Fudoki (25 page)

Even more than her apparent perfections, I envied her his attention. A half-sister and a consort fill two different places in a man’s life; this is no different for an emperor. He spent many of his nights with her, and certain days when no work could be performed, due to tabus or festivals or snow so heavy no one chose to leave the shelter of their own eaves. He visited me sporadically; “Whenever I want someone to question everything,” he said once to me when I asked, “whenever I want to think hard to keep up.” I took this as a compliment, reluctant to look at myself closely enough to determine whether he meant it as such.

“And your consort?” I said, half-laughing to conceal my embarrassment. “When do you visit her?”

He did not laugh. “When I can.”

And so my brother had Kenshi. She bore him a son that they lost, and then another who lived—my nephew Taruhito, who became emperor—Horikawa, now he is dead. These experiences brought them together; even when I saw him without her (or her without him), I felt as if I were watching a running dog who was missing a paw: the dog may not mind nor even know; but what is not there leaves an awkward bump in his gait.

After Mononobe no D
mei and I became lovers, I was not so jealous. I had my own companion, my own fourth paw; and I spent every possible moment with him. If I did not get pregnant, it was not (as I overheard one of my women say to Shigeko at the time) for lack of trying.

And then D
mei left the capital, to return to his family home. I claimed an indisposition and retreated for a few months from the court. I did not want to deal with the eyes of the others on me. Either they knew of our affair and would be feeling—ridicule? pity?—or they would not, and their jokes and petty concerns would grate on my sensibilities like ground nutshells on skin. My rooms at my uncle’s residence were always available to me, so I retreated there, and did not come out for a time.

My memory is that I cried steadily for a month or more, that every overcast day and every ink stroke that I blotted set me off again. But I have just asked Shigeko what she remembers of that time, and she tells me I did not cry once. And yet I am sure—well, memory is strange, after all. Perhaps both of these are true, and she and I live in worlds that almost—but do not totally—overlap.

And whether I showed this grief or not, we both remember that after a time I stopped jumping to my feet every time a messenger arrived with what might be a letter from the provinces. War started in Mutsu province, and I started to read again, about war and the making of it; when the first reports of Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war started trickling into court I read those as well, and pretended I was not searching for his name among the dead and distinguished.

I returned to court and even invited other men behind my curtains, usually old lovers who had become more friend than sexual partner.
I move forward with my life,
I said to myself, and felt smug about it. We can contrive victories of the most unpromising material.

A year after that, Shirakawa’s consort Kenshi died.

Kenshi did not die at a good time. There is never a good time, of course; there is always something left undone, a last trunk left unemptied. But this was especially inconvenient: early in Yoshiee’s war, when the situation was little understood, complicated, and not very encouraging. Kenshi and Shirakawa’s son, who was—five? six? very young, in any case—was sickly, and not expected to live to adulthood. The monks from the mountains nearby were behaving badly, marching armed in the streets of the capital and burning one another’s temples; and there had been a drought that was taking a year and more to recover from; and the chancellors were for some reason or other being more than usually tiresome in their requests. Shirakawa managed all such things with the grace of an expert
kemari
player, but he coped poorly with her death.

I wrote Shirakawa the letters one might expect of a sister worried for her brother, or a noblewoman for her sovereign. The answers were polite but short, and not in his handwriting. He did not visit, nor invite me to attend him, when I could have determined for myself how he was doing. I did see him, at the seventh-night rituals and at a reading of the sutras for the well-being of Kenshi’s soul. He wept—tears shining like rain on his face—and yet he seemed somehow remote, withdrawn, as if his grief were something held close. It seemed, as always, that Shirakawa without Kenshi was lacking some part of himself, but now it was more serious, more acute; as if it were not a limb but some vital organ gone.

I launched Shigeko and others of my women at their friends and admirers in his train, to learn what they could of my brother’s state—for no one ever
tells
anyone anything at court; we spy out what we can, and guess the rest. They returned with nothing more specific than the rumors. He did not meet with his chancellors or his high nobles. He did not read. He did not have lovers. He did not sleep.

I wrote more letters to Shirakawa; but what I really wanted to do was talk to him, face to face. I had lost D
mei, but I had survived; there was no reason why my clever, handsome, older brother—incidentally emperor of the Eight Islands—should not recover, as well; which is why, perhaps half a year after her death, I very improperly went to visit him without a summons.

