Fudoki (43 page)

I was sure I would die. Every horror my women had ever gossiped about came back to me: rape and robbers and wild beasts, death by fire, death by cold, death. I had not thought of myself as imaginative, but they came vividly to mind. The air smelled musky, as if some animal lived here; but I could not tell whether the scent was fresh or might be only my own fear. I was dizzy and my chest hurt from my heart pounding. I strained to identify every noise—and in a ruined outbuilding after rain, there are many noises. In my fear, each drip was a voice, so that the night was filled with their chittering.

This is how my mice were, I recall: shaking and startling at anything unexpected. Poor mice. I had not realized that to them I was every evil.

I still don’t understand how I could fall asleep. When the moon came up, I could at least see things through the doorway, dark shaggy trees and stars, and a haze of moonlight. My panic eased. I burst into tears, and cried as I had not since I was a child.

I recall my dream that night. Even now, so many tens of years later, it returns: something about watching a fish at the bottom of a river of blue-green water. Sometimes in the dream I jump in after the fish; other times, I reach down and it leaps into my hand. Sometimes the fish speaks to me, though the words never remain when I awaken. Perhaps I will finally hear them when I am dead.

I did not fall asleep so much as fall unconscious, and I was not aware of either until I startled awake, disoriented and cold and oh, so very stiff. Somehow I’d slept through first light, and the sky was already the color of pearls. Through the storehouse door I saw a streak of rose-colored sunlight touching a single tree. The storehouse was worse than I’d thought in the dark. The tile roof sagged down nearly to my eye’s height, the timber that should have held up the roof rotted through and hanging loose. It looked as though any jar might collapse it. The dirt on the floor was patterned with so many paw prints that I could not identify them: fox?
tanuki
-badger? something else? Whatever it was had not visited in the night. I hoped.

I retrieved my clogs and crawled cautiously through the door, stretched and relieved myself, and assessed my situation.

—which was not good. I had no food, and while water stood all around me in puddles, I had nothing I trusted to drink. On a rainy day, when everyone keeps their eyes on the ground in front of them, my robes might pass as ordinary, but on a sunny day they stood out, both for their glorious shimmering amber color and for the mud and dirt ground into the weave. My hair and face could be no better. The first man to see me would recognize that I did not belong—anywhere.

I was ill-equipped for tending myself. I longed for Shigeko, who always knew (or could at least find someone who knew) how to do anything. Shigeko made food and hot drinks appear (and despite the sun’s growing warmth, I was still chilled from my night on bare boards), filled quiet comfortable sleeping enclosures with soft bed robes and padded pillows. Undoubtedly Shigeko could make something pleasant out of even this unpromising situation. No: Shigeko would never have allowed this in the first place. She would have wept and clung to me, or—harder to resist—reasoned with me; and I would have endured another night of my husband-to-be’s awkward gropings. And I would be married. Even starvation seemed preferable to that; though I learned soon enough that starvation only seems an acceptable alternative to something else until you get really hungry.

I was in the northwestern quarter of the city; now that it was daylight, I could see that—there was the hill Funaoka to the north, the mountains like walls to the east and west, all so familiar that I could have aligned myself from anywhere in the city. I walked south along what would have been the capital’s western wall, had there been anything but rubble and a fading mound; sometimes I came to clear places where I could see a glimpse of the Red Sparrow gate to the court.

I was hungry, but afraid to address anyone directly. It was unlikely anyone I met down here would have heard of my flight, wrapped up in their own survival as they must be; but I knew I looked a perfect fiend, and I wanted no one to run screaming for an exorcist. More immediately, I wanted no rape or robbery: no one to steal my clothes and leave me naked.

Many of the city blocks were untamed as countryside, with forest-thick copses of trees and weed-choked pools; but I learned that enterprising folks planted gardens of grain or vegetables on some blocks, hidden behind artfully placed windfalls. As a child playing (improperly) in the kitchen yards of my foster father’s residence, I had learned a little about what plants (and which parts) were edible. Looking for a private place to relieve myself at midmorning, I stumbled into one of these gardens, and ate carrots and radishes raw. The dirt I could not scrape off was gritty on my teeth. Still, I was comforted: I would not starve, not immediately.

I did not walk fast, for I had nowhere I planned on going.
Away
had been my only thought, but I did not have the courage to go far. I could not bring myself to cross the western wall, though there was not much difference between the city’s blocks and the countryside, squared-off dirt streets on this side of the wall and apparently random dirt roads on that. If anything, the countryside seemed better mannered, for it had not been allowed to grow shaggy with disuse. I was not used to walking far, and had nowhere to go, so I stopped often, hiding whenever I saw someone.

It was midafternoon when I next stopped, perhaps the sheep’s hour. No, it was the monkey’s hour; I remember hearing the gongs of the guardsmen announcing the time. I was smug with the notion that I could scavenge for my own food, but I had been lucky earlier: it was not so simple. I had learned to see the paths that people left when they snuck into ruined residences or secret fields. The first path led to a pool of relatively clear water, left over from a fine garden—but no food. The second took me to a set of collapsed buildings full of nothing. The third took me to a little field where buckwheat or something similar had been harvested. Perhaps I could pick through the field looking for fallen grains: that would be something at least. It was backbreaking work, but I grew absorbed in my gleaning, intent on each tiny, crunchy, unsatisfying bite.

