by Kij Johnson
There was a day when my husband (well, husband-to-be) was considered old enough to wed. This was the year my half-brother retired from the throne, and handed it to his son, though the child (I should call him Horikawa, for he is dead now) was still quite young. I’m not sure why my half-brother did this, for he loved the work of ruling; did he really think he could be as happy retiring to one of his estates and concentrating on the sutras? In any case, he did not do so, for Horikawa was always frail and interested more in poetry than in matters of the court: if an emperor was to rule us, it would have to be a retired emperor.
Shirakawa retired to his residence south of the capital’s walls, though he visited the capital often (it is only a mile, after all). I accompanied him when I could. It was a year or two after this, when we were at the southern residence, that my uncle told me that the boy he had selected for me was old enough to be wed.
I had been examining a dead crow Shigeko brought to me, and attempting to record the delicate feathering of its leg, the glossy scales that covered its clawed foot. It was of course highly improper that I bring any dead thing into the house of an emperor, retired or otherwise, but I salved my conscience by thinking of the fleas we all killed without compunction, even in his presence. If a flea (or a mosquito, or a louse) was acceptable, surely a crow, which everyone knew was a mere scavenger, could be only a little worse.
Mercifully, my uncle would not be allowed behind my curtain, so the dead bird and the mysterious stains I had somehow accumulated from its body would not be visible to him. “How old is he?” I asked absently.
I could see out, for the curtain was just transparent enough to allow this. I watched him shift his weight a little. He cleared his throat. “He is thirteen—but well built for his age. He had his manhood ceremony this spring.”
I stifled a laugh, for I was then nearly thirty. Well, perhaps he would be interested in dead birds: children often were. It was arranged that I would go to my uncle’s house for a time, and the boy—“man”—would come to me there.
It was the sixth month when he first visited. The convention is that visits between men and women are serendipitous; he and she are admiring the moon in the same courtyard; or he passes her house on a rainy night and seeks shelter; or he idly accompanies a friend visiting another woman in the same rooms. Of course my uncle and I—and everyone in the house, I expect—knew the day and time he was expected to arrive; but none of us were allowed to admit it.
Even as she pretended there was nothing special to the night, Shigeko dressed me with special care that evening. I remember my robes were yellow and sea-green gauze, the outermost woven with a pattern of waves (I’m sure we’ll find them in one of the trunks we haven’t yet emptied)—and she refused to let me do anything that might possibly dirty the pale silk. Forced inactivity is never comfortable; I fidgeted from place to place, and tried to interest myself in a collection of poems that was popular in court just then.
He arrived at the dog’s hour, along with a little army of male friends and attendants, my uncle’s son among them. It was understood (if not mentioned) that my cousin had invited him to drink wine in one of the garden’s pavilions—my uncle being conveniently away, busy with something or other at court. My suitor would somehow end up, not there, but on the verandas of my rooms, and it would all be very charming and poetic, and he would eventually end up in my bed.
Everything happened as predicted. The men had been drinking together, so they were somewhat more ribald than I had expected; but by the rat’s hour, most of the men wilted off to other assignations; and my husband-to-be was behind my curtains. Dim light conceals much—age and youth, flaws and tics—but he looked a mere infant to me, too young to have had his trouser ceremony. Thirteen was far younger than I had remembered. His face had the perfect roundness of beauty—or baby-fat. He was elegantly dressed—no doubt some attendant had fussed over him as obsessively as Shigeko had over me. We exchanged a few conventional poems. He was as uninspired as I in creating them, which made me hope his attention was focused on some other, more interesting topic—moths, perhaps, or Chinese medicine: something we might share after marriage. I had never heard that he was an intellectual, but I knew almost nothing about him.
The lovemaking was as inept—and incomplete—as might be expected. The sky was already growing pale and he would need to leave before daylight, so we did not have much time. He smirked at me (thirteen! a horrible age) as he fumbled at my sash, trying to untie what was a very simple knot and succeeding only in tangling it past remedy.
