Fudoki (49 page)

“What is that called?” she said.

“A
torii,
” he said. “A gateway.”

“It’s not very impressive,” she said, remembering the great Raj
gate in the capital. “What does it go through? There’s no wall.”

He laughed a little. “It’s a passageway between
here
and
there.
” He pointed. “A sort of road for gods and spirits.”

“Oh,” she said. They listened for a time to the humming air and a stick cracking in the heat somewhere, the almost inaudible whistle of the pine needles crushed under their feet. Kagaya-hime ran her finger along the head of one of the foxes: a porous stone, rougher than it looked.

“Once in a while,” Kitsune said into the silence, “I wonder what it is like, being a fox. Being human is supposed to be better. But. Do you see things differently? Does time move faster, slower? Do you get hungry for different things?”

“Better?” Kagaya-hime said. “Different.”

“I remember when I was little,” Kitsune said into the humming silence. “Mostly I was a boy. I had this pony, and there was a dog, and then Nakara; she was my nurse. You knew that, right? I think my mother didn’t like me being a fox much. So I wasn’t. And then there was a fire and my family died, and Nakara brought me to her family. I have not been a fox since then.”

“You were, though. Are,” Kagaya-hime said. “You mean you have not had a fox’s shape; but it is there in you. I smell it. It’s in your blood.”

“Hmmm,” Kitsune said. And sometime later, “But how?”

“I don’t know,” Kagaya-hime said. “You’re half of each. How hard can it be to move from the one to the other?”

And just like that, as if her words had caused it, he was a fox. He looked up at her for a moment: gold eyes to gold. She smiled at him, and he was gone, slipping through the trees, ears and head high.

Kagaya-hime walked back to Takase’s grave and watched the men lay his already stiffening body into it, and push the frozen earth back in place. After a while, she noticed Takase’s ghost stood beside her watching the burial: a young man now, taller than the living man had been: slim. “Well?” Kagaya-hime asked.

“What a lot of trouble
that
was,” the ghost said, nodding at the body. “Why did I wait so long?”

“The others all cried,” Kagaya-hime said. “The ghosts.”

“Did they?” the ghost said. “I suppose they left things behind that they missed.”

“And you?”

The ghost turned to her. “I will miss you a little, cat-girl.”

“And I you,” she said. “A little.”

The ghost smiled. “I think you will have plenty to keep you busy.” It reached out a hand as if to touch her belly, but she felt nothing, only the sun and a breeze against her clothes. “I have given you something; now give me something. If a male deserves it, give him a place in your
fudoki.
”

“There is no
fudoki,
” she said, but without bitterness.

“Hah,” the ghost that had been Takase said. “You are a one-cat
fudoki
. Don’t you realize that yet? Promise.”

“If a male stays, if he earns a place in the tale, he will be allowed into it.”

“Already has, I’d say,” Takase said. “Remember the fathers of your children, cat-girl.”

“Tell me—” she said; but he was already gone.

The half-fox Kitsune returned, a rusty shimmer of movement, at the bird’s hour. It was nearly dusk, the sky through the trees strange shades of peach and amber and blue. A fox loped from the trees, and then he stood there, breathless, a man again. “Oh,” he said, but nothing else.

“I know,” she said. “I would do anything to go back to that.”

He shook his head slightly, settling into his man’s shape again. “Then do so. Who do you think keeps you in that body?”

Uona came shouting in the woods trying to find Kagaya-hime, and disturbed them. Kitsune gathered Takase’s and his attendants together. “They won’t be too many miles ahead,” he said. “We’ll ride until dark and then catch up with them tomorrow. But you’re not returning with me, are you?”

“No,” Kagaya-hime said. “I am not finished, not yet. Tell Nakara that I love her.”

“I will,” Kitsune promised, and they were gone.

Me, I’m waiting. It is four more days until I leave the capital.

Northward again. Kagaya-hime and Biter and Uona and Otoko traveled slowly through the summer days, accompanied by a packhorse, a pretty roan that Otoko loaded with most of the armor and what little food they had. They found a rough little road that led north and west through the forest. After half a day, it faded into a path and then, a day later, a track over the shoulder of a mountain—though their route would have been easy enough even without the path, for the weather was beautiful, and the ground soft from fallen leaves and needles.

