At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (5 page)

There was a boy with Yoshifuji’s features. How could I have missed him all those days I had watched my husband? He was still young but he gave orders with an assurance that seemed very familiar. Servants ran in all directions. A priest walked in the gardens, calling the Buddha’s Name and reading sutras for Yoshifuji’s return. I saw the priest’s feet slow as he passed us and I tensed; but he didn’t stop. I had to laugh: the mighty Buddha, confounded by mere foxes? We watched all this for a time but no one looked under the storehouse. No doubt it seemed too humble a place to find a man.

When I slipped back into my woman’s body, I made a discovery.

Mother shrieked when I told her. “Pregnant?”

“I could feel it. When I made myself a woman again, I could feel it, a little male.”

“A son! Oh, such news! You will bring such honor to the house!”

“How can it? I am a fox. My child will be a fox. He will see and leave me.”

Mother laughed at me. “You have lived all this time with a man and you have not learned the first thing yet. He will see a son because that is what he wants. He will be so happy! I’m going to go tell your grandfather. A son!”

It was just as she said. Yoshifuji was thrilled. I grew heavy with the child and after a time I could hardly lift myself to walk from room to room. My husband’s responsibilities kept him often away. Though he spent every spare moment with me, I found myself often bored. I took out the little white ball from time to time and amused myself by tossing it in the air and catching it, and when it rolled from my grasp, my women retrieved it for me.

My delivery of my child was easy, comparatively painless as these things go. Yoshifuji rushed into the room as soon as Mother would allow him, and brushed through the curtain to my side.

“My son, let me see him!” he said. “You marvelous wife of mine!”

I gestured for the nurse to show my husband the child. He peeled away the tight cloths. “What a child! Wife, you are extraordinary. A beautiful healthy boy.”

I said nothing, seeing for a moment the shadow of a man in filthy, ragged robes crouching in the dark to kiss a fox kit on its closed eyes.

Time was strange in the fox-world. Years passed for us and for Yoshifuji. Our son grew rapidly until he hunted birds with toy arrows and began to ride a fat gold and black spotted pony. Years passed but they were only days in the outer world. My brother, who brought us much of our food, said that my husband’s other wife had returned.

“What is she like now?” I asked. I watched my son practice his brush strokes, tilting his head to see the shine of the fresh ink over the matte black of dried ink from earlier lessons; all our magic, and paper was still too scarce to allow a child to destroy more than the absolute minimum number of sheets.

“Sad,” Brother said. “What do you expect?”

I shook my head, then remembered he couldn’t see me. I was behind my curtain-of-state. As always. “I hoped she would feel better in time.”

“How can she?” he said. “It is years you have had Yoshifuji beside you. Out there he’s only been missing for a few days.”

I dropped my ball and it rolled across the floor. “How can that be?”

Brother’s sigh was impatient. “When were you out last, Sister?”

“I don’t know. Before the boy was born, anyway.”

“Why not?” He sounded shocked. “Why aren’t you going out? Are you sick? I know you were nursing but the kit’s weaned.”

“I like to be here when my husband is around.”

“We used to play, Sister, just you and me. Remember? We would run in the woods, and at night we’d hunt mice in the formal garden and play Pounce in the Shadows. What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said, but I lied when I said this. So much had happened to me, how could I start?

“Then come outside with me. Now.” Brother jumped up and knocked the curtain over. I looked up at him, too shocked to hide my face with my sleeve. He caught my hand and pulled me to my feet. My son looked up at us. I gestured to his nurse, who picked him up and took him from the room.

“Very well,” I said. “We’ll be foxes together.”

Crawling out of my woman’s form this time was excruciating, as though it were my own skin I pulled off. My brother’s muzzle pressed against mine, I hunched over until the sense of loss eased. When I felt a little better, I lifted my head and left the space under the storehouse.

