Fudoki (12 page)

There were robbers from time to time, for they are common as lice on the T
kaid
. Some she avoided, others she fought or negotiated with or simply gave something to: different solutions for different situations.

Somehow, no one asked her for papers or tolls. The guards at the barriers and the posting stations bowed deeply and let her pass, as if it were an everyday thing to see a woman in silks walking alone in winter. The ferryfolk did not charge her for their services, though they found themselves carrying her at times that they did not intend to cross this river or that bay, with the water icy-cold and foaming white as rice powder. The bridge-men and ferryfolk and guards never seemed to realize how irregular their actions were.

She still recited her
fudoki
to herself. She, the cat of that
fudoki,
was dead, and the tale with her. But sometimes, when the nights were cold and wet, and she was alone (and lonely, though she would not have recognized the concept), she would recite the familiar chain of cats to herself and take comfort in them. In this she was becoming human, that meaningless words can ease loneliness. We have all received enough empty poems from lovers to have learned this.

The dreams of fire-cats ended, as well. She knew—and had known, even when she spoke with the ghost of the servant, two and more months ago—that her people were dead. For cats there was no afterlife except one’s place in the
fudoki.
Our Hell, filled with fire and demons and arcane punishments for breaking the precepts, did not frighten her, for she had no god or Buddha to send her there for disobedience or neglect. She’d left the cats of the Eight Islands far behind. Now she walked through country that had never seen a cat, and never heard a cat’s story.

Nor did it now, for she was no cat, though there were things about her that remained very cat-like. She did not feel squeamish at the taking of life, as any good Buddhist would; little as she understood of the kami, she understood still less of the Buddhas, which were as pointless to a cat’s sensibilities as poetry would be. I pray for her enlightenment, as I pray for the enlightenment of us all; but I must confess (honesty is a good thing so close to death) that I think she was perhaps better off for not believing in the Buddhas.

She enjoyed the hunt, though it was different than it had been when she was a cat, since her prey was bigger and had different habits. Her favorite prey was the little serow deer, as tall as her thighs, for their abrupt movements and bright black eyes reminded her a bit of mice. She stalked them when the craggier bits of the forest came close to the T
kaid
. They were wary, but she knew in her bones how to wait, and she caught them almost as often as she failed.

She reveled in the feel of her knife sliding along bone and through meat, the pulse of hot blood across her hand. She loved the slowing of their heartbeats, the shallow breaths, the silence. She did not thank the kami for the meat as some hunters do, but she understood the importance of their deaths. She caught enough that she traded meat sometimes. She usually remembered to cook what she ate.

She had always watched ducks and wondered what they might taste like, but as a cat they had been too clever for her. Now she learned to wade into marshy waters and wait for them to come close enough to kill by throwing one of her knives. They tasted better than she even had hoped, warm and grainy: an advantage to being human. At other times, she caught grouse, deer, monkeys, turtles, a crane once.

When nights came, she found she missed her night vision (though her eyes were still sharper than yours or mine might have been), and the messages her whiskers and sensing hairs had given her; so she slept wherever she found herself at dusk. She was fortunate, for it was a surprisingly easy eleventh month. Frost came some nights, snow others, but it did not accumulate. She watched the moon grow and rise, earlier each night, until the full moon of the eleventh month was bright through dead reeds or pine needles, or shredded clouds, or the tears that sometimes flooded her eyes.

But there were also times when she forgot her sorrow and her state and enjoyed something, the taste of pheasant, the warmth of the sun, a rain so soft it was scarcely a hissing on her face. She was learning something about grief, that it begins with a great blow, but heals with a thousand tiny strokes.

To me her life is perfect. The cold is of no account; we are all cold in the winter. She owes nothing to anyone, and does not fret over the shape of her eyebrows or her robes’ color combinations. She catches what she eats with her own hands, and sleeps where she likes. Every day she sees new sights,
real
things—an ancient pine struck by lightning, a shining green field frosted with melting snow and grazed by ink-black oxen—and not merely yet another well-painted screen.

And yet I have invented her, and her perfect life. These sights are not mine, but are secondhand. I have heard them from lovers, or read them in tales; in truth, I have more firsthand experience with well-painted screens than with anything in her world.

