by Kij Johnson
Farmers, peasants, and poor people came even before the war band was gone, to glean the battlefield, the war band’s campsite, the stockade’s grounds. They left with whatever they could carry, and there was much of it after a month of siege, ranging from a longsword dropped in the woods in the darkness to half-filled barrels of rice.
Takase died in the heat of the afternoon, his last breaths fainter and fainter, until only Kagaya-hime could tell he still lived. “That’s it,” she finally said, and stood. “He is gone.” She did not see his ghost: not then.
She and Kitsune left their attendants to bury him, and walked a little way up a slope, into the forest. The sun did not reach all the way to the ground, so they walked in a false dusk that hummed with insects. They had removed their armor, but had not changed clothes (and after a month of siege, there is little worth changing into), and sweat and bloodstains made patterns on their trousers and vests.
A flash of vermilion caught Kitsune’s eye, and they made their way to a small shrine to Inari, newly painted and still bright. The stone foxes stood on either side of a red-painted arch scarcely taller than a fox itself. She nodded to the little arch.
“What is that called?” she said.
“A torii,” he said. “A gateway.”
“It’s not very impressive,” she said, remembering the great Raj gate in the capital. “What does it go through? There’s no wall.”
He laughed a little. “It’s a passageway between here and there.” He pointed. “A sort of road for gods and spirits.”
“Oh,” she said. They listened for a time to the humming air and a stick cracking in the heat somewhere, the almost inaudible whistle of the pine needles crushed under their feet. Kagaya-hime ran her finger along the head of one of the foxes: a porous stone, rougher than it looked.
“Once in a while,” Kitsune said into the silence, “I wonder what it is like, being a fox. Being human is supposed to be better. But. Do you see things differently? Does time move faster, slower? Do you get hungry for different things?”
“Better?” Kagaya-hime said. “Different.”
“I remember when I was little,” Kitsune said into the humming silence. “Mostly I was a boy. I had this pony, and there was a dog, and then Nakara; she was my nurse. You knew that, right? I think my mother didn’t like me being a fox much. So I wasn’t. And then there was a fire and my family died, and Nakara brought me to her family. I have not been a fox since then.”
“You were, though. Are,” Kagaya-hime said. “You mean you have not had a fox’s shape; but it is there in you. I smell it. It’s in your blood.”
“Hmmm,” Kitsune said. And sometime later, “But how?”
“I don’t know,” Kagaya-hime said. “You’re half of each. How hard can it be to move from the one to the other?”
And just like that, as if her words had caused it, he was a fox. He looked up at her for a moment: gold eyes to gold. She smiled at him, and he was gone, slipping through the trees, ears and head high.
Kagaya-hime walked back to Takase’s grave and watched the men lay his already stiffening body into it, and push the frozen earth back in place. After a while, she noticed Takase’s ghost stood beside her watching the burial: a young man now, taller than the living man had been: slim. “Well?” Kagaya-hime asked.
“What a lot of trouble that was,” the ghost said, nodding at the body. “Why did I wait so long?”
“The others all cried,” Kagaya-hime said. “The ghosts.”
“Did they?” the ghost said. “I suppose they left things behind that they missed.”
“And you?”
The ghost turned to her. “I will miss you a little, cat-girl.”
“And I you,” she said. “A little.”
The ghost smiled. “I think you will have plenty to keep you busy.” It reached out a hand as if to touch her belly, but she felt nothing, only the sun and a breeze against her clothes. “I have given you something; now give me something. If a male deserves it, give him a place in your fudoki.”
“There is no fudoki,” she said, but without bitterness.
“Hah,” the ghost that had been Takase said. “You are a one-cat fudoki. Don’t you realize that yet? Promise.”
“If a male stays, if he earns a place in the tale, he will be allowed into it.”
“Already has, I’d say,” Takase said. “Remember the fathers of your children, cat-girl.”
“Tell me—” she said; but he was already gone.
