by Kij Johnson
Some things he knew. He entered me easily enough, with minimal fumbling, though his thrusting was feverish and clumsy. By this time I was too annoyed with him to do more than the minimum to encourage him. In his inexperience, he did not recognize the signs of my disinterest, and I resented him for that, as well. When he spent for the second time, I cried out and closed my eyes—in gratitude.
Poor boy. It is so many years since then, and now I realize it was not entirely his fault that things did not work. True, he was a smirking, self-absorbed monkey as gauche as he was stupid. But I was resentful and ungenerous, and did not conceal that I despised him. I could not stop thinking of Dmei, and how different things would have been with him.
That was the second night of the three nights required for our wedding to be final. He stayed until dawn, as was required for the marriage to be formalized, but we said almost nothing after that. He drank plum wine as quickly as Shigeko brought it to him, and looked out at the garden, spurning my every attempt at conversation—for I knew I was behaving badly, and I tried to smooth things over with courtesy. As the sky paled, he took me again, one final time, quickly and angrily, and was gone.
I was not present for the third night of my marriage.
After our second night, my husband-to-be left at dawn. He did not stalk out, as I suppose he thought he was doing, instead flouncing with all the maturity of a child in a tantrum. He gathered his closest attendants (who had spent their night on the veranda, near the screens of some of my women), and they swung off, down a long walkway that led to the residence’s east gate. The sky had lightened enough that I saw them clearly, but all the curtains and eye-blinds and lattices and screens cut my view into tiny random shapes: here, half of an angry face; there, a hand caught in a gesture without meaning.
Even after they were gone, and Shigeko and the other women started to bathe and dress me, I watched the world in fragments. The lattices that hung from the eaves broke everything into tiny squares, and even these were hidden in places by the eye-blinds, which left only slivers of light and motion. In one place, a half-opened screen revealed a narrow stripe of the world: silver-blue sky, and a part of a cloud, and a tree’s crown, a tiled roof, other lattices and verandas, and ivy and white stones, all no wider than my hand at arm’s length. And everything was hazed by the silk gauze of the curtains of state that surrounded me.
The squares and slices and slivers hinted at the world, but did not offer it. I had grown used to this, had learned to see a splintered world and conclude the rest. Even when I stood outside, as sometimes happened, my world was a shred of the whole world, the real world, bounded by walls and roofs and carefully planted trees. And even the hill Fudaoka and the mountains to the east and west, all as familiar as the rips in the screens around my bed.
My uncle and cousin called. I could not deny them a visit, but I had little enough to say to their plans for the marriage. The boy sent his morning poem, surprisingly shy and so late that he must have spent some hours sweating to get the words right. I replied with something meaningless about plovers at dusk, crying for loneliness. I have never seen a plover, I thought, but I sent the letter anyway, grateful for the emptiness of poetry.
When we have been awake all night, we commonly sleep the day away; the more so when the next night promises no rest. By midday most of my women had retired, though several stayed with me, concealing their yawns so poorly that I sent them away. And then there were only myself and Shigeko, who might as well be my skin, so closely joined are we. The air was warm, and hummed with insects I could not see. The shreds of the world shifted as breezes arose and then collapsed, as the sun moved inexorably across a sky I saw only in shards. Shigeko drowsed beside me, head on a porcelain pillow padded with worn China-silk. I did not read, nor list such observations as I had been lately making, about the feathered legs of crows. I carefully, carefully, thought of nothing at all.
I said aloud: “I will leave now.” I made no decision. It was as if my words decided for me.
My voice awoke Shigeko, who sat up, blinking.
“My lady?” she said. “Did you speak?” Her hair had been tied back with many little paper tapes, but strands had pulled free to make her outline hazy, indistinct.
“Nothing,” I said. “I said nothing.”
It does not take many days to travel from the burned-out estate to the main estate of the Abe. Despite the trail of fires and deaths left in the war band’s wake, it took fewer still for the news to reach the head of the clan. After tragedy most people are distracted by their situation or their grief; but there are others who flee, salvaging nothing from their ruined lives; still others who burn, hot and fast as paper, for revenge. The Abe main estate swarmed with those few who had seen the burnings, and more who had heard the tales and run northward, away from the danger. To the south, there was always smoke in pillars or veils, and a greasy look to the air. Sunsets were astonishing reds and golds.
The leader of the clan was a man fifty years of age, Abe no Norit. No one had lived through the burning of the first estate; but Norit must have known or guessed that this trail of fire led straight from where his fourth son had lived and died. Grief and the desire for revenge often share the surface of a single stone. Where does one end and the other begin? No one can tell, not even the stone.
Norit’s resources for a war (even a small one) were not great. It was the middle of the fourth month: food is short, for the winter’s stores have been used up and the foods of the new year—sweet potatoes and taro and daikon and azuki beans—are not yet grown. People are scarce, as well, for there are so many up in the pastures with the horses, or busy in the fields, or with the silkworms. Everyone is tired; the harder they work now, the better they will eat come winter, and the more easily they will pay their taxes to the provincial governor. Of Norit’s three remaining sons, only one remained at the estate; another was in the capital, at court as a guardsman; the third was far to the west, settling a dispute. Potential allies were mostly wrapped up in the affairs of their own estates and households; they had their own storehouses to fill and taxes to pay.
