Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  This man—Nakara called him Little Brother—did not look like a fox (or half-fox), except that his eyes were slanted, and flecked with gold. He moved quickly, but no more so than many men. Though he was some distance away, Kagaya-hime could smell him, for the wind blew from him to her. His smell was sweet and thick and slightly wild, too delicate, too human, to be a fox’s musk. But animal knows animal: Kagaya-hime recognized him as readily as if he walked on white-tipped paws.

  Foxes and cats do not like one another. It is not the guarded warfare of the cat and the dog, the fights and truces that so resemble court families vying for primacy with their emperor. No: foxes and cats do not like one another because they are so similar, though one is wild and the other (occasionally) tame. They are both clever and self-absorbed. They eat many of the same foods, and since mice are sometimes scarce (though this is hard to believe living at court as I do, where the mice seem to be like the gods, numberless), one cannot always afford to share. Adult foxes and cats will not fight one another because, though foxes are slightly larger, cats have more sharpnesses; but each will kill and eat the young of the other, and then complain that the kit (or kitten) is gamy and unpleasant tasting.

  Kagaya-hime watched Nakara and her brother embrace. Cats do not like foxes; but she was the first to be jealous of one.

  (Am I a fool? I think of Shigeko watching my lover and me play with bow and arrow. I am sure it was envy, but now I must ask: Of what? And of whom?)

  There was a day when I first saw the guardsman Mononobe no Dmei.

  I had been at court for several years, serving my half-brother the emperor. My proximity and relationship to him covered all my imperfections with gauze, and emphasized the few skills I had that were appropriate to court. I was praised for my wit, mostly because I had read so much more than my peers. Observations culled from reading something other than the monogatari tales and the poetry collections, to which the other women were addicted, were hailed as witty or wise.

  In six years, a woman can have many lovers. Whatever my skills as a musician or poet, I was justly considered an extraordinary beauty—though much of this was owing to the never-ending labors of my woman Shigeko, who ensured that I was never seen in unattractive robe combinations or with tangled hair.

  I was also a princess and thus valuable as a lover or wife for ambitious men—even if I could not bear children (and this seems quite likely, when one considers how many lovers I had, and never a baby). My foster father retired and then died, and was replaced in everything—job, house, authority—by his nephew: my uncle. My uncle selected husbands for me, men who could help his branch of the Fujiwara family to maintain or even expand its power, usually men I had seen only once or twice at court, if so much. I was willing to marry whoever was chosen for me, though it meant leaving my brother and the court; but circumstance (or karma, circumstance’s older sister) intervened again and again. The first husband died during an epidemic of smallpox when I was sixteen and he fifteen, months before our wedding. The second disgraced himself before the union could be formalized, and was sent to Satsuma province (which might as well be Korea, so far away it is), where he was killed by a disease or pirates or something. The third was nearly twenty years younger than I, six to my twenty-three, and my uncle was waiting a year or two before marrying us. I had met the boy and found him very ordinary, prone to runny noses and setting things on fire, but the alliance would be good for the Fujiwaras, and thus for the empire. As I waited for my husband to grow up, I stayed at court in desultory attendance on my brother and took lovers, always from the fourth rank or above, always amiable, talented men who cried at sunsets and fallen maple leaves.

  It was autumn of the last year of the Eih era. There had been drought all summer, and the dust made the sunsets unusually beautiful. The moon was the red-orange of amagaki persimmons when it rose each night, surprisingly large. I was not attending my brother, for he was at Ise visiting one of his other sisters, who served as priestess there (and presumably guarding his brushes; the people of Ise are perfectly capable of robbing their own parents). Several of his attendants, including Shigeko and I, rested on a veranda. The others were there to write poems, I remember; I was watching for bats, and hoping I might hear their wings beat, and the tiny nearly inaudible cries that sometimes scratch at one’s ears.