The half-fox Kitsune returned, a rusty shimmer of movement, at the bird’s hour. It was nearly dusk, the sky through the trees strange shades of peach and amber and blue. A fox loped from the trees, and then he stood there, breathless, a man again. “Oh,” he said, but nothing else.
“I know,” she said. “I would do anything to go back to that.”
He shook his head slightly, settling into his man’s shape again. “Then do so. Who do you think keeps you in that body?”
Uona came shouting in the woods trying to find Kagaya-hime, and disturbed them. Kitsune gathered Takase’s and his attendants together. “They won’t be too many miles ahead,” he said. “We’ll ride until dark and then catch up with them tomorrow. But you’re not returning with me, are you?”
“No,” Kagaya-hime said. “I am not finished, not yet. Tell Nakara that I love her.”
“I will,” Kitsune promised, and they were gone.
Me, I’m waiting. It is four more days until I leave the capital.
Northward again. Kagaya-hime and Biter and Uona and Otoko traveled slowly through the summer days, accompanied by a packhorse, a pretty roan that Otoko loaded with most of the armor and what little food they had. They found a rough little road that led north and west through the forest. After half a day, it faded into a path and then, a day later, a track over the shoulder of a mountain—though their route would have been easy enough even without the path, for the weather was beautiful, and the ground soft from fallen leaves and needles.
Their path met Noshira river and turned west, to accompany it to the sea. They followed its shores for several days until they found a boat large enough for Biter. The woman who ferried them across had a barbarous accent but a ready laugh; they paid her with the last of Kagaya-hime’s ancient coins and turned north again.
There was plenty to eat. Kagaya-hime hunted, and her attendants were clever at gathering food, or even stealing it when there was someone to steal from, though in those cases it was often easier to trade meat for rice. Biter ate whatever green things came his way and grew a little thinner, evidently missing grass. He allowed Uona to ride him, but still snapped at Otoko whenever he was close.
The journey had no urgency. There was no Osa Hitachi, no Nakara longing for her home, no Seiwa Minamoto no Takase pursuing his war to drive them forward, and so they traveled slowly, at a walking pace. They did not often find farms or even cultivated fields, though sometimes they passed an abandoned house built in half-buried, in the old style. Uona was pregnant with Otoko’s child, in her early months, so she did not often feel well enough to travel immediately in the morning, and there were days they went nowhere, everyone content to drowse cat-like through the afternoon. The few people they encountered did not ask where they were going, or how they would fare through the winter.
In the north, mountains are common as geese, and there always seems to be another just beyond this one. But as one travels north they get smaller, just as horses and dogs seem to grow smaller. When the party left Noshira river, they aimed for a smooth-sloped mountain, a perfect little sister to the great mountain Fuji.
“Softer country,” Kagaya-hime said.
“Not easy, though,” Otoko said. “Look.” He pointed to a nearby ridge, its firs and pines bent nearly double. “They’ll have snow here, and winds. Bad years, it’ll be higher than my head.”
Otoko had somehow become their guide. It did not occur to Kagaya-hime to wonder how he had learned any of the ten thousand things he seemed to know, or ev
en why they still traveled. She nodded and said no more.
Their path angled across the mountain’s flank. It didn’t seem steep until they started walking it, an endless steady climb that was more tiring than crags would have been. They stopped often for the sakes of Uona and the packhorse (“Both of us”—Uona laughed breathlessly—“we’re carrying extra baggage”), so that by midafternoon they had only ascended part of the way. Kagaya-hime stopped them beside a torii-gate in a little clearing, having no wish to leave everyone huddling on a ridge when the sun set and the wind grew bitter.
Building camp was quick, for there was little to do. Kagaya-hime unloaded the horses as Otoko settled Uona in a nest of cloaks, with Biter’s saddle as a pillow. She fell asleep almost immediately as Kagaya-hime and Otoko gathered wood for a fire. They still had the better part of a deer’s haunch wrapped in its own hide left over from the day before, but: “Mushrooms, my lady,” Otoko said softly, and pointed downslope. He took a cloth for gathering and vanished among the trees.
