Time-traveling Adventures with Taklamakan, Queen of the Huns and Tarbagatay, Khatun of the Khazari

We came out of the past and met men living in our past, men on horseback with
no big elephants, or tanks as they told us, in an age of tanks. Each warrior dressed
like a Khazar as if time had not passed, wearing their shaggy bourkas that covered
the entire rider and the back of his steed.

We had arrows, but they had what they said were "rifles." And the barrels of
their rifles protruded from their long bourkas. Below dangled the horse-tails
braided with bullets, just like the Khazar warriors who carried their arrow heads
that way. So nothing really changes in the mountains or in the steppes like it
would have if we were at the crossroads of the world. We are not. Those of the
steppes soon take to the eagle's nests.

We stopped for the night. Murat seized his son and rode on a raid. He lived
by the art of war. We lived by the book. I sensed these tribes needed a hero, but
fast. What they had was the running fire of the guerilla as a power game.
Murat's son, Lam, rode from aoul to aoul calling upon warriors to follow
them.We rode with them to a spot chosen to hold an assembly-in a vale shaded
by trees.

Instead of making war charts, they sang praises of heroes. Murat determined
his plans by a chorus of voices. A moonless sky paraded before us as we sprang
into saddles of sheep's wool.

We were still in the Kafkas, but in the "year" as they call it, 1942, the party
told us and explained in a way that they didn't know we weren't from their time.

A narrow, rugged path winded over the mountains picking its way along the
rocky bed of the torrent. Stopping to rest, the greenish tea passed before our noses. Murat cooked better
than Taklamakan and prepared hot burghoul wheat and barley cakes with a
savory pilaf of minced mutton. I poured honey over dried fruits.

The war would have to stop when it was time for cooking. Mountain men
passed bowl of skhone, or mead with a little seasoned sour milk and a few honey
and millet cakes. Everyone shared the food as they shared life.

Murat's son of the Kagan of the Khazars and Taklamakan, Queen of the Huns were silent, and so was my brother. They were both boys of the same age, that special ritual of transition that began in the future when a child
turned thirteen and became responsible...when you dress as a warrior, but are still a little boy with a big job to save your family and your homeland while learning great wisdom.

The food eaten, every man took to cleaning his weapons while uttering a short
prayer for protection. No speaking to one another. The sentinels were set. Each
man knew that if he fell down in battle, he would only be a sleeping baby, the sky
his crib's curtain.

I cut branches for them and covered the branches with mats and felts. It began
to rain, and a wind rose up. The boughs furnished us a place to nap. The men
couldn't sleep well. They kept the watch fire burning out of the rain. Fires lighted
up the whole mountainside making the granite glow with eerie colors.

Rocks snuggled against one another. The radiance warmed our faces. The
enemy's fire, still the same old enemy, diffused a glow. Where were we now? The
Kuban river still flowed as it had in my time. Whoever made the war set fire to
the reeds on the Kuban and Terek rivers meant to destroy the huts of the mountaineers.
The shadows threw a dull red tint on the horizon.

There's the moon, a thin line of silver, rippling the blackness, outlining the
sides of tanks hidden in a dark forest. "Never take an enemy's life in cold blood," Murat whispered to my brother.
He did not answer, but moved to kiss my father's hand, touching it to his forehead,
and kissing it again before letting the Kagan's strong hand drop slowly to
his side.

The Mountaineer's leader looked us over. "If you do not fear, there is nothing
that can harm you. The horse's head will be turned toward the mountains."
Murat's son paced back and forth. "You tell me what tanks do?"
My father answered them all, a stranger in a strange land. "The Creator of all
of us must help your enemies. We Khazari can do without outside help when it
comes to fighting the enemy of our brothers in the mountains."

"Ah, but we have outside help," Murat grinned.
"The Russian hirelings. The free men of the mountain have spies along the
border. Everywhere there are souls which can be bought for gold."
"War is not hell, son," Murat told his boy. "It's a poet's paradise."
"It is too, hell," the Kagan responded quickly.

"I'd rather be listening to the music of my water wheels."
"A poet fights better because he has read or written the romance of war,"
Murat said.
"Romance?" My father laughed.
"Yes," said the Mountaineer leader. "Our enemies, like the Roman legions cut
off in the woods of Germany, will be left with no one to bury them. Each foreigner
who comes in here to make war thinks more of his hut in his own land.
Then one of us, unable to rest, rides down from the mountains and hides for a
day in the reeds of the Kuban river."

Murat's son continued the vision, "We creep at night like a wolf from his lair.
We glide unseen by the guard post of the enemy as the war-makers take their
final pull on a vodka bottle. We crawl up within sight of him, and pick him off."
"And who is this enemy you speak of?" My father asked.
"Where have you been? Don't you know there's a World War on?"
"You are not thinking real," said the Kagan.
"You'll all perish. I haven't received any invitation to a war."
"You're in it now," Murat scowled.
We were all in this together, people from different times and different lands.
Here and there small parties appeared in the distance. The method of warfare up
here in the mountains hadn't changed since my times.
The men rolled stones on the heads of the enemy below same as they did
twenty thousand years before. At Gogatel, a small fort situated south of the
Andian range that runs parallel with the Andian branch of the Koissu, Murat and
Atokay joined a tribe of mountain men.

Now, we all pitched in, Khazar from a distant time and Mountaineer mountain
men from another time like two ends of one candle. We helped those around
us to establish a depot of such provisions and munitions of war. This place, I'm
told is a single day's journey from Dargo.

The soldiers, lightly laden, set off at dawn full of cheer and energy. Before they
tired, the men had crossed the pass of Retchel into the beech woods of Itchkeria.
I am the only female in this pack of wolves. And then the fight begun.

Hostile tribes of the region were up in arms, and waiting for the enemy. The
woods are deep here. As Murat's vanguard reached the first narrow ledge, a murderous
fire from behind broke loose from behind the trunks of a thousand trees.
Lost in time. Lost in the woods. We scattered, not knowing what monstrous
machines these men of the future had. Again, in the Kafkas, the more things
changed, the more they didn't.

The mountain men fell across the path, serving as a shield for one party and
obstacles to their enemy. They never explained who the enemy was, but they
were fighting the Rus or what they later told us were the Russians on one side and
the Germans on the other and also other enemies of the tribes of the Kafkas.
We had barricades-natural vines and flowercreepers.

The paths were narrow and steep like in our summer palace away from the river flies. The winding path
made the march so difficult that both us and whomever the enemy happened to
be at the moment, none of us could march more than a few steps in a day.
Why were we fighting people we had never met? They told us about the war
against the Jews and their war for a free Kafkas and the world war, and it all rang
together like a giant gold bell.

Fighting went on into the night. Murat brought us close to Dargo. Flames
and fire consumed this aoul, and the burning lighted up our path. Murat had set
on fire every bit of wood, straw, and grain that could not be taken away. He left
the enemy only the blackened stone walls of the mud houses.

