Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  In the flurry, Kagaya-hime was treated more as a member of the household than as a guest—which means she was alternately left to her own resources and asked to help. Nakara asked for her assistance in preparing clothing, but Kagaya-hime had no interest in sewing. She had a single needle, so sharp and slender that the women all exclaimed with awe at it, and she was very good at sewing, the tiny pounces of needle into fabric coming as naturally as knife-thrusts to her, but sewing brought down no prey, did not fill the darkness inside. Instead, she caught birds for the arrow-makers to strip for fletching.

  The noise and her hunting had discouraged most of the useful birds close to the estate, so she and Biter roved far, traveling into the mountains to the west looking for eagles. There were times they stayed out for a night or even two, and Kagaya-hime slept pressed against Biter’s side, watching the ice-brilliant stars wheel overhead, threading their way through treeless branches.

  She was gone for New Year’s, sleeping in a thrown-together shelter of driftwood near the beach, where she had gone to look for geese. The air roared here with surf and wind, and perhaps this is why her New Year’s dream was filled with the chittering voices of the kamis—reed, despair, wives, six wordless tones in sequence, Wear red when you worship me—when she had walked the crystal-bright road through golden mist. She searched for the road, or even the great mottled darkness full of blood and a thousand green eyes, but searching is futile when there are no landmarks, no way to keep track of one’s movements. In the end, she gave up and sat as if on a riverbank, with her feet hanging into the mist. “Tell the road that I miss it,” she said, and she awoke.

  When at the Osa Hitachi estate, she watched the preparations with a certain curiosity. Cats understand combat—toms fighting for a female, females fighting to protect ground or kittens—but they carry their claws and teeth with them and they catch their own supplies as they go. War and its logistics—food and wine and weapons and tools to be carried to somewhere that is not one’s fudoki, to fight a mass of others for no good reason—were incomprehensible to her. It was obvious that, whoever had initiated this war, Takase was at its heart, and so she watched him most.

  Two days after her New Year’s dream, Kagaya-hime returned with two eagles, three osprey, and a crow across Biter’s haunches. She left them with the fletcher (who would pluck their long feathers and pass them to the kitchen), and led Biter to the stables to clean and brush him before releasing him into the field with some of the Osa Hitachi horses. When Takase entered leading his own grizzled black, Kagaya-hime and Biter were pressed face-to-face, eyes closed, communing as horse and rider ever have. The black huffed and jangled its bridle. Kagaya-hime spun, knife in hand. “Ease up, girl,” he said. “Inkstick and I are no threat.”

  “No.” Kagaya-hime replaced her knife in her sash and looked up at the old man, her cheek against Biter’s neck. “You are both old.”

  He laughed, a surprised snort. “Not too old to bite. Someday you’ll be old; you’ll see. I heard your story. You’re the one who fought off the robbers.”

  Kagaya-hime knew this already. She said nothing.

  He continued. “Is your sword any good?”

  Hime’s hand went to her waist and for the first time there was a longsword at her side, hung with amber-colored silk cords in the jindachi-zukuri manner. She slid it from its sheath: a short blade of the old design, straight-bladed with a ring pommel. She touched the steel, folded countless times so that blue and purple and indigo patterns chased one another across the metal, fine as slow-growing pine wood. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s not a necklace, girl. Give it to me.” She handed it to him, and he examined the metal, his horse throwing up its head, restless. “Settle down, Inkstick. I don’t recognize the maker’s mark. Does your blade have a name?”

  “No,” she said. He handed it back, and she sheathed it, as easily as if it had been for the thousandth time. Teeth didn’t have names.

  Takase was silent for a moment, absently rubbing his horse’s long grayed nose. “Your horse. Good sturdy one.”

  Kagaya-hime did not know Takase, but she said something that surprised her, and knew it was the truth even as she said it. “He is the only thing I love.”

  “I understand,” Takase said. “I had a horse I felt like that about, a long time ago. Not Inkstick, here. He’s a good horse, but I can’t afford to care anymore.”

  Cats do not ask questions about one another, for there is no reason to do so. The fudoki tells all, or everything important anyway; if the information sought is important, it is in the tale. She cared for Nakara, but this did not extend to asking questions; the others of the estate (even Junshi, who was often kind to her) mattered too little for her to wonder about them. But she wondered about Takase, and began, for the first time, to ask questions of the men who traveled with him.

  One of the followers, a nephew serving as bodyguard, thought Kagaya-hime beautiful, and he said much about Takase, mostly to keep her close to him. Takase’s fudoki crossed sixty and more years, forty of them spent fighting bandit-gangs, pirates, refractory landholders. Takase had been a great general, and a governor somewhere in the south (Kagaya-hime did not bother to remember the place). Since his favorite consort had died, he had lived quietly, bowstring loosened, all thought of war gone. And he was ill—for even people could see this, though they could not smell or see that he was dying.

