THE WHEY OF THE WOODS
- TESSO’S JOURNEY -

Chapter One

‘The Nibe safflower fields, then on through thistle and flax.’ His nomi rice-straw cape rustled and fluttered, fighting not against but with the wind, pushing him onwards. Although he willed them to, his feet would not drag. He let the air wash him forward. A strong gust lifted his woven hat half an inch from his head before he caught it with a skip and chirrupy squeak, pulling the stiff straw back down over his ears, flattening them. ‘Less tree cover. Even the air blows differently.’ He scrunched his pointed nose into his tuft of white neck fur and rubbed his bristled whiskers between his paws. ‘The hunt is the same,’ he repeated. ‘Always the same.’

Ignoring the arching tunnels and paths more trodden, he weaved between and over the thick, branching flowers. The open air was oddly stifling—not that he wished the air to be closed or shut off, but a little more guarded at least. As he walked, he tried to bury himself in the most closely-knit stems. Nothing except his fine-pointed pine needle sword and the drawstring bag that hung from his waist differentiated him from the thicket. He tapped the bag. Three days’ food supply rustled inside: a dried blackberry, some sunflower seeds and cheese. Nothing differentiated him, that is, except for the needle-blade, drawstring bag, and—of course—the package. ‘I shouldn’t be out of the woods for long,’ he told himself. ‘Not for long.’

Another gust buffeted the safflower heads above, undulating the sea of orange and yellow. The canopy snowed down a flurry of thin beansprout petals that momentarily coloured his surroundings. They dithered, drifting in circles and cartwheels until settling on a place.

‘Also called dyer’s saffron. Fifteen to twenty seeds a head.’ He looked up for the first time, one paw holding his straw hat in place, calculating the profit for each stem at harvest. ‘Fields of gold.’ He froze. A rustle in the leaves and a smell of salted maple. Maple, and something else altogether unfamiliar.

A trio of field mice plunged into one thicket and darted out the other end, their paths well-known, if only to them.

‘They say they might call all field hands back,’ one whispered.

‘All of us?’ Another burst out, rising up to his tiptoes as he was unable to keep his body or voice down. ‘Well, I’m not going. Not for a whole creamery!’

‘A whole creamery? Think of the yoghurt!’ The third chimed in.

‘Liquid dairy upsets my stomach.’ His little legs couldn’t bear the thought and popcorned around in quick, short, little hops.

‘Blimey, I’d do near anything, even join the field militia, for a creamery.’

‘Hush, the two of you.’

‘Oh, pish-posh, hushing us. No one can hear. Look. Fluffy cheeks here has all his fur in knots for the postal master’s daughter! See, no one can hear except us.’

‘Never! You don’t, do you?’

‘I told you that in private!’

The sound of their voices was lost behind a wall of compact foliage.

They noticed nothing out of the ordinary, of course. The hunter was crouched, almost as still as the unmoving beansprout petals that had settled around him, bar a gentle swaying in tune with the flower stems. His eyes remained unblinked, and his nose hairs untwitched. ‘Be like milk,’ he thought. Wood mice being larger than other mice meant little when outside the burrow; they were as hard to spot as a screech-owl in an oak cavity.

Eventually, his small, dark eyes demanded a quick blink and, as it was only fair, he permitted a momentary twitch of his nose hairs, too. He was alone again. ‘I’d wager a walnut, or even a hunk of cheese’ — he tapped the lip of his bag again, more out of habit than anything — ‘that most here don’t know what there was before they came. The soaring trees that lifted the clouds.’ He sighed. ‘The price of seedling treasure. But that smell, so unfamiliar, it wasn’t the field mice.’ Only a few steps on and… he wasn’t alone. He disappeared into the foliage once again.

This time, a Ryukyu merchant came fumbling past, striding through one of the tunnels and ducking between folded and pointed leaves. Bright dyed robes, blue pigments brushed over their eyes, the Ryukyu mouse hauled the usual assortment of oddities and satchels of curiosities. The lessons on Ryukyu mice were not far off, despite the distances they travelled. Salt, maple (perhaps salted maple), wood-pigeon eggs taken with rot, or at least something that smelt similar.

