Dendera (5 page)

“I must admit that the Hawks do have the upper hand at the moment, unfortunately,” Hono Ishizuka said, almost apologetically. “I suppose it’s inevitable, as Ms. Mei Mitsuya herself is the faction leader. But what about you, Ms. Kayu? What is your position? Which side will you take? Are you a Hawk or a Dove?”

“Neither.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I won’t be attacking the Village. And I won’t be working to make Dendera a better place.”

“So what will you do?”

“Why don’t you die?” Kayu Saitoh said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m saying you should die,” Kayu Saitoh said, glaring at Hono Ishizuka. “We’re all over seventy. We shouldn’t be alive. Don’t you feel ashamed? Haven’t you let yourself down?”

“That’s a pretty mean-spirited attitude to take,” Hono Ishizuka said quietly.

“No. I’m not being mean. I just think it’s a terrible shame that you don’t all just die. Hawks, Doves, the lot of you.” With that, Kayu started walking away.

“Where are you going?” Hono Ishizuka asked.

“To watch this so-called drill.”

“Well, take care,” Hono Ishizuka said. “I’ll look after your coneys for you.”

The Hawks, or rather the twenty-eight old women, were gathered in the clearing. They were lined up in three rows, practicing thrusting their flimsy-looking wooden spears in rough time to Mei Mitsuya’s count. Once again, Kayu Saitoh was embarrassed on their behalf at the pathetic display.

When Mei Mitsuya noticed Kayu Saitoh, she ordered the women to continue and then turned her gummy, brown-toothed smile to Kayu Saitoh to ask in her usual barking voice whether Kayu Saitoh had come to practice with them.

“No, I’m just here to watch,” Kayu Saitoh said.

“Just look at them! My brave little soldiers,” Mei Mitsuya said, surveying the stick-wielding old women with pride. “This is my army that’ll bring down the Village.”

“Mei Mitsuya. Do you remember the Mountain Barring we had in the Village?”

“Mountain Barring, eh? That brings back memories,” Mei Mitsuya said.

“I was only a little girl when it happened, but I still remember every detail,” Kayu Saitoh said, vivid memories flooding back to her as she spoke. “The Villagers who destroyed the salt merchant’s house and beat the couple to death were determined. They were strong.”

“What’re you trying to say?” Mei Mitsuya asked.

“This group of half-dead hags don’t stand a chance against them,” Kayu Saitoh said. She ignored the half dozen or so pairs of eyes that were now glaring at her.

“You’re forgetting that I was the one who roused the women of the Village at the time! They didn’t want to go through with the punishment at first! Yes,
I
was their leader. And I’ll be leading the attack again, except this time against the whole Village. How can we possibly fail?” Mei Mitsuya was in an elated mood. “At that time, all the people in the Village felt was anger, anger that their food was stolen. Anger can be channelled! It gives people strength. Strength enough to run riot through the Village!”

Mei Mitsuya opened her large mouth and laughed triumphantly. Kayu Saitoh couldn’t think of anything to say back, and she just stared at Mei Mitsuya’s open, red-raw mouth.

The twenty-eight women continued their drill. Their movements might have been stiff, a farcical parody of a real army, but Mei Mitsuya was right at least about the anger that dwelled in their eyes, smoldering away and driving them on. Kayu Saitoh didn’t think that would be enough to affect the outcome of an attack on the Village, though. Kayu Saitoh knew all too well that back in the Village life was hard, that there was an undercurrent of resentment and anger running through everybody’s lives, whether they were old or young, man or woman, and that even so nothing ever changed. The old women here should have known for themselves that anger alone was never enough to change anything. Perhaps they had forgotten or were willing themselves to try and forget, for there was nothing half-hearted about the effort that these women were putting into the drill, even if the outcome was risible. Kayu Saitoh had seen enough, and she turned away from the drill to go back to the home that she had been assigned to.

They called it a home, at least, but although it might have been big enough to be called a house, it was basically just a makeshift shelter consisting of planks of wood and straw—nothing compared to Mei Mitsuya’s residence or the storehouses. This particular excuse of a house was residence to Kayu Saitoh, Ate Amami, Shigi Yamamoto, and Inui Makabe.

Only Shigi Yamamoto was in, sitting in front of the fire in the center, muttering something unintelligible to herself under her breath.

