Dendera (18 page)

Kayu Saitoh listened without looking at the woman, whose voice was, as she had suspected, the same as the one Kayu Saitoh had heard in the darkness of her prison. As she listened, an unguarded feeling of security enveloped her.

But Kayu Saitoh squashed this feeling and probed Soh Kiriyama with another question.

“Just now, you said … you’d have a hard time letting them kill you without a fight. Do you mean to resist them?”

Silence fell over them. This wasn’t a refusal to answer, but Soh Kiriyama required time to sort through her emotions.

“Kayu Saitoh,” she said after a time, “I might end up causing you trouble. I’m sorry for that. We were able to become so close in that darkness. I’ll never forget our talks.”

“Neither will I,” Kayu Saitoh said with a nod. “I won’t forget.”

“And a little bit ago, you told me that what I had done was for nothing.”

“You were determined to uncover what had happened in the past, but look how everybody ended up finding out. So it was all for nothing, wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t for nothing.” Soh Kiriyama shook her head. “I learned how to be brave.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll soon see.”

Soh Kiriyama turned and departed the burial grounds.

If Kayu Saitoh had thought to follow, she could have, but instead she kept staring at the graves. She didn’t exactly know what Soh Kiriyama intended, but the woman’s options were limited, and Kayu Saitoh would not be able to aid or oppose her in any of them.

The sun climbed to its apex, and the dazzling, flickering sunlight announced that the day was half gone. Kayu Saitoh returned to the clearing where the fanatical women were gathered.

Their work finished, the women inspected and re-inspected the sharpened knife as they passed through that uncertain period before the next development. Kayu Saitoh sensed something vaguely unnatural about Ate Amami’s presence there, but that was merely based on Kayu Saitoh’s self-imposed preconceptions of the woman; after all, Ate Amami could have been seized by the fear of the plague. Nothing would have been odd about that. But this observation drew Kayu Saitoh’s attention to Hono Ishizuka’s inexplicable involvement in the sharpening of the knife. Even when the bear appeared, that woman had remained cool-headed. No matter how Kayu Saitoh looked at it, her participation in the likely-meaningless ritual slayings was bizarre.

Kayu Saitoh wondered if Hono Ishizuka knew something about the plague, or if the two women were participating with an ulterior motive. The seed of suspicion grew unabated inside her.

“It begins,” came Mei Mitsuya’s voice. She appeared on the balcony.

A black excitement spread through the clearing.

Tahi Kitajima and Maka Kikuchi entered the manor and returned with Makura Katsuragawa and Somo Izumi. Makura Katsuragawa’s eyes quivered, puffy from crying, as she shouted, “Help me, help me!”

Somo Izumi had regained consciousness, and she lifted her face, reddened by the crowd’s beatings and her vomited blood, and cursed the crowd with her withering glare.

Kayu Saitoh heard footsteps crunching on snow. She looked to the direction of the sound and saw Soh Kiriyama gripping a wooden spear. The woman walked past Kayu Saitoh without sparing her even a glance. Again Kayu Saitoh could sense the woman’s desire to take action—a vortex of will within her that the other women failed to detect—as they amiably regarded her as a comrade, saying things like, “Where have you been?”

Without a word, Soh Kiriyama stood beside Tahi Kitajima and Maka Kikuchi, who were holding the infected women in place, and she thrust out her spear. The wooden tip pierced through Tahi Kitajima’s neck and kept going until it had jabbed into Maka Kikuchi’s neck.

With their guards dead, Makura Katsuragawa and Somo Izumi took off running, and Soh Kiriyama ran after, as if in chase.

Mei Mitsuya’s booming voice echoed from the balcony above. “After them! Kill them!”

The seventeen women standing stunned in the clearing snapped back to their senses. With tearful expressions and bewildered by the sudden violence, they began searching for the three plague carriers. Kayu Saitoh, to whom these events hadn’t been unforeseen, was nevertheless interested in seeing how they played out, and so she took part in the search. The women instinctively broke apart into several groups. Kayu Saitoh, Mei Mitsuya, Usuma Tsutsumi, and Kan Tominaga entered the hut where Kura Kuroi and the others had been brutally slain. The corpses and viscera had been cleaned up, but the walls hadn’t been repaired, and snow had blown inside. The search party remained alert for any sudden attacks, but they found no one, not even a trace.

