Legend

From dawn to dusk Erkinai Aru’s Sunflower turned its head after the sun, and at night it waited facing east, before the sky had even begun to pale.

At harvest time Erkinai looked in on a settlement out on the steppe. Against the wall of the house where a young weaver lived with her father grew a sunflower – thin, pale, bent towards where the wall ended. The weaver sat beside it at her loom, weaving her father’s pattern, as she had for years.

“I do everything as I should, and nothing grows for me,” she said without raising her head.

Erkinai glanced at the sunflower, then at her.

“Just like you,” she said bluntly.

She fetched a hoe from the shed and pushed it into the weaver’s hands.

“Dig it up and move it.”

The weaver dug by the wall until her back ached. The roots went deeper than she had thought and clung stubbornly to the earth. When at last she pulled the plant free, she carried it out to the open field and planted it in full sun.

“You’re not weak,” said Erkinai. “You stood in the shade. Even if it was the shade of someone who loves you.”

When the first frosts came, the weaver brought Erkinai a seed head full to bursting, and her first cloth woven to her own pattern – yellow as sunflower petals. Erkinai Aru’s Sunflower sowed itself from those seeds every year.