4.24

Ajam lived in the steppe he loved: the rolling hills, the warm dry winds.

Where did the wind come from? Who blew it out?

 Zel. Her grace surpasses even the brightness of the stars.

But none can say they have seen her and not be found a liar.

But they see her effects. The feel of her slips across skin on quiet nights. The men will brag about her visits, but the women are all quiet. They know more. But more than they, is Zel.
Zel's love touches Ajam most. She and the land are akin, and he can feel here that way.  He feels her in dry dust wiped from his eyes. He feels her in never still air. He feels her in open doorways and horses' manes. Once, her footprints ran to him in the sweep of a rushing wind through the long grass. He watched as her fingers dragged gooseflesh along his limbs before she was torn away by her own momentum.

Who was she?

It didn't matter to Ajam, and as such it doesn't matter to you.
He can tell you a story, you know, of each time she came to him. Each night in his sleep he would catch glimpses of her out of the corner of sight, always laughing at something he hadn't yet said, only just thought of. Sometimes, she was closer, and she would wrap her arms around him from behind, cold, and then he would close his eyes in the dream, and she would press up against him, warm, and whisper into his ear the language of the winds. He wrote these stories down with knots in string, long patterns of single and double contortions stretching back a thousand memories to his earliest moments. Each time she came to him, he would stretch a length from his pocket, today green, tomorrow orange, each visit a red, blue, yellow, all bright, all welcoming, all reflecting the mood she brought to him.

I can't see the purpose of his work.

If you can't see it, then perhaps no one can. Let me describe him to you by his actions, for this was the only description he had of her. For once he had assembled his threads a thousand thousand yards in length, each knotted with a story of her, he took them all and straightened them. His mother waited patiently for him to hang them from the door handles, from the bed frames, from the ceiling. He draped them from the roof of the yurt and the long nights when he kept his eyes closed, the dreams in which she would take his hand and run him blind-wise through the hills, these longest stories trailed even to the trough of the horses in the yard. His father was pushed out of the house for a time, told to return with a civil tongue in his head. And still, Ajam laid out his strands, the house a rainbow, his fingers callousing against the delicate work.

Your story grows more intricate.

As does his own creation.

Zel grows impatient.

Ah, you feel her too?
Ajam built for himself a loom, a thousand strands and more, and began to weave into it his stories and memories of Zel. He wove in September, when the rains came and she was quiet. He wove in October, when the grass froze and cold footprints were found circling the house in morning. He wove in November, when the wind howled against the walls and his father begged to up roots and run to the South. He wove in December and, as his shuttle clattered from its ancient purpose to the foot-worn floor boards, he couldn't hear her anymore. The world was still, and drifts three feet deep had cloistered the family. He gathered the long cloth, delicate with patterns of story-knots, and wrapped it with the last, most recent thread, the only for which there was no place. It was weak and black, and it had a thick, constant wrapping of knots, her name again and again. Placing the bundle under one arm, he dressed for the worst of the winter. He gathered his things and the most hardy pony and bid goodbye to his father, to the dogs, to the house. His mother, she didn't come outside. She had known where he was going for months now.
He knew exactly where he was walking, though he had walked it blind, for he had walked it a thousand times before in strides that broke from hilltop to hilltop, pressing the earth away and springing from it with her grace, in her hands. December broke into January, and still the world was still. And even so he walked.

Was this her wont?

You know she had never laid quiet before. This winter was different.

I won't ask this question.

I wish you would.

 What of her had changed?

January into February, and his journey led him into the woods, a world of unfamiliar places, where the land tilted toward the sky. I'm sure you understand. February into March, and the new year, and even onward he journeyed. The world broke from its winter, but did not awake. The atmosphere itself had developed a whining tension, and Ajam could feel the foreignness of the wind, even in this place where he himself was out of place. And then, he was sure, as he passed a ridge and looked into the first mountain valley his eyes had ever seen, he had arrived. It was as familiar to him as though he had lived there his whole life. He lept from the pony and slid down the hill, tearing his jacket, cutting his hands. Under his arm, he carried his whole life's work. In the small hollow between earth and heaven, at the exact place where the stars touch the planet, he found her home. He cut the string, the final string of only her name, again and again, and the cloth unfurled around him. It enveloped him, it overwhelmed him, it grew from him like a spreading wave, and yet it broke around two strange feet that weren't there. Two strange hands he couldn't see picked up the riotous cloth and each color surged in its weave. She wrapped herself in his cloth, and he could see the shape of her in his words. She spoke to him again in the language of wind, and clasped him cold in the tightest embrace he had yet received, her body growing warm through the tight folds of cloth.

Did he say what he meant to, when he saw her?

Oh, you dear fool. There was never anything to say between them.
I, too, have held the breeze. Ajam's story is my own.