by Kij Johnson
“Did it catch?” one man murmured to another, both nameless in the gloom. “Maybe he should—”
“Wait,” the other said, and there was a noise, the soft sudden movement of air as new-dried straw burst into flames.
The men around Kagaya-hime took a simultaneous step as if pushed back by the light. Kitsune ducked backward, away from the sudden fire, and tossed the torch onto the roof. The clearing brightened as pillars of fire shot up elsewhere. “Now that’s a light you can read by,” one of the men said and laughed without humor. Kagaya-hime could see his intent face. They all had this look: the expression of a cat before she jumps.
They heard the first shout inside the main building: “Fire,” and then, “Fire! The roof—look!” screams and disorder. People tumbled through the doorway, a woman and two children, one an infant. One of Takase’s men shouted, “She’s mine,” and shot her in the belly, below the baby in her arms. She fell without a cry, dropping to her knees and then side. The child beside her stared stunned at the men outside until an arrow took him in the chest. He collapsed backward into a man and old woman stumbling out. The baby of the fallen woman started wailing as the man screamed. The old woman was silent for a single white-eyed moment before she turned to shout inside. “It’s an attack. We’re—”
She fell to the ground clutching the flesh around an arrow set fletching-deep into her thigh. “Well, shit,” she said before the next arrow slashed into her face.
The flames were young, bright and enormous as funeral pyres, though black smoke and glowing steam obscured them in places. Sparks showered the clearing; it was only when one landed on her face that Kagaya-hime realized that some were drops of rain catching the light.
The men of the war band howled, fierce as wolves, eyes shining flat and pale. They shot everything that came through the door, and after a time no one tried to escape that way except fowl and a terrified dog with a great dirty burn along its flank.
This was how it had been for her home, for the cats of Kagaya-hime’s tale—not the arrows but the fire, the thatch collapsing, the agonizing death, the impossibility of escape. She had lost everything in fire; but this did not make her merciful. She killed people as they ran out, and when they stopped coming she shot arrow after arrow into the flaming door, as if to kill those still inside. Perhaps this was mercy of a kind; no one had offered the cats of her fudoki so quick a death.
This is the way of war—of this war, anyway. Perhaps somewhere in the world, among the barbarians beyond India or across the great ocean, there are civilized wars with rules of engagement and judges to determine proper behavior. Perhaps strategies are clever and complicated and minimize unnecessary deaths. Perhaps the only people who die are warriors sent to the scene of battle for no other purpose than to kill or be killed. Perhaps there is somewhere that chroniclers can tell the plain truth about a battle without shocking even the most delicate of sensibilities.
But I rather doubt this. We are a civilized people, in our way (dare I say it?) more sophisticated even than China; and yet I cannot forget the stories of the men from Yoshiee’s war. Even for us war is unpleasant; surely it must be more so elsewhere.
Kagaya-hime understands war, accepts it as I do not. Why would she not? She is a cat, a killer by nature. She has seen children killed before this: the males of her race have been known to kill the kittens of a fudoki when they claim its territory. Perhaps this is the way of all males, to kill. They have no fudoki and so all that is left to them is life and death and their children. But I am forgetting; this is Kagaya-hime I am speaking of. Human males, men—Dmei—surely they are more than this.
The cries ceased after a time, or were drowned by the fire. The screaming infant that had been crying fell silent; the heap of bodies before the door smoked, smelled of cooking meat. The war band’s shouts stopped, and as it became certain that there would be no last-ditch escape—no one was left alive in the buildings to attempt one—men left the fire. Some wept or vomited as they walked, or collapsed as if they had fought for their lives, or shivered as if ill or injured. Some stayed: Kagaya-hime, Kitsune, Takase, others.
“Why are they sick?” she asked Takase. A man—the one who had laughed at the fire—had fallen to his knees, body wrenched with dry retching.
Takase turned to look at her, his expression harsh. “It takes some people this way. We’ve killed a lot of people.”
“Wasn’t that why you did this?”
