by Kij Johnson
We were fools—or I was, anyway. No matter its form, death is not exciting. Or it is always exciting. I do not yet know which. Frankly, I have no desire to know.
In the morning, most of the fires were out at the destroyed estate. What remained burned on, sullenly stubborn but easy enough to avoid.
Kagaya-hime had never lost her cat’s skill at walking over uneven surfaces, so she climbed farther into the collapsed main house than the others dared. She stooped under a beam and found herself in a strange gap where the wall had not completely collapsed, holding the ceiling beams clear. The space was slick with ash and water, and filled with the scents of burning and rain.—And ghosts: a man screaming and clawing at the remains of the wall; another bent over and weeping tears of blood that vanished when they fell; a woman lying beside a charred body, as if asleep beside a lover.
Kneeling at Kagaya-hime’s feet, a ghost woman pawed at a collapsed timber.
“You can go now,” Kagaya-hime said. It seemed futile work, even to a cat. “Most of the others have.”
The ghost woman looked up. “My husband—I think he’s here, but I can’t seem to—help me. Please.”
“You’re dead.” A drop of water landed on the back of Kagaya-hime’s hand and left a black circle; she rubbed it away. “Everyone is.”
“If we’re both dead, why can’t I find him?” the ghost said reasonably. “He should be right here, yes?”
Kagaya-hime looked around the dark reeking space. “There are others here, but I can’t tell if they are your husband.”
“Where?” The ghost leapt up, and Kagaya-hime could see a corpse, black as the wood that pinned it; though there was no telling whether it was the ghost’s corpse, or that of the husband it sought. “Where is he?”
“There are people there”—Kagaya-hime pointed at the ghost men—“and there. But—”
The ghost whirled to look. “There’s no one!” It sagged to its knees, tears red on its face. “I’m alone. Why would you lie?”
“I see them,” Kagaya-hime said. She stepped across to the weeping ghost man, who looked up, confused. She held her hand just above its head. “Here is one.”
The ghost man looked up at her hand. “What are you? Why are you alive?”
The ghost woman’s face crumpled. “There is nothing there, nothing but darkness. Don’t mock me.”
“Never mind,” Kagaya-hime said. After a moment, the ghost man covered its face with its hands; the ghost woman knelt again, to scrabble uselessly at the timber that trapped the corpse.
Kagaya-hime picked her way forward, through the darkness. Impatient with their stupidity, she did not speak to the other ghosts; but she heard something living, a high fast panting, and following it she found a dog with blood on its muzzle, hind legs crushed by a fallen chest. The dog did not lift its head at her approach, so she crouched and brought her face to its muzzle.
“It hurts,” the dog said.
“I can make it stop,” she said, “but then you’ll be dead.”
The dog panted for a time, then: “Yes.”
Kagaya-hime slit the dog’s throat. The breathing ended with a soft, wet noise. The body twitched once, and again. And then the dog shook itself free of its body, stood, and stretched. “Much better,” it said. “This is dead?”
Kagaya-hime nodded. The markings on the living dog had been concealed by ash and blood, but the dog’s ghost was clean: gold-brown coat, black muzzle and paws. “I did not know that dogs had ghosts.”
The ghost nosed at its corpse. “Neither did I. Now what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re dead. Everyone is.”
“I guess. Hey, there’s my lady.” The ghost dog pricked its ears forward.
“You can see her?”
“I see everyone,” it said. “Dead, like you said. She looks upset. I better check.”
“I don’t think—” Kagaya-hime began, but it was already gone across the short distance to the ghost woman trying to lift the timber.
“My lady?” the dog said.
The ghost woman did not look up. “Not now, Goldie, I’m busy.” The woman stopped suddenly and looked at the dog, realizations tumbling one after the other. A dog spoke: no, it is dead: no, we are both dead, and yet we see one another. I am not alone. Trembling, the ghost woman reached for the dog’s shoulder. Ghost touched ghost; she cried aloud, and pressed her face against the glossy immaterial fur.
Dogs, even ghost dogs, are only patient with tears for a time. It wriggled a little in her arms and said, “Now what?”
She wiped her eyes and looked around. “My husband—”
“Don’t see him,” the dog said. “He’s gone.”
“Oh,” she said, believing the dog as she had not Kagaya-hime.
Kagaya-hime said, “You, dog—you see all the ghosts, yes?”
“I suppose,” the dog’s ghost said. “My lady, let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” Kagaya-hime said. “Are there mouse ghosts?”
The dog seemed to shrug. “See for yourself. My lady, can we go now?”
“Yes,” the woman’s ghost said, and at her voice a beam overhead shifted, ash and water cascading down. Shouts outside the building: “Girl! Are you in there?” When Kagaya-hime lifted her head from her protecting arms, the air was white with drifting ash. The ghost woman and dog were gone.
The other ghosts wept and screamed and slept on, unheeding. Kagaya retraced her steps carefully, but saw no mouse ghosts.
In all, Takase’s party found forty corpses and another score of things that might once have been bodies. I wish I could say that the peasant man Mori’s sister and her family survived, but it seems unlikely.
