Fudoki (42 page)

And I do not even know whether she has ever felt for anyone as I did about D
mei.

Away
was all I had wanted from my escape, and
away
brought me through the servant’s gate into Nij
avenue. Fine: I was out, an emperor’s aunt standing under the incurious eyes of a low-level guard, wearing stolen clogs and unmatched robes and watching the sky to the east blur the purple of wisteria or rain. At any moment, Shigeko or my cousin or someone—
anyone
—would enter my rooms and find the wreckage I’d left behind, and the alarm would go out, and they’d catch me, ten feet from the residence walls. Something I learned immediately: the fear of embarrassment is a sharper goad than a chopstick in a child’s hands. I briskly walked off, as if I knew where I was going.

A second thing I learned: walking is hard. It had been twenty? twenty-five? years since I had walked with vigor; and then I’d been a girl. The rutted dirt of eastern Nij
avenue was awkward, not to mention cluttered with carts and vendors and overgrown weed-patches. The dog-path alongside was little better, with an added risk: the clusters of noblemen in informal robes, drifting off to this or that assignation. Anyone might recognize me—or, more accurately, these robes, since my face was hidden. But I had forgotten that people see what they expect to see; I was just another attendant scrambling to complete an errand before the rain.

A third: rain is only pleasant if you are tucked under deep eaves, watching it mist across your pretty little garden. Standing under a dying oak in one of those icy, soaking autumn rains is hardly the stuff of poetry, unless there is a poetry of howls. The street and dog-path remained rutted, but over time transmuted, dirt to mud. The oak’s few leaves were such inadequate cover that I gave up and walked on. I held my robes up to my knees and then my thighs, and even so mud splashed my hems as I clomped through the deepening puddles. The hat was of mixed advantage: while it did conceal my face and even protect my hair and neck, the brim dumped most of the water down my back.

At least the rain would discourage pursuit, I thought: cold comfort, when warm robes and brazier sounded better all the time.

I was lost, of course. I knew little of the capital outside the court and a handful of houses in the east quarter. The city was a collection of scattered places I had visited or heard of, separated not by a navigable grid of streets and avenues but by allotments of time spent in the rush-scented shade of a carriage; blurred shapes seen through woven palm-frond walls; the sounds of bells or street-vendor’s cries or horse hooves on dirt.

I was learning that
away
is not really a plan. The only temples allowed within the capital walls are at the city’s southernmost edge, and I knew that they would be too far to walk (whichever way south was; I had turned myself around in the rain), and I was sure that my uncle and cousin would look for me there. I might have retreated to the house of a relative or an attendant if I had any idea where any of them lived—and if this were not the third night of my own wedding I evaded.

There was a gate to the east, the fastest way out of the eastern quarter—where at any moment I might run into my husband-to-be—and, incidentally, the city. It led to the T
kaid
, and which led eventually to the Shirakawa barrier and Mutsu province. It was not much of a plan, but it was something: I would find the gate, and then something would turn up.

Poor little princess, poor me that was. I thought myself so clever, my mind stuffed with mouse-pelts and military theory. I despised poetry because it was useless (as it is; that is its charm, I am learning from Shigeko). But life is much more than utility, even supposing that familiarity with the patterns of moths’ wings can be considered practical. All that cleverness, and I did not realize how lonely I was.

The rain did not stop, the day I ran away. Perhaps the kami were warning me to return to my uncle’s home, or marriage with the boy, or my life, but I do not think so. The kami are not convenient; they do not teach lessons. They are what they are, and they are everywhere; but they are as unfamiliar with our way of thinking as a cat might be.

I might have asked which way was east, but those few people outdoors moved quickly, running to avoid the rain. And I couldn’t think of how to ask them a question. How did ordinary people call to one another? Did one say “please”? Did one bow when one’s question was answered? I did not know any ordinary people.

