Fudoki (16 page)

They turned back, and when they got a certain distance from the tree, Nakara said, “I will tell my nieces and nephews of this.”

The tortoiseshell woman frowned, abrupt in her unhappiness. “Why? What will you tell them? ‘I saw a tree’? I have seen a million.”

Nakara stopped and turned, surprised. “That tree is—you did not sense it? It is sacred.”

“To whom? The gods? Which gods? Do we stop at all these places so that you may find sacred things?”

Nakara turned back and walked slowly. “Not really. I stop because I must, I suppose.”

“Why?” the tortoiseshell woman asked, black grief forcing her to speak more harshly than she might have. “I understood the ducks and the monkey and the black pig, a little. But you can’t eat a tree. One is just like another. Where is the use in that?”

“It warms my eyes and my heart,” Nakara said, “and the world is cold enough.
That
is the use of that.”

Their conversations were often strange, for the tortoiseshell woman did not always make predictable (or even socially acceptable) statements. Nakara was not shocked. There had been a time when she was young, when she had lived under an enchantment, attendant to a fox in distant Hida province. Her life had been filled with wonders and strangeness. A woman who was also a cat did not surprise her.

Nakara treated the stranger as a peer and a friend, and gave her a sobriquet: “Princesses may say what they like; the rest of us must be more circumspect,” Nakara said to her at the end of one of their conversations.

“But then what is the good of speaking?” the tortoiseshell woman asked. “You might as well be silent.”

“We are not all princesses,” Nakara said. “And yet we have things to say.” That was how the tortoiseshell woman came to be called
Hime,
princess. The sorrel they called Biter, for obvious reasons.

It is very late; the only light in my room is the brazier’s dim red gleam and a faint sift of starlight that has somehow managed to ease its way past the screens and walls and curtains that otherwise protect me from the elements. My writing grows large and sloppy; I am sure that in the morning it will look to me as irregular as a child’s.

Shigeko kneels across from me in silence, though I have written many pages since she first entered my rooms. She is pulling at a flaw, a loose thread in a sleeve. I can only trust that the thread is there; I see the tension in her hands and the soft puckering of the fabric, but the thread itself is invisible in this light. The night conceals her age; with her sleeping robes all askew around her shoulders, and her hair tied with paper tapes into a single hank to keep it from snarling, she looks like a small girl awakened by a bad dream.

“Shigeko, stop doing that, you’ll ruin the fabric.” She looks at her hands as if surprised they are hers, and places them in her lap abruptly. “Are you hungry? Would you like something warm to drink?” There is another attendant with me (there is
always
an attendant with me), a younger woman who silently bows and leaves, to try and find hot broth at this absurdly late hour. I no longer remember the younger ones’ names; it seems pointless, like naming maple seeds.

Shigeko has stopped pulling threads; now she pulls the tapes from her hair and drops them into the brazier. Each bursts into tiny flames before vanishing utterly, a gold flare that illuminates her face’s lines, touches the white in her hair.

I ask, “What’s wrong, Shigeko?”

She does not answer immediately. Despite the tapes, there are tangles: she begins to comb out the knots using her fingers.

Except for visits to her family or the shrine at Ise, and her monthly retreats for her courses, we have been together nearly every moment of every day of fifty years. She seems to have no great dreams, no restless desire to be anything but what she is. For fifty years, she has been content to select robe combinations, sew even seams, exclaim about the weather, and exchange gossip with my other women—and to do it all again the next day, and the next. All these decades of shared minutiae have mounded up around us, concealing the fact that she is her own person, with yearnings and tastes of her own. I know her better than anyone, in the same way I know the texture of my own skin, or the shapes of my fingernails. There is a disadvantage to this: I do not always see what I am looking at.

The young attendant returns with bowls of hot
taro
soup and slivers of boar meat on a lacquered tray. I am not hungry: the growing thing that kills my body makes it difficult to eat, but I watch Shigeko drink her soup with tidy little sips, just as she has drunk every bowl of soup for fifty years. It is just as well that her manners are good, or she would have driven me mad, and I would have had to send her away. And this would have been like losing an arm.

