Slowly, the intense heat of the summer starts to fade and it grows cooler in September. The trees of the great forest that surround the lake start to turn colour from tired green to sere yellow, and the swallows swirl around the turrets of the castle every evening, as if to say goodbye for another year. They chase each other round and round in a dizzying train, like a veil being whirled in a dance. The rows on rows of vines grow heavy with fruit and every day the peasant woman go out with their sleeves rolled up over their big forearms and pick and pick the fruit into big wicker baskets, which the men swing onto carts and take back to the press. The smell of fruit and fermenting wine is heavy in the village, everyone has blue-stained hems to their gowns and purple feet, and they say it will be a good year this year, rich and lush. When the ladies in waiting and I ride through the village they call us to taste the new wine and it is light and sharp and fizzy in our mouths, and they laugh at our puckered faces.
My great-aunt does not sit straight-backed in her chair, overseeing her women and beyond them the castle and my uncle’s lands, as she did at the start of the summer. As the sun loses its heat she too seems to be growing pale and cold. She lies down from the middle of the morning to the early evening, and only rises from her bed to walk into the great hall beside my uncle and nod her head at rumble of greeting, as the men look up at their daggers.
Jomei prays for her, by name, in her daily attendance at church, but I, childlike, just accept the new rhythm of my great-aunt’s day, and sit with her to read in the afternoon, and wait for her to talk to me about the prayers floated like paper ships on the waters of rivers that were flowing to the sea before I was born. She tells me to spread out the cards of her pack and teaches me the name and the quality of each one.
“And now read them for me,” she says one day, and then taps a card with her thin finger. “What is this one?”
I turn it over for her. The dark hooded shape of Death looks back at us, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, his scythe over his hunched shoulder.
“Ah well,” she says. “So are you here at last, my friend? Hibiki, you had better ask your uncle to come to see me.”
♡
I show him into her room and he kneels at the side of her bed. She puts her hand on his head as if in blessing. Then she pushes him gently away.
“I cannot bear this weather,” she says crossly to my uncle, as if the cooling days are his fault. “How can you bear to live here? It is as cold as the Land of Fire and the winters last forever. I shall go south, I shall go to Beppu.”
“Are you sure?” he asks. “I thought you were feeling tired. Should you not rest here?”
She snaps her fingers irritably. “I'm too cold,” she says imperiously. “You can order me a guard and I shall have my litter lined with furs. I shall come back in spring.”
“Surely you would be more comfortable here?” he suggests.
“I have a fancy to see the Kuma once more,” she says. “Besides I have business to do.”
Nobody can ever argue against her - she is the Lady - and within days she has her litter at the door, furs heaped on the bed, a brass hand-warmer filled with hot coals, the floor of the litter packed with oven-heated bricks to keep her warm, the household lined up to say farewell.
She gives her hand to Jomei, and then kisses my aunt Junko and me. My uncle helps her into the litter and she clutches his arm with her thin hand. “Keep the Maid safe,” she says. “Keep her from the Land of Fire, it is my command.”
He ducks his head. “Come back to us soon.”
His wife, whose life is easier when the great lady has moved on, steps forwards to tuck her in and kiss her pale cool cheeks. But it is me that the Lady of Goto calls towards her with one crook of her skinny finger.
“God bless you, Hibiki,” she says to me. “You will remember all that I taught you. And you will go far.” She smiles at me. “Farther than you can imagine.”
“But I will see you in spring?”
“I will send you my books,” she says. “And my bracelet.”
“And you will come to visit my mother and father at St Mizuki in the spring?”
Her smile tells me that I will not see her again. “God bless,” she repeats and draws the curtains of her litter against the cold morning air as the cavalcade starts out the gate.
YOU ARE READING
The Lady Of The Rain(Naruto Fanfiction)
फैनफिक्शनGame of Thrones meets Naruto The back drop of the series is the 100 year old war and the War of the Roses/Cousin's war, just with Naruto Character's and Oc's The Narrator of the story is Hibiki Hyuga, Hinata's mother. This is the first story of...