There was little for Kagaya-hime to do. The packhorse nosed over the weeds in the clearing; as he did every evening Biter chewed on his hobbles trying to find a flaw that hadn’t been there the night before. Uona stirred a little and said, “Don’t forget…” before sinking back into sleep. Kagaya-hime walked across the clearing to examine the torii-gate.
It was taller than Kagaya-hime could reach, painted a red now faded to dust, and hung with a braided straw rope and slips of white paper, soft-edged with weather. Offerings had been heaped by the posts, but the foods were long gone, only trays and leaves left to mark them. Other, more permanent gifts remained, but they meant little to Kagaya-hime: a padded amulet necklace shredded by sun and rain to show glimmers of something inside; the ghost of a scent of sandalwood; and, amazingly, a full set of court robes in spring colors, now faded nearly to white.
Every gateway implies a road that passes through it, but this was a gate that led nowhere: there was no shrine beyond the torii-gate, not even another torii-gate that would also lead nowhere. She walked around pillars, but saw nothing. Looking up she glanced through the gate in the other direction, and gasped.
Spread out before her was a thousand miles of mountains and river-plains and marshes. The path they’d followed was a thread across the land, leading—she knew where it led. She could not see the great mountain Fuji, which was many hundreds of miles to the south, but it felt as though she ought to be able to; perhaps, if she knew just where to look, she might even see the Tkaid, the shrine where she became human, the Raj gate to the capital, the path of her panicked running through the streets: her vanished home on Nij avenue.
It was a gateway, and there was a road; but she’d been looking in the wrong direction.
She still wore the torso of her armor, though she’d removed the skirts and shoulder pieces long ago. Now she ran back to the camp and gathered the rest of the armor: leggings, arm protectors, shoulder-guards—everything. She carried the awkward weight to the foot of the torii-gate and laid it there. She bent over and shook the kote over her head, catching it with her hands as it dropped, before it could fall and awaken Uona. The tortoiseshell colors of the lacings flared with the afternoon’s gold light. She hopped a little dance, like a cat chasing a dust mote, feeling light, almost insubstantial with the removal of her armor.
The kami voices that were always in the back of her mind rustled like tree leaves in a breeze. She had grown used to them, and scarcely ever listened to their words anymore; but she listened now, wondering if they said different things so far from her old home.
“Ah,” something said suddenly, very loud and close in her mind: the road-kami.
“Where have you been?” she said. “I left you behind, I thought.”
“I am the kami of the road, but I never said which road. People occasionally misinterpret things.”
Kagaya-hime looked down the slope to the path. “This is a different road. Can you be both?”
“Who says you are on a different road than you were?” the kami said. “There are a lot of roads, and they go everywhere. Some of them can’t be seen. You are coming to the end of this one.”
“But then what?” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
“You will settle down. Make a new fudoki.”
“Alone?”
She had the impression of snorting. “When’s the last time you were alone? Your tale is a thousand long already—men, women, horses. Not to mention you have a belly full of kittens.”
Her hand came to rest on her belly. “I have wondered—they’ll be kittens?”
“Cats are clearly as dense as humans. Yes, kittens.”
“I have been locked in this body for a thousand miles,” she said, a little bitterly. “It’s no surprise if I wonder.”
“Who locked you there, hey?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but a thought came to her and she said nothing, her mouth gaping open, forgotten. “I never tried,” she finally said. “I wept and complained and mourned, but I never thought to change myself. And it’s that simple. Oh, I see. But why?”
“You needed a home. Could a cat come a thousand miles? It’s cold up here; I expect your children will get sort of shaggy. But you’ll come in handy.”
“Which road did you say you were?” she asked suspiciously. “Did I come here, or was I summoned?”
“You need a home; they need cats. Seems straightforward to me.”
And the kami’s voice was gone, as simple as that.
