by Kij Johnson
She stood on a road as clear as crystal, fading into fog at either end. Ten thousand voices chittered, growled, chanted in the back of her mind: turn; cedar; emulate; I hear it now; rain-wet sleeves. “Go away,” she said as she had before, but added: “Did you make the rice-ball creatures?”
“The farmer made them,” the kami said. “His wife and the little pregnant servant-girl, actually. You take cooked rice and a bit of vinegar and—”
“No, I mean did you make them live?”
The road shrugged, causing the tortoiseshell to stagger. “I am the road.”
She gave up. “Did they all die?”
“Why do you care?” the kami said, echoing the rice ball.
“Because—” She sat down. “If they didn’t all die, they might breed. Perhaps someday they might tell tales to one another. I wondered what a rice ball’s story might be like.” (As do I, though I cannot tell their stories myself. I must pick carefully what tales I tell in the time I have left.)
The road was warm, with a pulse like a heartbeat against her legs, she curled down until her face and side were against it. She found herself purring at the warmth. She had not felt warm all the way through since winter had started, and that had been at the border of Owari province, miles and days back.
“So why are you here?” she asked at last. “I told you to go away, the last time I saw you.”
The kami’s voice in her head sounded a bit like a snort. “You made an offering. And I came.”
“I did not!” She straightened. “And this is a temple, not a shrine. It wouldn’t be an offering to you, anyway. Even if it were one.” It was another thing she knew without knowing, the difference between the Buddhas’ temples and the shrines of the kami.
“The Buddhas were done with it,” the kami said, “so I took it back. And there was an offering. Water in a fallen leaf. And rice. Though it would have been nice for you to offer something else, as well.”
“The rice balls? They bit me, and then they turned back to rice and I threw them on the fire.”
“Quite. Was there anything else you wanted to give me?”
The tortoiseshell woman sighed. “I suppose you could have the cloth they came in. It’s in my wicker pack. As if you cannot tell.”
“An excellent gift”—as it was. The cloth was linen (if a little sticky and greasy), and flax is always appropriate for a kami.
There was silence for a moment—or an age; there is no telling about time when it is dark and there are no watchmen to sound the hours—and then the tortoiseshell woman spoke. “What are these voices?”
“The gods,” the kami said. “The eight million gods, speaking all at once.”
“Are they all roads?”
“That would be a lot of roads. No. They are peace. War. Rice, barley. A thousand forges, ten thousand gates. This lake, that pond, the other river. The houses of Fujiwara, Minamoto, a dozen others. A tree, all trees, a forest, all forests. I am not here to discuss theology.”
“How can there be so many of you, and I have never met a god before this?”
“How would you know if you met one? You cats live in a cat-shaped world. There do not appear to be any cat-shaped gods.”
“And now I am not even a cat,” she said bitterly.
“You are no more and no less than you ever were,” the kami said. “You lost nothing that was yours in the first place.”
“I am nothing and no one. Is that all I ever was?” She tipped her face toward the darkness, and felt hot tears on her cheeks. “I did not ask for this shape.”
“Do you hate it?”
“Yes! No. Sometimes. Parts are good. But,” she added, “I’m sure there are good things to being a mouse, and yet I have no desire to become one. I want to be a cat again. Change me back.”
“Who says I did this?” the kami asks. “Eight million gods and all the Buddhas and all the demons and all the dead; foxes and tanuki-badgers, snakes and spiders. Monkeys. Magicians. Any of these might have done this, or encouraged it to happen, or convinced you to do this to yourself.”
“I wouldn’t do this. I think you’re a nightmare,” she said. “I don’t think you’re really here at all—you or any of the others. At least rice balls are real. But what are you? No one can eat you.”
“I exist,” the kami said. “But never mind.”
“Wait—” she began, but it was gone. She had no more dreams that night.
When she awoke, she saw tiny pawprints in the dust on the floor and the cold ashes of the fire. Mice had crept past her as she slept and had eaten the rice balls.