The T
kaid
takes to the great sea for a short while, on a long boat ride that just skims the Noumi peninsula, entering a vast inlet, landing the traveler at last in the Shida district of Hitachi province. This is (usually) safe in the summer months, but less so in winter, when snow can blind the pilot, and winds and strange tides may pull a boat far from shore before it can duck into the shelter of Shida inlet. The Osa Hitachi party waited for days before the weather and tides were such that the ferryfolk would take them. The only place they could stay at this time of year was a small and bitterly cold inn, mostly closed down for the season. Whatever their ranks, everyone gathered in the raised room beside the kitchen area of the main building, where the ovens kept things a bit warmer. The men went out often, for they had the animals to tend and various preparations to make, but the women stayed inside, and Hime often waited with them. They read aloud sometimes from a palm-leaf sutra they carried in a deerskin case; or from a handful of notebooks containing
monogatari
tales. Hime ignored the sutras (alas; she might have learned much from thinking of the Buddhas), but the tales intrigued her. “Though they are not very interesting,” she said aloud.

Junshi put down the notebook from which she had been reading. “No? When Genji is exchanging such heartfelt poems with Aoi?”

“There is no fighting,” Hime said. “No wonders, no strangeness. Not like the
fudoki
of my people.”

“Tell it then,” Nakara said.

“Tell you my
fudoki
?” Hime said, taken aback. She remembered all the cats’ stories as vividly as if they were her own paws, but to tell them to one not of the group—this stymied her.

Nakara laughed at her expression. “I’m sick of
our
stories; I’ve heard them a thousand times. I say I’m praying for my brother’s success, but I have to admit that a big part of my prayers is the hope that he brings me something new to read from the capital.”

The Five-Colored Cat, The Cat with Three Legs, The Straw-Cloak Cat. She could tell the tales, and they would be heard, they would be witnessed. The
fudoki
would continue. But it would be wrong. The tale would be like the woman’s ghost back in the capital, begging her charred body to awaken. “No,” she said. Her eyes burned. “I have no tale to tell. Not anymore.”

The other women begged a little, but Nakara said nothing, only poured tea for them all and led the conversation down safer paths. Hime left shortly afterward, to “see to the horse,” and did not return for many hours.

She did see to Biter, and then stayed with the sorrel. Nakara might have been hurt had she realized this, that Biter was the closest thing Hime had to a friend. Hime did not speak to him, except the little nothings we say to our pets and our horses. He never spoke back. He did not behave in any human way; he was totally and unequivocally a horse, which is to say stubborn, occasionally stupid, frequently lazy, and occasionally savage.—Which is quite human, if I think on it.

Biter was an animal, and Hime, suspended between cat and woman, longed to be one. Perhaps Nakara would have understood this better than any of us might expect.

Nights were too dark to read anything, and so they talked, and Hime learned more of the party’s mission. “It’s complicated,” Nakara warned.

Hime—thinking of the intricate interrelations between cats and people, dogs, horses—shrugged. “I will try to keep track,” she said.

It
was
complicated, the sort of tricky political situation that usually ends with disaster of some sort. The
band
, the east, has always been a troublesome part of the empire. The original inhabitants were absolute savages (they wore furs and drank blood and carried arrows in their hair!), but they were controlled many centuries ago, when families from the central provinces and the southwest were sent by the empire to pacify them. Over time, some of these people became little better than those they defeated—though at least they did not drink blood. The eastern families are many months’ travel from the capital, and generally well armed and well mounted (indeed, Osa Hitachi no Nakara’s family is not atypical). The families develop independent ambitions and become fractious, and then the emperor (any of a dozen emperors over the past four hundred years) must send or assign troops to remind them of his absolute authority.

Or so it was explained to me so many years ago, on the one hand by my half-brother; on the other by my golden-eyed lover, Mononobe no D
mei. My lover came from Mutsu province, as far north and east as one may go, and his perception of the situation was quite different from my brother’s, naturally. I tried to find a medium between their varying reports, but I must believe my half-brother was right. Was he not emperor?

Nakara explained to Hime: there was a problem. The Osa Hitachi clan controlled a neglected estate somewhere in Mutsu province. (I cannot say in which of the districts, for they’re all barbarous places; there’s no point to keeping track. The only district I know in Mutsu province is Iwate, which was D
mei’s home.) The second Osa Hitachi brother managed the estate, which he did well, opening new land for rice fields and producing small amounts of gold from a mine on the site.