Fudoki (48 page)

What if it had been possible to wed Mononobe no D
mei instead of the irritating pup my uncle had chosen? What if I had accompanied him to Mutsu province, given up my rank to sleep on his shoulder every night of my life?

The D
mei of my memory was not the real D
mei—but then, the Harueme I recalled was not the Harueme who lived through those days and nights. And neither Harueme was the woman who would have gone to Mutsu province.

I looked up to catch my half-brother watching me, frowning slightly: worried. He said softly, carefully: “I think it wasn’t him you loved, but the places his eyes had seen.”

So. The attack against the stockade ended in nothing. The men of the war band dragged their wounded and dead out of arrows’ range and lit more torches, built the fires higher. Ten deaths: three men trampled or crushed between the horses, five slashed deep, one pierced through the throat with a turnip-headed arrow, and one who started howling and then died, though no one could find a mark on his body. There were many wounds, of course, arrows and broken bones and cuts; a severed hand, a crushed leg. Five horses were injured. Their screaming made everything seem worse; when they had been killed, the camp grew calmer.

Kagaya-hime examined her thigh where she’d felt the blow and found a bruise, thumb-sized and already hard as callus, where she was hit with a spear butt, or perhaps a spear tip deflected by her sword’s sheath. Otoko bandaged the arrow-wound on Kagaya-hime’s arm, but when he went off to help Uona with Biter, she removed the wrappings, and licked the deep little hole until it hurt a bit less.

Exhausted but sleepless, she limped through camp. There were no celebrations, not even the false ones born of bravado and weariness.

Kitsune was easy to find. He moved through the war band, spoke to everyone who was conscious to hear it, and touched the others, as if skin on skin might somehow ease their dreams. His head had been cut in the fight—shallow but bloody, as head wounds are—and his face was still masked in drying blood, twin tracks cleaned by the tears he didn’t notice.

She didn’t find Takase until the tiger’s hour, for he had been pulled out of range on the opposite side of the stockade, where the trees clustered closer to its walls. Suwa, the old attendant who had brought them wine so many times, had settled him half-leaning against the trunk of a pine and cut the lacings on his armor, to bare his chest and belly.

Takase was not dead: not yet. He looked ash-white in the light just before dawn, his chest hollow, skin waxy with a sheen like sweat. She knew the shape and texture of the ancient wound in his belly, had cleaned the fluids that wept from it. Everything was changed now. Ragged lips of flesh peeled back at a new angle. Fresh blood, surprising red in the gray light, slipped down his leg and dripped onto the pine needles beside him. “You were hit,” she said as she knelt beside him. “Again.”

“Same place,” he said. “A relief, really. It doesn’t hurt so much now. I think we’ve lanced it, hey.” He wheezed out a laugh. There was blood on his lips; it shivered with each breath. He opened his eyes. “Ha, girl. Didn’t think I’d see you again.” His voice was thin and dry as spiderweb.

Suwa laid a hand on his shoulder. “Quiet, my lord. Please—”

“It’s all right, Suwa,” Takase said. “Find the boy. Kitsune.”

“But—”

“She’ll stay with me. Yes?” He rolled his head to look at her.

She nodded.

“Keep him quiet.” Suwa stood slowly. “I’ll bring a litter.”

“They left,” Takase said, when Suwa had limped away. “In the dark.”

“The Abe?” she said. She reached up to brush something from her face. Tears.

He nodded, then drowsed for a time. She settled herself more comfortably, her back against a neighboring tree. On the opposite side of the stockade, she heard the camp’s muted sounds, then the sudden shouts and bustle that must have meant Suwa had come.

“They’re gone,” Takase said, waking suddenly. “Did I tell you? They passed me, so close I could have shot every one of them. If I wanted to, hey.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Is there wine?”

“Just water.” She helped him drink the last swallows from the water-skin she’d carried all night. “But you didn’t.”

“No,” he said. “Too dark. No strength. Anyway, it’s over. They’re done.
We’re
done.”

“Will they try to avenge this? Attack the Osa Hitachi?”

After a while she realized he’d fallen asleep again. Not dead: his chest still moved, slow tired breaths. Blood still slid from the wound, darker, thicker. A fly rested on his upturned hand: waiting.

When she heard running footsteps, she turned her head to watch Kitsune approach with Suwa; behind them walked the priestess, Onobe no Kesuko, a sword still bare in her hand.

Kitsune dropped to his knees as Kagaya-hime held up her hand. “He’s sleeping,” she said, just as Takase spoke again.

“They’re not going to come after you,” Takase said in a conversational voice, as if he had not nodded off at all, as if they were discussing capital politics in a courtyard a million miles away.

The priestess arrived as Takase nodded off again. She bent to inspect the wound, and straightened. “That’s that.” She sheathed her sword, announced to the men beginning to cluster around Takase: “He will die.”

“Please, can you do anything?” Suwa asked.

