Fudoki (28 page)

And perhaps death will be like this, whether Hell or the Pure Land or some incomprehensible place I have not imagined. Will there be roads and sunlit verandas and sleeping cats? Would this be a comfort or a disappointment? Is there anyplace that is filled with wonder, anywhere but my imagination, and the tales?

Yesterday my great-grandnephew the emperor sent me a poem, which I correctly interpreted as a summons. It is more fitting that I attend him than the reverse; but I am an old woman, and I remember when he was born, the pup. I remember when his father was born: even his
grandfather’s
birth, for I waited with Shirakawa’s consort Kenshi when she was in labor. I bit back my mild annoyance at the poem. We have not visited for many months, and I may not see him again before I leave the palace altogether. And he is ten, after all. I can hardly expect more elegance of mind than I myself showed at that age.

It always takes time to prepare for an imperial visit, but it takes even more for an old woman who has been recently ill. One would think that Shigeko was accustomed to emperors by now, but for some reason this visit set her all a-flutter, and she fretted over my robes as much as she ever did when I was younger.

“Akihito’s ten,” I said. “He’s not going to care, as long as I’m respectable.”

She frowned at me. “He’s not Akihito anymore. He’s the
emperor,
my lady. Even if you seem to forget it; even if he doesn’t care. You have a responsibility to look respectable.”
Not to disgrace us all,
she meant.

“To him?” I said. “He didn’t seem to care much for such things, back when he spent all his time vomiting on his clothes.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, refusing the bait. So many years together make all sports familiar.

My younger women were all flutters and excitement, resetting the sleeves for a green-gray robe combination that had been disassembled for cleaning. Shigeko and two others washed my face and throat and hands, and eased me into my garments, stuffing one sleeve full of soft papers to use if I coughed. They propped me up between them, and we walked down walkways and verandas and galleries at a pace I hoped looked more deliberate than feeble. (I find I have
some
vanities, after all.)

The emperor my great-grandnephew has immense rooms, but as most emperors seem to, he lives most of his time in a small area set off from the immense echoing spaces. Curtains and eye-blinds and a canopy create the illusion of walls and intimacy; the lovely floor is padded with reed mats and a phoenix-bright carpet from some unimaginably distant land. He is never alone, so he had with him his regent, a calligraphy instructor, and a number of men and women. Everyone still wore mourning for Shirakawa’s death, so the room felt muted.

They all looked very young to me (as, in truth, everyone does, when one is seventy). I recognized only a few of them, but amused myself searching for resemblances to court people I had once known, all now retired or dead:
with that nose, he must be one of the Sugara boys; the girl must be the daughter, all right, granddaughter of Fujiwara no Kimiko
. One of the women (she had the square face and unconscious grace the Kuroku-clan girls all seemed to have) slipped across to me, and led me to a curtain-stand very near the emperor, placing a mat and helping me to settle.

She wafted to the emperor and murmured in his ear. The boy put down his brush with a certain air of relief and dismissed the calligrapher. “Aunt, I trust I find you well? I heard you were ill, so I burned incense for your health.” His voice was clear, sweet as the high notes on a set of
sh
-pipes.

“Thank you, Nephew. Highness,” I added as an afterthought.

He stared critically at me, head tilted like a bird’s. It is true that he is a ten-year-old boy; still, I was glad that Kignu had goaded the women into finishing these robes. “Are you feeling better?”

“Child, I am seventy years old. Remaining alive is as ‘better’ as I can hope for.” A ripple of stifled laughter ran through the attendants. The emperor—most of these children—were too young to understand what I meant by this; even the boy’s father was born forty years after I. I must seem unimaginably old to them all, like the clay figures we find sometimes at ancient gravesites.

My nephew frowned a little. “You must take care of yourself, Aunt,” he said sternly.

