Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  Kagaya-hime and the others shot everyone who showed his face and burned everything flammable. The pillar of thick smoke was just becoming visible when they returned. Howls of anger rose from behind the walls: a flurry of arrows shot at extreme range. One arrow ticked against Kitsune’s shoulder armor, and dropped like a fallen scroll. He picked it up and fired it back at the stockade. It skinned over the logs and vanished: “Should have written your name on it, my lord,” one of the men said, “then they’d know who to look out for.”

  Takase looked tired and irritable. He’d sent envoys to the ki-stockade with letters to Abe no Norit; the responses had been short, sharp, and defiant. They had fired on the returning envoys, and the closeness of the misses indicated not sloppiness in their aim, but great skill. “Well?” he snapped at Kitsune when they met with the captains at dusk.

  “They evacuated everyone to here,” Kitsune said. “And they brought the contents of one storehouse. Rice and buckwheat, it looked like from the dust everywhere. I can’t say how full it was.” Takase looked at Kagaya-hime, who added nothing, only nodded.

  “I see these options,” Takase said. “They mean to come out and attack us tomorrow or the next day, when they are rested. Or they mean to sneak away from the stockade the next moonless night, or during a distraction of some sort. Or they mean to stay inside the stockade until we grow tired of waiting and leave.”

  “Siege?” a captain said. “Are they mad? It’s the wrong season; they won’t have enough food this early in the year”—for last year’s crops would be nearly eaten up, and this year’s were still no more than new greenery.

  Takase held up his hand for silence. “The place isn’t well designed for sneaking away. We’ll remove the underbrush, just to be sure. I think that we will wait for them.”

  This startled everyone but Kagaya-hime. Common as siege may be in the Chinese manuals of war, it is not a usual thing here in the Eight Islands. We are too impatient to wait for a mouse at its hole; if our enemy goes to ground, we are more likely to give up and return another day. Only Kagaya-hime knew that sooner or later the mouse comes out.—Unless he has another hole, anyway.

  Siege. I think it must be hard for everyone involved, this mix of tedium and gnawing fear. Is there enough to eat, to drink? Does the enemy plan some trick that we are too weary or bored to see? Have the gods changed the rules in the night, so that we are now somehow within range of their arrows? And how do my distant family fare as I wait here for something to happen? Have the crops been planted, the silkworms harvested? Both sides in a siege fret; neither can do anything to ease their concerns.

  The small river that ran through the valley was clean water, safe to drink, but food was short at the camp. The war band had carried some food and stolen more; but it is astonishing how much food even two hundred men (they were sixty horsemen now, and one hundred thirty grooms and attendants) can eat. Takase sent out people to take what they needed from nearby farms, but the longer a war band stays in one place, the more time there is for the neighbors to grow nervous and relocate what little they have to a secure location; and he was forced to rely increasingly on his hunters. The monkeys came down from the mountains to steal their food and mock at them, but after the first day the men did not waste arrows on them, for they had a tendency to grab any arrow that missed them and swing hooting into the trees. It was only half a joke when the men talked about going into the woods to find the monkeys’ secret armory.

  The horses were accustomed to fending for themselves; but the valley was not large, and they had grazed parts of it down to bare dirt within days.

  The days of siege were perfect weather: the seventh month, brilliantly clear and as warm as it gets so far north. The members of the war band wore their kote over their torsos instead of the full armor as they moved about the camps. It rained twice, summer showers as pretty and translucent as gauze, good only for damping down the dust the camps kicked up.

  As the siege continued, many of the men injured by arrows at gen died, their deaths variously tranquil or violent. Some death-blows are obvious, as when bright blood froths on a man’s lips, or a wound turns color and begins to smell of carrion. Others are subtler: a man loses his appetite as dull bruising spreads across his abdomen; a man’s breathing bubbles in his chest until he turns blue and dies; night by night a man’s fever grows until his skin burns like iron in sunlight.

