Searching for the Amazons Read online

  The valley – densely forested, its open spaces overgrown with weeds, its lowest area a mess of mud and reeds – belonged to a state farm. He rented 15 hectares and set about adapting it for horseback archery. This was a long, slow process. A valley like that, where nature ruled, deserved respect. He studied the winds, the waters, the plants, the movements of animals and people, the smell of the pastures in the changing seasons, and the feel of each hilltop and every marshy area. It took him four years.

  Then, at last, came the horseback archery. Everything about this ancient, forgotten skill had to be rediscovered from scratch. The landscape gave him a natural 90-metre course, along which he placed targets. He acquired a second horse, Bella, a poor sickly creature that he made sleek, gentle and sensitive with months of care. Bella learned to gallop evenly, without reins, then got used to the twang of the bow, the zip of the arrow and the feel of a rider indicating a turn or a change of pace with small movements of the legs and shifts of bodyweight.

  His first target was a bale of hay, but even from 2 or 3 metres away he could fire only one arrow every pass, and hardly ever hit the mark. He found it almost impossible to perform the most famous action of the mounted archer, the over-the-shoulder ‘Parthian shot’, named after the Parthians and then distorted in English into the ‘parting shot’. He practised for weeks, doing fifteen to twenty gallops a day. He made no progress at all. There seemed to be no way to overcome the combination of speed, bounce, the shock of hooves, and his flailing arms. The idea of reloading was a dream.

  There was something he was not getting, something that every mounted archer from time immemorial must have learned in childhood. To get beyond the obscuring clouds of effort and frustration, he turned to Zen archery, which relies on internal harmony, on the ‘relaxed concentration’ by which an athlete produces a seemingly effortless record.

  He returned to the basics: horse and rider. He abandoned his saddle to ride bareback, to feel the horse’s muscle, sweat and breath. Pain became a way of life. He fell constantly. His urine had blood in it for weeks from the battering. He learned that pain and suffering are not the same. This was not suffering, because he had chosen this route as monks once chose hair shirts and flagellation, and in this painful service he found freedom.

  And at last progress. He learned to separate upper from lower body, until, holding a glass of water, he could keep his hand steady while riding bareback at a trot. He acquired more horses and practised on them all. He practised in the worst conditions – rain, mud, snow, frozen ground. He turned himself into a Centaur, half horse, half man.

  He perfected the technique of shooting one arrow after another, at speed. This is not something that an average unmounted archer ever does, so once again he started from scratch. An arrow has a nock in its end which slots on to the bow string, but, as I know from doing archery as a teenager, as any amateur knows, it takes many seconds and many actions to load an arrow: you lower the bow, turn it flat, reach for the quiver, extract an arrow, turn the arrow to the correct orientation with the ‘lead feather’ pointing away from the string, fiddle the slot on to the string, get the tips of three fingers hooked round the string, grip the arrow between first and second fingers to keep it in position against the bow, raise the bow, pull the string, refocus your attention on the distant target, aim and at last release. The whole thing takes perhaps half a minute, which is about the time it takes to read the foregoing instructions.

  It took Kassai months of experimenting to work out how to shoot quickly. For a start, forget the quiver. That’s only to store arrows; it is not for the arrows you are about to shoot, because it is hopelessly slow to reload by reaching down to your waist or over your shoulder to pull an arrow from your quiver.

  This is how it’s best done: hold a bunch of arrows in the left hand against the bow, making sure they are spread like an array of cards, with the feather ends accessible; reach between string and bow; grip an arrow with two fingers bent double so that they form firm supports either side; place the thumb just so; pull the arrow back so that the string slides along the thumb straight into the nock in the arrow; and pull, while raising the bow, all in one smooth set of actions.

  After a year –

  – he could fire three arrows in six seconds.

  Say that out loud, three times, fast: that’s how long it takes him to load and shoot the three arrows.

  Now it was time to apply his new skills. He began loading and drawing at the gallop, aiming in all three directions consecutively, to the front, to the side, to the back. Then, at last, it became reality: a gallop past his bale, firing three arrows – failure after failure, as usual, until one day all three arrows ended up in the bale.

