Dendera (32 page)

“That’s some resolve,” Hikari Asami said, taking out the last of the dried fish from her basket. “I don’t intend on dying here. I’m eating the safe food.”

“As you should.”

Kayu Saitoh forced down the cold potato.

Hotori Oze watched her for a while, then clicked her tongue, swiped a potato from Kayu Saitoh’s basket, and stuffed it in her mouth. She chuckled and said cheerfully, “It doesn’t matter if
I
eat it!”

When the morning brightened, the women resumed their march. Their bodies were frozen to the core; their noses had gone numb as if someone had given them a good, hard punch; and their hands were stiff; but the women didn’t—and couldn’t—let that stop them. They pushed through bamboo grasses and climbed over haphazardly growing bushes. Kayu Saitoh had never been this deep into the Mountain. As she gazed around at the unfamiliar scenery, she ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, still able to taste the potatoes, and knew that she could never go back to Dendera. The Mountain became ever more steep, now absent of anything that could be called a path. The uneven ground hid beneath the snow, and each time she stumbled over an indentation or a break in the rock, she tumbled and hit the ground hard. But no one criticized her, for Hotori Oze and Hikari Asami also struggled, even with the benefit of all four working limbs. To her irritation, Kayu Saitoh realized that her forehead and arms were bleeding from various scrapes, but she didn’t stop moving. Punishing her body, she climbed and climbed along paths that weren’t really paths, with no end in sight, when suddenly the women reached an open space. Kayu Saitoh gasped.

They had reached the Destination, where all who turned seventy were abandoned.

Kayu Saitoh had never seen the Destination in broad daylight like this, but that wasn’t the only difference. With few trees providing cover to the open space, the direct sunlight had melted most of the snow, revealing countless bleached-white skeletons scattered about.

Though some bones stood out, namely skulls and ribcages, there were many she couldn’t identify, including some crushed into a fine white powder that blanketed the earth in place of the snow. Her breath caught at her first true sight of the place where she had awaited death. Something in the shade of a fir tree caught her eye, and when she looked she saw it was a skeleton seated in a formal position. Its hands seemed to be clasped in prayer.

Kayu Saitoh’s feet moved mechanically into the center of the Destination. Bones cracked and popped beneath her feet. Though worried that she might step on the skeleton of someone she knew, she nevertheless proceeded into the clearing, when something else caught her eye, this time in the shade of a rock. It was a fresh corpse, and one that Kayu Saitoh thought had come after her Climb. She tried to get a look at its face, but wild animals—maybe even the night ravens—had picked it apart and left nothing recognizable.

The women put the Destination behind them. Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami remained silent, but anger had stirred Hotori Oze into becoming even more talkative than before. The woman’s earlobes turned red from more than just the cold air, and she bellowed and yelled.

“How can this happen? Climbing the Mountain always makes me mad, but I’ve never been this furious in my life. It’s unforgivable. Isn’t it?” Her breath huffing and white, Hotori Oze struck a fir tree with her spear. “To abandon us … to abandon us … it’s insane! It makes me sick. Everyone in that damn Village makes me sick. What’s wrong with their heads?”

“I understand how you feel,” Hikari Asami said calmly, “but be quiet. Someone from the Village might be nearby, Climbing the Mountain.”

Hotori Oze shouted louder. “Then we’ll kill him! Unbelievable. I can’t understand it. What is it with that place—that Village? Where I used to live, yeah, we didn’t do anything like this. Do you know why everyone from the Village is crazy? Because you’re all destitute. Every single person in that Village is mad. It’s nothing like where I used to live. What a sorry and pathetic excuse for a village. That’s why you’ve all lost your minds!”

Seeing tears begin to glimmer in Hotori Oze’s sharp, hawklike eyes, Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami swallowed their own emotions and waited for Hotori Oze to calm down.

Once she had done so, the women proceeded again, but now it was different.

Now they were searching for the bear.

