At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (16 page)

Half a year from now, she will be in the kingdom of Silla on the Korean peninsula, completing a task the gods have set her. It will be bitterly cold, a pale-skied day with snow in the air. Though it will be six months before she sees it, she knows that Silla’s capital is built on the Chinese plan, its walls twenty feet high and roofed with tile to protect the city against flaming arrows, roads from the gates scattering across a treeless plain—the perfect place for her to draw up her troops. Though she is pregnant with her son, who will be due—and overdue—by then, Jingu is on horseback at their head, dressed in armor, her long hair tied close in a man’s style. Her bow lies across her horse’s neck and she runs a crow-feathered arrow between her fingers. She longs for the Sillans to attack, longs for their king to open the gates of the capital and ride out to meet her. She has wanted this since her husband Chuai died. The gods demanded he take Silla; when he refused they killed him. She cannot avenge herself on the gods, but aches to kill someone, anyone.

That is half a year from now. Now, this instant, she looks at the trout suspended in water as clear and cold and pitiless as the future.

Eight years ago. Jingu is to be married. She kneels on a litter hung so heavily with silk and paper and tree branches that she can see nothing, but she sees anyway. She is carried through the emperor’s temporary palace; though it is only a month before they move to their next home, the many wood-and-plaster buildings are solidly constructed, with graceful tall roofs. Her husband the emperor will be called Chuai when he is dead. This is his name to her even now, before she has seen his face—though she must remember to address him as “husband” or “your highness.” The future is uncomfortable enough to a woman who is born to it, and she knows already that he will be afraid of the gods that speak through her, that he will ignore them and die.

Her robes are heavy with appliqué and silver. Her crown’s dangling ornaments tickle her face when she tips back her head. The soles of her shoes are hung with silver charms shaped like fish. Her bracelets of jade are narrow but so deep that they form broad flat disks around her wrists. She cannot walk, cannot pick up anything. Her wedding-dress is nearly as heavy as the armor she will wear eight years from now, after the gods speak and her husband dies.

Her husband has other, older wives and even two grown sons. This will be a problem when her child is born, for a time anyway. She sees her stepsons’ deaths, unavoidable as soon as they raise arms against the boy. Her son will prevail and become emperor. Many generations from now he will be a god, the god of peace and then the god of war, Hachiman. She smiles and touches her virgin belly. It is appropriate that his mother will conquer a land across the sea for him.

Five months from now. Jingu crouches alone in a shrine, a building sunk half into the earth, its roof far over her head. The roof’s supports make strange angled shadows against the morning light that sifts from the steep triangles of the eave openings. The air is thick with the scents of horses and hot metal, latrines and cooking fish, all the smells of an army. Outside the shrine she hears her war leader Takeuchi talking with her guard. It is Takeuchi who will stop the rebellious stepsons for her, but that is years in the future. Jingu has a war to fight and a son to bear before then.

She does not pray for her troops’ safety in crossing the sea or a victory in Silla, for she has seen these things already. No: she is nine months’ pregnant and her child frets to be born. The contractions drive her to her knees, panting. Her urine runs into the hard-packed earth; snot and saliva and sweat drip from her face. She prefers not to embarrass herself in front of her troops. The privacy of the shrine is welcome.

Jingu has been careful to show none of the weakness that can come of pregnancy, though hers has not been an easy one. Her chest hurts, and her bowels, pelvis, legs, back—everything. She finds herself panting at even slight exertion. Her breasts have begun to weep and the cotton with which she binds them chafes. Inside her, Ojin grows large and kicks, searching for a comfortable position.

Things have grown a little easier since her son dropped in her belly. It’s easier to breathe, easier to move. The clear fluid seeping from her loins to stain her saddle is only a minor inconvenience.