Why?
I did not ask. “Your concern touches me,” I said, and found I meant it. An attendant entered and claimed his attention: a relief, for my eyes were burning, and I had to blow my nose, which I did as quietly as possible. Shigeko took the damp sleeve-paper from me and slid it into her own sleeve with the bland look of a woman for whom such unappealing actions are duty. I watched my nephew and his court for a time, content to let the activity, the clever puns and poems, drift around my ankles.

“Aunt?” the emperor asked, later, when not so many people were paying attention to us. “Are you dying?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” He thought for a time, a single tiny line between his eyes. “Well, don’t.”

“I have no choice, child. None of us do.” I wondered if he was thinking of Shirakawa, his great-grandfather, my half-brother. “I am sorry I won’t see you grow up.” I realized suddenly that this was true. I have seen so many of my family grow up and then grow old and die, or die young and untimely. It would have been nice to watch this one, as well. And to see next spring, and the winter after that, and the robins returning from the south, and the dragonflies after a rain, and anything and everything.

His voice was very small. “You used to sing to me. When I was a child.”

“You remember this?” I had a vague recollection of having done so when he had flu and was too ill to do more than cry and sleep.

He nodded vigorously. “All about moths and, um, butterflies.”

“Really,” I said. I had not offered poetry, not
ki
-chronicles nor Chinese exhortations to proper behavior: I had sung a peasant’s love-song from the north. D
mei had taught it to me, singing the woman’s lines in a squeaky voice that never failed to dissolve me in laughter. “You remember this.”

“I still know the words,” he added. “They were pretty.”

“Yes, they were,” I said softly. D
mei and I sang the song often, even sometimes when we made love, tossing lines back and forth like poetry.

He spoke the first line, hesitantly, and then sang it. And I found I could not help but join him. My nephew’s voice was much higher than D
mei’s had been; mine was much lower than it had been when I was young.

A ten-year-old emperor and a dying woman sang a peasant’s song taught her by a long-lost lover from the north. Life is full of wonders. D
mei lives still, in my heart, and in words a child does not yet understand.

Kagaya-hime traveled
with eighty horsemen, two hundred miscellaneous attendants, and a hundred twenty horses. This is a good-sized village’s worth of people, though
this
village sent a vanguard to scout its way; slept somewhere different each night; and was almost entirely male and entirely childless.

Kagaya-hime knew even less of villages than she did of estates. The road had taken her through a number of them, but she did not usually stay in them longer than it took to find food; she was uncomfortable in the presence of so many people and the undetectable boundaries between their territories. The war band’s constant motion eased the discomfort she might have felt in such a large gathering. She knew about motion and travel; she knew what it was to sleep under unfamiliar trees.

Any gathering of men—but particularly of warriors—is like a troop of monkeys. There are continual jostlings and posturings, males circling one another looking for weaknesses. (I learned this from my lover D
mei’s stories, though I do not think this is the lesson he expected me to learn.) Even if the group’s leadership is incontestable, even if the hierarchies of commander and captain are established, there is another level of dominance, based not on lineage or military rank, but on personal strength and skill, and the indefinable element that makes this man attractive and that man merely ordinary. My half-brother had this charm, if you can use so slight a word for a power that won him lifelong loyalties and affection. Takase had it, as well.

Though the war band traveled quickly, there was plenty of time for monkey-games, for most of the men were experienced at campaigning. Yoshiee’s war was not so many years in the past, and these were northerners; even the youngest were accustomed to the constant scuffles to protect their lands from robber gangs. Some of the games involved the horses pushing past one another at a trot or even a gallop—on unfamiliar terrain; Kagaya-hime watched and could not see what they accomplished by risking their horses’ legs in this way.

Other games involved archery—shoot at that fencepost, shoot at this twig, see if you can slice the fuzz from a rabbit’s tail without hurting the rabbit. They also involved talk and bursts of laughter, and mock arguments: “You first, and then I’ll put my arrow through yours.”—“That rabbit there? Let’s see his hat marker. He’s not high enough ranked for me, but he’ll do for you.”—For in battle everyone wore a wood tag attached to his
eboshi
cap, to make severed heads easier to identify, one assumes.

