Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  “No,” Hime said.

  “That’s fine. We don’t need to; it’s really just a courtesy to Kashima. Let’s register at the post, and then there will be hot food when we’re finished.” Her party straggled off, some back to the inn; Nakara, Hime, and two of her men to the guards’ post, a large farmhouse at one end of the village.

  “Do you know what this place is?” Nakara asked.

  “Hitachi province,” Hime said. “Yes?”

  “We are in Hitachi, yes, and that means we are home. Or nearly so. But it’s more than that, too. You have followed the Tkaid for a thousand miles. Or something. And now we are at the end of the road.”

  “The Tkaid ends?” Hime said, taken aback.

  “Of course it does,” Nakara said. “Every road has a start and an end somewhere. It ended at the ferry dock.”

  “But there is the road.” Hime pointed past the posting station. The road was clearly present, a band of dirt and frozen slush that curved off to the north.

  “That’s Hitachi road. It’s different.”

  Hime looked at her with startled eyes for a moment, and then bolted back the way they’d come. Nakara called after her, but did not follow.

  Hime ran to the ferry dock, clogs clattering on the wood. “Road?” she said. “Are you still here?”

  The road said nothing, though the people by the dock looked at her strangely. She knelt on the cold wood and closed her eyes, tried to remember the path of her dreams: the crystal beneath her feet; the golden fog from which it came, into which it vanished (though she could not have told which way was which). “Road?” she said again. “Please don’t be gone.” Silence. “At least change me back. I don’t want to stay like this.” Water lapped the dock.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “I didn’t like you much, and I don’t understand you at all, but I am sorry you’re gone.”

  One tear is lonely: she cried again, for the second time in half a day. When she was done, she scrubbed her face pink with clean snow and returned to Nakara.

  They were in Hitachi province, but the Osa Hitachi estate is at its northernmost edge, and that is some eighty or more miles from Enoura village. Nakara stopped less for pleasure (“I have had surfeit of pretty things,” she told Hime when asked; “now nothing will be prettier than my own rooms”), but a storm forced them to halt for several days. And then one of the women began her monthly courses and they had to stop; and one of the oxen hurt itself on a rocky incline and had to be rested until its foot healed. Hime did what cats generally do when things are cold and not very pleasant; she slept nearly all the time, even sometimes in her saddle.

  It was the full moon of the twelfth month. The day before the cart had fallen into a half-buried ditch some ten feet deep that crossed the pathway, tumbling the women out onto the rocks and ice at its bottom. Junshi hurt her ankle, and the others were shaken. It took most of the day to lift the ox-cart back to the road. They had seen no farmhouse or other place to stay, so they had bundled everyone possible into the cart. No one slept well. Some slept not at all. At first Hime enjoyed the warmth of so many bodies close together, but after a time she grew restless and left the cart, to climb onto Biter’s back and sleep there, under a robe that covered them both.

  Everyone was tired the next day, and this is why no one, not even Hime, saw the ambush. Bandits are as much a problem in the east as monks are here—they gather in groups and steal whatever they please (though bandits are more likely to kill than monks; that is one advantage to the capital, at least). Like everyone else in the east, the robbers do not stop working merely because the weather is bad. They need food and clothing and animals, and these can be gathered in any weather. They have been known to steal even the loincloths from parties they attack, leaving their victims to die, barefoot and naked in the snow.

  I am told that there is a place where the Hitachi road is some fifteen feet wide, a rutted dirt track that a thousand years of travelers have worn down until the land on either side is waist-high, held back in places by stone retaining walls. Two well-treed hills rise on either side. This is good, because the walls and the trees cut the wind for a time; it is bad, because a robber gang can easily ambush careless travelers here.

  The Osa Hitachi party was ten people: Nakara and three women in the ox-cart; the ox-boy leading his animals; four guards on horseback, two on point and two behind; and Hime, riding beside the cart. The robber gang—who can say how many there were? There might have been a thousand. Certainly, there were enough that their cries shook the trees, and their arrows struck two of the guards immediately, unhorsing them.

