Fudoki (2 page)

The Fire-Tailed Cat
. I wrote those characters as my woman Shigeko came to me, to warn me of the impending visit from the latest healer my great-grandnephew has sent—a yin-yang diviner this time, with the good looks and arrogance that mean he will go far in his profession. He wasted half a day of my none-too-long life, but as I waited for his rather silly rituals to be completed I at least had ample time to ask myself why I am writing in this notebook. For the pleasure of watching the characters shape themselves under my hand? Do I distract myself from pain or boredom or fears for the future (for of course I am afraid. I am not so enlightened as all that)? I know the ending of my own story: do I long for a tale with an end I do not yet see?

I have written much before this but always notes about things I have observed. Never a tale (which is, after all, a lie, without proof or relevance). And why a cat?—Which is the easiest of all these to answer, for My
b
sat beside me, sunlight in her green eyes as she stared into air, or nothing. What does she see? And when I look at her, what do I see? Cats. Who can tell?

There was a day, beautiful and very hot: summer, though autumn would begin soon enough. The first gingko leaf had turned, a surprising brilliant gold fan against dusty, dry green. Ducks slept on a pond as still as enamel, out of reach of ambitious cats. Pollen choked the air with a haze like smoke. The afternoon sky had leached to the color of tin in the heat.

The cats were gathered at the midden, five adults and a handful of half-grown kittens. There were not many, because it was not a good summer for cats: the cat distemper had killed some, and a stray dog others including the oldest female, The Cat Who Found the Jewel. Most of her kittens—too young to have earned places in the
fudoki
—died, but one survived, the small golden-eyed tortoiseshell. She sat on a wall, looking down at the courtyard, blinking as the sun moved into her eyes.

Adults dozed tight-muscled in the dappled shadows cast by the garden’s trees, or stretched out on the gravel under the sun, looking dead. The kittens played idly with fishes’ tails retrieved from the midden, pausing to rest in the shade of the raised walkway and buildings that formed three sides of the space. One cat licked clean the ears of her half-grown daughter. The
fudoki
rippled over them all, slow and warm as a summer brook. A wind started.

The ducks panicked suddenly: awoke and whirled up from the lake in a ragged spiral like a dust devil. The cats did not move from their places, but in a blink slipped from sleep to hunters’ wakefulness. They watched the wheeling ducks, all thrashing wings and strange cries. The air had changed; or something.

A duck broke from the spiral and arrowed toward the cats. The others followed her; and when the first duck slammed into the side of a storehouse they followed her there, too, and died with her. The last broken-necked duck had not hit the ground when the earthquake struck.

It was not a large quake, nor a long one. Across the capital, screens and cooking braziers rattled or fell. Humans and animals screamed in their various ways. Tree branches tossed; leaves rustled as if in a gale. Temple and shrine bells jangled in their frames without rhythm.

The ground shuddered and gave a deep sound the cats felt through their paws. Some had experienced earthquakes and hunkered down, ears flat and eyes wide. Some bolted for safe places, under buildings or up trees.

The tortoiseshell did not know earthquakes; her
fudoki
(and there were quakes in the
fudoki
) could not prepare her for the ground moving. She jumped to her feet, teetered, and lost her balance, falling to the wall’s base in an awkward heap. Plaster fell around her in heavy flakes. She staggered to the courtyard’s center, braced her legs against the bucking ground, and hissed.

The residence’s main house collapsed slowly, almost painstakingly. Old timbers groaned and broke like river ice. With odd musical noises, cracked roof tiles shook free, slid, and shattered on the dirt. More fell; they sloughed in sheets like snakeskin as supporting pillars flexed. A dislodged beam crashed down. Another splintered with a noise like fireworks, or thunder. Slowly, the roof crumpled in on itself, vanished into the building with a wave of white dust and a sound so loud that the tortoiseshell fell, stunned with the weight of it.

She could not tell when the shaking stopped being the earth and became instead the falling building. She streaked up the ragged bark of a
hinoki
cedar, to an abandoned squirrel’s nest she knew. She heard noises outside the grounds: shouts, cries; on the street to the west, frightened horses that had kicked down their stable doors; the frightened (or irritated) bleating of the estate’s goat, fading as it bolted away. The last cat she saw was an aunt vanishing beneath the west walkway.

The bells chimed randomly for a long time after the earthquake ended.