The day was beautiful. The sun was warm on Kagaya-hime’s back, but when she crossed into shade she shivered, for the air was still cold. They crossed into Mutsu province in the morning, leaving Hitachi road for a new road: another stage between her and the T
kaid
’s irascible kami. Mutsu road was as unimpressive and variable as its predecessors had been, widening to a broad lane of drying mud when it passed through villages, deteriorating to a single dirty band where it crossed the hills.

The road was littered with signs of other travelers: worn straw sandals and hoof-covers, ox and horse droppings; torn paper that once protected something; a discarded lantern, its wood frame irreparable. Occasionally the band met others, who always stepped aside or wheeled their carts into the new growth along the road and stared up at the men and their horses as they loped past. “Look!” a child said as Kagaya-hime passed: “A girl! Why is she—” but she did not hear the end of his question, already far behind. Everywhere smelled of sun on earth and new growing things.

Biter seemed content to amble forward in the straggling line of horses and men. Kagaya-hime sat him easily, the heavy weight of her armor (though she did not yet wear her helmet or shoulder guards) eased where it rested against the saddle. She watched the land pass, and the attendants running over fields or hills to retrieve the arrows of their masters’ monkey-games; and she was close to content.

When they stopped for the night, Kagaya-hime saw other monkey-games in how the men chose the places they would tie their horses and lie down to sleep. They all knew what it was to sleep on the ground and they were frankly uninterested in doing so whenever they could avoid it; but the farms and temples and shrines here were loyal to the Osa Hitachi and Seiwa Minamoto, and Takase did not choose to inconvenience (and possibly antagonize: loyalties in the north might as well be written on water) anyone by appropriating foods and roofs for his own people. Instead, dry patches and tree-sheltered knolls were claimed; campfires sprang up, and the smell of food filled the air.

Kagaya-hime threaded her way through them all, unwilling to play the games (which are as pointless to a cat as they are to a woman), but fascinated with the men’s loud voices, their jokes and profanities and boasts. Takase and Kitsune and their attendants shared a fire, a little away from the others, and when she passed them, Takase gestured her over: “Have your people set up here.” He returned to his conversation with Kitsune.

“I don’t—” Kagaya-hime began, and then she realized she
did
have people. Two attendants had been walking beside her horse for some time; she had not noticed this, for she had been full of her own thoughts. Their presence had seemed as natural as Biter’s had on that day she’d first found him.

One of these attendants brushed past her with a quick, perfunctory bow, and setting down his pack started to unload rice and dried fish, striking up a conversation with the other servants as if he had known them for some time: a man of average size, neither handsome nor homely, dressed in sensible travel clothes, a peasant’s straw rain cape thrown over one shoulder.

The other attendant was, amazingly, a woman: again, of average size and attractiveness, dressed in men’s garb, but with a servant-girl’s thick, short hair and a ready laugh in her eyes. Bowing, she eased Biter’s reins from Kagaya-hime’s slackened grasp, and led him toward the river, alternately cooing in his ear and exchanging greetings and insults with the other servants: the first person (if one did not count Kagaya-hime) that Biter had ever allowed to touch him.

Over the months, Kagaya-hime had learned that other people did not find that useful items (such as servants) magically appeared when needed.—Indeed, it is not common save for princesses.

I have had this experience myself, especially lately. I awaken, and there is a new woman waiting beside my bed. Without a word spoken, she helps me upright and to my chamber box, as if she has done this all her life, and mine. Dazed with sleep, I am not sure whether she is truly new, or I just do not remember her. My age is the standard excuse for my uncertainty; but as an excuse it is more convenient than true. I do not remember them all, because there have been so many of them, scores or hundreds of interchangeable women who have attended me over the decades. A few remain vivid to me because their intelligence or charm or opinions made them intriguing companions.