"So you want to be a mountain man, eh?" I said to my brother, Marót. Our
Mountaineer friends cooked their meals on the bivouac fires. We slept under the
open sky. The next day more fighting came to us on wild horses.

Murat had found a force of six thousand warriors of the Kafkas to anonymously
join up with this village called an aoul. The warriors opened fire on the
Russians who were supposed to save the mountain men from Teutonic lands. We
finally learned the name of those on each side.

An arrow wasn't good enough, or a stone. We had to learn the guns. And the
guns consumed too much ammunition to be fired with any rapid movement.
When the mountaineers took the weapons, they could not operate the Russian
equipment they had taken. Someone took Dargo, but it wasn't Murat.

"In Medieval times when the Jews of Eastern Europe had no hope other than
the grace of the Almighty, the coming of the Meshiach (Messiah), or the arrival
of the Khazari...we always saved the battle for those we defended," said my
father.

"We're time traveling again. This must be our purpose," I told all of them.We
already know the future for Khazaria. Things don't get any better for us."

"It will," my father answered. "We have a purpose."
The Russians sent half of their force back to Gogatel to grab a supply of provisions.
They had to push though the woods to regain their line by the north route.
This move on Gogatel gave our brothers, the mountaineers another chance at
their enemies. But who was our enemies-those who were now called the Russians
or the Germans?

"You're Jews. What do you think?" Murat assured us.
"And we're also Khazari," I answered. "And what do you think?"
"We certainly remember tales of the Khazari." Murat nodded. "But we learned of them through books written by the Russians."

The mountain men had given themselves no rest. Not satisfied with the slow
work of the rifle, they now rushed in on the battalion tanks with only knives and
expected to fight hand to hand. I still had to learn all about tanks and rifles, but
with Murat at their head and strengthened by reinforcements, they attacked the
escort party both going and returning.

With a war like this, who needs Khazaria's battle with the Kievan prince? Rain
made the battle muddier. Along came a general named Klucke. He was a German
deserter who still fought the Russians in vain. Now he asked to join the Mountain
Men. When he arrived at Dargo, he had left thirteen hundred of his men,
together with two captured Russian generals behind in the woods.

Three hundred mules with packs and wagons overflowing with grain stood
next to cannons. And the mules and wagons fell into the hands of the Russians as
all of us watched still hidden deep in the woods.

Soldiers were put on half rations as they called their nomadic meals, and the
horses at the grass. Through the valley of the Aksai, a battle left scars on the earth.
Murat's mountain men fought the battalions step by step s they retreated. Wherever
the mountain of pain stood forth to the banks of the Aksai, only a narrow
passage was left for their troops. Barricades blocked the way.

The mountain men took aim from behind the rocks and the beech trees as
they brought down so many that the Russians took to their tanks. Murat sent for
reinforcements so his men wouldn't fall into enemy hands. Fortunately for the
mountain men, a band of Tatars carried messages to the fortress of Girsel.
The Tatars got through the barricades and brought the news of what was happening
to the Mountain Men. Then three thousand infantry and three hundred
Cossacks under a German named Freitag ran to their relief. The joy of the famished
battalions could be painted in a portrait.

So nothing has really changed in this part of the world since the glory days of
Khazaria, nothing except the shape of the metal and the reach of the weapons.
We still didn't know who we were fighting and for what.

All we knew is that there is a war against the Jews and the German's wouldn't
want us to survive. And when the Russians found out we were not only Jewish,
but Khazari, they, too would be the enemy of us and the mountain people.
It was a time when everybody hated you because your people migrated to a
certain place to find food. We asked now, just like we asked in Khazaria, where
are we going to go to find a homeland?

Everyone thought the impenetrable mountains would stop the columns of soldiers.
If it didn't stop the Khazari with arrows, why would it stop anyone else
with elephant-like tanks?

What were we doing here, trying to liberate Kabarda? The fall of Dargo was a
gray tedium that went through everyone, regardless of his tribe. These are the
mountains. The Kabardas, great and small, lie on the northern side of the Kafkas
range halfway between the two seas, northwest of the Lesghi and Chechen highlands.

If only there wasn't war. The green valleys, the broken, dappled mountains
would undulate in the center like Khadife velvet on a Khazar's horse.
Army after army crawled out of the north, fresh from the tomb of men, and
inexhaustible. Bulwarks circled the free homes of the highlanders.

The Pagan days seemed to live on, even though the mountaineers are Moslem now.
Yet these mountains are Pagan as the ghosts that live in the rocks and the
witches who live in the trees. So were in the Mountaineer militia now. A bunchof
Khazar Jews in the middle of a Muslim militia.

We were drafted to be among the warriors, the hot young bloods who simply
liked to fight. Every man wanted to through off his yoke. Independence was the
word now as in our homeland and time. Finally, Murat had sent his zealous partisan,
Ibrahim to lead an armed force that hoped to compel the Kabardians to
take sides with him. Was there no other choice than war or to be a zealot?

Fearing the Russian tanks and the German tanks, the Kabardians preferred to
stay neutral. No matter how much Murat asked them to riot against the Russians,
they preferred to perfume their beards. Then the deportations started. Many of
the mountain men were marched village by village to the deserts of Kazakhstan.
Murat made a speech, "The enemy has conquered Cherkei and taken Akhulgo,
and murdered the women of Avaria.

When lightning strikes one tree, does every other tree in the forest bow down
to the storm and cast itself down should the lightning also strike them?" My
brother watched Murat closely. The speech went on in front of the Kabardins.
"You think for a moment they think of you as Russians? Is not your passports
stamped 'Tatar' or stamped with your religion?"

"Don't you get the feeling we Khazari are undesirables here?" Mother whispered
to me.
"I think those Moslem Kabardins feel the same way about the people who rule
them. What do you say we get out of here?" I answered her.

Murat went on: "One branch rots and the whole tree goes to ruin. I shall protect
you. Fight for your faith. Words won't work any longer. Now deeds will."
Everybody likes the idea of fighting for your faith, but there are so many types
of faith, and just who is the enemy? No, this war thing won't due at all. I watched
Murat walk away to his quarters.

On a pole a breeze trembled through a proclamation sign put up by the Russians.
My Mountaineer friend translated and told me it read, "The commotions
and bloodshed that have taken place among the Caucasian Mountaineers have
attracted the most serious attention of Stalin."

Now who in the world is Stalin? Sounds like the name of a type of horse. Stalin
the stallion. I had to find out. Troops already had arrived. I sensed a lot of
people in this insane war had lost hope. In Khazaria we say when you lose hope
you lose all fear.

What's good about that? I met a young lady my age that was from one of the
Mountaineer tribes, the Adyge. She began to teach me her language and I followed
her through these neutral fields of Kabardia. Her name is Raziet. We had
run out of time in this place, but unless we could get back to that dark cave and
the secret opening that could hurl us back through time to the same place, we
would never get back to Khazaria.

