Fudoki (13 page)

From time to time, other men tried to attack the tortoiseshell woman, but these attempts were never successful. She usually killed them silently, but there were times, when the black empty place that had once held her
fudoki
seemed overwhelming, that she laughed. When she had been a cat, killing meant food, survival. It came also to mean peace.

When she crossed into Sagami province, and stopped for a time at the border shrine, she found a lovely sorrel stallion tied outside its walls, a bridle and rosewood and inlaid-shell saddle wrapped in oiled hemp-cloth at the sorrel’s feet. Perhaps by the sheerest coincidence they were abandoned here by some noble who had staggered into the woods to die (for the horse and the tack were very fine; no one would willingly leave such a treasure). Perhaps they were created by the magic that placed flint and knives in her basket—which had also, somehow, changed, to waxed saddlebags of leather patterned with tiny dark blue flowers on an ivory background. Perhaps the horse and its gear were an apology or a lesson or something completely different, from the road-kami or another.

We try desperately to make sense of the world, to see the
why
s behind how things happen. We make up things that might help:
sukuse,
the law of cause and effect; perhaps even the gods. Perhaps even Buddha. But sometimes there is no
why.
The tortoiseshell woman didn’t wonder why the sorrel was there—or the
why
s of any of it: the earthquake, the fire, the journey, her unfamiliar body. In this she was purely a cat. She approached the horse cautiously (always wise, when meeting a strange horse), and ran her hands along its legs and belly and back. She understood horses, she found. She also understood this horse, its temperament and the strength in its bones and its great-lunged chest. She pressed her face against the sorrel’s long nose, hands on its cheeks. They stood there for a time, woman-who-was-cat and horse. And then she saddled and bridled it, mounted easily, and moved on.

Miles: days. Or a journey can be measured by sights, the smooth exchange of vista and intimate detail, shrine and temple. She saw the great mountain Fuji when she was as far away as Yoshida, back in Mikawa province, though it was many days before she saw it a second time, for the air hid it in clouds or mist. She crossed under the sullen black forests of Ashigara mountain, and overheard the elegant savage songs of the countrywomen there. She led the sorrel across the plains of Morikoshi, where she saw no flowers (and did not know enough to look for them, having no experience with the poetry we have all read a thousand times). She passed through reeds so tall that even standing on the sorrel’s back she could not see over them. Mountains, rapids, marshes that stretch for days, dunes dusted with snow as white as the sand. Skies that stretch a million miles east across the endless ocean. A lake so clear that she could watch a sleeping fish as long as her arm, suspended as if in crystal.

I have not seen these sights, but I have heard of them, and longed to hear more. When I was young, I foolishly imagined myself in love with a guardsman who had been sent from Mutsu province. He was handsome, though his eyes were unsettling, for they were not properly black but instead liquid gold.

He could not write poetry, but I didn’t care. Poetry did not laugh the way he did, and it did not come warm to my bed on certain brilliant moonlit nights. Poetry did not tell me about the great mountain Fuji at dawn, when it is the color of roses and pearls and peaches. Fuji captured a cloud sometimes, he told me, round and flat as a mirror. “You cannot imagine how big it is,” he said to me, and I reached under the bed robes and grasped him. “Not that!” He laughed, and told me more, about the plains of the Kant
, which run to the very foot of Fuji, so that it seems but a handful of miles away, instead of the seventy and more that it is. There are many herds of half-wild horses there, each a hundred or more together, all more beautiful than anything you’ve ever seen.

He told me about all these places, and others besides. I did not write them all down back then. I regret this now, even though I would be burning those notebooks tomorrow in any case.

“You love it there, don’t you?” I said to him: a little wistfully, for his eyes never shone when he looked at me, not as they did when he spoke of
azumi,
the east. “You will leave someday, and return there.”

He said, “I serve my emperor as directed by my father; but come dawn of the first day my duty is done, I’ll be gone.”

And so he was. I cried a bit, for he had been very handsome, and was a kind lover. But mostly I cried from envy for his freedom, and because there was a place he loved like this.

Strange, how I have not let myself think of him until now.

One night, when she was still in Sagami province, she slept outside, for there were no houses or inns close—though there had once been a salt-making place close by; the silvered wood ruins looked and felt like ancient bones. The sky was clear and brilliant with stars, for the three-quarters’ moon of the eleventh month was not yet up. She was very near the sea here, on Morikoshi plain. She could hear the surf, and feel it in the darkness, a great restless weight to her right.

She unsaddled her horse and hobbled him, and he began to pull up grass, and to strip the needles from a small tree stunted by the wind.

