Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  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 Dmei. Dmei did not play flute, and he was no cryer. Still:

  “Do you recall Mononobe no Dmei?” 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. “Dmei? 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. Dmei quite made me want to see his family pastures.”

  Horses? In all our time together, Dmei 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 Dmei 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 Dmei. How odd.

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

  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 Tkaid, 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 s
helter.

  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.

  I was sure I would die. Every horror my women had ever gossiped about came back to me: rape and robbers and wild beasts, death by fire, death by cold, death. I had not thought of myself as imaginative, but they came vividly to mind. The air smelled musky, as if some animal lived here; but I could not tell whether the scent was fresh or might be only my own fear. I was dizzy and my chest hurt from my heart pounding. I strained to identify every noise—and in a ruined outbuilding after rain, there are many noises. In my fear, each drip was a voice, so that the night was filled with their chittering.

  This is how my mice were, I recall: shaking and startling at anything unexpected. Poor mice. I had not realized that to them I was every evil.

  I still don’t understand how I could fall asleep. When the moon came up, I could at least see things through the doorway, dark shaggy trees and stars, and a haze of moonlight. My panic eased. I burst into tears, and cried as I had not since I was a child.

  I recall my dream that night. Even now, so many tens of years later, it returns: something about watching a fish at the bottom of a river of blue-green water. Sometimes in the dream I jump in after the fish; other times, I reach down and it leaps into my hand. Sometimes the fish speaks to me, though the words never remain when I awaken. Perhaps I will finally hear them when I am dead.

  I did not fall asleep so much as fall unconscious, and I was not aware of either until I startled awake, disoriented and cold and oh, so very stiff. Somehow I’d slept through first light, and the sky was already the color of pearls. Through the storehouse door I saw a streak of rose-colored sunlight touching a single tree. The storehouse was worse than I’d thought in the dark. The tile roof sagged down nearly to my eye’s height, the timber that should have held up the roof rotted through and hanging loose. It looked as though any jar might collapse it. The dirt on the floor was patterned with so many paw prints that I could not identify them: fox? tanuki-badger? something else? Whatever it was had not visited in the night. I hoped.

  I retrieved my clogs and crawled cautiously through the door, stretched and relieved myself, and assessed my situation.

  —which was not good. I had no food, and while water stood all around me in puddles, I had nothing I trusted to drink. On a rainy day, when everyone keeps their eyes on the ground in front of them, my robes might pass as ordinary, but on a sunny day they stood out, both for their glorious shimmering amber color and for the mud and dirt ground into the weave. My hair and face could be no better. The first man to see me would recognize that I did not belong—anywhere.

  I was ill-equipped for tending myself. I longed for Shigeko, who always knew (or could at least find someone who knew) how to do anything. Shigeko made food and hot drinks appear (and despite the sun’s growing warmth, I was still chilled from my night on bare boards), filled quiet comfortable sleeping enclosures with soft bed robes and padded pillows. Undoubtedly Shigeko could make something pleasant out of even this unpromising situation. No: Shigeko would never have allowed this in the first place. She would have wept and clung to me, or—harder to resist—reasoned with me; and I would have endured another night of my husband-to-be’s awkward gropings. And I would be married. Even starvation seemed preferable to that; though I learned soon enough that starvation only seems an acceptable alternative to something else until you get really hungry.

  I was in the northwestern quarter of the city; now that it was daylight, I could see that—there was the hill Funaoka to the north, the mountains like walls to the east and west, all so familiar that I could have aligned myself from anywhere in the city. I walked south along what would have been the capital’s western wall, had there been anything but rubble and a fading mound; sometimes I came to clear places where I could see a glimpse of the Red Sparrow gate to the court.

  I was hungry, but afraid to address anyone directly. It was unlikely anyone I met down here would have heard of my flight, wrapped up in their own survival as they must be; but I knew I looked a perfect fiend, and I wanted no one to run screaming for an exorcist. More immediately, I wanted no rape or robbery: no one to steal my clothes and leave me naked.

  Many of the city blocks were untamed as countryside, with forest-thick copses of trees and weed-choked pools; but I learn
ed that enterprising folks planted gardens of grain or vegetables on some blocks, hidden behind artfully placed windfalls. As a child playing (improperly) in the kitchen yards of my foster father’s residence, I had learned a little about what plants (and which parts) were edible. Looking for a private place to relieve myself at midmorning, I stumbled into one of these gardens, and ate carrots and radishes raw. The dirt I could not scrape off was gritty on my teeth. Still, I was comforted: I would not starve, not immediately.

  I did not walk fast, for I had nowhere I planned on going. Away had been my only thought, but I did not have the courage to go far. I could not bring myself to cross the western wall, though there was not much difference between the city’s blocks and the countryside, squared-off dirt streets on this side of the wall and apparently random dirt roads on that. If anything, the countryside seemed better mannered, for it had not been allowed to grow shaggy with disuse. I was not used to walking far, and had nowhere to go, so I stopped often, hiding whenever I saw someone.

  It was midafternoon when I next stopped, perhaps the sheep’s hour. No, it was the monkey’s hour; I remember hearing the gongs of the guardsmen announcing the time. I was smug with the notion that I could scavenge for my own food, but I had been lucky earlier: it was not so simple. I had learned to see the paths that people left when they snuck into ruined residences or secret fields. The first path led to a pool of relatively clear water, left over from a fine garden—but no food. The second took me to a set of collapsed buildings full of nothing. The third took me to a little field where buckwheat or something similar had been harvested. Perhaps I could pick through the field looking for fallen grains: that would be something at least. It was backbreaking work, but I grew absorbed in my gleaning, intent on each tiny, crunchy, unsatisfying bite.