For in my time Khazaria was in its greatness, and I didn't have to worry about
what would happen to it in a hundred years. Yet it seemed such a waste to only
have lasted only so short a time. If there was only something I could do to change
my homeland's fate. To take these people back in time with me and defeat the
enemy would be wonderful. But that was not the time I was born into. Enemies
couldn't make a dent in Khazaria in my time.

"Let's ride in the apple truck," Raziet motioned to me with hand signs and her
words that I quickly learned. "In this year your destiny will be decided," she told
me.

I decided everyone around me was no match for a war of this size. "My father
has a plan for raising a troop for the crossing of the Kuban," Raziet explained.
"Sheik Mansour from the Eastern Kafkas will give my father three thousand
men."
"I still don't know who you are fighting. Is it the whole world against the Kafkas?
I thought this was the war against the unarmed."
"And everyone else," she told me. I began to understand her language.
"Hey, Raziet, my friend. Are you talking three thousand men against the
whole Russia? Or is it Germany you're fighting now?"

Nothing was clear to me anymore. Not only hadI to deal with a time leap, but
now sizing up who was fighting who and for what kind of freedom and independence.
All I saw were messengers riding from one end of the mountains to the
other.

And they were using the same horses we used, and it seemed everyone else was
riding in those big tanks. I looked around. Peaceful highlands to my right and
left. All I saw were the blossoms.

A steed cropped the first tender blades in the vale. A Lesghi sat listless at the
door of his sakli basking without a thought of war. He watched the wooden
beams of his home. The birds chirped, and I saw a turtle moving slowly in peace,
half-asleep.

Then came the shouting. "Drag him down. He is the alien. He will kill us all
by pulling us into a useless fight against an unseen enemy. Pull him down with
ropes."

All of the men of Himri, Akhulgo, and Dargo, the riders of Arrakan and
Gumbet, Avaria and Koissubui, Itchkeria, and Salatan, the people of the four
branches of the Koissu, the bloodstained banks of the Aksai-all of them gathered
here.
Lesghi, Chechens, warriors of Dagestan. Tribes of mixed Khazar and mountain
origin, freemen all, speaking a basket of dialects sat in stirrups when they
couldn't find jeeps. Guns and rifles rode at their side where Khazar arrows had
gone before them.

Their leather bags were filled with cracked wheat. Few could afford what they
showed me were called "cars." "Pull him down," the men shouted at Murat. No
one had to pull him. He stepped down to meet the crowd who cheered.
Raziet and I, like stick figures, were pushed into the crowd.

I found out the men here were Sufis. Murat explained to father and me when I brought Raziet
home to take a meal with us. She explained with translators through two different
dialects so we could barely understand the words sent from Turkic to Adyge, a
language of the North Kafkas. I also spoke the Kievan dialect and some of the
languages of the mountain people we lived with in the summer from my own
time.

"Our enemy is common," Raziet told us.
"Don't tell me you still have the same enemy over all these years? Why do people
have to have enemies?" I asked her. I'm not sure she understood where we
belonged and when.

You'd be surprised at how many different faiths have leaders who say they
hold direct communication with heaven, seeing their prophet, leader, or savior in
the form of a dove who gives divine commands. Of all the places I traveled to and
in all the times, almost everyone from everywhere sees a dove and gets divine
commands from that dove. I wonder why and what that means...and why a
dove? Does it mean freedom to everyone all over the world? Or does it mean
peace?

Freedom and peace should be the same, but you rarely see one without the
other. Some force crammed the mountaineers. The state was spreading like
plague.

"We go home and wait to die because your leader thinks the Mountaineer
mode of warfare is not good enough for him now," said one man at our table.
Are our faiths pre-determined to grow within us? Is war pre-destined to
explode from within us no matter how many thousands of years we travel into
the future? Is our past our future and our future our past? I shall travel and see for
myself.

In the present, Murat came to visit the large cabin we sat in with our guests.
We were the guests.

"Fighting is useless without tanks," said one warrior.
I stared out of the window watching horses clopping down the stone streets of
the aoul. The streets were almost empty. Rain washed bits of colored paper from
an empty market place. Flies buzzed in the sun, and doors remained bolted waiting
for some word.

They showed me what a radio was, but all I heard was a blank noise. In the
distance, the boom echoed across the hills. Fire and smoke and the sound of war
closed in.
Therefore, the more things change, the more they change back to what they
were in the first place. "What will happen to us?" I asked my new friend, Raziet.
Outside a Sufi Imam preached from a goat stand. "My words came to pass."

Inside this cabin, small tablets were placed around the room inscribed with
verses. Ornaments on the walls were weapons suspended from wooden pegs.
Sabres gleamed.

The sights told me a lot about my own Khazaria. We didn't have women's
rooms, but here, the rooms for females and children were separate from the others
and they had no look-out windows, just shadowed lattices hiding one room
from another. With no look-out windows on the passing world, no news came.

Raziet explained it wouldn't be proper for a man to question his wife or wives.
Great wooden pegs and tables filled the women's rooms where they knitted their
silver lace in an obscurity illumined by scanty rays of sunlight from an opening in
the roof.

Raziet and her mother showed me where they live, in their own set of rooms.
The walls of the womens' quarters were hung with dresses and fabric, not with
weapons. Yet perhaps clothes also are passive weapons.

In the corners were large boxes filled with the bedding for her house. Strung
on lines across the room were embroidered napkins, scarves, silk bodices glittering
with gold threads and silver flowers. The shelves were filled with copper and
crass, china and glass ware, pottery, and the wooden bowls and spoons used for
eating. Raziet showed me her loom.

I was offered a pottage of millet with boiled lamb and goat flesh in it. Raziet
drank from leather bottles filled with sour milk and honey and some barley. I ate
the wheat loaf with honey and wild thyme. Outside was a shaggy steed. In walked
the Kalmyk Mongolian women who tinted their hair red with henna. We went
with these women to their hut half buried in the sand on the shore.

A boy ran to meet us with a falcon on his wrist. Then we saw him-the Bavarian,
General Neid. The women told us through a translator, but we understood
the Tatar women. I learned a new word-the Nazis were all over the mountains.
Who are the Nazis? Oh, yes.

Murat told me what had happened. Then he told
me about the soldiers who deserted their Nazi ranks and were hiding and creeping
in the mountains. All over the mountains the men searched for deserters from
the Nazi ranks.

"He was sent into the Kafkas to carry out a system of defense and conquest,"
they warned me. Raziet pointed to the older Tatar woman. "Murat uses German
and Polish deserters to make Dargo their headquarters.
He collects stores of ammunition and provisions."
"What side is that man on?" I asked.