‘The hunt is the same - wood, field or house. But the prey, the prey is not natural here.’ He gulped the sweet air and shivered as if sucking a lime, which he never had as citrus was quite repellent. But that was the point. ‘Chasing information. Using structure and tradition as weapons.’ His left paw perched on the hilt of the needle sword, which was wrapped in a kinume decorative grip of criss-crossing pine seed wings. ‘Why was I sent? Why not that hulking beast Chûtaro? Why not the Lavender twins, or even dear Kiyu, while we’re at it?’ He sighed and his cheeks sunk below his jaw line. ‘Kiyu.’

He let his mind wander. His paw slipped back to the drawstring bag. The knot wasn’t so hard to learn, or perhaps she was just a masterful teacher. ‘Nothing is so hard to learn if you understand it first,’ he mimicked Kiyu’s soft squeak. The scene played out silently in his mind. ‘Developed from a hairstyle used an age ago on young pups’ — he could hear her giggle — ‘the kimagea knot symbolises the trapping of vigour and grit and the warding off of all weakness. The cord loops through itself, like so, and the inside lines pull out to resemble dragonfly wings. Sometimes even real grit, lumps of red earthy clay, can be added for the less metaphorical.’ Kiyu took anything in her stride, and she could leap further than a flying squirrel at a Persimmon tree. ‘She could stomach all these tree-cutters and cat-lovers. Well, perhaps not stomach, but at least store them in her cheek pouches like a chipmunk.’ He chuckled out loud.

‘Oof.’ He was knocked back with a sudden thump in the ribs and ingested a punch of sweet maple aroma. Falling, he spun his head to redirect his body and landed four paws on the leaf-covered soil. His hat slid down only as far as his head and ears did; kimagea knots always held. ‘Be like milk. Milk is the softest of substances. Softer still than water, given its fatty buoyancy.’ The words recited in an instant within his mind, swirling and floating somewhere deep in his memories. The wood-pigeon egg flushed through his nose. He regained his posture, tail counterbalanced and whipping him around, right hand now crossing over his waist and gripping the seeded hilt. Another paw pressed softly on top of his.

‘Begging ye pardon, woodpecker. I walk like I’m shaking a cloth in the wind, but aye, it’s the wind, see.’ Before he knew it, the Ryukyu mouse reached up and patted his shoulder with three hard thuds.

‘You? You were only moments ago headed…’ the young hunter stopped himself. Was it him? Ryukyu mice didn’t usually travel in groups so far from the docks. Could all his lessons already be proving lacking? ‘Woodpecker?’

‘Aye, a pecker, tadpole, nipper from the woods. But aren’t ye a strapping lubber.’ A thin, Gimawa jacket whisked about as the Ryukyu mouse prodded about the hunter’s waist. The jacket was dyed a shallow stone leek, resembling the clear seas, and was faded by the same salty air that had given rise to its distinctive smell. ‘Hard to tell though, mind, half buried under straw as you are. Planning to feed a sika deer with your cloak?’ The Ryukyu mouse’s eyes twinkled from within the turquoise face-paint. Closer up, the pigment flaked on the fur, but more intricate lines could be made out, as if his eyes themselves were round-hulled sailing boats skimming the blue waves. ‘But ye be a hunter if I’m not mistaken!’ As the Ryukyu mouse’s eyes widened, they re-crafted themselves into tub-turned boats. ‘A greenhorn fledgeling, no doubt. Else no one would have ever found ye, by chance or otherwise. Only a blue peter by the looks. Not seen your kind in the fields before,’ he chuckled, ‘not that it means you haven’t been here.’ He winked and strained upwards to slap the young hunter again. ‘But don’t let this ol’ merchant spin me own yarn. Out with it, woodpecker!’ He ploughed his painted face into the hunter’s rice-straw cape so suddenly and deeply it made the stalwart hunter twitch and tickled his chest with whiskers. The Ryukyu mouse’s muffled voice continued from within the coverings. ‘First time out of the thicket burrows, aye. Set sail on an errand, likely. Selected for ye wit and strength, nay, speed for sure. All despite being a whipper.’ The muffled voice scampered deeper, the hunter’s eyes widened, and furry cheeks pinked—he did not think it so easy to tell. ‘A task made only for a mouse’s mouse, ha, they’ll have ye deal with the house, am I right?’

