Fudoki (3 page)

The tortoiseshell’s grounds caught in a hundred places. Flying sparks settled on roofs and in dead pines and cryptomeria. Fire slipped into the ditch, leapt across the reeds that bridged the slimy trickle, crept up to the outside wall, and swarmed over it.

The residence burned for most of the night. Thatch and shingles went immediately. Woodwork took a little longer, the perfect grid of a screen or a carved phoenix over a doorway outlined for a time in light. The buildings’ heavy-beamed skeletons settled in like
Urabon
festival bonfires as the timbers turned black and then white and cherry red. The smoke thinned somewhat, for the wood here was well aged.

The air was very hot, not quite unbearably so. When a coil of smoke curled around the tortoiseshell, she pressed her face between her paws and breathed through the fur of her inner leg, leaving tears and smears of the dirty mucus that trailed from her nose. Her claws had been out since sunset. Her muscles trembled with exhaustion.

Through the gaps left open by her second eyelids, she watched the flames flicker, quick as birds or lizards. Sometimes cats looked up through the hot, wavering air with shining eyes and glistening mouths that said things she could not hear. They might have been the cats of her
fudoki,
her cousins and aunts. They might have been ghosts, or flames, or illusions. She could not tell.

A live cinder settled on her shoulder: a tiny smell of burning fur. It was a moment before she recognized the pain. She screamed and scraped herself convulsively against the bark, but there was nowhere to run, nothing to fight.

Fire is not constant. Trees near her burned, but the
hinoki
cedar did not. Needles on the lower branches sizzled as they flared, and then smoldered like incense sticks. She smelled the changed air, and pressed herself harder against the trunk. The squirrel’s nest below her remained intact, though the smoke would have been fatal. Her retreat was high enough that fresh air found its way to her, and so she lived.

We
understand what fires are like, in the same way we understand about riots and wars. We hear tales, rumors, reports from the front. They interest us, but they do not threaten us. Long before we are truly endangered our careful attendants hustle us off to some safer place: the summer house at Biwa lake, a relative’s home in a quieter quarter, a temple in the mountains.

There are some who know fire (or riots, or war) intimately, who see it as the tortoiseshell did. I am not one of those (my so-careful attendants have prevented this), but I have watched bonfires and braziers and walked in a garden after a fire once. I guess what she might have seen or felt, the acid touch of scorching air in her lungs. I imagine; I dream, even when (especially when) it frightens me.

“What are you writing?” Shigeko asks me. It is afternoon, and I write out on my veranda, enjoying the sun’s warmth and the low voices of my women as they put together a robe for me to wear when next I am summoned to visit my great-grandnephew the emperor.

Shigeko is my primary attendant, as old and weathered as I, and so she dares ask such a question, when other, younger, lesser women might instead remain silent. The perfect attendant (and I have had many of them in my life) asks no questions. She brings what is requested; she cleans up what is spilled; she laughs and cries appropriately, as required by her mistress’s mood. Shigeko has never been the perfect attendant, despite her inarguable skills: managing the other women, overseeing my wardrobe, and intercepting unwanted visitors and letters.—Though she certainly has been the most interesting of them.

My brush was moving when she asked this, and so I have written her words and now my thoughts, quite as though they were part of this tale. Now her politeness is at an end, for she has said, her voice sharper: “My lady?” I think I must put down my brush and answer her—

“Nothing,” I told her.

She frowned: she knows I lie. I am not skilled at lies, and she is expert at detecting them. Why did I not tell her, “A
monogatari
tale”? I have written a thousand things and shared them with her: my notes on the number of legs and the wing-colors of whatever vermin I was observing, my letters, even my diaries. Why am I unwilling to show her this?

I have shared everything in my life with others. Not much has belonged to me alone.

The cat did not sleep so much as fall unconscious, and she was not aware of doing either until she startled awake, her claws still sunk deep in the bark, her burning eyes sticky with clotted tears and mucus. She was hungry and very thirsty. Dirt and ash caked her fur and clotted at the roots of her whiskers and sensing hairs. The air smelled strange, of char and ash, every scent changed beyond recognition.