"We can't be too sure." The Tatar woman grinned. "He uses the zeal of the
tribes all over this part of the Kafkas. He's defensive. Watch out, but he isn't
making any progress in stepping on us highlanders. He's been here two years, and
is losing ground."
"How do you know all this?"

The Tatar woman laughed. "I listen to the men talk. I sleep with one eye
open. The men around here say he has the power of life and death over the
mountain people. He'll put anyone he wants on trial for offences, and he
appoints the civil workers. Someone hired him to put down us few rude tribes in
the mountains."

"Who hired him?" I looked at the women. "Don't tell me you mountain men
are still battling the Russians for independence after more than a thousand years.
What did you expect-the Nazis to set you free? What about us steppe and
mountain Jews? Whose side are you on anyway, my friends?"

"Nothing short of the capture of Dargo would kick the Germans out and
restore Russian rule of the twelve tribes of the Caucasus Mountains." The Tatar
whispered to me.

"Is that what you want, more Russian rule over your people?"
"We want independence," the Tatar shouted.
"Here, have a bite of this cake." She shoved her honey cakes in my mouth to
shut me up. It was toasty and sweet.
I studied Neid's face from a few paces away later that day. The blackness
beneath his eyes told me he wasn't eating well. What I didn't know wouldn't
harm me, yet.

Murat left his meal with the mountaineer men and my father and went to see
the Tatar woman's men folk.

"I have a plan," he told his followers at the Tatar's place. "With a force of ten
thousand infantry and a few hundred Cossacks, I'll set out for Dargo, taking the
northern track, the route by the river Koissu and through the district of Andi."
The Tatar males agreed. "The mountaineers will watch all the enemies."
"Only small parties are to show themselves. The villages will be left without
police indefinitely."

Women were afraid they'd be molded by grief, but suddenly the latest infantry
rifles came into the hands of the mountaineers. Their world was smelted together
into a unity for an undetermined goal. If one mountaineer fed the enemy a spoon
of yogurt-laban, the Russians would take their revenge on the Sufi Mountain
Men. Nazis had just exterminated thousands of Russians on the front, and they

were ready for revenge on any mountaineer who thought for one instant that the
Nazis would promise the mountaineers a homeland free from the Russians.
Enemies boxed in the hills from all sides. Neid, the German general who had
run away from his Nazi army walked into the house of the Tatars. "You work in a
factory?" He asked the woman's old husband.
"I'm a machinist," said the Tatar.

"That's the myth of the happy worker," the deserter grinned.
"And what about you?" He looked right through me.
"I'm getting married." I didn't know what else to say.
"So? If you're not in school, then you belong in the factory."
What was I going to say, that I'm a Jewish Khazarian Princess? Luckily, the
Tatar man spoke up. "From whom do you get your soldier's pay?"
"What?" Neid said sharply.

"We don't depend on the fifth of the booty taken from the enemy or the fines
imposed for violations of the shariat."
The Tatar moved closer to Neid. "We have a system of taxation. A poll tax to
the amount of the ruble is levied on every family. One tenth of the produce of the
land goes into the public treasury. If you die without heirs, your money goes to
the government. And wealth is accumulated in the mosques.

"The Sufi dervishes living on voluntary contributions have been absorbed into
our army or driven out of the land. Our general lives as simply as we do. The
Imam is rich and deposits money in secret places in the woods of Ani and Itchkeria-
great treasures of gold, diamonds, and other valuables."

As Neid scrambled to his feet the Tatar man laughed. He looked at me or
through me as if I were invisible, assuming from my gaudy Khazar clothing,
straight brown hair, and high cheekbones that I was a Tatar.
"Riches are a strong ally," Neid grumbled.

"But simple living makes us outlast you." The Tatar walked around him. "We
number only a million and a half, maybe less now. The Russians are returning to
the front by way of Transcaucasia and Cis. Better watch out, General Neid."
"Large expenditure for such a small result," the General said.
"Where do you stand? I know you're a deserter, but what side are you really
on, or did they plant you here?"

"They?"
"Someone set you up in the mountains. I don't believe you're hiding out
here."
"This damned Kismet of yours," Neid scowled.

"You see us through foreign eyes," the Tatar man added. "I heard there's a
wedding."
"No wedding in wartime," Raziet said.
"Then what?" Neid paced the floor. "I know the trap will close on Berlin."
"Whom can we trust?" Raziet whispered to me.
"Only yourselves." I told her. "Always be prepared."

A whistle made us jump from the smoking breach in the front line. Not
hands, but two would do just fine. Ahead lay a long journey, and we had no
chance to return to that cave and trace our footsteps and markers placed to get
back to our own homeland and time. We weren't in a hurry.

There could be a war there, too, if we didn't get the exact year we came out of.
One of the Mountain Men began to sing an old song that had been around the
Kafkas for centuries:

"I rejoice if I see a Khazakh, galloping on horseback and wearing the tymakh."
I told him we used a tymakh also, but it wasn't something we wore, it was a
musical instrument we played. Then she showed what the piece of clothing
looked like. So words get changed over the centuries and are used by neighboring
tribes to mean different articles.

"Foreign workers!" The cry went up from the Nazis we saw. "Workers from
the Caucasus." Only now we were in the West Kafkas and we had come from the
East Kafkas.
Mountain men were being brought into Germany to work in large numbers as
the people were shouting why are their own commanders doing that when the
war was in part about expelling large amounts of people considered foreign.

The Nazi's war was about excluding, segregating, and expelling people they
didn't like, and made up labels and names that these people were not as good as
themselves. That was an excuse to get them out so boundaries could be established,
racial, land, and political.

Once boundaries were in place like neat little lists, more living space would be provided for their own people, so the line went. That was the same line the Kievan prince used on us long before our conversion.
Now, it was 1942, and the tribesmen told me that a quarter of their labor
force was made up of foreign workers and those who worked by force with no pay.

The farms were "manned" by foreign workers supervised by farm women, old
men, and boys. As more foreign workers, usually unpaid, were dragged into their
country, the Nazi fears gave way to terror. And all along they started the whole
thing by wanting to cleanse their country of foreign workers.

That was what Prince Svyatoslav wanted, or was it? Maybe he really did mean
"nothing personal" as he said. Perhaps he didn't care who we are, but really only
liked to fight. He'd fight anyone-us, the Pechenegs, and anyone else who
appealed to him for a fight. To Svyatoslav we were a game. He had to fight someone
just so he'd feel like his old self again.

There's always a type of man-or woman, like the Queen of the Huns who
had a need to wage war. It was as if he or she was so understimulated to begin
with-in her mind and body, that only to bring her up to the level of well-being
or normal, he or she liked to fight and had to wage combat.

The whole lot of us except my father, the Kagan, the Khatun, and my brother,
stayed behind. Everyone else finally landed in one of the 22,000 camps in Germany.
All the tribesmen we had camped with landed in Ohrdruf, a concentration
camp for Russian and Mountain men and other minority groups.