It was early evening. The moon was nearly full and the stars were washed out with its brightness in the east and the dying colors in the west. We traveled across the formal garden, moving in the trees’ shadows. When I leapt across the stream beside the half-moon bridge, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the moving water, and it startled me enough that I stumbled when I landed and rolled into a ball.

Brother stopped and nosed at me. “What’s wrong?” he whispered. I shook my head, the gesture coming uneasily to my fox’s body. I did not tell him that I had seen a woman in my reflection.

There were already lights in the house: torches set along the verandas, and braziers and lamps in the rooms despite the night’s summer heat. Many of the sliding walls were open. I watched moths fly in and die in the house’s many flames.

The north suite of rooms, Shikibu’s rooms, were dimly lit. I crept up almost to the veranda and looked in. I couldn’t see her, but I saw her sleeve half exposed beneath her curtain-of-state. A priest knelt before the curtain chanting a sutra. The night’s breeze pushed aside one of the curtains; before one of her women could pull it back in place, I saw Shikibu, listless and sad in the gloom.

The house’s main rooms were full of light. My husband’s other son stood with two older men in traveling clothes, men who looked like brothers to Shikibu. They had brought a tree-trunk segment as tall as a man, and they clustered around it, with a Buddhist priest and many servants crowded in the garden watching. Everyone was dressed strangely; in mourning, I realized. It surprised me—no one was dead—until I realized it must be my lord they were mourning. I found that funny but something hurt quite incredibly in my chest at the thought.

The boy chipped at the tree trunk with a chisel and mallet.

“What can they be doing?” my brother whispered. “How eccentric humans are.”

“I don’t like this, whatever it is,” I said.

“Come up closer. Let’s see at least what it is.” My brother crawled forward on his belly.

“Brother!” I hissed but he didn’t turn around, so I followed him.

The boy in the hall passed the chisel and mallet to one of Shikibu’s brothers.

“Finished, Tadasada?” the man said.

I squinted at the wood: close like this, I could see that it had been carved with an image of some sort, but I couldn’t tell what the carving was. The priest stepped forward with two assistants who threw incense on the braziers in the room. Everyone else lay down and began to pray softly. The priest fell forward and began chanting in a loud voice.

He was praying to the Eleven-Headed Kannon—when I squinted, the carving made sense this time: there was the cluster of heads, and the arms and the crossed legs. My fur rose on my shoulders until my skin prickled with the strain. “I hate this,” I hissed at my brother; he just nuzzled me and went back to listening.

There was no reason to worry. I remembered the priest who had called on Buddha and walked past us anyway. How could this one fare better? His voice went on and on, asking to know where Yoshifuji’s body lay. Smoke from the incense snaked from the braziers and out onto the still air of the garden. One tendril seemed to move toward us as though questing. The tiniest breeze lifted its tip, so like a snake’s head that my courage broke and I bolted, my heart so hot and heavy with panic that I could hardly see the garden I ran through.

I ran under the storehouse and rushed back into my woman’s shape and stood there, shivering. “Husband?” I called. “Husband? Where are you?”

I ran through the rooms and hallways, careless of being seen by the men of the household, calling my husband’s name. I was on one of the verandas when Yoshifuji emerged quickly from a brightly lit room, dropping the blinds behind him.

“Wife?” he said. His face was wrinkled with a frown. “I have emissaries. We could hear you all over—”

“Husband!” I panted. “I am so sorry—I know this is most unseemly—it’s just that—I was so afraid… .”

His face softened and he moved forward quickly to hold me. “What happened? The child? It is all right now, whatever it is. I am here.”

I swallowed, tried to control my breathing. “No, not our son, he’s fine.” What could I tell him? “A snake of smoke, and it was looking for you. I—must have had a bad dream. I woke up and I was all alone and I felt so afraid.”

“Alone? Where were your women?”

“They were there. I just meant—lonely for you.” I threw myself against him, my arms tight around his neck and sobbed against his cheek. He held me and made soothing noises. After a while, he loosened my hands and passed me to one of my women, who stood waiting in the shadows.

