Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  “What?” it said, a little impatiently.

  “You do speak,” she said. She lowered her bow and arrow carefully, rolling her shoulders as she did so. Within their limitations, monkeys are clever; hunting them required that she keep her arrow nocked and bow drawn, and this made her stiff. “I’ve always wondered.”

  The mouse said, “You are a killing animal?”

  Kagaya-hime was silent, already knowing the answer.

  “There is no record of your type,” the mouse added. “What are you?”

  “A cat,” she said. “We’re small and quick and silent, and designed for killing little things.” Kagaya-hime bared her teeth: a small smile. “Mice, mostly.”

  “Ah,” the mouse said, as if storing the information for later. “Yet humans are not killing animals.”

  “I’m not human.”

  The mouse said nothing, its bright eyes fixed on her. Kagaya-hime laid her bow down slowly, and leaned back against a sapling’s trunk. The mouse-path to the barrels had moved out of reach, she saw. “You steal our grain,” she remarked.

  “It is necessary to appropriate resources. There are many of us to feed,” the mouse said.

  “We don’t stay forever,” she said. “You’ll have to find other resources.”

  “We will find others when you are gone,” the mouse said. “Other districts report resources for utilization, as well.”

  She chewed on a stalk of grass for a time. “‘We’?”

  “Oh, yes,” the mouse said absently, its attention on the mice by the barrels. There were more mice now; several had joined the one that had found the weak place in the barrel, all gnawing steadily. “We are a large empire.”

  “Why are you here?” she said. “You gather nothing.”

  The mouse flicked her a sideways glance from one tiny brilliant eye. “I am here to report on this appropriation to my superiors. I will mention you, and ‘cat’ as well.”

  “I see.” Kagaya-hime had spent much time with people; something in the fawn-colored mouse’s pose, its steady focus on the others’ labors, reminded her of men she had met: quartermasters, with their constant cataloguing, their brushes and portable ink and ever-present notebooks and scrolls. “You are a recorder.”

  “I am third assistant comptroller of grains for my district’s secondary storehouses,” the mouse corrected. “But I hope for a promotion soon. We do not always live so long, you see.”

  “Why report at all?” she asked. “The grain is there or it isn’t. Why not eat it yourself, or take it home to your family?”

  “A family is small, of no account,” the mouse said. “We are a large kingdom. It is necessary to catalog things: potential resources, storehouses, census rolls, properties.”

  “But you would have these things, even if you didn’t keep track. There would still be food and young and holes.”

  The mouse crumpled its whiskers, as if in distaste. “It would mean nothing. The records define the kingdom of mice.” She said nothing, and the mouse seemed to sigh, like a tutor with a dull student. “Perhaps you are faster in this form than you look; or a fox will eat me as I return to report; I will be trampled by one of those immense clodhopper horses; I will drown in my hole in a storm. Or my superior will die, and I will be promoted, but there will be another third assistant comptroller for grains, and one after that, and another. I am not so important, so long as the role remains filled. It is necessary to keep track of things, you see. Do you—‘cats’—not do this?”

  “We have the fudoki, our tales. That is what we save.”

  “Hmm,” the mouse said. “Perhaps that is why there are not so many of you. No organization.”

  There are many mice in this world—many more than cats, more even than people. We—the men and women of the court—have always thought of ourselves as the center of an immense empire, a thousand miles from Mutsu province to–

  Osumi province, ten thousand villages and temples and shrines; but we know in our hearts that China is a thousand times more vast than we.

  But an empire of mice—what might a million mice create? Kagaya-hime had a sudden image of such a land, its families and clans, villages and districts, provinces and regions, overseers and governors, courtiers. And the cities of the mice, underground plats squared and vast as Chang-an on a mouse’s scale. A mouse would never be alone, always part of the strange fudoki of the mice, a tale without individuals.

  “I’d like to see your land,” Kagaya-hime said.

  “That is not a good idea,” the mouse said. “I do not think my superiors would approve.”

  Kagaya-hime snorted. “Perhaps not.”

  Where the mice had chewed the barrel, rice trickled from a new hole and formed a little mound. The third assistant comptroller straightened and tipped its head as a weary man might, hunched for too long over some list. “I must report, and send laborers.”

  “Wait,” Kagaya-hime said. “I’ve killed so many of you; I’ll do so again”—the mouse gave an impression of shrugging—“I’m curious. Do you have souls?”

  “Why do you care?”

  Kagaya-hime blinked. “I want to know what tales I end.”

  “Would it change anything?”

  She thought of the taste of mice, hot and squirming on the tongue. “No. Oh, no.”

  “I thought not,” the mouse said, dryly. “You might as well ask, do rice balls have souls? I have as much of a soul as a rice ball. Or a cat,” and the mouse slipped from the tree stump and vanished from her sight.

  She waited there until dusk, but the fawn-colored mouse did not return. She did not disturb the visits of the mice who slipped into the barrel and left, cheeks fat.

  Well? she asked the endless chittering of the kami; but they said nothing.

  My rooms echo. They seem much larger, and harder-edged, the corners all rediscovered, bare to the eyes. And the hollowness: soft as it often is, my voice rings now. Shigeko’s footsteps are no longer muffled, and I hear her approach from rooms away. As my possessions have gone, so have my women, sent back to their homes, the younger ones first, more recently the older, the women who have been with me for years or decades. A few begged to accompany me to Kasugano, but I remain sure that I want no one but Shigeko. It’s not as though I will be there long before my death, and I will have no visitors (or trunks) to need the attentions of attendants.

