Dendera (13 page)

Something long was sticking out from the bear’s right eye.

Kayu Saitoh realized that she no longer held her spear.

The bear let out a terrific roar and flailed its forelegs about. Someone shouted, “Run, run!”

Using only her arms, Kayu Saitoh dragged herself away until she thought she was safe. She looked at the bear. With the spear still lodged into its right eye, the beast opened its maw to its fullest and cried out, then fled through the hole, leaving vast amounts of blood and body parts behind.

Hikari Asami scrambled to her feet and began checking on the women. Shaking, Hyoh Hamamura appeared from the straw. Kayu Saitoh crawled forward, shouting, “I’m alive!” She repeated, “I’m alive, I’m alive!” Mei Mitsuya pulled her to her feet, but Kayu Saitoh’s hips had dislocated, and she collapsed back down on her rear.

“Can you move?” the chief said, pulling her up again. “Don’t give up!”

“I—” Kayu Saitoh said, her voice sounding not like her own. “I’m … alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.”

“Are you?” the chief asked.

“What?”

“Your head’s split open.”

Kayu Saitoh touched her hand to her head and felt something wet as pain jolted her.

Her palm was covered in red.

Hikari Asami said, “The bear is injured. It fled. I’m going after it,” then left through the hole, and Mei Mitsuya followed after.

Kayu Saitoh wanted to join them but couldn’t see through the blood. In frustration and anger, she wiped her eyes, grabbed a piece of nearby cloth, and wrapped it around her head. Immediately after, she realized the scrap was part of Kura Kuroi’s robe, and she saw her friend’s severed head where it had rolled to the floor.

When she went outside, Dendera was in complete chaos.

Kayu Saitoh didn’t know what had happened, but confusion heaped upon confusion, and an extraordinary uproar unfolded under the moonlight. Shrieks, cries, and shouts came from all directions. Kayu Saitoh ran alone through the madness. In the snow, a blood trail led up the Mountain. It seemed to belong to the bear.

“This way, everyone!” Kayu Saitoh shouted. “The monster has fled to the Mountain! It’s injured. If we’re going to catch it, and if we’re going to kill it, we have to go now!”

But her voice didn’t carry over the uproar. As rage filled her, a tiny spray of blood spurted from her head wound.

She saw several women emerging from the adjacent hut. She yelled at them as loudly as she could, and they came toward her. There were six women: Kotei Hoshii, Maka Kikuchi, Koto Onodera, Nokobi Hidaka, Tamishi Minamide, and Tsusa Hiiragi. After Kayu Saitoh filled them in, the two torch-bearing messengers, Ate Amami and Inui Makabe, came with Mei Mitsuya and Hikari Asami in tow.

“Why is all of Dendera in such chaos?” Kayu Saitoh asked Inui Makabe. “The bear came into
our
hut. What happened?”

“Well,” Inui Makabe said, embarrassed, “the women watching over the cemetery started screaming that the bear had come, and—”

“Who cares about those fools?” Mei Mitsuya said, adjusting her headscarf. “We have to hurry. If we let that thing escape far up the Mountain, we’ll have trouble later.”

Eleven women set out in pursuit: Kayu Saitoh, Mei Mitsuya, Hikari Asami, Kotei Hoshii, Maka Kikuchi, Koto Onodera, Nokobi Hidaka, Tamishi Minamide, Tsusa Hiiragi, Ate Amami, and Inui Makabe. With only one torch, navigating the shadowy Mountain proved difficult, but all save for Kayu Saitoh proceeded with experienced movements. Kayu Saitoh gave up on leading the group and settled for trying to at least not hinder the others.

At some point, the sky over the Mountain had changed, delivering a snowstorm, but the group pressed on, following the scattered blotches of wet blood beneath the top layer of snow. The thickening fir trees and intensifying storm blocked the moon, leaving the single torch their only real light. Then further misfortune struck. The blood trail vanished.

“Impossible!” Kayu Saitoh said. “The bear’s wounds were far too severe for the bleeding to stop.”

“Don’t worry. Its footsteps remain. And look at how clear they are. It’s shameful, really.”

The beast’s footsteps indeed remained, leading higher up the Mountain. Refusing to let feelings of unease get the better of them, the eleven women forged ahead. The bitter storm froze them to the bone, but this was of no bother to the women excited by the prospect of slaying the bear. They kept walking. But they were forced to stop when the bear tracks abruptly ended.