Word got back to us that several days before the arrival of the troops of liberation,
the Nazis brought out all their inmates of the camp to the square in the center
of the camp and had killed them.

You can look this up for yourself, whatever time zone you're in now. It was
reported by Vernon Kennedy, UNRRA Liaison Officer to the 12th Army Group
in a memorandum detailing an inspection trip made from April 15 to 21, 1945.
There were about 4,000 killed and 1,000 who survived this massacre, mostly people
from the Kafkas or Rus.

So war is not what anyone would want to return to in any time zone. Well
what happened was eerie. When it came to the Mountain men, some people had
the idea that if they didn't want to return to Russia, then they must have collaborated
with the Nazis. Actually, they were afraid of being under the thumb of the
communists where they were treated badly.

So one group of Mountain men refused to return to Russia and began to fight the liberating troops who only
wanted to pick them up and free them so they could return to Russia. Then word got around that a few distinguished Mountaineer generals who had fought on the side of the White Russians in the old Russian Civil War had emigrated and held Austrian or German citizenship from the years before this war. These generals tried to intervene with the authorities.

They failed, and voluntarily returned with the others. As leading White "Russian"
officers, automatic execution awaited these generals in Russia, but they voluntarily
returned anyway. Then I heard what happened, all about the
Mountaineer suicide rite, the 'adat' or unwritten law of the mountains that took
hold. Their honor would not be defaced.

Well, we Khazari don't have any suicide rite of the mountains or the steppes.
We have the Torah. That's what we answer to. So just after breakfast, Atokay
raised a nervous fist and began to hammer on the door of the International Refugee
Organization.

"Let me in, I tell you." He growled at the clerks.
"Stop that banging." The door opened a bit and Atokay put his foot in it. We
stood behind him.
"War criminals, quislings, traitors!" We heard the shout go up around us.
"No, we're Jews," the Kagan answered. No one believed him in that Khazar
dress until he showed the skull cap under his other mountaineer's cap.

The voices began, "Any other persons who assisted the enemy in persecuting
civil populations or voluntarily assisted the enemy forces, ordinary criminals, and
persons of German ethnic origins, whether German minorities in other countries,
who have been transferred, evacuated, or have fled into Germany...."
"Hey, but we are Khazari, Jewish steppe peoples." Nobody believed us in this
time zone.

"When they have acquired a new nationality, they become otherwise firmly
established. When they have unreasonably refused to accept the proposals of the
Organization for their resettlement or repatriation, or..."
The one in authority kept on reading, "When they are making no substantial
effort toward earning their living when it is possible for them to do so, or when
they are exploiting the assistance of the Organization."

Atokay sat next to his wife. The clerk warned him, "The main object of the
Organization is to bring about a rapid and positive solution of the problem which
will be just and equitable to all concerned.

The main task is t encourage and assist in every way possible early return to their countries of origin. No international assistance should be given to traitors, quislings, and war criminals, and nothing
should be done to prevent in any way their surrender and punishment."

Atokay confronted the International Refugee Organization officer reading his
constitution and explaining it to the others. "Stalin is exterminating the Mountain
Men in Russia because someone told him that a few sided with the Germans
to get out from communism. Do you believe that story?"

The clerk cleared his throat. "The constitution provides for individual freedom
of choice. We handle valid objections to repatriation."
A shuddering silence filled the room. Atokay watched the blue veins in his
bare feet grow fat. "Persecution or fear based on grounds of persecution because
of nationality provided these are not in conflict with the principles of the United
Nations as laid down," the clerk continued to speak in a flat tone.

"Objections of a political nature judged by the Organization to be valid."
"What do you mean-valid?" Atokay questioned him.
"Do you believe the entire peoples of the North Kafkas or the émigrés who
fled to Austria and Germany sided with the Germans to escape Russia's treatment
of mountain people and Communism?"

"What should I believe when a see a few Mountaineer generals trying to help
your people, Generals who had fled to Austria and Germany who were not
judged to be of such an inferior "race" as the Nazis put it, that they were promoted
to generals? What should I think?" The clerk's faced blushed as he spoke
to Atokay.

"We want the Kafkas to be free, that's all. We are not traitors, and we didn't
fight for the Germans."

"Well, Turkey didn't exactly go with the allies either at the start of the war,"
the clerk answered."We're not Turks."

"Some of the tribes of the North Caucasus do speak a Turkic language, but
most speak one of the North Caucasus Mountains dialects, I know," the clerk
said. "I also know you people sought independence under the protection of
England and Turkey. That's the real reason Stalin killed 800,000 North Caucasus
Mountains people and sent the remainder to prisons in Kazakhstan. This I
know."

"There can be no religion under Stalin." Atokay bowed his head and pounded
on the clerk's desk.

"Stalin is our ally," the clerk answered defiantly.

"Are you doing this to me to save your own face for the Soviet bloc?" Atokay
turned and left.

"Wait," the clerk shouted. "We have responsibility for the care of more than
seven hundred thousand refugees and displaced persons. We have a problem in
France to take care of."

The clerk sat back uneasily. "Do you need medical services?" His blue eyes
stared at Atokay and the rest of us standing behind him. What do you need?
Blankets? A place to sleep? Name it."
"I'll name it," Atokay said in a shaky voice.
"You gave people like us to the highest bidder. Why are you treating us like
next-to-nothings?"
"Don't tell me you have a sense of entitlement. You're like anyone else here.
We're all equal." The clerk rubbed a spot in his shirt.

"Why are you blaming me?" Atokay paced restlessly as he spoke. "Why don't
you blame it on the Cossacks?"
"Blame what?"
"Being traitors."
"The Cossacks aren't traitors."
"Says who?"
"You know what I mean," Atokay said to him, and the rest of us as he turned
to face us. "How come you distribute cash grants and furnish legal assistance to
the White Russians and others with Nansen passports and to the Spanish Republicans,
but Mountain Men you treat like dirt?"

"Where did you learn that?" The clerk squinted at Atokay.
"From books and travels. You're not educated unless you have traveled like I
have-everywhere."

Well, he hadn't traveled in time-the ultimate education. And I have. Atokay
stared at the fluttering eyelids of the IRO officer. The officer poured eye drops
into his eyes while the clerk shuffled papers in a file cabinet. "We're cutting costs
to the bone," the IRO officer said, looking at the clerk instead of Atokay who was
talking to him.

"What does that mean for me? I'm interested in being resettled. I don't want
to be repatriated. Little necessities like dental treatment and washrooms are for
those not facing death as a traitor in Moscow. Where shall I go? What shall I do?"
The IRO officer yawned. "Maybe you should try New York."

"Mumtaz Allah!" Atokay raised his voice an octave. "I want my people's old
flag back. It was the flag of a free Kafkas, symbol of unity. Our flag of 1830 was
green with three crossed arrows and twelve stars, representing the twelve tribes of
the tribes and districts of the Caucasus. Long live the valley of the apple trees, our
capitol."

