Fudoki (47 page)

“Well,” Takase said, his tone measured, as if he were about to comment on an arrangement of irises. “We will kill them. They will kill us. But it will be done. Go on, then.”

Sound can make a wall as thick as wood and plaster. The men shouted, and the air was solid with noise, a barrier to push through. Kagaya-hime had never shouted in battle—why scare the prey?—but the sound pounded through her heart and bones, so loudly that she could not feel her own pulse, or tell whether she joined them.

There was no strategy and little tactics to this battle. Everyone bolted for the base of the walls, riders hunched over their horses’ necks, foot soldiers racing behind. The Abe behind the walls shot, and shot and shot more, but many of the arrows missed, and most of the hits were an annoyance only.

The Osa Hitachi skimmed arrows over the wall or threw torches against its base. The hot days had dried the grass, and flames caught in the underbrush, licked the dry timber. Elsewhere, foot soldiers dug at the berm holding the logs upright, and horsemen used their horses’ shoulders or flanks as bludgeons against the timbers. Two logs loosened, like teeth in old gums, and crashed down, leaving gaps that filled with arrows and
naginata
. A third post came down, a fourth.

Despite this, the stockade was still defensible. The Abe had to use their kettles of boiling water to put out the fires instead of pouring them over the attackers, but they still had stones to throw down, and an almost infinite supply of arrows, since they could pick up the Osa Hitachi arrows and return them a thousand times. They could have stayed, protected themselves. Waited.

But the Abe opened their gates, and their horsemen crashed into the Osa Hitachi men with a shock like an earthquake. Horses slammed into one another, trampled foot soldiers. The wall of sound made of arrows and whinnies and war cries turned to screams, shouts of rage.

Everything is dark, remember, like a rape on a moonless night, noise and buffets and terror. Everything is motion and uncertainty. A horse backs into Biter, and Kagaya-hime whirls, sword already flying. At the last instant, a flicker of torchlight shows her the colors of the armor’s lacing:
kon,
fox-call blue. This is Kitsune she has nearly killed. She jerks the sword back and up and nearly clips Biter’s ear. He leaps sideways, away from the hiss of moving steel. His hooves sink into something soft that screams in the shadows; when he jumps away he lands on another man. There is no telling whether these are soldiers or grooms, or for whom they fight. She feels a sharp shock on her thigh and a blazing pain, hot as touching a brazier; but when she reaches down, she feels no wound. She cannot tell what struck her or what damage it has done.

Kagaya-hime sees a little better than the men: she stands on her stirrups to get her head above the immediate fray, and sees helmets,
eboshi
caps, manes, and ears. A horse’s eye catches the firelight, rolling white in pain or rage. Otoko and Uona are utterly hidden to her, lost in the roiling darkness; but for an instant she sees Takase, standing on his stirrups as well, arm slashing down at something she can’t see. Her own arm hurts; when she glances down, she sees an arrow jammed there, slipped through a loose place in the lacing of her shoulder guards. The feathers dance in the corner of her vision, distracting her, so she breaks it off. A wave of white pain blinds her for a moment, but no one attacks until she has time to blink it away. The arm doesn’t seem to work well, but a cat uses the claws on either side equally: she shifts her longsword to her left hand.

Strange, these little gaps in the middle of battle. She looks for someone to kill, but everyone is just beyond her reach. She picks someone she doesn’t think she recognizes as one of her war band, and moves Biter toward him. Movement from the side catches her eye; her longsword comes up, just as someone else’s swings down. It strikes heavy as a timber falling. She loses a stirrup and drops from Biter’s back to her knees on the ground. None of the foot soldiers are close enough to kill her, but the man who struck her jumps down, ready to stab her with his short sword. She lurches upright, steps inside his swing and grapples him, tips him backward to the churned dirt. His armor makes him fall heavy, knocking the wind out of him. She takes his short sword from his loosened grasp and stabs him with it, in the throat just above his
kote
armor. The blood looks black in the bad light. His quiver has fallen to one side: in all the chaos, she sees a slip of wood attached to it and with her cat-sharp eyes reads a poem he has written there, about rain and fish.