Hikari Asami brushed away the snowflakes clinging to her face, and her expression was dumbfounded. “It doubled back.” she said.

“What?” Mei Mitsuya groaned.

“The bear … knows we’re following its tracks. It’s used its trail against us—to confuse us.”

“To confuse us, you say?”

“The bear purposefully left this trail,” Hikari Asami explained. “Then along the way, it jumped to a tree and escaped in some other direction.”

“It’s just a dumb brute!” the chief said. “How could it fool humans?”

“This is definitely a false trail. The bear could be anywhere by now.” Hikari Asami shook her head. “What should we do?”

The chief clearly wanted to keep moving, but she looked back and forth between her torch and the untouched snow, then ordered a withdrawal. The women were forced to return empty-handed. Amid the bitter taste of humiliation, Kayu Saitoh and the others went back down the Mountain. Their excitement melted away, leaving only the cold, and no one said a word as they dragged their legs in an anemic descent. Having lost their quarry, the hunting party was reduced to skin and bone and disgrace.

The weary group arrived back in Dendera to find that the commotion hadn’t calmed but rather had intensified. Despite the ill-spent exhaustion that had taken hold of her body, Kayu Saitoh jogged ahead to see what had happened. For a moment, she pictured the bear having returned to Dendera to massacre its inhabitants, but the women’s shouts carried a great joy.

A group had gathered in front of the burial ground.

Several graves had been unearthed, wooden grave markers snapped in half, and gravestones tossed about in every which way. A few corpses—mostly bleached-white skeletal remains—had been dragged out and appeared to have been partially eaten. And yet the women had circled around these desecrated remains and shouted and cheered with delight.

Guri Togawa raised her hands in the air, cackled, and said, “We did it! Don’t mess with us!”

“Don’t mess with us!” Kan Tominaga repeated.

“It was me who did it,” Makura Katsuragawa said. Her body was covered in blood, and she jumped up and down in excitement. “I killed it! I killed the bear!”

Hearing this, Kayu Saitoh sprinted the rest of the way, pushed through the circle of women, and put her eyes on the lifeless brown-furred animal.

It was the cub.

Redback hadn’t lost because she had underestimated the Two-Legs. Rather, her defeat came about
because
she understood their strength and remained ever cautious. They didn’t have those strange, fire-spitting sticks, but she fully expected them to attack her using some different method. When she came back to fight to reclaim the food that had been stolen from her, she felt something hot strike her rear. Despite its not being a serious injury, she fled out of caution that it was some new form of attack. And even as the abandoned meat lingered in her thoughts, she endured her increasing hunger and waited, inviting the Two-Legs to lower their guard.

But despite all her prudence, she was now fleeing through a blizzard, her right eye destroyed.

Her backtracking had successfully thrown her pursuers off her trail, but she still had lost her eye. To a creature of the wild, the loss was dire. And when she had found that her cub, who always clung to her so, hadn’t followed her, she knew she had lost him. She had lost he who was to carry on her blood, her experiences, and her ways, and that, to a creature of the wild, was the greatest possible loss.

The Two-Legs killed the cub she had been raising to rule over her domain. As she fled, Redback thought about what had happened and where that left her. Had she human emotion, she would have been angry and sorrowful, but she felt nothing at the killing of her cub. Creatures of the wild were endowed with no such emotions. Her offspring had been her priority, and she had protected him with her life, but now that he was gone she felt nothing. Even if she did, the emotion would have been expressed by a small, single howl.

What Redback needed now was escape and recuperation, and she had secured one of those when the Two-Legs gave up her trail. To a creature of the wild, the actions of the Two-Legs had been an error, nothing more, made in total disregard of the rules of nature. They should have either kept searching for her on the mountain or gone back to secure more numbers and better equipment and then resumed their pursuit. If, hypothetically, they had taken either of those measures, nature would have judged her death a fair outcome. But the Two-Legs let their resignation rule them. They descended from the mountain, and Redback achieved her escape.

Having successfully eluded the Two-Legs, recuperation became her next goal. Her measures were simple: she found a hole to shelter her from the wind and settled in to endure the pain and blood loss. Humans would offer a helping hand to their injured, but the creatures of the wild, and bears in particular, lived solitary existences where injury and death were in direct relation. Animals understood far better than man what an injury meant. Redback’s fangs chattered and her back fur drooped, and she did her best to survive.