Kayu Saitoh removed her straw shoes and sat down by the hearth, opposite Shigi Yamamoto, and picked out a potato from the embers. Food was strictly rationed in Dendera, and each person was allowed one potato a day. The potato was hot and brought a twinge of pain to Kayu Saitoh’s frozen hands where it came into contact with them and thawed them out, but even that pain felt good as Kayu Saitoh split the potato open. A warm, savory cloud of moisture rose up, making Kayu Saitoh’s stomach rumble, and she took a big bite. Having said that, Kayu Saitoh had lost most of her teeth, so it was more a case of trying to crush the potato between her dribbling gums.

Kayu Saitoh glanced over at Shigi Yamamoto as she ate the potato, but Shigi Yamamoto simply stared into the fireplace without appearing to notice her. Shigi Yamamoto was always lost in her reveries. She would feed herself occasionally, but other than that she hardly did anything—never talked, never went outside the house. She just waited for the days to end. Even so, Kayu Saitoh thought she understood why Shigi Yamamoto acted the way she did.

Kayu Saitoh had decided that Shigi Yamamoto must have wanted to Climb the Mountain.

Shigi Yamamoto was about seventeen years older than Kayu Saitoh, and Kayu Saitoh remembered her from their Village days as a lively and articulate person. Her memory of Shigi Yamamoto was that she married into a household with a fine herb garden and that Shigi Yamamoto took great delight in cultivating it. Not that you would have known any of this to look at her now.

The sun set, and it was time for dinner. Rations in Dendera were never enough, so to make what little there was go further, everything was thrown into a communal pot on the fire. There were no such things as iron pots in Dendera, of course, so it was more like a makeshift stone bowl, hollowed out using bone and flint. It was a poor substitute for the real thing, and it took a long time to heat up, unevenly. The broth itself was made of water, the day’s catch of coney (both the flesh and the bones), a few vegetables, and corn dumplings. The old women huddled around the fire, scrunched up from cold and fatigue from the days’ exertions, and all went calm as they focused single-mindedly on the task of slurping up the bland, tasteless broth. An eerie quiet fell on Dendera.

After that, the old women all went to sleep before the next bout of hunger pangs had time to fall on them. Kayu Saitoh tried to do the same and burrowed herself into the straw, but the biting cold that gnawed at her fingers and froze her rump was too much, and she opened her eyes. The cold had never been too much of a problem back in the Village, but here it was a matter of life and death. The only clothes the women had were the gossamer-thin white ceremonial robes they had worn to Climb the Mountain, supplemented by whatever straw overcoats they had been able to rustle up without real tools, and the huts they lived in were so flimsy the roofs had to be regularly cleared of snow lest they collapse under its weight. The cold was ever present. It suffused their lives.

Because Kayu Saitoh lacked the fiery determination of the Hawks who lived for revenge on the Village, or even the quiet resolve of the Doves who were passionate about turning Dendera into something safe and stable, she could not comprehend what possessed people to put up with this level of suffering and hardship just so they could extend their miserable lives that little bit further. She needed to consider how she would choose to live her life from now on. It was the first time ever that she was faced with such a choice. When she lowered her eyelids again she saw the figure of Kura Kuroi floating up in her mind’s eye.
I must find time to go and see her tomorrow,
she determined, and by and by she was overtaken by a death-deep sleep that won out over the ever-present thick cold. She dreamed no dreams.

The next morning Kayu Saitoh awoke amidst icy air that seemed to sap away at her very soul. She flicked away the frost that had almost glued her eyelids shut and emerged from the straw bedding. Ate Amami, Shigi Yamamoto, and Inui Makabe seemed to have grown used to the cold, for they were blithely asleep amidst the chill air that was enough to freeze solid the remnants of last night’s broth still in the pot. Kayu Saitoh felt a painful, raw swelling at the back of her throat and realized that she must have some sort of cold coming on. She dragged her miserable, maladapted body out of the hut and into the still-dark breaking morning. Snow had settled where it had fallen during the night, more snow. The promise of the new day was in the air, and when Kayu Saitoh exhaled, crisp clean puffs of crystal emerged, but the beauty of the scene was lost on her.

Then her nose picked up a strange odor.

