Fudoki (22 page)

The year I was fifteen and came to court, the war in Mutsu province had been going on so long that I think everyone was surprised when it ended.

D
mei had actually fought. He said little about it, but what he did say made it clear that war was quite different from the little boys of my childhood scrambling around with their feeble bows: different, even, from the court guards who could shoot through a poem slip on a board a hundred paces away. D
mei had actually fought. He had fired arrows—three feet long and tipped with steel—directly at men.

“Did you hope to kill them?” I asked one night, shocked but thrilled.

“That’s why I aimed for them,” he said and then laughed, though it was not an amused sound. “Truthfully, what I hoped for was to get through alive and without letting my father down.”

And that is all he would say then.

Shortly after he left, yet another war began in Mutsu province: Yoshiee’s war. I grieved for the loss of D
mei, (though I did not realize at the time that this is why I took lovers, why I cried without reason some nights, why my temper was grown so short), and this manifested in a fascination with war. It certainly had to be more interesting than my activities at court, which left me feeling trapped and desperate: a mouse gnawing hopelessly, endlessly, at the lacquered walls of my box.

I have strayed far from my tale, I find. The
monogatari
tales (for I have read them, despite my professed disdain), and the folktales the blind storytellers recite, and the parables of the priests all stay close to their topics, such as they are. Event follows event in tidy progression, poem and response, question and answer.

I have often thought that we humans sort our lives and their experiences very strangely. We see everything as a tale, event following event, birth to death. These are the years I could have borne a child, that is the year I wore mourning for my father; this was the month that I fell in love, that the day I ran away.

But time is very flexible, I think. I remember things from many years ago with crystal clarity—the brilliance of the red silk the Chinese traders brought to the capital when I was nineteen, the tiled skin of a snake I touched when I was six, the grass-bright smell of D
mei’s breath—and they are clearer to me than the robes I wore yesterday. Today does not follow yesterday;
now
follows other
now
s.

There is another way to sort things, just as I can sort moths’ wings by size, or by color, or by when and where acquired. Every line of this notebook—and all my other notebooks, and every letter and sutra and poem I have ever scrawled in a long and word-ridden life—has required that I make ink. On occasion the ink is gold or vermilion or the color of lapis; but it is most generally glossy black, and thick as paint.

The manner in which I make ink—the precise gestures of grinding the ink stick, adding water drop by drop, gathering and blending the two on a soft thick brush rolled against the ink stone—is always the same, whether I do it today or ten years ago or sixty, and it never fails to fill me with satisfaction—though this may be dispelled immediately afterward, when I drop the brush or find a long hair in the ink, or have absentmindedly made it too runny and must fiddle to correct it. Still, there is that perfect instant of brush and water and ink.

The instant that I make ink is closer to all the times I have made ink than to any other instant, even the moments surrounding it. I make ink, and a visitor is announced, someone I cannot simply send away. He approaches my screens bare heartbeats later, but his voice, the polite bow I see beyond the blinds, is almost infinitely far from the moment of the ink stone.

I have not lived seventy years. I have lived instead these things: the entwining of my days with a few men and women I have loved; a longing to walk on unpaved roads; the collecting of vermin, and other unacceptable studies; quite a number of unpleasant or tedious duties performed; the making of ink; eating and elimination and hair-washing and tooth-dying. My seventy years are only the frame on which they hang.

Very well, then:

Eventually the chaos in the yard settled down. The horses were settled, and the men were shown to quarters and fed, and given warm dry clothing. As bitter-cold twilight settled into moonless night, Nakara’s brother Kitsune and the older man and several of their retainers were given places beside Nakara’s omnipresent braziers. For once, Nakara banished much of the household, though Nakara’s woman Junshi stayed, and Kagaya-hime: eight in total. The curtains that would more properly have been used to separate the men and the women, or the old man (who was the noble Seiwa Minamoto no Takase) from the lower ranks, were clustered around them all, the reflected light of lanterns and braziers making a warm little space that smelled of hot coals and men who have spent much time on horseback lately. The eaves were many tens of feet over their heads, blackened and shiny with soot and moisture, and the light lost itself in a tangle of beams that refuted the sense of coziness. No one but Kagaya-hime looked up. Everyone there knew that safety is an illusion; everyone except Kagaya-hime felt that sometimes the illusion is preferable.

Kagaya-hime’s instinct had been right: Kitsune and his party had failed. There would be no official warrant to allow them to pursue and strike the Abe. The vice-governor of Hitachi province was not seen as the correct person to bring this to the central government’s attention; however, if these allegations were true, they would surely be addressed by the next governor of Mutsu province, who would be named at the New Year’s appointments.

“But that is many days from now, and then it will be months before he gets here,” Nakara said, her eyes glittering with tears. “Months more before he acts—if he is not like the last one, allied with the Abe. My brother is dead and the Abe tramp over the land he kept and we have done nothing for half a year already.” Her tears spilled over.

“
I
came,” Takase said, as if that changed everything.

In many ways, it did so. There were the usual New Year’s celebrations—the new men, Takase’s attendants, made for more than usual humor among the unattached women of the estate; and children will celebrate in the midst of an earthquake, if need be—but they were muted, overwhelmed by the activities of a household preparing for war. Most winters the fields doze, and so do many of those who work them. But this year, gathering allies and supplies kept everyone as busy as silkworm season, when no one (not even the dogs) sleeps much.

Takase wished to head north with his troops as soon as possible, perhaps even in the second month, if the weather permitted. This urgency surprised everyone, even Kitsune and Nakara, eager as they were. Wars in the north can (and do) last years, even decades. Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war, for which my D
mei betrayed his empire, lasted four years; before that the Former Nine Years’ War lasted twelve years. There is no need to rush into wars in the north; they will wait for you to begin.

Despite the untrustworthy weather (icy rain one day, bitter windless cold the next), messengers with letters flew like leaves in a gale. Some men chose to follow Takase because they owed it to his family, or they chose to support Kitsune’s, or they hated the Abe for reasons of their own; or because, in the north, men are bred to war as horses are bred to run, and they pine if left too long without it. (D
mei was one such man—restless without battle.) Warriors and their attendants arrived, three or ten or twenty at a time, bringing horses.

Takase pressed so hard because he was dying. The pain I feel, the bitter never-ending ache, the sense that my body is tired of its work—these are what he felt. And there was an old wound, where a barbed arrow had entered his side some years ago. It had never healed properly, but remained angry and wept pus from time to time. Takase had grown used to the red throb—had years to grow used to it—but now it grew worse again, the granulated flesh too sore to touch. He was dying, and he knew it (just as I know that I am dying), even if no one else could see it. Kagaya-hime also knew, for she smelled the wound and sensed the pain beyond it, the slow decay of his organs: a water-clock with a leak, nearly drained and useless.