Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  Dmei once told me that he missed war.

  “How can you?” I asked, shocked.

  He was drunk and more candid than usual: he slurred as he spoke. “I have never had such good friends.”

  “You are surrounded by people who love you,” I said, “and no one is dying here.” How could war be better than this? Than me?

  “We are all dying,” he said. “We just forget that when nothing is trying to kill us.”

  I said nothing (indeed, could think of nothing to say), and he lay back, arm thrown across his eyes. And he started to talk. I held myself silent, clinging to his words.

  The stories were not all interesting. Even the stories about battle focused on little, often banal things: a man who lost his helmet and part of the skin beneath it, slick as skinning a rabbit; someone-or-other’s armor lacings that had rotted due to the dye used on them, replaced at the last minute with hemp cord—though I cannot even picture this, so barbarous it sounds; a man with dysentery so foul that the men who shared his campfire the night after a fight called him The Yellow River. There were a lot of stories, and after a time, I saw that tears leaked past Dmei’s arm. He wept for these stupid stories.

  No: he wept for something else behind the stories: the men he shared them with, and the sharing that comes only when you think you die tomorrow.

  I have always thought I know what it is like when women are together: what we talk about and fret over, what matters to us—though lately I have begun to wonder whether I understand even Shigeko. But men with men? They are as foreign to me as the Chinese traders who came to court when I was nineteen. More: they are as foreign as listening to wolves talk, or tigers.

  I am so easily distracted these days. I tell Kagaya-hime’s story, but my own is as insistent. So: I said that men set watch and drank and talked.

  Takase and Kitsune sat at a sunken coal-pit in the middle of the building they slept in. Once he had brought tea and wine, Takase’s main attendant, as weathered and old as his master, settled back beside him, and talked with the ease that comes from decades of service to someone. There was a fire to discourage the insects: the men were too hot, but it was preferable to being bitten.

  The stories were not all about making war. Takase and his attendant (who was called Suwa, for the town he was born in) knew one another’s stories intimately; but they did not know Kitsune’s, nor he theirs; in any case it is no bad thing to hear such stories one last time, just before (possible) death. The men talked about their homes, their horses. As is typical, they talked about sex, swapping amusing or impressive encounters first, and, much later, the partners that mattered too much to discard thus casually, the women (and men) they loved: Takase’s first lover, Suwa’s wife, Kitsune’s favorite mistress. Kagaya-hime’s restlessness eased (or perhaps the mosquitoes grew worse than the restlessness), and she joined them in the bitter smoky air. They looked sidelong at her, but the tales went on. Such stories are not easily shared with strangers or women, but woman or no, she might die with them tomorrow: that made her no stranger.

  Takase had a single wife, a woman from a branch of the Hata clan. There had been a night when he had crept into her father’s residence and watched the moon with her. Just before dawn he gathered his courage (“You were afraid?” Kitsune said. “There are things more frightening than death,” Takase said. “If you haven’t figured that out, you’re even younger than you look”) and slipped behind her curtains, and they shared hurried, breathless, giggling sex, trying to be done before the household awoke.

  “It isn’t sex, is it?” Kagaya-hime interrupted him. “It’s not being alone.”

  Takase wheezed a laugh. “Clever you. Some people say it’s about love, but you’re right. I loved her, yes. But one of the things I loved about her is that when we were together I wasn’t alone. I had other lovers. None of them were like that for me.”

  “What about you?” Kitsune said to Kagaya-hime. “Have you loved anyone?”

  “My horse,” she said, and after a pause: “Your sister Nakara. Uona and Otoko perhaps.”

  “Ha,” Takase said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then I don’t know the answer.”

  “Well, you will wed none of them, I hope,” said Takase, and the topic changed.

  Much later, when the fire was guttering, and Suwa and Kitsune slept, their heads on their bundled armor, Takase and Kagaya-hime spoke.

