Mushishi: The Slaker of Thirst
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aegiscryptTitle: The Slaker of Thirst
Rating: PG
Genre: General
Word Count: ~4000
Also Archived On: Archive of Our Own on December 17, 2019.
Summary: They say that the river that flows through these mountains rises and ebbs to the rhythm of life itself: without spectacle, without mercy, and without pause.
A.N.: Dear GriegPlants, happy Yuletide! I hope this captures the atmosphere of Mushishi that you so love!
Legend has it that the river that flows through these mountains runs clear and strong like no other. Once it took more than it gave; now, it is a herald of auspice, of harvest, of good fortune. Its waters is said to slake the thirst of all who drink it.
The wind wends through the pines and rustles the grassy stalks on the riverbank, bringing with it the smell of freshwater as it breezes through the window. So loud are the susurrations that the sigh from the bed nearly went unheard. The next words, though, are as strong as the rock beneath the river itself.
“Water,” croaks the old woman in the bed. “Itane, water.”
“Yes, Grandmother. Here.”
Grandmother struggles upright, bloated hands clutching at the earthen cup and sipping from it with vigour. The young woman sits at her side in anxious attention. “Ah,” the old woman sighs at length, “no drink in the world can ever compare to fresh meltwater.”
“But you cannot drink only river-water, Grandmother. Your body needs food.”
“Nothing nourishes me better than the sound of the river’s flow.”
“Humans cannot subsist on sound.”
“Don’t dismiss anything until you’ve tried it, child.”
Itane frowns, fretful. “Grandmother,” she chides, “the healers could still make a difference if only you’d see them again.”
“Nonsense. Tatsuro could do more for you after I go than he could do for me now. Don’t waste his time. I’d sooner see Saya from the village over the mountain than him again, and don’t lie to me, I know she’s already left.”
Itane’s hands clench into her kimono. “What luck, then. I heard that a visiting healer has lodged in the inn for the night. It will be no effort at all for him to come by after dinner.”
Grandmother glares, then shakes her head. “I know that expression. Nothing dissuades you when you wear it. Very well, bring him if this will sooth you, granddaughter.”
Itane’s smile flashes as bright as the sun’s reflections off the ripples in the river. “Yes, Grandmother! Thank you!”
The gravid moon is rising above the treeline when their foreign visitor arrives. Itane shows him in, and guides him through the sliding door of the bedroom before taking her leave.
“Good evening, Grandmother,” says the healer as he folds himself down to the ground. His height is as unremarkable as the bedroom itself, his attributes do much more to recommend him. The only feature that detracts from his unnatural pallor and shock of white hair is the verdant flare of his visible eye. “My name is Ginko. Pardon my intrusion into your abode.”
“You are welcome in my home, Ginko-san. I pray that you have enjoyed our people’s hospitality as we celebrated the vernal equinox.”
“Yes, the feast was most generous. But you were missed tonight, Grandmother. I hear that you have been unwell.”
“It’s not been too long.”
“It’s been twelve moons since she’s felt an appetite for food, but that is not the latest of a long, slow decline,” says Itane, slipping into the room to kneel between them and serving cups of water. “She’s been drinking more and more water ever since the ice started to melt two moons ago.”
“The waters in this area is renowned for its fulfilling taste, Ginko-san.”
“I see.” The healer glances at his water, and looks at them consideringly. Itane is slender and in the prime of her life; dark hair gleams against her smooth skin; not even the drab brown of her worn kimono can hide the beauty of her form. Yet Grandmother is the magnetic presence in the room, imposing not because of her oedematous form nor the sharp wisdom in her aged visage, but because of— “Your eyes, Grandmother,” he remarks, “has anyone ever told you how unique they are? How bright those blue streaks look, when the light hits at the right angle?”
“Only by too many,” Grandmother laughs behind her cup, wrinkles creasing into crevices, “it almost makes me feel like I’m young and nubile again!”
“Grandmother,” Itane says, exasperated, as the healer chokes and reddens to his neck, “have mercy upon your visitors.”
“If he deigns to serve as a guide on the path of healing, then he can take more than this. Yes, Ginko-san, so I have been told.”
“It doesn’t seem to have passed on through your family, though.”
“I grew into it. Vagabonding isn’t an easy lifestyle, naa. We didn’t eat well until we settled into this valley, oh, how long ago was it? Sixty years? Closer to seventy now, probably.”
The healer chews on his unlit roll of paper, tracing the rim of the cup absent-mindedly with the tip of a finger. “So you ate well from what you’d ploughed and reaped? Drank well?”
“Oh, yes! The fields became so fertile after only a little tending! First time any of us ate until we were full and still had enough left to trade. And it wasn’t just the earth that became fertile, if you follow,” Grandmother adds with a curl of her mouth that has the healer coughing again and Itane sighing. “Our village grew big so quickly after that merciful year. The earth and the water were kind to us.”