  Guardsmen at court are often importunate; their duties give them permission to wander about at all hours. Several happened by and, seeing us there, stayed to flirt. I was hidden behind one of the screens we providentially had placed around ourselves—but the screen was of wide-woven gauze, and I saw them all clearly, four young men in identical hunting garb, with identical hair and caps and expressions. As they talked, I corrected myself. One of the men was a few years older than the others, though younger than I, perhaps twenty. The folds in his soft black eboshi cap were slightly different than those of his peers, but I could not decide whether this was a daring aesthetic statement or mere sloppiness on his part. And when he turned to respond to something Shigeko said, I saw that his eyes were gold, even in the moon’s cool light.

  Young men and women together in the moonlight breed poetry as oak trees breed mushrooms. I don’t remember anyone’s poems—I was only half attending and they would be largely interchangeable anyway, all about the coming dawn and longing hearts, typical fare—until one of the guardsmen said, “But there are four of you, and we have heard only three poems.”

  Shigeko and I exchanged glances. “My mistress does not share her poems with every wandering rake,” she said, “and she is not the only one who holds silent. There are five of you, and only four poems”—for the fifth guardsman, the golden-eyed man, had recited no poem.

  “Why should I?” the golden-eyed man, Mononobe no Dmei, said. “You have all said everything so much more eloquently than I can.” I hid a smile. So he had not been listening, either.

  “You must forgive him, my ladies,” said one of the guardsmen. “He’s from the hinterlands, practically a savage.” Dmei snorted, and then we all laughed, for his amusement was infectious.

  The moon eventually slid behind the clouds that rose during the rat’s hour, and the women and guardsmen wandered off; but I fell to talking with Dmei, and before dawn, he was behind my curtains.

  I knew Dmei was no sort of lover for the daughter and granddaughter of emperors. He was of lower fifth rank, and unlikely to rise higher. Worse, he was from the provinces, thought playing the game kemari was a waste of time, and wrote pedestrian poetry when he could be brought to write it at all. Certain of my friends at court saw the appeal (“Those shoulders!” one sighed. “Those eyes! Such a pity he’s practically a peasant”), but the general opinion was that Mononobe no Dmei was ultimately meaningless to court, just another in the endless stream of semi-civilized hicks the provinces seem to churn out and deliver for guard duty each year.

  Everyone who knew was horrified—and of course everyone did know; a secret at court is like a hawk in a cage, it screams to be let out. But there are certain advantages to high rank, and one is that very few people have the effrontery—or courage, depending on one’s perspective—to criticize their superiors directly. Shigeko shrugged at this affair of mine, only begging me to be more circumspect. From others there were sly comments, but I had no responsibility to respond to them in any way, and chose not to. I saw no reason to: I was blissfully, foolishly, in love.

  He visited when his and my responsibilities permitted, a handful of nights each month; and we exchanged many letters, though we almost never wrote poetry to one another—a great comfort to me, as I was sick of producing tanka on demand, like a peasant making straw sandals to trade by the roadside. We made the usual promises that our love would last forever, even as we both spoke freely about our differing futures, his in the east, mine here in the capital. I cannot say exactly when I started disregarding the future, and believing the promises.

  And then Dmei left court and returned to his family. It was a year later that Minamoto no Yoshi
ee’s war began in Mutsu province, and Dmei fought against my half-brother’s troops: a traitor.

  We were in the middle of the Former Nine Years’ War by the time I was old enough to be aware of anything beyond my nurse and my home. This was yet another war in Mutsu province, a million miles away, where they were apparently as common as the snowstorms there. “War” meant nothing to me, no more than did “sex”: catalogued in my mind (and one of the notebooks I kept even then, childish calligraphy in large uneven lines down the pages; I found it this evening when we opened a chest I have not looked into for twenty years) as something important to adults but not as interesting as, say, spiders’ eggs.

  As far as I could tell, wars started when people rushed about killing one another with arrows someplace a long way from the capital. Some of the boys I knew had little bamboo bows and arrows made of mugwort twigs. I did not see how anyone could die in a war, for the arrows were so fragile that they tended to snap if they hit anything—which did not happen often.

