Fudoki (29 page)

And then I noticed my notebook was missing—I was interested in wing-shapes back then; I expect it was the gray dogshead-silk one, filled with drawings of birds’ wings—and knew somehow that this was what she was reading.

“You, girl,” I snapped out. She approached and bowed correctly, but I saw her finger still keeping her page. “Give me that.”

She bowed again as she laid it before me, but she did not retreat as another might have. “You must still be cold. Let me stir up the fire, my lady.”

I watched her use iron sticks to mound the coals. She was right: I was still cold. I tapped the notebook’s cover with one finger. “What were you doing with this?”

She tipped her head to one side, still intent on the sparking heap. “I wanted to see what sort of mistress I was getting.”

“And what have you decided?” I said, my voice arrogant to conceal my sudden embarrassment.

She leaned forward and opened the notebook, finding a page. I am right: it
was
the gray notebook, because I remember an outstretched wing drawn with a fine brush. Conscious of a stranger’s eyes on it, I squinted at the drawing. It looked wrong now. I had made the largest feathers too long, I knew suddenly.

“I learned,” she said, “that you need someone else’s eyes on you.”

Startled, I looked up. She added, “—to keep you honest. You are too accustomed to things being easy for you.”

I felt as though the floor had collapsed under me, as if she and I were alone, sprawled in the dirt. How dare she see me so clearly? “I could send you home in disgrace,” I said, thinking about it.

“Yes,” she said, and for the first time, I saw the shyness behind the bravado. “But I would like to stay, my lady.”

“Why?” I asked baldly.

“I—would like to serve you.”

“Why, if I am so flawed?” I asked again, but she only blushed and shook her head, and did not answer, even after I pressed her.

A conversation with Shigeko never really begins nor ends; more accurately, it began the day we met, and will end the day I die. One of us says something, and we are distracted, by a letter or the moon’s rising or a bat that has found its way under the eaves. Later, or the next day, or the next month, we return to that thought. Perhaps years go by. Some questions are never answered: we have learned to leave silent places in this forty-year wandering conversation, and in what we know of one another.

On the other hand, I can’t sleep. “Shigeko,” I bark.

I am curled in my sleeping robes, trying not to drip ink anywhere while I use this not-very-practical portable writing desk. Shigeko lies burrowed into her duck’s-down padded robes beside me. She has always been a messy sleeper, making a nest like a mouse. I can tell from her breathing that she is not sleeping tonight, either.

“My lady?” She rolls to her side and leans on an elbow looking up at me. Her hair is neatly tied, but strands have strayed free and catch moonlight and lamplight, silver and copper. She looks as translucent and fragile as a jade Kannon.

“Why did you stay with me?” I do not say:
when you first came
. So many years in a single conversation: we no longer find it necessary to complete our thoughts.

She wraps her arms around her knees like a girl. I can’t remember the last time I could do that, even though she is older than I. “Because I knew I could not bear not to be with you.”

“Ah.” I had expected any of a thousand answers, but not so deep an honesty.

She continues: “You were kind, I could see; and always thinking. Your women all loved you—love you still—there had to be a reason, I knew. I remember thinking how brave you were.”

“I?” I say, startled. “Brave?”

She looks sidelong at me, smiling a little. “You’re thinking you’ve never done anything brave. But, my lady, I saw you that first day, trapped in these rooms, pacing like a fox trapped in a storehouse, born under a thousand thousand rules; and I knew that it took bravery to be happy, with all that.”

“You have lived exactly the same life,” I say.

Her smile grows wider. “I did not say you were the only brave one.”

I have to laugh.

All my life I have longed to see the Shirakawa barrier, at the border to Mutsu province. As a child I imagined it would be a fabulous place, with towers as tall as cedars, built of jade and turquoise and guarded by strong-armed men and horses that breathed fire. As I grew older and moderated my daydreams somewhat, I altered this vision to walls of thousand-year oak, and slender fierce guards with eyes like Mononobe no D
mei.

I have never been, and now will never go, to the Shirakawa barrier and beyond, into Mutsu province. And now I cannot visit it even here, in Kagaya-hime’s story. I had thought I controlled this tale, but if that were the case I would demand, “Everyone must now travel Mutsu road, along the banks of Abukama river,” and it would be so. But Seiwa Minamoto no Takase, old and wily, gives other orders and I find I cannot naysay him. He must bring his band to the estate where Kitsune’s brother was killed, which is three hundred miles north, in the heart of the Abe clan’s lands, and he must do this without drawing undue attention. Mutsu road is much too frequented, so instead he slips through the less-visited Nakoso barrier to the east and travels the sea road, with mountains to his left and the great ocean to his right.

Kagaya-hime will not see Shinobu rock, where white silk left overnight flushes rose-red and amber. She will miss the fields of
susuki
grass at Kasashima, subject of so many really rather uninteresting poems. She will never see the two-trunked pine of Takekuma; she will not cross the bridge over Natorigawa river, built of wood from a previous incarnation of the sacred pine.

The war band paces off its miles, always within hearing of the ocean: sometimes hushed like the wind in firs, at others a crashing din, louder than a peasant couple hurling pots at one another. There are estates and villages, of course, but those who live by the sea have their own concerns and alliances. They do not care about the disagreements of those whose hair is not whitened with salt-rime. The war band travels quickly and comparatively silently, and no one rides ahead to warn the Abe clan.