“What makes you think you grew into those eyes, Grandmother?”
“Well, for one, my eyes had always been brown when I was a girl. We had enough to buy mirrors the year we settled. So I was able to watch my eyes change colour.”
“They changed quickly?”
“Quickly is not the right word. I just remembered the first day I saw the blue in my eyes. It was during the first year post-settlement, during the vernal equinox, coincidentally... ahh, forgive this doddering brain. I woke one morning, picked up the mirror to prepare for the feast, and saw that my eyes had gained blue flecks. Small, they started at first, but as the years passed they grew brighter.”
“’Water-eyes’, they called you,” Itane says, then adds, “and they still do, to this here day.”
“Yes, yes. The flecks weren’t obvious at first. But they were, to me, and to my beloved. And they kept growing.”
“And I heard that they call you the River’s Daughter, too,” the healer comments thoughtfully. He is staring at the pine through the window. “Was it because the blue in your eyes is the exact shade of the river water?”
“Perhaps,” Grandmother says with a shrug, “but I wager it is more because I can hear the intentions of the river.”
That green eye sharpens as it swings back to focus on the old woman. “Hear the intentions of the river?”
“Yes. When it will overflow, and when it will fall. Its currents and eddies and such. The river cannot lie to me.” That little curl of her lip shows again, crafty as a crow. “They call me the Riverine Witch, too, but not as loudly as they’d dare with those other boring titles, ha.”
“When did your ability manifest?”
“Shortly after my eyes turned blue, I think. I couldn’t hear the river very clearly first, but I’m very, very good now.”
The healer is silent for a long moment. The rich gurgle of the river fills the space; the blue in Grandmother’s eyes sparkle in an echo, a resonance, an answer.
At length, he says, “have you ever heard of mushi?”
Itane shakes head. “No,” Grandmother harrumphs, “but I expect you’ll tell me about them now.”
“I’m not quite a healer; I’m a mushi-shi, a practitioner who helps people manage mushi. Mushi is the purest and most basic form of life. It is as distant from bacteria as bacteria is from us human beings. Ah... do you know what bacteria is?”
“No,” Grandmother harrumphs again. “Simplify, Ginko-san. If you know your stuff then you should be able to pare it down to digestible bits.”
“I shall show you. Here.” A swing of his merchant’s chest, and the mushi-shi extracts a scroll with alacrity and little fanfare. “All things have life, yes? Mushi is just the simplest form of life itself. One such mushi is called the Shoukawaki, the thirst-quencher.”
Itane leans close to peer at the delicate illustrations of unremarkable spheres, frowning. “The thirst-quencher.”
“Yes. It is an aquatic mushi. It feeds on smaller mushi, and attracts water as a way to hunt. Your river is home to a particularly productive colony of them, it seems.”
“So we drank these mushi, did we?”
“Yes. When the Shoukawaki are unsuccessful at hunting, they will call to each other and band together to gather more water and control its movement. A big enough gathering can very well influence river currents.”
Itane’s eyes widen. “So within Grandmother is...”
“Yes. There is a very large collection in your body, Grandmother. This is why you were able to predict the river’s flow more and more accurately over time; the mushi within you are calling to their fellows still in the river because they are not able to feed in your body. And that is also why your body retains water, and yet you still feel thirst – they are gathering more water in an attempt to enlarge their hunting grounds. It will be to no avail unless you drink river water, of course,” he adds, “because the river itself carries the mushi that the Shoukawaki eats. But it won’t be long before you’ll have to drink again to feed them.”
“But then why can’t everyone in the village hear the river? We all of us drank the same water.”
“Yes, but as you yourself have said: it takes time. And I expect that as the number of mushi in Grandmother grew, so too did the mushi gather the fastest in Grandmother’s water supply in response to their call.”
Itane falls silent. Grandmother continues to watch him without an expression. “The mushi within me are hungry still?” asks the old woman. “And will continue to be hungry no matter what I do? What will become of them?”
“If the mushi in your body continues to starve, they will eventually return to Kouki, the River of Light, the place where all life originates. Mushi glows more brightly the closer they are to returning to the River of Light, and the ones in your body grow close indeed,” the mushi-shi adds, grim.
“And what will happen to me when they return?”
“It depends. Should you reduce the number of mushi within you immediately, you will be relatively untouched. But if they are within you in that same concentration when they return, you will go with them.”
“And how do we reduce their numbers?” says Itane.
“Their ability to communicate with kin weakens with distance. Grandmother should feel less of their influence when she moves away from the river. I would advise leaving as soon as you can, if not tomorrow then within the next few—”
“No.”
“Grandmother—”
“Ridiculous,” Grandmother snaps. “What use is me living longer uprooted from my home? I will be even more useless than I am now.”
“Your wisdom and memory will remain as assets—”
“—and then the river will then wash it all away when the next flood comes unpredicted.”
