About the book: year / Dear reader! The story I want to tell you happened a long time ago. So long ago that it is remembered only by the free wind blowing from year to year in the Caspian steppes, and the gray rocks, watching from above the world around them... If you look deep into the centuries, you will see how some states rose from oblivion and others fell into the abyss of oblivion. Where is the Achamenid Empire now? Or the state of Alexander the Great? Or Great Rome, Byzantium? All of them were buried by the sands of time, and they were replaced by others, so that in turn they too would leave the arena of world history... So we too will one day leave, giving way to new states, the existence of which we do not even suspect now...... In front of you is the first book from a trilogy dedicated to the formation, rise and decline of the Persian Empire. Throughout their history, the Persian kings constantly faced hordes of wild nomads who disturbed their borders. Ultimately, they led to the weakening of the Achamenid power and its decline. This story is about the Persian king Cyrus and the Massagetian queen Tomiris. It happened in 529 BC. and ended with the death of one of them. The main source for writing this novel was Herodotus, who lived a hundred years after the events described. In his “History,” he most fully recreated the era that will be discussed in the novel. In our Soviet and post-Soviet literature, the image of the Scythian is too idealized, and truth can rarely be separated from fiction. But if you rely on the works of famous historians of antiquity, you see that our ancestors were far from perfect. With their raids, the Scythians-Massagetae and related tribes constantly kept all the surrounding states in fear and at the same time were particularly cruel. These cases are sufficiently described by the same Herodotus and Xenophon, ancient Greek historians and novelists. But what do we want from the cruel century in which they lived?…