  That was just the beginning. New discoveries lay ahead. Standing archers draw the bow to the cheekbone or chin, often kissing the string and sighting along the arrow. But for horseback archery it was hopeless. All that tension, with the bow drawn and the whole body wracked by motion – how could the rider choose the right moment to release?

  The answer was first to draw the bow, not to the chin but back to the chest, to the heart, to the seat of the emotions; and second to let the unconscious choose the right moment of release. For there is a right moment. It comes when the horse’s four feet are all off the ground at once, a split second in which to find peace: ‘during the moment we float through the air before the horse’s hoof connects with the ground again’. But the brain has no time to bring this moment into conscious awareness. It lasts a fraction of a second. There can be no thinking, no analysis. There is only action.

  How do you aim? You don’t, you can’t, because there’s no time. You leave your mind behind, and you respond by pure feeling. Like a medieval mystic wrestling with the long, dark night of the soul, he came through, into a sort of paradise:

  At dawn I rode my horse at a gallop on the crystal carpet laid by drops of dew and shot arrows damp with the morning mist at my target. The water thrown off the damp arrow almost drew a line through the air. Then I suddenly noticed the fiery rays of the sun burning my face red, everything around me was crackling with dry heat, and the yellow slope of the hill was reverberating with the noontime bells of the neighbouring village.

  I was awake in my dreams, dreaming awake. Time melted like sweet honey in morning tea. How much I had searched for that feeling! I had chased it like a little boy who wants to catch a butterfly in a flowery meadow. The wonderful insect zigzags in flight like a sheet of paper blown by the wind, then lands on a fragrant flower. The child catches up with it, panting with the effort and reaches towards it with a clumsy move to hold it between finger and thumb, but the butterfly flits away, and the boy is running, stumbling after it again.

  I had the butterfly in my hand. I enclosed it between my palms, careful not to hurt its fragile wings.

  The next challenge was to fund his obsession by turning it into a business, which meant inventing a new sport and all the rules to go with it. His valley gave him the dimensions. A 90-metre course, with three targets, each 90 centimetres across, to be shot at three times each – forward, sideways and backward – from a gallop that must take no more than sixteen seconds, with expert riders taking eight or nine seconds. To establish his new sport, he needed to make a name for himself, using his own expertise to show what could be done.

  In going public, his big idea was to ride his horses – he now had eleven – in relay, along the course he had set himself, firing continuously for twelve hours. He closed the valley, shut out the curious, ‘the unfaithful companions, tenacious enemies, two-faced lovers’ – hints here of how difficult it must have been for others to deal with this demanding zealot – and trained for six months. ‘There was not a single day I did not imagine myself to be in a battlefield. Despite being alone, I was not lonely for a minute. My imagination peopled the valley with comrades in arms and deadly enemies.’

  Then it was time to let the world know of the rebirth of mounted archery. The Guinness Book of Records, TV and newspa
pers were informed, helpers and friends called back to hold horses and collect arrows. One June day, at five in the morning, he started, first using the slow horses, firing five arrows in the ten or twelve seconds it took them to gallop the course; then, as the heat built and the hours passed, he switched to the faster horses, which covered the course in less than seven seconds, firing three arrows in each pass. By five in the afternoon, catatonic with fatigue, he had galloped 286 laps and fired something over 1,000 arrows.

  Fifteen years on, Kassai has honed his performance to something approaching perfection. The sport, using his scoring system, is well established and growing. Since the early 1990s several hundred men and women, more every year, have been practising this gruelling skill, first in Hungary and now also in Germany, Austria and the United States. Some of these adepts want the sport to be included in the Olympics.

  But to Kassai’s disciples, this is more than a sport. To Todd Delle, from Arizona, it is a fusion of body and mind, the two reflecting each other, a foundation for dealing with the successes and failures of life itself, ‘for you cannot fully understand success without first understanding failure’. It’s also about the group, with everyone encouraging everyone else – a collaborative spirit rare in competitive sport. There are others who claim to teach horseback archery, but – as Delle explains – ‘What makes Kassai different is that what he teaches is not simply the mechanics of how to shoot an arrow from the back of a galloping horse. What he teaches is the heart and soul of a warrior.’