“Leaves fall, and the river redirects its course,” says the mushi-shi. “We are born with feet so we can walk, Grandmother. Homes can change, and people can adapt. The coming of the flood does not have to herald the end of your village.”
“And where will they go? Where will they find the fields as fallow as this, so close to a snow-top mountain and a carven valley? No. We have suffered so that they will not. This is their home, and will be so for as long as the water will satisfy our thirst and the earth will fulfill our hunger.”
Despite the roughly hewn dimensions of the bedchamber, Grandmother sits like an empress on the futon amidst the tattered tatami. She wears her humble tan kimono and simply-plaited hair as though it were brocaded with silk thread and layered with imperial authority conferred by Amaterasu Herself. “I have been able to read how it rises and ebbs to the benefit of my people. The crest of the river has been within me as constantly as my own heartbeat. No, Ginko-san, I will not give that up now, in the dusk of my life.
“Besides,” she says as she turns back to the window in a clear dismissal, “the spring floods are due very soon. Within the next few days, I would wager, and it’ll be the biggest one we’ll have ever known. How could you ask me to leave now, of all times?”
They all of them fall silent afterwards, for there is no satisfactory answer to that.
Shortly after dusk the next day, the klaxon of bells rip through the peaceful night.
The mushi-shi steps out of his room to a massive swell of villagers streaming down the streets. “What’s going on?” he calls, tension stringing his voice thin.
A clamouring shout in reply: “A flood! The flood is coming in minutes! Clear out, clear out now!”
Swearing, the mushi-shi ducks back in to shoulder his merchant’s chest and hurries next door. To his visible horror, two sets of shoes are still at the entryway. ‘Itane-san! Grandmother!”
“Ginko-san!” Itane pants as she throws the door of her little house wide open. “Please, I need your help with Grandmother!”
“Certainly. Hey, you, come help carry an old woman—”
“No, no— Masa-kun, thank you anyway, but go on ahead— Grandmother told me to ring the flood bells, but she’s refused everyone’s offer to carry her out. She won’t leave.”
“What?!”
They stumble together through the house, to where the old woman is sitting silently, unmoved from last night. Outside, the trees sway, leaves rustling, as the moon bathes the world in silver light. But the birds share no song, and the insects are conspicuous in their absence. Her stillness is a typhoon’s eye unto itself.
“Grandmother!”
“Grandmother, please,” begs Itane, “will you not come with us?”
When Grandmother looks up, the blue in her eyes is shining, as bright as fire. “The waters are coming,” she says, in a whisper, in a roar, “and it has shown me the way home.”
“The river is overflowing!”
“It is time for me to leave you.”
Itane grasps at her gnarled hands, desperation twisting her face into a rictus of anticipatory pain. “It doesn’t have to be now! Grandmother, please, the village needs you—”
“Life and death are parts of the same great cycle. Need is immaterial in the face of its momentum. Very soon, the village too will be gone. The forests. Humans. The wheel turns, and mine turns with the river.”
“That is the Shoukawaki within you speaking—”
“The mushi will return to the River of Light, yes? And that I will go with them? I do not fear, mushi-shi. My destination is a river, ever-flowing. I will be going home.”
Itane bows her graceful head, hair swinging over her shoulder to shroud her lovely face, and is silent for a long, priceless moment as the river’s cacophony thunders ever closer. “So be it, then,” she says, a bare tremble in her voice that evens out by the end of the sentence. “So be it. Farewell, Grandmother. My love and thoughts will ever be with you.”
“Be well, granddaughter. You have two minutes to reach the evacuation point I told you about. Go now, before the river comes.”
The torrent sweeps down the mountain valley in a great roar of sound. The rocks and trees shake and tumble and fall into its frothing churn as the riverbanks submerge beneath the rising waters. In its path, the walls and farms crack asunder; the houses splinter like matchsticks; the heaths and signal-fires extinguish like so much ashes.
But there are none to witness and comment upon the rampant destruction, for the village is empty as a ghost town – save for one, who turns upon her bed to watch the oncoming water with an expression of welcome, with eyes the colour of the heart of a glacier, and with lips parted as if to offer a reply to a beloved, dearly missed, who has crossed the threshold of her house and called out a greeting just now.
Far from the flooding river, in a little hut on high ground, two figures watch the river rage through the wood-frame window.
One finally stirs. “By the headsman’s tally, nothing else of value had been lost to the flood,” says Itane.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“We might lose this year’s harvest, too, depending on the fields, but I have a feeling we will be able to salvage something after the waters recede. The current isn’t so deep that we cannot recover some fertile earth after clearing the debris, and our food storage is intact, thanks to my Grandmother’s wisdom.”
“You’d known all along,” says the mushi-shi, “hadn’t you, Itane-san?”
“Know what?”
“That you would also be able to hear the river sing.”