Their path met Noshira river and turned west, to accompany it to the sea. They followed its shores for several days until they found a boat large enough for Biter. The woman who ferried them across had a barbarous accent but a ready laugh; they paid her with the last of Kagaya-hime’s ancient coins and turned north again.

There was plenty to eat. Kagaya-hime hunted, and her attendants were clever at gathering food, or even stealing it when there was someone to steal from, though in those cases it was often easier to trade meat for rice. Biter ate whatever green things came his way and grew a little thinner, evidently missing grass. He allowed Uona to ride him, but still snapped at Otoko whenever he was close.

The journey had no urgency. There was no Osa Hitachi, no Nakara longing for her home, no Seiwa Minamoto no Takase pursuing his war to drive them forward, and so they traveled slowly, at a walking pace. They did not often find farms or even cultivated fields, though sometimes they passed an abandoned house built in half-buried, in the old style. Uona was pregnant with Otoko’s child, in her early months, so she did not often feel well enough to travel immediately in the morning, and there were days they went nowhere, everyone content to drowse cat-like through the afternoon. The few people they encountered did not ask where they were going, or how they would fare through the winter.

In the north, mountains are common as geese, and there always seems to be another just beyond this one. But as one travels north they get smaller, just as horses and dogs seem to grow smaller. When the party left Noshira river, they aimed for a smooth-sloped mountain, a perfect little sister to the great mountain Fuji.

“Softer country,” Kagaya-hime said.

“Not easy, though,” Otoko said. “Look.” He pointed to a nearby ridge, its firs and pines bent nearly double. “They’ll have snow here, and winds. Bad years, it’ll be higher than my head.”

Otoko had somehow become their guide. It did not occur to Kagaya-hime to wonder how he had learned any of the ten thousand things he seemed to know, or even why they still traveled. She nodded and said no more.

Their path angled across the mountain’s flank. It didn’t seem steep until they started walking it, an endless steady climb that was more tiring than crags would have been. They stopped often for the sakes of Uona and the packhorse (“Both of us”—Uona laughed breathlessly—“we’re carrying extra baggage”), so that by midafternoon they had only ascended part of the way. Kagaya-hime stopped them beside a
torii
-gate in a little clearing, having no wish to leave everyone huddling on a ridge when the sun set and the wind grew bitter.

Building camp was quick, for there was little to do. Kagaya-hime unloaded the horses as Otoko settled Uona in a nest of cloaks, with Biter’s saddle as a pillow. She fell asleep almost immediately as Kagaya-hime and Otoko gathered wood for a fire. They still had the better part of a deer’s haunch wrapped in its own hide left over from the day before, but: “Mushrooms, my lady,” Otoko said softly, and pointed downslope. He took a cloth for gathering and vanished among the trees.

There was little for Kagaya-hime to do. The packhorse nosed over the weeds in the clearing; as he did every evening Biter chewed on his hobbles trying to find a flaw that hadn’t been there the night before. Uona stirred a little and said, “Don’t forget…” before sinking back into sleep. Kagaya-hime walked across the clearing to examine the
torii
-gate.

It was taller than Kagaya-hime could reach, painted a red now faded to dust, and hung with a braided straw rope and slips of white paper, soft-edged with weather. Offerings had been heaped by the posts, but the foods were long gone, only trays and leaves left to mark them. Other, more permanent gifts remained, but they meant little to Kagaya-hime: a padded amulet necklace shredded by sun and rain to show glimmers of something inside; the ghost of a scent of sandalwood; and, amazingly, a full set of court robes in spring colors, now faded nearly to white.

Every gateway implies a road that passes through it, but this was a gate that led nowhere: there was no shrine beyond the
torii
-gate, not even another
torii
-gate that would also lead nowhere. She walked around pillars, but saw nothing. Looking up she glanced through the gate in the other direction, and gasped.

Spread out before her was a thousand miles of mountains and river-plains and marshes. The path they’d followed was a thread across the land, leading—she knew where it led. She could not see the great mountain Fuji, which was many hundreds of miles to the south, but it felt as though she ought to be able to; perhaps, if she knew just where to look, she might even see the T
kaid
, the shrine where she became human, the Raj
gate to the capital, the path of her panicked running through the streets: her vanished home on Nij
avenue.