Akmaral

Judith Lindbergh

Travel back 2400 years, when Mongolia didn’t yet have a name and fierce female warriors fought alongside men as equals.

Meet Akmaral, an orphan cared for by her clan and marked by prophecy to become a great warrior. This book tells the story of her life, from training as a young girl to coming into her full power as a leader. Along the way are close calls, wracking grief, brutal battles, and a forbidden love triangle.

Many of Akmaral’s choices and the day-to-day habits of the clan are dictated by two deities: the hearth goddess Rada Mai and the god of war, Targitai. The hearth represents home, heat, safety, life, and food. It’s protection against snow leopards, wolves, and human interlopers. In contrast, Targitai embodies violence and the force of attack. These two opposing forces battle within Akmaral: Attack the settlement on the other side of the hill or align with them for protection?

If you’ve ever wondered how anyone could survive in such a taxing environment, this story includes every detail you need to know. There’s a lot of drinking milk and being cold. During an epic thunderstorm, the only option is to hunker down on the open plain and wait. There are a shocking number of horse sacrifices, a devastating surprise attack by a golden eagle, and an extremely dangerous, angry mama boar.

Akmaral is treated with equality, respect, and sometimes fear by the men around her. There’s no question from them that she’s brave enough, strong enough, or determined enough to lead them. But her physical ferocity is matched by her equally fierce capacity to love: the men in her life, the children of the clan, and the land that is their home.

Is this an adventure tale masquerading as a story of motherhood and grief — or the other way around? Who cares when the storytelling is this muscular, the emotion is this rich, and the action is this thrilling.

The steppes are not a lonely place. They are vast, filled with spirits that linger and nourish. They take the form of eagles and antelope, hill pigeons that flock, black choughs that inhabit the winds. Foxes roam the flatlands and rabbits tuck into the narrow places. They tickle alive the broad, verdant grasses and the shallow, fragrant valleys. If you watch closely, and listen, you will learn from them. Still, it is not a human place. If ready companionship is what you seek, you must go to the settled villages. These dapple the shores of rivers, the sheltered sides of hills, the confluences of roads made by hoof-prints of goats and sheep, horses and camels. Our people sometimes visited these villages, for they had fine things to trade. We showed them rolls of felt or crafted rugs or dried meat or cheese, and they gave us glistening beads of stone or glass formed in places we had never heard of, or bolts of nubbly silk or wrought-gold plaques like those my dead mother once knew how to cast. Or tools or blades of bronze and sometimes even iron, like my father’s. — Judith Lindbergh

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