Itane glances at him, a flicker of eyes now brightly streaked with blue. “Yes. I did live with Grandmother, after all, and we drank the same water in the same house, the two of us.”
“How long have you known?”
Itane turns back to the window, raising her face to the cold lunar light. “After my parents passed, Grandmother took me in and raised me, and would always tell me stories about the river and what it sounds like when it speaks to her. I didn’t understand, at first, what she had meant, but I started hearing the river’s stories earlier this year, and I had seen my eyes gain blue flecks the last vernal equinox. If I hadn’t seen the very same phenomenon in my Grandmother, I wouldn’t have even noticed them.” She sighs. “By your reaction, though, I take it that the blue is brighter now.”
“Yes.” The mushi-shi regards her closely, then turns to look towards the river. “What will you do now?”
“I will stay.”
“You will not leave also?”
“No. This river will feed us as surely as it will destroy us. We need to be able to read the river.”
“If you accept your role, you will meet the same fate as your grandmother.” The mushi-shi tilts his head. “She didn’t die, you know.”
“She is of the river now, yes. I know.”
“Not just of the river.” The cycle of a village, a forest, humanity... it is the cycle of life writ at large, intertwined with the trees and the mountains, across the fields and through time. It is not the scale in which a single human being is adapted to operate. “She became part of the Shoukawaki in her body. She—”
“She wasn’t human anymore, yes, I know!”
“And you would choose to give up your humanity like her?” Grandmother’s eyes were as grounded as the old pine’s roots when they’d first met. She was sound of mind then, though perhaps not completely comprehending of what the mushi’s inhumanity would lead her to choose when the time came. Young Itane, though...
But no, Itane’s gaze is of the same relentlessness as the deep river current when she meets the mushi-shi’s eye. “Grandmother saw much farther than is normal for humans at the end. But what is humanity, Ginko-san? You call it a higher form of existence, but in the end, we all die, don’t we? If mushi is the very essence of life, then by definition mushi must die, too.”
“Be that as it may, Itane-san, humans are not mushi, the same way that bacteria and plants and animals and fungi are not mushi.”
“But I do not have to be human to care for my people now, or to die. I will be with the wind and the earth and the water. I will be with Grandmother.”
The mushi-shi turns to rummage in his chest. He extracts a roll of paper and a match and flint. “The act of caring is a human one. One cannot care in such a fashion as mushi.”
Itane smiles, small and bittersweet. “We have lived together for a very long time, the mushi and Grandmother and I. The river has given my Grandmother and me life, and to Grandmother, her meaning in life too. I am certain I will find mine with them as company.”
“I misexplain. Mushi are not human, Itane-san. They are not conscious enough to have, or act upon, intentions. The meaning that we understand is not the meaning by which mushi live.”
“Yes, of course. But they are with me now, and I am a human being with intentions. As Grandmother had said, who are we without the mushi within us, when it is all we have known? I tell you, Ginko-san, I act upon my own will now: I will rebuild with my village, and I will die with them.”
The mushi-shi lights his roll of paper. The fragrant herbal smoke wafts between the two of them, a soft counterpoint to the icy smell of thundering ice-water. “The way of the itinerant is not an unpleasant path to walk, you know.”
“I am the blood of wanderers who have founded roots here, and that is precious to me. As you have said, Ginko-san, we are born to adapt. And so will I, from how I live to how I love.” Itane’s blue gaze is as steady as the river’s currents. “We all express love in different ways. I love my family and my people, and so I will stay.”
“If you stay, your people will face the same choice that you had to make with Grandmother.”
“But they have time to live their lives now, and we will have a future to make this decision. I can tell them about this, and they will know of what I want, and of what they want should they too start being able to listen to the river. And when I become inhuman... I will definitely need them to make sure that the people around me will be kept safe from what I become.”
“You will not be able to walk back from this very shortly. You’ve been drinking the water at a younger age than Grandmother...”
“I have already chosen, Ginko-san.”
The mushi-shi bows his head, hiding his green eyes behind the fall of his unnatural hair. “Very well,” he says, in an eerie mirror of her own resignation. “I would not be so crass to stay when your village’s resources are so stressed now. I do not know when we may meet again, but until then, may fortune ever smile upon you and your people.”
“Thank you, Ginko-san. May the water ever slake your thirst upon your travels.”
The mushi-shi bows again, and does not look back as he takes his leave. His back is unbent and his shoulders held steady, and though he had shared no part of his story with Itane, she recognizes that he is kin: that once upon a time, he too had faced an impossible choice, and chosen accordingly – what he would hold onto, and what he would let the river take from him.
Legend has it that the river that flows through these mountains gave the villagers a child to foretell its great overflows, for all things within its floodplain would be swept clean away, and all things without left untouched. They say that the child would yearn for their mother the river, and remains in the river’s path during the flood out of their sheer longing. So they named its flood the Return, in honour of the blue-eyed water child who hears the river’s call to come home.