A journey can be defined by miles or by days. Hers was defined by both, for each day meant more miles under her clogs. The Tkaid is a comparatively easy road, though in winter it can be blocked by drifts of snow taller than a man’s height, or muddy wallows tens of feet across and knee-deep in the center, which stay liquid in all but the coldest weather. As on even the best of roads, there are ruts that can break a cart’s axle, but constant usage keeps much of the path free of tangling weeds. Even the Hakone pass is not high. Roads and trails trail off to both sides. Some have signs painted or carved into wood stakes stabbed into the ground at the fork; others say nothing, keeping their mysteries to themselves.
Her wicker pack contained more things that surprised her. The knives were there. There was also a doeskin pouch filled with ancient coins: copper wad kaih, gold kaiki shh. They were not very useful as money, of course, but the countryfolk wanted them as good-luck amulets, and she found them handy to barter for rice and a roof, when she did not find her own. Inns and villages string along the Tkaid’s length like beads on a cord, though they grow farther apart (and more barbarous) the farther east one goes.
Winter threatened, and the traffic along the Tkaid thinned, so that entire days would pass when she saw few people except in the villages that followed the road for a while, like idle dogs seeing one off their ground. The remaining traffic varied so much that there was no predicting what she would meet: a wagon pulled by horses, bells jangling on their necks; ox-carts with two wheels, with four; flocks of oxen tied neck to neck, being led to new pastures. Messengers and their guards cantered along the Tkaid on sturdy, wet, irritable horses. Begging priests walked barefoot through icy mud, their fud scarves tight over their heads against rain.
Many people called greetings as they passed (for she did not walk fast, as she retained a cat’s lack of enthusiasm for long marches), and when she stopped at the side of the Tkaid, to eat or rest or inspect her blisters (a disadvantage: her feet were always cold, and the clogs rubbed her toes raw; feet were not as durable as pads had been), others rested near her, and sometimes offered a bit of fish or taro root. She did not trust them, but no one threw anything at her, and after a time, she accepted that people generally meant no harm to this new shape. From them she learned to use the immense leaves of bog rhubarb to shelter her head, and even how to make the cheap rice-straw foot-covers that all peasants can make for themselves and their horses and oxen, and which they throw away whenever they please.
There were robbers from time to time, for they are common as lice on the Tkaid. Some she avoided, others she fought or negotiated with or simply gave something to: different solutions for different situations.
Somehow, no one asked her for papers or tolls. The guards at the barriers and the posting stations bowed deeply and let her pass, as if it were an everyday thing to see a woman in silks walking alone in winter. The ferryfolk did not charge her for their services, though they found themselves carrying her at times that they did not intend to cross this river or that bay, with the water icy-cold and foaming white as rice powder. The bridge-men and ferryfolk and guards never seemed to realize how irregular their actions were.
She still recited her fudoki to herself. She, the cat of that fudoki, was dead, and the tale with her. But sometimes, when the nights were cold and wet, and she was alone (and lonely, though she would not have recognized the concept), she would recite the famili
ar chain of cats to herself and take comfort in them. In this she was becoming human, that meaningless words can ease loneliness. We have all received enough empty poems from lovers to have learned this.
The dreams of fire-cats ended, as well. She knew—and had known, even when she spoke with the ghost of the servant, two and more months ago—that her people were dead. For cats there was no afterlife except one’s place in the fudoki. Our Hell, filled with fire and demons and arcane punishments for breaking the precepts, did not frighten her, for she had no god or Buddha to send her there for disobedience or neglect. She’d left the cats of the Eight Islands far behind. Now she walked through country that had never seen a cat, and never heard a cat’s story.
Nor did it now, for she was no cat, though there were things about her that remained very cat-like. She did not feel squeamish at the taking of life, as any good Buddhist would; little as she understood of the kami, she understood still less of the Buddhas, which were as pointless to a cat’s sensibilities as poetry would be. I pray for her enlightenment, as I pray for the enlightenment of us all; but I must confess (honesty is a good thing so close to death) that I think she was perhaps better off for not believing in the Buddhas.