  There was little news from inside the stockade. They saw the thin smoke of cooking fires; gold light from lamps and fires on cool, foggy evenings. A breeze brought the scents of cooking onions, boiling taro root, hot metal. They heard smiths’ sounds, for the ringing of hammers can carry for a mile: new arrowheads and hoko spearheads, no doubt. Sometimes men shouted, or a horse whinnied. On certain nights when the air was still, they heard the faint rumble of men talking behind the stockade walls, or sudden unexpected noises: a baby crying, a woman shushing it.

  As the moon thinned and the nights became darker, men slipped from the ki-stockade, one or two at a time. Some vanished unnoticed; others were caught and questioned. This was no organized plot on Norit’s part, though one of the captured men admitted that his goal had been to return with reinforcements from his own lands. Most wanted only to return to their families, their crops. Takase and the war band learned from these men that there were three hundred in the stockade; that there were a thousand, or one hundred; that Norit had sent for allies who were coming, who were not; that he had six months’ food, or half a month’s; that Norit’s wives and children were there; that they were all at a monastery far to the south, to the north, anywhere but here. People are not by their nature honest; they say what they must to survive—though in this case, they did not survive; Takase killed those he captured if he thought they would bring help for Norit. The rotting heads had been dropped into kegs of brine; the row of barrels downwind of the camp grew longer.

  This trickling loss of men was not one-sided. Siege has no glamour, no excitement to keep men distracted from their own concerns, and the men of the war band started to think of their own crops and wives and horses. Every so often someone gathered his attendants and his spare horses (if he still had any) and rode away to the south. The remaining men mocked him, but when he had ridden out of sight, they spoke wistfully of their own homes.

  “Let them go,” Takase said to Kitsune, when he complained. “They are drawn away by their homes, not driven by cowardice.”

  “I would not leave,” Kitsune exclaimed. “I will stay ’til this is finished.”

  Takase smiled slightly. “It’s different for you, and me, and the girl, here.” (Kagaya-hime, who was with him often now, and cleaned the hole in his side when his attendants were not near.) “She has no home to call to her, and my family is dead these fifteen years. I want to finish this before I die. And you—your brother was killed. Your way home is through this. In any case,” he said, “a reluctant warrior is no warrior at all.”

  Better than any, Kagaya-hime understood siege, the waiting at a mouse-hole; but this did not mean she liked it. A cat waits for an hour, perhaps, and she either catches the mouse or she doesn’t. This siege—day after day with nothing edible at the end of it—did not appeal to her. Cats love the warmth of sunlight and brazier, and she spent long hours lying along a broken wall, blinking in the sun. The men of the war band greeted her, on their way to this or that task, and in the evenings invited her to their fires lit for the smoke that shooed off the insects. Sometimes she did stop for a time with one or another of the groups, listening to their stories.

  Men like to hear their own voices; but every so often, one of them would think to ask her about her own family. She would say: “They are gone now; there is nothing to tell.” But she would remain at the fire, and when most men had fallen asleep or left for duty she would speak in a near-whisper about the cats of what had once been her fudoki: The Cat Who Ate Watercress, The Blue-Ink Cat, The Cat Who Would Only Sleep on Silk. The tales clung to her like the barbed seeds of certain grasse
s, but she gently plucked them loose and told them, and they fell from her, one after the other—no more than stories now. She felt herself grow lighter, felt the festering bitterness ease, replaced by a cleaner pain.

  The men listened with surprising patience and gentleness, and no one seemed surprised that the sisters and aunts she spoke of were all cats. Without anyone actually saying something, the men had learned already that she was a cat—there are no secrets in a war band, after all. Not everyone had seen a cat, but they had heard of them, from their comrades who had been to the capital.

  In some strange way, they found it easier to accept her being a cat than any of the alternatives. A woman fighting was bad enough. It would be worse if she were a kami or a demon, each equally untrustworthy, their motives equally unknowable. In any case, what excuse had anyone, male or female, god or demon, to fight if they did not come from a bow-and-arrow family, from gunki?

