Fudoki (20 page)

This is outrageous, of course—Shigeko (much younger, as were we all, forty years ago) is horrified, though it is she who has ensured our (more-or-less) privacy, here in the cinnamon-tree courtyard—but I revel in it. “Hold it thus,” he tells me, “the arrow resting on your finger.” Shigeko watches silently from the veranda, her expression strange to me, but I do not care. I am with D
mei and I am focused on his breath in my ear as he places my hands. I drop the dove-fletched arrow a thousand times, and snap my fingers a hundred; at last I send it off on a single wobbly flight. It lands twenty feet before me, with all the power of a dropped fan. We try again, and finally I manage to get an arrow to stick for a moment into a support post (though that was not what I aimed at).

I laugh, and he laughs with me, and I think he believes I am merely pleased at this scrap of skill I have learned. It is not this. It is that, for the first time (and, as it turns out, the last), I have felt a killing action run through my fingers. I have been dangerous to someone besides myself.

I wonder if we all long to kill. I did not think it at the time, but perhaps Shigeko recognized this and hungered for it—her expression might have been envy. D
mei had killed: animals, mostly, but bandits, as well. I envied him.

The party arrived at the Osa Hitachi estate at the three-quarters’ moon of the twelfth month. After the attack, they had pushed on as fast as they could, with no halts for sightseeing or monthly courses or directional tabus. “I am sorry if the kami are offended,” said Nakara, “but I won’t be able to apologize if we are dead.” Their arrival was well after the middle of the night, and Hime’s first impression of the place was a chaos of buildings, walls, and trees, touched red-gold by torches, pale lilac by the nearly full moon.

The big country estates are as different from the capital as a mountain might be. Each is a town, really: many buildings serving myriad purposes, gathered within bowshot of one another. There is a stockade of tree trunks gathered from land cleared for rice and soya and hemp, but (in this case, at least) it has been a long time since there has been a serious threat, and many of the logs are tipped or fallen, or even taken away to serve other, more immediately useful purposes. Goats and chickens wander through the breaks in the wall, scrounging for food under the shallow snow. The children of the estate (and there are a lot, for there are more than a hundred regular residents here, to say nothing of the visitors and followers and mendicants) climb on them, playing Bandits.

The Osa Hitachi estate is all of this. To the east and the north, forest-covered mountains march all the way to the ocean; on cold nights, you hear wolves plotting to steal calves. A river runs beside the estate, fast and unruly, full of clear water so cold that my teeth ache even thinking of it, like biting into ice brought from the storehouses in the seventh month. Below the main buildings, something everyone calls the spider-leg stream crosses to join the river.

The Hitachi road threads through a series of steep-sided hills not so far away. Everywhere are trees, and because this is winter, they are bare mostly. The air is very cold.

Nakara was glad to be home. She slept for a night and a day, and then left lengths of cloth and paper and silk flowers at the altars of the kami and the Buddha. By the second evening, she had returned to managing the estate for her oldest brother, the vice-governor of Hitachi province.

The cat Kagaya-hime was more ambivalent. For months she had traveled alone, without clan or ground. The
fudoki
was gone, but the road had offered a substitute, and she had accepted it. Joining Nakara’s party had not changed things so much. Kagaya-hime still slept on the ground, still killed her own food, still drifted north and east. And Nakara was far from her natural place, as well. A cat-woman on horseback and a provincial woman on pilgrimage are both unrooted from their worlds. But now they had come to the Osa Hitachi estate. Nakara belonged here, as did her attendants and guards and all the other scores of people. It was only Kagaya-hime who did not belong.

She did many things that were unconventional at best. Sometimes she wore women’s robes, when she was with Nakara and her women. More often, she wore a man’s hunting garb, knife at her waist and bow over her shoulder. The people of the estate did not seem to mind, or even notice her strangeness. People tend not to notice things that don’t fit into their expectations, and it might have been this; or something else, of course.

Kagaya-hime’s few expectations of people—that they tended to kick stray cats and were careless with food scraps—did not apply to her time as a woman at the Osa Hitachi estate, and so she noticed many things. Nakara had a lover, for instance, a bear-hunter who came down from the mountains one moonless night, and stayed until just before dawn. Kagaya-hime saw them say their farewells, as she returned from hunting with a serow deer across her shoulders. He passed her on the path without a look; only later did she realize how strange this was, that he appeared not to observe her.

She noticed the unpredictability most. People stayed up some nights, slept others; they ate, whether they were hungry or not. They changed clothes when there was no reason for it, and played games that taught them no useful skills, such as pouncing would be. People may think that it is cats that are the unpredictable ones, but this is only because we do not understand their thoughts. Within a cat’s mind the sequences—sleep to hunt to groom to doze—all make sense.

