Fudoki (18 page)

I can’t imagine
what I was thinking, keeping this paper for so many years—though I can see why I have not used it before this. I was never a lover of spring colors, and the scroll is busy with silver leaves and pale gray poems, an intimidating background to any words I might choose to record. Why would I write on something that is so obviously full of its own importance? But my eyesight is not what it was; the poems are mere patterns to me now, no more meaningful than the paw-marks of a restless cat on a rainy day.

I take a private joy in admitting this here, on paper; for my conversations have been all about poetry, lately. I have a former attendant visiting, a woman I have not seen in some years. She married a Kaya, and has been for some time off in the backwoods somewhere—Hida province? Shinano? Evidently her marriage is a trial, and she has left her husband and returned here. I invited her for a visit, grateful for her company, since Shigeko has a
kaze
-cold and is staying with a nephew somewhere on Nij
avenue until she has recovered. My guest’s faith in the proprieties is touching: she is careful with her robe combinations and poetic allusions, as if such things mattered in the long run. This would be irritating if her critical eyes ever turned outward, but she judges no one save herself.

I say whatever comes to mind in my conversations with her, but there are times she thinks I speak in poems. I stifle a smile, for this seems to be all the difference between a poem and a statement, or a poem and a background pattern on scroll’s paper: intention. And she can scarcely be thirty, too young to have learned that the intention is what matters.

It was a beautiful day when the Osa Hitachi party came at last to Hitachi province. Hime woke to bright daylight filtering down from the eave openings. The other women were awake and gone, but she heard shouts and laughing screams from outside. She stretched, and waited through the moment of grief she felt every morning, when she realized that she was still a woman, still with no ground and no
fudoki,
still alone. When her eyes stopped burning, she went outside.

Enoura was a posting station, and a fishing and farming village. Enoura inlet bordered them to the south, its open water nearly hidden by a tissue of mist, the only proof that there was any warmth in the thin sunlight. The houses of the village were large, with room under their roofs for cattle and sheep, though most animals (and people) were out, tramping through the stripped rice fields just up the hill from the inlet, hoping to find some overlooked treasure. A small fenced enclosure contained the border shrine, though the gate was open.

Nakara and her women stood at the covered well before the shrine’s entrance. They dipped water from a bucket and threatened one another with it as if they were still children. As Hime approached, they settled down at last, and each washed her mouth and hands and clapped and bowed to the east.

“The god Kashima,” Nakara explained when Hime was close enough. Recognizing the wariness that protected Hime’s heart, she said nothing of the night’s tears. “Agh, that’s cold. I think my teeth will crack. Do you want to—?”

“No,” Hime said.

“That’s fine. We don’t need to; it’s really just a courtesy to Kashima. Let’s register at the post, and then there will be hot food when we’re finished.” Her party straggled off, some back to the inn; Nakara, Hime, and two of her men to the guards’ post, a large farmhouse at one end of the village.

“Do you know what this place is?” Nakara asked.

“Hitachi province,” Hime said. “Yes?”

“We are in Hitachi, yes, and that means we are home. Or nearly so. But it’s more than that, too. You have followed the T
kaid
for a thousand miles. Or something. And now we are at the end of the road.”

“The T
kaid
ends?” Hime said, taken aback.

“Of course it does,” Nakara said. “Every road has a start and an end somewhere. It ended at the ferry dock.”

“But there is the road.” Hime pointed past the posting station. The road was clearly present, a band of dirt and frozen slush that curved off to the north.

“That’s Hitachi road. It’s different.”

Hime looked at her with startled eyes for a moment, and then bolted back the way they’d come. Nakara called after her, but did not follow.

Hime ran to the ferry dock, clogs clattering on the wood. “Road?” she said. “Are you still here?”

The road said nothing, though the people by the dock looked at her strangely. She knelt on the cold wood and closed her eyes, tried to remember the path of her dreams: the crystal beneath her feet; the golden fog from which it came, into which it vanished (though she could not have told which way was which). “Road?” she said again. “Please don’t be gone.” Silence. “At least change me back. I don’t want to stay like this.” Water lapped the dock.

