Fudoki (15 page)

She was capable of skinning out a deer or commanding her estate’s defense from bandits, in the unlikely event that her brothers (and all their useful, strong, martial men) were far away. When she had been younger, barely a girl, she had served as nurse at an estate in Hida province. There had been a terrible disaster, and she had escaped with the clothes on her back and a ten-year-old boy, the only survivor. Together they walked two hundred fifty miles through the mountains in the dead of winter, to her family home in Hitachi. She avoided bears, wolves, and robbers, managing so well that on arriving she and the boy were well fed, clad in fur, and bearing weapons.

We would have considered her at best uncouth and at worst a barbarian, and she was both these things—but there is nothing to stop me from speaking the truth, however improper it is. She was brave and full of laughter and wisdom, and I would have liked to have called Osa Hitachi no Nakara a friend.

The tortoiseshell knew no one. Her clan were all dead. In her traveling, she met people on the road for no more than the shared instant of passing. Her meetings with the kami on the crystal-clear road were short and without satisfaction. She had no skill at conversation, polite or otherwise. She was moved with quick powerful grace, and there were moments of contentment or even happiness that softened her eyes; but the black grief at her heart made her less-than-light company. And though no one would have guessed she was a cat, there was something people did not recognize about her, something strange. We avoid those who grieve; we avoid those who are not like us; and so she was doubly distanced from her fellow travelers.

Friendships are strange. I meet one woman and I like her instantly. Another I dislike and distrust as quickly. They are both of good family and have beautiful manners and taste; they both laugh when I say something I consider clever. My woman Shigeko resembles a thousand of the women who have served me, her independence of thought her only difference—and even in that, there have been others. And yet she is one ear, and I the other.

Osa Hitachi no Nakara was another twenty days on the road returning home. Many things can happen in such a time. A woman can have a baby, or fall in love, or lose a loved one to death or indifference (though that can happen in an instant). The tortoiseshell learned about people. Nakara gained a friend.

The weather was mostly cold, for the twelfth month is solidly winter. Snow fell and lingered from one day to the next, until the oxen pulling the cart could not get through in places, and they had to stop until things became easier. When the sky was clear, the tortoiseshell woman rode beside the ox-cart, or ranged far ahead of the Hitachi party, tasting air so cold that it burned her lungs. For reasons she did not understand, she returned each evening to Nakara’s people, to sleep wherever they did. Often she brought back animals she had killed, rabbits or
sika
deer draped across her horse’s shoulder. The sorrel did not seem to mind the smell of blood or the twitches of dying prey; in this he was his mistress’s match.

Though they considered their pace quick (particularly for winter), the party traveled far more slowly than she would have alone. An ox-carriage is not exactly noted for its swiftness. These oxen had been selected more for sturdiness than for fleetness of foot (if a fleet ox can even be imagined), and they lumbered through cold mud and hock-deep snow. The useful portion of the day was very short, so that there were days it seemed that they had barely begun to travel when the sun set abruptly over the mountains to the west—if they saw it at all; the sky was often overcast, or even snowing.

Snow like this would have stopped dead the soft people of the capital. We have snow, but it is not generally deep or long-lasting; and it is up to the servants and the guardsmen and the peasants to make their ways through it. We women merely watch from our sheltered verandas, and admire it as if it were painted on a scroll. It would never occur to us to take a winter pilgrimage of a hundred miles or more.

The farther one travels on the T
kaid
, the more real snow becomes. No longer just pretty spangles on a robe, it grows deeper and lasts longer. People can die in it, and not just because they passed out in a ditch and drowned, overcome by too much
sake
. They can die from this eastern snow due to even the tiniest carelessness, or karma, or simply bad luck. Storms come up where the flakes fall so thick that a stranded traveler cannot see the eave-light of a farmhouse a hundred—a dozen!—paces away. Someone lost can scream until she is hoarse, yet her voice is swallowed as if she shouted into a quilted robe. And these storms can last for days.

There are clear days, when the sky is a particular frozen blue, and the sun on one’s face leaves no warmth. These days are bright, but oh, so cold. One’s breath attaches itself as ice to one’s clothing, and even tucked into sleeves, one’s hands ache until they grow numb. Lakes and rivers freeze over and become solid for months instead of days; ferries become irrelevant. A cart can feel its way across the ice without falling through. (I have just realized: I do not think I will see snow again. How strange.)

Winter becomes harsher in the east, but the people somehow disregard it as we of the capital never can. They live and carry on their business even through snow and cold and darkness. There is no farming, of course, but the horses and cattle and other animals must be tended. Messengers still bring urgent business from outlying estates or along the roads. There is hunting and even fishing. My golden-eyed lover used to tell me about watching the fisherfolk of his district push their boats onto the sea on days when great snowflakes dissolved into its black water.
They like it,
he said;
snow keeps the waves down.