She wears the torso of her armor, though its metal plates are very heavy and, since she is still in Japan, their value is based only in her troops’ morale. There are ordinarily four panels but she has removed a side plate, claiming that her belly is too great to secure the fourth piece. In truth, she simply chooses to lighten the armor by removing some of it, and it is easy enough to see that the panel turned away from the enemy is useless. The weight: she already carries sorrow heavy as stone bracelets, and her child like iron in her womb.

When the contraction ends at last, she collapses on her left side—the unarmored side. Her tears leak to the ground. “Not now,” she says aloud to the gods and her son. “Wait. When I’ve returned from Silla. Then.”

She has brought with her the slender smooth stone she found beside the trout’s stream. She slides it into her vagina, a cold weight. The stone frets. Gods are not all great gods and this stone longs for its icy riverbed, for the company of its fellows. It has no choice but to stay, for she wraps hemp cloth tightly around her loins to hold stone and child in place, and ties a knot.

The stone, the army, the horse before the walls of Silla’s capital—they are in the future. In the meantime, Jingu stands on the riverbank and eyes the trout. It remains supremely unconcerned with her shadow over it, her loss and anger, her war and the forty years of her life that stretch beyond, each day without Chuai. The fish does not care. “You horror,” she says aloud and sets out to catch it, though she is not hungry.

Like every woman, whether peasant or empress, she has a needle, though hers is of silver, a treasure from beyond the same sea she will cross in six months. She draws it from her sash and bends it easily between her fingers into a hook. It looks fragile but will be sturdy enough for the trout, which is small.

The gods have taken even luck from Jingu; there is no serendipity to the fact she snagged her robe on a
sakaki
shoot when she walked to the stream’s edge. She crouches and rocks back on her heels, and worries at the frayed thread, tugging until it starts to slide past its fellows. Its absence leaves a tiny flaw in the fabric, a puckered line that is more sensed than seen. When she has pulled half a dozen strands of the dark silk, she twists them together, and when this is done, she tugs on the thread, hard as a fish fighting to live. She will not lose this trout because she underestimates the power of denial and despair. It holds. She threads the bent needle and ties a knot.

Problems with the natives. It is a year ago. Jingu and Chuai are well content with one another, though Jingu already mourns him in her heart. The blurring of present and future has consequences both large and small: unexpected minor advantages have been Jingu’s ability to sexually please her husband from the beginning and the passion they share even after seven years of marriage, fueled on her part by the knowledge that she will lose him so soon. And not so minor: the two older wives are nearly forgotten, and it is Jingu who travels with Chuai now.

Chuai (though she remembers to call him “beloved”) has for several years fought with the Kumaso, ill-mannered and independent-minded locals from a southern island, who refuse to pay their taxes. The battles with the Kumaso have been inconclusive at best—it is never easy to force recalcitrants to battle on their own terrain—but Chuai remains confident. He has called a council of his generals in Na, a strange little barbarian town on the island. Jingu walks the hills outside of Na, weeping, waiting for the dream that she knows is coming.

Still, when the dream takes her it is like a rape, and she awakens screaming. Her husband holds her until her muscles unclench and the tears begin. She speaks then, the gods’ voice scraping from between her clenched teeth. “
Ignore the Kumaso
,” it says.
“There is a rich land across the water to the north and west. Silla. Take it.”

Chuai has seen her weakness in the hands of the terrible gods before this. He knows that they tell the truth through her. But he is emperor and understands (better than the gods, perhaps) the intricate exchanges of power and influence that are necessary to rule a land. “Why?” he says to Jingu. “It has taken years to bring this together. We can’t leave this campaign to start another somewhere none of us have ever seen.” The gods do not permit her to say what crowds in her mind:
Because they will kill you.

In the morning, Chuai leads Jingu to the tallest hill they can see from Na, and together they climb it. There are no fish on the soles of her shoes this time, and it is a simple walk, if long. The autumn sky is very blue, the oak and maple trees in their first startling change from green to gold and red. For an instant she pretends that she and Chuai are not emperor and consort but ordinary people gathering sticks or hunting, free to live as they wish, to say without constraint, “Do that,” or, “Don’t do this.” The illusion is gone as quickly as it comes.

