Dendera (17 page)

Someone shouted, “It was the bear meat!”

If only for an instant, Kayu Saitoh thought her own thoughts had taken form and burst out—that was how closely the shout mirrored them. Evidently, she wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines, as a good many other women looked up with surprised or, for some, embarrassed expressions, their eyes searching for the source of the outburst.

The speaker was Naki Sokabe.

“I didn’t eat the bear! I had a bad feeling about it,” she cried, her voice a rasping assault. “Right? That cub rampaged through the burial ground. How could we eat it and expect to be unharmed?”

This proclamation equated to a death sentence for those who had eaten the meat—which was the majority of the women. From here and there came sobs, almost shrieks, which soon unified and transformed into anger. Kayu Saitoh realized that she too was getting angry, and that this anger was without reason, but yet she submitted to it, letting her outrage unfold. Her muscles throbbed, she lost control of her mind, and nearly unaware of her own actions, she spread her arms and cried, “The bear meat was bad!”

The simplicity of the collective rage felt good. Other women cried out as she had, and the conjecture became belief. None of them had a plan, but events proceeded with or without one. No one needed to take the lead. The old women shouted, radiating heat, and the snow in the clearing turned to a slushy mess. The crowd’s heat rose, and the sound of trampling, excited footsteps was explosive, and the rage and fever made them want to strike someone. They wanted to find an enemy. It felt incredibly natural for the crowd to turn these feelings toward the manor at the front of the clearing, and to the manor’s owner. Mei Mitsuya was the source of all wrong. Even Kayu Saitoh felt the same way, though assuming the plague had been lurking in the bear meat, Mei Mitsuya couldn’t possibly have divined the fact. But the hostile shouts continued to spread. The other women were shouting Mei Mitsuya’s name in contempt, so Kayu Saitoh tried it as well. When she did, relief and the pleasure of conformity ran loose within her, jumbling with the fever and the fury and the exhilaration, and she no longer understood why she was so sweaty, or why she was shouting so loudly, or what thoughts were in her mind—or why she should ever need to understand such things at all. Her awareness was an unsteady haze from which only the feeling of rage emerged clear. In this state, the old women—and Kayu Saitoh—succeeded in convincing themselves that Mei Mitsuya was the instigator of the plague’s outbreak. They succeeded in holding that conviction while being blind to any counterarguments and the frailty of their evidence. Their radiant heat and odors swirled and rose, crashing against the manor.

Mei Mitsuya appeared on the balcony. “Quiet, all of you! Silence! You all go stampeding down the same wrong path, and then what? A happy march straight to hell? Is that what you want?”

Kayu Saitoh heard the chief’s words but remained unable to come to her senses; instead, she could only thrust her hands high and bellow Mei Mitsuya’s name. The other old women too hurled angry cries at the chief.

“Don’t conflate the bear meat with the plague! If we had eaten meat infected with the plague, that would be one thing, but it was only a bear cub.” Mei Mitsuya didn’t shy away from the outcries, but rather confronted them head on. “What really matters is what fool set off all this panic.
She’s
the true plague! Reveal yourself, you plague, and I will show you no mercy.”

Rather than trying to nullify the panic, the chief and overlord of Dendera added a threat and a new offense, which she attempted to pin on someone else. As far as ploys went, this was an effective one—all the more so with the old women’s propensity for taking direction from anyone with a loud enough voice—and most times, under ordinary circumstances, this method would likely have played out as Mei Mitsuya anticipated, even though it wouldn’t solve the underlying issues.

But this wasn’t an ordinary time.

Without the slightest forewarning, several screams came from somewhere behind Kayu Saitoh. The shrieks were shrill and girlish, made by old women forgetting that they were old women.

Kayu Saitoh looked over her shoulder, and from the corner of her eyes she saw something red. She recognized it immediately as blood, and Somo Izumi had expelled it. The woman was coughing blood that splashed onto those around her. Her neck and arms twisted in impossible directions, and she convulsed and coughed blood again and again, and then she fell. No one came to her aid; rather, the entirely opposite idea spread through the crowd.

“We-we have to kill her,” someone whispered.

That was the mob’s conclusion.