“My lady!” Uona is by her,
naginata
dripping. Otoko is nowhere near, but somehow Uona stayed close, and even managed to catch Biter’s leading rein before he fled. Kagaya-hime shares a bare-toothed smile with her woman, and swings back astride Biter, feels her armor settle onto the saddle, lightening the load. She whirls Biter in a tight circle, but the field is growing strangely empty. She cannot find any Abe, so she gallops forward. It is surprisingly dark. She notices that light no longer pours from the opened gate, because the gate is closed again.

The Abe have retreated. Stupid as it is to leave the safety of shelter, it is stupider still to do so, and then return, nothing accomplished but death and more injuries.

Men.

I thought I understood war, but truly it is this: brutish and tedious and terrifying. This tale, the tale of the cat Kagaya-hime, is lies. But so were the historical chronicles I saw, of Yoshiee’s war and others; the Chinese manuals; even the guardsmen’s stories, D
mei’s nightmares. All lies.

Why do I tell her story, then? For that matter, why do I try to make sense of my own life, when I cannot say which things have happened exactly as I have written them, and which have been revised by wishes or regrets?

Tales and memories, however inaccurate, are all we have. The things I have owned, the people I have loved—these are all just ink in notebooks that my mind stores in trunks and takes out when it is bored or lonely. It is necessary to keep track of things, the third assistant comptroller of grains said. It is the recording of things, in our memories if nowhere else, that makes them real.

My
fudoki
is precisely as long as my life has been. Without my
fudoki
I am nothing, because it and I are the same.

It is time:
there are only a handful of trunks left, a neat little line of them down the center of my rooms. So I have written the emperor my great-grandnephew and asked his permission to leave court eight days from now. It is an auspicious time: no kami objects; the goddess Kannon does not mind; Kasugano temple has offered to send escorts. The emperor has written back, a kind little letter. He says he will miss me.

Now we are two: I and Shigeko. Well, there are three other women: a woman of sufficient rank to drive off visitors politely; another of a rank low enough to carry my chamber box away whenever required; and a third, of intermediate rank, to do everything else.

It is hard to believe that these are my (or anyone’s) rooms. They have the empty look of a space between owners—which is close to the truth, for I know that one of my grandnieces, the princess Kasiko, has already claimed the rooms for her own, and waits, not very patiently, for us to leave. Well, and she may have them: I have been sick these forty years of that irritating sag in the roofline of the building across the peony courtyard.

It was six months ago? eight? that my half-brother Shirakawa died. He was living in the
i residence outside of the capital’s walls. I had not been summoned, but I went to him. Months passed, even years when we did not see one another much; but then, whole winters passed when I never saw the sun, always hidden behind gray skies or high eaves. And yet it was there. I knew I would see it again, in spring if not sooner.

Now is perhaps the first time I cannot safely say this. Strange.

He was my brother: strong and clever and sensible and kind. He gave me a mouse when I was a child; he rejoiced with me, barefaced and laughing in the rain; he gained forgiveness for me when I refused the husband my uncle chose. He chuckled when I said something amusing, and listened patiently when I droned on (as I am sure I did) about the structure of claws or wings. He sent me poems when we were apart for one reason or another; he didn’t seem to care whether I responded in kind. He played
sugoroku
-backgammon with me, and even (one sleepless night after his consort Kenshi had died) told me a dream he had had.

His hair grew gray and his waistline spread a little. A few years ago, when I was reading (some dreadful
monogatari
tale, all about a bat and some sparrows), I noticed that he had wrinkles around his eyes, and frown lines set deep on his brow. He laughed at my surprise then: “We race toward the Pure Land, Sister; but it’s a race everyone wants to lose.”

