Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  —I find that insights grow more frequent as I have less time to take advantage of them.

  After the attack, Kagaya-hime and Kitsune walked together, pulling arrows from the bodies. It was not easy work. Arrows often wound, seldom kill. An armed man with an arrow buried deep in one thigh does not give up the arrow unless his life goes first. Hoko spear in hand, Uona followed, collecting the arrows they retrieved.

  The village of gen wanted no part of the battle but suffered nevertheless, as a mouse does caught under the feet of a panicking horse. The same concerns that drove the war band to destroy the farms they passed burned gen, as well. Some of Norit’s men had thought to hide here, as well; to prevent retribution, Takase had ordered them ferreted out and killed. If village men died as well, it was regrettable but unavoidable.

  “Gah,” Kitsune said. “This is making me sick.” They walked through a kitchen yard, blinking against the smoke that stung their eyes.

  “Why?” Kagaya-hime asked. She had lost an arrow, one of the three she had fletched with the golden eagle feathers given to her by Kitsune’s sister Nakara: her first friend. She did not often miss; it must be in someone.

  “It’s one thing when you’re caught up in the fight. But now—”

  She said, “We are killing animals, even in this form. Perhaps it is our nature.” A dead man lay facedown, his blood a gelled puddle. He had been running. The arrow (not her eagle-feathered one) stood straight up from his back.

  “No,” Kitsune said. He turned his face away when she pulled the arrow free with a wet grinding noise.

  “Man or fox, it’s your nature,” she said absently. An injured man had crawled behind a tumbled cart, but she heard him cursing, and came around to where he lay on the ground, arms wrapped tight around the arrow sunk deep in his belly.

  “Hush…” Kagaya-hime knelt beside him.

  His eyes focused for a moment on her—a woman in armor, naked sword in her hand. “Jing?” he whispered. “Goddess?”

  “No,” she said, and stabbed him in the throat: a clean death. When his body uncoiled, she pulled the arrow free and inspected the feathers. “Not mine,” she said.

  Running footsteps behind them: Kagaya-hime leapt to her feet and spun, cat-quick. A village woman had been hiding behind a tree; seeing them ready, she paused, still some steps away. Her single coarse robe was kilted high enough to leave her legs clear. She held a long knife.

  “Go away, woman.” Kitsune had raised his bow with her approach; he spoke past his bowstring, the arrow beside his face. “Unless you want to die.”

  “You killed him.” The woman wept, her face twisted in rage and grief. “You killed them all.”

  “Be grateful we did not kill you,” Kitsune said.

  “For what? You’ve taken everything.” Her anger seemed to dissolve, and she fell to her knees, knife loose in her hand. “They’re gone, they’re all gone.”

  “I know this feeling,” Kagaya-hime said.

  Kitsune turned to say something, but she ignored him and crouched beside the woman, taking the knife. It was a cheap one; someone had died to preserve his possessions, when he had owned nothing nicer than this.

  “You’re a woman,” the woman said in weary surprise.

  Kagaya-hime said, “I have lost everything, too. Family, tale, place. Gone. But I am alive. Do you have a name?”

  “I am Otomi no Seishi. This was my family.” She pointed to corpses in the yard. “Brother. Uncle. Cousin.”

  “Do you know how to do anything?” Kagaya-hime asked the woman.

  “I can farm,” she said.

  Kagaya-hime stood. The village woman remained kneeling, face wet. “Uona, give this woman my stores, the food from my packs, the rice: everything. Keep your things, Biter’s gear.” Uona bowed and left them.

  “What?” Kitsune lowered his bow. “And have her hunt us down for revenge?”

  The woman opened her mouth to reply, but Kagaya-hime spoke first. “Why would she? It won’t bring them back.” The woman shut her mouth abruptly.

  Kagaya-hime leaned forward until her face was close to the village woman’s. Cat-woman: farm woman; voices too soft to be heard by any but one another. “I have been alone,” Kagaya-hime said. “I have longed for death. Life is better, even life alone.”

  “Alone—” The woman cried in earnest. “I can’t—”

  “There may be others,” Kagaya-hime said, “but only if you live.”