"Is that the city of Maikop?" The officer surmised.

The clerk intervened. "You should have thought of your beautiful valley of the
apple trees that before you ran over to the Germans to be liberated from them
from Russia, our ally. You're always talking about the mountains, but now you
want the valley of the apple trees as well? What's wrong with going back to Russia?
You'll be repatriated to where you came from."

"I'm not Russian," Atokay shouted. "I'm a Mountaineer, a Muslim. Stalin wants to kill my people. Mikoyan and Molotov signed the secret orders to kill all of my people."

Yeah, and what about my family? I thought. There was a pause and then a
bell.

"Calm down," the clerk sighed. "Don't act like you are going to kill yourself
in front of our building. No employment is available, except with the Germans,
and refugees are not required to accept such work."

"We are good men doing good," Atokay begged and pleaded. "There's no
sense in bad men doing evil. The charges are false that we sided with the Germans.
We just came from fighting them in the mountains. Besides, there's a
deserter from the German army hiding with us and helping us. We are not helping
the men he deserted."

"You ran from communism to the first road to what you thought was freedom,"
the IRO officer added. "I understand. When the Nazis found you, they
put you in work camps as their slaves. That's how they freed you from the Russians."
Remember the Romans? I pondered.

They did the same, made the mountain men slaves by freeing them from their former masters. Does everyone who promises freedom end up making the runaway a slave? It's not that work makes free.
It's creative expression that makes free, but you have to really love what you do.

Then you have to convince someone to pay for it. And finally you give it away to
pay taxes. I'd have to go back to a time when there were so few people in my
steppes that no one paid taxes, and everyone was free. Ah, the life of the nomad
compared to the settled life in my orchards. Which really is better?

"The Germans were never in the part of the Kafkas in which we live." Atokay said. "Instead, the Russians killed most of us for begging for help."

Atokay told me yesterday that the mountaineers are all fight as long as they can see mountains, but what happens when they are taken away from their mountains or when they live in the valleys? So I gathered my brother and the rest of our Khazar family and before we were shipped away to some remote place, headed toward the secret cave near the waterfall high up in the mountains, back to the door between time boundaries.

By nightfall, all of us gathered near the cave. My father came forward and addressed the rest of the Mountain men through a man who translated between the Turkic dialects and the speech of the Kafkas.

"Come back with me to a time when your people were at peace under the
Khazar rule in this same place."

"Should we accept that?"
"I'm the Kagan, and I'll grant you free choice and the freedom you want for
your twelve tribes of the mountains. You can have the faith you choose."

Atokay looked at his people and took a vote. They sure didn't want to be repatriated
back to Russia, and they didn't want the Nazis in their homeland, not
with all the slave labor and the camps for their war machine.
That was not their idea of a free Kafkas and free mountain nations.
Darkness began to creep along the valley.
"We'll go back to your Khazaria."
"I've seen the future," the Kagan told them.
"And it isn't good for Khazaria in the future, but we can find a new homeland
easily in my time. There are open lands in Polin."
"No," Atokay said, shuddering. "If your Polin is the Poland of today, it's full
of war and invasions. Don't take us there."

"You could always choose to live in Syria, Jordan, or anywhere else in the
Middle East," I said. "When we were flung through time, we ended up walking
from Khazaria to Jerusalem, and we passed through all those lands. Would you
feel at home among the peoples of Jordan, Syria, or anywhere else in the Middle
East?

"What about in the villages of the Holy Land? We were great healers there,
since those acupuncture needles father received from a man who owed him a
great favor came in handy. You'd be surprised how those needles healed people
when we followed the energy lines and zones pointed out to us by that man from
Cathay."

"I know the future holds someday a free land for your peoples as it does for
mine," my father said.

Now we entered into a place where the reign of terror began. We rode and
rode until we ended up out of the Kafkas and into the streets of Crimean towns.
Nazis marched the Crimean Turks into the streets of Simferopol, as they call it
now.

This used to be a place where Khazari fled after the fortress had been
destroyed. I saw the Russian Army, (they called it Soviet during the War where
we landed in time-reach) occupy the Crimea and watched the deportation of
Crimean Turks, the Chechen, the Ingush, and Mountain men by NKVD forces
sent for that purpose.

If only I could ask them all to follow me, so we can move not between planes,
but between a single plane-time. If I move my body one way in time-or space,
my mind wants to move the other way to keep the center of time where it was.
There had to be room to take the deportees with us back through the cave, but
what if it became overloaded and closed up on us? We took a vote.

Our family, Atokay, all his Mountain men, and the Khazari we brought with
us would go back together in time to our special place when Khazaria enjoyed a
hundred years of light. Back then, the few people there danced in the streets with
the joy of learning how wisdom so old can be so new. And "then" could be
"now."

It was a clear choice: Khazaria in the ninth century or New York City in 1942.
On the other hand, I could have my teeth fixed better in New York. Only we
made a vow.

We sent messages in many languages to the deportees and sent other messages
on to the Jews in the camps or on their way, or in hiding to spread the word. We
told them where the secret cave of time was located.

If only someone would believe us and look for the opening in the fabric of
time deep in that cave, they could come back to the other end of that place and
emerge in our time either in the Kafkas where we entered, or somewhere in Khazaria,
the third branch where the cave opened in time.

There had been other branches opening in other places and times, but we
didn't have the chance yet to try all the places where at certain times of the year,
openings would begin to pulse in the rock, and anyone could take a leap of faith
and find his destiny on the other side far in the past.

We let them know where our markers had been tied. If only someone had the
chance to escape and believe us and really try to find that cave opening. When we
got back to our own time, the Byzantines, who are our allies at this time, but
won't be in a hundred years, might be looking for someone to blame for the
attack on them by the Rus that happened right before we left to go up into the
mountains far away from Atil and Sarkel.

Did the Emperor suspect the Khazari? In our time, the Dnieper trade route
had not yet been built. In the next century, it was. My father gave the Rus permission
to sail their fleet down the Don, past the fort of Sarkel so they could
enter the Black Sea from the Don. We had trouble with both sides.

And Byzantine prisoners had been held by us Khazari, but these prisoners had committed
crimes that would be seen as criminal acts by any group of people in the world.
The Rus took those Byzantine prisoners as part of their enormous booty.
Then they dropped them off at Sarkel on their return trip.

We had trouble. Then the Khazari demanded to take the Greek prisoners into protective custody,
to keep the Byzantines our allies for this short span of time. As soon as we
turned Jewish, the Byzantines stopped being our allies.

All of a sudden, they started looking for somebody to blame for not being prepared
to battle the Rus when attacked by them. So, they blamed the Khazari for
the Rus attack, when we had no idea the Rus were going to attack our Byzantines
allies.

Now the Byzantines are no longer our allies. We are alone in the world, being
the only Jewish Kaganate in the world in our time.