  I knew war must be like any child’s game. You could play without interference if the adults were busy elsewhere and you were not too noisy about it. But if for some reason the adults noticed you, they would stop you. In war, this meant the government sent troops and generals into the hinterlands, and expected a certain number of severed heads sent back to show progress. (At the age of six, severed heads fascinated me.)

  Even as an adult, I have not been able to discern why this conflict is considered worthy of the council’s attention and the empire’s resources, and that one is treated like the bickering of children in another room: only worth sending someone to see what is the matter if the tears and shouts become serious. The few people I discussed such things with (my lover Dmei; my half-brother Shirakawa; the old Sugara man with whom I pretended to flirt as a cover for the time he spent leading me through certain of the Chinese classics) could not always explain the differences. “It is because you’re a woman,” they said in their various ways: “too complicated, really.” Water-clocks were also complicated, and yet I had little trouble understanding them, so I knew this was a convenient lie to cover the fact that none of them—not even the emperor—really understood the differences. Still, war is a thousand years old, here since the gods made these islands—well, fights, anyway—perhaps it is as inevitable as death.

  The year I was fifteen and came to court, the war in Mutsu province had been going on so long that I think everyone was surprised when it ended.

  Dmei had actually fought. He said little about it, but what he did say made it clear that war was quite different from the little boys of my childhood scrambling around with their feeble bows: different, even, from the court guards who could shoot through a poem slip on a board a hundred paces away. Dmei had actually fought. He had fired arrows—three feet long and tipped with steel—directly at men.

  “Did you hope to kill them?” I asked one night, shocked but thrilled.

  “That’s why I aimed for them,” he said and then laughed, though it was not an amused sound. “Truthfully, what I hoped for was to get through alive and without letting my father down.”

  And that is all he would say then.

  Shortly after he left, yet another war began in Mutsu province: Yoshiee’s war. I grieved for the loss of Dmei, (though I did not realize at the time that this is why I took lovers, why I cried without reason some nights, why my temper was grown so short), and this manifested in a fascination with war. It certainly had to be more interesting than my activities at court, which left me feeling trapped and desperate: a mouse gnawing hopelessly, endlessly, at the lacquered walls of my box.

  I have strayed far from my tale, I find. The monogatari tales (for I have read them, despite my professed disdain), and the folktales the blind storytellers recite, and the parables of the priests all stay close to their topics, such as they are. Event follows event in tidy progression, poem and response, question and answer.

  I have often thought that we humans sort our lives and their experiences very strangely. We see everything as a tale, event following event, birth to death. These are the years I could have borne a child, that is the year I wore mourning for my father; this was the month that I fell in love, that the day I ran away.

  But time is very flexible, I think. I remember things from many years ago with crystal clarity—the brilliance of the red silk the Chinese traders brought to the capital when I was nineteen, the tiled skin of a snake I touched when I was six, the grass-bright smell of Dmei’s breath—and they are clearer to me than the robes I wore yesterday. Today does not follow yesterday; now follows other nows.

  There is another way to sort things, just as I can sort moths’ wings by size, or by color, or by when and where acquired. Every line of this notebook—and all my other notebooks, and every letter and sutra and poem I have ever scrawled in a long and word-ridden life—has required that I make ink. On occasion the ink is gold or vermilion or the color of lapis; but it is most generally glossy black, and thick as paint.

  The manner in which I make ink—the precise gestures of grinding the ink stick, adding water drop by drop, gathering and blending the two on a soft thick brush rolled against the ink stone—is always the same, whether I do it today or ten years ago or sixty, and it never fails to fill me with satisfaction—though this may be dispelled immediately afterward, when I drop the brush or find a long hair in the ink, or have absentmindedly made it too runny and must fiddle to correct it. Still, there is that perfect instant of brush and water and ink.

  The instant that I make ink is closer to all the times I have made ink than to any other instant, even the moments surrounding it. I make ink, and a visitor is announced, someone I cannot simply send away. He approaches my screens bare heartbeats later, but his voice, the polite bow I see beyond the blinds, is almost infinitely far from the moment of the ink stone.