The hunter stayed quiet, fighting the urge to push away. The building discomfort revealed itself through his teeth, which began to grind with anxiety. ‘Be like milk. Nothing hard can break milk.’ He clamped his teeth down hard, gritting them tight as the Ryukyu mouse’s cold, wet nose slipped down his belly. ‘Yet milk can crack the hardest rocks and turn to the softest cheese.’ It was difficult sometimes to keep all the teachings in their proper places within his mind. If it was the same Ryukyu mouse, how had he snuck around without being heard? He couldn’t—that smell could not have failed to fill his senses. No, there must be two. Surely the ears lopped differently. ‘Pay attention as you pay anything else, only so much as the seller asks.’ His thoughts whirred, recounting commands that were not commands, teachings that one could not teach; he had not paid enough. But the deductions were all very precise. Stories were like dry bread, often taken best with a pinch of salt. Most commonly they would be tales of the sharp minds possessed by Ryukyu mice, and this Ryukyu mouse was as well-learned as he had heard, and even more astute. The classes hadn’t fallen short there.

The strange mouse shifted around his waist and towards the package. The young hunter twisted his hips, sweeping the cape like a dancing parasol to the mikado song. With shuffling steps, the cape landed back across him and covered the package. The Ryukyu mouse was left a statue, balancing on one hind leg with an arm outstretched as he perched, exposed back in the field of swaying green trunks.

‘Agh, blimey.’ The Ryukyu mouse tumbled over, struggling to maintain his balance in a comically exaggerated manner. ‘The cat’s got yer tongue and left ye high and dry. Ha, still I wager yer eyes have not even cast on a Nenya cat yet. About ye business then, I’ll be off.’ The Ryukyu mouse was beside him again, slapped him once more for good measure, and then loudly stumbled off down another passageway.

The wind quietened and the thrumming drone of a flying bee could be heard above the safflower covering. The vision of Kiyu twirling to the parasol dance gambolled in his mind.

‘Well, I’m not going to stay hidden anyway, perhaps it’s best they see me coming.’ He nodded. ‘If I just pop out, their eyes will be on stalks.’ He swept his cloak around, brushing dust and orange petals up from the soil in an airy gale. ‘Given the height of the safflower stalks, it’ll be trouble getting their eyes back down.’ He snickered. ‘It shouldn’t have been me, but it is. I must flow like milk, because the hunt is different, even if it is the same.’

Striding out of the thick fields it emerged to him that being noisy did not come easily, for his hind feet were naturally padded and softly, silently selecting their own paths. ‘Be like milk.’ He felt for a crispy, dried ginkgo leaf and crunched it under his paw, flakes of yellow puffing out. ‘Harden into pungent cheese and attract attention, when attention is called for.’ The swing of his leg buffeted the needle sword and the package against his thigh. Something was wrong.

He disappeared under the cape, collapsing into a thimble-sized haystack before unfolding like a paper frog and springing to his feet again. His drawstring bag was gone! He leapt soundlessly back into the thicket. But gone where? His eyes thinned, squinting under the frayed rim of his hat. Had he dropped it? No, kimagea knots always held. He sped off, disappearing between two thick shoots. Three more orange petals jousted as they fell, spinning down, and pattering onto the floor to fill the otherwise motionless space.

The churning rustle of leaves gradually made way for bangs, clangs and hollerings throughout the thick field until the surroundings opened up entirely and there was no hiding from the hubbub. He instinctively scuttled back into the apparent safety of the flowers. There were too many smells, too many sights that blurred with chaotic movement to discern any specific one. He shrunk his back, curled up his tail and swept out into the fray. He needed that bag.

