At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  “How can she?” he said. “It is years you have had Yoshifuji beside you. Out there he’s only been missing for a few days.”

  I dropped my ball and it rolled across the floor. “How can that be?”

  Brother’s sigh was impatient. “When were you out last, Sister?”

  “I don’t know. Before the boy was born, anyway.”

  “Why not?” He sounded shocked. “Why aren’t you going out? Are you sick? I know you were nursing but the kit’s weaned.”

  “I like to be here when my husband is around.”

  “We used to play, Sister, just you and me. Remember? We would run in the woods, and at night we’d hunt mice in the formal garden and play Pounce in the Shadows. What happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” I said, but I lied when I said this. So much had happened to me, how could I start?

  “Then come outside with me. Now.” Brother jumped up and knocked the curtain over. I looked up at him, too shocked to hide my face with my sleeve. He caught my hand and pulled me to my feet. My son looked up at us. I gestured to his nurse, who picked him up and took him from the room.

  “Very well,” I said. “We’ll be foxes together.”

  Crawling out of my woman’s form this time was excruciating, as though it were my own skin I pulled off. My brother’s muzzle pressed against mine, I hunched over until the sense of loss eased. When I felt a little better, I lifted my head and left the space under the storehouse.

  It was early evening. The moon was nearly full and the stars were washed out with its brightness in the east and the dying colors in the west. We traveled across the formal garden, moving in the trees’ shadows. When I leapt across the stream beside the half-moon bridge, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the moving water, and it startled me enough that I stumbled when I landed and rolled into a ball.

  Brother stopped and nosed at me. “What’s wrong?” he whispered. I shook my head, the gesture coming uneasily to my fox’s body. I did not tell him that I had seen a woman in my reflection.

  There were already lights in the house: torches set along the verandas, and braziers and lamps in the rooms despite the night’s summer heat. Many of the sliding walls were open. I watched moths fly in and die in the house’s many flames.

  The north suite of rooms, Shikibu’s rooms, were dimly lit. I crept up almost to the veranda and looked in. I couldn’t see her, but I saw her sleeve half exposed beneath her curtain-of-state. A priest knelt before the curtain chanting a sutra. The night’s breeze pushed aside one of the curtains; before one of her women could pull it back in place, I saw Shikibu, listless and sad in the gloom.

  The house’s main rooms were full of light. My husband’s other son stood with two older men in traveling clothes, men who looked like brothers to Shikibu. They had brought a tree-trunk segment as tall as a man, and they clustered around it, with a Buddhist priest and many servants crowded in the garden watching. Everyone was dressed strangely; in mourning, I realized. It surprised me—no one was dead—until I realized it must be my lord they were mourning. I found that funny but something hurt quite incredibly in my chest at the thought.

  The boy chipped at the tree trunk with a chisel and mallet.

  “What can they be doing?” my brother whispered. “How eccentric humans are.”

  “I don’t like this, whatever it is,” I said.

  “Come up closer. Let’s see at least what it is.” My brother crawled forward on his belly.

  “Brother!” I hissed but he didn’t turn around, so I followed him.

  The boy in the hall passed the chisel and mallet to one of Shikibu’s brothers.

  “Finished, Tadasada?” the man said.

  I squinted at the wood: close like this, I could see that it had been carved with an image of some sort, but I couldn’t tell what the carving was. The priest stepped forward with two assistants who threw incense on the braziers in the room. Everyone else lay down and began to pray softly. The priest fell forward and began chanting in a loud voice.

  He was praying to the Eleven-Headed Kannon—when I squinted, the carving made sense this time: there was the cluster of heads, and the arms and the crossed legs. My fur rose on my shoulders until my skin prickled with the strain. “I hate this,” I hissed at my brother; he just nuzzled me and went back to listening.