  Later, when Kagaya-hime and Uona had given the village woman rice and dried fish and salted birds and a short sword and robes, and returned to her one of the village’s horses, they spoke again.

  “Do what you must,” Kagaya-hime said, “but stay alive.”

  “I still hate you all,” the woman said. “This changes nothing. But—thank you.”

  Kagaya-hime nodded. “And do not follow us, or I will kill you.”

  Members of the war band had different opinions of Kagaya-hime’s kindness. Some assumed it was feminine softness on her part. Others: “Soft? She’s soft like oak is soft,” said with a wise look—for her skill and savagery had not gone unnoticed, and there were those who whispered she might be a kami in human form; and no one knows why the kami do anything. The priestess, Onobe no Kesuko, said only, “She is no god. She has her own reasons.” Takase just shrugged.

  But Uona said later, “It was a kind thing you did, my lady.”

  “I wouldn’t have her starve. I can hunt for my food.”

  “Still,” Uona said, and bowed deeply. “I am proud to serve you.”

  Kagaya-hime, who had never done so before, blushed.

  After this, they were together more than they had been. Kagaya-hime had not the human gift of light conversation, but Uona did, and Kagaya-hime found she liked the quick rippling of her woman’s voice, even when she did not listen to the words.

  —Another thing changed, as well. After this, the magic no longer produced whatever Kagaya-hime needed. Food ran short until the next estate they burned down, and after this, she and her attendants ate and drank and wore and used what they found and carried, just as everyone else did.

  The night after the battle, Takase and his men camped at the same Buddhist monastery the Abe had used. The monks had made it clear that they did not care which side had won, provided no one threatened the monastery’s considerable riches; and Takase’s gift of horses and armor (everything left behind when Norit’s fighters retreated) soothed any concerns they might have had.

  Takase had forty-two heads lined up on the ground before his quarters: the thirty-six Abe horsemen and six of their foot soldiers, too injured in the early stages of the battle to escape. The foot soldiers’ heads were of no account, but might as well be removed as left on the corpses, now a mile behind the Osa Hitachi forces. The whole made an impressive display—if already foul-smelling: the day was ending warm.

  (I have seen such a display of heads, back when I was very small. They had been sent all the way from Mutsu province pickled in kegs of wine. I had nightmares for weeks afterward about their distorted faces and the smell—I cannot think what my nurse thought she was doing allowing me to see them.)

  The Osa Hitachi casualties were much what might be expected: six deaths. One man broke his back when he fell from his horse trying to navigate the barrier of shields. Another fell, uninjured until he was trampled: a strangely crumpled, concave form. Two men had been killed outright by arrows, one struck through the eye, the other barely touched, though the blood pulsed from a nick in his neck until he turned pale and died. Two were skewered on hoko spears and died before the battle ended.

  There were many injuries. An arrow often does not kill immediately. It is possible for the broad-headed killing arrows—the forked, the leaf, the four-sided—to slice a great hole in a man; but more often they do not even pierce his armor, if shot from too far away or striking at an angle. If the arrow does pierce, the wound will be painful and bloody, perhaps even incapacitating an arm or leg; but the man who suffers it m
ay still be able to fight that day, the next, ten days hence. Or half a lifetime later: Takase’s arrow wound was taking twenty years and more to kill him.

  But many of the wounds fester. They ooze clear and then colored fluids. Dark lines crawl across a man’s skin, reaching from the injury toward his heart. When the dark line reaches his chest, he dies. I have seen this once, a guardsman nicked in a fight with the monks who were harassing the capital some years back. We had been lovers a few years before, and he still visited from time to time. I saw the festering and the dark lines, and I smelled him, like rotting pheasant in the sun; but he denied all this: “Just a scratch,” he said, and laughed a little, though his face was twisted with pain, and he could not stop touching the flesh beside the stripes. In the end he wept for death, and his superior gave it to him. I had bad dreams after this, thinking of Dmei in Yoshiee’s war.