Half a year since his death. The heaviness was already in my chest when I last saw him, though I still thought it was indigestion—an indigestion that had lasted for what seemed forever—or simple weariness.

The dead seem so close to me sometimes. My mother, my father, half-brother and -sisters, my nephew, attendants and cousins and relatives of every sort—mine will be the last in a series, like the twelfth picture-scroll in a set showing the months. Really, I have seen a battlefield’s worth of death; gather the bodies of all those I knew, and they would carpet the ground.

Now it is my turn to fight, in this war that no one ever wins.

The last time I saw him. How could I have forgotten this, the things he said?—Or did I dream it all?

Shirakawa never liked lying down unless he was actually asleep. Weak as he was, he was elegant in informal hunting robes, leaning against a stack of cylindrical bolsters. He was pale and had lost some of the flesh on his bones, so that his face had the thinness I have always associated with certain Buddhist hermits and wise men. I mentioned this to him, and from his half-reclining position, he gave me a mock bow. “Neither hermit nor wise,” he said, and laughed.

It was spring, but still cold, so we huddled around the brazier, putting our feet up on its edge like peasants. We both knew he was dying, so we talked of everything but that—the weather (what conversation, in all the ages of the world, does not include the weather?); Shigeko (they had been lovers several times, many years before, and they retained their fondness for one another; indeed, they exchanged occasional letters independent of my own correspondence with him); the mouse he had sent me, and the set of drawings of it that I had sent him; our father the emperor Go-Sanj
and his consorts our mothers and an argument they had when we were small; old lovers and lost friends.

“I saw him once,” my half-brother said. “That provincial Mononobe man you favored. Thirty years ago? Back at the end of the Kah
era. Where was he from? Some backwater.”

“Mutsu province,” I said faintly. D
mei had returned home just before Yoshiee’s war, fifteen years before the end of the Kah
. How could Shirakawa have seen him since then?

“That’s right,” Shirakawa said, pursuing some memory of his own. “He had those strange eyes, I remember: almost foreign. Mononobe. Mononobe no—Dorei?”

“D
mei,” I managed to say without actually stammering. “Why—?”

“He brought news from up north. Fujiwara no Kiyohira is building some sort of fake capital up there. Hiraizumi, I think it is. He was warning us. Very sensible: he has a lot of land up there, and it could be a problem. Not mine, though.”

“He didn’t fight for the Mutsu forces in Yoshiee’s war?”
He wasn’t an enemy?
I had been so sure of his betrayal.

Shirakawa waved off the notion. “I think he mostly kept his head down, offered support to our forces when they came through. Sensible,” he said again.

“But he was a warrior!” I said. “He’d fought many times.”

My half-brother raised an eyebrow. “Then he’d know better, don’t you think?”

Truly, I could not tell. D
mei told me once that he missed the kinship that comes with sleeping in the shadow of shared death. But was it worth it? The nightmares, the dark days, the night he nearly killed me only because I had startled him? “Why didn’t he speak to your regent?” I said at last. “I can’t believe they let you meet him.”

He smiled at me, his warm eyes almost lost in the wrinkles. “I was curious, Little Sister. About what sort of man you would like.”

“You knew about him.” What I meant was:
you cared
.

“‘A strong emperor knows how well his people sleep, and whether their bowels are healthy,’” he intoned, his rough voice a clever imitation of a tutor we had both known fifty and more years ago. “An interesting man, I thought,” he said in more normal tones. “Content with his life.”

“Was he well?”
Why didn’t you tell me?
I did not say, but Shirakawa understood.

“He was—older,” Shirakawa said at last. “Married. Three sons and a daughter.”

“Ah,” I said. D
mei would have been forty at the end of the Kah
.
Married
. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Sorrow? Loss? Jealousy? None of these, I decided. Relief. See: he had been a good man. He was no traitor. My instincts had not been bad.