Fudoki (32 page)

So, improper as it was, I went out myself to regain the advantage for my side. Others of my women tumbled after me. Protesting through his laughter, D
mei tossed a handful of snow my way, a slow bright cascade in the torches. And I tossed snow at him, and my women at the men and at one another, and soon the courtyard was filled with squeals and screeching, for all the world as if we were none of us old enough to be trusted with using ink. As with the mountain-building, at first the men had the advantage of us, but I learn quickly, and it was no time at all before I had realized that the snow threw farther and more accurately when compressed into firm balls the size of a fist.—Which is not to say I was any better at this than I had been at shooting arrows at a target: I missed far more often than I hit, and even then it was not usually what I aimed at.

D
mei encouraged me to fling these balls at him, his laughter muffled, granted intimacy by the snow-filled air. He tossed his own carefully, close enough to incite me, distant enough not to strike me.

I tossed my balls of snow and learned: harder next time, and a little more to the right. I threw one so well that he was forced to duck. And the next time, when he was distracted by a snowball from Shigeko, I struck him solidly on the side of the face.

A face full of snow cannot be pleasant—snow crunched tight until it is hard as wood must hurt like being struck with a club. The snowball exploded into dust and smoke. D
mei dropped into a crouch of sorts, then leapt toward me, hands out to strike, eyes unrecognizing. I dropped to my knees, preparing to die. He would not mean it. I knew this would be no more than the unconscious slap of a man at a mosquito, a dog snapping at a flea that had bitten it. But I would be dead anyway.

I closed my eyes but I did not die, instead heard him fall to his knees before me, heard horror in his voice as he whispered my name.

This was the end of the snow-games that night. I coaxed him to stay with me, behind my curtains for a while, because the look in his eyes had frightened me, and I needed to replace it in my memory with other, tenderer expressions. He stayed because—I don’t know why he stayed. I loved him, lived in his sleeve (and he in mine) for a year and a season; and I think I never knew who he was. He was D
mei, the man from the hinterlands. He was a wild animal come to stay in my garden for a time. I watched him and wondered, but I never understood.

D
mei slept that night, though he did not often do so in my presence—slept and dreamt. I woke in the darkness, to the sound of a man crying, and it was him, sobbing as he slept. I cannot say what had happened to the lamp, the braziers, for we lay in a darkness like the inside of mourning sleeves. I called his name; when this did not awaken him, I touched his hand and then his cheek.

“What?” He thrashed awake.

“It’s just I.” When I stroked his face, I found it wet, and his body shaking. “What is it?”

“I was at the Moki estate, with my father—” The Moki estate: I knew this place from a casual allusion he made once to one of his attendants. The Mononobe clan and the Moki had fought; the Mononobe had won. “—and they were crying, all the women, inside the house. I heard them screaming.”

“Hush, hush. It’s all right. You’re here now. You’re awake.”

“I was awake then, too, Harueme.”

I barely breathed, for I had never heard this tone in his voice before.

Lamplight and even daylight change what we say. We see someone’s face and adjust our conversations accordingly: catch her interest, make him laugh. Certain things can be said only in darkness, true darkness, where one cannot see fear or horror or disgust in one’s auditor. In the light (and there is always light, it seems: moon and stars, embers if nothing else; but not this night, not as it lives in my memory) D
mei spoke of a thousand pleasant or amusing things: stories of his brothers, his horses, pranks and games and delights—it is no wonder I longed to see his home! He said nothing of battles, though I knew there had been several.

But the snow-fight and now the darkness—he spoke, in a voice I scarcely recognized. He had seen just such a night-attack as this I have written, years before. The fire that Kagaya-hime watches is his story—or the story I imagined behind his disjointed fragments of image and sentence that night; for he did not say, this happened and then that happened. He gave only details: how the screams ended in gurgles, sobs, an old man’s voice that said, “I’m tired, mama”; the mixed smells of wet thatch and the burning dead; a lone baby crying in the growing heap of bodies by the door until it fell silent.

I thought at first this was a nightmare he recounted. It could not be possible for someone I knew, loved—for
D
mei
—to have experienced this. I asked no questions, for I could think of none I might want answered. I held him until he stopped shaking and squeezing out the bitter words. He fell silent and turned to me, and we had sex again: wordless this time, and fierce as cats mating. He left shortly after this, still in the strange total darkness, and never slept in my rooms again, though he visited as often as he ever had.

In the morning I was not at all sure that
I
had not been dreaming. I asked Shigeko as she picked up scattered robes and sleeve-papers from my sleeping enclosure, but fatigued from the snow-fight, she had fallen asleep and heard nothing. This has always seemed strange to me, that the one night that D
mei spoke of war was the only night she failed to stay awake with me.—He forgot his sash, I remember now; Shigeko and I found it when we first started to empty these trunks.

“Shigeko?” I ask now. It is morning and bitterly cold. I have all my screens closed, but when one of my women came for my chamber box, I had a glimpse of the garden thick with fog, peony-colored in the rising sun. It is truly autumn now. I will leave soon, as soon as these words stop pouring from me, like a flux that cannot be cured.

Shigeko has been sleeping beside me as I fill this notebook. My favorite sandalwood-handle brush grew heavy, so I took up this brush, so much lighter in my tired hand. She awakened a short time ago; now she picks up the scraps of sleeve-paper I used to test this brush, for I tossed them on the floor. This could almost be that morning, forty years ago, when she gathered the papers left by sex with D
mei—though her hair is frosted silver, and her movements are careful, as if her fingers were unfired clay and too fragile to use heedlessly. If the moments of my life might be sorted, not by hours and years, but by all the times I have held a brush, perhaps Shigeko’s life might best be measured by the papers she has picked up.