The bustle of the village was at once disorienting, and his legs refused to let it carry them. ‘Like milk’, he repeated ‘Like milk’. Field mice marched two-and-fro, not minding a bump or three in the hard shoulder as they went. They all looked the same. Most wore the same, long, cotton tops, handmade and dyed a brick red on top and yellow around all the hems. The tops invariably hung over a drawstring hem work-trouser with loose waistbands. Each seemed focussed on their task such that they ignored others who crossed their path. Two such field mice, one pulling a wheelbarrow of powdered dye made from grinding safflower petals, the other carrying a crate of grasses for rhinoceros beetle feed, bumped straight into each other. Both fell backwards in a cloud of orange dust. The kerfuffle didn’t end quickly; the two mice attempting to pull each other up, see-sawing over all their produce.

The stretched and stained fields painted the landscape behind them, and like watching cherry blossoms drop as seasons change, or forms shifting from fluid to fixed, such as watching paint dry, it was a fascinating process. Purple thistles spattered between the village nests with their steep thatched awnings. The nests were a hodgepodge of angles, cutting the vista. Trees to fields, fields to homes, change was fascinating—but the unnatural change, a grotesque shiver quivered down his tail. The land was malformed. He shook the thought away.

‘My bag, my supplies.’

Carts passed stacked with seeds, gingko nuts, horse chestnuts and even dried fruit imported from faraway lands. One mouse declared these fruits ‘raisings’, or something of the sort, as they lifted them up. It seemed a confusing name, like calling the autumn season ‘fall’, as if it were toppling over. But it all headed up the main road, north.

‘The guest house must be that way,’ the hunter murmured, trying unsuccessfully to focus his attention as he scanned the crowd. One wagon, half filled with sunflower seeds and topped with a particularly arresting mouse, was being heaved on by a small band behind four armoured rhinoceros beetles. One foot on the carriage pole that strapped to the beetles, knee bent, he commanded the party.

‘Aye now lads, if it’s half the land promised, it’s half the seed in pay. See what they make of it!’

But what caught the hunter’s eyes as they thumbed through the scene, looking for what seemed a needle in a haystack, was the size of the feet. The field mouse’s nonuniform, sandy fur, peeking from under the trousers petered into the longest feet the hunter had seen. The wagon trundled forward, and more mice began noticing the misplaced hunter. A space parted before him, with gasps and coughs. ‘There!’ He lunged forward, arm outstretched as if performing the kitsuchû forward thrust that his body knew by memory—only the needle sword remained by his side. His fist clenched down on the collar, pulling the Ryukyu mouse backwards to the hunter’s chest. The mouse’s feet moved as waves on the ocean, swaying one way and crashing down the other. Front paws flitted to and fro. The Ryukyu mouse twisted around the hunter’s wrists and, with a light touch, turned them just so until grip was impossible to hold. The hunter, quite different in approach, rooted firm as a ginkgo tree itself, his paws outstretched like twisting branches blowing not against, but with the wind or crashing waves.

‘You stole my supply pack!’ the hunter grunted. He clenched his grip on the Ryukyu’s forearm with a stag beetle pincer movement.

‘Oh, good to be seeing ye again, little woodpecker. What’s that? Stole! Me?’ The trapped forearm was now becoming water itself, dissolving through its short sleeving to erupt upwards with a smacking palm to the chin. ‘Never!’

‘Give it back.’ The hunter rolled forward, upturning his opponent’s thin cloth, and revealing the drawstring bag tied hastily below.

With a sweep, the Ryukyu mouse created distance, but before the hunter could lunge again, he raised a single finger.

‘Fine, fine. No use, says I, in scampering. Me hull being so weighed and loaded down with goods.’ He panted, giving away the other reason for adjourning. ‘Say I do have a supply bag much like one ye might have misplaced. Trade ye for it.’

‘I’m not giving—’

The Ryukyu mouse did not wait for the hunter to finish. ‘What d’ye say to that there sword? I know it.’ He peered in with a smile. ‘That’s the famed Little Prick. Oh, I see yer taken aback an old travelling fool like me might know of it. But no, nothing would persuade a wood mouse to part with such a fabled needle sword. Outside yer woods named swords are as rare as sea urchins eating cabbage. Ha, but for ye burrowing lot, each sword carries its own name, its own story, eh?’ The Ryukyu mouse dusted himself off as he paced, though even the pacing appeared more like soft rolling waves on a flat sand beach. ‘The woven rice-straw Sakatsukuta, then? Aye, the hat will fetch a whole cheese wheel at the guest house, perhaps more. Same as those worn by yer mendicant monks, am I right? Not seen one skewered with ladybird antlers before, mind. Very odd, says I. Very odd indeed.’

