Siinji - Or, Ankūro and the City of the Golden Boughs

17

17

To walk, walk, and walk.
Knowledge is not ever found,
Outside ones own door.
- Momiji.

"Not 'foot', boot!"

Yurivno sat upright upon her mattress and looked around in the dark. Her Kannai eyes gave her an advantage in darker conditions, but it looked darker than usual, even to her eyes. Her half-asleep outburst had not appeared to have awoken the others. Tuccé, laid on his back, legs akimbo, the covers thrown to the side remained undisturbed. Ankūro still slept, leaning her back against one of Tanou's unfinished statues.

Rubbing her eyes, she looked outside, through the open, sliding wall, to see dark clouds covering the sky, rain falling in a hushed hiss upon the grass and the trees beyond. Her hand reached to the side, falling upon the covered tablets, placed between her and Tuccé. She had dreamed someone had taken them away.

The revelation that had caused her to wake still bounced inside her head, an instinctive need to work through her thoughts causing her to lose any interest in sleep. Rising, she wandered to the kitchen room, off to the side, and found a covered bucket of water, taking a drink with the ladle laid atop it.

Returning to the main room, she glanced outside to see Tanou stood in the centre of her garden, head raised to the heavens, arms outstretched, catching raindrops in her palms. Yurivno leaned against the frame of the sliding wall, resting her head against the soft wood, crossing her arms and watching the stonemason in the poor light.

She envied the woman, after a fashion. She had such a relaxed attitude to life that Yurivno could never attain. As though she were a leaf, fallen upon the surface of a stream, allowing the lazy current to carry her where the stream wished. Even now, Yurivno could never imagine standing out in the rain like that, accepting the gift of the clouds.

"Join me?" Tanou's head turned to Yurivno, her face slick with rain, and she smiled. "Rain season has arrived. A time of renewal, so? It is never so harsh, here on the Eastern side of the island."

Hesitating, taking a look into the sky through fear of lightning, or the sonorous rumble of thunder, Yurivno took the steps down to the garden, moving to Tanou's side. She couldn't feel the rain the same way humans, or Other-Kin that did not have fur. The droplets stopped upon her fur, catching between the strands, making her feel heavy and burdened.

Still, she raised her face to the sky, her eyes flickering as rain drops caught upon her eyelashes. Her ears flattened against her head as she felt the tip-tap of rain hitting her black nose, slicking her fur. As Tanou did, Yurivno stretched out her arms, turning her palms skywards, offering one of the few un-furred parts of her body to the rain.

Scowling, she looked at the bandage on her writing hand and began to unfurl it, wrapping it around fingers until she exposed the damaged surface. She could still the signs where the needles had forced themselves into her hand and shivered at the memory before tossing the bandage to the side and resuming the same pose as Tanou.

"It's wonderful." Even the sting as the rainwater trickled over her injured palm felt comforting. Yurivno couldn't remember the last time she felt less tense, less on edge, than she did now. "It's like bathing bit-by-bit. Drop-by-drop."

"The rain season signals both an end and a beginning. It brings life back to parched soil, replenishes thirsting rivers, feeds and nurtures all things." Tanou's hand closed around Yurivno's, interlinking their fingers. "The Divine Spirits give and take without malice."

Despite absorbing so much knowledge about the island in such a short time, Yurivno had neglected learning more about the prevailing religion of Kaguta, and regretted that. Where everyone, upon the mainland, worshipped one or more of the Patrons, the immortal beings akin to gods, but not quite gods, here, on Kaguta, they worshipped something else entirely.