Compared to the vastness of the Mountain, even the bear’s massive form was a mere speck, making the search one of great difficulty. But Kayu Saitoh’s plan required them to find the bear, so they all searched intently for any trace of the creature. Hikari Asami’s knowledge and experience with the bear was a boon. The woman had assured them that they would find a place where the bear had torn strips of bark from a tree or where it had lain to rest in the snow. But Kayu Saitoh and Hotori Oze hadn’t her skill and could hardly expect to notice such minute clues. Time passed with no progress, and when night came upon them, the women had nothing to show for it. The three women tucked themselves away in a natural hollow formed by the roots of a tall tree, and there they hastily took their cold, paltry dinner. Darkness covered the Mountain, and the women gave up their search for the day. To conserve their strength, they tucked themselves in their straw coats and lay down inside the hollow. Kayu Saitoh groaned. Exhaustion tormented her with a numbness that ran from the top of her head down to her toes. Their hollow didn’t provide complete protection from the Mountain’s harsh winds, and the women had no fire. As they endured the biting cold, they forced themselves into slumber. Kayu Saitoh never felt like she had gone to sleep, but at some point she noticed that dawn was approaching, and she arose to see how her body was doing. Her joints hurt as if they had all been broken, and her throat was swollen. She decided that the swelling was an ignoble thing and kept it to herself.

Their second day on the Mountain began. Yet neither on this day did they find any sign of the bear. Time kept on passing. Kayu Saitoh was getting anxious. She started to worry that she might die on the Mountain without ever finding the bear. At her core, that didn’t particularly bother her, but somewhere within her, some part of her she didn’t have the words to describe forcefully rejected that end. She felt exasperated by this stubborn part of her, but rather than fight it, she accepted it and kept on searching for the bear.

After some time, Hotori Oze vomited blood.

She coughed and coughed and then collapsed on the spot.

Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami ran over to her but could do nothing aside from support her back and feed her snow. Hotori Oze threw up a mixture of blood and snow and told the others to leave her be.

“What are you doing?” she said, clearly in pain. “Hurry up and find that bear. You don’t have time to look after me. You know you don’t. Right?”

With Hotori Oze unable to walk, Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami carried her to the hollow before again setting out to wander the Mountain. Then, Kayu Saitoh found an odd-looking fir tree. The hard, dark-brown outer bark had been torn away, and several claw marks had been gouged into the softer inner layer. Kayu Saitoh hurriedly fetched Hikari Asami, but the woman hardly glanced at the fir tree before announcing that it was an old mark. But then Hikari Asami ran her hand along the wood, said that the splintering on the underside of the claw marks meant it was the work of a bear, and offered some encouragement to Kayu Saitoh that the bear could be nearby. The trail ended there, however, and the following search was fruitless. The sky, glimpsed through the gaps between the trees, had turned to orange, and the wind of the Mountain spurred on the night. Thus did the second day end with still nothing to show for it.

“That damned bear,” Kayu Saitoh muttered impatiently. “It shows up whenever it damn well pleases, but when we go looking for it, it’s nowhere.”

Matter-of-factly, Hikari Asami said, “That’s … how animals are apt to be.”

“What should we do? We could go back to Dendera, but I don’t want to.”

“If we ration our food, we can last for several days. Our strength is the problem. Can you still move, Kayu Saitoh?”

“Don’t mock me.” Kayu Saitoh swung her left arm around wildly. “Hotori Oze is the one who can’t move. I don’t think she has much time left.”

“We can’t do anything for her. There’s no way to save her.” Hikari Asami kicked at the snow at her feet. “At least we were able to bring her a little closer to the Village … I think, to her, that’s better than dying in Dendera.”

“Do we really have to leave her there?”

“It’s what she wants of us.”

“Let’s go back to the hollow for the night,” Kayu Saitoh suggested. “It’s too dark for us to find anything out here—and I want to check in on Hotori Oze.”

Back at the hollow, Hotori Oze was lying where they had left her. Traces of frost ran along her face, where it stuck out from the straw, but she was breathing, albeit shallowly, in her sleep. Careful not to wake her, Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami quietly began to eat. The potatoes were too frozen to bite through, so Kayu Saitoh angrily hurled them away. The potatoes vanished into the mountainside and the quickly encroaching darkness. Merely throwing the potatoes had left Kayu Saitoh out of breath. When Hikari Asami had asked if she could still move, Kayu Saitoh had blustered, hoping to mislead the woman, but in truth her strength was almost entirely gone. Her throat’s swelling had worsened, the stump of her right arm hurt, and her legs were exhausted, puddlelike and unresponsive. Even if they could find the bear, her plan wouldn’t work if she didn’t have the stamina to carry it out. She exhaled into her cupped hand in an attempt to keep herself warm, but it had little effect.

