Work Text:
( Translated from recently discovered journals and papers during a family genealogy search :)
Grandmother actually spoke about her childhood today. Not even Father had heard this story, so I considered myself incredibly lucky and immediately wrote everything down before I forgot. It was a simple tale but for Grandmother to remember it so vividly, it had to have been special.
When she was only six summers old, she and many of the other children who lived in the castle grounds and the village just outside its walls had sought out the leader of the clan, a man she called Milord, but she remembered hearing her father call him something like Lord Box. (Forgive me, I’ve always been terrible with names so it might be something else.) Milord had made them all promise that if they were good and helped their parents without complaint for one week straight, he would teach them all how to fish. And so they swore to it, for the honor of the Akuma Clan!
I quickly got the impression that he hadn’t anticipated that a group of thirty or so children of varying ages would manage this, but they all had, and so my grandmother and the others found him and proudly told him about all the things they did the previous week. She remembered how surprised he had seemed at first, and then how he beamed like the sun at all of them as he heard more and more. Realizing he had a promise to keep, he let some of his guards know where they were headed and off they went for a day of lessons. It wasn’t too far; Grandmother remembered the river being within a stone’s throw of her friend’s home. It was this friend’s parents whom he borrowed fishing equipment from on that day as he didn’t own any himself.
Grandmother was so energetic and happy telling me this next part. It’d been a while since I’d heard her laugh.
So there this lord of the clan was: taller than any man she’d ever seen and more handsome than the man she would marry years later, with a gaggle of children sat eagerly along the river's edge…and with no idea about how to fish. Why he had promised such a thing, I don’t know. Perhaps he figured he had time to learn and would then pass the lesson on, or perhaps he simply forgot. Grandmother had said he could be fairly forgetful, but this particular promise hadn’t slipped his mind, not when so many children in the clan had been looking forward to it. (I figure he must’ve had his focus elsewhere and had merely run out of time to learn.)
Anyway, there he was, with a net in hand, calf-deep into the river, and he bade them all to be quiet so they wouldn’t scare the fish away. And they all were, in an instant.
And there he stood staring at the water. And stood some more. Grandmother wondered if he had turned into a statue; he hadn’t moved for such a long time. Then again, a long time to a 6-year-old was a blink to anyone older than that.
Then suddenly, he threw the net with a loud battle cry, the water splashing most of them as he had used a really big net meant for ocean fishing, not for one in a small river. And when he pulled it up, the look of astonishment on his face that he had managed to catch nothing was one Grandmother would never forget. They couldn’t help laughing, thinking their lord was being silly and entertaining them!
His face turned red and he shouted at them to stop and to shut up, but they just laughed more and cheered for him! Some of the older children kindly offered to show him what they remembered from seeing their parents do it, but without success. Or perhaps the man was too proud to accept their advice.
After a couple more fruitless tries–one that saw him slip on a rock in the river and land squarely in the water–he seemed to understand that they weren’t mocking him, but were just happy to see this side of a man they adored unquestioningly and were more than ready to help him get back up and try again. He was their lord, after all. Dripping wet, he accepted defeat, walked out of the river, and sat down on a fallen log with his waterlogged too-big net. He admitted that it had been so long since he had last fished that he’d forgotten how, which the children had pieced together by then but they clapped and appreciated him for trying anyway.
Allegedly, he promised to learn so he could teach them too, but I don’t think that happened. Grandmother never could fish well and left that to Grandfather and later my father and his siblings.
For the rest of that morning, Milord sat on that log and instead told them stories that Grandmother definitely couldn’t remember now–or wasn’t ready yet to impart to me–but she promised they were fantastical yet true at the same time.
She said it was one of the happiest moments in her life.
It was then that she confessed that this lord wasn’t a man. He was a demon! He had two long and scary horns atop his head, and strange gold and pink eyes that she was both scared of but also mesmerized by at the same time because of their ethereal beauty. (She made sure to emphasize how beautiful he was, but I’m not sure why.) Yet despite being a demon, he had a kind face and pleasant smile, something very much not like the demons I had learned about growing up. He was always nice to them, so they weren’t too scared of him, or weren’t for too long after meeting him. He always had a story he could tell them if he had the time, or would promise to tell them the next day.
She made me promise not to tell anyone else in the family about that particular detail about the handsome lord of the Akuma Clan, so I will honor that wish of hers. I got the impression that she had more to tell about him, but there was something melancholic about her expression when she was trying to decide if she wanted to or not, so I told her not today. Today will just be a happy memory alone. She seemed grateful for that.
I wonder if she was going to tell me about how her father died. She had started to tell me a long time ago that it happened the day the castle fell, but then said it was too difficult to speak of and apologized profusely for changing her mind. She knew how much I wanted to learn about that part of our family history. One day...maybe she can tell me about it.
How much of the tale she did tell me was true, I won’t ever fully know, but I do remember hearing rumors in my own travels back to that region about a demon who had made himself a lord of a small clan and how the people there were easily swayed into staying by his voice alone. Yet when I tried to marry that knowledge with what my grandmother told me, I found myself conflicted. Can such a creature have existed? Do any of the other surviving children of a clan that no longer exists remember that day? I can only hope my own descendants are able to find the answers to questions I won’t have answered in my lifetime.
In truth, I hope part of it was true. I hope that there was such a man who thought he knew how to fish. I hope such a kind-hearted and loving lord actually existed who’d humor the children of the clan during a time when life was uncertain and dangerous in the lands beyond his own.
I also hope that if this man was a demon, that if he was somehow still alive as other rumors have said, that he eventually learned how to fish without getting himself drenched to the bone.