  I have not lived seventy years. I have lived instead these things: the entwining of my days with a few men and women I have loved; a longing to walk on unpaved roads; the collecting of vermin, and other unacceptable studies; quite a number of unpleasant or tedious duties performed; the making of ink; eating and elimination and hair-washing and tooth-dying. My seventy years are only the frame on which they hang.

  Very well, then:

  Eventually the chaos in the yard settled down. The horses were settled, and the men were shown to quarters and fed, and given warm dry clothing. As bitter-cold twilight settled into moonless night, Nakara’s brother Kitsune and the older man and several of their retainers were given places beside Nakara’s omnipresent braziers. For once, Nakara banished much of the household, though Nakara’s woman Junshi stayed, and Kagaya-hime: eight in total. The curtains that would more properly have been used to separate the men and the women, or the old man (who was the noble Seiwa Minamoto no Takase) from the lower ranks, were clustered around them all, the reflected light of lanterns and braziers making a warm little space that smelled of hot coals and men who have spent much time on horseback lately. The eaves were many tens of feet over their heads, blackened and shiny with soot and moisture, and the light lost itself in a tangle of beams that refuted the sense of coziness. No one but Kagaya-hime looked up. Everyone there knew that safety is an illusion; everyone except Kagaya-hime felt that sometimes the illusion is preferable.

  Kagaya-hime’s instinct had been right: Kitsune and his party had failed. There would be no official warrant to allow them to pursue and strike the Abe. The vice-governor of Hitachi province was not seen as the correct person to bring this to the central government’s attention; however, if these allegations were true, they would surely be addressed by the next governor of Mutsu province, who would be named at the New Year’s appointments.

  “But that is many days from now, and then it will be months before he gets here,” Nakara said, her eyes glittering with tears. “Months more before he acts—if he is not like the last one, allied with the Abe. My brother is dead and the Abe tramp over the land he kept and we have done n
othing for half a year already.” Her tears spilled over.

  “I came,” Takase said, as if that changed everything.

  In many ways, it did so. There were the usual New Year’s celebrations—the new men, Takase’s attendants, made for more than usual humor among the unattached women of the estate; and children will celebrate in the midst of an earthquake, if need be—but they were muted, overwhelmed by the activities of a household preparing for war. Most winters the fields doze, and so do many of those who work them. But this year, gathering allies and supplies kept everyone as busy as silkworm season, when no one (not even the dogs) sleeps much.

  Takase wished to head north with his troops as soon as possible, perhaps even in the second month, if the weather permitted. This urgency surprised everyone, even Kitsune and Nakara, eager as they were. Wars in the north can (and do) last years, even decades. Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war, for which my Dmei betrayed his empire, lasted four years; before that the Former Nine Years’ War lasted twelve years. There is no need to rush into wars in the north; they will wait for you to begin.

  Despite the untrustworthy weather (icy rain one day, bitter windless cold the next), messengers with letters flew like leaves in a gale. Some men chose to follow Takase because they owed it to his family, or they chose to support Kitsune’s, or they hated the Abe for reasons of their own; or because, in the north, men are bred to war as horses are bred to run, and they pine if left too long without it. (Dmei was one such man—restless without battle.) Warriors and their attendants arrived, three or ten or twenty at a time, bringing horses.

  Takase pressed so hard because he was dying. The pain I feel, the bitter never-ending ache, the sense that my body is tired of its work—these are what he felt. And there was an old wound, where a barbed arrow had entered his side some years ago. It had never healed properly, but remained angry and wept pus from time to time. Takase had grown used to the red throb—had years to grow used to it—but now it grew worse again, the granulated flesh too sore to touch. He was dying, and he knew it (just as I know that I am dying), even if no one else could see it. Kagaya-hime also knew, for she smelled the wound and sensed the pain beyond it, the slow decay of his organs: a water-clock with a leak, nearly drained and useless.