  There was no reason to worry. I remembered the priest who had called on Buddha and walked past us anyway. How could this one fare better? His voice went on and on, asking to know where Yoshifuji’s body lay. Smoke from the incense snaked from the braziers and out onto the still air of the garden. One tendril seemed to move toward us as though questing. The tiniest breeze lifted its tip, so like a snake’s head that my courage broke and I bolted, my heart so hot and heavy with panic that I could hardly see the garden I ran through.

  I ran under the storehouse and rushed back into my woman’s shape and stood there, shivering. “Husband?” I called. “Husband? Where are you?”

  I ran through the rooms and hallways, careless of being seen by the men of the household, calling my husband’s name. I was on one of the verandas when Yoshifuji emerged quickly from a brightly lit room, dropping the blinds behind him.

  “Wife?” he said. His face was wrinkled with a frown. “I have emissaries. We could hear you all over—”

  “Husband!” I panted. “I am so sorry—I know this is most unseemly—it’s just that—I was so afraid… .”

  His face softened and he moved forward quickly to hold me. “What happened? The child? It is all right now, whatever it is. I am here.”

  I swallowed, tried to control my breathing. “No, not our son, he’s fine.” What could I tell him? “A snake of smoke, and it was looking for you. I—must have had a bad dream. I woke up and I was all alone and I felt so afraid.”

  “Alone? Where were your women?”

  “They were there. I just meant—lonely for you.” I threw myself against him, my arms tight around his neck and sobbed against his cheek. He held me and made soothing noises. After a while, he loosened my hands and passed me to one of my women, who stood waiting in the shadows.

  “Better?”

  I sniffed.

  He took my hands. “I’ll take care of this little bit of business and then I’ll come and sit with you, all night if you like.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Hurry.”

  I waited in my rooms. I sat in the near-dark, and tossed my ball and cried with the horror of that snake of smoke, and longing for Yoshifuji. My son was sleeping but my nurse carried him in to me, and I watched him for a time, curled up in a nest of quilts. “See, my husband must love me,” I said to myself. “Here is the evidence. No Buddha can take this away. No Buddha can threaten his love for me.” Then I would think of the snake of smoke and I would jump up and pace and stare out at our pretty fox-gardens again. And Yoshifuji did not come.

  But the Eleven-Headed Kannon came. He came as an old man with only one head and holding a stick; but I knew it was he: he was not made of fox magic in a place where everything and everyone was. He smelled of the priest’s incense. Who else could he be? He walked across the gardens stepping through the carefully placed trees, our rocks, and the ornamental lake; and he left a path in his wake, like a man raising mud as he fords a stream. The magic tore and shredded where he passed, leaving bare dirt and the shadow of the storehouse overhead. The magic eddied and sealed the break a few steps behind him but he carried the gash of reality with him like a Court train.

  He walked straight through all our creatings, toward the house.

  “No,” I shrieked and ran out onto the veranda. “Leave him here!”

  The man walked forward. I ran to the room where my husband was, burst in to where he sat with an emissary from the capital and his secretary. “Husband! Run!”

  “Wife?—” he said as I felt the veranda beside me shiver and dissolve. I fell to my knees. Yoshifuji jumped up, his sword sheath in his hands. I clawed at the Kannon’s robe as he passed me, locked my han
ds in his sword belt until he was pulling me forward with him. He did not even slow.

  “What are you—” my husband bellowed as the man prodded him with the stick in his hand. Yoshifuji jumped backward and pulled his sword free.

  I screamed. The sword shivered into a handful of dirty straw. My husband looked at it in disgust and threw it to the ground. The man prodded him again and Yoshifuji moved backward, through the house.

  “Leave him, please leave him, they mean nothing to him, I love him—” I begged and prayed as the man dragged me through our house, out into the gardens. My hands bled from the hard edge of the belt. If nothing else around us was real, I knew this was, this hot blood in my palms. Yoshifuji kept turning back, trying to help me. The man just jabbed at him again, and forced him stumbling on.

  The belt leather was slick with blood. My fingers slipped and I fell behind the man onto the dirt below the storehouse beside one of the support posts. The Kannon gave my husband one more jab, and he crawled out from our home and stood upright in his kitchen garden. I crawled after him but I knew it was too late already. I lay by the storehouse in my robes, blood on my hands, my long hair trailing on the ground.