“Better?”

I sniffed.

He took my hands. “I’ll take care of this little bit of business and then I’ll come and sit with you, all night if you like.”

“Yes,” I said. “Hurry.”

I waited in my rooms. I sat in the near-dark, and tossed my ball and cried with the horror of that snake of smoke, and longing for Yoshifuji. My son was sleeping but my nurse carried him in to me, and I watched him for a time, curled up in a nest of quilts. “See, my husband must love me,” I said to myself. “Here is the evidence. No Buddha can take this away. No Buddha can threaten his love for me.” Then I would think of the snake of smoke and I would jump up and pace and stare out at our pretty fox-gardens again. And Yoshifuji did not come.

But the Eleven-Headed Kannon came. He came as an old man with only one head and holding a stick; but I knew it was he: he was not made of fox magic in a place where everything and everyone was. He smelled of the priest’s incense. Who else could he be? He walked across the gardens stepping through the carefully placed trees, our rocks, and the ornamental lake; and he left a path in his wake, like a man raising mud as he fords a stream. The magic tore and shredded where he passed, leaving bare dirt and the shadow of the storehouse overhead. The magic eddied and sealed the break a few steps behind him but he carried the gash of reality with him like a Court train.

He walked straight through all our creatings, toward the house.

“No,” I shrieked and ran out onto the veranda. “Leave him here!”

The man walked forward. I ran to the room where my husband was, burst in to where he sat with an emissary from the capital and his secretary. “Husband! Run!”

“Wife?—” he said as I felt the veranda beside me shiver and dissolve. I fell to my knees. Yoshifuji jumped up, his sword sheath in his hands. I clawed at the Kannon’s robe as he passed me, locked my hands in his sword belt until he was pulling me forward with him. He did not even slow.

“What are you—” my husband bellowed as the man prodded him with the stick in his hand. Yoshifuji jumped backward and pulled his sword free.

I screamed. The sword shivered into a handful of dirty straw. My husband looked at it in disgust and threw it to the ground. The man prodded him again and Yoshifuji moved backward, through the house.

“Leave him, please leave him, they mean nothing to him, I love him—” I begged and prayed as the man dragged me through our house, out into the gardens. My hands bled from the hard edge of the belt. If nothing else around us was real, I knew this was, this hot blood in my palms. Yoshifuji kept turning back, trying to help me. The man just jabbed at him again, and forced him stumbling on.

The belt leather was slick with blood. My fingers slipped and I fell behind the man onto the dirt below the storehouse beside one of the support posts. The Kannon gave my husband one more jab, and he crawled out from our home and stood upright in his kitchen garden. I crawled after him but I knew it was too late already. I lay by the storehouse in my robes, blood on my hands, my long hair trailing on the ground.

It was still dusk there, the thirteenth evening after Yoshifuji had come to me, his thirteenth year in my fox-world. Nearly everyone was in the garden huddled in little clumps and talking among themselves. Yoshifuji was two things in my eyes, like something seen and distorted through water: handsome in his dress robes, a little dusty now, still carrying an empty sword sheath; and covered with filth, casual robes stained and torn, holding a little worm-eaten stick: a man who had lived in the dirt with foxes.

The boy was the first to see my husband looking around him.

“Father!” he shouted and ran to Yoshifuji. “Is this you?”

“Son?” my husband said hesitantly. “Tadasada?” I saw memory coming back to him, but the fox magic was strong enough to shape his understanding of things. “How have you not grown more while I was gone?”

The boy threw his arms around the man. “Father, what has happened to you? You look so old!”

Yoshifuji pushed the boy away. “It doesn’t matter. I am only here to send your mother back to her family. She is here, I presume? I was so desperate after your mother left to visit her relatives, and she was gone so long. But I met someone, a wonderful woman, and married her. We have had a lovely little boy. He’s growing much handsomer than you, I must admit. He’s my heir, you know. You’re no longer my first son, Tadasada: I love his mother so.”