by Kij Johnson
He had distracted me for a time; now his question brought it all back, and I started crying again. Between sobs, I sniffled out the story of my mice. He put his arm around me (though I was covered with dirt and snot and tears) and told me that they would be fine in the garden, if that’s where they had been abandoned. “There’s a lot for a mouse to eat out here.”
“But the cats—foxes—” I said, crying in earnest now.
“If they die, they will just come back as something better. Maybe cats themselves, hmm? And who can say? Even mice may eventually attain enlightenment.”
I was comforted by this, not because I believed the mice were safe (or that their enlightenment was possible; already I’d had enough mice to suspect otherwise), but because he had tried to comfort me at all. By the time he helped me sneak back to the storehouse undetected, I loved him with all my heart.
Later that night, after I had been freed from my storehouse, bathed and given a good supper, my brother’s chief man came to my rooms, and left a pierced silver box, a treasure from beyond even India. Inside was a single gray-furred mouse, young enough that its eyes were still too large for its face. I named it Little Sister, and pretended that I was my brother, and the mouse me. No one could take the mouse from me—it was a gift from the heir, after all—and so I carried it inside my sleeve and fed it rice from my bowl. I wept for a half a month when it died, because he had given it to me.
Several years later (I was fifteen) I came to court to attend my half-brother. Everything happened very quickly—my father the emperor Go-Sanj died, and Sadahito gave up his name and became emperor that very day. He asked for my company, and my foster father sent me there.
I had visited the palace before, when my father the emperor Go-Sanj requested it, and even once when he was gone to stay with a consort’s father, and I was allowed to explore a little. Still, the notion of living there made everything different. The painted floor the color of turquoises, the crimson pillars, the painted screens—these were all mine now, in some small way. Every day I would wear robes prettier than my finest as a child. I would be surrounded by witty, beautiful, cultured people, and I would (I fantasized) become immensely popular, famed for my wit and scholarship, and as elegant as Sei Shnagon had been, eighty years before. All my lovers would be handsome as Genji; all my attendants would be famous for beauty and charm, their glory reflecting on me.
And my half-brother and I—we would spend all our time together, reading and writing, perhaps even traveling, to Ise or even the Shirakawa Barrier or beyond! I would show him my moths’ wings, and my notebooks of observations; he would show me whatever it was he cared for most in the world. He would call me Little Sister; I would call him Brother.
It was not like that; I have to laugh at my naïveté at thinking such a thing was possible. His responsibilities were great; he was always with his regent or the other high nobles, discussing this or that. When his duties did not occupy him, he spent time with the other high-ranked young men at court; or his consort, Kenshi; or others of his women. He even had other sisters and half-sisters, at court or nearby shrines. A thousand thousand people wanted his time or attention. I was just one of the horde, if higher-ranked than most.
And I was no Sei Shnagon. Granted, I was the daughter of an emperor and (I am told) exceptionally beautiful; but the people at court were all more interested in music and poetry than in water-clocks and philosophy. No one but I cared how learned I was. And the public halls and emperor’s chambers were lovely, but the private rooms, even the rooms of a princess, were worn-looking, sometimes dilapidated, and always flea-haunted.
A month after I came to court, I asked the emperor if he would let me leave, to return to my uncle’s residence, or enter a nunnery. He denied the request. “I need you,” was all he said. It was not for many years that I understood what he meant by this, until the day we sat together and tasted the rain on our lips. In the meantime, I learned to accept my life here.
Shirakawa and Kenshi. I was jealous of her, of course. She was only a little older than I but she was beautiful and graceful, and more important, charming. In my heart I claimed to despise these things (it would never do for me to announce such a sentiment), but now I can admit that I despised them because I felt I could never attain them. I was beautiful (I say with all candor), but that meant nothing. A round face and white skin are an accident of birth; being well dressed and groomed was a reflection on Shigeko and my other women.
As a child I judged myself by the adults that surrounded me—my mother and her women; my foster father and my uncle—and they all seemed infinitely elegant, masters of mysteries I could barely perceive. I was the daughter of an emperor; if I could not be as elegant as they, well then, I would be clever.
Becoming beautiful was a process that surprised me as much as it did my uncle. He had despaired that I would ever be valued for anything besides my birth, but my woman Shigeko came to attend me (just before my half-brother became emperor, this was), and I was suddenly clean, and my robes matched, and any dead animals I might be examining were discreetly hidden away. I think my half-brother Shirakawa would have summoned me to court in any case; but it was a comfort, my uncle said, to know I was not going to disgrace everyone associated with me when I got there.
Shigeko made me polite as well as elegant. It was she who insisted I write to my half-brother’s favored consort, Fujiwara sammi no Kenshi, who lived elsewhere at court. I did so, growling all the way through the required poem, something about the reeds of the east wing greeting the grasses of the north—I’m sure it’s here somewhere; I’ll ask Shigeko when she returns from overseeing a gift to one of the temples south of town. I still recall Kenshi’s response: “The clouds visit both east and north. Grass-blades blown between us show only fragments of the wind.”