  It was still dusk there, the thirteenth evening after Yoshifuji had come to me, his thirteenth year in my fox-world. Nearly everyone was in the garden huddled in little clumps and talking among themselves. Yoshifuji was two things in my eyes, like something seen and distorted through water: handsome in his dress robes, a little dusty now, still carrying an empty sword sheath; and covered with filth, casual robes stained and torn, holding a little worm-eaten stick: a man who had lived in the dirt with foxes.

  The boy was the first to see my husband looking around him.

  “Father!” he shouted and ran to Yoshifuji. “Is this you?”

  “Son?” my husband said hesitantly. “Tadasada?” I saw memory coming back to him, but the fox magic was strong enough to shape his understanding of things. “How have you not grown more while I was gone?”

  The boy threw his arms around the man. “Father, what has happened to you? You look so old!”

  Yoshifuji pushed the boy away. “It doesn’t matter. I am only here to send your mother back to her family. She is here, I presume? I was so desperate after your mother left to visit her relatives, and she was gone so long. But I met someone, a wonderful woman, and married her. We have had a lovely little boy. He’s growing much handsomer than you, I must admit. He’s my heir, you know. You’re no longer my first son, Tadasada: I love his mother so.”

  The boy looked up at a darkened room of the house. I saw a form there, robes shifting softly, and I realized it was Shikibu watching but too aware of the proprieties to come down and greet her husband in front of so many people. The boy straightened. “Where is this son of yours?”

  “Over there,” my husband said, pointing at the storehouse.

  They saw me then. “A fox!” one man shouted, and they all took up the cry: “A fox! A fox!” Men ran toward me and the storehouse, carrying sticks and torches.

  “Husband!” I screamed. “Stop them!”

  He hesitated, obviously confused. “Wife?” he asked unsteadily.

  “A fox!” the people yelled.

  “Please stay with me!” I held out my arms to him. He stepped toward me. The boy threw himself into Yoshifuji’s arms, overbalancing him.

  I looked up at the house again in the instant before the men caught up to me, and for the first time I saw her face clearly, where she stood on the veranda. I saw tears on her face. I knew that she, alone of everyone here save my lord, saw me for a woman.

  They chased us, the men. They stuck their torches down so they could see under the storehouse floor and poked around with their sticks, and my family fled in all directions: even my son, who was only half-grown. They followed me until I threw off even the seeming of my woman’s body in blind panic. The pain drove me out of consciousness, but my fox’s body ran anyway on its bloody pads.

  I came back to my woman’s shape much later, when I was sick from the fear that had choked me. My house was empty save for the servants, who brought me clean robes and food.

  I have waited since then. My family has not returned. My grandfather was old, and I don’t know if he could have lived through the heart-bursting panic of the chase. My mother, my brother, and my son are all gone. I hope they are together but I fear they are scattered.

  Yoshifuji wept for many days. I heard him when I crawled through the darkness to his door, calling my name and the name of our son. The household summoned priests and a yin-yang diviner to purge my husband of his “enchantment,” but they say its hold has been strong. Recently, I heard him say that he is over his sickness, but I don’t know what to believe. It didn’t seem like a sickness to me and he does not sound over it.

  Without my family, it’s hard to maintain the house and the servants. The garden is already gone, faded like mist. The house dissolves room by room. I don’t leave my wing much, not wanting to see how far it has come, this melting of my home. My servants are fewer now and they are even more silent than they were before. I have thought of leaving, stripping off the humanness one more time and running in the woods again. I know I can’t. I am no longer simply a fox.

  But I am not simply a woman, either. I know it is a woman’s role to wait, always lost in the shadows, patient for her lord. I know the old tales would have me wait until my death after such a thing as this. But I have waited so long already, alone, tossing my ball, puzzling over Yoshifuji’s diary. I am so tired of this.