I guessed which way might be east, and walked and walked, eyes on my path more than my surroundings, which already faded into the early dusk of autumn rain. The walls that surrounded the blocks grew older and showed breaks where the stones or wood had collapsed; there were even places with no fence at all. This surprised me: everyone (even princesses) knew that the east quarter was where everyone of rank and influence lived, so how could there be so many ruined residences? Well, I supposed, the blocks nearer the wall and therefore farther from the court might be less attractive. I’d always heard that there were a thousand of us, men and women above the fifth rank; but there was no list I’d ever seen; perhaps there just weren’t enough families to fill the eastern quarter.

My feet hurt, a general thudding pain in my soles and heels, and sharp wet pains where the clogs rubbed. I saw a little gatehouse, isolated, its fence fallen. It looked dry under the remains of the ragged thatch. I stepped gingerly through the knee-high grass that buried the walkway, and into shelter.

The rain did not seem so bad now that I was at least somewhat protected. The space was filthy with dust and spiderwebs. I balanced myself with one hand on the doorpost and stepped from a clog to inspect my foot. The flesh was angry red in places, and slick with the remnants of a burst blister, my first since childhood.

When I was seven I studied the six-string
koto
as ordered by my foster father. I cannot remember the name of my instructor, a gaunt woman who looked as though she might have been carved of bamboo. I was a reluctant student, eager for any excuse to get out of lessons, which raised blisters on the tips of my fingers. There was a day I cried, and my instructor said, “A woman of culture gladly suffers for art; she does not whine.” “I don’t want to be a woman of culture,” I sobbed. She said coldly: “An emperor’s daughter may never whine; her
life
is art.” And she ordered me to continue. The blisters broke, ruining a set of sumac-colored silks, but I did not complain in my lessons again.

The rain eased a bit, so I returned to the dog-path and limped on, trying to walk in such a way that the clogs would not hurt, a futile attempt. There was no traffic: a dog and a man far down a side street; a gaunt ox, grazing the weeds in the ditch across the street. I smelled a fire, the fatty scent of cooking meat. I was hungry, I realized, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere one might find food, and the cooking smell was not distinct enough to follow.

Night was falling, changing my world into indeterminate shapes of varying darkness. I could see almost nothing, but a dark mass across the street a block or so ahead would be the wall that ringed the city. I could not see the eastern gate, but once I got to the wall, I could look for torches, fires—something that would lead me there. I had no idea what would happen when I found the gate. I trotted forward, ignoring the pain and the burst-blister stickiness in my clogs.

I was wrong, of course. The
eastern
quarter does not decay into disuse as one approaches the wall (which is not really a wall, in any case, with stones and a roof cap and all, except in the south). It is the north and western section of the city that does this. Unfamiliar with the world outside my walls, I had turned around in the rain and walked west instead of east.

Even in the darkness, I saw that the “wall” here was a ridge barely waist-high, worn flat by the many tens of years since the west had been an important neighborhood. The western gate did not exist at all, except as a pile of rotted timbers. I reached through the weeds and touched the wood, which crumbled in my hand, soft as mulberry paper. This was not the
away
I had expected.

Masako. That was the name of the woman who taught me six-string
koto
.

There was a crooked storehouse across from the gate’s remains: all ghost-shapes, dark and darker. I felt my way to the open doorway and up a step to the raised floor. From inside, the doorway showed as a blue-black shape but did nothing to relieve the darkness. I inched forward feeling for holes. There was at least one, for I reached out with my foot, felt nothing, and stumbling backward lost my clog. I kicked the other off: one clog is worse than none. The floor felt cold but soothing on my blisters. I knelt and felt around carefully—no other holes within reach, no stones or boxes or unclaimed bones—and laid my bundle down.

I shivered in my robes, which were too few and too light for the deepening chill of an autumn night spent, for all practical purposes, outside. I had not brought a lantern or a candle to warm myself (and had no way to light one, even had I been so clever); I had no food; and I was (more or less) lost. Leaving the capital was not going at all the way I had imagined. I could return to my uncle’s house or to court, but I thought I could better bear dying here than that embarrassment. I curled tight as a new moth’s wings, trying not to shiver. I felt queasy from so many hours of excitement and fear and no food.