After three full sleepless days, she had endured the worst of it, and her wound had closed over. When she dislodged the stick from where it had remained, it came out with a clump of coagulated blood, to which clung tufts of ripped-out fur and bits of what used to be her eye. The injury was far from completely healed, but nevertheless, she crawled out from her hole. Outside, the snow was thick, but the sun’s warmth soothed her frozen body. She stretched her back and began to walk just to see if she could. The right side of her vision had been lost to darkness, but she was a creature of the wild; to stop for such a minor reason equated to death, and so she kept her four legs moving.

Redback knew injury better than humans, and she had battled against it and won. Inside her, the fires of vengeance blazed.

Vengeance was not only the domain of mankind.

Wounding an animal was to invite vengeance.

Inside Redback, a new goal began to blossom.

She would survive this winter and carry a new child. To do that, she needed to secure food—in the form of those weak Two-Legs who acted as if they ruled over the domain that was rightfully hers.

She would beat the Two-Legs.

She would kill and devour.

She would kill and devour and survive.

She gave the land where the Two-Legs dwelled a single glance with her left eye, then proceeded deeper up the mountain. After that, she didn’t show herself again.

A
t first, the women wrestled with uncertain fears, but after five days passed with no sign of another attack, they concluded that the bear had succumbed to its wounds on the Mountain. That same day, they celebrated their victory. Casting aside their typical frugalities, they lit scores of fire baskets, brought food out from the storehouse, sharpened their stone knives, and boiled water over a bonfire in the clearing. There, they had buried the bear cub’s carcass in the snow to keep it from spoiling. Thirty-six women had survived the attacks, and all gathered in the clearing—save for Shigi Yamamoto, who never left her hut—where they unearthed the cub and gazed at it in the midday sun. The animal was still small, only about as long as a person was tall, but its stout, muscular body, thick legs, and sharp, amber claws demonstrated that even at its age, the cub had been a fierce creature.

“Listen to me!” Mei Mitsuya said, standing on the balcony of her manor, raising her cane overhead. “The bear hasn’t shown itself for five days. We’ve won! We are victorious against the beast. And we have the meat of its cub. Our victory is total. So come, let us celebrate. Let us eat meat. Let us feast until we can feast no more. This is our vengeance!”

The women raised a triumphant cheer.

It might have been the first outcry of optimism in the history of the secret settlement.

Kayu Saitoh later heard what had caused the mayhem the night of the attack. The group keeping watch near the cemetery saw the cub unearthing the graves, while a separate group saw the commotion and mistook the cub for their target, and in the end, Makura Katsuragawa, having succumbed to her fears and fleeing for her life, stumbled into the fracas and ran her spear through the cub, killing it. Since the women had obtained so much meat through her actions, none rebuked Makura Katsuragawa’s flight, and instead regarded her as a hero. But it was Kayu Saitoh who had garnered true respect. All praised her for destroying the beast’s eye, even as she suffered a vicious head wound. She was proud to have been of help to Dendera, but amid unease over the lack of confirmation of the bear’s life or death, and heartache over having let Kura Kuroi die, Kayu Saitoh didn’t speak, instead placing her hand on the bandage made from her departed friend’s robe cloth. With meat on the menu, none in Dendera would criticize her silence.

Mei Mitsuya came down from the balcony, joining the women in the clearing, and in the light of the sun and the fire baskets, the celebration began.

First up was the butchering of the cub. Hikari Asami was the one to wield the stone dagger. She had volunteered, asserting that she had never taken apart a bear before, but had seen it done and might be able to imitate it. The woman held the knife in a reverse grip, then pushed its tip into the black fur, plunging all the way into its groin as fat spilled out jiggly and milky white. The stone blade kept catching on the animal’s thick hide, but she pushed it deeper. A stench arose, not an animal smell, but something closer to rotting fish. But none of the women cared. Hikari Asami wiped her arm in the snow to clean away the clinging bits of fatty tissue, then switched to a fresh knife. Inserting the knife into the same place, she finally opened up the cub’s abdomen. Next, she ran the knife to the ends of the animal’s humanlike feet and arms. She cut the lines around the cub’s genitals, separating them from the carcass.

Hikari Asami looked up, sweat covering her face, and said, “I’m going to pull off its skin. I need help.”