Nakara and her people had adapted. They walked easily in high wooden clogs that no one in the city could manage with any facility. Their feet were often wet and always cold; but they shrugged this off as no more than an inconvenience. They did not panic if snow caught them unexpectedly; they sheltered themselves and made fire, and waited.

So travel was not fast. Beyond the limitations forced by the weather, the party stopped often for its own reasons. Nakara stopped at every temple and every shrine along the road, staying the night at the larger places, if they had guest quarters.

“Why do you stop so often?” the tortoiseshell woman asked once, when they pulled up for the third time in a day, before an unprepossessing little roadside Buddha cloaked in snow.

Nakara finished her prayer and laid her offering before the statue: food and a sheaf of votive papers, each printed with a hundred tiny Buddhas. She turned, her face sober.

“I had three brothers. Now I have one killed and one, my adopted brother, gone to the capital. How can I not pray for them every chance I get?” She stepped onto a plank that had been laid over the ridges and whorls of frozen mud between the Buddha and the road.

The tortoiseshell followed her an arm’s length behind, frowning. “You pray for males? They have no place in
fudoki
—clan, you would say.”

“Don’t they?” Nakara said. “And yet, I miss my dead brother every minute.” She sighed. “I pray that the gods leave me the brothers I still have.”

“Gods do not listen,” Kagaya-hime said. “They just talk, talk, talk, and none of it makes any sense.”

Nakara turned. “They speak to you?”

“Not to
me
,” the tortoiseshell woman said. “Not anymore.”

“Perhaps at least they listen,” Nakara said, and turned away.

Tabu slowed them, as well. Nakara traveled with three women (and the tortoiseshell woman), and so there were days when they could not travel due to this or that one’s monthly courses. There were directional tabus, which would not allow them to start a day’s travel in certain directions; often Nakara ordered the party to head in an acceptable direction for a quarter mile (though this might lead through fields, or down a country road that led nowhere). The party then returned to the road, having addressed at least technically the gods’ wishes. Delays were inevitable. There was a night when everyone was forced to stay up to protect their souls against demons, and they were too tired to travel far the next day. The tortoiseshell woman remained a cat in that she had no courses, and wondered at the delays of this and the other tabus.

“We have no choice,” Nakara explained that night. “Well, not much. There are times when I have had to ignore the strictures, but I prefer not to.”

The tortoiseshell woman snorted. “Do you think the gods notice?”

“Well,
I
notice,” Nakara said.

And then there were the ten thousand things they stopped to see only because it pleased Nakara to do so. The east is strange and beautiful, and doubly so in winter. Nakara did not travel as much as she would wish, generally busy administering the estate, and she looked about avidly.

A waterfall splashed over black rocks, on either side forming great intricate sculptures of ice, and Nakara and her women pretended they were mandalas, and searched them for tiny Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The tortoiseshell woman looked with them, but saw nothing, even when one of the women (Junshi was her name) broke a bit off and pointed out the half-formed face and draped robes. And yet the tortoiseshell’s eyes were clear enough that she saw an
ayu
-trout sleeping just below the waterfall, and threw her knife and startled it.

Later, just after they crossed Matsusado ford (now a stretch of slippery, dangerous ice that groaned under the cart’s weight), they passed a wild black sow, the biggest any of them had ever seen, scrounging for stubble under the snow of a sunken rice field. The black against the white of snow and brown of earth was stunning, but Nakara stopped at the next farm to warn them that the pig was stealing their straw. The farmer explained that he allowed this because he knew where the old sow farrowed, and collected her piglets each year to sell. Nakara left a gift, charmed by the man’s enterprise.

They came to a place beside a temple where a river had not frozen. Even though it was winter, a hundred ducks of every variety remained here, tempted by the open water and the grains the monks threw to them. A monkey moved among the ducks, squabbling with them as though he had been born from an egg. Nakara laughed until she cried, and stayed for nearly a day, using up all the fried rice cakes feeding this odd flock. The tortoiseshell woman did not laugh; perhaps did not know how to laugh.

Halfway through Shimosa province, there was a cinnamon tree as large as a
hinoki
cedar, alone in a field as flat as if it had been in the Kant
. Nakara and the women left the ox-carriage and felt their way across the field, which turned out to be less level than it looked, small stones hidden under moss and weeds and snow. The air was perfectly still, and they fell silent as they approached the tree. There was no shrine, nothing to indicate a kami was here (though of course they are everywhere), but Nakara saluted the tree as if it were a god, and removed her outermost robe and laid it at the roots. The tortoiseshell woman came close enough to see claw marks in the bark, as if a giant cat had scratched there. She pressed her face to them, but they smelled faintly of bear and not cat. She had known they could not be a proof of kin, for they were too large and too far away from the capital. Nevertheless, her sorrow nearly drove her to her knees.