Dendera (23 page)

In a contest of simple physical strength, she knew she was far more powerful. But she understood that when the Two-Legs used those strange sticks that spat fire, or when they presented her with a situation beyond her comprehension, her prospects of victory diminished. This time, Redback had been utterly confounded, and she didn’t get in a single attack on the Two-Legs. The defeat, a savage blow to Redback’s pride, brought back the fear she’d once held toward the Two-Legs. Raindrops penetrated Redback’s wounds and produced tingling pain. To relieve her stress, Redback pounded a fir tree, but the trunk developed only a single, paltry crack. Redback realized that she was beginning to weaken from starvation. After her right eye had been crushed, all she’d been able to put into her stomach was the inner bark of some fir trees and water. Malnutrition blurred the vision of her single remaining eye.

Redback was headed toward death.

Having failed to obtain any meat, Redback pondered whether she should relinquish the mountain. She had nowhere else to go, but she could no longer stretch out the meager offerings of this blighted land, and she couldn’t predict the Two-Legs’ next move. It was getting harder to stay alive here.

Weary, Redback slumped over. This was an unpardonable posture for one who was sovereign over her surroundings, but the simple act of walking fatigued her. She sniffed with her chestnut nose, but her sense of smell had dulled, unable to register anything but the scent of the rain. Her dark, reddish-brown fur, malnourished, failed to repel the rain, and her body was losing its warmth. She forced strength into her four legs and managed to raise herself. Instinct alerted her that if she lay down now, she would freeze to death before she could starve. Her feral essence suddenly swelled, latching on to the rage she held toward the Two-Legs. Her strength had hit rock-bottom, but her rage was inexhaustible. She turned this rage into power and stood firm on her back legs, lifting herself upright, and she struck at the cracked fir tree. It snapped in half.

She learned that anger could fuel her body.

As if testing this new knowledge, she focused strength into her front legs, and even her mind returned to that vivid thought:
Kill and devour.
This mountain did not belong to the Two-Legs. Through her rage, Redback vowed: as long as they strode about reeking of arrogance, as long as she, who killed and devoured all, lived, she would never back down. This was her creed, singular and absolute. Her family had been living in the mountain long, long before the Two-Legs came. Redback’s family lived in the mountain and ruled the mountain. Her rage against these invaders was only proper. Repelling trespassers from their territory was what the creatures of the wild did. But this time, Redback had yielded in retreat, because the Two-Legs had changed their tactics. Now, she thought, she needed to change
her
tactics too.

W
hen morning came, the rain turned abruptly to snow and again colored the Mountain in pure white. The downpour had furrowed the earth, making pathways for red-ochre-colored rivulets of thawed snow, but these were quickly covered over anew. The rain and fog had lifted, and the snow finished falling, and under a clear sky, five women—Kayu Saitoh, Kyu Hoshina, Tema Tsukamoto, Tsusa Hiiragi, and Itsuru Obuchi—ascended the Mountain using wooden spears as walking sticks. They had two goals: find the latest Climber and procure food along the way. Though Dendera’s leadership had changed, those two duties remained a constant. Kayu Saitoh felt somewhat excited to be joining the search party for the first time. Her attention was unfocused, and her gaze flitted here and there. Gone from her mind were any thoughts of the bear’s attack the night before or even of the party’s primary mission to gather food.

A smile spread on Kyu Hoshina’s darkly tanned face, and she said, “Kayu, nobody’s going to be over that way. Those are just rocks.”

Trying to conceal her cheerful mood, Kayu Saitoh spoke softly and said, “I know that much.”

“Well, today is really about gathering food. The search is only incidental.”

“Why? If we don’t find her quickly, she’ll die. Not everyone can survive on the Mountain like you.”

“Of course I want to find her, but if we run into her escort, it’ll be huge trouble.”

Kyu Hoshina kept a quick pace, as if she were trying to outrun the dazzling light of the midday sun.

The Climbs were performed between afternoon and evening. The reason for this was simple: to allow safe descent for the person who carried their elder up the Mountain. This consequently afforded the abandoned elders the chance to descend as well, but no matter what their circumstances—how familiar they were with animal trails, for example—the journey was not something seniors clad only in a single white robe could surmount alone. That said, some did return. Their stories had been told repeatedly to Kayu Saitoh as shameful things, and she had seen it happen once herself.

It was a woman who had been married into a charcoal-maker’s house and had returned, crying and looking monstrous, to the Village. The townspeople captured her immediately and took days killing her, in a process much like torture, as if in emphasis that they would not under any circumstances permit her to go to Paradise. Her corpse was broken into pieces and put in with the night soil. Witnessing this as a young woman, Kayu Saitoh thought how disgraceful it was to end up not in Paradise but in night soil, and she vowed deeply that once she had Climbed the Mountain, she would die with purity. And when she turned seventy, she was carried to the Mountain. As was the case in most families, her own son took her. That was a son’s duty. When his parents turned seventy, he carried them to the Mountain. When he turned seventy, he would be carried by his son, and that son would be carried by the next. Through this process, the Village’s population and food supply remained stable.