Still, Norit could gather one hundred fifty horsemen: with attendants, nearly four hundred men. He could not know the size of the advancing war band (survivors thought there were a thousand, or a thousand thousand), but he fought on his own ground. If he himself did not know every stick and stone of the territory, he knew or could find someone who did.
Ambush would be possible but difficult. Though the advancing war band mostly traveled along the narrow stretch of flatland between mountains following a river course, there would be scouts and outriders expecting ambush, and a wary target is the hardest to hit. There were several places where the flatland widened out into a plain of sorts, which would make face-to-face battle possible. Combine what looked like a straightforward battle with sharp-eyed bowmen on the mountains; this might prevail over slightly greater numbers, and if the advancing force was smaller, it might end in the valley. If nothing else, there would be time for Norit’s household to retreat to an ancient ki-stockade a few miles to the west. Norit sent a messenger south with a challenge: battle, on the twentieth day of the sixth month, on the plain beside the village of gen.
A scout came to Takase one evening, carrying the challenge, still wedged into its cleft stick. Takase, Kitsune, and Kagaya-hime were in an open-walled pavilion a little way up a mountain slope, upwind, where the smell of the smoke from the burning farmhouse below was faint. It was too early for mosquitoes, but the first gnats hovered in the air, annoying as dust.
“I killed someone, who was coming up from the north and the west, moving fast,” the scout said. “I found this afterward.”
“You killed the messenger?” said Kitsune. “Was he attacking you?”
“I hit him from cover.” The scout gave something very close to a shrug. “He’s the enemy. He didn’t exactly have a banner saying ‘envoy.’”
“Unfortunate,” Takase snapped. “If we respond, now we must
send one of our own. There’s no reason to think they will be any gentler with our man than we have been with theirs. Well. Let’s see what the Abe have to say.”
Kagaya-hime was a little apart from the others, only there at all because she did not care for the smoke down in the valley; it was easier to bind arrowheads to new shafts where the air was clear. “Girl, come here,” Takase called. “They’ll meet us. Find someone who can bring us to gen, and we’ll finish this.”
As it happened, the scout was sent with the message to Norit’s estate. Only his family care whether he survived or not.
gen was not hard to find: follow the river upstream, and it will be one of the villages alongside: if not this one, then the next or the next. The twentieth day of the sixth month was three days away, which gave the war band ample time to scout the ground and find defensible shelter—for a promise to fight on a given day is no guarantee that one side or the other will not try to win the night before.
They settled into a large but rustic farm less than a mile south of gen. The farm was halfway up the mountain’s flank, snugged against an outcropping of rock that kept even archers too far away to attack from above. There were ten or so buildings, and (once the reluctant inhabitants had been removed) these were comfortable for the men and their horses. Still: many scouts, many guards, many sentries.
This was a wet year. It is as well they found good roofs and hard walls, because it rained for two days in a row, and even the newly thatched main house developed leaks and that pervasive smell one gets in steady rain.
There were things to be done before the battle but not many, for the war band had been fighting for some days. The men slept as much as they could, and saw to the horses and their gear, swapping stories as they braided cord for new reins, or refletched arrows.
Kagaya-hime was restless. This might be expected, for she had traveled long, driven by kami and her own losses. No: it was something more immediate than that, a fever that flushed her cheeks and breasts and left her too agitated to stay long in one place. She could not be comfortable. She snapped at her woman Uona, more at her man Otoko; most of all at the men of the war band. Their presence was like sand caught in a graze, or a flea’s bite: pain and an excruciating itch that she could not scratch. She scouted as much as possible, far from everyone, but even the mountains held men, bear hunters and hermits and such. She killed several; after the first day, when she returned with three quivers and five swords that were not her own, Takase forbade her to leave camp unless she could control herself. “They needed it,” she snarled.
Takase was meeting with certain of his captains and the priestess Onobe no Kesuko beside the fire. Kagaya-hime paced the room, hands crooked into claws. The captains were always a little afraid of Kagaya-hime, who was strange in a way they could not quite define, so they avoided her eyes; but Takase and the priestess watched her with more-or-less well-concealed amusement, each for his or her own reason. “Why did they need to be killed?” Takase said.
Kagaya-hime stopped, taken aback. “I needed to get past them. And they might take reports to the Abe.”
“It is a temptation to kill everyone who gets in your way, but people try not to do this too often. It leads to this.” Takase gestured. “Wars.”
She started pacing again. “Their smell—they irritated me.”
Kesuko snorted. “I am sure it did. Listen: I recognize this fever. It will pass.”
“No one feels this,” Kagaya-hime snapped.
“On the contrary,” Kesuko said. “Most of us do, sooner or later.” She smiled slightly.
A messenger interrupted them all, and the topic was dropped. Neither Kagaya-hime nor Takase thought to ask what Kesuko meant by this, and in any case priestesses are famed for statements that make little sense, except in retrospect.
