by Kij Johnson
—moxas and bandages for healing;
—as if that were all. Then there are the attendants (and each horseman has one or two of these, to work as groom and servant and combatant as need arises), along with all of their food and supplies and weapons—hoko and naginata spears and swords and bows; and the priest who comes to give guidance, along with his or her followers, and food and supplies; and the clerks and warrant officers; and any hangers-on that the leader believes might be useful or cannot be naysaid. And so many supplies must have required carts and oxen or horses, and still more men to drive and tend them. And all of this is organized into companies of fifty men each, and subdivided into campfires of ten and then squads of five. It sounds as complex as court life, if not so pretty.
In the months after Yoshiee’s war was declared, I read much on the subject. I longed to understand, not what I later learned to call logistics, nor the whys of it, but the what. What was it like to fight, to actually shoot at someone else, to want them dead and have the means to make them so?
There were certain Chinese classics that all the military nobles thought essential: Sun Tzu, Ssu-ma, and the Ksekik sanryaku. These were full of strategy and tactics and oblique metaphors, but they seemed somewhat cold, bloodless. In addition, sheaves of poetry floated about court, purportedly written by soldiers (though this was often a literary conceit); but they said nothing about war itself, instead harping endlessly on how much the men missed their wives, and the loneliness of sleeping on those ubiquitous grass-stuffed pillows.
Some years ago a collection of stories started filtering through court—the Konjaku. We joked then that the Konjaku had one of everything, but in fact it has many more than one story about warriors, and these reports vary. In some, war seems more glamorous than horrible, as complex and formal as the presentation of the blue horses in the first month or the Gosechi dances in the eleventh: the exchange of arrows, the name-announcing; men in beautifully laced armor whirling in graceful combat on spirited horses. Others are perhaps more realistic, though in them war seems mostly to be exhortations and beheadings, usually over small (not to say absurdly petty) matters.
There was the Mutsuwaki, as well, all about the first war that had been going on in the north, back when I was very small. I was no longer at my uncle’s house, so I borrowed a copy of this from the scrolls of my half-brother the emperor; he looked at me strangely but had it sent without comment. This was much longer. For the first time I realized that war was as filled with politics as court, but still there was the painstakingly described armor, the elegant little platitudes about this or that one’s skill at archery or riding. When the author stepped down from these aesthetic heights to describe battle itself or its results, his images were improbably grisly. I still remember one: “The ground was slick with viscera, the moors wet with fat.”
All these wars, these battles, in the Konjaku and the Mutsuwaki and elsewhere, are true. Names are named; Shigeko (who knows everything about everyone who has ever been to court) could probably recite the genealogies of half the men mentioned in them. They are true, but they are lies—like all tales.
Some years ago there was a night in the fifth month when the full moon was hidden behind the clouds, and I overheard three older guardsmen talking in the darkness. They had fought in Yoshiee’s war. Tongues loosened by plum wine and sake, they compared the lessons they had learned. These had nothing to do with eloquent speeches, and everything to do with avoiding diarrhea and keeping one’s bowstrings from rotting. Their stories were hardly fit for gentle ears: an attack where foot soldiers swept blades along the ground to fell the horses by slashing their legs; a long season when everyone had dysentery and the men wore no hakama-trousers or loincloths, for it was pointless to do so and then clean them a thousand times a day; a man driven as mad as if he had been fox-possessed, all from an arrow-cut on his thigh that turned black and began to rot; a man hacked to pieces alive before his wife’s weeping eyes; a wife raped before her husband’s staring, severed head.
I listened to these things, and thought: This is Dmei’s life. This is who he is. But I could not reconcile this with the man who had laughed so often with me, the gold eyes that were so warm when we made love. I had nightmares for some time after listening to the men; and for years afterward their words would return to me suddenly, like a ghost story one heard as a child and can never forget.