  Kagaya-hime did not wonder about the half-fox Kitsune, but she watched him avidly when they were both at the estate, as a cat eyes a new dog. She did not choose to speak with him (what cat talks to dogs?), but she was often close, if safely out of reach. He would not have seemed beautiful to most of my friends at court (though there were a discriminating few). His face was thin, with straight eyebrows that flew up at the ends; and he had those sloped gold-flecked eyes, bright as a puddle reflecting autumn maples. He moved gracefully, with a fox’s quick efficiency—not a tall man, as Takase was, but long-limbed and slender. Despite his fox-eyes and name, he often seemed no more an animal than Nakara, and no one else seemed to think of him as anything but human. It was only sometimes, when his attendants were busy elsewhere and he was alone, that Kagaya-hime saw something in his expression that she understood.

  By the end of the first month, the first horses foaled in their pastures, and wolves came down from the mountains to try their luck—successfully, for two foals were dead within days. A man in charge of the pastures alerted Nakara (for she oversaw this as she oversaw everything else: “The Osa Hitachi men are busy being men,” she said to Kagaya-hime, “someone must make sure that the foals are counted and the taxes paid”). Because the men of the estate were busy, Nakara chose to attend to this herself, though in the end she did not go alone. “I am tired of being nice to people,” Takase said when informed of her wolves: “I need to kill something.” No one asked why Kagaya-hime joined them.

  Three men and three women left on a bright clear day. Down at the main estate, thin dirty snow covered everything; as the horses climbed into the foothills, it deepened and grew cleaner, a jeweled dust, until the horses slowed, each step crunching through a white crust into hock-deep snow, with drifts to their knees. They rode for much of a day before they found the herd, in a windblown clearing nearly free of snow. This was one of the Osa Hitachi’s far pastures, the only good place for foals right now. The smell of mares made the growing groups of bickering war-mounts fight among themselves. More importantly to anyone for whom the raising of horses is a livelihood and the waging of war a mere momentary madness, the stallions made the mares nervous and their herd’s leader overprotective and militant. Even the six horses the hunting party rode upset the herd. Nakara directed them away, to a hut of sorts half a mile east, and settled there.

  Six people and any gear they wanted kept dry (saddles: weapons) packed the little structure tight as herrings in a barrel: particularly busy herrings, for there was a fire to be set and a meal to be cooked and the herder to consult; and Nakara’s only att
endant fluttered around, trying to shield her mistress from the snow puffing in through the cracks in the hut’s wall. Kagaya-hime slipped unnoticed under the cracked horsehide that covered the open doorway, and out past the hobbled horses nosing under the snow for anything edible.

  It was very dark, for the moon was nearly new, but her eyes were better than mine have ever been. She walked easily in the black spaces under the trees and came into the open at the bottom of the horses’ clearing. The pasture was a great sweeping fold between two wooded slopes that lifted to the mountains beyond, dark jagged outlines against starlight and an almost invisible green light that hung in the air to the north. The mares and foals milled anxiously at the pasture’s center. The herd’s stallion trotted some distance away, his head high, his ears and attention focused into the hills above the herd.

  Kagaya-hime was more interested in a rabbit half-hidden under a low shrub near the trees. It had not seen her. The air was perfectly still and too cold to carry her smell. She dropped into a crouch before she realized she’d made the decision to catch it.

  She moved carefully, but in any case the rabbit was distracted, its attention elsewhere. She was scarcely an arm’s length away when it saw her. In the instant before it gathered its minimal wits to run, she leapt the space between them and spiked it to the ground, her knife through its shoulder. It gave a single scream before she broke its neck. Its blood was warm on her tongue when she felt herself observed from the trees behind her.

  “You are the wolves,” she said aloud without turning.

  A wolf slipped from the trees; another rose from a depression in the ground. There were four in all, long-muzzled and gray. All animals know and fear the great killing creatures: the eagle, the bear, Korea’s tiger, the wolf. The smaller killing creatures avoid them: they do not care to know how it feels to be prey. Kagaya-hime straightened and turned, the rabbit still in her hand.

  “What are you?” the largest of the wolves asked—for there were no cats so far from the capital, and nothing it could compare her to. Her woman’s shape meant nothing to the wolf, for it did not understand what a cat should look like.

  “The people call me Kagaya-hime,” she said. This appeared to be sufficient answer.

  The largest of the wolves shook itself. “You are a killing animal, but a small one. We could kill you if we chose. Are you not afraid?”

  “No,” she said. “It does not matter. I have no fudoki.”

  Wolves have no fudoki—the pack is defined by blood and smell and voice; their ground can change; their tales define nothing. Nevertheless, they understood her. “Why are you here?” another wolf, a female, asked. She smelled of milk and cubs.

  “The people come to kill you,” Kagaya-hime said.

  “The people always seek to kill us,” the female said, “but they do not succeed.”

  Kagaya-hime lifted the knife. “I have lived among them. If they have not killed you, it’s because they have not wanted to do so. Yet. But you have taken their foals—”

  “Ah yes, the foals,” the female said. “They tasted sweet and their bones were soft.”

  Kagaya-hime’s mouth watered despite herself. “—and now you must leave. They will hunt you down, find your cubs, and kill you. Your tale—your pack—will end there.”

  “And you?” the lead wolf asked. “Will you try to kill us, too, little killer?”

