Fudoki (21 page)

It was autumn of the last year of the Eih
era. There had been drought all summer, and the dust made the sunsets unusually beautiful. The moon was the red-orange of
amagaki
persimmons when it rose each night, surprisingly large. I was not attending my brother, for he was at Ise visiting one of his other sisters, who served as priestess there (and presumably guarding his brushes; the people of Ise are perfectly capable of robbing their own parents). Several of his attendants, including Shigeko and I, rested on a veranda. The others were there to write poems, I remember; I was watching for bats, and hoping I might hear their wings beat, and the tiny nearly inaudible cries that sometimes scratch at one’s ears.

Guardsmen at court are often importunate; their duties give them permission to wander about at all hours. Several happened by and, seeing us there, stayed to flirt. I was hidden behind one of the screens we providentially had placed around ourselves—but the screen was of wide-woven gauze, and I saw them all clearly, four young men in identical hunting garb, with identical hair and caps and expressions. As they talked, I corrected myself. One of the men was a few years older than the others, though younger than I, perhaps twenty. The folds in his soft black
eboshi
cap were slightly different than those of his peers, but I could not decide whether this was a daring aesthetic statement or mere sloppiness on his part. And when he turned to respond to something Shigeko said, I saw that his eyes were gold, even in the moon’s cool light.

Young men and women together in the moonlight breed poetry as oak trees breed mushrooms. I don’t remember anyone’s poems—I was only half attending and they would be largely interchangeable anyway, all about the coming dawn and longing hearts, typical fare—until one of the guardsmen said, “But there are four of you, and we have heard only three poems.”

Shigeko and I exchanged glances. “My mistress does not share her poems with every wandering rake,” she said, “and she is not the only one who holds silent. There are five of
you,
and only
four
poems”—for the fifth guardsman, the golden-eyed man, had recited no poem.

“Why should I?” the golden-eyed man, Mononobe no D
mei, said. “You have all said everything so much more eloquently than I can.” I hid a smile. So he had not been listening, either.

“You must forgive him, my ladies,” said one of the guardsmen. “He’s from the hinterlands, practically a savage.” D
mei snorted, and then we all laughed, for his amusement was infectious.

The moon eventually slid behind the clouds that rose during the rat’s hour, and the women and guardsmen wandered off; but I fell to talking with D
mei, and before dawn, he was behind my curtains.

I knew D
mei was no sort of lover for the daughter and granddaughter of emperors. He was of lower fifth rank, and unlikely to rise higher. Worse, he was from the provinces, thought playing the game
kemari
was a waste of time, and wrote pedestrian poetry when he could be brought to write it at all. Certain of my friends at court saw the appeal (“Those shoulders!” one sighed. “Those eyes! Such a pity he’s practically a peasant”), but the general opinion was that Mononobe no D
mei was ultimately meaningless to court, just another in the endless stream of semi-civilized hicks the provinces seem to churn out and deliver for guard duty each year.

Everyone who knew was horrified—and of course everyone did know; a secret at court is like a hawk in a cage, it screams to be let out. But there are certain advantages to high rank, and one is that very few people have the effrontery—or courage, depending on one’s perspective—to criticize their superiors directly. Shigeko shrugged at this affair of mine, only begging me to be more circumspect. From others there were sly comments, but I had no responsibility to respond to them in any way, and chose not to. I saw no reason to: I was blissfully, foolishly, in love.

He visited when his and my responsibilities permitted, a handful of nights each month; and we exchanged many letters, though we almost never wrote poetry to one another—a great comfort to me, as I was sick of producing
tanka
on demand, like a peasant making straw sandals to trade by the roadside. We made the usual promises that our love would last forever, even as we both spoke freely about our differing futures, his in the east, mine here in the capital. I cannot say exactly when I started disregarding the future, and believing the promises.

And then D
mei left court and returned to his family. It was a year later that Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war began in Mutsu province, and D
mei fought against my half-brother’s troops: a traitor.

We were in the middle of the Former Nine Years’ War by the time I was old enough to be aware of anything beyond my nurse and my home. This was yet another war in Mutsu province, a million miles away, where they were apparently as common as the snowstorms there. “War” meant nothing to me, no more than did “sex”: catalogued in my mind (and one of the notebooks I kept even then, childish calligraphy in large uneven lines down the pages; I found it this evening when we opened a chest I have not looked into for twenty years) as something important to adults but not as interesting as, say, spiders’ eggs.

As far as I could tell, wars started when people rushed about killing one another with arrows someplace a long way from the capital. Some of the boys I knew had little bamboo bows and arrows made of mugwort twigs. I did not see how anyone could die in a war, for the arrows were so fragile that they tended to snap if they hit anything—which did not happen often.

I knew war must be like any child’s game. You could play without interference if the adults were busy elsewhere and you were not too noisy about it. But if for some reason the adults noticed you, they would stop you. In war, this meant the government sent troops and generals into the hinterlands, and expected a certain number of severed heads sent back to show progress. (At the age of six, severed heads fascinated me.)

Even as an adult, I have not been able to discern why
this
conflict is considered worthy of the council’s attention and the empire’s resources, and
that
one is treated like the bickering of children in another room: only worth sending someone to see what is the matter if the tears and shouts become serious. The few people I discussed such things with (my lover D
mei; my half-brother Shirakawa; the old Sugara man with whom I pretended to flirt as a cover for the time he spent leading me through certain of the Chinese classics) could not always explain the differences. “It is because you’re a woman,” they said in their various ways: “too complicated, really.” Water-clocks were also complicated, and yet I had little trouble understanding them, so I knew this was a convenient lie to cover the fact that none of them—not even the emperor—really understood the differences. Still, war is a thousand years old, here since the gods made these islands—well, fights, anyway—perhaps it is as inevitable as death.