Fudoki by Kij Johnson Page A

home to a backwater in the provinces. Sometimes the cat died immediately, but often she lived a long time and became the pride of her farmhouse. Sometimes the hick was lucky enough to acquire a pregnant cat, or even a female and a young male. The innkeeper had been one of the lucky ones, and his cats had been thriving for a decade and more, their population expanding to fill the countryside around.
    The tortoiseshell did not know this. There were no scents in the cold rain, and the cats themselves were hidden away, sleeping off their night’s hunt. She checked for dogs when she approached the inn, but she didn’t notice the smell of a cat until she’d found a corner behind an earthen oven in the dirt-floored kitchen area. She groomed herself dry, taking comfort in the warmth of realigned fur. She was mildly hungry but willing to wait: there was a spill of some sort on the dirt floor, and she would examine it whenever the people went to sleep.
    “Leave,” a voice growled. There was a cat a short leap away, a well-fed and much larger black female with yellow eyes so pale that they looked white. Her ears were flat and angry. “This is my place.”
    The tortoiseshell responded warily, her claws half-out. “I won’t stay long. I’m just tired.”
    The black cat danced sideways at her. “My fudoki is a dozen cats long and there will be a thousand more. And you are no part of it. Go now. ”
    “I have no tale,” the tortoiseshell said. “My place is dead. Let me sleep here, just for tonight.”
    “Why should I?” the black cat said. “I am The Cat Who Killed a Hawk.”
    Cats fight as they run, in short spurts. The black cat and the tortoiseshell fought in quick snatches of great ferocity; in the pauses they groomed themselves with a cold rage. Ordinarily, the tortoiseshell would have left immediately, but the rain-turning-to-snow depressed her, and she was cold and sick at heart, and tired of having no place to call her own. For one day at least, she wanted to sleep safe and warm.
    And so she tried something she’d seen men do, when they drank wine and started pushing one another around. During one of the grooming times, she attacked without waiting for the other female to finish, and surprised her. The tortoiseshell slashed the black cat’s neck and jumped back, out of range.
    Despite this, weight and experience mattered in the end. The black cat pinned the tortoiseshell, and raked her again and again: “Storyless cat!” she snarled.
    She would have killed the tortoiseshell, for cats are like people: they are uncomfortable in the presence of those who have suffered disasters that might happen to them. But the cats had drawn the attention of the servants in the kitchen house, who threw water over them to stop the fighting. Soaked and bleeding, the tortoiseshell fled into the gathering dusk.
    She might have hidden in another building in the inn’s compound—the stable or an unused room, perhaps—but she was thoroughly unsettled, and smelled cats everywhere now. Ears folded back and eyes half-closed against the rain, she trotted east along the Tkaid, through wet flakes of snow as large as her paws.
    She came to a small wayside shrine: a hidden inner room and an open-fronted antechamber, in imitation of the great shrine at Ise. The shrine was small, perhaps waist-high to me, though built on a mound of stones that brought the structure to eye height. (When I was a very small girl and not yet properly respectful of the gods, I would have looked at this tiny shrine and longed to place dolls in it.) She stepped under the antechamber’s peaked roof and looked around her. Wooden tablets painted with prayers hung everywhere from the roof. When she brushed past them, they clattered softly together. Bowls and packets lay scattered on the antechamber’s floor, most empty, but a few still containing grains of rice or fraying scraps of fabric. She was hungry, but everything had been fouled with birds’ droppings, and the