The Osa Hitachi were a military clan, and everyone, from Kitsune and Nakara down to the oxkeepers’ children, was caught up in the preparations. The buildings within the estate were crammed with the supplies that could not be left in the rain—for it still rained, naturally. Outside, fields were being prepared for the summer’s crops (“I’m sure you want the space,” Nakara said tartly to her brother one wet day when everyone’s tempers ran high, “but come the tenth month, I’m guessing that you will want to eat, yes?”). Nakara had to send every mare within a ten-mile range twenty miles south and west to a smaller farm claimed by the Osa Hitachi, but even so the stallions sometimes fought. Kagaya-hime grew tired of trying to find solitude, and instead stayed out of the way and watched it all, rather as a cat sits on a wall watching the servants prepare to move a household to Biwa lake for the summer.
Nakara apologized one day. She clattered under the eaves of an outbuilding and saw Kagaya-hime there, tucked into the space between a pillar of shields and an untidy heap of new-made sickles, trimming Biter’s hooves with her knife. “Be patient, Hime. Things will settle down as soon as the men leave.”
Kagaya-hime finished the hoof and stood. “I imagine you will be grateful when we are all gone.”
Nakara was holding a cedar-wood box filled with chopsticks for moving the coals in braziers; she dropped this, and the little iron rods rolled everywhere. Woman and cat-woman knelt and gathered them. “You can’t leave,” said Nakara. “You’re staying. Aren’t you?”
“No.” Kagaya-hime laid her handful of sticks in the box and stood. “I go to Mutsu province, as well.”
“Mutsu,” Nakara said. “They are all fools or barbarians there. Or insane.”
Kagaya-hime said, “Your brother was one of them.”
“That’s why I would know.” Nakara hesitated, unaccustomed to asking for favors. “We’re not like city people here, my dear. My household is whomever I say it is. A sister would be a great comfort to me.”
Kagaya-hime closed her eyes and leaned against Biter’s flank, feeling his rough winter coat against her cheek. “Why would you wish this?”
“I know what it is to not know who—what—you are,” Nakara said. “This way you would have sister and brothers and home. You would know that much at least.”
This was what she had lost so long ago: ground to live and mate and hunt on, a family, a tale into which she would fit. Nakara’s brother was half-fox; there was clearly room for a woman who had once been a cat, for her to become Osa Hitachi no Neko. And she would no longer be alone. It would not be her fudoki, but humans’ tales did not grate as other cats’ had. She would remain what she was—changed, perhaps, but still recognizable to herself. The road-kami had abandoned her; might she not stop? Road? she whispered to the backs of her eyelids. It did not answer; but for an instant she saw the dark thing with a thousand eyes, and it spoke her name.
“I cannot,” she said finally, and opened her eyes. “I must go.”
Nakara said in a tight voice: “I do not want to lose anyone else.”
“You found this place, this—family. Or made it. It is not mine.”
“Where will you go? Why?” A tear slid down Nakara’s cheek; she brushed it aside impatiently.
Kagaya-hime said slowly, “I thought it was the road that carried me, but we left the road behind when we crossed the water at that town. Enoura. And I still have to go.”
“Where will it end? Will you fight with the men? Will you walk until you die, till you walk into the ocean and drown? And I am to let you do this thing?”
“I cannot help it.” Kagaya-hime bega
n twisting a lock of Biter’s mane into a tight little rope.
“Do not pretend that you have no control over your life, girl,” Nakara snapped. “You go because you wish to, because you don’t choose to stay.” She turned on her heel and walked away, leaving the box lying in the mud. Her hurt and anger lasted for days.
No one controls their own life. Well, perhaps some of the Fujiwara men do. Perhaps they attain manhood, and suddenly know exactly what they want from life—I will marry in two years, and have a son in five, retire at thirty, die at sixty. And my half-brother knew his life—was born knowing it. But the rest of us? I look back on my life and I see a series of decisions, each of which made perfect sense at the time, most of which led to nothing in particular.
It is true that I am powerless, that I am controlled by my family, by the Fujiwaras, by the gods and Buddhas; but I am also free: to think my thoughts, and dream of blue-green streams under foreign trees.
I thank the merciful Kannon for this tale I tell, where I can at last control a life, even if it is not my own.
