Samahe

Old Persian “Dark Haired Girl.” Samahe’s name represents one of the many problems of recreating the world of the Scythians — names. As far as I could tell, we have about twenty actual Scythian names and about ten words of their languages. There’s still argument in academia about whether Scythian is an Indo-Iranian language via Ossetian and Sarmatian, or something else. I went with the Iranian/Sarmatian/Ossetian scholarship for two reasons — first, because it was easier that way, because I could take words from Old Persian and adjust them; and second, because the ties between Ossetian legends and the Arthurian cycle delighted me! Cuyler Young firmly believed that the Scythians were an Iranian people, and I went with his vast (truly vast) knowledge on the subject.

Samahe is a normal Scythian girl — not a princess, not a great warrior nor even a spear maiden, but just a girl in her adolescent years serving as an archer in the “army.” However, her marriage to Ataelus and her own capabilities cause her to rise to be a tribal leader and, in effect, an officer of Kineas’s “scouts,” the Prodromoi.