  The narrow road broke into chaos. The horses of the fallen men panicked and bolted. The guards had all carried their strung bows across their horses’ withers; the two guards still on horseback tried to control their plunging mounts with their knees as they pulled arrows from the basket-quivers on their backs. But there were no targets: the bandits were protected by the heavy trees; and the horses were too unsettled for easy shooting. There was no winning this fight, so the two guards on horseback lowered their bows to the ground and showed their empty hands.

  Cats are used to watching a threat and ignoring it if it passes by; in this they are very like women—as I was, at any rate. I sat on my verandas and listened to distant shouts or carefully phrased reports: riots in the streets when droughts threatened to starve the common folk (and us, as well: we were not immune to the gods’ vagaries); the monks in open warfare in the capital; the men and women who died of famine or plague or cold or despair. I listened; but I looked at my beautiful screens, and when I could no longer bear it, I thought of anything else, water-clocks’ mechanicals or the change of caterpillars to moths—because even the human griefs were too much to bear, and there was so much more: dogs and horses that died of beatings, foxes frozen in a snowstorm, a nest of infant mice crushed by the sudden shifting of a trunk. What else could I have done? To understand the sorrows of the world requires the strength of a bodhisattva; to accept them requires a Buddha. I am not so enlightened.

  Hime did not immediately react to the threat. The men killed were not her, nor her offspring, nor of her fudoki. She was mobile and (thus far) unattacked. She had her knife and knew that she was quicker than most people. Her horse was both fast and sturdy. A direct attack on her person would not succeed. She was wary, but there was no need to engage.

  One of the women in the cart was married to one of the party’s guards (it was not Junshi, but I cannot say precisely what her name was). She screamed her husband’s name, and ripped the cart’s door open. The other women caught at her and dragged her back inside, muffled her sobs. Nakara saw Hime, knife in hand, waiting to see what came next. “Get in here,” she whispered.

  Biter sidled under Hime. She calmed him, eyeing the hills, the stone retaining wall, the ox-boy crouched under his charges’ feet; the two uninjured guards, empty-handed and dismounting now. “Why?” she said.

  “They’ll take everything, but there’s no reason to let them—” Nakara slid the door open a little more to show that she held a long knife.

  “They will hurt you?” Hime asked, watching. The robbers were emerging from cover, their bows still drawn: five to the right side of the road, more to the left—that she could see; there might have been another obstructed by the cart’s slab side, and possibly others remained behind trees. Three of the men on the right stepped forward, the leader (he must have been the leader: he was the tallest of them, with a beard that trailed onto his chest and a hat made of wolf fur: very strange and alien) and two guards. Still perhaps sixty feet away.

  “They will rape us if we are not careful,” Nakara said, “though I will fight. Get in here, and I’ll fight for us all.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hime, and flipped her little knife in her hand to throw it at the closest bandit. He was a full thirty feet away, standing on the wall, but she hit him solidly in the hollow of the throat. He fell screaming, tearing at the knife. In the moment of shock that
paralyzed the bandits, she caught up the bow across her saddle (though it had not been there even an hour ago). It fit in her hand, light and easy. She pulled a crow-fletched arrow from the basket-quiver at her back (and that was new, as well), nocked it over her head and pulled the bowstring and arrow apart as she brought the bow down, aimed, and shot, in a single movement, quick as a cat’s pounce. The second arrow’s lozenge-shaped head buried itself in a second bandit’s belly before the first man hit the ground.

  A cat is a highly experienced killer, and this seemed to transfer to her woman-shape. She hit three men before anyone understood what was happening. By the time she sank an arrow into the bandit-leader’s shoulder, the two Osa Hitachi guards had retrieved their bows and began firing. The robbers retreated, carrying some of their companions. Two remained behind, fallen where they had been struck.