I must not forget that her life is her own. Her miseries, her longings, are not mine. For her, even this perfect month was filled with tears. Life is like that.

She was fortunate, for she traveled for some time before a man tried to rape her, an apparent woman traveling alone. It was in Suruma province where she was attacked. As so many other nights, there were no stopping places close to hand, and so she ended her traveling for the day in the shelter of a great pine tree with branches that swept the ground around it, close to a slow stream. She started a fire and cooked her food in a thin-hammered black metal bowl she found sometimes (though not always) in her pack. It was nearly dark, only the dimmest glow to the west, when another traveler, a man alone, joined her.

He dismounted and led his horse into the firelight. “May I share your fire?” he asked. His horse was a small stocky bay, and his garb was such that any reader of
monogatari
tales could have instantly told that he was, in fact, a bandit, for he had leggings of
tanuki
-badger skin with the fur still on.

The tortoiseshell woman did not read stories, and so she only shrugged. “If you wish. You might as well get some use out of the fire, as well.”

He laughed. “An interesting perspective, my lady.” He unsaddled his horse, and crouched across the fire from her, a tall man with a missing tooth in the front of his smile. “If I put something in the pot, may I share your dinner?”

“If you wish,” she said again.

He handed her strips of salted deer meat and dried eggplant. “What do you have in there?”

“Rice, boar meat,” she said.

“Boar? Where’s a pretty woman like you getting boar meat?” he asked.

And so it began. He wanted to know her name (“Call me ‘Crow,’” he said, though she did not ask). She was obviously a lady, perhaps even a noblewoman (“Above my touch,” he said, and leered), so where were her attendants? Close? Within earshot? Her robes were very fine; where had she gotten them, from a husband, a lover, someone with power? Had she a brother, a father, waiting for her? He had a little barrel of plum wine, and he rolled it close to the fire, dragging it out every so often to drink from it. He offered her some, but she had discovered she had no taste for wine, and thus refused. She answered none of his questions, for they seemed pointless.

Every woman is born aware that a man can force his attentions on her. All our romantic
monogatari
tales are filled with circumstances where a nobleman slips behind the curtains of a woman who has repeatedly expressed a lack of interest, and has sex with her. Paralyzed with fear at what people might think, she says nothing, not a single squeak to awaken one of her women; and when it is done, she vows eternal love to her (to put it bluntly) assailant.

I was never like this. Courtiers (and others) crept behind my curtains from time to time, for, however inadequate my skills as a musician or poet, I was very beautiful when I was young—and I was a princess, and thus attractive to ambitious men. But I squeaked—emphatically—if I did not want them as lovers.

The tortoiseshell woman was not without defenses, though she did not recognize the exact nature of the threat. The man, Crow, stood and crossed to her side of the fire. She stood as he approached, and when he reached out for her, she slapped his hand away. “I do not choose to be touched,” she said as he nursed his stinging hand, anger darkening his eyes.

He grabbed at her again, and she attacked. She did not consciously pull her knife, but it was in her right hand, and she buried it to the hilt, straight down into his shoulder. It grated on bone and jammed there. Holding him with the knife and her left hand on his arm, she slammed her knee into his groin, lifting him with the force of the blow. She pulled him down in stages, knee to belly, then to breastbone, then to throat and face. He fell from her hands to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and neck. She kicked him in the ribs twice, though it was not as satisfying as it would have been had she still been a cat, for she had no hind claws to sink deep in his belly. When the blood stopped flowing, and his terrible wet breathing stopped, she pulled her knife free and wiped it clean on his clothes.

When she left in the morning, she took his horse with her, but she did not ride or keep it, for (whatever its reasons) it had loved its master, and it feared and hated her. The blood on her robes (and there had been much) had vanished in the night, and there was nothing left of the bandit and his intentions.

—I do not know that it would have been like this. My experiences, as I said, were not violent; but there were nights when I shared robes with a man I had invited and then realized I had no interest in; and yet I could not send him away without the mating he craved. So I lay beneath him and made the correct noises, and imagined how I might stop these movements had I not been a princess and unwilling to expose myself to the questions that would arise. Perhaps this is a sort of assault, that I did not feel I could say no; though I had not thought so.