Fudoki (50 page)

It was a gateway, and there was a road; but she’d been looking in the wrong direction.

She still wore the torso of her armor, though she’d removed the skirts and shoulder pieces long ago. Now she ran back to the camp and gathered the rest of the armor: leggings, arm protectors, shoulder-guards—everything. She carried the awkward weight to the foot of the
torii
-gate and laid it there. She bent over and shook the
kote
over her head, catching it with her hands as it dropped, before it could fall and awaken Uona. The tortoiseshell colors of the lacings flared with the afternoon’s gold light. She hopped a little dance, like a cat chasing a dust mote, feeling light, almost insubstantial with the removal of her armor.

The kami voices that were always in the back of her mind rustled like tree leaves in a breeze. She had grown used to them, and scarcely ever listened to their words anymore; but she listened now, wondering if they said different things so far from her old home.

“
Ah,
” something said suddenly, very loud and close in her mind: the road-kami.

“Where have you been?” she said. “I left you behind, I thought.”

“I am the kami of the road, but
I
never said which road. People occasionally misinterpret things.”

Kagaya-hime looked down the slope to the path. “This is a different road. Can you be both?”

“Who says you are on a different road than you were?” the kami said. “There are a lot of roads, and they go everywhere. Some of them can’t be seen. You are coming to the end of this one.”

“But then what?” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“You will settle down. Make a new
fudoki.
”

“Alone?”

She had the impression of snorting. “When’s the last time you were alone? Your tale is a thousand long already—men, women, horses. Not to mention you have a belly full of kittens.”

Her hand came to rest on her belly. “I have wondered—they’ll be kittens?”

“Cats are clearly as dense as humans. Yes, kittens.”

“I have been locked in this body for a thousand miles,” she said, a little bitterly. “It’s no surprise if I wonder.”

“Who locked you there, hey?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but a thought came to her and she said nothing, her mouth gaping open, forgotten. “I never tried,” she finally said. “I wept and complained and mourned, but I never thought to change myself. And it’s that simple. Oh, I
see
. But why?”

“You needed a home. Could a cat come a thousand miles? It’s cold up here; I expect your children will get sort of shaggy. But you’ll come in handy.”

“Which road did you say you were?” she asked suspiciously. “Did I come here, or was I summoned?”

“You need a home; they need cats. Seems straightforward to me.”

And the kami’s voice was gone, as simple as that.

Today is my last here. I have been sitting out on the veranda, writing the last of the oh, so necessary good-bye letters and poems, and warming my hands beside the brazier when my fingers start to stiffen. All day I’ve received letters from relatives and friends and former attendants wishing me well. I write back to them all:
Kasugano will be lovely; I will pray for you; I look forward to spending my final days in quiet contemplation
. I say this, secure in the knowledge that they will have no opportunities to discover the truth of my statements.

It is blustery, and the wind carves clear but concrete shapes from the air, limning them with gold and red fallen leaves. When I look into the sky, I feel as though I am staring down into a stream, at a shifting blue-green fish—though I cannot say whether it is the fish that moves, or the water that makes it appear to do so.

Perhaps it is not the wind, and not the fish (fish? There is no fish here. What am I thinking of? It is the trees I see, tossing in the wind). Perhaps it is my eyes, which weep continually now, from exhaustion, I think. Or my mind, wavering.

There was a day, beautiful and surprisingly cold: autumn, though winter was a clear omen in the air. The forest shivered gold and red and pine-green in the wind. There were ducks overhead, shouting directions at one another as they arrowed south in great untidy flocks.

The mountain where Kagaya-hime heard the kami’s voice was the last between her and the sea. She came around a curve in the path and there, miles ahead, across thinning forest and a broadening plain where a river wandered, was the distant glitter of a bay cupped in the land’s arms. “Well, that’s the end of journeying, then,” she said aloud; cats do not like water.