  Kassai’s valley is now the centre not simply of a sport but of a cult, of a way of life, and of a self-sustaining business.

  The sweeping curve of the valley holds Kassai’s house – simple, circular, wooden, with furniture carved from tree-trunks; a barn, sweet with the smell of hay, for the two dozen horses; a covered riding school and an arena; two training runs for mounted archery and two butts for standing archery; and, up on a hillside, a Kazakh yurt, where local children come for lessons in living history. The marsh has become a lake. In the nearby town, workshops make bows, arrows and saddles. The whole estate is underpinned by trainees – several hundred of them, mainly Hungarian, but also German and Austrian, with a scattering of English and American – and their need for equipment.

  You can see him at work on the first Saturday of each month. When I was there, the thirty-five students – eleven of them women – ranged from near-masters down to a six-year-old boy. Kassai controls his world like a sensei teaching a martial art. With a crowd of 100 watching from the arena’s banked sides, the day starts with rigorous drill-work, to the tap of a shaman’s drum. It ends with Kassai’s demonstration of his astonishing skills. Three men stand along the arena, each holding a pole on which is a circular target 90 centimetres across. Kassai gallops the length of the arena. As he passes, the man starts to run, holding his target aloft a metre or so above his head. Kassai takes six seconds to pass the first running man, during which time he shoots three arrows. Then on past the next – three shots – and the next – another three shots. Eighteen seconds, nine arrows, each released with a ‘Ha!’, and all strike true. And then, as an encore, the same gallop, the same men, except this time the men each have two unattached targets. As they run and Kassai gallops past, they throw the targets over their shoulders. Six flying targets, six shots, all within a metre of the runners, and not a single miss. The final runner falls on his knees, as if thanking the gods for his survival, and all line up for a round of applause.

  *

  The sport has now escaped its roots in Kassai’s work. In Germany, Austria, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, hundreds of men and women are members of half a dozen clubs, performing as equals. Possibly, the women outnumber the men. The Amazon spirit is alive and well, and becoming stronger by the year.

  It is, for instance, very much alive in Pettra Engeländer, Kassai’s top woman graduate, who now runs her own mounted archery school, the Independent European Horse Archery School (she favours the English version of the name),23 in glorious open countryside 100 kilometres northeast of Frankfurt. She loved riding as a teenager and also loved archery. It was natural to put the two together, ‘to live like the horse-people of old, in harmony with nature.’ Yes, she knows that sounds romantic, but she also knows that life on the steppes was not exactly comfortable, because she lived in a yurt for three years and spent a couple of weeks with a family in the Mongolian countryside. She saw for herself the freedom and strength that this way of life gave, especially to the women. Strength and freedom: the words keep coming up in her conversation.

  Then there grew in her another ambition: to spread the word, to teach others the benefits she had discovered with Kassai, and do so in ways that took the skills beyond highperformance sport. ‘I felt something was lacking to make horseback archery truly authentic. After all, the bow is a weapon that operates at a distance. It was followed by direct contact. I didn’t feel at ease with something that defined itself purely in terms of competition.’ So she began to treat it as a martial art. She performs as a latter-day Amazon in a horse show, Apassionata, which tours Germany and neighbouring countries with a sound-and-light pageant of different breeds and skills. She teaches men and women together as equals, but the women have pride of place, because they are so changed by the experience of horseback archery. The core experience remains that of the rider in tune with her horse, galloping without reins, releasing arrow after arrow, in complete control of herself, her horse and her weapon.

  Zana Cousins-Greenwood runs the Centre of Horseback Combat in Hemel Hempstead, near London. She is a fine example of how the sport can act like a virus. It seized her, drove her into action, and then into the business of teaching, organizing and generally infecting as many others as possible.

  She was always a rider, from childhood, and was organizing shows from the home where she lived with her husband, Karl, in Somerset. Having seen historical re-enactments, she thought it might be fun to try horseback archery, but had no idea that it was already a sport. One day, on the local radio, she heard mention of a guy who did horseback archery in his back yard. A friend said, ‘Yeah, that’s Neil Payne. Lives two miles away.’ She found him and dropped him a letter, saying, ‘Hi. I’d really like to do some horseback archery. Give me a call.’ He did, and she had her first lesson. It was more than a lesson. That was when the virus seized her. ‘I thought: This is brilliant! I need to do this! It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Shooting a bow, on horseback . . .’ She had been ambushed by passion, and she laughed with joy, struggling to capture the memory. ‘It was – it was just – so exotic! Then to discover that it was a sport, it was like, “I can actually do this? It’s real?’”

