Dendera

by Yuya Sato

  “It’s true …” Kayu Saitoh eventually forced herself to say, “true that maybe I was just fed up with living. Maybe I did just want to Climb the Mountain and die without thinking too hard about whether there really is a Paradise.”

  “Oho! So you admit it! You confess! What a weakling!”

  “But,” Kayu Saitoh continued, ignoring Mei Mitsuya’s interruption, “I still can’t help thinking that this place is an abomination. The very idea of making this place called Dendera and eking out a miserable existence, it’s shameful. You live like beasts. Like monkeys. You could have had a clean, elegant death in the Mountain, an honorable ending, and you chose to throw that away. There’s no honor in this. There’s no human dignity. It’s just … a disgrace.”

  “And that’s what you really think, is it?” asked Mei Mitsuya. “That’s the reason you want to die?”

  “I don’t know,” Kayu Saitoh said, suddenly aware of an acute, painful dryness in her throat. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put it into words.”

  “You just spoke, girl, about honor. How important it is. Pretty words. Well, do you know what? I agree with you. On that one point, at least. Honor is important!” Mei Mitsuya’s wrinkled face was trembling with excitement. “And one more thing. You’ve got us wrong. We’re not monkeys. We’re people. Want to know why? It’s because we have plans. We’re planning our next move.”

  “Your next move?”

  “Do you really think, girl, that I made Dendera just so I could while my days away in peace?”

  “Didn’t you?” Kayu Saitoh said defiantly.

  “No! That’s what a monkey would do, not me!” Mei Mitsuya said, staring straight back into Kayu Saitoh’s eyes. “No. I built Dendera for the sake of honor.”

  “Then why not just go back to the Mountain now and—”

  “Stupid girl! There’s nothing honorable about dying atop the Mountain. That’s not how honor works. Honor is something you have to win for yourself!”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re going to attack the Village,” Mei Mitsuya declared.

  “Attack … the Village? What do you mean? You and your army of one-foot-in-the-grave hags?”

  “What’s the point of just living in peace safely tucked away from the Village?” Mei Mitsuya continued. “Where’s the satisfaction in that? No, as long as the Village is standing, as long as the people who abandoned us are living their smug little lives, there’ll be no true peace for us here. We’re going to overthrow the Village. We reject them. We’re going to destroy them! Annihilate them!”

  Mei Mitsuya’s face flushed redder and redder as she spoke. Kayu Saitoh observed this and realized that she was talking to a woman who was well and truly overcome with hatred. You could almost boil a kettle on that hot face, Kayu Saitoh thought. Mei Mitsuya had done all this because she was driven by a desire to confront her old family and friends who had abandoned her. How do you like that? Kayu Saitoh could see that Mei Mitsuya was consumed by one-sided, unrequited hatred that only the truly abandoned could cultivate. And Mei Mitsuya called that hatred honor.

  “What’s that face for, girl? Are you mocking me?” Mei Mitsuya turned her wild, watery eyes on Kayu Saitoh again.

  “It can’t be done,” Kayu Saitoh answered simply. “You can’t cross the Mountain in winter. You’ll freeze to death along the way.”

  “Use your head. How long have I been living in exile from the Village? Thirty years! You don’t think I’ve learned a thing or two during that time? I’ve been up and down the Mountain so many times I know it like the back of my own wrinkly hands.”

  “It’s still a stupid idea,” Kayu Saitoh said. “Desperate. What do you think a bunch of old women, worn out by the journey, could do even if you did manage to reach the Village? They’d just beat the crap out of you or use you for target practice for their hunting rifles.”

  “That’s why I said use your head! Do you think I haven’t thought of that? Hell, these last thirty years I’ve thought of nothing else!” Globules of rank spittle were now spraying from Mei Mitsuya’s mouth as she spoke excitedly. “We plan our route carefully. Take breaks along the way. Arm ourselves. And we time our raid for when the Village is fast asleep. Those bastards have forgotten all about us—they won’t be expecting us! They’ll be lying there all cozy, and then bam! They won’t know what hit them!”

  “No way. No way that’ll work,” Kayu Saitoh said, calm in the face of Mei Mitsuya’s fervor. “They’ll send you packing. Or just slaughter you all.”

  “Maybe. Maybe they will at that.” Mei Mitsuya’s face was still scarlet with exertion, but her words were now calm again, matching Kayu Saitoh’s demeanor. “Which is why we need every bit of help we can get right now. That’s why I’m asking you, Kayu Saitoh. Won’t you join us? Help us win back our honor?”

  “Go ahead and win back your honor on your own, all forty-nine of you. Leave me out of it,” Kayu Saitoh said.

  “If only there were forty-nine of us,” said Mei Mitsuya, “maybe we’d be able to. But not everyone sees things my way. Some of the people here are happy to be monkeys. They just want to live and let live. What the hell do they think I built this place for in the first place?”