-fin-
Rating: PG
Genre: General
Word Count: ~4000
Also Archived On: Archive of Our Own on December 17, 2019.
Summary: They say that the river that flows through these mountains rises and ebbs to the rhythm of life itself: without spectacle, without mercy, and without pause.
A.N.: Dear GriegPlants, happy Yuletide! I hope this captures the atmosphere of Mushishi that you so love!
Legend has it that the river that flows through these mountains runs clear and strong like no other. Once it took more than it gave; now, it is a herald of auspice, of harvest, of good fortune. Its waters is said to slake the thirst of all who drink it.
-----
The wind wends through the pines and rustles the grassy stalks on the riverbank, bringing with it the smell of freshwater as it breezes through the window. So loud are the susurrations that the sigh from the bed nearly went unheard. The next words, though, are as strong as the rock beneath the river itself.
“Water,” croaks the old woman in the bed. “Itane, water.”
“Yes, Grandmother. Here.”
Grandmother struggles upright, bloated hands clutching at the earthen cup and sipping from it with vigour. The young woman sits at her side in anxious attention. “Ah,” the old woman sighs at length, “no drink in the world can ever compare to fresh meltwater.”
“But you cannot drink only river-water, Grandmother. Your body needs food.”
“Nothing nourishes me better than the sound of the river’s flow.”
“Humans cannot subsist on sound.”
“Don’t dismiss anything until you’ve tried it, child.”
Itane frowns, fretful. “Grandmother,” she chides, “the healers could still make a difference if only you’d see them again.”
“Nonsense. Tatsuro could do more for you after I go than he could do for me now. Don’t waste his time. I’d sooner see Saya from the village over the mountain than him again, and don’t lie to me, I know she’s already left.”
Itane’s hands clench into her kimono. “What luck, then. I heard that a visiting healer has lodged in the inn for the night. It will be no effort at all for him to come by after dinner.”
Grandmother glares, then shakes her head. “I know that expression. Nothing dissuades you when you wear it. Very well, bring him if this will sooth you, granddaughter.”
Itane’s smile flashes as bright as the sun’s reflections off the ripples in the river. “Yes, Grandmother! Thank you!”
-----
The gravid moon is rising above the treeline when their foreign visitor arrives. Itane shows him in, and guides him through the sliding door of the bedroom before taking her leave.
“Good evening, Grandmother,” says the healer as he folds himself down to the ground. His height is as unremarkable as the bedroom itself, his attributes do much more to recommend him. The only feature that detracts from his unnatural pallor and shock of white hair is the verdant flare of his visible eye. “My name is Ginko. Pardon my intrusion into your abode.”
“You are welcome in my home, Ginko-san. I pray that you have enjoyed our people’s hospitality as we celebrated the vernal equinox.”
“Yes, the feast was most generous. But you were missed tonight, Grandmother. I hear that you have been unwell.”
“It’s not been too long.”
“It’s been twelve moons since she’s felt an appetite for food, but that is not the latest of a long, slow decline,” says Itane, slipping into the room to kneel between them and serving cups of water. “She’s been drinking more and more water ever since the ice started to melt two moons ago.”
“The waters in this area is renowned for its fulfilling taste, Ginko-san.”
“I see.” The healer glances at his water, and looks at them consideringly. Itane is slender and in the prime of her life; dark hair gleams against her smooth skin; not even the drab brown of her worn kimono can hide the beauty of her form. Yet Grandmother is the magnetic presence in the room, imposing not because of her oedematous form nor the sharp wisdom in her aged visage, but because of— “Your eyes, Grandmother,” he remarks, “has anyone ever told you how unique they are? How bright those blue streaks look, when the light hits at the right angle?”
“Only by too many,” Grandmother laughs behind her cup, wrinkles creasing into crevices, “it almost makes me feel like I’m young and nubile again!”
“Grandmother,” Itane says, exasperated, as the healer chokes and reddens to his neck, “have mercy upon your visitors.”
“If he deigns to serve as a guide on the path of healing, then he can take more than this. Yes, Ginko-san, so I have been told.”
“It doesn’t seem to have passed on through your family, though.”
“I grew into it. Vagabonding isn’t an easy lifestyle, naa. We didn’t eat well until we settled into this valley, oh, how long ago was it? Sixty years? Closer to seventy now, probably.”
The healer chews on his unlit roll of paper, tracing the rim of the cup absent-mindedly with the tip of a finger. “So you ate well from what you’d ploughed and reaped? Drank well?”
“Oh, yes! The fields became so fertile after only a little tending! First time any of us ate until we were full and still had enough left to trade. And it wasn’t just the earth that became fertile, if you follow,” Grandmother adds with a curl of her mouth that has the healer coughing again and Itane sighing. “Our village grew big so quickly after that merciful year. The earth and the water were kind to us.”
“What makes you think you grew into those eyes, Grandmother?”