  “A cat,” Takase said, for he had been told by Kitsune. “You’re new to the islands. Well, I’ve heard no harm of your kind; you injure no man, unless you claw him—and then I expect he deserves it. But I hadn’t heard that cats are so fond of travel.”

  “I have no home,” she said.

  Takase leaned back carefully, cradling his belly as he did so. “I’ve governed three provinces, lived in four residences at the capital. There were things I missed about all these places, but wherever I was, was home.”

  I have read the war tales that float around court. Everything in a battle seems very orderly: the armies meet; there are envoys and arrows back and forth; one side or both decide to attack, and there is a scramble to be first in battle; men shout out their names and ranks, looking for suitably ranked foes; horsemen with their bows; the lower-ranked foot soldiers with their hoko spears and their naginata and their freestanding heavy shields to dodge behind.

  But I am also familiar with the sorts of lies that are told for the sake of a story or to save face. I can imagine details the war tales do not bother (or choose) to mention. I can imagine a very different way of fighting.

  gen stands at the edge of a small plain, no more than a mile long, half that across. They grow rye and buckwheat there, rice on the nearer slopes of the mountains all around. Outside the village (which is not large—twenty houses, no more), there are wells, storehouses, farmhouses of those who do not choose to live as close to their neighbors as a village demands. With all this, there is not much space for a war band of seventy horses and their riders, and one hundred fifty grooms and attendants taking up arms as foot soldiers; even less for a defending force of nearly two hundred horsemen, and two hundred fifty more foot soldiers. Still, they manage. The two armies (for what else can I call them? The war tales are full of armies of ten thousand and more, but it seems more reasonable that armies are small. Where would one collect ten thousand horsemen willing to fight for the same thing, and where could they do so?) stand on opposite ends, north and south, of the valley. Battle is set for the dragon’s hour, midmorning.

  The members of Takase’s war band were awake before dawn. Fighting men claim they can sleep through anything, but some part of them remains alert, and will startle awake at certain sounds. Dmei did not sleep often in my company, but when he did he was oblivious to nearly everything—the laughter of my women and the men who visited them as they exchanged rude poetry on the verandas; shrill sh-pipes from a nearby garden; thunder and lightning. But he came wide awake at the tiny metallic scrape of my picking up a knife to cut my nails, or the chink of pottery cups against one another.

  Few people sleep well before a battle. Many gave up with the sky’s first brightening, and called softly for their attendants to build up the fires and bring them food and drink. These muted noises woke more men, and most of the camp was awake by the time the sun lifted itself above the mountains. It had been a cool night, and mist hung above the fields, dissolving only when daylight struck it. Across the plain, members of the Abe forces came down in twos and tens, early to the field.

  “Looks like a calm day,” Kitsune said to Takase. “The shields shouldn’t blow over.” Takase nodded absently, and tucked an arrow into his topknot, as northerners do.

  An army’s shields are man-tall and very heavy, layers of hard wood pegged together to make what must look like a door to nowhere. On the back of each shield are legs that hold it upright at a slight slant. The foot soldiers of an army erect these shields and use them as cover, jumping out to jab or slash at the riders and their horses with the hoko
spears and the naginata, then retreating to protect themselves from the horses—and the riders’ arrows, provided the horsemen bother to pay attention to groundlings.

  It is traditional that the opposing armies plant their shields a hundred paces apart. I suppose shields might be portable in combat; but on a muddy, rain-soaked field like gen, once positioned they will not move easily or far.

  In any case, Takase had given other orders. Close to the southern entrance to the plain of gen, the foot soldiers arranged the shields into three ranks, close but staggered. Norit’s forces would see a wall of sorts, far behind the milling horsemen and foot soldiers: a waste of the shields, no doubt part of some feeble plot on the part of the meager band (or so the Abe might think). Or perhaps they meant to use them as a fortress of sorts, to protect the spare horses; though it kept the mounts too far from the action to be useful. Or perhaps there was a mutiny of sorts, and the foot soldiers refused to fight for some reason, and instead huddled away from the battle, trying to stay safe until they could slip home.