He barked a humorless laugh. “Clever girl. We chose to kill them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t suffer for it.”
“Why? You’re alive, they’re dead. This is what you wanted, and this is the way of things for you, is it not?” she asked: reasonably, she thought, but he eyed her as if she were a stranger found suddenly standing beside him.
“Yah,” he said, and spat on the ground; smoke leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. “We watch death and imagine it as if it were ours, our comrades’. Because it could have been. Will be, someday.”
“Is that why he vomits?”
“Maybe. Yes. No. Ask him, why don’t you.”
“Why don’t they all turn away?” She gestured.
“Some lost family,” Takase said. “They want to see these others die.”
“It doesn’t bring them back.”
“You lost your family, girl. Didn’t you want to kill someone, anyone, after that?” Takase rubbed his eyes. “Gah, I’ll go blind from this smoke. There are people who love death, who kill because it fills them with joy.”
“Oh, yes,” Kagaya-hime said softly. “Because the killing reminds them that they, at least, are alive.” A timber broke and collapsed inward, and a flame as tall as the trees shot up from the building’s interior. They stood in silence for a while. “Why do you watch this?”
Takase said. “I watch because—” He gave a short laugh. “I’m dying; I might as well tell you the truth. I’m here because I’m better at war than at anything else.”
“I also,” Kagaya-hime said. Cat and commander understood one another.
Fire in the night: the priest from the nunnery has been with me, and tells me to contemplate the sutras when I cannot sleep, as happens increasingly. It is my salvation, he tells me: my hope for rebirth into enlightenment.
But tonight I cannot. It is the tenth month now (can I have written for two whole months? I recall beginning these notebooks in the eighth month). I have been cold for so long, but for some reason tonight, when winter’s first frost glitters under the nearly full moon, I am sweltering as much as I did when my courses stopped, all those years ago. I do not hurt so much tonight, but earlier this evening the flush of heat drove me out walking a little, leaning on Shigeko until her back creaked. Now Shigeko sleeps, and I shift restlessly, pulling my sweat-sticky robes away from my skin.
Dmei. His skin felt good, tasted better. Like any civilized man, he wore scent, and I remember he smelled of Chinese oranges and sandalwood; but beneath that was something rich as pheasant-meat, musky but sweet. I can remember it so vividly; if I close my eyes, it is so strong that I can imagine him in my room, and see him untying his hakama-trousers behind my eyelids. He looks across the room at me, his eyes glinting with humor and passion. My heart pounds; I am choked with longing, sweet and hot and tart, like biting into sun-warmed fruit. He always loved to touch my throat, even lay his cheek and lips against it as we made love. My hand (the memory of his hand) reaches up to touch my neck and I feel—this. Skin as fragile and furred and folded as much-used mulberry paper. This is an old woman’s throat. My throat. Dmei is gone, and I am dying, and I will never never never be young again and feel his touch.
In my secret heart, I curse all the gods and Buddhas who permitted me to become old, who let Dmei go.
Dmei could not sleep nights, or did not sleep well, at any rate. Dreams haunted him, dreams he could never (or chose never to) tell me when I awakened him, unsettled by the inarticulate sounds he made, the sweaty thrashing as he fought the bed robes.
It is not a bad thing to have a lover who does not sleep well, when he may only visit you in the hours between dusk and dawn. Nights, we made love frequently and slept seldom, and I dozed my days away. I wonder (now, with the wisdom that has nothing to do with contemplation and everything to do with age) whether we had sex so often and so enthusiastically because he wished to batter himself against my body until he was too exhausted to dream.
But there was a night I had forgotten until this moment. It was winter, and snow was falling. This numbed the air, muffled it as thoroughly as summer humidity ever did. I had a bet with Dmei about making snow mountains, so two of my women and Dmei’s two attendants chased around the peony courtyard throwing up plumes as they pawed the snow into heaps. Dmei and I and the rest of my attendants watched, feet close to the braziers we had brought onto the veranda. The men were faster and more efficient, of course, so I sent Shigeko out to assist my team. Dmei protested the cheat, and when I only laughed and tossed my head, he waded into the snow himself, tossing snow between his legs, dog-style, onto his mountain.