“Well, for one, my eyes had always been brown when I was a girl. We had enough to buy mirrors the year we settled. So I was able to watch my eyes change colour.”
“They changed quickly?”
“Quickly is not the right word. I just remembered the first day I saw the blue in my eyes. It was during the first year post-settlement, during the vernal equinox, coincidentally... ahh, forgive this doddering brain. I woke one morning, picked up the mirror to prepare for the feast, and saw that my eyes had gained blue flecks. Small, they started at first, but as the years passed they grew brighter.”
“’Water-eyes’, they called you,” Itane says, then adds, “and they still do, to this here day.”
“Yes, yes. The flecks weren’t obvious at first. But they were, to me, and to my beloved. And they kept growing.”
“And I heard that they call you the River’s Daughter, too,” the healer comments thoughtfully. He is staring at the pine through the window. “Was it because the blue in your eyes is the exact shade of the river water?”
“Perhaps,” Grandmother says with a shrug, “but I wager it is more because I can hear the intentions of the river.”
That green eye sharpens as it swings back to focus on the old woman. “Hear the intentions of the river?”
“Yes. When it will overflow, and when it will fall. Its currents and eddies and such. The river cannot lie to me.” That little curl of her lip shows again, crafty as a crow. “They call me the Riverine Witch, too, but not as loudly as they’d dare with those other boring titles, ha.”
“When did your ability manifest?”
“Shortly after my eyes turned blue, I think. I couldn’t hear the river very clearly first, but I’m very, very good now.”
The healer is silent for a long moment. The rich gurgle of the river fills the space; the blue in Grandmother’s eyes sparkle in an echo, a resonance, an answer.
At length, he says, “have you ever heard of mushi?”
Itane shakes head. “No,” Grandmother harrumphs, “but I expect you’ll tell me about them now.”
“I’m not quite a healer; I’m a mushi-shi, a practitioner who helps people manage mushi. Mushi is the purest and most basic form of life. It is as distant from bacteria as bacteria is from us human beings. Ah... do you know what bacteria is?”
“No,” Grandmother harrumphs again. “Simplify, Ginko-san. If you know your stuff then you should be able to pare it down to digestible bits.”
“I shall show you. Here.” A swing of his merchant’s chest, and the mushi-shi extracts a scroll with alacrity and little fanfare. “All things have life, yes? Mushi is just the simplest form of life itself. One such mushi is called the Shoukawaki, the thirst-quencher.”
Itane leans close to peer at the delicate illustrations of unremarkable spheres, frowning. “The thirst-quencher.”
“Yes. It is an aquatic mushi. It feeds on smaller mushi, and attracts water as a way to hunt. Your river is home to a particularly productive colony of them, it seems.”
“So we drank these mushi, did we?”
“Yes. When the Shoukawaki are unsuccessful at hunting, they will call to each other and band together to gather more water and control its movement. A big enough gathering can very well influence river currents.”
Itane’s eyes widen. “So within Grandmother is...”
“Yes. There is a very large collection in your body, Grandmother. This is why you were able to predict the river’s flow more and more accurately over time; the mushi within you are calling to their fellows still in the river because they are not able to feed in your body. And that is also why your body retains water, and yet you still feel thirst – they are gathering more water in an attempt to enlarge their hunting grounds. It will be to no avail unless you drink river water, of course,” he adds, “because the river itself carries the mushi that the Shoukawaki eats. But it won’t be long before you’ll have to drink again to feed them.”
“But then why can’t everyone in the village hear the river? We all of us drank the same water.”
“Yes, but as you yourself have said: it takes time. And I expect that as the number of mushi in Grandmother grew, so too did the mushi gather the fastest in Grandmother’s water supply in response to their call.”
Itane falls silent. Grandmother continues to watch him without an expression. “The mushi within me are hungry still?” asks the old woman. “And will continue to be hungry no matter what I do? What will become of them?”
“If the mushi in your body continues to starve, they will eventually return to Kouki, the River of Light, the place where all life originates. Mushi glows more brightly the closer they are to returning to the River of Light, and the ones in your body grow close indeed,” the mushi-shi adds, grim.
“And what will happen to me when they return?”
“It depends. Should you reduce the number of mushi within you immediately, you will be relatively untouched. But if they are within you in that same concentration when they return, you will go with them.”
“And how do we reduce their numbers?” says Itane.
“Their ability to communicate with kin weakens with distance. Grandmother should feel less of their influence when she moves away from the river. I would advise leaving as soon as you can, if not tomorrow then within the next few—”
“No.”
“Grandmother—”
“Ridiculous,” Grandmother snaps. “What use is me living longer uprooted from my home? I will be even more useless than I am now.”
“Your wisdom and memory will remain as assets—”
“—and then the river will then wash it all away when the next flood comes unpredicted.”
