Tuvan word for "mound" or grave goods – presumably because of the many burial cairns that lie along the valley.

On the other side of the Altai the steppe went on unspooling all the way to Manchuria, and contained yet more cultures who were also intertwined with the Saka and Pazyryk. The Pazyryk embodied the fluidity and reach of the steppe, their grazing grounds in the Altai a saddle between eastern and western grasslands linked by difficult mountain passes. They were largely of what we now call European ethnicity but sometimes part-Mongolian, and probably spoke an Indo-European language related to Iranian. It was once assumed that the Scythians spread from west to east along the steppe, but now most accept that they were heading in the opposite direction, from the Altai to Europe. 

There are thousands of kurgans – not all Pazyryk – common as our scattered barrows and megaliths in Europe. They have been found in eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Anatolia and even Iran. A friend told me his Tuvan wife grew up playing on them; southern Siberian highways are lined with grassed-over mounds. The Pazyryk Valley I was walking along that summer is often called the Siberian Valley of the Kings; besides the canonical five "royal" kurgans, of which this empty mound was the second, there were 35 other barrows, stone platforms, formations and circles making up incomprehensible ritual landscape that I filed past as I caught reluctantly up with the rest of the tour group.

The Pazyryk couples' world was small, a valley or two, perhaps, but its horizons stretched across much of Eurasia. Their lives were cross-shot with long-distance movements and trade. The mummies had mirrors from China, cowries from India, rugs from Persia and beads from Egypt and decorated their possessions with distinctive Achaemenid lion-griffins. The man in the second kurgan wore a torc around his neck that seemed to show lion-griffins like those in the Oxus treasure. I doubted the Pazyryk couple meant to go to St Petersburg, even if they'd known it as a distant marsh, long before Peter the Great laid down the Nevsky Prospect and threw up the colourful facades of the palaces and houses. Somewhere in history, the bodies in the kurgan were transformed from people to artifacts and exhumed.

But they had also travelled through time. The fresh cheese in their tomb, the mulched grass in their horses' stomachs, had lasted long beyond the lifespan of most organic material. It had not been possible to extract DNA from their mummies – they were excavated in an age of skull measuring, not genome sequencing – but they have been drawn from death with flesh and hair and their clothing reconstructed. In one of my books, the woman in kurgan 2 sits crosslegged on a mat and gestures at her censer, her fur carapace restored and her witchy headdress towering over her black hair. The man's tattoos have been inked into the skin of scores of modern humans, including one Canadian man who has turned his body into a walking, breathing reproduction, from the fish greave to the curled, striping tail around the back of the heart. The couple were in my time but, even by travelling across a continent and planting myself next to their tumbled grave, I couldn't reach into their time. 

We existed, in my imagination, like the layers of frozen rain water in the tombs, each set in place one on top of the other without flowing together. I was above them, looking down through laminations of muffling, impenetrable but see-through ice. It ought, I hoped, to be possible to crawl into their world through those airlocks of graves, to open their eyelids, the sockets stuffed with deer fur, and look in. And yet it was not. And I was beginning to realise that other peoples' stories had piled up for centuries like the potentilla and the ice and logs and begun to obscure the original people. 

A word from me: “Do not be afraid to disappear”

Since I published The Age of the Horse in 2016 I’ve been pursuing what the book world calls “a profile”. That’s meant writing essays, reviews and journalism for many publications, knocking around on social media, and, lately, publishing this newsletter. It’s a good thing to do to help your books. I have enjoyed all of this. I got to go to mare’s milk farms, explore the idea of turning into a horse, grapple with the complexities of the Palio in Siena, grow my mind and my reading list on pre-Musk Twitter and launch Amazons of Paris. I love the shorter turnaround and immediate reward of all of these projects. I love how they make connections.

I have also worked on new books. Grave Goods resulted in writing residencies and grants but collapsed thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Amazons book research is more complicated now that I can’t just take off to Paris for a week without disrupting life for a small child. I also made a massive breakthrough that will require a ton of funding and competence in a new language to complete. So.

Literary social media can give the impression that we are all capable of simultaneously producing well-placed short pieces, writing books and teaching/compiling newsletters/doing day jobs, but this is not possible for many. A book review takes days but pays little. Few of your hard-earned newsletter readers are likely to pay. Good, commensurately paid homes for essays are rare. Vanishingly few writers buy time to write books by writing any of the above, and when it’s been a while since your last book came out, the value of investing effort in the non-book projects dwindles and it’s time to knuckle down and write an actual book again if that’s your goal.

Maybe if I didn’t have too much on my plate, it would feel achievable, but I have a day job, a toddler, and a language or two to learn. I tried to draw up a plan with a column for each commitment and found there were six or seven, minus domestic life. It’s taken me months to acknowledge that this is not feasible. I kept trying to make a stockpile of future newsletters so I could write a book, then finding it easier to just write more newsletters.

So I’m taking the advice of a writer friend, Victoria Gosling. After the January issue (a BANGER, if I may say) I will park the Amazons for a few months, and I’ll do what I need to do: retreat into a hole and write a chunk of a new project that’s a huge departure for me. I will stick to three columns: day job, Swedish, new project. This move is not very internet literary zeitgeist, but life is short, and art takes a long time. And this new project has been hovering temptingly and dangerously like Cittàgazze in the heavens over Svalbard for some time. So I’m going to do something out of character and dive in. “Be brave,” was the advice that my friend Ailana Kamelmacher gave to her mentees. She was right. 

I don’t think you’ll mind – I suspect you enjoy the Amazons when they arrive but aren’t desperate for a monthly fix. But if you want to read more, the archives are here. I noticed that my much beloved Zephora Furr didn’t have many reads. She’s a great place to start. And don’t forget the scorching heroine of January 2024’s issue.

Last year I saw that someone on Substack had quoted Michaela Coel’s 2021 Emmy speech and it’s a perfect new year’s resolution for me in 2024: 

“Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success – do not be afraid to disappear. From it. From us. For a while. And see what comes to you in the silence.”

PS. I never sought to monetise Amazons of Paris, but if you would like to add something to its figurative tip jar, please make a donation to Cancer Research in Ailana’s name here. She was wise, generous and beautiful, and is oh so badly missed.

Terrible blurry photo by me but unmistakably Ailana in 2012 at her wedding.