The Lady Of The Rain(Naruto Fanfiction)

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.4

It grows even hotter in August, and my great-aunt rests on a daybed in her inner room every afternoon, with the light curtains of silk around the bed soaked in lavender water and the closed shutters throwing barred shadows across the stone floor. She likes me to read to her, as she lies with her eyes closed and her hands folded on the high waistline of her dress, as if she were a sculpted effigy of herself in some shaded tomb. She puts aside a big horned headdress that she always wears and lets her long greying hair spread over the cool embroidered pillows. She gives me books from her own library that tell of great romances and poets and ladies in tangled forests, and then one afternoon she puts a book in my hand and says, “Read this today.”

It is hand-copied in the old Rivers-Language and I stumble over the words. It is hard to read: the illustrations in the margins are like briars and flowers threading through the letters, and the clerk who copied each word had an ornate style of writing which I find hard to decipher. But slowly the story emerges. It is the story of a knight riding through a dark forest who has lost his way. He hears the sound of water and goes towards it. In a clearing, in the moonlight, he sees a white basin and a splashing fountain and in the water is a woman of such beauty that her skin is paler than the white marble and her hair is darker than the night skies. He falls in love with her at once, and she with him, and he takes her castle and makes her his wife. She has only one condition: that every month he must leave her alone to bathe.

“Do you know this story?” my great-aunt asks me. “Has your father told you of it?”

“I have heard something like it,” I say cautiously. My great-aunt is notoriously quick-tempered with my father and I don't know if I dare say that I think this is the legend of founding of our house.

“Well, now you are reading the true story,” she says. She closes her eyes again. “It is time you knew. Go on.”

The young couple are happier than any in the world, and people come from far and wide to visit them. They have children: beautiful girls and strange wild boys.

“Sons,” my great-aunt whispers to herself. “If only a woman could have sons by wishing, if only they could be as she wishes.”

The wife never loses her beauty though the years go by, and her husband grows more and more curious. One day, he cannot bear the mystery of her secret bathing any longer and creeps down to her bath-house and spies on her.

My great-aunt raises her hand. “Do you know what he see? She asks me.

I lift my face from the book, my finger under the illustration of the man peering through the slats of the bath-house. In the foreground is the woman in the bath, her beautiful hair snaked around her white shoulders. And gleaming in the water … her large scaled tail.

“Is she a fish?” I whisper.

“She is a being not of this world,” my great-aunt says quietly. “She tried to live like an ordinary woman; but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in common ways; but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man's world, Hibiki, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man's drum. Do you understand?”

I don't, of course. I am too young to understand that a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

“Anyway, you can read on. It's not long now.”

The husband cannot bear to know that his wife is strange being. She cannot forgive him for spying on her. She leaves him, taking her beautiful daughters, and lives alone with the sons, heartbroken. But at his death, as at the death everyone of our house, his wife Mizu, the beautiful woman who was an undine, a water goddess, back to him and hears her crying around the battlements for the children she has lost, for the husband she still loves, and for the world that has no place for her.

I close the book, and there is such a long silence that I think my great-aunt has fallen asleep.

“Some of the women of our family have the gift of foresight,” my great-aunt remarks quietly. “Some of them have inherited powers from Mizu, powers of the other world where she lives. Some of us are her daughters, her heirs.”

I hardly dare to breathe, I am so anxious that she should go on speaking to me.

“Hibiki, do you think you might be one of these women?”

“I might be,” I whisper. “I hope so.”

“You have to listen,” she says softly. “Listen to silence, watch for nothing. And be on your guard. Mizu is a shapeshifter, like quicksilver, she can flow from one thing to another. You may see her anywhere, she is like water. Or you may see only your own reflection in surface of a stream though you are straining your eyes to see into the green depths for her.”

“Will she be my guide?”

“You must be your own guide, but you might hear her when she speaks to you.” She pauses. “Fetch my jewel box.” She gestures towards the great chest at the foot of her bed. I open the creaking lid and inside, beside the gowns wrapped in powdered silk, is a large wooden box. I take it out. Inside is a series of drawers, each one filled with my great-aunt’s fortune of jewels. “Look in the smallest drawer,” she says.

I find it. Inside is a small black velvet purse. I untie the tasselled threads, open the mouth, and heavy golden bracelet falls into my hand, laden with about two hundred little charms, each one a different shape. I see a ship, a horse, a star, a spoon, a whip, a hawk, a spur.

“When you want to know something very, very important, you choose two or three of the charms - charms that signify the thing that might be, the choices before you. You tie each one on a string and you put them in a river, the river nearest to your home, the river that you hear at night when everything is silent but the voice of the waters. You leave it until the moon is new. Then you cut all the strings but one, and pull that one out to see your future. The river will give you the answer. The river will tell you what you should do.”

I nod. The bracelet is cold and heavy in hand, each charm a choice, each charm an opportunity, each charm a mistake in waiting.

“And when you want something: go out and whisper it to the river - like a prayer. When you curse somebody: write it on a piece of paper, and put the paper into the river, float it like a little paper boat. The river is your ally, your friend, your lady - do you understand?”

I nod, though I don't understand.

“When you curse somebody …” She pauses and sighs as if she is very weary. “Take care with your words, Hibiki, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that when you put such words out in the world they can overshoot - like an arrow, a curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly.”

I shiver, though the room is hot.

“I will teach you more,” she promises me. “It is your inheritance, since you are the oldest girl.”

“Do boys not know? My brother Riku?”

Her lazy eyes half open and smiles at me. “Men command the world that they know,” she says. “Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves, they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women, but the realms of the unknown?”

“But can women not take a great place in the world? You Great-aunt, and Yuko of Hadano is called the Queen of four Kingdoms. Shall I not command great lands like you and her?”

“You might. But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price. Perhaps you will be a great woman like Mizu, or Yuko, or like me; but you will be like all women: uneasy in the world of men. You will do your best - perhaps you will gain some power if you marry well or inherit well - but you will always find the road is hard beneath your feet. In the other world - well, who knows about the other world? Maybe they will hear you, and perhaps you will hear them.”

“What will I hear?”

She smiles. “You know. You hear it already.”

“Voices?” I ask, thinking of Jomei.

“Perhaps.”