Kayu Saitoh, Kyu Hoshina, and Nokobi Hidaka stepped forward and helped remove the hide. It wasn’t as easy work as with a rabbit, but the skin came off with little resistance, revealing pink flesh beneath a film of fat. Their eyes trembling in fury and hunger and curiosity, the women stared at the carcass in wordless silence. With the cub’s hide and flesh separated, Hikari Asami next began carving into its chest. Once she had cut through the tough, fibrous pectoral muscles, she turned her blade to the cartilage of its ribcage, then directed Kayu Saitoh and the others to follow suit, and the four of them removed the ribs from either side and left the bones in the snow. Hikari Asami severed the arteries around the cub’s heart and placed the heavy-looking organ on the ground. The women proceeded to pull out the trachea, esophagus, lungs, and other bits and parts one after another, meanwhile instructing Kayu Saitoh to scoop up the blood that had settled inside the chest cavity. Kayu Saitoh filled up a soup bowl with the thick, grape-colored liquid.

“Drink it,” Hikari Asami said to the women. “Fresh blood will warm your bodies and give you strength.”

But none moved, the corners of their eyes and lips trembling in quandary. Then one woman stepped forward, cackling. It was Mei Mitsuya. The chief pulled a chipped sake cup from her breast pocket—where she’d found the thing remained a mystery—and told Kayu Saitoh to pour. Kayu Saitoh poured. The chief downed the cup as if to drink even the fumes, then displayed her blood-streaked teeth, cackled again, and said it tasted great. She extended the cup to Ume Itano and instructed the woman to drink. Ume Itano’s expression was one of flat refusal, but when the chief added that it might heal her hips, the woman took the cup. Ume Itano had crashed into the bear once in the Mountain and once in the hut, and the battles had taken a toll on her hips and back. Kayu Saitoh filled the cup, and Ume Itano closed both eyes and drank it all. At first, the woman’s face contorted in distaste, but the look gradually faded. Seeing this, the other women stepped forward one after another to ask for blood, forcing Kayu Saitoh to keep pouring. As she served the other women, she surreptitiously licked some blood that had spilled onto her finger. The taste of it stimulated long-neglected taste buds, and she began to salivate. This was the first time she’d tasted anything salty since her arrival in Dendera. The women drank of the blood, rich with salt and nourishment, and became lively. Someone started making noise, and that kicked off a merry clamor of voices, lilting somewhere between conversation and song. Meanwhile, Hikari Asami continued silently butchering the cub. Now she was working on the digestive tract. She pulled out its long intestines, squeezed the waste out from one end, pushed a narrow branch through the tube, used the stick to turn it inside out, sprinkled snow on it and washed it clean, then told Kyu Hoshina to fill it with blood. Taken aback, Kyu Hoshina asked why and received the curt reply, “For eating.” Next Hikari Asami began removing the cub’s head. This was an important step in the celebration, and the women cheered on Hikari Asami, who stabbed into the side of the cub’s neck and circled the blade around it. She pulled away the bones connecting the head to the body, then grasped the head and yanked it off. The women beamed with great satisfaction as they gazed at the cub’s severed head.

“I’m ready to carve out the meat,” Hikari Asami said, out of breath. “Does anyone want to help?”

The women pushed themselves forward and crowded around. Hikari Asami made several incisions in the animal’s back and instructed the others to follow the cuts and remove the limbs, and the women eagerly got to work. Gripping their daggers with hunger and rage, these drinkers of blood picked at the carcass with more efficiency than a flock of starving birds, and the cub had soon been dismantled, no longer a figure of dignity and awe, but just meat now.

“It’s time! It’s time!” Mei Mitsuya shouted, blood smeared on the edges of her mouth. “Let’s eat. Let’s eat it all. Let us starving women consume this bear. It cannot stop us now!”

The women tossed the meat chunks into several stone pots that had been brought to a boil over the bonfire. They stirred in potatoes and other vegetable scraps from their storehouse, and soon steam rose, giving off a fatty aroma. In another pot they simmered cut-up offal in blood for more flavor, and in yet another, they boiled Kyu Hoshina’s blood sausage. The smell of cooking meat entranced the women, and their throats trembled in rapture, and their stomachs rumbled. Kayu Saitoh was no exception. Her stomach pulsated and her mouth overflowed with saliva.

The food was ready a little after midday. “Line up!” Mei Mitsuya ordered. “I’ll divide up the meal.” The women had been watching the meat get tender and smelling its aroma, and when the chief gave the order, they lined up like intelligent dogs. Kayu Saitoh joined the line.

Some hadn’t.

Six women refrained: Hono Ishizuka, Naki Sokabe, Masari Shiina, Hotori Oze, Ire Tachibana, and Kushi Tachibana.