So, improper as it was, I went out myself to regain the advantage for my side. Others of my women tumbled after me. Protesting through his laughter, Dmei tossed a handful of snow my way, a slow bright cascade in the torches. And I tossed snow at him, and my women at the men and at one another, and soon the courtyard was filled with squeals and screeching, for all the world as if we were none of us old enough to be trusted with using ink. As with the mountain-building, at first the men had the advantage of us, but I learn quickly, and it was no time at all before I had realized that the snow threw farther and more accurately when compressed into firm balls the size of a fist.—Which is not to say I was any better at this than I had been at shooting arrows at a target: I missed far more often than I hit, and even then it was not usually what I aimed at.
Dmei encouraged me to fling these balls at him, his laughter muffled, granted intimacy by the snow-filled air. He tossed his own carefully, close enough to incite me, distant enough not to strike me.
I tossed my balls of snow and learned: harder next time, and a little more to the right. I threw one so well that he was forced to duck. And the next time, when he was distracted by a snowball from Shigeko, I struck him solidly on the side of the face.
A face full of snow cannot be pleasant—snow crunched tight until it is hard as wood must hurt like being struck with a club. The snowball exploded into dust and smoke. Dmei dropped into a crouch of sorts, then leapt toward me, hands out to strike, eyes unrecognizing. I dropped to my knees, preparing to die. He would not mean it. I knew this would be no more than the unconscious slap of a man at a mosquito, a dog snapping at a flea that had bitten it. But I would be dead anyway.
I closed my eyes but I did not die, instead heard him fall to his knees before me, heard horror in his voice as he whispered my name.
This was the end of the snow-games that night. I coaxed him to stay with me, behind my curtains for a while, because the look in his eyes had frightened me, and I needed to replace it in my memory with other, tenderer expressions. He stayed because—I don’t know why he stayed. I loved him, lived in his sleeve (and he in mine) for a year and a season; and I think I never knew who he was. He was Dmei, the man from the hinterlands. He was a wild animal come to stay in my garden for a time. I watched him and wondered, but I never understood.
Dmei slept that night, though he did not often do so in my presence—slept and dreamt. I woke in the darkness, to the sound of a man crying, and it was him, sobbing as he slept. I cannot say what had happened to the lamp, the braziers, for we lay in a darkness like the inside of mourning sleeves. I called his name; when this did not awaken him, I touched his hand and then his cheek.
“What?” He thrashed awake.
“It’s just I.” When I stroked his face, I found it wet, and his body shaking. “What is it?”
“I was at the Moki estate, with my father—” The Moki estate: I knew this place from a casual allusion he made once to one of his attendants. The Mononobe clan and the Moki had fought; the Mononobe had won. “—and they were crying, all the women, inside the house. I heard them screaming.”
“Hush, hush. It’s all right. You’re here now. You’re awake.”
“I was awake then, too, Harueme.”
I barely breathed, for I had never heard this tone in his voice before.
Lamplight and even daylight change what we say. We see someone’s face and adjust our conversations accordingly: catch her interest, make him laugh. Certain things can be said only in darkness, true darkness, where one cannot see fear or horror or disgust in one’s auditor. In the light (and there is always light, it seems: moon and stars, embers if nothing else; but not this night, not as it lives in my memory) Dmei spoke of a thousand pleasant or amusing things: stories of his brothers, his horses, pranks and games and delights—it is no wonder I longed to see his home! He said nothing of battles, though I knew there had been several.
But the snow-fight and now the darkness—he spoke, in a voice I scarcely recognized. He had seen just such a night-attack as this I have written, years before. The fire that Kagaya-hime watches is his story—or the story I imagined behind his disjointed fragments of image and sentence that night; for he did not say, this happened and then that happened. He gave only details: how the screams ended in gurgles, sobs, an old man’s voice that said, “I’m tired, mama”; the mixed smells of wet thatch and the burning dead; a lone baby crying in the growing heap of bodies by the door until it fell silent.