The days of preparation collected themselves into untidy fortnights, and then a month and more. Takase spent much of his time in the main house, surrounded by low tables heaped with slips of paper listing the details of war. These he arranged into various piles and then rearranged the piles, his clerk scribbling completed lists onto other, larger pieces of paper. Discarded scraps drifted across the floor.
A courtier might have compared him to an aging poet writing among fallen cherry blossoms or snow. He reminds me more of my half-brother the emperor, who spent many days in precisely this manner—though it annoyed my uncle (indeed, most of his branch of the Fujiwaras), who thought he concerned himself overmuch with the running of the empire, which (in their opinions) might better be left in their hands.
Kagaya-hime saw Takase and the clerk and the countless, strangely attractive, fluttering papers, and saw a kitten’s game, or a mystery. She often watched him, but Takase did not seem to mind, or perhaps even notice that she was near—it is easy to ignore a cat when she is not of a mind to remind you of her existence, though otherwise it is impossible. It may also be that he sensed she was not, strictly speaking, human; or perhaps he saw that she was one of those who are born to killing, without discerning the details.
On this day—it was toward the middle of the second month, when the irises by the spider-leg stream were first showing their leaves, straight as knives—Kitsune came into Takase’s presence. He spent most of his time outside with the men and horses, where his voice was necessarily loud and his stride long; papers skittered away from his feet as he stopped and bowed. “My lord—” he began, and the eaves rang.
“Wait.” Takase raised his hand. The clerk finished the character he was writing and laid down his brush, then fussed around, placing river stones on the heaps to hold them in place. Kagaya-hime knelt half-hidden by a latticed screen leading to the veranda, binding a steel arrowhead to a shaft; she lifted her head to watch. “Now,” Takase said, when the piles were secure, and only the scraps on the floor fluttered. “What is it?”
“It” was many things, of course. I have learned that no one (not even Shigeko, whom I see a thousand times each day) has only one thing to say. Ask, “And what else?” and there is always another, and sometimes it is the most important of all. Lacquered stirrups from Musashi province had come in; one of the Osa Hitachi retainers had received news that his wife was ill, and left for home with his men; mice had gotten into some of the rice, though it was still salvageable. Takase was old (and wise, though these are not always paired) and asked, “And what else?” a number of times.
If there are no secrets at court, there are fewer within a household, fewer still within a war band. “The men have learned that my sister’s guest means to travel with us,” Kitsune said.
“And they object,” Takase said.
Kitsune nodded. “A few. Monthly courses, sightseeing, endless delays for travel tabus and heating water and looking for protection from the dew.”
“Do you feel this way?”
“Ha. She is tough enough.”
“But you do not care for her,” Takase said.
Kitsune stiffened. “I never—”
“Boy, I am old. I have no interest in listening to excuses.”
Kitsune frowned and rubbed his neck. “I—do not understand her. Who she is.”
Takase snorted. “Say that about any woman, not just her. Will you be able to travel with her?”
“If she slows us down, no.”
“Well, girl?” Takase said. “Will you keep us waiting while you cut your nails on auspicious days?”
Kagaya-hime hadn’t known that he saw her: he had not turned his head her way once in the long hours of work. Caught, she stood and entered the room, arrow and thread still in her hands. She did not meet Kitsune’s eyes, but looked sidelong at him, gauging mood, threat, posture. He was flushed red with embarrassment, defiant. “No,” she said. “Why would I cut my nails?”
Takase barked a laugh that became a cough. And later, when (perhaps) he thought she had left them, he said to Kitsune: “She is driven by fate, as are we all. It’s a waste of energy to stand in the way.”
As I write here, my cat Myb watches me, suddenly intent, as though a fire flickered over my head. There have been many cats over the years, and I have spoken to them all in the high tones reserved for children, drunken men, and pets. They have never spoken back, but I have never thought they would. They are not badgers or foxes, after all. They are from distant godless places, beyond my most ambitious dreams.
