Daughter of the East Wind by Isilme_among_the_stars  

Her name is not recorded. History does not remember her. No songs were sung; no lay was written for the daughter of the East wind. But I remember her, and I have no need for names. From the moment her toe, peeking through travel-worn shoe, first touched my soil, to the hour she was interred beneath it, I loved her. And I love her still.

I welcomed the shining ones marching in from the West, the tall wheat-haired strong, and the hazel-skinned deceived ones, driven in from the East. I became a home, a pitched battleground. They called me by turn the Land of Echoes, or this damned place. I have no need for names. I am the green vale cradled in the palms of the mountains. I am the mist-land’s little sister, nestled between the craggy hills. I am every rock, every rill and every well-tilled field. I am the kindly soil, the biting wind and driving rains. The daughter of the East wind understood this.

She stumbled in weeping, and I caught her as she fell. She had no kinsmen left to catch her. They were stolen by iron and fire. So, I kissed her palms and caressed her knees. I whispered to her with the wind in the grass and caught the salt of her tears. She spread her threadbare shawl upon my belly and together we gazed up at the stars, to me familiar and to her strange.

Mother she called me, and sister became to me, grown together in the short days we shared her living breath. Not names, but bonds. I hold the memory of them close to my bosom. Perhaps, had we met differently, and she had plentiful kinder days to learn my ways, I could have held them longer. Fates decrees were not for me to change. Let it not be said that I was cruel.

She made no demand from me. She had learned to live without expectations. Bare soles trod softly over autumn-littered ground. Both shoes wore through, and she had no means to make them anew. Curious fingers dug gently in the soft earth but found little. She knew not where to find the gifts I stored in my belly, nor which of the green things emerging from my crust were good to eat. They were as strange to her as the stars. I had no voice to guide her with that would be understood. I gave her what I could. But the scars of summer stole autumn crops. I lay scorched and fallow where once was bounty. It was not enough. Her people looked upon salt-flecked hair and wrinkled cheeks and apportioned greater shares to smooth-skinned babes. She begrudged them not.

When the North winds chilled her shivering skin, I wanted to know what wind blew you here to me? And though she knew not what I asked, gladly sang to me of the East. Of deserts and heat, and water dug deep from the earth she told me. In harmonies beautiful and strange to me, I learned of dry air heady with jasmine and spice. She knew how to stay cool, but not warm. I wondered why she had come. That, she never told. 

When they buried her, the men that dug her grave graced her resting place with not one flower. Such was the cruelty of that winter. Too many hungry mouths. Too many trenches etched shallow in my embrace. Too little salt spilled on my soil from eyes long dried by sorrow run out of weeping. Neither could I weep. So instead, I made her bloom. In her veins entwined roots. From her lungs breathed shoots. From our tawny skin came the colours of the stories she had told me of the East. And in the wind on the plains, it is her fragrance that sings.

I loved well the daughter of the East wind. Her name is long since lost to time, but she is not forgotten. 

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