Fudoki (37 page)

“What else?” Takase said.

From behind the circle Kagaya-hime spoke. “Sheathe our claws.” Few men from the north had seen a cat, and none knew of this ability they have. But Takase knew cats, and had seen this. “Go on,” he said.

She stepped through the circle, and stood beside the fire at its center. “You are smaller than they, yes?”

Takase nodded, eyes tight—though there was no saying whether this was because of the smoke, or annoyance, or the pain of his unhealing wound.

“Then there will be no bite to the back of the neck. You must trick them.” She curled her back a little, remembering the feel of defiance. “Look larger than you are. Look fierce, and you may not be worth it.”

The captains muttered among themselves, but Takase held up a hand. “We cannot look larger: by now they know how many we are. We can look fierce, but that won’t stop them. Not this time. What else?”

She stared out over the heads of the council. “The hind legs are what kill,” she said absently. “Your front claws pull them close, and then you gut them with your hind legs.”

“What good is this?” one of the captains snapped. “If I want to listen to babbling, I will return to my wife and children.”

Another said, “She shoots well, but—”

“She thinks in ways we do not,” Takase said. “Four legs instead of two; hidden knives until they’re needed. Run away; turn to fight. I see a way. Summon your chief attendants.”

“The
servants?
” a captain said.

“The standard bearers, the grooms—yes, the servants. They have claws and teeth, just as we do,” Takase said. “And I have orders for them.”

So often we forget the servants. I say, “I was alone,” as if I walked or read or slept out of sound of voices, isolated. I may say, “I have spent my life alone,” but this is a lie—more of a lie than it would be for the baby in a family of six. I am never alone. Except for a handful of times in my life, the closest I have been is in the outhouses, and even then (unless I give orders otherwise) there is someone within earshot, just in case. There were always other women, and there is always Shigeko. Even when we were younger and she or I left court because of our monthly courses, I knew she was there, like the roof over my head at night, like the wind I breathed.

We share much, Shigeko and I. We have shared books, and laughed at the
monogatari
tales’ excesses, or the egregious lies in certain court diaries that have fallen into our hands. She has corrected my paintings of insects and moths and mice with her own delicate brush. She drew the line at millipedes, but she held dead birds for me, even though touching them was impure, so that I could better observe an outstretched wing or the tiny feathers that ringed their eyes.

She knows my face better than I do: has plucked my eyebrows and painted the new ones on since I was barely a woman. It was she who knew my monthly courses, and told me when I would be well advised to retire from court, or to avoid pale fabrics. She has held me more times in the night than any lover, than even my nurse.

Do
we
share, or does
she
share? She has aided me in all these things, but what would she read if left to herself? Soon enough she need read nothing (save sutras) she does not care to. What books and scrolls will she beg to have sent from the capital? More: what will she think about? What favorite foods of mine will she gladly stop eating? Which women (and men) of the court will she drop acquaintance with?

—When I wrote those words, she was kneeling across from me, staring absently into space, one long hand holding her place in a scroll that (I realized) I didn’t recognize. “What are you reading?” I asked her. Had I ever asked this before? I must have—five and forty years is a long time: most questions are asked in such a time—but I cannot remember ever hearing her response. It is true that most of us are more interested in our asking a question than in the answer: this must be even worse for a princess.

“It is nothing, my lady,” she said. “Do you need something?”

“No; except to know your answer.”

“Well, then,” she said, a little defiantly. “Poetry.”

Poetry? I hate poetry,
I managed not to say. She had heard me say it a thousand times, in any case. I was curious, yes? I wanted to discover what was inside Shigeko’s mind, not my own. “Tell me what you see in it,” I said.

“But you
hate
poetry,” she said.

“You have listened to me for the reigns of five emperors,” I said. “I can listen to you this once.”

So she spent the afternoon explaining what she sees in it. Her observations were not the clever interpretations of image and meaning I expected. She told me,
This one reminds me of when I was ten,
and:
My first lover used to recite this in bed
. I won’t write everything she told me. They are her stories to tell if she chooses, not mine.

After a time, I said, “Do you keep notebooks?”

“Yes,” she said, and laughed a little, as if embarrassed. “I started when I was a child. I suppose there must be a hundred of them by now.”

“Really,” I said.
Amazing
.

“Or were,” she added. “I’ve been destroying them. I won’t need them in Kasugano, my lady.”

And, old woman that I am, I cried. I haven’t cared about the burning of my own notebooks, but I had a thousand objections to her burning hers. What parts of herself has she hidden away or destroyed, only for my convenience? And now I may never know them.—Unless I ask, of course.

How could I have forgotten? Shigeko is more than an accessory in my life, a trunk I put things in, a notebook to record my thoughts. She is, and has always been, herself.