And so we wrote letters, and visited one another when we could. We were never friends, both being too highly ranked to be close to anyone not assigned to us; but I found her pleasant and quietly witty. It was easy to see why Shirakawa loved her.
Even more than her apparent perfections, I envied her his attention. A half-sister and a consort fill two different places in a man’s life; this is no different for an emperor. He spent many of his nights with her, and certain days when no work could be performed, due to tabus or festivals or snow so heavy no one chose to leave the shelter of their own eaves. He visited me sporadically; “Whenever I want someone to question everything,” he said once to me when I asked, “whenever I want to think hard to keep up.” I took this as a compliment, reluctant to look at myself closely enough to determine whether he meant it as such.
“And your consort?” I said, half-laughing to conceal my embarrassment. “When do you visit her?”
He did not laugh. “When I can.”
And so my brother had Kenshi. She bore him a son that they lost, and then another who lived—my nephew Taruhito, who became emperor—Horikawa, now he is dead. These experiences brought them together; even when I saw him without her (or her without him), I felt as if I were watching a running dog who was missing a paw: the dog may not mind nor even know; but what is not there leaves an awkward bump in his gait.
After Mononobe no Dmei and I became lovers, I was not so jealous. I had my own companion, my own fourth paw; and I spent every possible moment with him. If I did not get pregnant, it was not (as I overheard one of my women say to Shigeko at the time) for lack of trying.
And then Dmei left the capital, to return to his family home. I claimed an indisposition and retreated for a few months from the court. I did not want to deal with the eyes of the others on me. Either they knew of our affair and would be feeling—ridicule? pity?—or they would not, and their jokes and petty concerns would grate on my sensibilities like ground nutshells on skin. My rooms at my uncle’s residence were always available to me, so I retreated there, and did not come out for a time.
My memory is that I cried steadily for a month or more, that every overcast day and every ink stroke tha
t I blotted set me off again. But I have just asked Shigeko what she remembers of that time, and she tells me I did not cry once. And yet I am sure—well, memory is strange, after all. Perhaps both of these are true, and she and I live in worlds that almost—but do not totally—overlap.
And whether I showed this grief or not, we both remember that after a time I stopped jumping to my feet every time a messenger arrived with what might be a letter from the provinces. War started in Mutsu province, and I started to read again, about war and the making of it; when the first reports of Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war started trickling into court I read those as well, and pretended I was not searching for his name among the dead and distinguished.
I returned to court and even invited other men behind my curtains, usually old lovers who had become more friend than sexual partner. I move forward with my life, I said to myself, and felt smug about it. We can contrive victories of the most unpromising material.
A year after that, Shirakawa’s consort Kenshi died.
Kenshi did not die at a good time. There is never a good time, of course; there is always something left undone, a last trunk left unemptied. But this was especially inconvenient: early in Yoshiee’s war, when the situation was little understood, complicated, and not very encouraging. Kenshi and Shirakawa’s son, who was—five? six? very young, in any case—was sickly, and not expected to live to adulthood. The monks from the mountains nearby were behaving badly, marching armed in the streets of the capital and burning one another’s temples; and there had been a drought that was taking a year and more to recover from; and the chancellors were for some reason or other being more than usually tiresome in their requests. Shirakawa managed all such things with the grace of an expert kemari player, but he coped poorly with her death.
I wrote Shirakawa the letters one might expect of a sister worried for her brother, or a noblewoman for her sovereign. The answers were polite but short, and not in his handwriting. He did not visit, nor invite me to attend him, when I could have determined for myself how he was doing. I did see him, at the seventh-night rituals and at a reading of the sutras for the well-being of Kenshi’s soul. He wept—tears shining like rain on his face—and yet he seemed somehow remote, withdrawn, as if his grief were something held close. It seemed, as always, that Shirakawa without Kenshi was lacking some part of himself, but now it was more serious, more acute; as if it were not a limb but some vital organ gone.
I launched Shigeko and others of my women at their friends and admirers in his train, to learn what they could of my brother’s state—for no one ever tells anyone anything at court; we spy out what we can, and guess the rest. They returned with nothing more specific than the rumors. He did not meet with his chancellors or his high nobles. He did not read. He did not have lovers. He did not sleep.
I wrote more letters to Shirakawa; but what I really wanted to do was talk to him, face to face. I had lost Dmei, but I had survived; there was no reason why my clever, handsome, older brother—incidentally emperor of the Eight Islands—should not recover, as well; which is why, perhaps half a year after her death, I very improperly went to visit him without a summons.
This was easier than I would have expected. The court is a thousand buildings and courtyards connected by ten thousand walkways and gates; but it covers only a small area, and (if one is familiar with or can find one’s way) it is possible to walk the length of the enclosure without needing to put on clogs, or get one’s head wet on a rainy day. Shigeko was reluctant to invade the emperor’s presence, but she accompanied me nevertheless (in many ways, she is far braver than I). I dealt with the guards and courtiers we encountered by brushing past them without explanation. By the time they recovered from their surprise, Shigeko and I were well past, and another of my attendants was murmuring explanations, excuses—anything that might keep them from stopping us.