  And more. There is a sickness of the soul that settles once the war-madness drains away, a weary nausea in the belly. Men remember what they have done and cringe or weep or relive it endlessly, remembering certain sounds, screams, voices: searching for something, though they could not say what. Everyone who has fought is injured in this way. There is little they can do but wait for their flayed spirits to scab over. Some will. Some will not and their hearts will fester across a lifetime.

  Men have their various ways of coping with this. There was a group who celebrated their victory with bragging shouts and overly loud laughter, as if noise itself might heal. Others made themselves busy cleaning their armor and repairing their arrows; their voices were hard and practical: work to do, things to make ready. Many men sank (or retreated) into sleep, half-eaten food forgotten in their hands; or they wept openly or in secret. Everyone drank too much. Everyone’s hands shook a little.

  Kitsune was one of those who threw activity into the empty place left after the fever is gone. The battle had been directed by Takase, but the men of the war band were his men, Osa Hitachi men. He walked through the groups, talking to each warrior: loud with the shouters, brisk with the practical ones; quiet, even tender, with the broken ones. He stayed long with the injured men, keeping them from thrashing when their squad-mates laid burning moxas on their skin or pressed crushed leaves into the wounds.

  Takase and Kagaya-hime sat together. There was a veranda framed by pillars painted with flying Buddhas, faded with sun and weather: a welcoming place, but it was inhabited by the forty-two heads, so Takase and the cat woman sat upwind in the garden. He still wore the red brocade commander’s robe he had fought in, but it had been loosened by his attendant, who had checked the unhealing arrow wound in his side, found it open and weeping, cleaned it, and bandaged him. Now he drank sake, which he downed little bottle by little bottle, as if it were iced water on a hot day.

  Kagaya-hime was perhaps the only one not haunted by the things she might have done differently or should not have done at all. She herself had taken three of the heads: an odd way to kill, for an odd reason, but people did stranger things than this, so she had shrugged and accepted it. The restless heat of her mating season still ran through her, but her exhaustion was strong and it was pleasant to slump against her bundled armor, and watch the fire Otoko was building.

  “You don’t seem upset,” Takase said after a time.

  “Should I be?” Kagaya-hime said.

  He laughed, and stopped in midbreath. Sweat broke on his brow, shiny in the light. At last he let out his breath. “I keep thinking, this is the time it will kill me, and I keep being wrong. Hah.”

  The fire gave a flat brilliant yellow light: pinewood, still fresh enough to sizzle and pop. It erased the lines drawn by pain and fatigue and age on Takase’s face, leaving him what he had been; a strong-boned man with fierce eyes. Even the sake did not dim the intelligence, the strength, there. A strong man with a hawk’s expression: wise; a leader.

  Kagaya-hime stood suddenly, and reached a hand down to him. “Come,” she said. Wordlessly he allowed himself to be heaved upright; wordlessly he followed her into their rooms; wordlessly they mated there.

  As men so often do, Takase slept afterward. But a cat’s heat leaves her little peace, so Kagaya-hime dressed and walked out to pace beside the fire. Otoko and Uona drank wine with some of the other attendants: occasionally one would come back and stir her fire up or add new wood. The severed heads looked at her with glittering half-closed eyes. The flames gave a foreign life to the heads; as she paced their mouths moved as if trying to frame words with stiff lips.

  She paused for a moment at a cry from the other side of the temple enclosure, one of the injured men. When she turned back to her fire, a shower of sparks flared upward, and the heads became the thing of eyes and flames that had haunted her dreams. “What?” she said aloud. “Why are you here?”

  Because, they seemed to say in voices that were like and unlike the chittering of the million kami: grief and anger, you, joining. It did not seem to her to be an answer.

  “I have no patience with gods,” she said. “There was a kami, and it left me.”

  Ask yourself why it/they/you are gone. The flames settled and the heads grew silent, and nothing she said earned more response than the light in their eyes.

  I have given the early parts of Kagaya-hime’s tale to Shigeko. I watch her as she reads, all the while pretending that my mind is engaged in recording great thoughts here.

  I am as nervous as a child writing her first poems to send to her father. I wonder and fear what she thinks as she reads. Why should I care so? She has read everything I have written before this.—Ah, but this is different. Those were just my life. This is real.