  But a cat—well, if a cat was not from gunki, what was?

  Often she returned to Takase’s fire. There were fewer of the captains’ meetings; there is little strategy to a siege once begun, don’t let them out and don’t let them surprise you is about the sum of it, so many nights there were only the two of them. Kagaya-hime had taken to cleaning Takase’s unhealed arrow-wound, like a mother-cat cleaning a kitten’s cut. The flesh around it was hot under her fingers, but there was little she could do for it, except bathe the area with warm water, and wipe away the liquids that oozed out.

  Takase liked the softness of her touch. “Softer than your bony old paw,” he said to his man Suwa; “you’re gentle like an ox.”

  “You’re dying, aren’t you?” she said one night. Kitsune was with them: a sharp breath expelled, as if in shock; but there are no secrets in war bands. Everyone knew Takase was dying, though Kagaya-hime was the first to say it outright.

  Takase sighed heavily. “We’re all dying, girl: you know that as well as any of us. But, yes. It’s always hurt, but it’s worse now. I’m tired, weak.”

  “How soon?” Kitsune asked, and then gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. Of course you don’t know.”

  “Don’t I?” Takase said. “There are days I think I could tell you the number of breaths between now and then. Soon, boy.”

  Kitsune bowed. “I’ll have a sutra read for your soul, my lord.”

  “Don’t waste your money,” Takase said. “I’ve seen my wife die, and I’ve been in a thousand fights, cut off a man’s head when his mouth was still moving. And here’s what I think happens: we live, we die, we rot. Save your money, spend it on pretty silks for your mistresses.”

  “Something lives on,” Kagaya-hime said. “There are ghosts. I’ve seen them.”

  “Then where are they all?” Takase said. “My wife’s ghost? The men who died?” He pointed to the row of barrels, their brine-pickled heads inside. “Where are their ghosts?”

  Kagaya-hime squinted at the barrels, but saw nothing. “Gone. They don’t stay long, most of them.”

  “Where do they go then?” Takase had little artifice; the mockery in his voice was forced and brittle as ice over a pond.

  “I never asked,” she said.

  “Weren’t you curious?” Kitsune asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “Now, a little. Perhaps I will ask the next time I see one.”

  Takase said, “If you are there when I die, I will tell you.”

  There are good days and bad days. Lately I have had a whole series of bad days, bad enough that I found myself crying when I thought no one (but Shigeko) would see me. The thing that fills my chest has always been inappropriate, shall we say, but now it grows more wrong, somehow: evil, like cursing the gods or mocking one’s mother’s ghost. I can tell it does not belong in me, does not belong anywhere. Everything I try to eat makes me ill, so I have learned to take a little bite and then wait, and then another. It may take half a day to eat the segments of a Chinese orange. Shigeko is infinitely patient, getting me to eat.

  I think if I had finished telling Kagaya-hime’s story—if I knew how it ended—I might already have summoned the priests, taken my oaths, left the court, and died these last days.—Though there are still trunks to finish. Ten now; I can count them on my fingers.

  Today is the first day I have done more than sleep, and eat my single bites. I asked Shigeko to open my screens, take me onto the verandas to see the sun. It is full autumn, the leaves the colors of saffron and dandelion-dyed silk. The air is so cold that it seems almost a liquid; it leaves my fingers chilled and my nose running, but scorches my lungs.

  The sky. Strange how no one ever seems to write poems about the varied clouds. Today they are stretched thin and transparent, a great sweeping arc over watery blue. This is not the thick clotted sky of summertime, the hammered gray silk of winter. Why did I never think to study the clouds?

  I was unwilling to die when there was still much to say and do. But there is always something left undone, and if I were to die today, I would do so with the memory of the cold lambent sky; and that might be enough.

  Kagaya-hime took to hunting again, looking for meat she could bring back to Uona and Otoko. The other hunters strayed far, looking for large creatures that might feed several men at a time, but she had learned a trick.

