Fudoki (41 page)

Because,
they seemed to say in voices that were like and unlike the chittering of the million kami:
grief and anger, you, joining
. It did not seem to her to be an answer.

“I have no patience with gods,” she said. “There was a kami, and it left me.”

Ask yourself why it/they/you are gone
. The flames settled and the heads grew silent, and nothing she said earned more response than the light in their eyes.

I have given the early parts of Kagaya-hime’s tale to Shigeko. I watch her as she reads, all the while pretending that my mind is engaged in recording great thoughts here.

I am as nervous as a child writing her first poems to send to her father. I wonder and fear what she thinks as she reads. Why should I care so? She has read everything I have written before this.—Ah, but this is different. Those were just my life. This is
real
.

The fire had burned to embers before Kitsune returned, the grief and tension that drove him all night eased at last. Kagaya-hime offered wine and he gulped it down, and then more, as fast as Takase had. He dropped to the ground beside her, resting his head on her bundled armor.

“So many of them are going to die,” he said without looking at her. “The healers will work, and the monks will chant, and the priestess will pray, and none of it will make any difference. They’ll die anyway. Some of them, I know their families.”

“But you wanted this fight. Yes?”

He rubbed his eyes. “So I shouldn’t feel sick about it? Don’t
you
feel anything?”

“Sorry for the horses. Some of the attendants,” she said. “They didn’t want to be here. Everyone else?” She shrugged. “They’re here by choice. People die in their beds, people die as infants. Where’s the difference?”

“I’d cry for those, too,” he said, a little tartly. “How can you not?”

“Should I weep for every kitten who dies without becoming part of the
fudoki,
every mouse I catch and kill?” She touched her cheeks, her eyelids. “We do not cry for this, we cats.”

“What do you cry for, then?” he said. When she said nothing, he added, “Why did you leave the capital? Your—what do you call it?—tale was gone, maybe. But I’ve been in the capital. There are a million places you could have lived. And toms everywhere; I heard them. You could have built a new home, a tale. And you didn’t. Why not?”

“I—” she stammered to a halt. “I ran and then kept running, and then there was the voice, the road-kami. So I went. And then this happened.” She touched her human thigh.

“Huh,” said Kitsune. “Maybe cats are too stubborn to learn anything unless you throw it at them.”

“What was I supposed to learn? I knew every cat, every inch of ground, in my
fudoki
. I didn’t
need
more.”

“And when they were gone? A brave cat would have stayed and built a life.”

Noises from inside the rooms: Takase rolling in his sleep, mumbling the names of the men who had died that day—and other names; a lifetime of fighting leaves a long list. Kitsune and Kagaya-hime exchanged glances.

“I can’t,” Kitsune said. “I am so tired,” so Kagaya-hime went to kneel beside Takase, and soothe him in his sleep, and wipe the tears from his face.

Kagaya-hime
mated six times in four days:

—Kitsune in the shrine.

—An Abe scout she found the day before the battle; she did not learn his name, only coupled with him, and then (because she fought for the Osa Hitachi) she killed him as he slept.

—Takase, the night after the battle.

—A captain of the Osa Hitachi, a married man from Shimosa province.

—A strong-backed man from the village of
gen, when she remained behind the war band to look for her arrow.

—And Kitsune again, the second night after the battle, in the charred remains of a storehouse the Abe had burned to make the war band’s pursuit as irritating as possible. Six in four days: really, a cat in season makes even a woman at court look chaste.

And after this her season was done. She was no more restless than she ever had been, a cat without a
fudoki
in a woman’s body; and no more interested in men. Kitsune watched her a little wistfully sometimes, but he was not importunate. It was a momentary thing; he could not have hoped for it to last, except that between men and women it sometimes does.

Not so many trunks left to empty. I had not thought I lived in clutter, but my rooms seem twice as large as they used to, and there is a hollow sound to the space. Shigeko empties a pawlonia-wood box, making neat stacks: gifts for the women, gifts for the temples. She pulls free a rumpled mass of hemp fabric and shakes it out. A blizzard: a hundred paper cards settle to the ground. The pieces from a poem-matching game were unaccountably bundled into a child’s robe that none of us recognize and hidden here. Whose game? Whose robe? Why is it here?

There have been other surprises: the desiccated mouse, a teakwood box filled with unknown hard white seeds that smell like anise, a baby duck’s beak threaded on a black cord, a river rock with the word
twelve
painted in vermilion. I still have the rock beside my ink stone, cool and smooth when I lift it. Who painted it? I do not recognize the calligraphy. Why, and where, and how did it end up wrapped in a error-riddled page copied from a
monogatari
tale and stuffed into a box designed for combs?

I have been full of questions for Shigeko lately. It is as if I wish to see another life, one that will extend beyond my own. Or perhaps it is just love.

We have spoken much of her lovers lately. Her stories make me laugh, since we shared certain lovers, and can speak of their virtues and (far more often) their flaws with what we at least consider wit. But there were others we did not share. She has always had an incomprehensible taste for
sh
-pipe players (“Their hands;” she smirks, “their fingers are always so agile”), and the sorts of men who cry easily (“Self-absorbed,” she says, “they never demanded much of my heart”). Me, my taste ran more to tall men with dry humor, such as the Fujiwara boy, Munesuke, who grew up so interested in bees. And D
mei. D
mei did not play flute, and he was no cryer. Still:

“Do you recall Mononobe no D
mei?” I say, as casually as I can manage.

Shigeko is a little tipsy. We have been drinking too much hot wine; since the latest healers have demanded that I take divers noxious herbs in wine, I have chosen that I at least have the comfort of warm wine, which seems to make the medicines go less vilely. Shigeko takes hers without herbs, of course, but she has been matching me cup for cup, even though wine no longer seems to affect me. She slurs only a little, but her hair has become slightly disarrayed, a black-and-white wisp trailing over one eye. Her face is relaxed, seeming younger. “D
mei? Oh, yes, my lady,” she says.

“Were you lovers?” I say.

She pushes the strand to one side, but it slips back immediately. “Once. You were in seclusion. We talked for a while, and then he came behind my curtains.”

“What did you talk about?” I ask.

“Horses, mostly.” She frowns slightly, trying to remember. “Oh, spotted horses, and how much trouble they can be. And horse breaking. My brother used to be interested in horses. D
mei quite made me want to see his family pastures.”

Horses? In all our time together, D
mei and I had never spoken of horses, except as tools to a purpose. I am surprised by the stab of jealousy that shoots through me. Shigeko seems not to notice. She is turning her cup over in her hands, a single line between her brows.

“He was all right,” she says. “And charming, I suppose. But I was just never interested after that.” She shrugs. “In truth I liked a lot of your other men better. The Genji man, Akifusa, for one. And what was his name? his brother—Toshifusa, something like that.”

“But D
mei was—”
Wonderful
. Charming and warm, and—Perhaps the wine
has
affected me; I cannot think why I am even discussing this.

She shrugs. “Some horses eat soybeans. There’s no accounting for tastes.”

I realize to my shock that she means that is it
my
tastes that are strange, for loving D
mei. How odd.