Fudoki (26 page)

I had no idea how much was required for war-making! I suppose I might have guessed, familiar with what must be assembled for even a short journey by, let us say, a princess to the shrine of Inari no Jinja, scant miles from home and a place where one might be expected to need little. There was a list in my uncle’s papers of what warriors require for military duty. I have found it folded into a diary of mine from that time. What my uncle thought of such a document going missing, I can only imagine.

—rice and
sake
and salt (
enormous
amounts of salt—why, I cannot say);

—weapons of every sort and size—longswords, short swords, and knives; a bow and fifty arrows; additional steel arrowheads ready for mounting—as well as whet-stones and quivers and bowcases and all the bits and bobs that are required to tend and store one’s weapons;

—saddles and saddlebags and silk-cord bridles and steel bits;

—wood shields as tall as a man, to be propped on the ground in battle where they might serve as cover, for the men on foot or dismounted riders;

—axes and hatchets and chisels and saws, tents and cooking pots and copper trays;

—flints, tinder, long-handled tongs to grip coals;

—sickles (for what, I wonder?—and then think, ah, yes, the grass pillows mentioned in all those poems written by men at the frontier);

—moxas and bandages for healing;

—as if that were all. Then there are the attendants (and each horseman has one or two of these, to work as groom and servant and combatant as need arises), along with all of
their
food and supplies and weapons—
hoko
and
naginata
spears and swords and bows; and the priest who comes to give guidance, along with his or her followers, and food and supplies; and the clerks and warrant officers; and any hangers-on that the leader believes might be useful or cannot be naysaid. And so many supplies must have required carts and oxen or horses, and still more men to drive and tend them. And all of this is organized into companies of fifty men each, and subdivided into campfires of ten and then squads of five. It sounds as complex as court life, if not so pretty.

In the months after Yoshiee’s war was declared, I read much on the subject. I longed to understand, not what I later learned to call logistics, nor the
why
s of it, but the
what
. What was it like to fight, to actually shoot at someone else, to want them dead and have the means to make them so?

There were certain Chinese classics that all the military nobles thought essential: Sun Tzu, Ssu-ma, and the
K
sekik
sanryaku
. These were full of strategy and tactics and oblique metaphors, but they seemed somewhat cold, bloodless. In addition, sheaves of poetry floated about court, purportedly written by soldiers (though this was often a literary conceit); but they said nothing about war itself, instead harping endlessly on how much the men missed their wives, and the loneliness of sleeping on those ubiquitous grass-stuffed pillows.

Some years ago a collection of stories started filtering through court—the
Konjaku
. We joked then that the
Konjaku
had one of everything, but in fact it has many more than one story about warriors, and these reports vary. In some, war seems more glamorous than horrible, as complex and formal as the presentation of the blue horses in the first month or the Gosechi dances in the eleventh: the exchange of arrows, the name-announcing; men in beautifully laced armor whirling in graceful combat on spirited horses. Others are perhaps more realistic, though in them war seems mostly to be exhortations and beheadings, usually over small (not to say absurdly petty) matters.

There was the
Mutsuwaki,
as well, all about the first war that had been going on in the north, back when I was very small. I was no longer at my uncle’s house, so I borrowed a copy of this from the scrolls of my half-brother the emperor; he looked at me strangely but had it sent without comment. This was much longer. For the first time I realized that war was as filled with politics as court, but still there was the painstakingly described armor, the elegant little platitudes about this or that one’s skill at archery or riding. When the author stepped down from these aesthetic heights to describe battle itself or its results, his images were improbably grisly. I still remember one: “The ground was slick with viscera, the moors wet with fat.”

All these wars, these battles, in the
Konjaku
and the
Mutsuwaki
and elsewhere, are true. Names are named; Shigeko (who knows everything about everyone who has ever been to court) could probably recite the genealogies of half the men mentioned in them. They are true, but they are lies—like all tales.

Some years ago there was a night in the fifth month when the full moon was hidden behind the clouds, and I overheard three older guardsmen talking in the darkness. They had fought in Yoshiee’s war. Tongues loosened by plum wine and
sake,
they compared the lessons they had learned. These had nothing to do with eloquent speeches, and everything to do with avoiding diarrhea and keeping one’s bowstrings from rotting. Their stories were hardly fit for gentle ears: an attack where foot soldiers swept blades along the ground to fell the horses by slashing their legs; a long season when everyone had dysentery and the men wore no
hakama
-trousers or loincloths, for it was pointless to do so and then clean them a thousand times a day; a man driven as mad as if he had been fox-possessed, all from an arrow-cut on his thigh that turned black and began to rot; a man hacked to pieces alive before his wife’s weeping eyes; a wife raped before her husband’s staring, severed head.