When it came to Climbing the Mountain, love was immaterial.

The people of the Village felt affection and attachment toward their parents—after all, they were human—but Climbing the Mountain was sacrosanct. Refusal only meant the ruination of their houses; there was no option but to do it. Consequently, the people of the Village excelled in blocking out any and all thoughts relating to Climbing the Mountain. Some cried as they carried their parents to the Mountain, but none showed mercy, and their legs never, ever stopped moving into the heart of the Mountain. Kayu Saitoh’s son hadn’t cried, but she could feel his back trembling underneath her. This display of emotion hadn’t particularly bothered her, but she did think that he had no reason to be sad, as she would be arriving in Paradise only a little earlier than he.

But Kayu Saitoh was still alive and feeling eager in her search for another woman who had been carried to the Mountain as she had. She wondered what would be the creed of the woman they would rescue and bring back to Dendera. Would she rejoice as most women did, would she rage like Kayu Saitoh had, or would she react in some different way?

Now that establishing an aspiration was Kayu Saitoh’s foremost priority, she hoped to hear something new. Of course, that something new might not necessarily complement her current state of mind, but she couldn’t help but hope regardless. As she walked through the Mountain, she tried to picture the faces of the other women who had approached seventy alongside her, but among the people of the Village, she had only been close to Kura Kuroi, and her mind came up empty. Still, her hopeful feeling persisted.

Kayu Saitoh kept walking. Her feet were steady on the snowy path, due only in part to experience. The sureness of her step was testament to her immersion in Dendera.

In time, the animal trail merged into the incline of a ravine.

The ravine’s base lay fairly low to the right, and to the left was a steep rise nearly as tall as a fir tree. The five women proceeded single file along the treacherous path—if it could even be called a path. Kyu Hoshina led, followed by Itsuru Obuchi, Kayu Saitoh, Tsusa Hiiragi, and Tema Tsukamoto in that order. Kayu Saitoh looked down the ravine where the expanse of snow-covered firs made a white forest.

Then she said, “I just thought of something … something I’ve been meaning to ask.” She stared into the back of Itsuru Obuchi’s straw coat. “Say we find someone Climbing the Mountain. What if it’s a man? Do we kill him?”

“That would be too dangerous,” Itsuru Obuchi said. The woman was trembling, perhaps struggling to stay on the narrow trail. “We won’t do anything like that. We just quietly leave so that we’re not noticed. We forget about him.”

“Men can eat shit,” Tema Tsukamoto said menacingly from the rear. “It’s men who forced us here. Like we’d ever let them into Dendera.”

“But both men and women Climb the Mountain all the same,” Kayu Saitoh said.

With surprise in her voice, Tema Tsukamoto said, “Don’t tell me you’re considering rescuing the men too.”

“They might be good in a fight,” Kayu offered. “After all, there’s only nineteen of us left in Dendera.”

“We have our trap,” Kyu Hoshina said from the front. “We’d need a better reason than that to include men in Dendera. After all, we drove off the bear—next time, we’ll burn the beast alive. It’ll be brutal.”

None of the women rebuked her words as being too optimistic, and Kayu Saitoh for one held the firm belief that the bear could be defeated. With the women’s newfound confidence after the previous night’s events, the notion of accepting men for their combat strength had no room to propagate. Besides, Kayu Saitoh’s feelings toward men were ambivalent. If someone else had proposed the same idea to her, she might have rejected it based on emotion rather than logic.

Thinking of the Village inevitably—if not immediately—caused her feelings toward the men to surface. The men occupied the core of the Village; everything was decided by them, and everything proceeded according to them. Kayu Saitoh hadn’t the perspective to find anything unusual in that arrangement, and it didn’t bother her that the men were in charge. Yet there were more than a few rules made solely at the whim of the males, and she disapproved of how they treated the women (the use of monthly huts, for one). But as a woman, she was unable to raise her grievances. For one matter, talk would change nothing, and in many ways, the women relied on the men to keep alive. Kayu Saitoh had difficulty turning her feelings toward the men into hate. She understood, intuitively, why the men couldn’t be allowed into Dendera, but it was difficult to apply that notion, that feeling, directly upon the men who lived in the Village. She had for a fact lived under their protection. She had experienced being a woman; in her younger years, they were kind to her, and she had come to know several of them. In all these things, she had been happy. The other women shouldn’t have been much different. Of the Village women, Mei Mitsuya alone had taken offense, and she stirred up the others to demand an improvement in their lives. But after she was taken to the Mountain, the commotion was settled in a perfunctory manner. Such was the level of concern among the men and women alike. Moreover, under the reality that Climbing the Mountain affected both genders equally, no turmoil broke out.