A month later, Kagaya-hime left with the war band. It was a bright spring day, still winter-cold, except that the trees showed a haze of pale green, and the air seemed furred with moisture and the possibility of life. Nakara and Kagaya-hime had avoided one another, but now the woman joined the cat, and in silence they watched the band form an unruly line of snappish horses and hoarse-voiced men.
“Must you do this?” Nakara said again.
Kagaya-hime said, “Yes.”
Nakara sighed. “I cannot stop the wind from blowing, and I cannot stop you. I’m sorry that I was angry with you.”
Certain cats hold grudges. Shisutko, the little nun, was like this; she refused your embrace if she thought she had been slighted, or if you were to toss her from a veranda into the garden after a particularly wearisome morning of her face in everything; and she waited days if necessary to take a revenge as indelicate as it was surprising. I think it is possible that our cats learn how to bear grudges from people, for we can hold one for a lifetime.
Kagaya-hime was not of a resentful nature. This requires a sense of perogatives infringed, and she had no expectations to be dashed. She saw Nakara’s sorrow and did something she remembered from the aunts and cousins when they sought comfort from one another; she stepped forward and pressed her cheek into the curve of Nakara’s neck. Nakara reached out and pulled her close, held her tightly. Kagaya-hime stood taut-muscled for an instant, then relaxed and embraced Nakara: the first time she had embraced another, felt the comfort of one’s arms filled with a person one loves.
“I am—sorry,” she whispered into Nakara’s hair, “though I do not know what that means.”
They stood joined for a time, but no matter how tender the moment, a cat grows restive. Kagaya-hime moved away, still close but no longer touching.
Nakara looked at her and sighed. “There are people who cannot settle, as if they were birds born without legs. They go on and on, to the world’s end—the lands of the hairy northerners, or India; farther, even.”
“What happens to them, the ones who go?”
“I don’t know. They never return to tell us. Perhaps they never find a place to stop.”
“I am not one of those,” Kagaya-hime said. “I long for home and fudoki. I would stop if I could.”
“Would you?” Nakara said.
“I have a gift for you,” Kagaya-hime said suddenly. Tucked in her sa
sh was a slim, shallow box carved of tortoiseshell, hardly larger than a fan-case. She laid it in Nakara’s hands. Inside was a knife no longer than Kagaya-hime’s hand, its blade the color of claws.
Nakara looked up. “I cannot take your knife.”
“I have others,” Kagaya-hime said, and held up her hands, though she showed only her palms to Nakara, so that the woman might not see the raw place where one of her fingernails had been until that morning.
“I have a gift for you, as well,” Nakara said. Junshi stood a few paces away; Nakara gestured, and the woman handed to Kagaya-hime a lacquered woven box, long and narrow. Inside were gold and ivory feathers as long as Kagaya-hime’s forearm: eagle feathers, feathers worthy of an emperor’s arrows. The sunlight caught them and the feathers gleamed with flecks of muted light.
Nakara continued, her voice distant, as though she chose not to feel too strongly. “My father was a warrior; my mother was the daughter of a warrior. I have learned these things. Make sure that your neckguard is low. When charging, don’t get shot in the face. Trust the men beside you.”
Cats have no way to share their sorrow. It is not in their nature that two cats sharing a fudoki can truly feel sadness—cats come and go, it is the tale that matters. And a cat without a fudoki has no one with whom she can share sorrow, and so she learns no habits of expression. But a woman understands loss, and can express it. And this, Kagaya-hime learned, was both advantage and disadvantage to being human.
Mutsu province. This is the end of the (civilized) world, the farthest reaches of the empire. My favorite Michinoku paper comes from there, though I have a difficult time reconciling my image of the place with the notion that there are workshops, perhaps even manufactories, whole families or villages devoting their lives to producing luxuries for the capital, so many hundreds of miles away. Mutsu is meant to be a land of savages (that drinking of blood! those arrows in the hair!), of peaks taller than the great mountain Fuji and snow a thousand feet deep, of springs of scalding water that rise from the very depths of Hell, of monkeys that speak and tengu-demons and monsters—it is meant to be the fringe of the world. The Mutsu province of my mind is filled with wonders.