  The Abe could not have seen the part of this that did matter: hidden behind each shield was a hoko spear, heel sunk as deep into the mud as the attendants could make it, set at an angle toward the Abe. Forty shields; forty hoko spears. It was not so much, but the plain was not wide here, and this wall separated it into two halves, north and south. Sheathed claws, Takase had said the night before. Lure them in and then gut them.

  The horsemen of Takase’s war band did not much like their part in this; but the point of war is not to behave nobly or even well, or in such a way as to make it into the war tales of a future day. It is to win. You will seem noble enough once the chroniclers are done with you—but only providing you win.

  I have read the war tales and manuals but despite this I know so little about what war is like. Battles on scrolls offer surprisingly little useful knowledge. Could Takase’s plan work? How close do horses like to be? Will the foot soldiers and horsemen perform their parts? Will the enemy perform theirs? I can only guess, as I might guess what it is like to die in fire or bear a child.

  So: Takase and Kitsune, and many of their horsemen stood a quarter-mile in advance of the shields. Kagaya-hime rode beside Takase. (“How can I give her orders?” Takase said to Kitsune, when he asked where she was to be. “They will just be countermanded by the gods. Who will win that discussion?”)

  Some (but not many) foot soldiers and standard-bearers accompanied them. I think that, without cover, this took more courage than anything else that day. Most of the servants and foot soldiers milled about their shield-wall south of the line; prowled the slopes just above the barrier—anything to conceal the spears.

  Envoys passed back and forth—though, really, what would they have to say? I have never heard that they sought to stop the battle, and why would they? Both sides long to fight. Occasional arrows crossed the space between the groups, like insults or boasts. There was shouting, of course, though it was hard to hear the words over the noises of the river and the restless horses.

  And then battle.

  Everything fights to survive. A worm in a bird’s beak writhes. A rabbit struggles, even tries to kick and bite the cat that catches it. A fox in a snare gnaws her paw to the bone trying to get free. Battle may start with great goals, but I think it must always end up being a fight to survive, each man doing whatever he must to stay alive.

  The arrows and shouts that flew between the Abe and the Osa Hitachi men came faster; the horses approached one another at a walk, then a trot and a canter; and at some point, the abstract we ride to battle changed to I must survive this. Horses everywhere, the enemy all around. A man lifts his bow and awaits his chance, circling his horse to get to the right angle to shoot while staying out of his enemy’s line of fire. And of course there are many foes, all circling, all looking for their chances: and one’s helmet makes it hard to see to the sides and impossible to turn one’s head. Arrows have a harsh sound in the air, harsher when they strike one’s armor: sick thuds when they sink into flesh. And there are shouts and the frightened horses’ neighing, and hooves and feet scrabbling in mud. Even the shouting is cacophony, men’s and gods’ names and wordless screams, jumbled into a sound like the million voices of the kami.

  I must survive this alternates with How can I? even in the bravest fighters. The killing rage can change to white-lipped panic and back within a breath. No one who is not mad wants to be the bravest man, not if this means all the enemies’ attentions are focused on one; but no one at all wishes to be the most cowardly. Terror and courage shift places as deftly as the horsemen struggle for clear (but safe) shots.

  Fighting with arrows means that nearness is defined not by distance, but by lines of sight—the clearer, the closer. An arrow can come from anywhere, even (if one has been so unfortunate as to select an armor-lacing pattern that matches one of the enemy’s) from one’s own people.

  But arrows run out, and the battle becomes too close. One draws one’s sword, strikes at anything, horse or man, near enough to hit, trying in turn not to be struck. The blade often fails to cut through armor, but it can knock a man from his horse, to be dealt with on the ground.