Once employed as a solution, killing became the natural course. After the first woman began kicking the fallen Somo Izumi in the stomach, violence sparked into existence and spread in a wave not only through those near Somo Izumi but others farther away. The women moved as one, and Kayu Saitoh found herself separated from the crowd. On her own now, she regained some measure of composure and realized she had been caught up in the frenzy, but it was too late. The women wouldn’t stop. Mei Mitsuya wouldn’t be heard. What Kayu Saitoh had done wouldn’t be taken back. Amid the clamor, Somo Izumi was being killed.

“I accept your decision!” Mei Mitsuya shouted. “All right, I’ll kill them. Not just Somo Izumi, but also Makura Katsuragawa. Just like sixteen years ago!”

Her voice finally reached the crowd.

The women looked up at the balcony and raised a great cheer. Just then, a single ray of morning sunlight pierced through the clouds and reached the clearing. Another bright and pure dawn was coming, its light falling upon women wanting to kill one of their own.

Mei Mitsuya’s eyes were bloodshot, distressed by events having not gone according to plan and keenly aware that when the curtain rose on her day of reckoning, she had failed immediately. Mei Mitsuya lowered her head, steadied her breathing, then tossed down an unsharpened knife—though for now, it was less a knife than it was a piece of stone.

“Put Somo Izumi in the cage until your work is done.”

With no further word, Mei Mitsuya stepped back from the balcony and out of sight.

This was to be a repeat of sixteen years ago.

With that, tensions calmed.

The women went into a flurry of activity. Some hauled the bloodied and battered Somo Izumi to the cage, while others returned to their homes to fetch their sharpening stones, which they compared to see whose would be able to fashion the sharpest edge. The women seemed unified in their desire to carry out their unadulterated intent to kill. Meanwhile, Kayu Saitoh felt without a place, unsure of what to do. Despising her own inaction, she smacked her fist against the gash on her head as hard as she could. The intense pain brought her momentary satisfaction.

But then she realized Hotori Oze had been watching her, and her spirits fell. Hotori Oze’s eyes seemed to be following the other women, observing them as they moved about.

“What are you looking at?” Kayu Saitoh snapped.

“The way things are going, Mei Mitsuya will lose her authority. And I can’t say prospects for the assault on the Village are good.”

“That’s too bad for you, Hawk.”

“I might also deem the thwarting of her premature raid to be a positive outcome. The attack Mei Mitsuya envisions is a bit different than what I would consider ideal.”

“And what’s your ideal?”

“I want to burn the Village to the ground. Mere death and destruction won’t satisfy me. I want to thoroughly crush it, shred it to pieces, and leave no trace behind. I think fire presents the best option—set every person, every building, every single thing ablaze. Take it out by the roots.” Despite the brutality of her words, her expression remained placid. “I never sensed that level of conviction in Mei Mitsuya’s plans. She was angry, but she still held sentiment for the Village.”

“And did Mei Mitsuya ever tell you that?”

“No, not at all. It’s just my personal doubts.”

Hotori Oze’s opinion was new to Kayu Saitoh. Whether or not the woman was right, finding homesickness and affection for the Village in the chief’s demeanor was a feat of which Kayu Saitoh was incapable.

Hotori Oze continued, “Mei Mitsuya ate the bear meat and gave it to the Hawks. That’s why I have my doubts. All I care about is bringing an overwhelming assault against the Village. I’m not interested in bears, and I don’t want to eat bear meat of dubious quality. Regardless of the source of the plague, Mei Mitsuya’s half-hearted approach got us into this squabble over the bear meat, and now she has to stage this chicanery. In the final moments before our attack, she got careless. A person like that wouldn’t—and
couldn’t—
burn the Village roots and all.”

“What could have made you start thinking this way—to talk about burning the Village roots and all?”

“Don’t you understand?” Hotori Oze arched an eyebrow. “I hate it. I hate that Village so much I can’t stand it. It makes me feel sick. It offends me. It disgusts me. The place I used to live wasn’t like that nasty Village; it was beautiful and pure. Your Village doesn’t hold a shred of anything of beauty; where I grew up was filled with nothing else.”

“Shut up. I’ve heard enough.”

“What’s wrong, Kayu Saitoh? You sound angry. What, do you love that nasty Village?”

“Stop it. Stop babbling like a little girl.” Kayu Saitoh’s hand reflexively balled into a fist. Hotori Oze regarded her with a cool gaze, not making any attempt to retreat or smooth over what she’d said. Kayu Saitoh could no longer decide what to do with her fist, so she walked away instead.

