The Albasty: The Yellow-Haired Demon of the Birth-Bed
Across a territory vaster than any empire — from Anatolia through the Caucasus, over the whole Kazakh and Kyrgyz steppe, into Siberia and down into the valleys of Central Asia — the peoples of the Turkic world, and half their neighbors besides, feared one being above nearly all others, and feared her at one door above all: the door of the yurt where a woman lay giving birth. She is the albasty — the Turks of Anatolia call her alkarısı , the "al-woman," the scarlet woman — and her portrait is drawn with remarkable consistency across five thousand kilometers of telling: a hag-like female, heavy and shambling, with long loose yellow hair falling past her waist, pendulous breasts thrown back over her shoulders when she runs, and sometimes a bird's taloned feet showing under her hem. She can wear other shapes — a yellow dog, a fox, a goat, a heap of moving hay — but the yellow-haired woman is her true form, and every midwife from the Bosphorus to the Altai knew her business...