The Rus and Pechenegs are attacking us from all sides. Yet, father calls this
time we are going back to, the best and most peaceful in all of Khazaria-our
golden age. I thought our golden age was in eight century Cordoba.

So as we go forth in time through our secret cave, like a magical toy shop, we
keep ending up in the days when the Kagan of Khazaria first began to accept the
Judaic faith and customs. So back we will go. You call this peace? With a country
this peaceful, who needs war?

Deportees marched into empty cattle cars filled to overflowing, locked, and
sealed. Most of the Crimean Turks we followed went to concentration camps in
Sverdlosk Raion in the Urals.

Most died of the hunger and disease brought on by slave labor. A small minority fled to Turkestan. So many tribes were loaded up and deported. They were the Chechen, Ingush, Karachay, Balkars, Tatars, and
Mountain men. I still say we are part of the old Greek colonies and Greek
Diaspora, regardless of whether we are Jewish or Christian.

Then of course, there were millions of Jewish people who outnumbered all the
tribes of the Caucasus, but the Russians did not deport Jews in huge numbers.
The Nazis did. Russians deported peoples of the Caucasus, and they used the
excuse to deport them that a few had been traitors, looking up to the Nazis to rescue
them from the Russians.

Maybe they should have called a Khazar. That's who you call when all hope is
gone, if you want a mortal, that is. As history had it, Khazari peoples had scattered
and worked their way into populations of many countries and maybe disappeared
by the time zone we are in now, marrying into and mingling with
everyone around them until they became part of the whole patchwork of the
world.

Time changes everything, but people deep down change very slowly. Time
changes people less than people change time. I am fascinated about moving
through time. And I'm also curious about pioneering space. In the ninth century
to move through space you either travel or dance. If you want an education,
travel and mingle.

As I look down from the mountains, I'm filled with a passion to run, to roll in
the grass with my dogs and wolf cubs, to fight the pull of the earth ever downward.
It can all be summed up as my horizontal expression of a vertical desire to
grow up like a tall tree and reach out with my branches to every corner of the
world.

Life cannot be contained in a small space. It's the old nomadic reach fighting
against the need of the settled farmer to grow orchards and put down deep roots
instead of far-reaching branches. It has been said that you become the horizontal expression of your
vertical wish to move up the ladder.

The earth has become too small to reach sideways. One stretch, and you've
squashed your palm into the face of the person next to you. Life on the Silk Road
as a nomad has become too complex.

Dear Diary, even now, I feel the closing in of compartments, the containment
of life in small spaces. I, even as Princess of the Khazari, have only the personal
space of my own limited to what I can carry in my pockets.

Even my room is not my own. Everything is shared, down to the last morsel of
our thin, flat Khazar bread. My only privacy is in my little leather purse that I
wear around my neck on a long leather thong. Even my baby cousin reaches into
my pockets and pulls out a toy. At least my purse has draw strings.

So the vertical expression to build up of a horizontal desire reach out to our
neighbors, and the horizontal expression to reach out to the world for more land
of the vertical desire to grow in wisdom up toward righteousness forms this
fourcornered box. And I'm contained after all, it the box.

Let me out. I want to be free. No I want to be protected....No I want to travel
through time and space. All this conflict is the reason for my adventure, my time
travel, my leap of faith through space.

And only our family knows of the opening in the fabric of time. That cave,
that old watery place. I must get back to the secret cave and go back to my Pax
Khazarica, my own home and time.

We watched, Dear Diary, and hid in the woods. We still wore our Khazari
clothing from a thousand years before this war, and in this entire ruckus, nobody
noticed that these clothes were not from some isolated mountain tribe deep in
the Kafkas. So we gathered our friends who did have transportation and hitched a
ride back to the place we started from in the Kafkas before someone noticed our
strange appearance in these time-worn clothes.

We left the Crimea, watching the cattle cars depart and make history. Not a
minute too soon. We traveled for what seemed like centuries, but was a long
drive from the Crimea back the Kafkas. We crouched and crept along the roads
and into the woods.

At the right place in time and geography we met up with our Mountaineer
friends. They also fled with us to escape being deported to an empty desert along
the Silk Road. That's where the Rus wanted to send us in our own time, and here
in the 1940s, they would have sent us there once more.

Only now there were no more great trade caravans along the Silk Road to take
us up on long journeys and sell us fine acupuncture needles from Cathay so we
could earn our way as miracle healers in disguise as pilgrims.

Mother came in. "I'll show you the way back to the cave and to our time. At
least the rest of your own lives and your children will be in peace, in the pax
Khazarica, as the Latins visiting Byzantium have called our times."

The vote sided with father. Everyone in the aoul decided to come with us back
to Khazaria in the days when the Kagan's family had first turned Judaic for those
who chose to take that faith.

"I promise you all freedom to live in my land and choose whatever faith you
want," said father.
"We have people from almost everywhere in the known world living in our
country and worshipping as he or she wants. This is the only place in our part of
the world where such is the law of the Kagan of the Khazari."

We formed a human chain, hand in hand and tied a rope around each of our
waists to keep together in a line. As darkness fell, we were back in the cave where
I had tied my silver lace in little pieces of fabric all along the route. I knew where
the road split in two and had tied a bouquet of flowers on a post to mark the
route back home to my own time and place.

We trekked through the winding paths, beyond the stalagmites and stalactites.
I checked each tiny piece of silver lace to keep on the trail. Finally, we came to the
dark opening in the cave. There were old paintings there as we lighted a torch of
twisted reeds to see our way and feel for the sharp wind and the pulse in the fabric
of time at the opening of the time travel entrance.

The torchlight threw eerie shadows on the walls. Someone had painted horses
and bison on those caves, and part of the cave was under water. We walked for
hours until the waterline and the rock that I marked to show the opening into
time began to pulse in the opposite direction from the edges where it closed when
we whirled out. I took a leap of faith, and I was in first, and then my brother tied
in back of me, and all the rest.

The Kagan went last, out of custom for his safety. He let us test the waters
first, but I knew we would be in and out of there in a flash. So around we went,
and through the maze of time. We floated and swam as if in a pond, a salty well
of all beginnings. And we again where swirled through time, kicking past the
great year our Khazaria's fortress at Sarkel had been destroyed and we had to flee.

We moved past that with all our might and faith, and moved and flailed until
we came out the other end of the tunnel at the great blue-white light that
branched into gold rivers leading to different times.

Which one was our new beginning, the first day in Khazaria that I became
aware that all time is the great gold circle on the tree of life that can not be
locked-that it expands forever? I chose the light.

"No, don't choose the light," Atokay shouted.
"It's a trick to get you to go there like a moth. You'll be trapped in a box forever."
"I'm choosing the light because it leads to freedom." I echoed back to him.
"Choose the dark," my brother agreed with him. It leads back to our home.
You can't see, but you can feel the great mass of dark matter."
"I'm choosing the light as I chose to light the oil lamp and walk out of the
dark," the Kagan told us.