  Hime had dismounted at some point to jump onto the wall. She shot a last arrow after them. It hissed as it flew. When she knew they were gone, Hime went to the first man she had injured, to retrieve the knife in his throat. He still gasped a bit, and the red bubbles on his throat grew and vibrated and burst, tiny fireworks. She pulled the knife free. Blood steamed in the sharp air, and drilled twin holes into the dirty snow, where it dripped from his neck.

  Hime made a noise, half snarl and half hiss, and she did not realize that it was laughter. The blood and the bandits’ flight filled the black place inside her with a killing joy, sweet and hot as desire, the only true joy she had felt since the fire, so long ago. She touched the cooling blood, already gelling on his skin, and laid the wet finger against her lips. His blood tasted like copper and heartbeats and squirrel and dog and deer; and of something else that might have been his soul.

  His ghost looked up at her for a moment, surprised. “But you are not a woman,” it said, as if continuing a conversation they had begun before he had died. “I thought—”

  “Hime! Hurry—” Nakara’s voice summoned her, and she turned her back to the ghost.

  Nakara and the surviving guards were bundling the casualties (one dead; one injured and unconscious, bleeding from the nose and mouth) into the carriage with the women. Hime helped, and when the ox-boy whipped the oxen into a lumbering gallop, she stepped up onto Biter’s stirrup as he passed, and caught the reins of the last horse, whose guard was dead. The ghost followed for a short while, crying tears of pus and blood, but it forgot its name soon enough and left her.

  I have not been hungry of late, but for some reason I have just awakened feeling starved. I sent one of the women off to bring me food; but it is clearly very late. She’ll have to find someone to wake a cook, which may take time, and so I write, content to watch words shape themselves under my brush.

  I spent my life believing life is a series of nows, trying to discipline myself into accepting this, and enjoying (or suffering) the moments as they pass, instead of retreating into either memory or hope.

  But I think that this is wrong. There is no now, or if there is, it is drawn with too fine a brush to see. There is what was, and there is what might (or what ought to) be. The line between them, which is now, is too small to see, and even as you reach it, it is past. Now is the edge of a page in a notebook.

  Is this true? My old nurse would laugh sometimes. I would read or write a love-poem in a tale, and it would be about how “I” would love “you” for all the thousand years of the pine, how I want no one else. This is nonsense, of course—lies, in fact. I said this once to my nurse, and she laughed. “Lovers all lie, girl,” she said. It is their nature—they lie to themselves, to their lovers, to the world. This is because what they claim to have is not real, what they seek is not real. But they must pretend it is, and since they already dissemble, it is simple enough to dissemble more.

  When we were lovers, I believed that Dmei did not lie to me. But in the end I realized he had lied twice: once, that he would never leave (the commonest lie of all among lovers), and once, that his loyalty to his emperor was steadfast. And then he left for Mutsu province, and six months later the great families of Mutsu rose up. He would have been among them, I am sure of it.

  Wait. Tonight I have no reason not to see clearly, the hurt feelings over his abandonment so many decades old that they might as well be dead. Did he say he would never leave? Or did I want to hear it so much that I failed to listen to what was said? Perhaps it is not our lovers who lie, but our memories and hopes.

  Still, he was in Mutsu province, and Mutsu rose against my half-brother. How can I have loved a traitor?

  My broth is here, and just as well. I get no pleasure from my brush tonight.

  The Osa Hitachi party paused at a covered travelers’ well a mile or more beyond the fight in the sunken road. It was safer terrain. To their west was a gentle plain (soybeans in the summertime; now, in the twelfth month, snow). To the west were leafless trees and hills and then mountains. Any cover was far enough from the well that they would receive ample warning if anyone attacked. A short way ahead, a large farmhouse leaked smoke from its eaves. The tortoiseshell woman smelled tea and broth.

  One guard was dead. The man whose wife had screamed for him was alive, the frightening blood pouring from his face a sign merely of his broken nose, damaged when the shock from a bandit’s arrow shoved him from his horse. Hime’s mouth watered from the hot coppery smell of his blood in her nostrils. The ox-boy trotted off to the farmhouse to acquire a cart to carry the dead man, since no one was willing to ride farther with it. Hime walked into the fields a bit, where the smell was not so sweet and strong.