She enjoyed the hunt, though it was different than it had been when she was a cat, since her prey was bigger and had different habits. Her favorite prey was the little serow deer, as tall as her thighs, for their abrupt movements and bright black eyes reminded her a bit of mice. She stalked them when the craggier bits of the forest came close to the Tkaid. They were wary, but she knew in her bones how to wait, and she caught them almost as often as she failed.
She reveled in the feel of her knife sliding along bone and through meat, the pulse of hot blood across her hand. She loved the slowing of their heartbeats, the shallow breaths, the silence. She did not thank the kami for the meat as some hunters do, but she understood the importance of their deaths. She caught enough that she traded meat sometimes. She usually remembered to cook what she ate.
She had always watched ducks and wondered what they might taste like, but as a cat they had been too clever for her. Now she learned to wade into marshy waters and wait for them to come close enough to kill by throwing one of her knives. They tasted better than she even had hoped, warm and grainy: an advantage to being human. At other times, she caught grouse, deer, monkeys, turtles, a crane once.
When nights came, she found she missed her night vision (though her eyes were still sharper than yours or mine might have been), and the messages her whiskers and sensing hairs had given her; so she slept wherever she found herself at dusk. She was fortunate, for it was a surprisingly easy eleventh month. Frost came some nights, snow others, but it did not accumulate. She watched the moon grow and rise, earlier each night, until the full moon of the eleventh month was bright through dead reeds or pine needles, or shredded clouds, or the tears that sometimes flooded her eyes.
But there were also times when she forgot her sorrow and her state and enjoyed something, the taste of pheasant, the warmth of the sun, a rain so soft it was scarcely a hissing on her face. She was learning something about grief, that it begins with a great blow, but heals with a thousand tiny strokes.
To me her life is perfect. The cold is of no account; we are all cold in the winter. She owes nothing to anyone, and does not fret over the shape of her eyebrows or her robes’ color combinations. She catches what she eats with her own hands, and sleeps where she likes. Every day she sees new sights, real things—an ancient pine struck by lightning, a shining green field frosted with melting snow and grazed by ink-black oxen—and not merely yet another well-painted screen.
And yet I have invented her, and her perfect life. These sights are not mine, but are secondhand. I have heard them from lovers, or read them in tales; in truth, I have more firsthand experience with well-painted screens than with anything in her world.
I must not forget that her life is her own. Her miseries, her longings, are not mine. For her, even this perfect month was filled with tears. Life is like that.
She was fortunate, for she traveled for some time before a man tried to rape her, an apparent woman traveling alone. It was in Suruma province where she was attacked. As so many other nights, there were no stopping places close to hand, and so she ended her traveling for the day in the shelter of a great pine tree with branches that swept the ground around it, close to a slow stream. She started a fire and cooked her food in a thin-hammered black metal bowl she found sometimes (though not always) in her pack. It was nearly dark, only the dimmest glow to the west, when another traveler, a man alone, joined her.
He dismounted and led his horse into the firelight. “May I share your fire?” he asked. His horse was a small stocky bay, and his garb was such that any reader of monogatari tales could have instantly told that he was, in fact, a bandit, for he had leggings of tanuki-badger skin with the fur still on.
The tortoiseshell woman did not read stories, and so she only shrugged. “If you wish. You might as well get some use out of the fire, as well.”
He laughed. “An interesting perspective, my lady.” He unsaddled his horse, and crouched across the fire from her, a tall man with a missing tooth in the front of his smile. “If I put something in the pot, may I share your dinner?”
“If you wish,” she said again.
He handed her strips of salted deer meat and dried eggplant. “What do you have in there?”
“Rice, boar meat,” she said.
“Boar? Where’s a pretty woman like you getting boar meat?” he asked.
And so it began. He wanted to know her name (“Call me ‘Crow,’” he said, though she did not ask). She was obviously a lady, perhaps even a noblewoman (“Above my touch,” he said, and leered), so where were her attendants? Close? Within earshot? Her robes were very fine; where had she gotten them, from a husband, a lover, someone with power? Had she a brother, a father, waiting for her? He had a little barrel of plum wine, and he rolled it close to the fire, dragging it out every so often to drink from it. He offered her some, but she had discovered she had no taste for wine, and thus refused. She answered none of his questions, for they seemed pointless.