This was easier than I would have expected. The court is a thousand buildings and courtyards connected by ten thousand walkways and gates; but it covers only a small area, and (if one is familiar with or can find one’s way) it is possible to walk the length of the enclosure without needing to put on clogs, or get one’s head wet on a rainy day. Shigeko was reluctant to invade the emperor’s presence, but she accompanied me nevertheless (in many ways, she is far braver than I). I dealt with the guards and courtiers we encountered by brushing past them without explanation. By the time they recovered from their surprise, Shigeko and I were well past, and another of my attendants was murmuring explanations, excuses—anything that might keep them from stopping us.

His rooms were nearly unpeopled: two bodyguards who started forward, and then stepped back when Shigeko spoke to them, and a woman server with a covered lacquered box in her hands. “Where is he?” I asked, and followed her silent gesture.

He was in an enclosed place that might have been where they slept, though there was nothing here now but a carving of Kannon and its offerings. He was not praying, but there was a tabu tag hung from his
eboshi
hat, meaning he was not to be interrupted.
Ha,
I thought, and knelt beside him. I pulled my prayer beads from my sleeve and began a just-audible prayer.

He sighed and put down his own beads. “Not you, too.”

“Brother—” I began and trailed off. This had seemed like such a good idea; now that I was here, I found I had no idea what to say. He had been crying; his face was still wet. All the exhortations I had planned in my mind on the walk over here vanished, steam from a kettle. “I am so sorry,” I whispered, and to my horror started sobbing.

He tipped his head back, and fresh tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, shining trails to his ears, his neck. “I keep—missing her,” he said. “There are so many things that need to be done, I just—”

“You miss her so much,” I said. “But—”
But she is dead; she’s not coming back; she left you anyway, for the commonest lover of them all, death,
I did not say.

He glanced at me. “I am sorry about your guardsman.”

He knew; he had cared enough to know. “I’m worried for you.”

“Little Sister,” he said, and his smile was so sweet that I began sobbing in earnest. He reached across the space between us, and held me close. We wept together. I cannot claim it was my doing, but after this, he again involved himself with the world.

Enough of this. I know my own story—have lived it, each day a new section added to a scroll that grows near its end now. I know this story too well to be surprised by it. My little cat-warrior—her tale has the capacity to delight me and distract me from my half-brother’s loss, which just at this moment (it is very late, and the pressure in my chest prohibits sleep) is as immediate and painful as it was the day he died, when I cried until my eyes wept blood.

So:

Spring comes later to Hitachi province than it does to the capital; still, by the third month the snow was gone from the Osa Hitachi estate, and the world was buffeted by floodwater and spring winds and storms that thundered like dragons through the clouds. Takase had established a camp just outside of the estate for his war band, but camp and household had blurred until everything was a single filthy, noisome mess. The ground had been mashed to mud, ankle-deep in the places where the horses collected. The air was filled with smells: wood and charcoal smoke, wet manes and manure, the oily smell of cooking meat, the bitterness of hot metal pounded out by the smiths. Not all cats are fastidious (I have been familiar with a cat who rolled in the midden heap behind our kitchen house, and entered my chambers with wilted radish-greens trailing from her ears), but most are. Kagaya-hime was like many of her kin in this, that she did not care to have dirty feet and disliked sharp smells.

Takase and Kitsune had gathered perhaps a hundred horsemen, each with attendants and a horse or two. This was not many, but to fight the Abe without a warrant or potential amnesty was risky business. The central council might eventually offer an exemption to the usual penalties, not everyone dared take the chance. Though his had been the initial letter asking for the warrant, the vice-governor, Nakara’s brother, could not involve himself directly at the risk of his position. But when certain of his retainers asked for leave he did not ask too many questions. A handful of warriors brought their men and their horses from the provincial capital—along with sixty
hoko
spears, sent by the vice-governor under the convenient if implausible fiction that they might serve as “protection for the hazardous journeys home.”

This brought the total number gathered to about three hundred men—horsemen, retainers, and servants—and one hundred twenty horses. It was not a large band (though large enough withal, especially when the horses are all male) but there was an immense amount of material required even for this sort of conflict, where they expected to seize food as they traveled.

I remember reading something once, when I was at my uncle’s house, waiting through my monthly courses. Alert to my interests, Shigeko chanced to bring me an overview of the codes and practices that concerned war-making. (War-things were much on my uncle’s mind at this time, for this was in the months after Minamoto no Yoshiee’s war in Mutsu province began: a year after D
mei left me and returned to the east.)