Tana
Tana was born in early September of 1349 in the open grasslands north of the Caucasus, where Alan villages and camps sat on the edge of the Golden Horde’s reach. Tribute collectors and drovers moved along the tracks; news arrived in Kipchak words as often as in her own Iranian speech. At the hearth her family crossed themselves in the Orthodox way, kept a few saints’ days when a priest appeared, and tied small charms to cradles and doorposts against sickness.
Her earliest world was a crowded yard: her father Bera, her mother Nisa, Bera’s mother Vesna, and Bera’s unmarried brother Ansa under the same roofline and fence. Sana, the older sister who lived, was already walking and talking when Tana arrived. There had been three tiny graves before Tana’s birth—two boys and a girl who did not live past their first years—and the household spoke of those infants in short phrases and then turned back to work. A younger brother, Ratag, was born when Tana was three. Vesna kept a small bag of salt and dried herb by the rafters and insisted it be touched to a baby’s swaddling before the child was carried outside.
Tana grew quick in her hands, less so in her understanding. Sana could learn a new knot after being shown once; Tana needed it shown again, then again, until her fingers remembered without her head. She made up for it with routine. She rose when the coals were still dull, shook ash from the hearth, and set the pot before anyone asked. When Nisa sent her for water she went the same path, counted steps in her head, and returned without spilling.
She learned two ways of speaking early. At home the talk stayed in the Alan tongue: short commands, names for relatives, prayers. Ansa helped with the herds and made trips to trade felt and tallow for salt and metal goods. When he came back from the track, his mouth shifted into Kipchak, and Tana listened hard. The trader Toghrul, who came with drovers each warm season, amused himself by teaching her phrases for measuring and bargaining. Sana teased her for repeating them under her breath while she spun. Tana did it anyway.
Bera treated sons and grain as matters of honor. When he spoke, the younger children stopped moving. He carried weight in his shoulders, kept his knife clean, and counted sacks after threshing. His affection arrived as food set down and a new pair of felt wraps in winter. Nisa gave affection through instruction—how much sour milk to add to porridge, how to rub a baby’s gums with honey-water, how to keep a spinning whorl steady.
Tana’s first clear memory of death came when Vesna died in 1369. The women washed the old body, crossed her hands, and laid her on boards while men dug beyond the yard. Father Giorgi, a priest who traveled between Alan settlements, murmured prayers; Nisa added bread and a small onion to the grave cloth before the earth went in.
By her teens Tana worked like an adult. In spring she bent in the fields and in the afternoons she carried dung cakes to dry, even when her back protested. At night she spun. She had a sharp temper when accused of doing a task wrong. Once, when an aunt laughed at her for miscounting a measure of grain, Tana snapped back loudly enough that Bera came in from outside and ended the quarrel with a hard look.
In 1368, with her father’s consent and a small exchange between households, she married Yanaq from a nearby settlement. She did not travel far; she could still recognize the hills and the bends of the track. The move changed her days. Her husband’s yard held fewer people than her father’s had, and she felt the empty spaces. Yanaq wanted order and obedience, but he also wanted drink at feasts and time away with men on errands. He counted her work as his due.
The beatings began in her second year of marriage. They started with words about missing grain, about her tongue, about who had visited the yard while he was away. He hit her with his open hand, then with a strap. She learned to keep her face blank and her eyes down, but she also argued when he accused her of theft or laziness. After a blow split her lip she went to his parents’ hearth and stayed three nights, sleeping on a mat by the wall. His mother pressed a cloth to her mouth, then scolded her for provoking him.
Roxa was born in 1370. Tana held the baby close, kept her near the hearth when it was cold, and touched the child’s forehead with a pinch of blessed salt she had saved from a feast day. Roxa grew into a sturdy girl who liked to sit by the doorway and listen to stories. When Toghrul came through again, he showed Roxa a coin with a stamped mark; Roxa laughed and tried to bite it. Tana laughed too, briefly, before she wrapped the child and returned to her work.
Two sons followed. The first, Ardan, lived only hours. The second, Suraq, born three years later, did not survive the night. After each burial Yanaq’s anger sharpened. He said she had failed him. He accused her of bringing bad luck from her father’s house. In 1377, after a winter of quarrels and another beating that left bruises across her ribs, he pushed her out. No elder intervened. He kept the bridewealth goods her family had given and sent nothing with her. She walked back to her mother’s household with Roxa on her hip.