They come to the hill’s top and look around them. The island they stand on stretches away to the south and west. To the north and east is the main island. To the north and west, where Silla is supposed to be, is nothing but water and sky and a few fishing boats, small as fallen leaves on a lake. He says, “There is nothing there, nothing to conquer, nothing to point to and strive for. Whereas here”—his sweeping arm encompasses the hill, little Na at its feet, the island they stand on—“are the Kumaso. Enemies we can see and destroy. Which do you think my commanders will see as the wiser course?”

“The gods—” she whispers past her strangled throat.

Chuai rubs his face with his hand. “The gods are unreasonable and they are not all allies. The gods can be treacherous.”

She knows this better than he ever will. The words come out in a rush: “They will kill you if you do not.”

He touches the tears growing cold on her cheeks. “You’ve already seen your life without me, haven’t you?” She cannot meet his weary eyes. “Then I am already dead.”

Some months later, the gods do kill him, with a Kumaso arrow in the chest, an infected wound, and a quick uncomfortable death. There are times in the last days when he asks about the future, but she has nothing to tell him for none of it has to do with him, none but the barely begun son in her belly: Prince Homuda, who will be Ojin after he has died, and then the god Hachiman.

Knowing her husband will die is not the same as losing him. She is numb as she stumbles through the purification retreat and rituals. Past and future are meaningless to the gods and thus to Jingu. The pain never lessens. Each moment of each day contains the first shock and the endless ache of his death. Forty years before she dies.

A fish is not seduced by bait. When it grows hungry, it eats whichever mosquito egg or dragonfly happens to be closest. If one is fortunate or destined, it is one’s bait that is closest at that moment. But it is chance that fish and bait are in the right places at the right time. There may be no fish there or a different fish, or the wrong bait, or the fish may not be hungry. The woman who hopes to catch a fish knows she offers nothing to the fish that it cannot find for itself—and better, for her bait comes with a hook and a thread, and death.

The spilled rice on the ground is cold. Grains stick to her hand when she picks up one and presses it onto the needle. It looks like the tiny things that live at the water’s surface and become mosquitoes.

She stands slowly and looks down into the stream, down at the shimmering motionless uncaring trout. “You horror,” she says again. “Prove to me that I should go to Silla.”

Jingu knows what the gods want. They toss their demands at her, knowing she will meet them: a dozen shrines to this god or that, rice fields and offerings, priestesses in Nagata and Hirota. And Silla.

Chuai died because he sought to conquer the Kumaso rather than Silla, but the gods allow Jingu to defeat the Kumaso in mere months. Past and future blur in the gods’ minds. They knew, and know, that this is how things will happen. Chuai’s death was arbitrary and meaningless, proof that the gods are either ironical or cruel or simply do not care. The gods may define her actions but they do not care what she feels, the sorrow and anger and love and grief that are always with her, always as intense as the first moments she feels them.

For a time after his death she performs divination after divination, all asking,
Shall I conquer Silla?
Catching trout with a needle is part of this. She will also watch a rock crumble and allow water to irrigate a rice field she has planted. She will bathe in a river and feel the water in her hair, drawing conclusions from the currents that pull it this way and that. She knows what the answer will be—it is as familiar to her as a song she will sing to her infant son when he is born—but her only power over the gods is this, that they must tell her what they want for her to give it to them. And so she asks them to repeat themselves and takes a chill comfort in hearing their voices and pretending they care.

There are places in Japan where the gods do not permit men to fish during spawning, for they cannot understand and will not properly respect the fish’s feelings. Jingu often fishes as a child before she becomes consort and then empress, and old skills come back easily when the past is eternally now. It is still some months before Ojin disrupts her balance, so she stands precariously on the little river’s bank, the thread coiled in one hand, the baited needle in the other.