Every woman is born aware that a man can force his attentions on her. All our romantic monogatari tales are filled with circumstances where a nobleman slips behind the curtains of a woman who has repeatedly expressed a lack of interest, and has sex with her. Paralyzed with fear at what people might think, she says nothing, not a single squeak to awaken one of her women; and when it is done, she vows eternal love to her (to put it bluntly) assailant.
I was never like this. Courtiers (and others) crept behind my curtains from time to time, for, however inadequate my skills as a musician or poet, I was very beautiful when I was young—and I was a princess, and thus attractive to ambitious men. But I squeaked—emphatically—if I did not want them as lovers.
The tortoiseshell woman was not without defenses, though she did not recognize the exact nature of the threat. The man, Crow, stood and crossed to her side of the fire. She stood as he approached, and when he reached out for her, she slapped his hand away. “I do not choose to be touched,” she said as he nursed his stinging hand, anger darkening his eyes.
He grabbed at her again, and she attacked. She did not consciously pull her knife, but it was in her right hand, and she buried it to the hilt, straight down into his shoulder. It grated on bone and jammed there. Holding him with the knife and her left hand on his arm, she slammed her knee into his groin, lifting him with the force of the blow. She pulled him down in stages, knee to belly, then to breastbone, then to throat and face. He fell from her hands to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and neck. She kicked him in the ribs twice, though it was not as satisfying as it would have been had she still been a cat, for she had no hind claws to sink deep in his belly. When the blood stopped flowing, and his terrible wet breathing stopped, she pulled her knife free and wiped it clean on his clothes.
When she left
in the morning, she took his horse with her, but she did not ride or keep it, for (whatever its reasons) it had loved its master, and it feared and hated her. The blood on her robes (and there had been much) had vanished in the night, and there was nothing left of the bandit and his intentions.
—I do not know that it would have been like this. My experiences, as I said, were not violent; but there were nights when I shared robes with a man I had invited and then realized I had no interest in; and yet I could not send him away without the mating he craved. So I lay beneath him and made the correct noises, and imagined how I might stop these movements had I not been a princess and unwilling to expose myself to the questions that would arise. Perhaps this is a sort of assault, that I did not feel I could say no; though I had not thought so.
From time to time, other men tried to attack the tortoiseshell woman, but these attempts were never successful. She usually killed them silently, but there were times, when the black empty place that had once held her fudoki seemed overwhelming, that she laughed. When she had been a cat, killing meant food, survival. It came also to mean peace.
When she crossed into Sagami province, and stopped for a time at the border shrine, she found a lovely sorrel stallion tied outside its walls, a bridle and rosewood and inlaid-shell saddle wrapped in oiled hemp-cloth at the sorrel’s feet. Perhaps by the sheerest coincidence they were abandoned here by some noble who had staggered into the woods to die (for the horse and the tack were very fine; no one would willingly leave such a treasure). Perhaps they were created by the magic that placed flint and knives in her basket—which had also, somehow, changed, to waxed saddlebags of leather patterned with tiny dark blue flowers on an ivory background. Perhaps the horse and its gear were an apology or a lesson or something completely different, from the road-kami or another.
We try desperately to make sense of the world, to see the whys behind how things happen. We make up things that might help: sukuse, the law of cause and effect; perhaps even the gods. Perhaps even Buddha. But sometimes there is no why. The tortoiseshell woman didn’t wonder why the sorrel was there—or the whys of any of it: the earthquake, the fire, the journey, her unfamiliar body. In this she was purely a cat. She approached the horse cautiously (always wise, when meeting a strange horse), and ran her hands along its legs and belly and back. She understood horses, she found. She also understood this horse, its temperament and the strength in its bones and its great-lunged chest. She pressed her face against the sorrel’s long nose, hands on its cheeks. They stood there for a time, woman-who-was-cat and horse. And then she saddled and bridled it, mounted easily, and moved on.