Bera died the following year, in 1378, and his household tightened further. Nisa took Tana in, but there was nothing to spare. That autumn, at a watering place on the track near the fields, a neighbor woman named Zarifa shouted that Tana’s animals had grazed her plot and that grain had gone missing. Words turned to hands. Zarifa and a male relative knocked Tana down and kicked her. She crawled home with dirt on her face and pain in her side. Nisa washed her bruises and warned her to keep quiet. Tana did not keep quiet. She snapped at Zarifa the next time their paths crossed, and after that she avoided the track when she could.
The household lost animals to sickness that winter, then faced a spring with little seed. A patron kinsman named Khalmat offered grain on terms that bound them: a share of the next harvest and days of labor. Tana measured the seed into the furrows with careful hands, then went to help thresh in Khalmat’s yard. In the lean springs that followed—1380, 1381, and after—she took small amounts of millet and barley from his store, one sack at a time, hiding it under her wrap. Each time she brought something back later—extra days of work, a skein of thread, a small bowl of curds—so that the taking would not become an open accusation. She kept count in knots on a cord because numbers slipped away from her when she tried to hold them in her head.
Ratag, her younger brother, died in 1383 after a sickness that moved through the herdsmen’s camp. Ansa, her father’s brother, followed in 1388. Those losses meant fewer hands for pasture work and fewer men to argue on her behalf. Still, Roxa grew and took on tasks early. Mother and daughter worked with little talk: milking, stirring porridge, rubbing fat into cracked hands in winter. Roxa teased Tana for her habit of tying the same knot twice. Tana replied with a rare joke, calling Roxa “little priest” when the girl tried to copy prayers with too much solemnity.
In 1390, during harvest transport, Tana fell from an ox-cart. The cart jolted into a rut; she landed badly and screamed. Her ankle swelled and her hip burned with pain. For months she could not walk far. She sat near the hearth, sorting grain, spinning, and directing Roxa in sharp, clipped instructions. Neighbors brought a little help, then stopped when their own work pressed. Tana learned to move with a stick and anger.
Four years later a winter cough settled into her chest. Smoke from the indoor fire made it worse. She wheezed after carrying water and had to stop and spit. In summers she managed, but each cold season the breathlessness returned. She shifted to indoor work and light tasks, keeping to routine with a stubbornness that irritated younger relatives.
Sana died in 1396. She had been the steadiest one, the sister who found Tana work and a place to sleep when the yard felt crowded. Sana’s death came during years of louder news: talk of rival khans, collectors arriving with new demands, and the fear that armies moving somewhere far could turn into raiders closer by. When riders came through, Tana listened from behind a fence slat, catching Kipchak phrases and missing the rest. She went back to the stores and checked the sacks again.
Nisa, her mother, died in 1404. She had grown frail and slow, and at the end she lay on a mat near the hearth while Tana brought her water and wiped her face. After the burial Tana felt the absence in small ways: no one to remember the old prayers exactly, no one who had known the yard before all the deaths.
Roxa died in 1408 at thirty-eight. She had been a grown woman with her own place in the extended household, then illness took her quickly. After the burial Tana’s work became smaller: keeping children from wandering into the cold, mending, cooking. She moved into a corner of a nephew’s house, where a mat and a chest held everything she owned.
The following year an older woman in the extended household fell sick and could not rise. Tana washed her, changed cloths, fed her thin gruel, and kept the hearth warm. She did it day after day while others went to fields and herds. Her own cough rasped as she leaned over the sickbed. When impatience rose, she moved faster and said nothing.
The years after that passed without great change. She rose early, tended children too young to work, spun thread in the light from the doorway, and kept count of stores with her knotted cord. Her chest rattled each winter but cleared enough by spring to let her move. She attended burials—a nephew’s wife, a cousin’s infant—and murmured the prayers she had learned from Vesna. Younger relatives found her stubborn and sharp-tongued, but they also trusted her to measure grain fairly and to notice when a child ran a fever. She outlived most of the people who remembered her marriage and her separation. By her seventies she was the oldest woman in the yard.
In November of 1426, after a morning of coughing and sorting kindling by the hearth, Tana stood to fetch water and collapsed without warning. The women of the household washed her body, crossed her hands, and buried her beyond the yard with a short prayer, a pinch of salt, and bread set near the head cloth.