I listened to these things, and thought:
This is D
mei’s life. This is who he is
. But I could not reconcile this with the man who had laughed so often with me, the gold eyes that were so warm when we made love. I had nightmares for some time after listening to the men; and for years afterward their words would return to me suddenly, like a ghost story one heard as a child and can never forget.

The Osa Hitachi were a military clan, and everyone, from Kitsune and Nakara down to the oxkeepers’ children, was caught up in the preparations. The buildings within the estate were crammed with the supplies that could not be left in the rain—for it still rained, naturally. Outside, fields were being prepared for the summer’s crops (“I’m sure you want the space,” Nakara said tartly to her brother one wet day when everyone’s tempers ran high, “but come the tenth month, I’m guessing that you will want to eat, yes?”). Nakara had to send every mare within a ten-mile range twenty miles south and west to a smaller farm claimed by the Osa Hitachi, but even so the stallions sometimes fought. Kagaya-hime grew tired of trying to find solitude, and instead stayed out of the way and watched it all, rather as a cat sits on a wall watching the servants prepare to move a household to Biwa lake for the summer.

Nakara apologized one day. She clattered under the eaves of an outbuilding and saw Kagaya-hime there, tucked into the space between a pillar of shields and an untidy heap of new-made sickles, trimming Biter’s hooves with her knife. “Be patient, Hime. Things will settle down as soon as the men leave.”

Kagaya-hime finished the hoof and stood. “I imagine you will be grateful when we are all gone.”

Nakara was holding a cedar-wood box filled with chopsticks for moving the coals in braziers; she dropped this, and the little iron rods rolled everywhere. Woman and cat-woman knelt and gathered them. “
You
can’t leave,” said Nakara. “
You’re
staying. Aren’t you?”

“No.” Kagaya-hime laid her handful of sticks in the box and stood. “I go to Mutsu province, as well.”

“Mutsu,” Nakara said. “They are all fools or barbarians there. Or insane.”

Kagaya-hime said, “Your brother was one of them.”

“That’s why I would know.” Nakara hesitated, unaccustomed to asking for favors. “We’re not like city people here, my dear. My household is whomever I say it is. A sister would be a great comfort to me.”

Kagaya-hime closed her eyes and leaned against Biter’s flank, feeling his rough winter coat against her cheek. “Why would you wish this?”

“I know what it is to not know who—what—you are,” Nakara said. “This way you would have sister and brothers and home. You would know that much at least.”

This was what she had lost so long ago: ground to live and mate and hunt on, a family, a tale into which she would fit. Nakara’s brother was half-fox; there was clearly room for a woman who had once been a cat, for her to become Osa Hitachi no Neko. And she would no longer be alone. It would not be her
fudoki,
but humans’ tales did not grate as other cats’ had. She would remain what she was—changed, perhaps, but still recognizable to herself. The road-kami had abandoned her; might she not stop?
Road?
she whispered to the backs of her eyelids. It did not answer; but for an instant she saw the dark thing with a thousand eyes, and it spoke her name.

“I cannot,” she said finally, and opened her eyes. “I must go.”

Nakara said in a tight voice: “I do not want to lose anyone else.”

“You found this place, this—family. Or made it. It is not mine.”

“Where will you go? Why?” A tear slid down Nakara’s cheek; she brushed it aside impatiently.

Kagaya-hime said slowly, “I thought it was the road that carried me, but we left the road behind when we crossed the water at that town. Enoura. And I still have to go.”

“Where will it end? Will you fight with the men? Will you walk until you die, till you walk into the ocean and drown? And I am to let you do this thing?”

“I cannot help it.” Kagaya-hime began twisting a lock of Biter’s mane into a tight little rope.

“Do not pretend that you have no control over your life, girl,” Nakara snapped. “You go because you wish to, because you don’t choose to stay.” She turned on her heel and walked away, leaving the box lying in the mud. Her hurt and anger lasted for days.

No one controls their own life. Well, perhaps some of the Fujiwara men do. Perhaps they attain manhood, and suddenly know exactly what they want from life—I will marry in two years, and have a son in five, retire at thirty, die at sixty. And my half-brother knew his life—was born knowing it. But the rest of us? I look back on my life and I see a series of decisions, each of which made perfect sense at the time, most of which led to nothing in particular.