“Leaves fall, and the river redirects its course,” says the mushi-shi. “We are born with feet so we can walk, Grandmother. Homes can change, and people can adapt. The coming of the flood does not have to herald the end of your village.”
“And where will they go? Where will they find the fields as fallow as this, so close to a snow-top mountain and a carven valley? No. We have suffered so that they will not. This is their home, and will be so for as long as the water will satisfy our thirst and the earth will fulfill our hunger.”
Despite the roughly hewn dimensions of the bedchamber, Grandmother sits like an empress on the futon amidst the tattered tatami. She wears her humble tan kimono and simply-plaited hair as though it were brocaded with silk thread and layered with imperial authority conferred by Amaterasu Herself. “I have been able to read how it rises and ebbs to the benefit of my people. The crest of the river has been within me as constantly as my own heartbeat. No, Ginko-san, I will not give that up now, in the dusk of my life.
“Besides,” she says as she turns back to the window in a clear dismissal, “the spring floods are due very soon. Within the next few days, I would wager, and it’ll be the biggest one we’ll have ever known. How could you ask me to leave now, of all times?”
They all of them fall silent afterwards, for there is no satisfactory answer to that.
-----
Shortly after dusk the next day, the klaxon of bells rip through the peaceful night.
The mushi-shi steps out of his room to a massive swell of villagers streaming down the streets. “What’s going on?” he calls, tension stringing his voice thin.
A clamouring shout in reply: “A flood! The flood is coming in minutes! Clear out, clear out now!”
Swearing, the mushi-shi ducks back in to shoulder his merchant’s chest and hurries next door. To his visible horror, two sets of shoes are still at the entryway. ‘Itane-san! Grandmother!”
“Ginko-san!” Itane pants as she throws the door of her little house wide open. “Please, I need your help with Grandmother!”
“Certainly. Hey, you, come help carry an old woman—”
“No, no— Masa-kun, thank you anyway, but go on ahead— Grandmother told me to ring the flood bells, but she’s refused everyone’s offer to carry her out. She won’t leave.”
“What?!”
They stumble together through the house, to where the old woman is sitting silently, unmoved from last night. Outside, the trees sway, leaves rustling, as the moon bathes the world in silver light. But the birds share no song, and the insects are conspicuous in their absence. Her stillness is a typhoon’s eye unto itself.
“Grandmother!”
“Grandmother, please,” begs Itane, “will you not come with us?”
When Grandmother looks up, the blue in her eyes is shining, as bright as fire. “The waters are coming,” she says, in a whisper, in a roar, “and it has shown me the way home.”
“The river is overflowing!”
“It is time for me to leave you.”
Itane grasps at her gnarled hands, desperation twisting her face into a rictus of anticipatory pain. “It doesn’t have to be now! Grandmother, please, the village needs you—”
“Life and death are parts of the same great cycle. Need is immaterial in the face of its momentum. Very soon, the village too will be gone. The forests. Humans. The wheel turns, and mine turns with the river.”
“That is the Shoukawaki within you speaking—”
“The mushi will return to the River of Light, yes? And that I will go with them? I do not fear, mushi-shi. My destination is a river, ever-flowing. I will be going home.”
Itane bows her graceful head, hair swinging over her shoulder to shroud her lovely face, and is silent for a long, priceless moment as the river’s cacophony thunders ever closer. “So be it, then,” she says, a bare tremble in her voice that evens out by the end of the sentence. “So be it. Farewell, Grandmother. My love and thoughts will ever be with you.”
“Be well, granddaughter. You have two minutes to reach the evacuation point I told you about. Go now, before the river comes.”
-----
The torrent sweeps down the mountain valley in a great roar of sound. The rocks and trees shake and tumble and fall into its frothing churn as the riverbanks submerge beneath the rising waters. In its path, the walls and farms crack asunder; the houses splinter like matchsticks; the heaths and signal-fires extinguish like so much ashes.
But there are none to witness and comment upon the rampant destruction, for the village is empty as a ghost town – save for one, who turns upon her bed to watch the oncoming water with an expression of welcome, with eyes the colour of the heart of a glacier, and with lips parted as if to offer a reply to a beloved, dearly missed, who has crossed the threshold of her house and called out a greeting just now.
-----
Far from the flooding river, in a little hut on high ground, two figures watch the river rage through the wood-frame window.
One finally stirs. “By the headsman’s tally, nothing else of value had been lost to the flood,” says Itane.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“We might lose this year’s harvest, too, depending on the fields, but I have a feeling we will be able to salvage something after the waters recede. The current isn’t so deep that we cannot recover some fertile earth after clearing the debris, and our food storage is intact, thanks to my Grandmother’s wisdom.”
“You’d known all along,” says the mushi-shi, “hadn’t you, Itane-san?”
“Know what?”
“That you would also be able to hear the river sing.”
Itane glances at him, a flicker of eyes now brightly streaked with blue. “Yes. I did live with Grandmother, after all, and we drank the same water in the same house, the two of us.”