  I offered to send Shigeko home. She has a brother still, and she’s always gotten along well with his wives, who express (in a series of fatuous poems) the honor they would feel in welcoming so valued a courtier into their midst. There would be nieces and nephews, and even grandnieces and grandnephews; a wing in the house that she could fill with trunks of her own; the chance to be pampered by others, to be the unreasonable one. She is older than I, but her health is very good. She might well live another decade; the women in her family are notorious for living well past any realistic age.

  To my no-doubt poorly concealed relief, she has refused. She will attend me to Kasugano, and after I am dead, she will remain there. The assumption is that she will spend the rest of her life praying for a better next life for me; but I rather hope she does not waste her time brooding about this dead woman she once served. Even at seventy there are better things to think about. I hope she does some traveling, for she has always enjoyed that; and pilgrimages are a perfect excuse to see the sky ringed by new mountains. She might even see the great sea. She has her share of friends and old lovers who might welcome a visit.

  What would it have been like if she had been the princess and I the attendant? Would I have been as good as she? Would I have loved her as selflessly? She is not here just now (out relieving herself, I think: an old woman’s bladder is like an autumn grape, small and always close to bursting), so I cannot ask her what she thinks.

  —She has returned, and I have asked her, and she has said, “Swap clothes with a monkey, and you end up with two monkeys, my lady.” I laugh until my belly hurts, and now I think oh, yes, I would have loved
her. I am “my lady,” and she is my woman, but we are more than this. Swap clothes and we are still friends.

  It was the mice that ended the siege. Kagaya-hime in her woman’s shape had not much need to kill mice, but she was curious (and provident: if she ever returned to her cat’s form, anything she learned now would have immediate and useful applications), so she spoke with them. She never saw the fawn-colored mouse again; she did not ask where it might have gone, knowing as well as it had that an individual mouse’s life is short and hardly worth the recounting. Clearly it filed its report, for the mice seemed to recognize that she was a threat without teeth, a killing animal in useless human form. From one of these mice, she heard that the siege accomplished nothing: the Abe and their mice ate well, if boringly, on rice and salted fish; their well was deep and showed no signs of drying up, even as the summer stretched out into a series of bright hot days. The Abe had taken apart a ruined building and used its timbers to strengthen the other buildings. They hacked one of the logs into shakes, which they used to shingle the empty spaces in the roofs, to keep out the rain that fell sometimes from indigo clouds in the afternoons.

  Back when I was so interested in warfare, siege seemed simple enough to me, something every woman understands. Someone undesirable starts to haunt your rooms, hoping for an invitation to join you behind your curtains. His constant presence makes it impossible for you to entertain anyone else, or even perhaps to leave your chambers. He looks for any contact: bribes your women, steals the food you send away after meals.

  The solution is simple, if dull: you outwait him. You do not respond to his ten thousand poems either with direct excoriation or indirect sarcasm, since these might be (indeed, will be) taken as encouragement. You wait patiently behind your screens and curtains. Sooner or later he will be summoned away by duties at court, or another woman’s elegance, or even boredom. You wait; eventually he leaves.

  Men, it seems, do not think this way. Not only do they avoid siege, preferring instead to feed one another’s rages until face-to-face battle is inevitable; even when they do have a siege, they seem pantingly eager to break it at the first opportunity. While I might expect this of the besieger, since he has everything to gain by facing his opponent, I would not have thought the besieged have any incentive to leave their safe den, provided they have food and water enough.

  Takase’s war band tried to coax the Abe out with daily insults sent by envoy. The Osa Hitachi horsemen played their monkey-games, bragging and jostling one another until someone donned armor, raced his horse to the wall, and hurled a torch, hoping to set something, anything, on fire. Archers wrote their names and rude comments on the shafts of their arrows and then shot them over the walls. It was unlikely that they would hit anything, but the insults might incite someone to open the gate and charge out. But the Abe stayed cozy within their walls, disdaining all efforts.

  The captains debated attack options for days, but there were no secret caves, no forbidding but passable cliffs. No one had a sister inside the stockade who might consider betraying her master. No one imagined that a prayer to the kami or the Buddhas would cause one of the walls to collapse.

  If Abe no Norit had been a woman, I think the Abe might have stayed until winter, when the lack of firewood would at last drive them out; but by then, the war band would have left, returned to their own fields and estates. The winter after a summer without crops would be hard; but surely easier, less dangerous, than war. But Norit was male, and so this conflict could only end with battle: this month, next month, the tenth month.

  The Osa Hitachi did not lift the siege; they merely lost interest in it. Kagaya-hime told Takase and the captains what the mice had told her. Faced by the possibility of no clear end to this waiting, Takase ordered the men to be ready that night at the rat’s hour, midnight. The men of the war band would ride against the stockade’s wall and shoot anyone who showed his head, while the foot soldiers pulled down the timbers. The Abe (it was as certain as if there had been an agreement between them) would open their gates and attack; there would be a lot of killing, and injuries that would lead to death, and it would all be over by dawn.

  Men.

  The night the siege ended was very dark: the new moon, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when the air is so thick that the stars seem small and blurred. It is hard to conceal the preparations of two hundred men, the restless noises of warhorses who sense battle, so the Abe were not precisely unprepared.

  Kagaya-hime and Biter stood beside Takase at the center of the ragged line of the war band. Many of the horsemen held torches, but the light was murky, as if the air absorbed half the illumination. No wind: smoke went straight up until it vanished into the darkness. The air was filled with waiting. A foot soldier murmured the Amida Buddha’s name three times; in the momentary silence it was as audible as if she shared a room with him. A horse stamped and puffed; the metal of its bridle jangled gently. The priestess Onobe no Kesuko and her acolytes were far behind the line of horsemen, but Kagaya-hime smelled incense, and heard soft bells and chanting: prayers.

  “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.