by Kij Johnson
I have always been told that the difference between intention and reality is karma, the unknown factor that makes one silkworm change to a moth and its neighbor rot in its cocoon. I conformed, because life demanded it, because it was my karma to do so. But I had such dreams, full of blood and anger. Some nights I had a knife in my hand, and I stabbed the darkness full of eyes, though the blade met nothing.
Another memory: my golden-eyed lover, Dmei, and I stand outside. It is very dark, for it would be improper for him to visit me during the day; but we have placed a single torch in my courtyard, and inspect a target at its opposite end. Learning of my interest in small things, last night he told me of rabbits, the shapes of their small hearts. He used to hunt them with bows and needle-slim arrows. We talked of hunting, and he has brought me a mulberry-wood child’s bow and a handful of arrows scarcely larger than my hand.
This is outrageous, of course—Shigeko (much younger, as were we all, forty years ago) is horrified, though it is she who has ensured our (more-or-less) privacy, here in the cinnamon-tree courtyard—but I revel in it. “Hold it thus,” he tells me, “the arrow resting on your finger.” Shigeko watches silently from the veranda, her expression strange to me, but I do not care. I am with Dmei and I am focused on his breath in my ear as he places my hands. I drop the dove-fletched arrow a thousand times, and snap my fingers a hundred; at last I send it off on a single wobbly flight. It lands twenty feet before me, with all the power of a dropped fan. We try again, and finally I manage to get an arrow to stick for a moment into a support post (though that was not what I aimed at).
I laugh, and he laughs with me, and I think he believes I am merely pleased at this scrap of skill I have learned. It is not this. It is that, for the first time (and, as it turns out, the last), I have felt a killing action run through my fingers. I have been dangerous to someone besides myself.
I wonder if we all long to kill. I did not think it at the time, but perhaps Shigeko recognized this and hungered for it—her expression might have been envy. Dmei had killed: animals, mostly, but bandits, as well. I envied him.
The party arrived at the Osa Hitachi estate at the three-quarters’ moon of the twelfth month. After the attack, they had pushed on as fast as they could, with no halts for sightseeing or monthly courses or directional tabus. “I am sorry if the kami are offended,” said Nakara, “but I won’t be able to apologize if we are dead.” Their arrival was well after the middle of the night, and Hime’s first impression of the place was a chaos of buildings, walls, and trees, touched red-gold by torches, pale lilac by the nearly full moon.
The big country estates are as different from the capital as a mountain might be. Each is a town, really: many buildings serving myriad purposes, gathered within bowshot of one another. There is a stockade of tree trunks gathered from land cleared for rice and soya and hemp, but (in this case, at least) it has been a long time since there has been a serious threat, and many of the logs are tipped or fallen, or even taken away to serve other, more immediately useful purposes. Goats and chickens wander through the breaks in the wall, scrounging for food under the shallow snow. The children of the estate (and there are a lot, for there are more than a hundred regular residents here, to say nothing of the visitors and followers and mendicants) climb on them, playing Bandits.
The Osa Hitachi estate is all of this. To the east and the north, forest-covered mountains march all the way to the ocean; on cold nights, you hear wolves plotting to steal calves. A river runs beside the estate, fast and unruly, full of clear water so cold that my teeth ache even thinking of it, like biting into ice brought from the storehouses in the seventh month. Below the main buildings, something everyone calls the spider-leg stream crosses to join the river.
The Hitachi road threads through a series of steep-sided hills not so far away. Everywhere are trees, and because this is winter, they are bare mostly. The air is very cold.
Nakara was glad to be home. She slept for a night and a day, and then left lengths of cloth and paper and silk flowers at the altars of the kami and the Buddha. By the second evening, she had returned to managing the estate for her oldest brother, the vice-governor of Hitachi province.