The sky was pale and smoke-pillared in the southeast, smeared indigo and black to the west. Several buildings retained their shapes but were hollowed out and seared. Others were only heaps of charred timber, unrecognizable piles of smoking gray and black, red light peeking through cracks in certain logs. The fire still burned in the northern wing where the “servants” had lived, but with the idle half-interest of a well-fed cat teasing a mouse. The great trees of the garden stood, though their lower branches were charred or gone altogether. Everything else was scorched or destroyed, leaving the garden a tangle of black shapes that might have been shrubs or branches, and might not.

The tortoiseshell
niyaan
ed softly, and then loudly. There was no response, no sound of any sort: no morning songbirds, no people swearing and spitting and clattering pottery in the north wing. No cats. The only living creature she saw was a soaked rat climbing from the stream, which was chalky with ash. Setting foot on a patch of still-smoking ground, it made an anguished noise and leapt back into the water, then swam off to vanish beneath a collapsed bridge.

She was alone. She knew this, though she could not have explained how, or even what, she knew. We, who are more familiar with the gods of our land than she, might have said that the garden’s and the residence’s kami were gone—dead or angry or distracted, or something else that men cannot understand. But her people were new to the Eight Islands, and neither knew nor cared about our gods. She knew only that the heart of her home was gone.

She climbed down, carefully feeling her way along the soot-slick branches. She paused on the lowest and then dropped the final distance. The earth was hot enough that she shifted from paw to paw trying to find a comfortable place to set her feet. Around the base of the
hinoki
cedar was a scattering of dead birds fallen in the night, but her thirst was stronger than her hunger. Startling with every step, she walked down to the little stream. She found a place where she could crouch without burning her paws and lapped at the water. A taste like sulfur caught at the back of her throat, but she drank.

She returned to the dead birds. She pushed the closest one with a paw but it was already rigid despite the heat. She wrinkled her nose and turned away. The next bird had been badly burned, its eyes melted away, its clawed feet curled against its breast. It was unpleasantly crunchy, and she turned away from this one as well. The third was a late-season nestling, scarcely a mouthful.

The fourth she ate. The meat was smeared with ashes that ground against her teeth, but she was too hungry to care. The blood in its veins was stagnant but warm and helped ease the sulfur taste at the back of her throat. Feathers were always bitter, and she clawed them from the bird when she could; otherwise spat them out as she ate. She tried to groom the blood and feathers and ash from her fur, but her mouth was dry. After cleaning her forepaws and face, she gave up and explored her world’s remains.

The continuing silence frightened her. She had always lived in a cloud of noises large and small. Leaves rustled, birds sang, water chattered over rocks in the stream; the people in the north wing had yelled and whispered and snored through their days. Now she heard noises outside the grounds, but the silence within seemed absolute. She listened to her own rasping breath and a steady fast thump like a small drum: her heart beating. She
niyaan
ed again. The sound did not carry, muffled by ashes.

One of her aunts had slipped beneath the walkway, so the little cat searched there. She found no one, only a smoking shape that might once have been a cat, pressed into a depression in the ground. She sniffed carefully and caught the memory of a scent, the black-and-white cat, The Cat Who Talked to Moths. “Aunt?” she asked. When the tortoiseshell tapped with a paw, the shape that might have been a cat crumbled.

She searched throughout the grounds and the destroyed structures, but she found no other cats.

Beside the north wing, she found a dead woman caught beneath a beam that had fallen in such a way that half the wood was untouched and the other end burned away to a blunt point. The woman had been pinned and died there, of the smoke or injuries. A ghost knelt over the corpse, patting it as one might try to wake a child and sobbing, “Get up, get up!” Though there was no wind, its hair and clothes moved like water weeds in a storm.

Cats see ghosts, of course, and speak with them, too, when they have not yet passed on to wherever they must go. Can you doubt it? “Where are the other cats?” the tortoiseshell asked.