The war band’s men set watch and sharpened their weapons and drank cold
sake,
and talked.

Armies have a
fudoki
of sorts. There are tales stretched so far as to become lies, familiar jokes a thousand times repeated, a list of the names of those now gone and how they died. There are childish pranks played (a hat marker replaced with a nonsense name, Prince Rabbit-toes or My Lady Blue-loins; an arrow’s fletching changed from hawk feathers to rows of white down), and these, too, become part of the army’s tale.

D
mei once told me that he missed war.

“How can you?” I asked, shocked.

He was drunk and more candid than usual: he slurred as he spoke. “I have never had such good friends.”

“You are surrounded by people who love you,” I said, “and no one is dying here.” How could war be better than this? Than me?

“We are all dying,” he said. “We just forget that when nothing is trying to kill us.”

I said nothing (indeed, could think of nothing to say), and he lay back, arm thrown across his eyes. And he started to talk. I held myself silent, clinging to his words.

The stories were not all interesting. Even the stories about battle focused on little, often banal things: a man who lost his helmet and part of the skin beneath it, slick as skinning a rabbit; someone-or-other’s armor lacings that had rotted due to the dye used on them, replaced at the last minute with hemp cord—though I cannot even picture this, so barbarous it sounds; a man with dysentery so foul that the men who shared his campfire the night after a fight called him The Yellow River. There were a lot of stories, and after a time, I saw that tears leaked past D
mei’s arm. He wept for these stupid stories.

No: he wept for something else behind the stories: the men he shared them with, and the sharing that comes only when you think you die tomorrow.

I have always thought I know what it is like when women are together: what we talk about and fret over, what matters to us—though lately I have begun to wonder whether I understand even Shigeko. But men with men? They are as foreign to me as the Chinese traders who came to court when I was nineteen. More: they are as foreign as listening to wolves talk, or tigers.

I am so easily distracted these days. I tell Kagaya-hime’s story, but my own is as insistent. So: I said that men set watch and drank and talked.

Takase and Kitsune sat at a sunken coal-pit in the middle of the building they slept in. Once he had brought tea and wine, Takase’s main attendant, as weathered and old as his master, settled back beside him, and talked with the ease that comes from decades of service to someone. There was a fire to discourage the insects: the men were too hot, but it was preferable to being bitten.

The stories were not all about making war. Takase and his attendant (who was called Suwa, for the town he was born in) knew one another’s stories intimately; but they did not know Kitsune’s, nor he theirs; in any case it is no bad thing to hear such stories one last time, just before (possible) death. The men talked about their homes, their horses. As is typical, they talked about sex, swapping amusing or impressive encounters first, and, much later, the partners that mattered too much to discard thus casually, the women (and men) they loved: Takase’s first lover, Suwa’s wife, Kitsune’s favorite mistress. Kagaya-hime’s restlessness eased (or perhaps the mosquitoes grew worse than the restlessness), and she joined them in the bitter smoky air. They looked sidelong at her, but the tales went on. Such stories are not easily shared with strangers or women, but woman or no, she might die with them tomorrow: that made her no stranger.

Takase had a single wife, a woman from a branch of the Hata clan. There had been a night when he had crept into her father’s residence and watched the moon with her. Just before dawn he gathered his courage (“You were afraid?” Kitsune said. “There are things more frightening than death,” Takase said. “If you haven’t figured that out, you’re even younger than you look”) and slipped behind her curtains, and they shared hurried, breathless, giggling sex, trying to be done before the household awoke.

“It isn’t sex, is it?” Kagaya-hime interrupted him. “It’s not being alone.”

Takase wheezed a laugh. “Clever you. Some people say it’s about love, but you’re right. I loved her, yes. But one of the things I loved about her is that when we were together I wasn’t alone. I had other lovers. None of them were like that for me.”

“What about you?” Kitsune said to Kagaya-hime. “Have you loved anyone?”

“My horse,” she said, and after a pause: “Your sister Nakara. Uona and Otoko perhaps.”

“Ha,” Takase said. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then I don’t know the answer.”

“Well, you will wed none of them, I hope,” said Takase, and the topic changed.

Much later, when the fire was guttering, and Suwa and Kitsune slept, their heads on their bundled armor, Takase and Kagaya-hime spoke.

“A cat,” Takase said, for he had been told by Kitsune. “You’re new to the islands. Well, I’ve heard no harm of your kind; you injure no man, unless you claw him—and then I expect he deserves it. But I hadn’t heard that cats are so fond of travel.”

“I have no home,” she said.

Takase leaned back carefully, cradling his belly as he did so. “I’ve governed three provinces, lived in four residences at the capital. There were things I missed about all these places, but wherever I was, was home.”