Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  The Abe have retreated. Stupid as it is to leave the safety of shelter, it is stupider still to do so, and then return, nothing accomplished but death and more injuries.

  Men.

  I thought I understood war, but truly it is this: brutish and tedious and terrifying. This tale, the tale of the cat Kagaya-hime, is lies. But so were the historical chronicles I saw, of Yoshiee’s war and others; the Chinese manuals; even the guardsmen’s stories, Dmei’s nightmares. All lies.

  Why do I tell her story, then? For that matter, why do I try to make sense of my own life, when I cannot say which things have happened exactly as I have written them, and which have been revised by wishes or regrets?

  Tales and memories, however inaccurate, are all we have. The things I have owned, the people I have loved—these are all just ink in notebooks that my mind stores in trunks and takes out when it is bored or lonely. It is necessary to keep track of things, the third assistant comptroller of grains said. It is the recording of things, in our memories if nowhere else, that makes them real.

  My fudoki is precisely as long as my life has been. Without my fudoki I am nothing, because it and I are the same.

  15. The Silver-Foil Notebook

  It is time: there are only a handful of trunks left, a neat little line of them down the center of my rooms. So I have written the emperor my great-grandnephew and asked his permission to leave court eight days from now. It is an auspicious time: no kami objects; the goddess Kannon does not mind; Kasugano temple has offered to send escorts. The emperor has written back, a kind little letter. He says he will miss me.

  Now we are two: I and Shigeko. Well, there are three other women: a woman of sufficient rank to drive off visitors politely; another of a rank low enough to carry my chamber box away whenever required; and a third, of intermediate rank, to do everything else.

  It is hard to believe that these are my (or anyone’s) rooms. They have the empty look of a space between owners—which is close to the truth, for I know that one of my grandnieces, the princess Kasiko, has already claimed the rooms for her own, and waits, not very patiently, for us to leave. Well, and she may have them: I have been sick these forty years of that irritating sag in the roofline of the building across the peony courtyard.

  It was six months ago? eight? that my half-brother Shirakawa died. He was living in the i residence outside of the capital’s walls. I had not been summoned, but I went to him. Months passed, even years when we did not see one another much; but then, whole winters passed when I never saw the sun, always hidden behind gray skies or high eaves. And yet it was there. I knew I would see it again, in spring if not sooner.

  Now is perhaps the first time I cannot safely say this. Strange.

  He was my brother: strong and clever and sensible and kind. He gave me a mouse when I was a child; he rejoiced with me, barefaced and laughing in the rain; he gained forgiveness for me when I refused the husband my uncle chose. He chuckled when I said something amusing, and listened patiently when I droned on (as I am sure I did) about the structure of claws or wings. He sent me poems when we were apart for one reason or another; he didn’t seem to care whether I responded in kind. He played sugoroku-backgammon with me, and even (one sleepless night after his consort Kenshi had died) told me a dream he had had.

  His hair grew gray and his waistline spread a little. A few years ago, when I was reading (some dreadful monogatari tale, all about a bat and some sparrows), I noticed that he had wrinkles around his eyes, and frown lines set deep on his brow. He laughed at my surprise then: “We race toward the Pure Land, Sister; but it’s a race everyone wants to lose.”

  Half a year since his death. The heaviness was already in my chest when I last saw him, though I still thought it was indigestion—an indigestion that had lasted for what seemed forever—or simple weariness.

  The dead seem so close to me sometimes. My mother, my father, half-brother and -sisters, my nephew, attendants and cousins and relatives of every sort—mine will be the last in a series, like the twelfth picture-scroll in a set showing the months. Really, I have seen a battlefield’s worth of death; gather the bodies of all those I knew, and they would carpet the ground.

  Now it is my turn to fight, in this war that no one ever wins.

  The last time I saw him. How could I have forgotten this, the things he said?—Or did I dream it all?