  And there are the foot soldiers, as well. They mostly do not waste their time aiming for riders, but horses are easy game, their fragile legs within easy reach of a nine-foot naginata. The Abe’s foot soldiers and their shields are everywhere. An Osa Hitachi rider fights to keep his horse safe as well as himself: if your horse stumbles—or if, injured or unbalanced or hit, you fail to keep your seat—you fall among the foot soldiers. You may live awhile, but their pole-arms are longer than your sword. They will kill you.

  It is no surprise to the Abe that the Osa Hitachi horsemen, outnumbered and unsupported by foot soldiers, retreat. The Osa Hitachi horses sidle back toward the shields. At some point a signal runs through the Osa Hitachi men. They appear to panic, spin their horses, and bolt to the south end of the plain, back to the shields.

  The Abe men had thought that the shields, the apparently reluctant foot men, were perhaps a trap; but their blood howls in their ears. They ride and shoot, hunters now, prey scattering before them.

  Takase’s horses dance through the zigzag paths between the shields. And at a shout from Takase, the foot soldiers behind the shields heave them up and sideways. The Abe horses see barriers where the paths used to be, and jig to the new-made gaps. Some stumble onto the deep-set hoko spears. They scream and fall, dumping their riders to the ground. The men just behind the leaders don’t see what’s happening and their horses do not have the time or room to react; they crash into the spears and the fallen shields and the struggling clots of horse and man. The Osa Hitachi foot soldiers stay out of range of desperate hooves, and slash anything they can reach with their spears and naginata. The lacings of everyone’s armor have loosened in battle, and there are a hundred gaps at neck and arm and breast and groin. It is easy work.

  The muddy ground is too wet to absorb the blood, which runs along its surface in glossy dark streams. Takase and Kitsune and Kagaya-hime watch; but many of the Osa Hitachi horsemen do not and turn their heads away; or focus instead on shooting at the Abe horsemen who have managed to stop their horses before they become part of the tangle.

  There is little the remaining Abe horsemen can do. They shoot at any Osa Hitachi they can see, but the foot soldiers are half-hidden behind the chaos, and the horsemen are well armed and shoot back. There is no headcount, not yet, but the Abe have lost a surprising number. Shocked and demoralized, they retreat. A few, trapped, wave their hat markers to show they surrender.

  There is a lot of death this way. Norit loses sixteen horsemen outright; twenty are caught or injured in the broken heap of men and horses, and beheaded by the Osa Hitachi men. This is a slaughter by the standards of war, for a thousand horsemen can fight all day and suffer only twenty deaths, despite hundreds of injuries.

  As Norit retreats, another twenty of his men flee like clouds, scatter like divining sticks, r
eturning to their own homes. By the time he makes it to the ki-stockade to which he has evacuated his family, he has fewer than a hundred horsemen and their attendants—less than two-thirds of what he began with—by the village of gen.

  The battle changed nothing. Tomorrow it would begin again: the riding and the burning, and it would not end until there was more fighting, more injuries, more death. And even then, supposing the Osa Hitachi destroyed the Abe, there were many hundreds of weary miles riding or walking home again, and more fighting, injuries, death along the way. Tomorrow it would all start again. This would be cause enough for despair.

  —Although this is what life is. In our most painful times—a brother dies, a lover leaves, the world is not what it was—we claw through our days and weep as we fall asleep, grateful to be done with the day. And then morning comes and we have it all to do again, breath by weary breath. There is a difference, in that my battles have always been within myself.

  How can men do this? It is horrible enough to imagine, let alone to be there. We are willing to suffer unbearable things for those we love, or because we must; but how can a man (anyone, of course, though it is only men who do so) walk into a battle for no great reason beyond this, that someone he respects wishes him to do so?

  Perhaps this respect is love, a man’s sort of love. Dmei spoke more warmly of the men he fought with than anyone else—than even, I suppose, me. After he was gone, I brooded long on this, trying to understand, and concluded that only men could understand this, or practice it. Now that I am old, I realize this is too simple an answer. I would walk into all the Buddha’s hells for Shigeko, not from courage but because I would not willingly leave her alone in such a circumstance. I love her more than I fear Hell.