The cat Kagaya-hime was more ambivalent. For months she had traveled alone, without clan or ground. The fudoki was gone, but the road had offered a substitute, and she had accepted it. Joining Nakara’s party had not changed things so much. Kagaya-hime still slept on the ground, still killed her own food, still drifted north and east. And Nakara was far from her natural place, as well. A cat-woman on horseback and a provincial woman on pilgrimage are both unrooted from their worlds. But now they had come to the Osa Hitachi estate. Nakara belonged here, as did her attendants and guards and all the other scores of people. It was only Kagaya-hime who did not belong.
She did many things that were unconventional at best. Sometimes she wore women’s robes, when she was with Nakara and her women. More often, she wore a man’s hunting garb, knife at her waist and bow over her shoulder. The people of the estate did not seem to mind, or even notice her strangeness. People tend not to notice things that don’t fit into their expectations, and it might have been this; or something else, of course.
Kagaya-hime’s few expectations of people—that they tended to kick stray cats and were careless with food scraps—did not apply to her time as a woman at the Osa Hitachi estate, and so she noticed many things. Nakara had a lover, for instance, a bear-hunter who came down from the mountains one moonless night, and stayed until just before dawn. Kagaya-hime saw them say their farewells, as she returned from hunting with a serow deer across her shoulders. He passed her on the path without a look; only later did she realize how strange this was, that he appeared not to observe her.
She noticed the unpredictability most. People stayed up some nights, slept others; they ate, whether they were hungry or not. They changed clothes when there was no reason for it, and played games that taught them no useful skills, such as pouncing would be. People may think that it is cats that are the unpredictable ones, but this is only because we do not understand their thoughts. Within a cat’s mind the sequences—sleep to hunt to groom to doze—all make sense.
The patterns of movement and interaction on the estate were bewilderingly complex, especially in comparison with her only other experience of a shared ground, her fudoki with its ranked handful of cousins and aunts and fellow-wives, its careful separation of range from range. Even the fudoki’s overlaps were sharply differentiated; this cat used the wisteria courtyard in daylight only, that cat only at dusk. Perhaps such structure is a comfort to cats. Their lives are filled with a thousand sorts of danger; it may feel good to know precisely where one stands. Men and women also do this, but the dangers that threaten us are not quite so easy to identify as a hungry dog or distemper, and our attempts to give the world a pattern confuse even us.
The constant talking didn’t bother her, for cats use their voices to say, “Here I am; where are you?”—and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation, the words mere ornaments over the underlying purpose. The fact that humans seem never to be alone when they can help it bothered her more, and she found the constant companionship, as steady and irksome as dogs’, annoying. She spent many hours in the stable with Biter, until one of the grooms saw in her a fellow spirit, and came more and more often to share stories of horses he had loved, brown, bay, and blue—the comparative merits of each—mares’ tricks hiding their foals—the cleverness of certain stallions—a red stallion who had kicked off any saddle, however well placed—the comparative advantages of pearwood or cedar for saddle frames—the best workmanship available only from the capital, of course, preferably from the Yana family workshops. After this, she spent time well out of range of the people, killing quail or whatever fell within reach of her arrows and knives.
She rediscovered another thing, as well, the charm of hunting for mice. When she was a cat, this had been as automatic to her as breathing, but a mouse
was scarcely a mouthful to a woman, and she had fallen out of the habit. Once she began to see them again, she saw that mice, like smoke, were everywhere. There were nights when she walked down to the grain storehouses and crouched there, killing mouse after mouse with quick stabs of her knife.
One night, Nakara, walking down to an outhouse, saw Kagaya-hime turning something over in her hands. It was a dead mouse, or rather the scrap of fur and flesh that was left when a finger-wide blade pins a mouse to the frozen ground.
“Vermin!” she exclaimed, and then, crouching beside Kagaya-hime, said, “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Trying to see if mice have ghosts.” Kagaya-hime gestured at a heap of mice by her foot. “So far none of them do,” she added.
“Why do you care?” Nakara asked. Kagaya-hime said nothing, so she added: “Why are you killing mice at all? That’s dogs’ work.”