Night fell. Waiting for sleep that wouldn’t come, Kayu Saitoh curled up inside the hollow. The tips of her gray hair and her eyebrows were frozen stiff, and her fingernails had started to crack, possibly from the cold.

Hikari Asami said, “So you’re still awake,” and sat down beside her. “If you don’t sleep, you’ll die.”

“I’m scared to die.”

The words came out of their own accord.

“Is that so,” Hikari said with only a nod. “You’re scared?”

“I’m scared,” Kayu Saitoh repeated, still curled up in a ball. “I’ve never really used my head for much, so I don’t know much about Climbing the Mountain. I don’t know much about Paradise, either. All I want is to die. And yet I’m afraid of dying.”

“You’re … stating the obvious. Everyone’s afraid to die.”

With newfound surprise, Kayu Saitoh said, “Yeah, I suppose I am stating the obvious.”

Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami didn’t say anything of note after that. Having abandoned the possibility of sleep, the two simply watched the dawn’s gradual arrival.

When the first light came streaming in to dispel a part of the darkness, Hotori Oze awoke. Staggeringly gaunt, her face had lost so much color that the crevices of her wrinkles now stood out in harsh contrast.

Her eyes slitted, Hotori Oze mumbled as if in delirium, “I’m back … Wonderful. Wonderful. I finally made it back. I made it back …”

“She’s hallucinating,” Kayu Saitoh said, dispirited. “She’s done now.”

“Hmm? Kayu Saitoh, what are you doing here? What’s going on?” Hotori Oze’s eyes squinted with incomprehension as she looked at Kayu Saitoh. “You can’t be here. This is where I used to live.”

“She’s having a dream—a dream of when she was happy,” Kayu Saitoh said, realizing that with the potatoes in her own stomach, the time would come when she would meet this same fate. “A shameful thing, but there’s no shame in it now.”

“I don’t think she’s looking at us.”

Hikari Asami was right; Hotori Oze’s eyes were moving randomly, and it was hard to tell if she was seeing anything or not.

“Take a look, Kayu Saitoh,” Hotori Oze whispered faintly. “What do you think? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? This, this is how bountiful the place I lived was. It’s nothing like the Village. Listen to all the birds. And we have squirrels and rabbits in abundance. Even the moles are fat … making all their holes in the dirt. Just a little farther ahead, there’s a little field, where in the spring, butterbur and horsetail and plants of all kinds grow in plenty. Fish swim in our mossy river—lots of them, and all of them big. Carp with bright green scales, plump redfin … Look, you can see them over there. I really enjoy trying to catch them as they splash about.”

“She’s completely lost it,” Kayu Saitoh muttered hopelessly. “Carp and redfin don’t swim the same waters.”

“My home … is not like your Village. It’s not squalid.” Hotori Oze’s vacant gaze roamed about. “Even the mud has turtles and eels. When you step in it, it’s funny how they all scatter. That’s in the place I lived. Your Village doesn’t have that. And everyone wears beautiful kimono, and they’re always smiling. Always. And in the spring, the butterbur bloom red and blue flowers, and …”

The talk of her dream was interrupted when she vomited blood. It came in a retching fit, sullying her own face with splashes of red. Kayu Saitoh and Hikari Asami tried wiping her clean but had to give up when the blood kept coming.

Hotori Oze’s face twitched into something of a grin. “Kayu Saitoh, I’m glad … I was able to show you. How about it? What do you think of my old home? It was beautiful, right? It was truly beautiful, right?”

“I know. Don’t say another word.”

Hotori Oze likely didn’t intend on obeying Kayu Saitoh’s command, but she closed her lips until only her front teeth showed, and she took several deep, loud breaths, and then moved no more.

Hikari Asami watched over her until the end, then said, “We’re burying her. If anyone Climbing the Mountain finds her … it’d mean trouble.”

The hollow was free of snow, and burying her wasn’t that difficult in and of itself, but it was gloomy work, and one that required perseverance. When the two women had scooped out just enough soil to fit Hotori Oze entirely, they lowered her body and covered it with dirt. Kayu Saitoh wished she could have left a gravestone or wooden marker, however makeshift, but she had to abandon the thought. As Hikari Asami had said, someone Climbing the Mountain might find it. When the two women finished their work, Kayu Saitoh, completely exhausted, slumped back down to sit, even though this was only the beginning of their third day on the Mountain.