Seeking to identify the feeling that filled her, Kayu Saitoh asked, “Would you just quietly leave if you found your husband abandoned on the Mountain?”

“My husband?” Itsuru Obuchi said wistfully. “My husband Climbed the Mountain long ago.”

“What if he hadn’t Climbed the Mountain, and he was still alive?”

“What would you do, Kayu?”

“I …” Kayu Saitoh tried to think of her husband, whose Climb was four years ago, but the answer was not one she could find in an instant. “I … think I would want to save him. Of course.”

Behind Kayu Saitoh, Tsusa Hiiragi said, “If it was one of the younger men, I would.”

Tema Tsukamoto scoffed. “Hah, like they’d do anything with an old woman like you. You can talk like that when you’ve dusted off the cobwebs.”

The women, Kayu Saitoh excluded, shared a vulgar cackle. They seemed to hope ribald comments would let them sidestep the question at hand, but that kind of ruse wouldn’t last forever. Soon their laughter abated, and they walked the trail in silence. It was an uncomfortable silence. The irregular crunch of ice under straw sandals, snow falling from tree branches, the blowing wind; these were the only sounds around them. Worse, the women were empty-handed. They found no wild rabbits, no birds, no abandoned elder of either sex. Giving up, the five dragged their weary bodies back down the trail. It was a homecoming laden with the weight of their failure.

Leading the return, a bewildered Kyu Hoshina said, “What’s going on? This hasn’t happened before. I’ve never seen the Mountain like this—and I lived up here for three years. Even in the great famine ten years ago, there were still rabbits.”

From behind, Tsusa Hiiragi said, “I know we’re in the middle of winter, but it really is unusual to be unable to find a single rabbit. Did they all die off?”

Kayu Saitoh shared their unease. With the absence of even the birds’ chirping, she wondered if the Mountain’s bounty had exhausted, leading to the starvation of all its many creatures.

“We had that big unseasonal storm yesterday,” Itsuru Obuchi muttered. “Another great famine might be coming.”

The women’s displeasure at least made their descent more lively as they all complained together. They were all hungry. They daydreamed of sweet, fatty meat. Their displeasure broadened to include talk of attacking the Village. As Kyu Hoshina followed the trail, she jokingly suggested that they should assault the Village themselves. Itsuru Obuchi shook her head slightly and warned her to be quiet.

“Kyu, you mustn’t say that sort of thing in Dendera. We’ll overlook it here, but just see what happens if you let Masari catch wind of it. Who knows what your punishment would be.”

“Oh, that’s right, most of you lot are long-time Doves,” Kyu Hoshina said, sounding displeased. “With Mei dead and Masari the new leader, the Doves have it pretty easy now, don’t they?”

“Don’t you use Mei’s name like that,
little girl,
” Itsuru Obuchi said.

Kyu Hoshina stopped in place and remarked that age was irrelevant here, and the four women lined up behind her had to stop as well.

“Irrelevant? Nonsense!” Itsuru Obuchi was shaking slightly. “Of anyone alive in Dendera today, I arrived the soonest after Mei. That’s how long we were together. Yes, I’m a Dove, but I won’t let you mock her name.”

“Mei is dead,” Kyu Hoshina said without turning. “You need to let go sometime. It’s getting pathetic.”

But Kayu Saitoh was the one to respond. “Stop it. You don’t have the right to talk like that.”

“Kayu,” Kyu Hoshina said, still facing forward, “whatever do you mean by ‘right’? Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

“You’ve been completely taken in by Masari Shiina. Itsuru Obuchi has been a Dove for a long time, yet you were a Hawk, through and through. But now you’ve reversed your attitude and are working on the Doves’ behalf. Kyu Hoshina,
you’re
the one who’s pathetic.”

Immediately Kyu Hoshina responded, “I’m not working on the Doves’ behalf. I’m helping to kill the bear. That’s different than working for the Doves. And can’t the same be said for you? Wouldn’t you say this foraging expedition is on the Doves’ behalf?”

“I’m talking about attitude. There’s not a shred of beauty in you, standing there saying hurtful things. It’s a shame; when we were looking for Sasaka Yagi’s body and you stared down that bear, you were so beautiful.”

“Drop it,” Tsusa Hiiragi cut in.

Without a word, Kyu Hoshina began to walk. Kayu Saitoh couldn’t tell if her words had given the woman something to think about, or if she was simply thinking about Sasaka Yagi.

Again silence ruled over their group. Whether Hawk or Dove, each woman had her own opinion about Masari Shiina taking over after Mei Mitsuya and the Doves gaining dominance over the Hawks. Being neither Hawk nor Dove, Kayu Saitoh’s situation was a little different, but her mood sank, and a fermentative warmth spread in her empty stomach, accompanied by sharp, acidic pangs.