Otoko walked beside her leading the horses. “Down there.” He pointed. A stream joined the river on the plain; there was a small village at the conflux, too far away to see clearly—perhaps ten shaggy-eaved buildings nearly the color of the fields that surrounded them. The pale lines of stone fences made ragged calligraphy against the ripe gold of grain, the heavy green of
taro
fields. Otoko crouched, turned over the dirt with a knife’s edge. “Good soil.” He straightened. “It’s even better down there.”

Uona astride Biter nodded toward the plains, the village. “Will they welcome us, husband?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Otoko said. “We have horses, we’re strong. And”—he grinned suddenly, a look Kagaya-hime had never seen on him—“my family is from here.”

“You have
family?
” Kagaya-hime said; even a cat can be surprised. “Are there mice there?”

“They’re terrible,” he said. “They get into everything and—”

“Then I will stay,” she said.

Otoko said, “You’d be welcome, but it’s no place for a cultured woman.”

“But I’m not a woman, am I?” Kagaya-hime said. She kicked off her sandals, grateful to feel even cold earth underfoot.

“What are you doing?” Uona said.

“Starting a new tale,” Kagaya-hime said, and started to untie her short over robe.

“No men, then,” Uona said. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

Otoko said, “We—would not have thought of this,” and Kagaya-hime knew he meant:
becoming real
. He bowed. “Thank you, my lady.” He turned and led the packhorse down the slope toward the far-distant village.

Uona slipped from Biter’s back and busied herself loosing ties and lacings. “You’re sure?” she said, kneeling to remove Kagaya-hime’s
hakama
-trousers. “You will give up all this? Hands and the skills to make things; arrows, knives?”

“Oh, yes,” Kagaya-hime whispered, a voice soft as a purr. She dropped her vest and under robe on the ground: a shapeless untidy heap, like a snake’s skin when the snake has discarded it. Naked in the sun she stretched, a small fine-boned woman with thick black hair to her shoulders, gold eyes under straight brows. “You will let me sleep by your hearth-pit, yes?”

And there was no woman there, but a small cat, fur black flecked with gold and cinnamon and ivory, like the tortoiseshell of a hair ornament. She blinked up at Uona through eyes slitted to threads in the brilliant light. Biter reached down to touch noses with the tortoiseshell, and the cat leapt in a single fluid movement to Biter’s shoulders, balancing there until Uona pulled herself into the saddle. Cat and horse and woman started down, toward the village.

Another piece of this story: a small tortoiseshell cat stands on the banks of a stream. The sun is out, but it is very cold; snow has mounded into strange shapes on the ground. Her breath puffs from her nostrils, like smoke from an inner fire, but she does not feel the cold through her winter-thick fur.

The stream’s water is brilliantly clear, and there is a fish there, a trout as long as her tail. She can see it hover, every blue-green scale as brilliant as Mikawa silk, or a butterfly’s wing. The fish’s shadow hangs against the warm gray stones of the streambed. The tortoiseshell is reluctant to risk falling into the water, which she knows would be horrid. Still: a fish, and
such
a fish, fat and beautiful, and so close to the water’s surface. And she is always hungry, keeping the kittens in her womb fed until they are born. She creeps down to a stone that touches the water, and crouches low, one paw raised over the water, patient.

The fish seems to examine the paw, as if it were an insect hovering above the water. Its eye is bright and shallow as a blade. It flicks a fin and raises higher in the water, closer to her claws.

“Cat!” Otoko’s voice, behind her. “
There
you are.” The tortoiseshell blinks and the fish is gone, as quickly as that. She stretches and sighs, and saunters closer to the man.

“Look what I have, girl.” He cracks open his basket to show her the contents, all blue-green scales and blade-bright eyes; half a dozen trout. “Let’s go home and have Uona cook these up, hey?” The tortoiseshell lets him stroke her head for a moment and then follows him home.