“You mean, ask the gods to heal him?” She snorted. “They know as clearly as he does that he will die.”

Takase roused himself suddenly. “I heard them whispering, as they slipped past. It’s over. A war where everyone retreats, hah.”

“We should go after them to make sure,” Kitsune said.

“No,” Takase said. “Let them have whatever lives they can. Same as all of you. Go home.”

Kitsune clenched his fists. “Then all this was for nothing?”

The priestess said, “They killed some people, you killed some people. And now it’s done.”

Kitsune opened his mouth and then closed it.

“Go home,” Takase said again. “My last order, hey.” He slipped into unconsciousness and did not wake again.

Last night we found the strangest thing in the bottom of one of the last trunks: a letter.

There have been a thousand letters in the trunks, a thousand thousand—and I have not always been able to recollect who sent which and when. It became a game between Shigeko and myself: which lover wrote
these
deathless words? These two poems, of identical image and nearly identical language: were they written years apart, their similarities merely serendipitous; or do men crib their love-poems from one another when their creativity fails? And these—an entire packet of letters, clearly from one of my half-sisters—but which? Shigeko and I have played the game of unraveling my past, and burned the letters when the game palled.

But there is one that we have not been able to identify, written on a rich tricolored paper flecked with gold. The calligraphy is very fine, delicate and precise as whiskers. We are not even sure it is a letter:

Who wrote this? we exclaim to one another, but I already know. I fought so hard to keep Kagaya-hime and her story in line, but it kept breaking out of my expectations. Once you have opened the gate to alternatives, it can be hard to get it closed again.

All those places I have never been, and now, never will see.

Wait—

All those months of preparation and travel, all those injuries and deaths, and this war ended with all the drama of a fan falling. The men of the war band broke camp quickly and were gone by midday. Most would travel together until they were far enough south not to fear retribution, and then the band would dissolve into groups that grew smaller and smaller, each man traveling as fast as he could toward home. It was three hundred miles to the Osa Hitachi estate, farther for those who had come from Shimosa or Kozuke provinces. Some traveled with injured men (which generally means dying men); it might take them a month or more to return home.

Most of the dead were buried in the forest, wooden hat markers and paper prayer slips hanging from the branches above their heads. There were other tributes, as well: a pair of torn reins hung like straw rope over a shrine; an arrow driven into the ground over a grave, a poem written on its shaft.

Before she left, the priestess Onobe no Kesuko took Kagaya-hime aside. “It will not be long,” she said, nodding at Takase. “Half a day: less.”

“Yes,” Kagaya-hime said, and then: “May I ask something?”

“Ha,” Kesuko said. “Finally. Yes.”

“The kami—I hear them,” Kagaya-hime said, feeling her way, “but they never make sense.”

“Why should they make sense to you? You don’t even make sense to yourself, cat,” Kesuko said. “Where’s your ground, your tale, your, what was it,
fudoki?
”

“Gone,” Kagaya-hime said, and felt the familiar grief, the wrench of loss.

“No,” Kesuko said. “You’re the first cat I’ve met, but I thought they were supposed to be smarter than this.
This
”—she gestured around them, at the striking camp, the empty stockade, the mountains and everything beyond them, the hot cloudless summer sky over all—“is your
fudoki,
girl. It lasts a lifetime, but you never noticed that.

“Why should they make sense to you? They have their own tales, their own shared grounds. They don’t have to make sense to anyone but themselves. No one does.”

Kagaya-hime and Kitsune and Takase’s man Suwa knelt with Takase as he slept out the last hours of his life. “There’s no point to taking him from this place, my lady,” Suwa said, and Kagaya-hime nodded. The smell of death was strong on him. Even the crows had picked it up; though many pecked for the blood that had soaked into the ground, some lined themselves neatly along a branch over Takase’s head, waiting. Servant and half-fox and cat-woman took turns digging a grave and gathering stones to place over it.

Farmers, peasants, and poor people came even before the war band was gone, to glean the battlefield, the war band’s campsite, the stockade’s grounds. They left with whatever they could carry, and there was much of it after a month of siege, ranging from a longsword dropped in the woods in the darkness to half-filled barrels of rice.

Takase died in the heat of the afternoon, his last breaths fainter and fainter, until only Kagaya-hime could tell he still lived. “That’s it,” she finally said, and stood. “He is gone.” She did not see his ghost: not then.

She and Kitsune left their attendants to bury him, and walked a little way up a slope, into the forest. The sun did not reach all the way to the ground, so they walked in a false dusk that hummed with insects. They had removed their armor, but had not changed clothes (and after a month of siege, there is little worth changing into), and sweat and bloodstains made patterns on their trousers and vests.

A flash of vermilion caught Kitsune’s eye, and they made their way to a small shrine to Inari, newly painted and still bright. The stone foxes stood on either side of a red-painted arch scarcely taller than a fox itself. She nodded to the little arch.