  Shirakawa never liked lying down unless he was actually asleep. Weak as he was, he was elegant in informal hunting robes, leaning against a stack of cylindrical bolsters. He was pale and had lost some of the flesh on his bones, so that his face had the thinness I have always associated with certain Buddhist hermits and wise men. I mentioned this to him, and from his half-reclining position, he gave me a mock bow. “Neither hermit nor wise,” he said, and laughed.

  It was spring, but still cold, so we huddled around the brazier, putting our feet up on its edge like peasants. We both knew he was dying, so we talked of everything but that—the weather (what conversation, in all the ages of the world, does not include the weather?); Shigeko (they had been lovers several times, many years before, and they retained their fondness for one another; indeed, they exchanged occasional letters independent of my own correspondence with him); the mouse he had sent me, and the set of drawings of it that I had sent him; our father the emperor Go-Sanj and his consorts our mothers and an argument they had when we were small; old lovers and lost friends.

  “I saw him once,” my half-brother said. “That provincial Mononobe man you favored. Thirty years ago? Back at the end of the Kah era. Where was he from? Some backwater.”

  “Mutsu province,” I said faintly. Dmei had returned home just before Yoshiee’s war, fifteen years before the end of the Kah. How could Shirakawa have seen him since then?

  “That’s right,” Shirakawa said, pursuing some memory of his own. “He had those strange eyes, I remember: almost foreign. Mononobe. Mononobe no—Dorei?”

  “Dmei,” I managed to say without actually stammering. “Why—?”

  “He brought news from up north. Fujiwara no Kiyohira is building some sort of fake capital up there. Hiraizumi, I think it is. He was warning us. Very sensible: he has a lot of land up there, and it could be a problem. Not mine, though.”

  “He didn’t fight for the Mutsu forces in Yoshiee’s war?” He wasn’t an enemy? I had been so sure of his betrayal.

  Shirakawa waved off the notion. “I think he mostly kept his head down, offered support to our forces when they came through. Sensible,” he said again.

  “But he was a warrior!” I said. “He’d fought many times.”

  My half-brother raised an eyebrow. “Then he’d know better, don’t you think?”

  Truly, I could not tell. Dmei told me once that he missed the kinship that comes with sleeping in the shadow of shared death. But was it worth it? The nightmares, the dark days, the night he nearly killed me only because I had startled him? “Why didn’t he speak to your regent?” I said at last. “I can’t believe they let you meet him.”

  He smiled at me, his warm eyes almost lost in the wrinkles. “I was curious, Little Sister. About what sort of man you would like.”

  “You knew about him.” What I meant was: you cared.

  “‘A strong emperor knows how well his people sleep, and whether their bowels are healthy,’” he intoned, his rough voice a clever imitation of a tutor we had both known fifty and more years ago. “An interesting man, I thought,” he said in more normal tones. “Content with his life.”

  “Was he well?” Why didn’t you tell me? I did not say, but Shirakawa understood.

  “He was—older,” Shirakawa said at last. “Married. Three sons and a daughter.”

  “Ah,” I said. Dmei would have been forty at the end of the Kah. Married. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Sorrow? Loss? Jealousy? None of these, I decided. Relief. See: he had been a good man. He was no traitor. My instincts had not been bad.

  What if it had been possible to wed Mononobe no
Dmei instead of the irritating pup my uncle had chosen? What if I had accompanied him to Mutsu province, given up my rank to sleep on his shoulder every night of my life?

  The Dmei of my memory was not the real Dmei—but then, the Harueme I recalled was not the Harueme who lived through those days and nights. And neither Harueme was the woman who would have gone to Mutsu province.

  I looked up to catch my half-brother watching me, frowning slightly: worried. He said softly, carefully: “I think it wasn’t him you loved, but the places his eyes had seen.”

  So. The attack against the stockade ended in nothing. The men of the war band dragged their wounded and dead out of arrows’ range and lit more torches, built the fires higher. Ten deaths: three men trampled or crushed between the horses, five slashed deep, one pierced through the throat with a turnip-headed arrow, and one who started howling and then died, though no one could find a mark on his body. There were many wounds, of course, arrows and broken bones and cuts; a severed hand, a crushed leg. Five horses were injured. Their screaming made everything seem worse; when they had been killed, the camp grew calmer.