This notebook is nearly filled, but I have enough room to tell this much more. Kagaya-hime will have six kittens, from five fathers. This new land will belong to her, a part of a new
fudoki
that begins with her.

There is nothing
left in these rooms: only two small trunks, and several bundles of indeterminate shape—and, I am afraid, contents; there are always a thousand last-minute requirements for anyone traveling, and they never fit into the storage space allotted to them.

I have burned all the notebooks but this one. I wrote them for my own reasons. When their job was done, I burned them, converting ink on paper to the loose calligraphy of smoke. Before I leave these rooms, I will burn this one as well.

The priests have been with me all morning, preparing me for my entrance into Kasugano—and, eventually, the Pure Land, though I’m afraid I daydreamed through their interminable prayers—regrettable, since I expect I will have need of their good wishes. I kneel behind a curtain (for not even now am I expected to be barefaced before these men; really, this makes me nearly laugh), so when I receive my nun’s robes, they are handed past the curtain, and it is Shigeko who drapes them over my own blue-green robes and then kneels again beside me. She and I share a smile, but we say nothing.

The priests have offered to clip a mere hand’s length of my long hair: a polite symbol of my separation from this world with none of the embarrassment (not to say shame) of having hair short as a servant-girl’s. The priests sound impressed, if a little shocked when I demand that they cut it to my shoulders; even Buddha’s servants are not impervious to social proprieties. Shigeko gathers the lengths of my hair in her hands, tugging at my head a little as she passes them through an opening in the curtain. The shears make a grating noise, and then a cascade of black and white pours back through the gap: the new ends of my hair. They aren’t willing to go so far as shoulder-length hair, but it only hangs to my waist now, and my head feels weightless, light on my neck. If I decide it is still too long, I can always have Shigeko cut it shorter.

They give Shigeko her robes, and cut her hair, as well. There is a little more praying, and they bow themselves out. They do not stay to accompany us: we have told them that the emperor very kindly offered men and carriages to carry us the short miles to Kasugano. I nearly laugh out loud.

For I am lying to everyone except Shigeko. I am running away—or rather, we are running away together, two old women sneaking away to see what sights they can before they die.

Shigeko has found a useful man of no rank whatsoever, but immense virtue in that he understands animals and traveling. And the T
kaid
. His mother accompanies us to empty chamber boxes and makes sure we are fed; she used to wash for us, so we know she is patient with the foibles of old women. He has found others to assist us, guards and grooms and carters; and some quiet horses and two pairs of (I am assured) extremely well-mannered oxen. If we need further help, we will find some useful peasant-girl and exchange hair ornaments for her exertions.

I can’t say how far I will be able to travel before the weight in my chest kills me. It may be no farther than Otsu, just past the walls of the city, or the first ferry (I might cross water in a boat! Think of it!). I think it’s too much to hope that I will see the great mountain Fuji before I die, but at least I will see the sky unfringed by walls.

And I have this letter, in whisker-fine calligraphy, about fish that “mention my name.” It was unsigned, of course—she never did have a name, only what she was called—but there is a single line after the poem. If it is a poem: I still cannot decide:

Of course it is she, now mother and grandmother to a thousand cats, The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles. She returned to her cat’s shape, but she is no longer just a cat. Why might she not have questions for me, just as I have questions for her? And why might we not meet?

Shigeko and I have talked much about her these last days. I know that she is as real as I am. I thought that I invented her, that she had no more existence than any other set of words on paper; but I know now that this is not true. She saw things I did not expect, and felt things I did not mean her to. She is as real as flesh, as ghosts.

I am not sure if she means I will make it all the way to Mutsu province; or that we travel toward one another and will meet in some monastery or temple between here and there, when I grow at last too ill to travel; or even that she will meet me in the Pure Land when we are both dead. I am not sure whether she will be a woman or a cat—or, for that matter, what I will be. But then, I will still be Harueme, and she will still be the cat Kagaya-hime.

I would like Shigeko to meet her.