I realized suddenly that, had I wed the first husband my uncle found for me (the one who died of smallpox), I might well have a son his age. With this came a certain sympathy. Here the poor child was, trying to impress a woman more than twice his age, his future wife, the daughter and sister and aunt of emperors. He was probably intimidated by my sexual experience (which was not inconsiderable) and simply overdoing it in an attempt to seem worldly. I tried not to sigh out loud, but I allowed him to paw me through my robes until he left at dawn.
After he left I surprised everyone, including myself, by vomiting until my throat burned and my muscles ached. Shigeko attributed this to nerves.
For the wedding to be finalized, he would visit me for the next two nights and stay late the third, and we would share wine. And then it would all be over, “and we can go back to what we were,” Shigeko said, comfortingly.
Pah. I cannot bear to think of him just now. My cat and her journey are a welcome distraction from unpleasantness.
Mutsu province is a patchwork of estates that offer loyalty to any of a dozen or more great men or monasteries or temples, most of them a very long way away. Some of these estates are nothing at all, only uncut forest and fields that have been allowed to grow over and vanish back into the countryside. The farther from Hitachi province the war band came, the fewer Osa Hitachi estates and farms there were and the less certain their loyalty; and once they had passed the provincial capital Taga, there were barely a handful. This was why Nakara’s brother had come here in the first place, to solidify influence in the region.
At the same time, the Abe estates grew more common, and more directly linked—for alliances and allegiances are not as simple as I am pretending. There are layers of loyalties, overt or hidden, and nuances of promise and oath, and the only-ifs and what-ifs of conditional alliance. It is hard to say, “This household is loyal to the Abe,” because the household may simultaneously be loyal to the Onobe, who are enemies of the Abe; and to the Tendai temple at Taga, which hates both Onobe and Abe. In the end a household’s loyalty is to itself—and to the emperor, of course.
Still, at some point beyond Taga the war band’s journey crossed an invisible barrier. Beyond it, the estates they passed (or passed through) became what might now be considered enemies, with loyalties to the Abe, and not to Osa Hitachi or Takase or to any of the men who traveled with the war band. The men knew now that whoever they met was an enemy, or might as well be, and the lack of ambiguity was a relief of sorts.
Takase, Kitsune, and Kagaya-hime spent more of their time listening to reports from scouts. From time to time Kagaya-hime and Biter went exploring and brought back information of their own. She knew little and cared less about the spiderweb of politics, so she brought back news of useful wells and flooded river-fords—phenomena of interest to a traveling cat.
10. The Chang-An Notebook
I have been ill for several weeks—so tired, so very tired. The thing that fills my chest and leaves no room for breath evidently left room for a kaze-cold of sorts, for I found myself coughing out gobbets of dull green matter, and even blood. Shigeko moved me from the palace, of course—dying here would have been bad for the palace’s purity—taking me to her family’s residence on Konoe avenue, since her family is one of the few exalted enough to host a princess. The coughing (and the gobbets) eased, though they have not abandoned me; but they left in their place a terrible pain, as if I inadvertently coughed out some v
ital organ. Still, I am accustomed to pain of many sorts, and this is not what will kill me.
Perhaps I should have gone to Kasugano rather than return to the palace. Shigeko was surprised—I suspect she is looking forward to the simplicity of life there, of a life after I am gone—but I found I could not. The emptying of my trunks is only half-finished. I recently found a little teakwood cabinet filled with letters exchanged with one of my half-sisters when she was in retreat at Ise. She was prolific (as was I, it seems), and for some days I amused myself by hearing the echoes of her voice as Shigeko read the letters to me, one after the other. What other letters, memories, remain in those trunks?
And another reason: I did not want to leave this unfinished, these notebooks of my life. Writing is a habit into which I have fallen. It is hard to break.
And so five days ago (was it? I am not sure, for I have been sleeping such odd hours lately, tucked deep in my rooms away from daylight and stars) I returned here. Since then I have slept, and stared into the coals of my brazier (will I ever be warm again?). Today is the first day I have tried to write, and even these few lines have required that I rest three times.