  She could do it, but not like this, in a back yard. It had to be done properly. After two false starts (south of London and Wales), she and Karl answered an advertisement in Horse & Hound placed by a family living in a beautiful but somewhat under-used eighteenth-century estate, Gaddesden Place in Hertfordshire. The family needed someone to do something with the stables. Horseback archery had not exactly been in the forefront of their minds, but they took a leap of faith. Zana and Karl arrived in February 2012 with ten horses, boot-deep in snow, taking over a house and stables untouched (it seemed) since Jane Austen’s day, with three weeks until opening. Zana drove herself, Karl and helpers with Amazonian intensity. They opened as planned.

  Four years and 1,500 clients later, that was where I talked to her, in the eighteenth-century pack room, now the HQ for a successful business of eighteen horses, the old stables (which once accommodated the carriages for the big house), several acres of field, twenty bows, arrows enough for a Scythian army, and a horse-archery track.

  She reckons they get more women than men. Why should this be so? ‘It’s all so male, isn’t it, this weapon stuff? But women love weapons too. They really do. They don’t want to be left out. Here, they’re not. In horseback archery men and women are absolutely equal. There is no difference.’ Actually, there
is a difference: the men are not so good at listening. They get the arrow on the bow any old how, and it’s ‘Let me shoot! Let me shoot!’ They get frustrated easily, they don’t want to take time to learn the right technique. You have to calm down, relax, be a little spiritual about it. Women are better at that.

  In February 2016, Zana and Karl were the UK delegates to Moscow, where they had been invited by Russia’s Dzhigitovka Federation, the organization that promotes military riding skills, like Cossack-style trick riding, and displays with lances and swords. The Russians wanted to include horseback archery and needed advice on Russia’s first steps towards international competition. There were demonstrations. Their horseback archery was nothing – just one target, to be hit by a single arrow, and only men riders. Where were the women? Well, they did some trick riding, but only four stunts where the men did six. And in mounted archery? Oh no, she was told, girls don’t do that. Zana was shocked. ‘We said, hold on a minute. If you’re opening this up internationally, the women are not going to have that. There’s no way you can have an international sport in 2016 and say the girls can’t do that. You won’t get away with it.’ So they changed the rules. In July that year, she competed on equal terms with men in dzhigitovka, the catch-all name for trick riding, which, thanks to her, is now not just for men. Zana won the silver in horseback archery.

  The whole field is opening up, some in the tradition of Kassai, some in others. There’s an International Horseback Archery Alliance, linking nineteen countries, though not yet Mongolia, which in this field has only recently started to recover the rather effective skills it possessed under Genghis Khan, lost under the softening effects of Buddhism and Chinese rule. In the US, the Mounted Archery Association of the Americas (MA3 for short) has seven affiliates, in Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas and two in Washington state. In Arlington, WA, Katie Stearns, running the Flying Duchess Ranch just north of Seattle, says that she has seen women ‘transform into warrior goddesses’ over the weekend, because ‘mounted archery is an equalizer and it gives women the power to be just as strong and capable as their male counter-parts.’ There are different forms of horseback archery in Korea, Turkey and Japan, and much controversy about styles and techniques and equipment. Do you have to hold the arrows on the bow, as Kassai teaches? Some people say it’s more authentic to draw arrows from a quiver. Should arrows have three fletches for stability or two for authenticity? Should you use the three-fingered Mediterranean draw, or the thumb draw, or use a thumb ring? Should you gallop fast, like the Koreans, or more sedately, like Kassai? What about the behind-the-head shot, useful for hitting a target on the ground, or lying along the horse’s neck to shoot directly up at a target on top of an 8-metre pole? It’s going to go on getting better, if your measure is the number of people involved; worse, if you count the rivalry and the conflicting rules.