War and passion are caused by disturbances of the humors, an imbalance of yin and yang, too much fire or air, not enough water or wood. And yet the monks tell me that there is karma, and cause and effect; that war and passion (and sickness, and death) happen because they have been earned in some way. But this is nonsense. The peasant man whose sister died at the burned estate, and Kagaya-hime, who has lost her tale, and I, who die of this pressure in my lungs—what precisely earns these specific punishments?
Only in stories do things make sense.
11. The Ten-Ox Notebook
I have been so tired lately. We have emptied many of the trunks, but there are still what seem a thousand more. It is not the pain that keeps me awake. I am curious about this monogatari tale I tell: curious about the cat, and even curious about myself. My story ends, as all tales do, in death—or, more truthfully, my story ends just before that, when I put down this brush and retreat to Kasugano at last.
And that will be when the last of these empty notebooks is filled, and the last of the filled trunks is emptied. I replace things with words, I see. And after that? The notebooks are things, as well. As such, I suppose that even they will be put on the fire, when all is finished.
When I am done with the notebooks (and my life), there will be left the word: remember… Shigeko will think of me until she is dead, I hope with kindness. My great-grandnephew the emperor may have occasion to think of me when he is grown old; may even teach some child the song I taught him. Finally there will be no one who remembers me. I will be a name on a list, like the consorts of emperors five hundred years dead.
I should not be holding a brush when I feel like this.
I remember this from the Chinese guides to war-making that I borrowed from my half-brother the emperor: a small force in the territory of an enemy of superior numbers must utilize speed and surprise if it is to prevail. The war band of Seiwa Minamoto no Takase was still a hundred miles from the primary estate of the enemy. They (no doubt sensibly) did not choose to follow the main road north. This followed the course of Kitakawi river for many tens of miles, and led through villages and past forts and estates. There were many possibilities of losing surprise, and the almost certainty that soldiers assigned here would resent an unauthorized assault.
There was another way,
a route that crawled over the flanks of mountains, and crept beside streams of icy water so fast that a horse more than knee-deep might be swept away and die. There were villages and farms along this way as well, but fewer of them, and no forts. The route followed ox-wide roads in the valleys, and hunters’ trails over the mountains. Here, two hundred fifty men and their horses (for others had left the war band, summoned or lured home) had more chance of traveling north without unwanted attention.
The Chinese guides do not mention this, but there is another thing required for a conflict of this sort, something so fundamental that I think that they overlook it. Strike fast, yes; and strike with surprise; but more importantly, strike hard, hard enough that the enemy reels and does not regain his balance. The books were full of strategy and tactics, a million details; but at its heart, war is about a single thing: violence. The war band understood this, as all the Chinese sages did not.
The band moved quickly. Estates were far apart, sometimes no more than a handful of buildings and a series of fields carved from the otherwise unending forest. The fields were often better tended than the structures, filled with horses (“not so good as ours,” Kitsune said to Kagaya-hime one day) or grain, still no more than slim green shoots in the wet dirt.
Strategy was simple: the war band approached an estate and burned it to the ground. Anyone they found—peasant, child, country noble—they killed. If it was dusk when they found a place, they made camp in outbuildings, and burned the main house and fields: lighting a fire for the night, the men called it, and laughed.
The assumption was that anyone found between the estate where Abe no Juro was killed and the main estate of the Abe would be an ally of the Abe—if you could call people this when they had no options, and were in any case more interested in whether their poultry stayed healthy. This assumption was probably true, though “ally” is a flexible term in a world where a loyal follower can leave a marching war band with no dishonor because he is summoned home by the birth of a son, the sickness of a parent, a possible blight in the buckwheat, or an ill-omened dream.
The local inhabitants did not send north for assistance; by the time they realized assistance might be required, they were dead, or too busy fighting fires and mourning the lost. Perhaps they did not think to send north. Takase’s men did not explain their goals as they advanced, even to the few survivors. There was no reason to be sure that this force was directed at the Abe and not another of the powerful families that bickered across Mutsu province. The locals may even have believed the war band was no more than robbers, if better equipped and in greater numbers than usual.
There was warning for the people north of the war band, of course: smoke from a fire makes a towering signpost, the more so when it is night and the southern horizon shimmers angry orange. And messengers did get out: desperate youths on horses stolen from the fields, mothers cuddling infants in slings fashioned of charred cottons; but their messages were locally directed, to a daughter married in a neighboring village, a cousin working on one of the estates.
Men and women are full of contradiction. Even as they believe every runny nose is harbinger to the kaze-cold that will kill them, they convince themselves that the man idling alongside the road fingering his sword is no threat, and when they are too close to escape they are shocked to find his intentions are hostile. The residents saw the fires and they heard those few who fled; but they hoped that the band would pass somewhere else or ignore them, that the weather would change and hide them, that the gods would somehow save them.
The gods save no one. The fires continued. While there were men who loved the killing, for most men the willingness ebbed and flowed. There were moments when it was simple, others when a man could not bring himself to draw his bow. Many men grow sick of killing just after a battle: they shiver as if cold, and vomit and cry easily. This is why there were always survivors: stay quiet and hidden, pretend you are not there, and the men of the war band, grateful that the worst is over, will pretend that you are not there, either. You will not follow to avenge yourself. You will not report them, even supposing there is someone who cares, who is not grateful that the attack fell on you and not them. You will be too busy burning or burying your dead, tracking your escaped animals into the forests, saving what you can of the fields.