  I have a plan, if a simple one. It was summer, the thirteen days he spent with me. Now it is winter. The first snow has fallen today, a cold cloud as deep as my wooden clogs. I know him so well. He will come out into the garden tonight to write about the snow and the moon. And I will roll my white ball across his path. If he still misses me, he will see it for what it is and find me, and we will be happy: no false lives this time, no waiting in the darkness, no magic but that which will keep us either human or fox together, according to our choice. And if he truly is content there with Shikibu and the boy, it will only seem another piece of the snow.

  I think he will see the ball.

  I have just thought of something:

  Fox magic:

  Priests, you can cure him of everything

  but love.

  I think this is a poem.

  Names for Water

  Hala is running for class when her cell phone rings. She slows to take it from her pocket, glances at the screen: unknown caller. It rings again. She does not pick up calls when she doesn’t know who it is, but this time she hits talk, not sure what’s different except that she is late for a class she dreads, and this call delays the moment when she must sit down and be overwhelmed.

  “Hello,” she says.

  No one speaks. There is only the white noise that is always in the background of cell phone calls. It could be the result of a flaw in the tiny cheap speaker but is probably microwaves, though she likes to imagine it is the whisper of air molecules across all the thousands of miles between two people talking.

  The hiss in her ear: she walks across the commons of the Engineering building, a high-ceilinged room crowded with students shaking water from their jackets and umbrellas as they run to class. Some look as overwhelmed as she feels. It is nearly finals and they are probably not sleeping any more than she is.

  Beyond the glass wall it is raining. Across the wet quad, cars pass on Loughlin Street. Water sprays from their wheels.

  Her schoolwork is not going well. It is her third year toward an engineering degree, but just now that seems an unreachable goal. The science is simple enough, but the mathematics has been hard and she is losing herself in the tricky mazes of Complex Variables. She thinks of dropping the class and switching her major to something simpler, but if she doesn’t become an engineer what will she do instead?

  “This is Hala,” she says, her voice sharper. “Who is this?” It is the last thing she needs ri
ght now: a forgotten phone in a backpack, crushed against a text book and accidentally speed-dialing her; or worse, someone’s idea of a prank. She listens for breathing but hears only the constant hiss. No, it is not quite steady, or perhaps she has never before listened carefully. It changes, grows louder and softer like traffic passing, as though someone has dropped a phone onto the sidewalk of a busy street.

  She wonders about the street, if it is a street—where in the city it is, what cars and buses and bicycles travel it. Or it might be in another city, even somewhere distant and fabulous. Mumbai. Tokyo. Wellington. Santiago. The names are like charms that summon unknown places, unfamiliar smells, the tastes of new foods.

  Class time. Students pool in the doorways and pour through. She should join them, find a seat, turn on her laptop, but she is reluctant to let go of this strange moment for something so prosaic. She puts down her bag and holds the phone closer.

  The sound in her ear ebbs and flows. No, it is not a street. The cell phone is a shell held to her ear, and she knows with the logic of dreams or exhaustion that it is water she hears: surf rolling against a beach, an ocean perhaps. No one talks or breathes into the phone because it is the water itself that speaks to her.

  She says aloud, “The Pacific Ocean.” It is the ocean closest to her, the one she knows best. It pounds against the coast an hour from the university. On weekends back when school was not so hard, she walked through the thick-leaved plants that grew on its cliffs. The waves threw themselves against the rocks and burst into spray that made the air taste of salt and ozone. Looking west at dusk, the Pacific seemed endless but it was not: six thousand miles to the nearest land, ninety million miles to the sun where it dropped below the horizon, and beyond that, to the first star, a vast—but measurable—distance.

  Hala likes the sudden idea that if she calls the water by its right name, it will reply in more than this hiss. “The Atlantic Ocean,” she says. She imagines waters deep with fish, floored with eyeless crabs and abandoned telecommunication cables. “The Arctic. The Indian Ocean.” Blue ice; tunnies in shoals.