  Kagaya-hime examined her thigh where she’d felt the blow and found a bruise, thumb-sized and already hard as callus, where she was hit with a spear butt, or perhaps a spear tip deflected by her sword’s sheath. Otoko bandaged the arrow-wound on Kagaya-hime’s arm, but when he went off to help Uona with Biter, she removed the wrappings, and licked the deep little hole until it hurt a bit less.

  Exhausted but sleepless, she limped through camp. There were no celebrations, not even the false ones born of bravado and weariness.

  Kitsune was easy to find. He moved through the war band, spoke to everyone who was conscious to hear it, and touched the others, as if skin on skin might somehow ease their dreams. His head had been cut in the fight—shallow but bloody, as head wounds are—and his face was still masked in drying blood, twin tracks cleaned by the tears he didn’t notice.

  She didn’t find Takase until the tiger’s hour, for he had been pulled out of range on the opposite side of the stockade, where the trees clustered closer to its walls. Suwa, the old attendant who had brought them wine so many times, had settled him half-leaning against the trunk of a pine and cut the lacings on his armor, to bare his chest and belly.

  Takase was not dead: not yet. He looked ash-white in the light just before dawn, his chest hollow, skin waxy with a sheen like sweat. She knew the shape and texture of the ancient wound in his belly, had cleaned the fluids that wept from it. Everything was changed now. Ragged lips of flesh peeled back at a new angle. Fresh blood, surprising red in the gray light, slipped down his leg and dripped onto the pine needles beside him. “You were hit,” she said as she knelt beside him. “Again.”

  “Same place,” he said. “A relief, really. It doesn’t hurt so much now. I think we’ve lanced it, hey.” He wheezed out a laugh. There was blood on his lips; it shivered with each breath. He opened his eyes. “Ha, girl. Didn’t think I’d see you again.” His voice was thin and dry as spiderweb.

  Suwa laid a hand on his shoulder. “Quiet, my lord. Please—”

  “It’s all right, Suwa,” Takase said. “Find the boy. Kitsune.”

  “But—”

  “She’ll stay with me. Yes?” He rolled his head to look at her.

  She nodded.

  “Keep him quiet.” Suwa stood slowly. “I’ll bring a litter.”

  “They left,” Takase said, when Suwa had limped away. “In the dark.”

  “The Abe?” she said. She reached up to brush something from her face. Tears.

  He nodded, then drowsed for a time. She settled herself more comfortably, her back against a neighboring tree. On the opposite side of the stockade, she heard the camp’s muted sounds, then the sudden shouts and bustle that must have meant Suwa had come.

  “They’re gone,” Takase said, waking suddenly. “Did I tell you? They passed me, so close I could have shot every one of them. If I wanted to, hey.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Is there wine?”

  “Just water.” She helped him drink the last swallows from the water-skin she’d carried all night. “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” he said. “Too dark. No strength. Anyway, it’s over. They’re done. We’re done.”

  “Will they try to avenge this? Attack the Osa Hitachi?”

  After a while she realized he’d fallen asleep again. Not dead: his chest still moved, slow tired breaths. Blood still slid from the wound, darker, thicker. A fly rested on his upturned hand: waiting.

  When she heard running footsteps, she turned her head to watch Kitsune approach with Suwa; behind them walked the priestess, Onobe no Kesuko, a sword still bare in her hand.

  Kitsune dropped to his knees as Kagaya-hime held up her hand. “He’s sleeping,” she said, just as Takase spoke again.

  “They’re not going to come after you,” Takase said in a conversational voice, as if he had not nodded off at all, as if they were discussing capital politics in a courtyard a million miles away.

  The priestess arrived as Takase nodded off again. She bent to inspect the wound, and straightened. “That’s that.” She sheathed her sword, announced to the men beginning to cluster around Takase: “He will die.”

  “Please, can you do anything?” Suwa asked.