  Nakara came with her, shivering and pale from mingled horror and exhilaration, the aftermath of killing. “Brr,” she said, and then, after a moment of silence, “Thank you.”

  Hime shrugged.

  “There is blood on your mouth,” Nakara said. “Like a court woman’s lip paint.”

  Hime wiped and looked at the smear on her finger. There was more blood on her hand, darker than it had been when it poured from the bandit. She licked it clean. “Better?”

  Nakara gave an unsteady laugh. “I suppose. You—shoot very well.”

  Hime’s bow was in one hand still, and she looked at it, a great curve of tawny wood and black horn bound with ivory sinew. It was what warriors call a three-man bow (which is to say that it requires the strength of three men to string it, though in her case it was always strung when she needed it, like the tension of a cat’s muscles sheathing and unsheathing its claws) and it was taller than she by a foot. She reached behind her back, felt the complex little basket that served as a quiver, a cluster of arrow-shafts springing like bamboo from a pot. She picked one at random, a humming-bulb head on a slim shaft nearly as long as her arm, fletched black and ivory with crow and goose feathers.

  “Sharpness,” Hime said to herself.

  “Why did you not attack sooner?” Nakara asked.

  “They were not threatening me.” Hime lifted bow in right hand and arrow in left, high over her head. She caught the bowstring between her fingers, and brought her hands down and apart to the ready position, the arrow aligning itself to rest on her bow hand. All this was a single fluid gesture, formal as a girl in the Gosechi dances. She turned and released. The arrow howled as it flew, and slashed into the ground near the well. The two guards snapped around at the humming, saw Hime and Nakara—and no foes—and relaxed.

  “But you could have escaped, I imagine,” Nakara said. “You’re certainly quick enough.”

  “I did not want you to be injured.”

  “Was that it?” Nakara said. “You were laughing. You killed them and you laughed. I come from a bow-and-arrow family, but none of us would laugh, I don’t think.” She shivered. “It is so cold. I wish we were home.”

  Hime said, “This”—her gesture took in the bow, the arrows at her back, the knife in her sash—“is the only thing the gods left me. If they exist.” Her mouth twisted with the word gods.

  Nakara touched her hand, fingers cold as ghosts. “The gods mean no harm
,” Nakara said. “We just—get caught up in their things, sometimes. They have their own problems, even Buddhas.”

  This battle was why Nakara started calling the tortoiseshell woman Kagaya-hime: Princess Glory.

  The night after the robber gang’s attack, Kagaya-hime had dreams. She slept in a monastery’s guest house, tucked warm and alone under sleeping robes, for Nakara and her women tended the injured guard. In her dream, Kagaya-hime stood as a woman in gold-gray mist that somehow managed to seem both bright and dim. When she knelt to see if she stood on the crystal-bright road, there was nothing but mist under her feet, no matter how closely she looked. The voices of a million kami flooded through her (many sons, loyalty, stag’s tail), but none were her road, though she called for it and searched the mist.

  She did not find the road; but she met a mottled darkness that stared silently at her with a thousand green eyes, and said nothing, no matter how she spoke to it. With dreams’-reason, she thought it was a cat, a male whose territory she had strayed into.

  She averted her face. “I do not mean to stay—” and she meant here, in mist, without roads or sense. Though her own were closed, she saw the green eyes stare unblinking and heard voices say I/we/you, intentions, without significance/crucial. She could not tell whether this was the green eyes speaking, or the endless nattering of the million kami.

  When I was young, and still fighting the new framework that shaped me, frog-watching girl to imperial princess, I met that darkness often in my dreams. I had no right to be angry that the world sought to form me to a shape I did not choose—none of us, peasant or emperor, have much choice, whatever plans we make. We do not choose to have one leg shorter than the other, eyes that do not focus well, weak lungs; but at least we have no illusion of control over these things. Yet even the things we pretend we control—our house’s prosperity, our skills with a brush, a marriage’s success—are beyond us.