Some of the allies left the war band as they lost their taste for killing; others fought on out of loyalty to Takase or the Osa Hitachi, or (more often) a desire that the men of their campfire not despise them. Kagaya-hime had no bad times when she could not kill. Neither did Osa Hitachi no Kitsune, whose brother had been slaughtered and who was half-fox, which means killing-blood.
And Takase never faltered. I wonder about this, for I do not think he is a cruel man; but he is old, after all, and there are things we must finish before we die, so that we know who we are when the time comes. A military man spends his life preparing for war, and perhaps he never sees it, or sees it in an imperfect form, in unimportant squabbles and artificial conflicts. Takase had fought, and led men, but that was many years ago, and often to no real purpose. Revenge is a simple motivation: aiding loyal followers is a good one. Me, I think that he wished to be a warrior once more before he died.
The boy who was to be my husband touched me that first night, a clammy, shaking hand pressed against my breast as if he were stanching a wound, and (because he could not untie the knot) incompetent gropings through the folds of my hakama-trousers, which grew soaked only by his nervous sweat. And then it was dawn, and he was gone.
I vomited and then slept the day away, and Shigeko made everyone—attendants, inquisitive cousin and uncle’s messenger, priests and monks—leave me alone. I did not even see the morning letter he sent. Poetry is nothing but lies (I will love you for all the years of the pine; we will share a thousand lives), and she guessed that I would have little pleasure in any poem he might send. She wrote the response for me, and only showed me the exchange after I awakened and washed and ate sweet foods, hoping to clear my mouth of a terrible taste I could not identify.
The second night. Again my cousin and my suitor and all their attendants, the endless idiotic conversation. I had a headache but could not allow it to interfere with this oh, so important visit, so I left the burden of conversation to others (in our years together Shigeko has suffered much for me), and watched the moon move through clouds as thin and transparent as silk gauze robes. Again came the false yawns and “appointments elsewhere,” and we were alone, he and I, six feet of boxwood floor and a curtain-stand between us.
Evidently he had spent the day thinking of our night together, for he was not so shy this time. “It grows quite cold”—though in fact it was unseasonably warm, that night—” May I come sit beside you?” he asked. I could hear a hundred rehearsals in his carefully casual voice.
“Oh, no!” I said in a voice that was no doubt as artificial as his own. “That would be quite improper.” On my side of the curtain I exchanged a glance with Shigeko (who was there, of course, with two others of my women); it had been some time since anyone had been quite so gawky in his pursuit.
The correct response to this, of course, is, “I will do nothing, just talk, I swear,” a statement patently false, reassuring only in its predictability. But he was hopeless. On this, his second night, he had decided to make up for last night’s clumsiness by being as debonair as possible, which at thirteen is not at all. He crawled around the edge of my curtain-stand, tangling his feet in the long legs of his hakama-trousers. “You’re even more beautiful the second time,” he smirked.
I itched to slap him, but he was my husband, after all—or would be. He would (one hoped) mature into a civilized man. In the meantime, it was my responsibility to use my skills to set him at ease, to show him desire and release. To educate him, train him into the man I wanted him to be. I was old enough to be his mother, after all: how hard could this be?
He showed an unseemly eagerness to dispense with the hakama-trousers and get down to cases, but it was a
bsurdly early. “Oh! A moth!” I said. “Tell me, my dear, are you interested in such things?” I tried not to sound like an adult making polite conversation to a child.
“Not unless they eat the silk right off you,” he said.
I gave it up. There would be other nights, years of them. Later, no doubt, he would display his (currently undetectable) virtues. And even if he grew no more pleasant, he would grow older and presumably less annoying; and there would be other wives and consorts and lovers. I might not even see him from one month to the next. As for tonight, at least he would not care (or perhaps even realize) that any poems I might make were uninspired.
And so I said the things I should say, and tried not to either laugh or cry. He pushed aside my robes and then loosened my hakama-trousers (left untied this time, the cord only looped over itself, to avoid a second disaster) and pushed them down until they clumped around my knees and ankles, an awkward and unappealing wad of fabric.
In my turn, I untied the knot that held his trousers in place, priding myself on my grace in doing so: it is strange how one focuses on tiny benisons when trapped in unpleasantness. He was erect, and not inconsiderably sized. I made the appropriate admiring noises, and touched him, gently and then firmly, feeling the heat of his skin, the texture of his flesh, soft over firm.
But it had been some time since I’d had sex with a young man and I had forgotten certain things. He spent almost immediately all over my iris-colored robes, surprising us both.
And even this might have brought us together. A shared mis-step can do that, if handled with charm and humor. Instead he tried to ignore the situation, his sullen embarrassment a poor way to handle it. Since he was hard again almost immediately (ah, youth), he laid me down into the cooling stickiness of my ruined robes, not even pausing to slide the hakama-trousers off my legs.