  “You mean, ask the gods to heal him?” She snorted. “They know as clearly as he does that he will die.”

  Takase roused himself suddenly. “I heard them whispering, as they slipped past. It’s over. A war where everyone retreats, hah.”

  “We should go after them to make sure,” Kitsune said.

  “No,” Takase said. “Let them have whatever lives they can. Same as all of you. Go home.”

  Kitsune clenched his fists. “Then all this was for nothing?”

  The priestess said, “They killed some people, you killed some people. And now it’s done.”

  Kitsune opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “Go home,” Takase said again. “My last order, hey.” He slipped into unconsciousness and did not wake again.

  Last night we found the strangest thing in the bottom of one of the last trunks: a letter.

  There have been a thousand letters in the trunks, a thousand thousand—and I have not always been able to recollect who sent which and when. It became a game between Shigeko and myself: which lover wrote these deathless words? These two poems, of identical image and nearly identical language: were they written years apart, their similarities merely serendipitous; or do men crib their love-poems from one another when their creativity fails? And these—an entire packet of letters, clearly from one of my half-sisters—but which? Shigeko and I have played the game of unraveling my past, and burned the letters when the game palled.

  But there is one that we have not been able to identify, written on a rich tricolored paper flecked with gold. The calligraphy is very fine, delicate and precise as whiskers. We are not even sure it is a letter:

  “I have been fishing in a river a thousand miles from you, eyeing the trout beneath its surface. For some reason this brought you to my mind.”

  Who wrote this? we exclaim to one another, but I already know. I fought so hard to keep Kagaya-hime and her story in line, but it kept breaking out of my expectations. Once you have opened the gate to alternatives, it can be hard to get it closed again.

  All those places I have never been, and now, never will see.

  Wait—

  All those months of preparation and travel, all those injuries and deaths, and this war ended with all the drama of a fan falling. The men of the war band broke camp quickly and were gone by midday. Most would travel together until they were far enough south not to fear retribution, and then the band would dissolve into groups that grew smaller and smaller, each man traveling as fast as he could toward home. It was three hundred miles to the Osa Hitachi estate, farther for those who had come from Shimosa or Kozuke provinces. Some traveled with injured men (which generally means dying men); it mig
ht take them a month or more to return home.

  Most of the dead were buried in the forest, wooden hat markers and paper prayer slips hanging from the branches above their heads. There were other tributes, as well: a pair of torn reins hung like straw rope over a shrine; an arrow driven into the ground over a grave, a poem written on its shaft.

  Before she left, the priestess Onobe no Kesuko took Kagaya-hime aside. “It will not be long,” she said, nodding at Takase. “Half a day: less.”

  “Yes,” Kagaya-hime said, and then: “May I ask something?”

  “Ha,” Kesuko said. “Finally. Yes.”

  “The kami—I hear them,” Kagaya-hime said, feeling her way, “but they never make sense.”

  “Why should they make sense to you? You don’t even make sense to yourself, cat,” Kesuko said. “Where’s your ground, your tale, your, what was it, fudoki?”

  “Gone,” Kagaya-hime said, and felt the familiar grief, the wrench of loss.

  “No,” Kesuko said. “You’re the first cat I’ve met, but I thought they were supposed to be smarter than this. This”—she gestured around them, at the striking camp, the empty stockade, the mountains and everything beyond them, the hot cloudless summer sky over all—“is your fudoki, girl. It lasts a lifetime, but you never noticed that.

  “Why should they make sense to you? They have their own tales, their own shared grounds. They don’t have to make sense to anyone but themselves. No one does.”

  Kagaya-hime and Kitsune and Takase’s man Suwa knelt with Takase as he slept out the last hours of his life. “There’s no point to taking him from this place, my lady,” Suwa said, and Kagaya-hime nodded. The smell of death was strong on him. Even the crows had picked it up; though many pecked for the blood that had soaked into the ground, some lined themselves neatly along a branch over Takase’s head, waiting. Servant and half-fox and cat-woman took turns digging a grave and gathering stones to place over it.