  The fire had burned to embers before Kitsune returned, the grief and tension that drove him all night eased at last. Kagaya-hime offered wine and he gulped it down, and then more, as fast as Takase had. He dropped to the ground beside her, resting his head on her bundled armor.

  “So many of them are going to die,” he said without looking at her. “The healers will work, and the monks will chant, and the priestess will pray, and none of it will make any difference. They’ll die anyway. Some of them, I know their families.”

  “But you wanted this fight. Yes?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “So I shouldn’t feel sick about it? Don’t you feel anything?”

  “Sorry for the horses. Some of the attendants,” she said. “They didn’t want to be here. Everyone else?” She shrugged. “They’re here by choice. People die in their beds, people die as infants. Where’s the difference?”

  “I’d cry for those, too,” he said, a little tartly. “How can you not?”

  “Should I weep for every kitten who dies without becoming part of the fudoki, every mouse I catch and kill?” She touched her cheeks, her eyelids. “We do not cry for this, we cats.”

  “What do you cry for, then?” he said. When she said nothing, he added, “Why did you leave the capital? Your—what do you call it?—tale was gone, maybe. But I’ve been in the capital. There are a million places you could have lived. And toms everywhere; I heard them. You could have built a new home, a tale. And you didn’t. Why not?”

  “I—” she stammered to a halt. “I ran and then kept running, and then there was the voice, the road-kami. So I went. And then this happened.” She touched her human thigh.

  “Huh,” said Kitsune. “Maybe cats are too stubborn to learn anything unless you throw it at them.”

  “What was I supposed to learn? I knew every cat, every inch of ground, in my fudoki. I didn’t need more.”

  “And when they were gone? A brave cat would have stayed and built a life.”

  Noises from inside the rooms: Takase rolling in his sleep, mumbling the names of the men who had died that day—and other names; a lifetime of fighting leaves a long list. Kitsune and Kagaya-hime exchanged glances.

  “I can’t,” Kitsune said. “I am so tired,” so Kagaya-hime went to kneel beside Takase, and soothe him in his sleep, and wipe the tears from his face.

  13. The Blue-Gre
en Notebook

  Kagaya-hime mated six times in four days:

  —Kitsune in the shrine.

  —An Abe scout she found the day before the battle; she did not learn his name, only coupled with him, and then (because she fought for the Osa Hitachi) she killed him as he slept.

  —Takase, the night after the battle.

  —A captain of the Osa Hitachi, a married man from Shimosa province.

  —A strong-backed man from the village of gen, when she remained behind the war band to look for her arrow.

  —And Kitsune again, the second night after the battle, in the charred remains of a storehouse the Abe had burned to make the war band’s pursuit as irritating as possible. Six in four days: really, a cat in season makes even a woman at court look chaste.

  And after this her season was done. She was no more restless than she ever had been, a cat without a fudoki in a woman’s body; and no more interested in men. Kitsune watched her a little wistfully sometimes, but he was not importunate. It was a momentary thing; he could not have hoped for it to last, except that between men and women it sometimes does.

  Not so many trunks left to empty. I had not thought I lived in clutter, but my rooms seem twice as large as they used to, and there is a hollow sound to the space. Shigeko empties a pawlonia-wood box, making neat stacks: gifts for the women, gifts for the temples. She pulls free a rumpled mass of hemp fabric and shakes it out. A blizzard: a hundred paper cards settle to the ground. The pieces from a poem-matching game were unaccountably bundled into a child’s robe that none of us recognize and hidden here. Whose game? Whose robe? Why is it here?

  There have been other surprises: the desiccated mouse, a teakwood box filled with unknown hard white seeds that smell like anise, a baby duck’s beak threaded on a black cord, a river rock with the word twelve painted in vermilion. I still have the rock beside my ink stone, cool and smooth when I lift it. Who painted it? I do not recognize the calligraphy. Why, and where, and how did it end up wrapped in a error-riddled page copied from a monogatari tale and stuffed into a box designed for combs?