“Your dogs are not very effective, then. It is good practice.” Kagaya-hime scooped up her mice and stood. The broken mice barely filled her hand.
“Good practice for what?” Nakara asked, but Kagaya-hime was gone already, walking toward the stables where Biter stayed. When they met later, in Nakara’s rooms, she did not ask her guest what she did with the mice.
I am cold, and so I write of the cold. It is winter in Hitachi province, and Nakara’s world, like mine, is centered on braziers.
Nakara had many braziers. In the hinterlands, the proprieties are not adhered to quite so stringently as they would be here at court. At the Osa Hitachi estate, everyone who was acceptably clean—male, female, warrior, and ox-boy (if clean enough)—stayed near Nakara. The curtains designed to protect her from the eyes of men and lesser souls instead embraced them all, cuddling the braziers’ warmth close. “What is the good of having all these charcoal makers on one’s property,” she said once to Kagaya-hime, though the cat-woman had made no comment, “if you get no good from it? It’s like raising silkworms and wearing hemp.”
In any case, Nakara’s responsibilities as practical manager of the estate precluded her hiding behind curtains; but even when it might have been appropriate—entertaining functionaries or messengers from the capital—she did not often hide herself. When she did, it usually had less to do with propriety, and more to do with concealing her sometimes obvious signs of boredom.
Kagaya-hime stayed nights with Nakara and her women. Like any cat, she craved warmth, and the braziers and fires compensated for the occasionally irritating unending patter of conversation. And there was much conversation.
There was even a fudoki of sorts for the people, an unconscious mix of shared jokes and experiences with histories of the residents: The Man with the Two-Foot Penis, Great-Grandfather Falls Through the Broken Screen, The Three Clever Sisters. Some were funny, but others were less so: The Woman Who Gave Birth to a Demon, The Leg That Rotted Off. The stories—or even a slanting reference to one, for everyone seemed to know them all—wove these people together as much as the rooms they shared and their confusing relationships.
Kagaya-hime had no stories, or thought she had none, and their tales filled her with longing. The events of her life grew as great as a fudoki a hundred cats long, but she could not see that this mattered. Not yet.
I am come to the end of this notebook, and find I must begin another.
7. The Michinoka-Paper Notebook
I love the feel of this paper, soft and strong at the same time. I can see the patterns of the mulberry bark in it. Strange that this paper comes all the way from distant Mutsu province, just as the cat-warrior Kagaya-hime approaches its borders.
Strange that I write this at all. I am dying, I remind myself sharply. I have no intention of showing this to anyone. Why do I fill page after page with a monogatari tale that no one (but I) will ever see?
It is late, and my women are asleep, even my former attendant from the provinces Shikujo, who does not sleep well these nights; even my dear Shigeko, who tries to keep me company but cannot, not tonight and not through this final battle. There is a brazier lit because I am cold all the time, even though it is the eighth month and swelteringly hot. I refuse to wear padded winter robes, for it is not the season yet (I am still that vain, at least), but I admit to looking forward to the tenth month when I can switch from these thin robes without disgrace—if I yet live.
The light from charcoal is unimpressive, a dim bloodred, but the three-quarters moon is bright enough that reflected light creeps in from the peony courtyard. This afternoon my women and I opened one of the trunks from my storehouse, and I found a mirror there, a pretty handheld disk of silver and bronze, from when first I came to court. Now, in the solitude of my sleeping women, I inspect myself in the mirror. My hair and face are only hinted at by faint silver curves, here a cheek, there my brow. There are no wrinkles or white hairs in such darkness. But behind my eyes is dull red fire, which might be Hell or might be a hearth in the Pure Land. I cannot tell, though this will become clear to me soon enough.
Perhaps this is why I write—so that things will be clear to me. Now that I am old and dying, I think I write because I always meant to tell this story, and yet I never did, unsure of the ending. But I find I cannot rest, cannot cut this heavy hair and leave this world for the monastery, until I do this thing. I don’t think it will be seen by anyone; but I will have done it and it will no longer tie me to this world.