She built a fire of driftwood and watched the flames leap up taller than her own height. She had flinched the first few times she’d made fire, but that was many nights and miles (and sights) ago. She no longer saw the fire-cats who had tried to speak to her with their distended mouths. There were no cats, fire or flesh, in these lands she passed through. She was the first, which only increased her sense of loneliness and loss. The words of her
fudoki
were rather pain than comfort, though she could not help but recite them some nights, as a child cannot help sucking her thumb.

Her ears were still sharp. Even through the crackling of the fire, she heard a tiny rustling in one of her unstrapped saddlebags, and so she flipped it upright, and began to remove things carefully until she saw her intruder. It was a straw-brown mouse, small as her thumb. Its black eyes stared up at her. “Mouse?” she said, and got no answer. “Do you speak? Do you feel? Have you a soul? Do you have gods?”

It only stared at her, vibrating with fear, and so she tipped the saddlebag onto its side and let the mouse go. Mice were less than a mouthful these days, anyway, and she would have gotten little satisfaction from eating this one.

She came to Musashi province at the end of the eleventh month, and forded Sumida river a few days into the twelfth month. The air was crisp, and heavy forest crowded the T
kaid
on either side, so she buried her hands in her cloak, and let the sorrel pick its own path. Through a thinning in the trees she saw a wood yard, and a great tree propped up to be sawed into planks. A wiry little man in a loincloth stood atop the tree, pulling through the wood a saw as tall as he was. Sawdust drifted down in the heavy still air. Two other men watched him and said something—but she could not hear it, for by that time, she and the sorrel were past, and she had been craning back in her saddle to watch.

There was little traffic. She watched her breath puff in front of her and thought of mice. Ahead, a large party had pulled off the road near a roadside shrine to Inari. A well-dressed provincial woman and her women laid a packet of silk and a little barrel before the moss-green statues of Inari’s foxes, bowed and clapped. The tortoiseshell woman picked up her reins, and helped her horse choose a path through the cloud of servants and guards and horses and oxen that clogged the road. The noblewoman lifted a hand and hailed her, and the tortoiseshell woman stopped.

“We are about to eat,” the noblewoman said. “Would you be so kind as to join us?”

The tortoiseshell woman looked down from her saddle for a moment. The noblewoman was of middle age but still lovely, with a clever expressive face and merry eyes. She had kilted her padded robes to her knees, but this had not prevented their hems from being splashed with mud. The noblewoman looked down at herself and said, “I must look a perfect demoness to you; but I promise I’m hardly that. I don’t exaggerate when I say it would be a kindness for you to join us. We’ve been on pilgrimage for half a month now, and we are sick of each other’s faces.” She laughed and her attendants laughed with her. Provincials have a very different sense of the proper relationships between a master and the various sorts of servants. “Please.”

The tortoiseshell woman trusted no one, and yet she found herself sliding from her saddle. One of the noblewoman’s menservants reached for the sorrel’s bridle. “My horse doesn’t like—” she began, but the sorrel finished the statement by lashing out at the man, teeth slamming together with an audible sound a hairs-breadth from his arm.

He laughed and grabbed its bridle. “Settle down, biter.” He caught the tortoiseshell woman’s eye and said, “I like ’em feisty. Horse like a dragon, here.”

“He’ll make sure your horse gets some food and water,” the noblewoman said. “Please, come.” She bowed and took the tortoiseshell woman’s hand. If she felt the burn scars she said nothing, only led her to a rush-walled ox-carriage and helped her up into it.

It was warm in the carriage, and when the noblewoman followed her inside, it was crowded. There were five of them, all women, kneeling on thick cushions. They passed around little boxes filled with food of various sorts, and each helped herself with smooth little sticks to pickled cabbage, cold fried rice cakes, salted eggplant, and sea slugs. The tortoiseshell woman had never used sticks to eat, but she found a pair tucked into her sash—a thing she understood without learning, like horses and knives and knot-making. When the women were done, they handed the boxes out of the cart, and the men filled them with hot tea. She sniffed it warily (cats do not like hot things to drink), and carefully sipped. The warmth soaked right through her, along with a sweet, bright grassy flavor. She remembered with bitter clarity that summer afternoon, crouched on the wall at her grounds, the last moment she had still belonged. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned her face from the women.

There was little talking until the tea.

“I realized I have said nothing of who we are,” the noblewoman said suddenly. “I am the oldest daughter of my family. I’ve been to the temple at Takeshiba to pray for my youngest brother’s success in an endeavor. These are my women.” She named each, but the tortoiseshell woman frowned. She didn’t understand names: unlike a cat’s place in the
fudoki,
they said nothing useful about a person. The noblewoman laughed at her expression. “Never mind, you can ask again later, when there aren’t so many of them. Now: who are you and where are you from?—because this is the middle of nowhere, you know. Hitachi province is not the end of the world—that would be Mutsu province”—the women laughed—“but we can certainly see it from here, on a clear day anyway.”