Fudoki (34 page)

That was the second night of the three nights required for our wedding to be final. He stayed until dawn, as was required for the marriage to be formalized, but we said almost nothing after that. He drank plum wine as quickly as Shigeko brought it to him, and looked out at the garden, spurning my every attempt at conversation—for I knew I was behaving badly, and I tried to smooth things over with courtesy. As the sky paled, he took me again, one final time, quickly and angrily, and was gone.

I was not present for the third night of my marriage.

After our second night, my husband-to-be left at dawn. He did not stalk out, as I suppose he thought he was doing, instead flouncing with all the maturity of a child in a tantrum. He gathered his closest attendants (who had spent their night on the veranda, near the screens of some of my women), and they swung off, down a long walkway that led to the residence’s east gate. The sky had lightened enough that I saw them clearly, but all the curtains and eye-blinds and lattices and screens cut my view into tiny random shapes: here, half of an angry face; there, a hand caught in a gesture without meaning.

Even after they were gone, and Shigeko and the other women started to bathe and dress me, I watched the world in fragments. The lattices that hung from the eaves broke everything into tiny squares, and even these were hidden in places by the eye-blinds, which left only slivers of light and motion. In one place, a half-opened screen revealed a narrow stripe of the world: silver-blue sky, and a part of a cloud, and a tree’s crown, a tiled roof, other lattices and verandas, and ivy and white stones, all no wider than my hand at arm’s length. And everything was hazed by the silk gauze of the curtains of state that surrounded me.

The squares and slices and slivers hinted at the world, but did not offer it. I had grown used to this, had learned to see a splintered world and conclude the rest. Even when I stood outside, as sometimes happened, my world was a shred of the whole world, the real world, bounded by walls and roofs and carefully planted trees. And even the hill Fudaoka and the mountains to the east and west, all as familiar as the rips in the screens around my bed.

My uncle and cousin called. I could not deny them a visit, but I had little enough to say to their plans for the marriage. The boy sent his morning poem, surprisingly shy and so late that he must have spent some hours sweating to get the words right. I replied with something meaningless about plovers at dusk, crying for loneliness.
I have never seen a plover,
I thought, but I sent the letter anyway, grateful for the emptiness of poetry.

When we have been awake all night, we commonly sleep the day away; the more so when the next night promises no rest. By midday most of my women had retired, though several stayed with me, concealing their yawns so poorly that I sent them away. And then there were only myself and Shigeko, who might as well be my skin, so closely joined are we. The air was warm, and hummed with insects I could not see. The shreds of the world shifted as breezes arose and then collapsed, as the sun moved inexorably across a sky I saw only in shards. Shigeko drowsed beside me, head on a porcelain pillow padded with worn China-silk. I did not read, nor list such observations as I had been lately making, about the feathered legs of crows. I carefully, carefully, thought of nothing at all.

I said aloud: “I will leave now.” I made no decision. It was as if my words decided for me.

My voice awoke Shigeko, who sat up, blinking.

“My lady?” she said. “Did you speak?” Her hair had been tied back with many little paper tapes, but strands had pulled free to make her outline hazy, indistinct.

“Nothing,” I said. “I said nothing.”

It does not take many days to travel from the burned-out estate to the main estate of the Abe. Despite the trail of fires and deaths left in the war band’s wake, it took fewer still for the news to reach the head of the clan. After tragedy most people are distracted by their situation or their grief; but there are others who flee, salvaging nothing from their ruined lives; still others who burn, hot and fast as paper, for revenge. The Abe main estate swarmed with those few who had seen the burnings, and more who had heard the tales and run northward, away from the danger. To the south, there was always smoke in pillars or veils, and a greasy look to the air. Sunsets were astonishing reds and golds.

The leader of the clan was a man fifty years of age, Abe no Norit
. No one had lived through the burning of the first estate; but Norit
must have known or guessed that this trail of fire led straight from where his fourth son had lived and died. Grief and the desire for revenge often share the surface of a single stone. Where does one end and the other begin? No one can tell, not even the stone.

Norit
’s resources for a war (even a small one) were not great. It was the middle of the fourth month: food is short, for the winter’s stores have been used up and the foods of the new year—sweet potatoes and
taro
and
daikon
and
azuki
beans—are not yet grown. People are scarce, as well, for there are so many up in the pastures with the horses, or busy in the fields, or with the silkworms. Everyone is tired; the harder they work now, the better they will eat come winter, and the more easily they will pay their taxes to the provincial governor. Of Norit
’s three remaining sons, only one remained at the estate; another was in the capital, at court as a guardsman; the third was far to the west, settling a dispute. Potential allies were mostly wrapped up in the affairs of their own estates and households; they had their own storehouses to fill and taxes to pay.

Still, Norit
could gather one hundred fifty horsemen: with attendants, nearly four hundred men. He could not know the size of the advancing war band (survivors thought there were a thousand, or a thousand thousand), but he fought on his own ground. If he himself did not know every stick and stone of the territory, he knew or could find someone who did.

Ambush would be possible but difficult. Though the advancing war band mostly traveled along the narrow stretch of flatland between mountains following a river course, there would be scouts and outriders expecting ambush, and a wary target is the hardest to hit. There were several places where the flatland widened out into a plain of sorts, which would make face-to-face battle possible. Combine what looked like a straightforward battle with sharp-eyed bowmen on the mountains; this might prevail over slightly greater numbers, and if the advancing force was smaller, it might end in the valley. If nothing else, there would be time for Norit
’s household to retreat to an ancient
ki
-stockade a few miles to the west. Norit
sent a messenger south with a challenge: battle, on the twentieth day of the sixth month, on the plain beside the village of
gen.