I thought at first this was a nightmare he recounted. It could not be possible for someone I knew, loved—for Dmei—to have experienced this. I asked no questions, for I could think of none I might want answered. I held him until he stopped shaking and squeezing out the bitter words. He fell silent and turned to me, and we had sex again: wordless this time, and fierce as cats mating. He left shortly after this, still in the strange total darkness, and never slept in my rooms again, though he visited as often as he ever had.
In the morning I was not at all sure that I had not been dreaming. I asked Shigeko as she picked up scattered robes and sleeve-papers from my sleeping enclosure, but fatigued from the snow-fight, she had fallen asleep and heard nothing. This has always seemed strange to me, that the one night that Dmei spoke of war was the only night she failed to stay awake with me.—He forgot his sash, I remember now; Shigeko and I found it when we first started to empty these trunks.
“Shigeko?” I ask now. It is morning and bitterly cold. I have all my screens closed, but when one of my women came for my chamber box, I had a glimpse of the garden thick with fog, peony-colored in the rising sun. It is truly autumn now. I will leave soon, as soon as these words stop pouring from me, like a flux that cannot be cured.
Shigeko has been sleeping beside me as I fill this notebook. My favorite sandalwood-handle brush grew heavy, so I took up this brush, so much lighter in my tired hand. She awakened a short time ago; now she picks up the scraps of sleeve-paper I used to test this brush, for I tossed them on the floor. This could almost be that morning, forty years ago, when she gathered the papers left by sex with Dmei—though her hair is frosted silver, and her movements are careful, as if her fingers were unfired clay and too fragile to use heedlessly. If the moments of my life might be sorted, not by hours and years, but by all the times I have held a brush, perhaps Shigeko’s life might best be measured by the papers she has picked up.
“Do you remember Mononobe no Dmei?” I ask her. This is the first time we have spoken of him in—twenty? thirty?—years.
She smiles slightly. “Of course, my lady.”
“Do you recall the night we had the snow-fight, he and his men and you and I and—”
She thinks for a moment. “Murasaki and Tamiko and Hashi were there, as well.”
“No doubt,” I say to her: I cannot keep track of all the women who have attended me over the years. “That night, after we retired—were you there?”
“Oh, yes
,” she says. “He—had bad dreams, as I recall.”
“You heard him, then? He said things?” I did not dream them? And you recall such a small thing, so many years later?
“I could not sleep, my lady. It was very dark. I was thinking about the snow, remembering the fight—” She smiles again. “That was fun, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “I only remembered it when I began—” I gesture at the notebook with my brush, which I see is drying, the ink caking into the bristles.
“Truly, my lady?” She looks surprised. “I have never forgotten.”
“It was not a dream, then? What he said that night?”
“About the—fire, when those people died.” She shivers and goes without my asking her to stir up the coals in the brazier. “Yes,” she says absently.
“It was not a dream, then,” I say, and I mean, not just that night, the words he said, but everything about Mononobe no Dmei, and how I loved him.
“No,” she says. “It was all real.”
What is it like, to die by fire? I have wished this fate on my cat-warrior’s family, and then on Osa Hitachi no Kitsune’s brother and his people; and now on the Abe, and all the hapless others that lived at this estate. There are fires in the capital nearly every year, and each time some tens or thousands die. Whenever there was a fire, I (through my women) followed its progress through the responses the guardsmen and passersby shouted to us as they hustled past. We clung to one another and imagined the fire might veer, and that somehow we might not be saved. It would creep closer and closer, pillars of smoke and flame; choking fumes; some touching final poems exchanged—
Well, really, what were we thinking? We played with the fire, thrilling ourselves with the notion of deaths so unlikely and exciting, just as a child pokes a stick at a sleeping mastiff, confident that the rope that holds it will not break. We already knew that we would die by childbirth and disease and old age. Fire, or drowning, or freezing to death would all be exciting deaths, so much more glamorous than the circumscribed borders of our lives.