The men of the war band will pass the provincial capital of Taga in fives and tens, secretly and at night, so as not to draw the attention of the governor and military there. They will travel nearly a hundred miles in a fortnight—and none of it will be the Mutsu province of my dreams.

Kagaya-hime called the servants Uona and Otoko. No one seemed to find it worthy of comment that they had appeared like dew, without warning, and that Uona was a woman.

Kagaya-hime had no difficulty keeping up with the war band. She belonged to no squad and shared allegiance with no one, so she left the group often and roved far ahead and down side-paths, bringing back deer and wild calves and birds.

Even her skills did not prevent many of the men from viewing Kagaya-hime’s presence with distaste, though most could not have said why they did not care for her. I have noticed this before, that there are people who simply do not care for cats, and many of these people are men. There are also men who do not care for women (except in the most rudimentary ways); and still more men who dislike women who like men-things, water-clocks and war among them. She did not talk of her family, of course, so perhaps she had been disgraced or even exiled. And (the men said), she was probably not even from one of the bow-and-arrow clans, the only excuse anyone (let alone a woman) could have to mess around with weapons and such. Kagaya-hime was cat and warrior and woman, and she was also strange; the members of the war band could sense this, even if they could not identify it.

Days passed, and miles, and landmarks. The war band made camp under stars and rain clouds and the roofs of abandoned farmhouses. Because life is full of such minor catastrophes, saddle-frames cracked and bags of rice burst: evenings were spent repairing things and sharpening arrows. The men determined their hierarchy, and the monkey-games settled into jokes and posturing, repeated until they became little rituals. The joke about rabbits’ hat markers became dogma: every insect met along the road was asked for its marker.

Kagaya-hime continued to share Kitsune’s and Takase’s fire. It was a busy place. When the evenings were dry enough, the captains assembled and debriefed the day. Most of the rest of the time Kitsune and Takase were deep in plans. Kagaya-hime said little; but she listened, and watched Takase, and smelled the ever-present infection in the old arrow-wound in his side. Takase in his turn watched her, as he watched all his troops.

Kagaya-hime grew used to Uona and Otoko. They were good servants, quiet, efficient, and very loyal. Otoko got into fights with the other attendants, defending Kagaya-hime. Uona was a storyteller, perhaps the best of the war band. On fine nights, the other servants gathered around to listen to her tell the story of the daughter of the moon, or the fox-wife and the Kannon; but she refused to tell tales in the presence of people who had criticized her mistress.

Most of the men distrusted or feared Kagaya-hime, or tried not to think of her at all. (Nearly everyone hides from the thing we do not understand—death, for example.) But one or two wondered to themselves who—or what—she was. She could shoot a swift from the sky, and she never lost an arrow. She said little, yet the commander and his war leader kept her close, shared their fire with her. She appeared tireless. Even by the eastern provinces’ high standards for horses Biter was exceptionally fine (if fractious)—a dragon of a horse. Her servants were exemplary.

I have said that the war band was men, but there was another woman attached, the priestess Onobe no Kesuko. A war band needs priests as much as it needs weapons, and Kesuko served a shrine to Hachiman in Omi province, which owed a certain loyalty to Takase and had sent her when he requested their benison. She was a severe woman, younger than I (but not by so very much), slim and rough-edged as sword-grass. She wore women’s robes and a travel cloak and basket-hat that concealed her face from the raff and scaff of the war band. She and her party kept much to themselves, for they could not afford to compromise their ritual purity; but she often came to Takase’s fire to offer advice. Kagaya-hime did not like Kesuko, but she understood her better than she did any of the others with whom she traveled, for Kesuko’s cold manners reminded her of the cousins and aunts she had lost.

Kesuko and Kagaya-hime circled one another warily. But on the fourth night of travel (roofless under a cloud-stained sky, on the mashed young stems of a trampled buckwheat field), Kesuko stopped by Kagaya-hime, who remained by the fire as the captains left the nightly council, playing idly with a thick silk tassel from Biter’s bridle. “Come,” Kesuko said.

Even the daughter of an emperor does not comfortably say no to a priest of the myriad gods; and Kagaya-hime was not experienced with generating quickly the excuses that might have been palatable to Kesuko or her kind (as a princess is; over the many years I have grown proficient with such lies). Kagaya-hime only nodded and stood, handing the tassel to Uona.

Typically Kagaya-hime navigated the encampment’s chaos as a cat passes through unfamiliar ground: remaining at its fringes, moving from safety to safety. Kesuko moved as a tiger might, walking a straight line across the ground, men and animals scattering before her, sidestepping only for the fires themselves. Kesuko led Kagaya-hime directly to the stream: once clear, now churned the frothy brown of certain teas. “Sit,” she ordered, and Kagaya-hime, who disliked orders (in truth, barely understood what they might be), found herself sitting on a rough cold rock beside the water.

Kesuko nodded. “Now. What are you?”

Kagaya-hime turned her face away but watched the priestess sidelong from the corner of one eye. “I am nothing and no one. They call me Kagaya-hime. I will fight.”

“No doubt these are all true,” Kesuko said. “But you do not answer my question.”

Kagaya-hime looked her directly in the face. “Why should I tell you anything? Seiwa Minamoto no Takase is commander here. I do what I wish.”