Shigeko has watched me write and write and write—over the years, yes, but also here, in all these once-blank notebooks. She has seen how hard writing is for me, just now, and she has finally asked me what I write.
“Memories,” I tell her. “Dreams.”
“Why?” she asks. “You have all your old diaries”—though this is no longer true; many have already been picked apart and fed to the flames of braziers like this one.
“It is something to do,” I say. I do not tell her that I write because I must, because the price of my life is telling this story, if only to myself. If I die without telling it, I die in debt, and I will never be able to move into the Pure Land.
She does not ask more, not tonight, but no conversation between us truly ends.
There was a day when they were at last very close to their goal, and Kitsune took a handful of men and rode ahead to survey the situation at the Osa Hitachi estate. It had rained for three days, and the band had camped on steep pine-covered slopes that offered cover from the interminable tap-tap-tap of the rain—but only in exchange for irregular gouts of water that gathered and then dropped from the branches—the difficult choice between a steady small evil and a sporadic great one. Takase was not allowing patrols, so Kagaya-hime remained close to camp, and vented her irritation at being cold and wet by throwing knives into the soft bark of a yew, again and again at the place where she had seen a beetle, though nothing remained of the beetle and very little of the wood where it had walked. Biter stood under the thick rice-straw rain blanket Otoko had made for him, snapping idly at anyone who came within reach. The morning and the afternoon dripped on; and then dusk, made drab by the heavy skies. Takase sat back on his heels in silence beside the fire, absently rubbing his ancient arrow-wound. He said little, and Kagaya-hime said less. Cats and commanders know how to wait.
Kitsune did not return until shortly after full dark had fallen. Kagaya-hime woke from a doze when she heard horses walking and soft voices. Kitsune dismounted slowly, and handed his reins to a servant, then stumbled to the fire and sank back onto his heels. He was soaked through: gold and orange firelight glistened on his wet face. The horses and other riders moved away. There was a stranger with the group, a peasant by his looks, who remained near Kitsune just at the edge of the light, squatting under an immense rain hat. Peasants also know how to wait.
Takase had been sleeping beside the fire, but with the arrival he eased himself upright, and coughed and spat on the ground. “Well, boy. I didn’t expect you’d find your way back through the trees until morning.”
Takase’s attendants always had water heated at camp (an old man—or woman—is offered such courtesies); now they poured it onto tea leaves and handed cups to their master and Kitsune. He smelled of horses and wet silks and sweat and exhaustion—and tears, Kagaya-hime realized. He was crying: that was the water on his face.
Takase watched him for a moment. “Well, and—?” he said, and his voice was more gentle than Kagaya-hime had heard before.
Kitsune did not look up from the cup he cuddled in his hands. His voice was almost too low to hear, even in the quiet camp. “I knew they burned it,” he said, “that they killed him; my nephews, my baby niece—everyone. I knew it.—And it was nearly a year ago.” A tear slipped from his face, a gold flash in the light before it fell into his cup. “We got there at midday, maybe the horse’s hour. Some of the buildings are just gone, just charcoal. Farmers have been breaking up some of the structural timbers, burning what’s left in their ovens. The main house is about half-ruined.—They’re keeping mares in it nights, to protect them from wolves. My brother’s house.” He looked up suddenly. “It’s almost a year, now. It still smells like smoke.”
“Like kitchen fires and sulfur,” Kagaya-hime said. She remembered the burned grounds on Nij avenue, the cats with burning eyes that might have been real or might have been ghosts. “And death.” Her nails were biting into her palms. She flexed her hands, trying to relax, and saw Takase and Kitsune looking at her. “I have seen it,” she said. “My fudoki. My aunts and cousins—that is how we died.”
“Well,” Takase said again. “What’s the situation there, boy? Where are the Abe?”