“How long have you known?”
Itane turns back to the window, raising her face to the cold lunar light. “After my parents passed, Grandmother took me in and raised me, and would always tell me stories about the river and what it sounds like when it speaks to her. I didn’t understand, at first, what she had meant, but I started hearing the river’s stories earlier this year, and I had seen my eyes gain blue flecks the last vernal equinox. If I hadn’t seen the very same phenomenon in my Grandmother, I wouldn’t have even noticed them.” She sighs. “By your reaction, though, I take it that the blue is brighter now.”
“Yes.” The mushi-shi regards her closely, then turns to look towards the river. “What will you do now?”
“I will stay.”
“You will not leave also?”
“No. This river will feed us as surely as it will destroy us. We need to be able to read the river.”
“If you accept your role, you will meet the same fate as your grandmother.” The mushi-shi tilts his head. “She didn’t die, you know.”
“She is of the river now, yes. I know.”
“Not just of the river.” The cycle of a village, a forest, humanity... it is the cycle of life writ at large, intertwined with the trees and the mountains, across the fields and through time. It is not the scale in which a single human being is adapted to operate. “She became part of the Shoukawaki in her body. She—”
“She wasn’t human anymore, yes, I know!”
“And you would choose to give up your humanity like her?” Grandmother’s eyes were as grounded as the old pine’s roots when they’d first met. She was sound of mind then, though perhaps not completely comprehending of what the mushi’s inhumanity would lead her to choose when the time came. Young Itane, though...
But no, Itane’s gaze is of the same relentlessness as the deep river current when she meets the mushi-shi’s eye. “Grandmother saw much farther than is normal for humans at the end. But what is humanity, Ginko-san? You call it a higher form of existence, but in the end, we all die, don’t we? If mushi is the very essence of life, then by definition mushi must die, too.”
“Be that as it may, Itane-san, humans are not mushi, the same way that bacteria and plants and animals and fungi are not mushi.”
“But I do not have to be human to care for my people now, or to die. I will be with the wind and the earth and the water. I will be with Grandmother.”
The mushi-shi turns to rummage in his chest. He extracts a roll of paper and a match and flint. “The act of caring is a human one. One cannot care in such a fashion as mushi.”
Itane smiles, small and bittersweet. “We have lived together for a very long time, the mushi and Grandmother and I. The river has given my Grandmother and me life, and to Grandmother, her meaning in life too. I am certain I will find mine with them as company.”
“I misexplain. Mushi are not human, Itane-san. They are not conscious enough to have, or act upon, intentions. The meaning that we understand is not the meaning by which mushi live.”
“Yes, of course. But they are with me now, and I am a human being with intentions. As Grandmother had said, who are we without the mushi within us, when it is all we have known? I tell you, Ginko-san, I act upon my own will now: I will rebuild with my village, and I will die with them.”
The mushi-shi lights his roll of paper. The fragrant herbal smoke wafts between the two of them, a soft counterpoint to the icy smell of thundering ice-water. “The way of the itinerant is not an unpleasant path to walk, you know.”
“I am the blood of wanderers who have founded roots here, and that is precious to me. As you have said, Ginko-san, we are born to adapt. And so will I, from how I live to how I love.” Itane’s blue gaze is as steady as the river’s currents. “We all express love in different ways. I love my family and my people, and so I will stay.”
“If you stay, your people will face the same choice that you had to make with Grandmother.”
“But they have time to live their lives now, and we will have a future to make this decision. I can tell them about this, and they will know of what I want, and of what they want should they too start being able to listen to the river. And when I become inhuman... I will definitely need them to make sure that the people around me will be kept safe from what I become.”
“You will not be able to walk back from this very shortly. You’ve been drinking the water at a younger age than Grandmother...”
“I have already chosen, Ginko-san.”
The mushi-shi bows his head, hiding his green eyes behind the fall of his unnatural hair. “Very well,” he says, in an eerie mirror of her own resignation. “I would not be so crass to stay when your village’s resources are so stressed now. I do not know when we may meet again, but until then, may fortune ever smile upon you and your people.”
“Thank you, Ginko-san. May the water ever slake your thirst upon your travels.”
The mushi-shi bows again, and does not look back as he takes his leave. His back is unbent and his shoulders held steady, and though he had shared no part of his story with Itane, she recognizes that he is kin: that once upon a time, he too had faced an impossible choice, and chosen accordingly – what he would hold onto, and what he would let the river take from him.
-----
Legend has it that the river that flows through these mountains gave the villagers a child to foretell its great overflows, for all things within its floodplain would be swept clean away, and all things without left untouched. They say that the child would yearn for their mother the river, and remains in the river’s path during the flood out of their sheer longing. So they named its flood the Return, in honour of the blue-eyed water child who hears the river’s call to come home.
-fin-