Nineteen women—Naki Sokabe, Itsuru Obuchi, Hono Ishizuka, Kotei Hoshii, Maka Kikuchi, Ate Amami, Chinu Nitta, Inui Makabe, Tai Komaki, Koto Onodera, Tahi Kitajima, Ume Itano, Kan Tominaga, Usuma Tsutsumi, Tema Tsukamoto, Tamishi Minamide, Tsusa Hiiragi, Ire Tachibana, and Kushi Tachibana—were in the clearing. In solemn silence, they dutifully sharpened the knife that was to kill Makura Katsuragawa and Somo Izumi. Each woman hammered the blunt stone knife with the sharpening stone a few times, then was relieved by the woman next in line behind her, who would hammer the knife a few more times, then be relieved by the woman next in line, and so on. The women would repeat this process until the knife was sharp. This act of mutual complicity disturbed Kayu Saitoh. The women put on a display of being willing to get their hands dirty, but Kayu Saitoh saw through the transparent ruse—their actions were in fact diluting the crime—and she found it reprehensible.

While Dendera headed down its new course, Kayu Saitoh went on a solitary walk.

She didn’t have any destination. Without the strength to return home and choose indifference alongside Shigi Yamamoto, without the courage to cut through the crowd and enter the manor, and without the resolve to visit Makura Katsuragawa and Somo Izumi’s prison, she simply wandered. The heavy snow that blanketed Dendera glittered in the morning sunlight. Only after she’d already walked part of the way did Kayu Saitoh realize her legs were taking her to the burial ground. When it came into view, she saw the area had been put back into order, perhaps through the employment of mass graves. The burial stones had been returned to their proper places, the wooden grave markers had been exchanged for new ones, and the scattered bones had been reburied.

Someone was standing there, facing the graveyard.

Kayu Saitoh was still some distance away, but somehow she knew the woman was Soh Kiriyama. She calmly approached and called her name. When the woman turned, it was indeed her.

A gentle look came to Soh Kiriyama’s grimy, unwashed face. She said, “It seems you couldn’t stand it either,” and returned her gaze to the graveyard.

Realization of the truth in Soh Kiriyama’s words brought some small measure of order to Kayu Saitoh’s emotions.

“What you did ended up being all for nothing,” Kayu Saitoh said, standing beside the woman. Both of them stared into the graveyard. “You know, don’t you? Your sister was killed to pacify those who were terrified of the plague.”

“There’s something I want to tell you, Kayu Saitoh.”

“What’s that?”

“Yesterday, I vomited blood.”

“What?” Kayu Saitoh blurted.

“Keep your voice down,” Soh Kiriyama said with a smile. “My bones might be getting that same crack my sister’s have.”

After a pause, Kayu Saitoh said, “Don’t tell anyone.”

“Either way, I’ll soon be found out. It’s only a matter of time.”

Kayu Saitoh cursed, then gritted her teeth as if she could grind away the senselessness of their situation. “Why is this happening? Why are we all dying? After the bear, next comes the plague?”

“This time, people will be killing people.”

Soh Kiriyama stared at the burial grounds and the graves in which now rested the women who had lived in Dendera and died in Dendera.

Nothing could be done for those who had already perished. They knew nothing and could do nothing as their flesh and bones disintegrated into the burial dirt. Kayu Saitoh glanced at her right arm. Emaciated with age to skin and bone, it wasn’t all that different from those of the dead, but she was alive, and she felt an urge to move it. She sensed a similar urge for action within Soh Kiriyama. Even while her disease could kill her at any moment, she emanated a will for action; a resolve to do something before she became no more useful than those who rested in the graveyard.

Without turning to look at the woman, Kayu Saitoh asked, “You’ve gone quiet. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about my sister, myself, the plague … and, well, a lot of things.”

“Have you come to a conclusion?”

“I’ll have a hard time letting them kill me without a fight. I suppose that counts as a conclusion. What about you, Kayu Saitoh? Aren’t you going to leave Dendera and find your death?”

“Aren’t you the one who told me to live?”

“When I said that, I didn’t know I had the plague.”

“I don’t see how your having the plague has anything at all to do with my staying in Dendera.”

Softly, Soh Kiriyama said, “You’re right, it doesn’t.”