The ghost looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “Help me wake up.”

The tortoiseshell said, “You’re dead. I don’t think you’ll wake up from that.”

“I have to,” the ghost said. “Where will I go? I was a bad Buddhist, but I don’t want to go to Hell. I won’t have to, if I can just wake up.” It shook its corpse, and ash flew from its clothes.

A flake fell on the tortoiseshell’s nose, and she shook her head to dislodge it. “Where are the cats, my cousins and aunts?”

The ghost stopped shaking. The tears that fell from its eyes were blood. “They are all gone. Cats and mice, people and kami. I am all that’s left.”

“No,” the tortoiseshell said. “
I
am left.
You’re
a ghost. If my kin are dead, where are their ghosts, then?”

“Why would I know?” the ghost said bitterly. “I am no cat. If cats go to Hell perhaps I will meet them there. Unless I can wake up.”

The tortoiseshell returned to the midden heap to think.

Individual cats are not important. Even if the other females were gone, she lived, and the
fudoki
continued. Grass and bushes would grow again, and mice would crawl from their holes or move from other, less damaged residences. Humans might or might not return, but they were of only minor usefulness. Perhaps other females would find the grounds and become part of the tortoiseshell’s
fudoki
. Eventually, the males would visit again. If they did not, new males would take their place. She would have kittens, perhaps many litters, and some would be daughters. The tale would continue, and she would take her place in it: The Surviving Cat. She was frightened and alone, but the tale remained, and this comforted her.

There were sounds within the grounds: men’s voices, heavy footsteps. The fire left a thousand new hiding spots, but they were unfamiliar and frightening, so she leapt for the top of a wall.
Up
had always been safe; had been safe through the night’s fire.

She landed with her full weight on her front paws, driving them down onto the still-smoking top edge. She screamed and twisted sideways in the air, fell full length onto a raised stone walkway, still scorchingly hot. The pain closed down her mind, and she ran.

All through the night, when her life depended on it, the tortoiseshell had not panicked. With morning, the enemy was no longer immediate and all-threatening. It could be avoided, and so there was no longer a reason to panic. But she was weary to staggering, and queasy with the poisons of the night’s unused fear. When she burned herself, the pain overwhelmed what strength she still had.

Cats do not like to run far at a time—their strength is in their patience, not their legs—but she could not stop herself. She was past the wall in a flash, and streaked south, in the shadow of the weeds along Sai avenue’s western ditch. Everything was strange. The noises that had whispered at the fringes of the frightening silence were all around her now, and they were all made by
things,
blundering objects that moved unpredictably, any one of which might be a threat. There were horses and oxen, dogs and carts and people. Smoke still choked the streets, and she smelled fire, old and new, everywhere around her, and she could not tell what was dead and what still lived. With each step, new pain seared her feet. She jumped forward, away from the pain, but it stabbed at her with the next step. Whenever she managed to overcome the reaction caused by the pain, a noise or blundering
thing
would startle her, and she would run again.

In the end, the exhaustion that began her flight also ended it. She missed a step and sprawled. Because she fell on her uninjured side, for a moment there was no sharp shock of pain. In that moment, the goddess Kannon was merciful, and the tortoiseshell fainted. Small and injured as she was, she had crossed more than a mile of the capital.

It was not, perhaps, the ideal place to fall: in the center of the dog-walk, the walkway that ran alongside Rokuj
avenue, which is always busy with the doings of the common people who live in the south of the capital. But she was both fortunate and unfortunate in the day: unfortunate, for had there been no earthquake, there would have been no fire and no deaths, no burned paws and terror to drive her from her home and
fudoki;
fortunate in that her own troubles were mirrored in those of others, and no one paid attention to the corpse of a small filthy cat in the middle of the path. People saw her and stepped aside. There are a thousand ownerless dogs in this city, but they were all busy elsewhere. It is true that a dun-and-black dog examined her, leaving a moist nose-print on her shoulder; but he was called away by his owner, who had lost much in the fire and feared to lose this last thing, his dog.