Fudoki Read Free

strong-legged sons. A shop next door remains open, and a woman buys gourds in a net from an old man. Except for the cloths over their mouths, they seem oblivious to the burning city.
    If the wind blew safely away from where I lived, the fire became exciting, like riots in another quarter of the capital. “What is the news?” we all called to passersby. The rules were forgotten, and noblewomen (even princesses, if no one was attending closely) ran barefaced and barefooted into the street to catch at the sleeves of the guardsmen hurrying past: how many houses are gone, what streets, what lives? We ate our rice cold on the verandas where we could watch the smoke. We prayed desperately to the kami, to the Buddhas, to all the gods and demons, begging for an easy fire, begging that the wind stay kind.
    We know about the fires, but the tortoiseshell did not. There were stories in the fudoki, of course, but a story does not choke you with fumes; the grass in a tale doesn’t hiss like a kitten as it burns. She crouched in her tree and watched through eyes slitted against the smoke.
    At sunset the wind eased, and the flames slowed. The fire seemed brighter with dusk, its movements clearer. The smoke glimmered red and amber. She heard individual noises within the roar now: a whistle like an overblown sh -pipe, low wooden sighs, an angry metallic squeal.
    To the east was a shinden residence like this one, old and forgotten and dry. The main house and its wings were half-hidden from the tortoiseshell, but for a time what she could see remained recognizable and was even made beautiful by the fire. Flames defined everything, tracing the shapes of screens and supports, railings and walkways. Smoke gushed like water along the roofs, but she could not tell whether it moved up or down.
    The flames hesitated at Sai avenue. Lanky weeds and half-grown trees muddled its neglected surface, but it was broad, and the border-ditches still carried water, if not much. Cinders showered up from the burning buildings and started small fires in the weeds. The neighbors’ gatehouse collapsed outward, and coals caught in a young katsura tree in the avenue. Smoke oozed from the tree’s crown until the fire became visible and destroyed it.
    The tortoiseshell’s grounds caught in a hundred places. Flying sparks settled on roofs and in dead pines and cryptomeria. Fire slipped into the ditch, leapt across the reeds that bridged the slimy trickle, crept up to the outside wall, and swarmed over it.
    The residence burned for most of the night. Thatch and shingles went immediately. Woodwork took a little longer, the perfect grid of a screen or a carved phoenix over a doorway outlined for a time in light. The buildings’ heavy-beamed skeletons settled in like Urabon festival bonfires as the timbers turned black and then white and cherry red. The smoke thinned somewhat, for the wood here was well aged.
    The air was very hot, not quite unbearably so. When a coil of smoke curled around the tortoiseshell, she pressed her face between her paws and breathed through the fur of her inner leg, leaving tears and smears of the dirty mucus that trailed from her nose. Her claws had been out since sunset. Her muscles trembled with exhaustion.
    Through the gaps left open by her second eyelids, she watched the flames flicker, quick as birds or lizards. Sometimes cats looked up through the hot, wavering air with shining eyes and glistening mouths that said things she could not hear. They might have been the cats of her fudoki, her cousins and aunts. They might have been ghosts, or flames, or illusions. She could not tell.
    A live cinder settled on her shoulder: a tiny smell of burning fur. It was a moment before she recognized the pain. She screamed and scraped herself convulsively against the bark, but there was nowhere to run, nothing to fight.
    Fire is not constant. Trees near her burned, but the hinoki cedar did not. Needles on the lower branches sizzled as they flared, and