Usuma Tsutsumi whispered, “You don’t suppose they went to the Mountain, do you?”

“The Mountain?” Kan Tominaga said. “Why would they go there?”

“Maybe they realized they had no hope, and gave up and Climbed the Mountain. Or …”

“Or?”

“Maybe they went back to the Village.”

Some time passed under heavy silence.

Usuma Tsutsumi’s speculation troubled them all. If the three plague-bearing women returned to the Village, they would likely reveal Dendera’s existence. Kayu Saitoh couldn’t predict what the Village would do once they learned about Dendera, but she recognized that the women’s surprise attack would no longer be possible, and the Village might attack Dendera instead. At the very least, this would nullify the women’s largest advantage: the Village was ignorant of Dendera, while Dendera knew about the Village.

“Don’t worry. They won’t go back to the Village,” Mei Mitsuya said. “What would happen if they did? They’d be killed, of course. They’ve witnessed it themselves. No, they have to be nearby. Shut up and search.”

Her words held some truth, and the women calmed down and resumed their search amid the oppressive, clinging stench of blood. But they remained unable to find the three women. Then, just as one of them suggested moving their search to another hut, Koto Onodera burst into the room.

“What is it?” Mei Mitsuya asked. “Did you find them?”

“Th-they,” Koto Onodera gasped, heaving her shoulders, “they’ve shut themselves in the storehouse. It’s a siege.”

“Bastards!” Mei Mitsuya screamed, teeth bared, spittle bubbling. She ran outside through the wall the bear had destroyed.

Kayu Saitoh followed after, but the storehouse was a good distance away, and along the way she tired and tripped in the snow. She didn’t feel the coldness or pain. Such sensations were superseded by an unidentifiable fear that made her legs shake. She forced herself to stand, and she ran nearly oblivious to anything else.
A siege at the storehouse.
The thought filled her awareness. That alone was enough to make her certain that Soh Kiriyama’s group truly meant to fight Dendera.

By the time Kayu Saitoh arrived at the storehouse, the other women had already surrounded the building.

But nobody was doing anything.

“What are you doing?” Kayu Saitoh asked Nokobi Hidaka, who was glaring at the storehouse door. “Open the door already.”

“I can’t tell if they are pushing against it or if they’ve barred it, but the door won’t open.”

“Bust it down then.”

“We built it sturdy so it would withstand such attempts. Our spears are useless.”

The storehouse, built differently than the other structures in Dendera, appeared impenetrable to most lines of attack. Kayu Saitoh snatched Nokobi Hidaka’s wooden spear and struck the door with it. At the first blow, the spear snapped like a twig.

“Let’s set it on fire!” Tai Komaki suggested. “We’ll burn it down. We can burn down the storehouse and the plague inside it.”

“Our food is inside,” Hono Ishizuka pointed out. “If we do that, we’ll starve to death. We won’t have a single potato to eat. We’ll die.”

“If we don’t do anything, we’ll die of the plague. The plague will kill us before the starvation will.”

“Well, the plague is terrifying, but starvation even more so. Do you really want to go through such suffering?”

“Shut up!” Tai Komaki said, her eyes defiant. “Do you want to get the plague? Do you want to retch putrid blood before you die?”

“If we’d stored up more food, we wouldn’t be having this problem. We could’ve set the storehouse on fire.” Hono Ishizuka didn’t attempt to hide her anger. “This is all because you Hawks idled about with your training instead of helping us gather food. You Hawks do nothing but cause Dendera trouble.”

“What did you say?”

“It was only thanks to the Doves’ stockpiles that we made it through the famine ten years ago with minimal losses.”

Mei Mitsuya muttered, “Would you stop that? What good does talking like that do us?”

The two women realized their argument was pointless, and their conflict dissipated, leaving only silence. The group of women got back to taking up their positions around the storehouse, itself silent as well.

But when Kayu Saitoh realized what role she could play, she went to stand in front of the storehouse.

“Soh Kiriyama, can you hear me?” she shouted. “I understand that you’re serious. I won’t disrespect you by asking you to open the door. But let me tell you this one thing: you’re wrong. You’re so very wrong. If you resist this way, you’ll only die. Those of you inside that storehouse, and those of us outside—we’ll all die in this confusion and ignorance. This isn’t a victory. You’re not making a point. Hey, what’s wrong with you? Answer me. Answer me!”

No reply came.