Today is my last here. I have been sitting out on the veranda, writing the last of the oh, so necessary good-bye letters and poems, and warming my hands beside the brazier when my fingers start to stiffen. All day I’ve received letters from relatives and friends and former attendants wishing me well. I write back to them all: Kasugano will be lovely; I will pray for you; I look forward to spending my final days in quiet contemplation. I say this, secure in the knowledge that they will have no opportunities to discover the truth of my statements.
It is blustery, and the wind carves clear but concrete shapes from the air, limning them with gold and red fallen leaves. When I look into the sky, I feel as though I am staring down into a stream, at a shifting blue-green fish—though I cannot say whether it is the fish that moves, or the water that makes it appear to do so.
Perhaps it is not the wind, and not the fish (fish? There is no fish here. What am I thinking of? It is the trees I see, tossing in the wind). Perhaps it is my eyes, which weep continually now, from exhaustion, I think. Or my mind, wavering.
There was a day, beautiful and surprisingly cold: autumn, though winter was a clear omen in the air. The forest shivered gold and red and pine-green in the wind. There were ducks overhead, shouting directions at one another as they arrowed south in great untidy flocks.
The mountain where Kagaya-hime heard the kami’s voice was the last between her and the sea. She came around a curve in the path and there, miles ahead, across thinning forest and a broadening plain where a river wandered, was the distant glitter of a bay cupped in the land’s arms. “Well, that’s the end of journeying, then,” she said aloud; cats do not like water.
Otoko walked beside her leading the horses. “Down there.” He pointed. A stream joined the river on the plain; there was a small village at the conflux, too far away to see clearly—perhaps ten shaggy-eaved buildings nearly the color of the fields that surrounded them. The pale lines of stone fences made ragged calligraphy against the ripe gold of grain, the heavy green of taro fields. Otoko crouched, turned over the dirt with a knife’s edge. “Good soil.” He straightened. “It’s even better down there.”
Uona astride Biter nodded toward the plains, the village. “Will they welcome us, husband?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Otoko said. “We have horses, we’re strong. And”—he grinned suddenly, a look Kagaya-hime had never seen on him—“my family is from here.”
“You have family?” Kagaya-hime said; even a cat can be surprised. “A
re there mice there?”
“They’re terrible,” he said. “They get into everything and—”
“Then I will stay,” she said.
Otoko said, “You’d be welcome, but it’s no place for a cultured woman.”
“But I’m not a woman, am I?” Kagaya-hime said. She kicked off her sandals, grateful to feel even cold earth underfoot.
“What are you doing?” Uona said.
“Starting a new tale,” Kagaya-hime said, and started to untie her short over robe.
“No men, then,” Uona said. “It wouldn’t be proper.”
Otoko said, “We—would not have thought of this,” and Kagaya-hime knew he meant: becoming real. He bowed. “Thank you, my lady.” He turned and led the packhorse down the slope toward the far-distant village.
Uona slipped from Biter’s back and busied herself loosing ties and lacings. “You’re sure?” she said, kneeling to remove Kagaya-hime’s hakama-trousers. “You will give up all this? Hands and the skills to make things; arrows, knives?”
“Oh, yes,” Kagaya-hime whispered, a voice soft as a purr. She dropped her vest and under robe on the ground: a shapeless untidy heap, like a snake’s skin when the snake has discarded it. Naked in the sun she stretched, a small fine-boned woman with thick black hair to her shoulders, gold eyes under straight brows. “You will let me sleep by your hearth-pit, yes?”
And there was no woman there, but a small cat, fur black flecked with gold and cinnamon and ivory, like the tortoiseshell of a hair ornament. She blinked up at Uona through eyes slitted to threads in the brilliant light. Biter reached down to touch noses with the tortoiseshell, and the cat leapt in a single fluid movement to Biter’s shoulders, balancing there until Uona pulled herself into the saddle. Cat and horse and woman started down, toward the village.