Kitsune rubbed his eyes. “The main force went back north in the autumn, but there’s still one of the family here, the fourth son and his family; and a cousin. They’re not rebuilding; they ride over from an estate a few miles away to check on things.” He gestured at the peasant, still crouched out of the fire’s circle of warmth. “Mori here knows more. He served my brother before—” His voice trailed off.
“You,” Takase barked at the man. “Come here.” The farmer crept forward, forehead nearly to the ground. “Where is this other place?”
“That way,” the peasant said and pointed into the darkness without looking up. “Two miles east and north of my master’s old estate. Ten miles from here.”
“You have been there?”
The man nodded.
“Who is there?”
“Abe no Juro—that is the fourth son, my lord; his cousin—families and servants—thirty horsemen—” The peasant looked up doubtfully. “And the servants, and all the locals.”
Takase looked up at the sky, as if he could see stars and moon through the dripping clouds. “It’s still early,” he said, “the rat’s hour or thereabout—”
The peasant pressed his face to the wet dirt again. “The boar’s hour, my lord.” Peasants can often tell such things.
Takase said, “Early, at any rate. We can be there long before dawn and attack while they sleep, before they’ve heard we’re here.”
Kitsune stood, his eyes flat in the firelight. “Attack them. Yes.”
“Lords—” The peasant’s voice sounded as though it had been wrung from him. “Please. My sister and her husband serve there. They have children.”
“So did my brother have children,” Kitsune said.
“My sister did not burn your brother’s family,” the peasant said, as sharply as he dared. “Please, let me send her word. She will leave and never say a thing, I swear it.”
“No,” Takase said. “She would have friends, and she would tell them. It must be this way.”
“Then they are dead,” the peasant said and turned his face away, toward the darkness and the rain.
There were few guards on the estate, the inhabitants evidently trusting to the wet night as their best protection. Forerunners found only three men standing under trees. Their senses numbed by the steady rain and the late hour, they died silently, perhaps without even realizing they died.
The war books I read so long ago were full of elaborate strategies with names that sound like sexual positions from a Chinese handbook; but on the night I listened to the old warriors from Yoshiee’s war, I learned that the commonest strategies are the simplest. Ambush: night atta
cks: destroying a bridge so the enemy cannot approach: out-and-out flight.
Burning an enemy’s household while he sleeps is popular, as well. The guards gone, Takase found it simple to arrange his war band around the main buildings of the estate. The horses he left out of earshot, for they had picked up their riders’ excitement and could not be trusted to stay silent.
Not everyone was asleep, of course. There is always some old woman with aching bones, or a mother soothing her colicky baby, or a man full of wine shifting restlessly, his bladder full. But they were unlucky this night, or cursed. Everyone stayed inside and no one heard the Osa Hitachi men take their positions. The dogs must have heard, and the geese with which farms are always infested, but they said nothing—or perhaps did not hear, after all, over the rain.
Kagaya-hime’s eyes were better than the men’s, but there was little to see: the buildings and the men brought for this attack were just variations in the darkness, more felt than seen. Takase was a black bulk a few steps from her. When he spoke, his voice was low: “Bring the torches.” The order was passed until she lost it in the rain. A moment later, lights dull as fox-fire bobbed toward the heavy mass of the main house: torches guttering in the rain. The torchbearer nearest her was Osa Hitachi no Kitsune. Watching to ensure his fire did not die, he walked carefully, feeling his way over the puddled ground. Tiny red lights flicked across his face. Kagaya-hime thought about the dream-thing of eyes and flames, the killing rage, and recognized it in Kitsune. She did not recognize the other torchbearers, but guessed that they, too, had lost family.
The main house was a typical rural building, thatched rather than tiled for warmth in the winters. The structure was raised on pillars, the roof far out of reach; but in one place the thatch had loosened over the winter and not yet been repaired. It hung down in a sloppy garland, like the frayed straw rope at a neglected shrine. Kitsune held his torch high beneath the overhang until the rice straw hissed as it dried, barely audible over the rain and the dripping trees. Dull red light licked certain stems, too weak to spread.