The patterns of movement and interaction on the estate were bewilderingly complex, especially in comparison with her only other experience of a shared ground, her
fudoki
with its ranked handful of cousins and aunts and fellow-wives, its careful separation of range from range. Even the
fudoki
’s overlaps were sharply differentiated;
this
cat used the wisteria courtyard in daylight only,
that
cat only at dusk. Perhaps such structure is a comfort to cats. Their lives are filled with a thousand sorts of danger; it may feel good to know precisely where one stands. Men and women also do this, but the dangers that threaten us are not quite so easy to identify as a hungry dog or distemper, and our attempts to give the world a pattern confuse even us.

The constant talking didn’t bother her, for cats use their voices to say, “Here I am; where are you?”—and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation, the words mere ornaments over the underlying purpose. The fact that humans seem never to be alone when they can help it bothered her more, and she found the constant companionship, as steady and irksome as dogs’, annoying. She spent many hours in the stable with Biter, until one of the grooms saw in her a fellow spirit, and came more and more often to share stories of horses he had loved, brown, bay, and blue—the comparative merits of each—mares’ tricks hiding their foals—the cleverness of certain stallions—a red stallion who had kicked off any saddle, however well placed—the comparative advantages of pearwood or cedar for saddle frames—the best workmanship available only from the capital, of course, preferably from the Yana family workshops. After this, she spent time well out of range of the people, killing quail or whatever fell within reach of her arrows and knives.

She rediscovered another thing, as well, the charm of hunting for mice. When she was a cat, this had been as automatic to her as breathing, but a mouse was scarcely a mouthful to a woman, and she had fallen out of the habit. Once she began to see them again, she saw that mice, like smoke, were everywhere. There were nights when she walked down to the grain storehouses and crouched there, killing mouse after mouse with quick stabs of her knife.

One night, Nakara, walking down to an outhouse, saw Kagaya-hime turning something over in her hands. It was a dead mouse, or rather the scrap of fur and flesh that was left when a finger-wide blade pins a mouse to the frozen ground.

“Vermin!” she exclaimed, and then, crouching beside Kagaya-hime, said, “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Trying to see if mice have ghosts.” Kagaya-hime gestured at a heap of mice by her foot. “So far none of them do,” she added.

“Why do you care?” Nakara asked. Kagaya-hime said nothing, so she added: “Why are you killing mice at all? That’s dogs’ work.”

“Your dogs are not very effective, then. It is good practice.” Kagaya-hime scooped up her mice and stood. The broken mice barely filled her hand.

“Good practice for what?” Nakara asked, but Kagaya-hime was gone already, walking toward the stables where Biter stayed. When they met later, in Nakara’s rooms, she did not ask her guest what she did with the mice.

I am cold, and so I write of the cold. It is winter in Hitachi province, and Nakara’s world, like mine, is centered on braziers.

Nakara had many braziers. In the hinterlands, the proprieties are not adhered to quite so stringently as they would be here at court. At the Osa Hitachi estate, everyone who was acceptably clean—male, female, warrior, and ox-boy (if clean enough)—stayed near Nakara. The curtains designed to protect her from the eyes of men and lesser souls instead embraced them all, cuddling the braziers’ warmth close. “What is the good of having all these charcoal makers on one’s property,” she said once to Kagaya-hime, though the cat-woman had made no comment, “if you get no good from it? It’s like raising silkworms and wearing hemp.”

In any case, Nakara’s responsibilities as practical manager of the estate precluded her hiding behind curtains; but even when it might have been appropriate—entertaining functionaries or messengers from the capital—she did not often hide herself. When she did, it usually had less to do with propriety, and more to do with concealing her sometimes obvious signs of boredom.

Kagaya-hime stayed nights with Nakara and her women. Like any cat, she craved warmth, and the braziers and fires compensated for the occasionally irritating unending patter of conversation. And there was much conversation.

There was even a
fudoki
of sorts for the people, an unconscious mix of shared jokes and experiences with histories of the residents: The Man with the Two-Foot Penis, Great-Grandfather Falls Through the Broken Screen, The Three Clever Sisters. Some were funny, but others were less so: The Woman Who Gave Birth to a Demon, The Leg That Rotted Off. The stories—or even a slanting reference to one, for everyone seemed to know them all—wove these people together as much as the rooms they shared and their confusing relationships.

Kagaya-hime had no stories, or thought she had none, and their tales filled her with longing. The events of her life grew as great as a
fudoki
a hundred cats long, but she could not see that this mattered. Not yet.

I am come to the end of this notebook, and find I must begin another.