It is more than servants and attendants, of course. If I need a new writing brush, it appears. Leaf-shaped paper, ink sticks, sesame-seed tea, coals for the braziers, clean under robes: these things materialize as if I had prayed to some god and found him in an accommodating mood. Often I do not realize the need is there until it is met.

I know that the world is not like this for other people—if they run out of rice they must somehow acquire more—though I have no idea how this might be done. I put down my brush and ask my companion, “If you ran out of rice, what would you do?”

“My lady?” Shikujo is the girl whose marriage is so unsatisfying (though she is nearly thirty now: no girl), my visitor from the provinces. We are the only two awake: even Shigeko has returned to her bed where she can sleep off the remnants of her
kaze
-cold.

“Rice,” I say again. “If you were to run out—in your household, I mean—what would you do?”

“Have more brought in,” she says.

“How?” I ask.

“Send the servants for it, I suppose. I’m not sure what you’re asking me, my lady.”

I sigh. Of course she doesn’t understand: Shikujo is nearly as artificial a creature as I am. Neither of us could feed or clothe ourselves if others did not supply the food and silk—and this goes on, layers and layers, for our attendants need attendants, and so on, all the way down to the person who actually knows how to husk rice or peel the cocoons of silkworms. But that person is as distant from my experience as she would be from a cat wandering in the northlands.

Kagaya-hime has no idea how to make fabric and cannot grow sweet potatoes. Her clothing, food, horse—and now servants—all come from the gods (or me, actually, for I am the kami of this tale). I had not thought of it before this, but it is not an accident she is called
hime,
princess.

My woman Shigeko came to me as suddenly as a sneeze. This was some months before my father died and my half-brother the emperor summoned me to court, so I must have been fourteen. I was officially a woman, but I was still awkward as a boy, all long strides and loud laughs, apt to hang around the gardeners and carry dead vermin into my rooms in my (usually filthy) sleeves.

I despised my foster father’s and uncle’s wives and even my own women. They had no intellect, no wit to follow my reasoning about the relations between butterflies and moths, or robins and sparrows. They did not read Chinese, or at least were careful never to be caught doing so. They cared about stupid things:
monogatari
tales; the endless stream of poetry that flowed, drab and steady as river water, from their brushes; the shapes of their eyebrows; the low quality of the silks from Mikawa province in recent years; who was having a baby, by whom, and when and why.

I would never pluck
my
eyebrows; they would never get me to care whether my robes were the correct shades of peach, and not unseasonable rose. Any husband I might get (and I did not care whether I ever had one, not knowing yet the tricky exchanges of power that demand marriage of a princess) would have to accept all this. I am sure that I was as thoroughly a burden to my family as ever they were to me.

It was early in the year, when water left in a cup overnight skins over with ice. I had escaped the woman who was nominally in charge of my behavior by the simple expedient of lying to her face. “Off to the outhouse,” I said and bowed, unwilling to let her see my face. Really, I thought, she was as stupid as hens—they all were. And I spent the morning in the pine-and-cypress grove where I had once found my half-brother longing for his consort. There were beetles there, even in the cold.

I only came back when I was hungry, and my feet were so cold that I stumbled in my clogs. There was the usual flurry of activity and complaints. I ignored these as I always did, though I was grateful for the padded robes the women wrapped around me, and the brazier I knelt beside.

There was a new girl, tall and not much older than I was. Even I could see that her robes were simpler than those of the other attendants, the silks less valuable; but somehow, her manner made this look perfectly correct, and the others slightly fussy and overdressed. Her face was hardly pretty—perhaps the reason she was being sent off to attend me, and not married to someone who might improve her family’s situation—but I thought it interesting. Most new girls were shy about meeting a daughter of the emperor, watching me with anxious eyes until forced forward by someone more experienced; but she knelt apart reading—some romance, no doubt, I thought with contempt.