It was a cloying scent, dense, and it puzzled Kayu Saitoh. It might have been different had the women been walking around and going about their business, but nobody had stirred, as far as Kayu Saitoh could tell, so there should have been nothing to pollute the fresh morning air. Kayu Saitoh lifted her nose and sniffed, and she followed the scent. The two storehouses came into view. Kayu Saitoh noticed that the ears of corn that had been hung out to dry were now scattered on the ground in ruins, and she hurried toward them to investigate. As she grew closer the smell became worse, much worse, assaulting her senses and forcing her to stop using her nose to breathe, but still she pushed forward.

The women at the scene had become chunks of meat.

Blood. Entrails. Teeth. Clumps of hair with pieces of scalp still attached. All scattered about the entrances to the two storehouses. It was impossible to tell which body part belonged to which person. Furthermore, one of the storehouses had a hole ripped into its side. Agitated, Kayu Saitoh tried to consider what to do next, what her next step should be, but she couldn’t think; her head wouldn’t work. She couldn’t link one idea with the next. The next thing Kayu Saitoh was conscious of was sitting on the ground being kicked in the back by Mei Mitsuya, who had somehow arrived on the scene.

It took a few such kicks before Kayu Saitoh snapped out of her daze. She looked up to meet Mei Mitsuya’s eyes. Mei Mitsuya’s wrinkle-etched face was trembling, and she looked about to collapse, but she kept herself propped up using her wooden staff and sheer force of will, speaking the names of the old women who had been brutally dismembered. Kayu Saitoh learned through this that the dead were Matsuki Nagao, Ran Kubo, Kuwa Kure, and Sasaka Yagi, but as none of the victims had been particularly well known to her, this new piece of information did nothing one way or another to affect her already-shattered mental state.

“It was a bear!” Mei Mitsuya hollered.

That was the only explanation, of course, for what other creature could have performed such an act of brutality? Still, hearing it spelled out in so many words made Kayu Saitoh shudder. As the Village had been equipped with rifles, bears had simply not been a real issue there, and Kayu Saitoh had never heard of one actually attacking the Village. Bears were supposed to have been responsible for desecrating cemeteries, for killing and eating horses and cows, for attacking people while they harvested vegetables in the field, but that was just rumor, closer to legend than reality. Here, in Dendera, it
was
reality. Kayu Saitoh realized, once and for all, that she had just understood the crucial, decisive difference between the Village and Dendera.

Mei Mitsuya looked at the broken wooden spears and then entered the storehouse through the hole in its wall. Kayu Saitoh followed her and, as soon as she entered, saw the chaos inside. The stores of dried fish, potatoes, and beans had been well and truly eaten, with debris scattered around the floor. When Kayu Saitoh realized the implications of the sudden loss of so much of their valuable stores, her fear of the bear was replaced with a sense of despair at how they would possibly survive the morrow.

“Ludicrous!” Mei Mitsuya banged her staff against the ground. “What the hell is this? It’s ludicrous! Why would it do a thing like this? A bear! What have we ever done to hurt
it
? So, you think you can get away with ruining all our plans, do you? You? A mindless
beast
? Well, you’re wrong. I’m going to kill you for this!
Kill
you!”

A beast cannot speak the language of men and has no such thing as a name. Nevertheless, as the hair on this particular bear’s back was notably reddish, let us call her “Redback.” Let us say that Redback could speak the language of humans. What would she say if she were given the opportunity to explain herself? No doubt, she would angrily growl that the mountain was her territory, and that the Two-Legs had no right to be here. The reality was that Redback’s ancestors roamed the mountain for many a generation, long before people even arrived on the scene to start calling it “the Mountain.” And yet these Two-Legs had the temerity to appear on the scene and start cutting the trees down with their tools and shaping the mountain according to their will, carving what they called their village into the landscape, preventing Redback from roaming freely around what should have been her birthright.

Redback knew what a powerful beast she was.

She knew that she was the strongest, proudest beast in the area, as did the other beasts of the region, who all deferred to her might and kept out of her way. That was the rightful way of things. And yet when the two-legged intruders ignored this natural order, and when Redback decided to teach them a lesson by going to that place that they had claimed for themselves, Redback came across a group of these Two-Legs on the way down the mountain, and they had pointed those strange sticks at her that spat fire, and she felt a pain like no other as her rear leg went limp. After that Redback decided never to appear before the Two-Legs again. That was the law of nature, the logic of beasts. Avoid confrontation with that which is stronger than you.