  She raised her chin, a cat before an emperor. “I will kill you if I can. But I would rather you leave.”

  “We stand together,” the wolf said. “We decide together.”

  “Together.” Kagaya-hime’s face was very cold. “You are never alone.”

  “We stand together,” the wolf said again. Its eyes flickered and it vanished, it and its priests, into the darkness of the overhanging trees.

  “Girl!”—Takase’s voice across the clearing. He loped to her side, sword bare and gleaming in his hand; slowed when he saw she was unharmed. “Where did they go?”

  “Away. I told them we would kill them.”

  “Huh,” Takase said. “So you talked with them, did you?”

  She wiped the back of her hand against her face, smearing blood into her tears. “I don’t know if they’ll stay. They lose nothing by going; they carry their tale with them.”

  “I—” Takase said, and then shut his mouth abruptly. He gestured to the rabbit on the snow. “You will want to clean that. And wash your face before you return.”

  In the morning they tracked the wolves back to their den, a mere slit in a rocky slope. Kagaya-hime was the smallest of them, and she crawled in to find nothing, only the torn fur of a nest, the chewed thighbone of a foal. She backed out and brushed herself clean. “They decided to leave,” she said, and no one asked how she knew this.

  I have never seen a wolf, never even seen a picture of one. “They are like dogs,” said Dmei, when I asked him once about them: “Like the gods of dogs.”

  “Bigger, you mean?” I asked. We were sitting on the veranda, eating pickled eggs and watching one of the household’s cats prowling at the edge of a clump of reeds under a bright moon.

  “They have gold eyes,” Dmei said. “Flat and fierce. Think of a dog that could kill you, that would not even care whether it did so: that’s a wolf.”

  Mutsu province, where there are wolves, and gold-eyed men like Dmei. I shall never see it now.

  8. The Fan-Fold Notebook

  Strange. All these pages, all these brush strokes, and I have said little about my half-brother, the emperor everyone now calls Shirakawa. This is perhaps intentional: thinking of him is like scratching at a scab to see if the cut beneath is still fresh. What will I accomplish by doing this? I already know that it has not healed, and I am not brave enough to face the fresh pain.

  It is not many months since the forty-ninth night rituals after his death. Some nights, when I feel the thing inside my chest pressing against my lungs, I talk to him. Some nights, I think he answers me.

  He was not so many years older than me, and, when he was young, very handsome (as everyone told me, again and again—even my nurse sometimes looked at me and sighed, “Why could you not have a bit of your brother’s elegance?”). For a time, when his father was still emperor, he lived with my foster father. The house was full of flurry and attendants because of him, but my women kept us far apart (“Trust me, your highness, he has no interest in having his thoughts disturbed by a flyaway girl with dirty hands and no manners”).

  Then my foster father said that I could no longer keep mice. Worse, he forced my nurse to take away the mice I did have. There were two or perhaps three: tiny buckwheat-colored creatures with glittering black eyes bright as prayer beads. She would not tell me what she did with them. My tears devolved into an enormous tantrum, for which she locked me into a little raised-floor storehouse, avowedly until I learned to control myself.

  I did not learn control there, but I did learn that there were two planks in the floor that had not been properly secured, so that a resourceful girl could lift them and let herself down into the crawl space. I crept through the dust and emerged cautiously, on the far side from the house, then ran for the copse of white pine and sawara cypress at the garden’s opposite end, as far from the main buildings as I could get without crossing the residence walls.

  We called him Sadahito then, for he was not yet emperor. He must have been sixteen; certainly, he was much taller than I. He spent much of his time with his father, so I did not expect to find him in the grove—and certainly not alone; an heir is never alone, any more than a princess. I do not know what he was doing there—did not think to ask, caught up as I was in my own miseries.

  I knew bursting in on him was a terrible solecism, but I couldn’t think of what to do next: Apologize? Back away as if I hadn’t seen him? Throw myself on the ground? Faint? Grace in awkward situations does not come at the age of ten, so I stood rooted to the ground, as if a tree myself. He did not seem offended; said only: “You’ve been crying,” and pulled a sof
t paper from his sleeve. “Here, use this.”

  I took it from his hand and scrubbed at my cheeks, but I could not stop staring at him. Unless I did something stupid (now, for instance), I would probably serve Sadahito at court someday; he (and my foster father) would select the man I would marry. He controlled my destiny—he and the other gods.

  “You’re my half-sister,” he said. We had met before, but always through curtains, as befit a princess and the heir. “I forget: what do they call you?”

  “Harueme. What should I do with this?” I held up the now-grimy wad of sleeve-paper.

  “Give it to me and I’ll get rid of it for you,” he said. “You don’t want them to guess you got out, do you?”

  “No,” I said, amazed at his insight. He knew I’d been crying, and he knew I’d escaped. No wonder he got to be emperor. “Why are you here?”

  He made a gesture, implying everything and nothing. “I am tired of studying, and I cannot visit Kenshi right now—she is in her courses.” I knew who Kenshi was: she was his consort, and said to be very beautiful, though I did not meet her and learn the truth of this for several more years. He sighed heavily, though he smiled at himself as he did so. “So, little sister, why have you been crying?”