A shout took me by surprise. I did not see who spoke, or where they were. I leapt to my feet and fled the way I had come: the panic of prey. Whoever it was did not follow me, no doubt was interested only in protecting his fields. When I stopped, I waited until my heart stopped hurting in my chest, and then I turned north and east, toward court and my uncle’s residence.

Three days north and east, following the path of the defeated Abe forces. Takase drove the Osa Hitachi war band hard, hoping to intercept their enemies. In any case there was little to slow them down—no food or horses to claim—for the Abe were as destructive in their flight as the war band ever had been.

But a band in retreat will always travel faster than those pursuing, and there were tricks the Abe played to slow them down. Takase’s men found a path seeded with jagged iron caltrops half-hidden by dirt and underbrush; three horses and an attendant on foot were injured before they realized what was happening, and it took nearly half a day for the band to work its way past.

The pursuit crossed a mountain river at the bottom of a small gorge. Rocks and wooded slopes overlooked the gorge: a perfect place for an ambush. Takase sent scouts out to search for Abe archers, but Kagaya-hime and the others found none, and no sign that any had been left behind. The war band broke its loose ranks and threaded across the water one at a time, the men leading their horses up the steep slope opposite. No attack.

This was repeated at the second river they came to, and the third. By the fourth the scouts were careless (and the archer well hidden); and four men and two horses were struck before Kagaya-hime’s sharp senses showed her the movement in a tree upstream, and she killed the sniper.

The wind was from the north and east and blew the smoke from the fires set by the Abe straight into the war band, making the horses choke. Men wrapped scarves over their mouths, and the lucky ones, the horsemen, closed their streaming eyes, relying on their mounts to get them through. The smoke was nearly unbearable the first night, when they trampled a field of hemp to the ground to make camp; the village nearby was still alight, the surviving peasants so crazed with grief and rage that they shook their hoes and bear-claw rakes at Takase’s men. When horses panic, mice are trampled; to the mouse, it does not much matter which horse did the trampling.

By morning the wind had changed, and they were able to make better time, despite the second batch of caltrops.

Takase had (in his word) “borrowed” a man from
gen to tell him the lie of the land. The man, Yui, was tall, strong-armed, and young: enough used to having things his way that he argued with Takase instead of begging. “I have a wife, children. And my fields—haven’t you done enough, without taking away our only chance to survive? I’ll have to replant—”

“Serve well, or your family will be fatherless as well as fieldless,” Takase had said at his dryest; and took the man.

Now Takase brought Yui forward. “They’re off the path for their estate,” Takase said. “Where are they going?”

Yui had become somewhat more accommodating after Takase left five horses for the people of
gen, an exchange for the food he took and the trouble. “I’ve been wondering this myself, my lord. There’s not much this way: a hot spring, this crazy old hermit who’s been living under a rock. There used to be a
ki
-stockade out here; my mother’s sister married a man from a family that kept their mares in what was left of it during foaling. There, maybe.”

Takase nodded. The
ki
-stockades had been bases for the men who conquered the northern barbarians a century and more ago. So long ago; but the dirt walls and earthworks might still be in place. There would have been great logs set upright to make a spiked wall; even if it had collapsed, most would not have rotted away. A good place to fight from—a place where the battle would not destroy your crops, nor frighten your animals into flight. “How far to the stockade?” Takase asked.

Yui pursed his lips. “Ten, twelve miles. In land like this, a group like yours—a day’s travel. A little more for the injured to catch up.”

It was the monkey’s hour, midafternoon. Arriving after dark was not a good idea. “Have you seen it?” Takase said.

“When I was a boy, once,” Yui said.

Takase said, “We will stop here, and move tomorrow.”

I went back, of course. Kagaya-hime may be strong enough and resourceful enough to find her own way, but I was the daughter and sister of emperors, and in the final reckoning, this turned out to be less useful than being able to find your own food, and knowing how to sleep safe and warm.

I was lost, but I found the Red Sparrow gate and then recognized Seisenden park across Nij
avenue. I had been there a number of times, though always at night; by daylight it looked tawdry, full of rubbish people had dumped there. I stumbled around the northeast quarter until I recognized a thunder-struck magnolia that I had passed many times on my trips between my uncle’s residence and court. I’d never seen the entire tree. I rode in palm-leaf carriages for the (I saw now) short journey; the magnolia had never been more than slivers and squares, glimpsed through the woven walls or the grille at the carriage’s front. It was larger than I had imagined, the patterns of its burning more complex. Hidden in my cloud of carefully mixed scents, I had not smelled its earthiness: charcoal and bark. I laid my hand on it, and then my cheek.
There,
I thought.
I will go back, but I will always have this with me
.