There was a blustery day, at the end of the twelfth month. Nakara was writing accounts on a scroll in the stilted half-language of official reports; her women quilted silk batting into a sleeping robe for a newly born son on the estate. Kagaya-hime slept, curled up so close to one of the braziers that the tips of her shoulder-length hair sizzled when she shifted position. From outside came shouts, whinnies, hooves, heavy thudding sounds, as several men tried to break a recalcitrant stallion for riding.
“Mistress!” a man shouted from outside. Clogs clattered onto the stepping stone to the veranda; bare feet raced along a gallery. “Mistress,” he said again, panting as he entered the room. Kagaya-hime blinked her eyes open, looked up at him from cat’s eye height. He towered over her as he bowed to Nakara. “Riders, my lady. From the west. There are banners.”
“Whose?” Nakara laid her brush down and blew on her fingers.
“The wind blows them the wrong way. But one might be ours.”
“My brother?” Nakara stood. Her women exploded upward like ducks rising at a sudden noise. Quacking with excitement, they trailed the man out to the veranda. Kagaya-hime paused to pull on another robe before following them.
The scene in the courtyard was so chaotic that she could not separate the new arrivals from the residents. There were men everywhere, leading horses away and pulling packs from behind saddles. Some of the women, barefaced and (occasionally) barefooted, stood or danced in the frozen slush around certain of the men; others stayed on the veranda, in the gloom under the eaves. Nakara was one of the women behaving like an unruly child in the slush, her arms thrown around a newcomer.
After watching for a few moments, Kagaya-hime sorted through the sights and understood several things. The new arrivals were clearly the expected party from the capital, but they were far too few, no more than twenty; and they seemed disheartened, for all their happiness at being there. Since the youngest of the Osa Hitachi brothers had left with ten attendants of his own, that meant that the request for assistance had failed. Kagaya-hime had listened to Nakara talk often enough to understand that there should have been fifty or a hundred, or even more. There were a few strangers, but they had no part in the chaos of greetings, laughter, tears. Instead they attended to their horses and gear, all carefully not looking at the women, who in any case shouldn’t have been scampering like puppies out in the open. And of these, there was one, an old man, heavyset, with eyes sharp and angry as hawks’, astride a tall black horse, its own nose rather grizzled. He was their leader; he must be.
Kagaya-hime knew that the man Nakara embraced must be her youngest brother: the unc
omplicated love on her face made this clear. And she also knew that he was not human.
Nakara had told her story to Kagaya-hime, but cats are literal-minded creatures, and I do not know whether Kagaya-hime understood it all. The family in Hida province had been a fox family, a wife and her human husband. Through magic I cannot explain, Nakara had been the child’s nurse, but things had gone wrong, and she had fled here with him. There had been angry Buddhas and saddened Kannons, a jealous former wife—it is a long story, one I imagined when I was a girl myself, and pining for adventures that had nothing to do with Fujiwaras and Minamotos and boy emperors.
I made up many stories—I think every girl must; they are our best opportunity to become something unexpected. In some I was the heroine: a bandit-queen in the east, the empress Jing conquering Silla. In others I was the victim, the princess who had been stolen away by a man of low rank in that tale from Ise. There were others, little tales I made up about people I saw and was fascinated by. I also made up stories about cats—fudoki, I suppose—for the little gray-furred cat Shisutko and subsequent pets; and there were the stories about mice. Only now, as I prepare to die by emptying my trunks and, apparently, my mind, do I realize these tales are all connected.
Kagaya-hime knew foxes. There had been foxes on the neighboring residence’s grounds, dirty little scavengers who occasionally strayed into her fudoki. They all smelled strong, even the smallest ones, who should have been scentless as kittens were, for protection’s sake; and they were easy to avoid. She had seen them on the Tkaid, for she and they shared dawn and dusk as hunting times, and preferred the same prey, mice and small things. After she became a woman, she only saw them at a distance, a russet blur in twilight vanishing through a gap in weeds.