At Kesuko’s recommendation, Kagaya-hime was allowed scouting again (“Better to have her far away, when she feels like this,” she said), though the cat woman stayed high in the mountains where she saw few people, and none up close. Well, almost no one: Kitsune also scouted, and they encountered one another on the second afternoon.
Kagaya-hime walked along a ridge that had a good view of the valley, just inside the trees. Ahead was a small covered shrine, one side open to the overlook. The vermilion paint was nearly gone, leaving only bare wood dark with rain, and the roof tiles had gathered moss and pine needles until the shrine seemed to fade into the woods around it. Kagaya-hime knew someone was there, though there was little to hear over the steady hissing of the rain through foliage, and less to smell. Well, then: if this one spied on the war band, she would kill him. She approached silently from the shrine’s blind side, short sword loose in her hand. She came around and saw sandaled feet stretched out, and leggings; and a bow tipped against one leg, ready for use. A basket-quiver stood on its block base holding a dozen arrowheads of every shape. Kagaya-hime sheathed her sword as she stepped around to see Kitsune. “Keep better watch,” she snarled.
Kitsune had grabbed his bow and settled the arrow she had not seen until she saw him pick it up, a single quick motion. A leaf-headed arrow, long-shafted and designed for killing. He lowered bow and arrow to his lap, and spat on the ground. “Are you trying to get killed?” he asked.
“I think I would not be the dead one,” she said.
“Huh. Fish?” he said. He had been eating, rice balls and pickled fish.
“Yes.” She squatted on her heels, back to a post that held up the roof. The fish tasted of vinegar and salt and smoky earth. His smell, his closeness, his presence, still bothered her, but she was hungry. “You should have heard me,” she said. “Or smelled me.”
“Through this?” He pointed at the rain sifting down.
“A fox is supposed to have sharp senses. It was part of the fudoki, the—tale.”
He picked up the leaf-headed arrow and stabbed it point-down into the ground. “I am no fox.”
“You are half one,” she said. “I see it and smell it on you.”
“I have not been one, not since I was a boy.”
“You’ve been a man so long? You’ve never wished to taste a fox’s world?”
Kitsune laughed. “My brothers thought I cheated at all our games, anyway. If I had been changing back and forth—? It was easier to stay human. Human is good.”
She looked away. “No. I would kill everyone I know to become a cat again.”
“Ah,” Kitsune said. “So that is what you are.”
“It is what I was. The kami—someone—took everything away.”
“You are Kagaya-hime now,” Kitsune said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“It is nothing at all.” She leaned forward and her hair swept across her cheek, hiding him from her gaze. “I have no sisters and fellow-wives, no kittens, no ground to belong to us all, no tale.”
She heard in his voice that he smiled. “And yet I would have said you fit very well with us. You have sisters—my sister Nakara loves you; she wanted you to stay, or at least return with me. You have comrades in arms. You have a horse and servants, and can make a new home anytime you decide to.”
“And kittens?” she said, lifting her face to watch him. “Someone to pass the tale to?”
“Even those,” he said.
“Where are the toms?” she said bitterly. Her gesture included the trees, the camp, all of Mutsu province. “It is my season, and none are here.”
“Have you ever thought this body of yours might serve a purpose besides offering you clever paws? There are no toms here? I see no cats at all. I see a woman. You are surrounded by men. This is no problem at all, that I can see.”
“Do you think their smells—all your smells—don’t drive me mad?” she whispered. “But I will not have a human child.”
“You’re a cat, all cat. This”—he touched her shoulder—“is nothing. It’s like robes; you put them on, you take them off. This”—he touched her belly, where her soul lived—“is what you are. Which are you? Human or cat?”
; “Cat.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, cat.”
“Then why would you have a human child?”
“Oh,” she said, like a child understanding a lesson she has struggled with.
Sex. I was fourteen or so, new-come to court, and in love with every sweet-voiced guardsman I encountered. The first man who shared my robes was older than I by a few years and, I thought, handsome. Our conversations and letters would have incited a nun to sex, I think; while the experience itself was painful, I was so maddened by desire that I did not mind, even looked forward to this, since it meant that good as this was, subsequent caresses would be even better.—Though I cannot call his name to mind, my first lover. Or my second or third, for that matter—while I did not think of myself at the time as one who untied her sash for many, I loved the feel of flesh against flesh, and I suppose provincials might have called me wanton. I had no children, which certainly was easier than bearing one and finding a proper home for it.
What has made me think of sex?—Ah, yes: Kagaya-hime. I remember that burning she feels. She stalks through her days longing to ease an itch she does not know how to put her hands on. She aches; she shivers; she snarls and purrs in the same breath.
Kitsune was half-fox, and she a cat, both killing animals; but both human now. They have been speaking, words trotting back and forth. Her momentary peace is gone, and she paces the tiny width of the shrine. He stands and reaches toward her. Her hand comes up, fingers half-curled in what might be a memory of claws, or might be fingertips, curious about the texture of his skin. She touches his jawline, and his throat. He steps closer and slides his hand into her short, thick hair, soft and fine as cat’s fur.