  Early on, the monkeys had learned to use even the slight amounts of cover on the plain to approach the camps and steal a box here, a sack there. They had learned that the containers made for a very interesting game: while some held things useless to a monkey (clothes, for instance, or replacement reins), others were crammed with enough rice to gorge the troop; or salted fish, which was not a usual food for monkeys but was at least amusing, well worth the game of seizing it, fighting over it, chewing it, and spitting it out.

  Now the monkeys stole everything that was light enough to carry on the off-chance that they would find something edible; and they tasted everything they stole, edible or no. The men of the war band could do little, so they watched their possessions closely, and cursed the monkeys with great dark oaths whenever they saw them.

  Kagaya-hime learned to wait near something sure to be attractive to monkeys, which meant anything otherwise unobserved, conveniently near the trees. The monkeys saw her, of course; but after a while, their curiosity would overwhelm their caution and they crept forward. As they came into range, she would shoot one with a slim leaf-shaped arrow that would not shred the meat much. Whichever monkey she struck screamed and fell; the rest of the monkeys leapt for the trees and swore at her from their shelter. Sometimes she saw the ghost of the monkey she killed, plucking at its side or chest or face with immaterial fingers; but having no interest in the souls of monkeys, she did not listen to its chattering or ask where it went. The survivors were wary for a time, but monkeys are just clever enough for their curiosity to kill them. They returned eventually.

  She killed many this way—though there were always more: the woods seemed to grow as many monkeys as pinecones. None of the men of the war band tried to imitate her, for she was the best shot and more patient than any of the men, willing to wait for a morning, or a day.

  There was a day when she was hunting in this fashion, staking out a handful of barrels stacked on top of a shield to keep them out of the dirt. Spilled rice made a mound near the barrels: irresistible to the monkeys, she figured. The monkeys were proving slow to arrive (she could not know this, but they had found a stack of boxes at the other camp. They were busy running their hands and mouths over wood stirrups and saddle-frames, and growing more irritable by the moment), but she was content to wait. The air was warm, gold with pollens. It tasted sweet and grassy.

  Uona had taken Biter for a ride, to use up some of the energy that tended to show as irritability. Otoko was playing a gambling game with some of the other attendants. Takase slept; Kitsune watched the walls of the stockade, and amused himself by shooting arrows with his name written on them over its walls, hoping to hit something. There was nothing better to do.

  Because she w
as watching for monkey-sized things, she didn’t notice the smaller movements in the trampled grass near the barrels. Tiny actions, a rustling so faint she could hear it only when everything else in camp fell silent for an instant, as happens in even the busiest camp. She squinted, trying to separate the movement she’d caught into its elements: grass growing, the tiny breeze, the whatever-it-was.

  Mice. Once she recognized the movement, she saw them easily: here eyes, small as seeds; there a tail, waving too slowly to be a grass stalk. They were using the trampled grass to get a short (human) pace from their goal, and then dashing, pausing, dashing across to the mound of rice. With her attention on the trees, she had not noticed them as they passed her foot, so close that she might have shifted her foot and stepped on one.

  Mice had been her favorite thing, so many miles ago, when she still had a cat’s form and lived in the abandoned residence at the capital. They had been sweet and salty at the same time, full of the sharp shards of crunchable bones, with none of the feathers that made sparrows so difficult, or the gaminess of voles. How long had it been since she had eaten one? Months, miles. Her hands were full of arrow and bow. She had no hand free to throw a knife, and they would all be gone if she moved quickly.

  She had never watched them without hunting them. One of the mice stuffed rice into its mouth, grain after grain until its cheek bulged, as absurd as a squirrel storing nuts. Another crept around one of the barrels, sniffing at the iron binding that protected the wood. When it started to chew a splintering stave-edge, another joined it. A fourth mouse, fawn-colored, stood on its hind legs beside her foot, as if watching.

  “Mouse,” she said. A flicker, a rustle, and the mouse by her foot had whisked itself to a broken tree stump three paces away.