“Well, anyway,” she said, “I didn’t like you much, and I don’t understand you at all, but I am sorry you’re gone.”

One tear is lonely: she cried again, for the second time in half a day. When she was done, she scrubbed her face pink with clean snow and returned to Nakara.

They were in Hitachi province, but the Osa Hitachi estate is at its northernmost edge, and that is some eighty or more miles from Enoura village. Nakara stopped less for pleasure (“I have had surfeit of pretty things,” she told Hime when asked; “now nothing will be prettier than my own rooms”), but a storm forced them to halt for several days. And then one of the women began her monthly courses and they had to stop; and one of the oxen hurt itself on a rocky incline and had to be rested until its foot healed. Hime did what cats generally do when things are cold and not very pleasant; she slept nearly all the time, even sometimes in her saddle.

It was the full moon of the twelfth month. The day before the cart had fallen into a half-buried ditch some ten feet deep that crossed the pathway, tumbling the women out onto the rocks and ice at its bottom. Junshi hurt her ankle, and the others were shaken. It took most of the day to lift the ox-cart back to the road. They had seen no farmhouse or other place to stay, so they had bundled everyone possible into the cart. No one slept well. Some slept not at all. At first Hime enjoyed the warmth of so many bodies close together, but after a time she grew restless and left the cart, to climb onto Biter’s back and sleep there, under a robe that covered them both.

Everyone was tired the next day, and this is why no one, not even Hime, saw the ambush. Bandits are as much a problem in the east as monks are here—they gather in groups and steal whatever they please (though bandits are more likely to kill than monks; that is one advantage to the capital, at least). Like everyone else in the east, the robbers do not stop working merely because the weather is bad. They need food and clothing and animals, and these can be gathered in any weather. They have been known to steal even the loincloths from parties they attack, leaving their victims to die, barefoot and naked in the snow.

I am told that there is a place where the Hitachi road is some fifteen feet wide, a rutted dirt track that a thousand years of travelers have worn down until the land on either side is waist-high, held back in places by stone retaining walls. Two well-treed hills rise on either side. This is good, because the walls and the trees cut the wind for a time; it is bad, because a robber gang can easily ambush careless travelers here.

The Osa Hitachi party was ten people: Nakara and three women in the ox-cart; the ox-boy leading his animals; four guards on horseback, two on point and two behind; and Hime, riding beside the cart. The robber gang—who can say how many there were? There might have been a thousand. Certainly, there were enough that their cries shook the trees, and their arrows struck two of the guards immediately, unhorsing them.

The narrow road broke into chaos. The horses of the fallen men panicked and bolted. The guards had all carried their strung bows across their horses’ withers; the two guards still on horseback tried to control their plunging mounts with their knees as they pulled arrows from the basket-quivers on their backs. But there were no targets: the bandits were protected by the heavy trees; and the horses were too unsettled for easy shooting. There was no winning this fight, so the two guards on horseback lowered their bows to the ground and showed their empty hands.

Cats are used to watching a threat and ignoring it if it passes by; in this they are very like women—as I was, at any rate. I sat on my verandas and listened to distant shouts or carefully phrased reports: riots in the streets when droughts threatened to starve the common folk (and us, as well: we were not immune to the gods’ vagaries); the monks in open warfare in the capital; the men and women who died of famine or plague or cold or despair. I listened; but I looked at my beautiful screens, and when I could no longer bear it, I thought of anything else, water-clocks’ mechanicals or the change of caterpillars to moths—because even the human griefs were too much to bear, and there was so much more: dogs and horses that died of beatings, foxes frozen in a snowstorm, a nest of infant mice crushed by the sudden shifting of a trunk. What else could I have done? To understand the sorrows of the world requires the strength of a bodhisattva; to accept them requires a Buddha. I am not so enlightened.