His rooms were nearly unpeopled: two bodyguards who started forward, and then stepped back when Shigeko spoke to them, and a woman server with a covered lacquered box in her hands. “Where is he?” I asked, and followed her silent gesture.
He was in an enclosed place that might have been where they slept, though there was nothing here now but a carving of Kannon and its offerings. He was not praying, but there was a tabu tag hung from his eboshi hat, meaning he was not to be interrupted. Ha, I thought, and knelt beside him. I pulled my prayer beads from my sleeve and began a just-audible prayer.
He sighed and put down his own beads. “Not you, too.”
“Brother—” I began and trailed off. This had seemed like such a good idea; now that I was here, I found I had no idea what to say. He had been crying; his face was still wet. All the exhortations I had planned in my mind on the walk over here vanished, steam from a kettle. “I am so sorry,” I whispered, and to my horror started sobbing.
He tipped his head back, and fresh tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, shining trails to his ears, his neck. “I keep—missing her,” he said. “There are so many things that need to be done, I just—”
“You miss her so much,” I said. “But—” But she is dead; she’s not coming back; she left you anyway, for the commonest lover of them all, death, I did not say.
He glanced at me. “I am sorry about your guardsman.”
He knew; he had cared enough to know. “I’m worried for you.”
“Little Sister,” he said, and his smile was so sweet that I began sobbing in earnest. He reached across the space between us, and held me close. We wept together. I cannot claim it was my doing, but after this, he again involved himself with the world.
Enough of this. I know my own story—have lived it, each day a new section added to a scroll that grows near its end now. I know this story too well to be surprised by it. My little cat-warrior—her tale has the capacity to delight me and distract me from my half-brother’s loss, which just at this moment (it is very late, and the pressure in my chest prohibits sleep) is as immediate and painful as it was the day he died, when I cried until my eyes wept blood.
So:
Spring comes later to Hitachi province than it does to the capital; still, by the third month the snow was gone from the Osa Hitachi estate, and the world was buffeted by floodwater and spring winds and storms that thundered like dragons through the clouds. Takase had established a camp just outside of the estate for his war band, but camp and household had blurred until everything was a single filthy, noisome mess. The ground had been mashed to mud, ankle-deep in the places where the horses collected. The air was filled with smells: wood and charcoal smoke, wet manes and manure, the oily smell of cooking meat, the bitterness of hot metal pounded out by the smiths. Not all cats are fastidious (I have been familiar with a cat who rolled in the midden heap behind our kitchen house, and entered my chambers with wilted radish-greens trailing from her ears), but most are. Kagaya-hime was like many of her kin in this, that she did not care to have dirty feet and disliked sharp smells.
Takase and Kitsune had gathered perhaps a hundred horsemen, each with attendants and a horse or two. This was not many, but to fight the Abe without a warrant or potential amnesty was risky business. The central council might eventually offer an exemption to the usual penalties, not everyone dared take the chance. Though his had been the initial letter asking for the warrant, the vice-governor, Nakara’s brother, could not involve himself directly at the risk of his position. But when certain of his retainers asked for leave he did not ask too many questions. A handful of warriors brought their men and their horses from the provincial capital—along with sixty hoko spears, sent by the vice-governor under the convenient if implausible fiction that they might serve as “protection for the hazardous journeys home.”
This brought the total number gathered to about three hundred men—horsemen, retainers, and servants—and one hundred twenty horses. It was not a large band (though large enough withal, especially when the horses are all male) but there was an immense amount of material required even for this sort of conflict, where t
hey expected to seize food as they traveled.
I remember reading something once, when I was at my uncle’s house, waiting through my monthly courses. Alert to my interests, Shigeko chanced to bring me an overview of the codes and practices that concerned war-making. (War-things were much on my uncle’s mind at this time, for this was in the months after Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war in Mutsu province began: a year after Dmei left me and returned to the east.)
I had no idea how much was required for war-making! I suppose I might have guessed, familiar with what must be assembled for even a short journey by, let us say, a princess to the shrine of Inari no Jinja, scant miles from home and a place where one might be expected to need little. There was a list in my uncle’s papers of what warriors require for military duty. I have found it folded into a diary of mine from that time. What my uncle thought of such a document going missing, I can only imagine.
—rice and sake and salt (enormous amounts of salt—why, I cannot say);
—weapons of every sort and size—longswords, short swords, and knives; a bow and fifty arrows; additional steel arrowheads ready for mounting—as well as whet-stones and quivers and bowcases and all the bits and bobs that are required to tend and store one’s weapons;
—saddles and saddlebags and silk-cord bridles and steel bits;
—wood shields as tall as a man, to be propped on the ground in battle where they might serve as cover, for the men on foot or dismounted riders;
—axes and hatchets and chisels and saws, tents and cooking pots and copper trays;
—flints, tinder, long-handled tongs to grip coals;
—sickles (for what, I wonder?—and then think, ah, yes, the grass pillows mentioned in all those poems written by men at the frontier);