Normally, Kayu Saitoh might have wondered why, but hunger ruled her thoughts now. The moment the bear broth hit her bowl, she forgot all else. Mei Mitsuya smiled, told her she had done a great service, and gave her an exceptionally large piece of meat.

The women formed a circle around the cub’s severed head. As they watched over what remained of the bear while eating of its flesh, the head sat there in what seemed like humiliated silence.

When her teeth sank into the meat, Kayu Saitoh’s mouth filled with grease. As she swallowed the mixture of fatty juices and saliva, the hot broth passed down her throat and into her stomach. She eagerly chewed the tender meat, and the taste of it, so strong as to be nearly overwhelming, filled her mouth and her nose. Not even in the Village had she ever eaten so much meat. The Village had bear and deer hunters, but most of the meat and offal ended up elsewhere, and what remained was usually claimed by the hunter’s family. Having married into the house of a paper-miller, Kayu Saitoh wasn’t sure how to manage more meat than she could fit in a single mouthful, but she polished it off and moved on to the offal stew. Her tongue rejoiced at this new texture, and as she chewed, the grease coated her mouth. Much in this same way, the women all emptied their bowls.

After the meal was finished, the ring of women around the cub’s head raised a victorious shout. Some danced, some sang, some laughed, and some cried. As the festivities continued, Mei Mitsuya raised her cane, called Kayu Saitoh and Makura Katsuragawa over, and said she would bestow them each with part of the pelt and a bowl of stew with the bear’s genitals. Kayu Saitoh forced down the bitter soup, and her insides felt feverish, and sweat formed all over her body. Makura Katsuragawa seemed to have trouble as well, following the stew with a coughing fit that continued until tears had begun to form in her eyes. Sharing a dose of ribald humor long absent from Dendera, the other women joked about how she was probably just upset because the food had gotten her libido going again while she was stuck with only old women around.

“The sun has set,” Mei Mitsuya announced. “It’s time to bring this celebration to a close. The funerals will be held tomorrow morning. Sleep well, and don’t be late! Sleep while the bear is in your bellies.”

With the daylong festivities at an end, Kayu Saitoh dragged her feverish body back to her hut. Ate Amami and Inui Makabe came home in high spirits, while Shigi Yamamoto sat, as she always did, in front of the hearth in mute disinterest for the lingering revelry—or for that matter, for the party itself. After a little while, Hikari Asami arrived carrying a piece of the cub’s pelt, which she gave to Kayu Saitoh. When Kayu Saitoh wrapped herself in the fur and lay in the straw, she was able, for the first time since she’d arrived in Dendera, to sleep without feeling the cold.

She awoke the next morning and felt refreshed. Between the nourishment and fat of the bear’s meat and genitals, and the deep sleep granted her by the fur’s warmth, Kayu Saitoh was stronger than ever. Her arms moved freely and with vigor, her joints didn’t hurt, and even her skin had regained its luster.

“Good morning, Kayu,” Ate Amami said, emerging from the straw beside her. “How was it, the fur?”

“Warm,” Kayu Saitoh replied frankly.

“The straw was terrible, as you know.” Ate Amami’s tone carried no bitterness, only the truth. “I hope you’ll let me use it sometime.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

“Kayu, your face is so bright and cheerful now. You look like you’ve found acceptance.”

After a moment, Kayu Saitoh responded, “I haven’t accepted the way of life in Dendera.”

“I know,” Ate Amami said. “That’s not what I meant.” She brushed the straw off the back of her head. “If you don’t care for that word—acceptance—let me rephrase it. You’ve found resolve.”

“Resolve,” Kayu Saitoh said softly. “I still haven’t figured out how to live in Dendera. Now that the bear has stopped coming, I’ll be thinking it over every day.”

“Today is the funeral. Maybe you should think about everyone who died in this fight, and everyone in Dendera who has died before, as you make up your mind.”

Ate Amami went to the water jug. Half watching her, Kayu Saitoh realized that the woman’s advice was sound, and even though Ate Amami wasn’t watching her, she nodded. But then she felt that someone
was
watching her, and she looked around. Shigi Yamamoto’s eyes were open. The woman wasn’t looking directly at Kayu Saitoh, but her head was turned in that direction. Her eyes had been full of life back in the Village, but not anymore.

“Shigi Yamamoto,” Kayu Saitoh said, “what are you thinking about all the time? You move hardly at all. You didn’t care when the bear came. You’re always thinking.”