Before the bartering could continue any further, squeaks and squeals reverberated through the crowd. At one end a cart overturned, spilling a landslide of safflower seeds that a few field mice tried unsuccessfully to remain upright atop, and behind them another cloud of orange huffed upwards. Mice scattered. Whiskers and tails whipped around, and between them slipped barely perceptible whispers. Nenya.

The hunter’s tail shot out rigidly and his shoulders froze. He searched the fields for movement. The Ryukyu mouse too did not move, instead scanning the blue sky.

‘Nenya cats, here?’ The hunter calmed his thoughts. ‘From the guest house or not, it would be on the prowl. Only a handful of wood mice have survived a Nenya. And what if it is a stray? Feral beasts with a thousand spears for claws and whole pinecones for teeth.’ He breathed out deeply. ‘Like milk.’ He scanned the wall of stems before him, looking for the smallest flicker of movement. ‘A Nenya cat could bend trees, they say, and still hide behind a single safflower. They were shapeshifters and shadow eaters.’ He exhaled again, just as movement began near to where the field met the first thatched hovel. ‘Life is not a question to answer. It can be understood as easily as it can be stopped. Like grains of dune sand on a faraway planet.’ The words trickled like those same grains, tumbling down the dune of his mind. Silence.

A branch snapped and a handful of stalks contorted horribly, crashing down and…

‘Timber!’ Behind the crescendo of crackles, pops and bluster was a wicker ladder and a pair of field mice, one on either end of a long saw constructed out of a hair comb the length of their arms. But there was no cat.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the shadow descended with a screech. The hunter flinched, but before he could react the Ryukyu mouse had hurled the pair of them face-first into orange dust. The wagon jerked forward and the mouse atop it sprung a good three tails-length or more—those feet being put to use. Luckily for the village, the bird had marked its prey. With as fluid a motion as any mouse was capable of, the hunter swung both back up and led a trail that the Ryukyu merchant knew well enough to follow, mimicking each movement with careful precision.

The chase of the wood mice began. One, two, three, switch and they darted diagonally. Only mice born to the burrow, born to the roots and bracken of the wood where worse things lived, only they knew the chase truly. That was not to say that field mice had it easy, but the red fox nestled its den deep within the woods, and the imposing grey owl seldom ventured so far except during the harshest winter, when the burrows were stocked with supplies. Two, three, crack, and any without practice might fall under a broken ankle. Not the hunter, and it seemed not the merchant either.

The ground churned as soil scraped behind them, feathers twisting and fluttering down. A storeroom’s thatching collapsed as a clawed foot tried to land there, flustering the beast until it ripped loose. Two, three, switch. The wood mouse broke in the opposite direction, swinging the Little Prick around to scoop the Ryukyu mouse with him just as a beak snapped shut where the dust of his body floated. Caws and squarks deafened them as the bird rolled over, knocking splayed drying racks and their content of exotic fruit and peel over. The bird pecked frantically, jabbing and picking at each shrivelling grape and persimmon slice that tumbled across the soil.

‘Moving with the flow. And not just with it but joining it and becoming part of it. To be part of nature as it moves.’ The hunter and the Ryukyu mouse did not stop until they were well into the prickling leaves of a deep thistle flower.

‘A half-squished blackberry, some seeds and a lump of cheese!’ The Ryukyu mouse huffed, throwing his arms in the air, drawstring bag hanging from one. ‘Barmy woodpecker! Got yer under-apron worked up over air pie and windy pudding!’ He tossed the bag away, the hunter catching it aptly with his fingertips. ‘Have ye catch back and get on with ye. Going to the house, aye, quaking in ye sandals at the mention of a cat. Naught but a bird.’

‘A Lidth’s Jay,’ the hunter corrected.

‘That, too. And don’t think I didn’t see, ye were all at sea, as lubbers put it, about seeing grapes dry. A woodpecker like ye, wondering if the task given is a mite’s leg too much?’