Kayu Saitoh recalled what Soh Kiriyama had said: “I’ll have a hard time letting them kill me without a fight.” She realized that this conviction was shared by all the women who escaped the Mountain to live in Dendera. The difference between the three fugitives and the women of Dendera was the circumstances of their resistance. With this realization, Kayu Saitoh stared at the storehouse and saw danger in failing to take the three women seriously. They weren’t simply clinging to their lives; they were making their last, desperate stand.

Night came, but nothing had changed. Several fire baskets cast light upon the storehouse, while the surrounding armed women, beset by a mixture of hunger and coldness and irritation, expectantly awaited a new sign of movement from within. But all in the storehouse remained still; its occupants issued not a single demand and made not a single noise. The women on the outside weren’t merely idle. Hono Ishizuka and several of the others had made several attempts to open negotiations. Eight of the women, headed by Mei Mitsuya, went up the Mountain to chop down a fir tree. They planned on using a log to batter down the door. These two separate approaches—negotiation and attack—proceeded concurrently. All had agreed to leave fire as only the last resort. They absolutely couldn’t lose the precious provisions stored inside.

With Soh Kiriyama and the others holed up inside the storehouse, the rest of the women hadn’t been able to eat. The women of Dendera were chronically malnourished and accustomed to hunger, but robbed of the knowledge of when their next meal would come, the hunger wasn’t so easily endured. The fire baskets illuminated their haggard faces and anxious expressions. On the inside, their empty, aching stomachs churned, sapping their spirits before their physical strength had a chance to wane. Too exhausted to move, the women were halfheartedly watching the motionless storehouse when Hono Ishizuka came to stand in front of Kayu Saitoh. The woman’s face too showed exhaustion.

“Hey, Kayu. You don’t have to keep standing there. Move where some of the fire can reach you. It’ll make you feel a little bit better.”

“Please leave me alone. I’ll move when I want to.”

“I know everyone’s on edge, between the plague and the hunger, but you seem upset about something else. What’s gotten you in such a foul mood?”

“I’m not in a foul mood. I just have the feeling there’s a better way to go about this.”

“A better way … I certainly can’t think of one.” Hono Ishizuka glanced over her shoulder at the storehouse. “They’ve got all of our food.
We’re
the ones who are imprisoned out here. If this goes on for days, we’ll have to go foraging in the Mountain.”

“What about water? No matter how much food they have, they can’t survive without water.”

“The storehouse holds water reserves for times of emergency. If they’re careful, they can make it last for several days. No matter what else, those three won’t be dying from hunger or thirst.”

Kayu Saitoh thought of something that had been bothering her. “I heard someone saying that the Doves had saved the Hawks during some big famine. What was that about?”

“Oh, that’s nothing important. What you said covers it. We were hit by a famine ten years ago, Dendera ran out of provisions, and five of us died. The Doves shared their food reserves with the Hawks.”

“And I’m sure you got something out of it.”

“Actually, we did.” Hono Ishizuka gave her a quick nod. “After that, the Hawks lost some of their power, and more women joined us Doves. Before then, it had just been Masari and me.”

“Come to think of it, what’s Masari Shiina doing? If Dendera is so important to her, where is she now?”

Kayu Saitoh searched the firelit faces for the woman but didn’t find her.

Hono Ishizuka said, “This rough stuff is the duty of the young—and to be blunt, the Hawks.”

“Listen, Hono Ishizuka,” Kayu Saitoh said, trying to appeal to the woman with her tone. “You know something about the plague, don’t you?”

Her expression completely unchanged, Hono Ishizuka replied with a question. “Why would you think that?”

“No reason. The thought just came to me. That’s all.”

“Since you were kind enough not to hide your suspicions about me, I’ll give you a straight answer. I honestly don’t know anything about the plague.”

“But you didn’t have any of the bear stew.”

“I lived through the events sixteen years ago, so I was being cautious. Nothing more. Didn’t Naki say it this morning? She had an objection to eating the meat of the cub that rampaged through the plague victims’ graves.”

“Do you really believe that? Do you believe that the bear’s meat has caused the plague to spread again?”

“I don’t know.” Hono Ishizuka shook hear head wearily. “We can never know what the cause is—we just live here in Dendera. That’s why I took a precaution. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that. If I had known that the meat would cause the plague, at the very least I wouldn’t have allowed the Doves to eat any of it.”