Despite the earthquake’s damage, it was the fire that destroyed the
shinden
residence and its grounds. The eighth month is a dangerous month: the gardens are dry, and wood-and-paper houses catch fire as quickly as brazier coals. In the capital’s southeast quarter, a tipped lantern set fire to a floor mat. A length of summer gauze hanging from a curtain stand flared up and lit an old reed eye-blind, and that was the first house to burn. In the afternoon’s rising breeze, flames spread to the north and west, a bright fan across the city.

Crouched in her tree, the tortoiseshell smelled the fire before she saw or heard anything. The air grew sharp and stung her eyes, made her wrinkle her nose and sneeze: a greasy, complicated smell. She shook her head to dislodge the tang.

There were more shouts outside the grounds, more hoofbeats, wagon wheels screaming under weight. Bells rang again, their discord rhythmic, in earnest this time. Behind all was a steady roar, like a festival crowd cheering.

The heart of a
hinoki
cedar is not a good vantage point, and the tortoiseshell crept along a limb until she could see out through the needles, over the broken outer walls. Through the dirty air she saw that everywhere to the south and east was smoke. Where buildings burned, thick dark plumes seethed upward; where there was grass or gardens, pale shreds crawled toward her. And there were flames.

She knew fire, convenient little blazes that the residence’s people used for their mysterious purposes, but this was not the well-mannered glow of charcoal or lamplight. This was chaotic, full of angry colors: the source of the roar she had heard, the shouting crowd. A sudden gust of hot wind slammed into her. She retreated along her branch.

When she was small, she fit into the squirrel’s nest, had hidden here as the dog killed her mother. But she was larger now, and it was no longer a refuge. She climbed as high as she safely could, and pressed herself into a little hollow where a branch joined the trunk. And then she waited, panting, for the fire.

We—humans I mean, peasants and nobles alike—know about the fires. I had not lived more than a few summers before I had learned of them. They always start with something small, but if the weather is dry or the wind is strong, they can destroy everything—or nearly everything; fire is as whimsical as the gods. Flames settle into one place, burning for days with choking black smoke and leaving the ground too hot to touch, mysteriously poisoned for years afterward. Across the street, they cross another residence with no more damage than black-scorched tips to the banquet field’s grass. The flames disregard entirely the gardens of a third residence, happily beyond the range of the winds’ vagaries. Within a few streets one may see all of these, and more besides: a thatched stable with a roof like a pillar of flame, its walls hidden in the smoke that pours downward; a storehouse half-burned, half-untouched; a garden pond filled with boiled, once-ornamental fish. One shop is abandoned, screens and grilles gaping as the owners flee with the best of their stock in a wagon pulled by their strong-legged sons. A shop next door remains open, and a woman buys gourds in a net from an old man. Except for the cloths over their mouths, they seem oblivious to the burning city.

If the wind blew safely away from where I lived, the fire became exciting, like riots in another quarter of the capital. “What is the news?” we all called to passersby. The rules were forgotten, and noblewomen (even princesses, if no one was attending closely) ran barefaced and barefooted into the street to catch at the sleeves of the guardsmen hurrying past: how many houses are gone, what streets, what lives? We ate our rice cold on the verandas where we could watch the smoke. We prayed desperately to the kami, to the Buddhas, to all the gods and demons, begging for an easy fire, begging that the wind stay kind.

We
know about the fires, but the tortoiseshell did not. There were stories in the
fudoki,
of course, but a story does not choke you with fumes; the grass in a tale doesn’t hiss like a kitten as it burns. She crouched in her tree and watched through eyes slitted against the smoke.

At sunset the wind eased, and the flames slowed. The fire seemed brighter with dusk, its movements clearer. The smoke glimmered red and amber. She heard individual noises within the roar now: a whistle like an overblown
sh
-pipe, low wooden sighs, an angry metallic squeal.

To the east was a
shinden
residence like this one, old and forgotten and dry. The main house and its wings were half-hidden from the tortoiseshell, but for a time what she could see remained recognizable and was even made beautiful by the fire. Flames defined everything, tracing the shapes of screens and supports, railings and walkways. Smoke gushed like water along the roofs, but she could not tell whether it moved up or down.

The flames hesitated at Sai avenue. Lanky weeds and half-grown trees muddled its neglected surface, but it was broad, and the border-ditches still carried water, if not much. Cinders showered up from the burning buildings and started small fires in the weeds. The neighbors’ gatehouse collapsed outward, and coals caught in a young
katsura
tree in the avenue. Smoke oozed from the tree’s crown until the fire became visible and destroyed it.