‘I know.’ The hunter slouched down so that only the tip of his nose poked from under the front of his straw hat. ‘It shouldn’t have been me. I’m not ready. And truth is, I don’t even understand what’s needed to be done.’ He squeezed the package under his knees. ‘Politics have no place. Governance is unnatural.’

‘Oh, ye be one of them.’ The Ryukyu mouse tutted, shaking his head so that his whiskers flapped like an Iko fish tail. He let his satchels and other encumbrances thump to the dry ground.

‘What is that smell?’ The hunter’s paws rose, smushing his nose.

‘Ha, just seaweed. Like it, hey? But I’ve it wrapping peppermint oil. Ghastly stuff. Seems here one cask’s leaked.’ He continued rummaging carelessly through a walnut shell that looked to have been converted into a chest. ‘Trouble is, those like ye have not a clue which way the wind would blow without the order, the structure and foundation of the house.’ The Ryukyu mouse pulled out a carved acorn fashioned into a small receptacle and removed the cap. It contained a milky filling that clasped at a wick of straw. ‘Ha, it’s from the heads of toothed whales. Keeps them afloat. Look.’ He scraped a stick as big as the Little Prick and its gritted head blazed up. ‘Now, now,’ he chuckled too heartily, ‘didn’t mean to startle ye.’ He transferred the flame from the stick to the acorn, flickering at the wick. ‘That’ll burn till the sun’s down and wind changes. I’ll be camping here a spell.’

‘To be part of nature as it moves.’ The words of his teachers still refused to leave the hunter’s cavernous head, instead grasping at his ears as if desperate to avoid being lost to time or memory. He straightened, overcompensating and displaying his chest to the sky. ‘Be like the giant salmon of Ryukyu tales. In lands across oceans bigger than any wood, they swim. Always swim. Inaction does not mean no action, but swim with the water. Inaction is the choice of letting one’s muscles stop and the flow of life do the work, taking it where you must go, must be.’ The voice seemed clear yet unmistakably distant. With a deep exhale he opened his eyes, not having realised they were even closed, and the scents that filled his nose began painting a vivid picture of the fields around him. ‘But be the salmon, that once a year fights the flow and swims upstream. For that is its nature.’

It was the hunter’s turn to dust himself off. ‘You’re smart, very smart, but you speak a lot, old mouse.’ He looped the thread of the bag under his bio belt and fastened it with a kimagea knot. He looked up at the Ryukyu mouse, then back down and tied the knot twice over. ‘And this woven Sakatsukuta is not skewered with ladybird antlers. They are leafless antlered branches to represent outstretched hands in supplication.’ Once more, he regained his composure, concealed within the thistles and almost entirely blending into the surroundings. Only the glimmer of the Ryukyu mouse's curious, radiant flame betrayed his presence, the shimmering in his eyes giving them away.

‘We respect the Gonshi monks for finding a balance only attainable through complete and utter acceptance. Just as we respect the trees—the trees the field mice fell uncontrollably—and the seasonal beetles that Ryukyu mice enter our territories to hunt. Their chitinous shells may be good for rigging your vessels, but that’s not where they belong. Tell that to your shipmates: we will stop any more encroachment into the woods.’

The Ryukyu mouse chucked under his breath. ‘Sounding awful political, woodpecker.’

The young hunter turned so subtly that it was no different from if the barbed leaves had stretched out and swallowed him. Half in shadow. ‘The name is Tesso.’ He paused. ‘And you? Only, I’d rather know who to report if I find myself strolling the Sapling trail with Kiyu when suddenly my under-apron goes missing.’

‘Aye, only fair to give when another has proffered. Mashirau. That’s me name, though aren’t but a handful of Ryukyu mice this side of Hotsu now, and most near these dockings know me as the Lost Captain.’

Tesso melted into the darkening shadows, vanishing amid chuckles and the clinking of packed curiosities. The village had become a place to steer clear of, and whether he embraced it or not, the responsibility had now been thrust upon him. ‘Be the milk. Find the Nazo Nazo guest house and find the General. Be the flow. Be the salmon.’ He tapped his paw against his forehead. ‘When will the teachings that aren’t teachings tell me to be a wood mouse, is that not more my nature?’ He sighed once more and headed north.