"I'm going with the light because I want to see truth," Khatun said with a
voice of compassion and strength. "The light is righteousness."
"The dark is righteousness. The light is a trick to lock your souls in a box forever,"
my brother shrieked in his changing voice. Only bugs go to the light and
they get burned or trapped. Curiosity draws the light to you, and you get killed
by curiosity like a cat drawn to a trap."

"You learn by curiosity," I disagreed with my brother. "My brain is bigger
than a cat's."

Khatun sighed. "I'm going to take that leap of faith and go toward the light. It
worked before by accident when we were hurled into the year Khazaria fell. It will
bring us back. It's the only sign we know, and let's all go to what is familiar. We
must go with precedence."

"No, you go to what's familiar even when what is familiar is pain," my brother
warned.

"We're all going toward the light," a chorus of voices from all the men from
the Mountain men spoke together.

"The light it is. It worked before," I said. My brother reluctantly agreed. We
moved toward the light, swimming and flailing, our arms pushing the thick air
and underground black water like frogs in a pond.

And in an instant the pulsing light and the walls of the cave closed in and
expelled us beyond all time and space through a whirlwind and faster and faster
we spun like dreidles (Festival of Lights tops) on Hanukkah. We were great spinning
tops, and floating kites of the children of the Silk road. We spun and spun
until we were almost fabric woven into the cloth of time ourselves, this long chain
of human longing. We wove ourselves through the fabric of time.

Out we leaped, rolling like boulders onto the soft summer petals. It was daylight
now, early morning with the sun beginning to rise, and the mist on the
meadows showed us we were reborn.

"What's that?" Khatun pointed. "Where are we?"

"It's the mighty fortress at Sarkel," my father said cheering. "It's not
destroyed. It's just being prepared for the summer, and getting a good washing
down at that."

"Welcome to Sarkel everyone." I said cheering.
My brother leaped for joy. We all joined hands. The Mountain men looked
around getting used to the site.

"What year is this?" my father asked anyone who heard him as he walked to
the door. A soldier came up to greet him and recognized him.

"My Kagan," the solider said. "Why, how did you arrive so soon in Sarkel? It
was only yesterday that you gave your decision to accept the Judaic faith for the
royal family. Why I heard you say that you had hoped the people would imitate
the Kagan's family as so many strive to-and also take an interest in possibly
choosing the faith you selected."

"I see," said the Kagan.
"But, but...you told us you were going to spend many days traveling into the
mountains to reflect at your summer residence. How did you travel back here so
soon?"

"I never left because Khazaria is not only a state of mind, it's also everywhere
one travels," the Kagan said.
"It's more important that we welcome our new people to the royal court and
show them the full hospitality of how those who come to live in our lands are
honored and given the freedom to choose their own faith. Let them see what
Khazar tolerance and friendship is about and how much it will show them our
warmth, charity, and blessings. They are now part of Khazaria and equal to anyone
else who lives here."

The soldier saluted his Kagan and hurried away. Then the The Mountain men
led by Atokay looked around Khazaria in awe of what life used to be not too far
from their own lands.

Taklamakhan and her new husband walked up to us to continue her wedding
that would go on for weeks with feasting and music. It was a time in Khazaria to
begin all times. This is a day of joy and enlightenment. And this is how I will
remember it always. I am Tarbagatay, flower of all the Turkic peoples, and my
land borders the Sea of Meotis, the sea of the Khazari.

Now I have something else to add. Upon converting to the Judaic faith, I
make a promise to relinquish all other faiths that I have been before adopting the
faith.

How can I relinquish all that is my past generations? Who will light a candle
in memory of all my peoples of all times? Yet I am part of the Silk Road and its
music, joy, and soul, and I go back more years than can be written by time.
How can I forget the song of the open road?

And how can I forget my responsibility to take care of the land's fruits and not use them up and move on? I can't
let my goats graze recklessly and walk in the nomad's path to conquer lands anew.
And if I settle in my great orchids, can I not forget all my past and remember
them as I remember Jerusalem? Who am I and where do I belong? Where are the
paths to virtue and righteousness, Dear Diary?

So for this memory of a past that connects me to every other faith and to every
other person, I am commanded to time travel through many lands and adventures
from the beginnings of this world to its great reach into the light. And as a
storyteller of tales, I am obliged to bring this story of Tarbagatay's adventures to
all through each storyteller anew.

Go tell my tale with a truthful tongue. And speak my speech so that all may
know the travels of Tarbagatay, princess of the Khazari, daughter of the Kagan,
and one more flower from the garden of Atil. I am blessed by the ability to travel
through time. And for that, my gifts to you are the tales for storytellers of all
times and places, the adventures of the Silk Road Kids.

Stay tuned. I think as I grow up, I'm going to be more restless for travel and
adventure than be suited to the life of the Khatun of the Khazari, even as a righteous
ambassador of peace, healing, and enlightenment. And yes, my brother and
parents travel with me. In this century, I have not yet married my dignitary from
Toledo. I have moved back here, a hundred years and choose to remain not quite
sixteen yet.

In fact I shall choose to stay this age a long time, and I shall choose to stay out
of the century in which Khazaria is destroyed. There's plenty of time to grow up
later. I've decided that it's better to stay not quite sixteen for the energy and joy.
And my brother? He isn't unhappy at staying 13 for as long as he wants, either. It
simply feels good to enjoy the best years of your life over and over again.

That's the secret of our time cave with the ancient horses and bisons painted
inside where the rock opens into a new century. Now, Khazaria's in her glory
years of light and abundance, and I shall think of her always this way--as my
steppe sister. We have gained insight, foresight, and hindsight from this adventure.
Until our next time-travel escape, I seal my Diary, for it is my joy toy shop.

Bihar, Kaghan of the Khazari, Marót, Tarbagatay, and the Khatun shall return
in the next adventure to a new century in another place along the Silk Road.
After all, we're steppe sisters and brothers, aren't we? Hear that, Taklamakan,
Queen of the Huns? We're steppe sisters in time. Can I buy that new horse of
yours?

Thus, I write, Dear Diary:

The year Khazaria's royal family turned Jewish, I, Princess Tarbagatay brought
the Queen of the Hungs out of her fourth century and rode with her through the
tides of time along the Silk Road for the sake of righteousness.

Family, friends, and I emerged through the time cave in many lands and in the middle of many
wars. My brother had to rescue the Kagan of the Khazars from captivity in the
Viking ship's belly, but all turned out well back in the golden age in this common
year eight hundred and sixty.

Now let me look up the Hebrew year. I could use some lessons in the many languages I am learning. This year Dear Diary, I'll stay almost sixteen. After all, my husband and child of my later years said they want to
time travel at different ages before they join me next summer in real time.