  “How many? Who opposes you?” Kayu Saitoh was starting to find that she could use her head to think after all.

  “Almost half! Given up the fight before it’s even begun! Cowards and ingrates, the lot of them!”

  “Mei Mitsuya. I’ve listened to your story. I understand why you founded Dendera and how all this works,” Kayu Saitoh said with a calmness that she barely felt, fighting to quell a rising tide inside herself. “But I still think you’ve got it wrong.”

  “What? You … useless—”

  “Attacking the Village won’t change anything,” Kayu Saitoh declared, her first truly confident declaration since her arrival at Dendera. “It won’t win you any honor.”

  “Well, we’re doing it anyway. I don’t care what you think, and I don’t care whether half of Dendera refuses to come with me,” Mei Mitsuya said, her voice unwavering. “As soon as we’re ready, we attack the Village. We massacre them. We’re going to turn their twisted little smug lives inside out. Twist their heads inside out too, and their bodies. Turn them inside out!”

  It was the third day of Kayu Saitoh’s life in Dendera.

  Kayu Saitoh had at first imagined she would be living an aimless existence wallowing listlessly in the mud and grime. But the workload she had been assigned was so heavy that she barely had time to snatch a breath. It brought back memories of the drudgework she had done as a young woman back in the Village.

  Kayu Saitoh must have been about fifteen when she was wed to the paper-miller. Her day as a fifteen-year-old girl had gone something like this: First she had to fetch the water. She would awake while it was still dark, then draw water from the river that ran two fields over. Of course, one trip a day was not enough for a full household, and the paper mill used copious amounts of water in the course of business, so a number of round trips were involved. Seven trips to get enough water for work, three trips to fill the household cistern, and another six trips to fill the bathtub. She had to prepare the morning meal, work the fields, and then the day would end and she would wake up again the next morning so that she could fetch more water and start the cycle again. When her body aged and she was no longer fit for such tiring work, she was transferred to other duties—minding the grandchildren, looking after the chickens, and weeding the garden. Not quite so strenuous work as when she had been younger, perhaps, but physically exhausting all the same, due to its relentlessness (there was always some mindless beast or child to run after, to catch, to tidy up after, to clean, to look after …) And then she would have to have everything neat and tidy and ready for dinner by the time the younger adults returned home from their toil in the fields, and everything would have to be up to their exacting standards. Th
en, before she knew it, before she had a moment’s respite from the daily grind, she found that she was seventy and it was time to Climb the Mountain as the new year dawned.

  That should have been the end of her toils, when she finally entered Paradise, but instead she now found that her work carried on unabated.

  The majority of the working day of the fifty old women was taken up with sourcing food supplies.

  Nothing could be grown under the blanket of winter frost that covered the area, so food had to be found in the Mountain. As no plants, fruits, or nuts were available during winter, that meant hunting game. To Kayu Saitoh, who knew only how to fetch water and work the fields, this was a whole new world, and she was as ignorant of its workings as a newborn babe, and so it fell to others to teach her the necessary skills and know-how. This morning she was under the wing of the hunting party that consisted of Hatsu Fukuzawa, Somo Izumi, Kotei Hoshii, and Maka Kikuchi. The men of the Village often employed a technique called wadara hunting to catch wild coneys. One woman was familiar with this method, and so it gained predominant use in Dendera. The wadara was a ring-shaped bundle of sticks and straw that when thrown would be mistaken by the coneys as an attacking hawk. The animals burrowed into the supposed safety of the snow, from which the women could easily pluck them. Kayu Saitoh tried throwing a wadara, but with no result. The sound the disk made as it cut through the air was crucial to its effectiveness; having failed to produce this noise, Kayu Saitoh might as well have tossed a clump of straw, and as such she hadn’t been able to alarm the coney.

  “Watch how I do it,” Hatsu Fukuzawa said as she spotted a single coney perched some distance away. She maneuvered herself downwind so that the coney wouldn’t pick up on her sound or smell, and then skillfully threw the wadara up so that it danced through the air, spinning and emitting a whirr that startled the creature. Twice, three times the lure went into the air, and meanwhile Kotei Hoshii and Maka Kikuchi nimbly closed in on the coney as it frantically burrowed into the snow.

  Back in the Village, women were not permitted to eat rabbit flesh. It was said that a woman who ate the meat of a coney would bear children with cleft lips. This was a baseless superstition of course, but the whole of Village society was governed by baseless superstitions and myths. And so Kayu Saitoh did not know what rabbit flesh tasted like. She hadn’t even been allowed to taste it after she was past childbearing age.

  “Hoho, got it!” Kotei Hoshii cried as she grasped hold of the fear-struck coney’s trembling hind legs.

  “Well done!” Maka Kikuchi grinned broadly, and Kotei Hoshii grinned back. Kayu Saitoh knew that the two women hadn’t been particularly close back in the Village, but now they were all smiles. Dendera had evidently brought them together, forged a new friendship in a new place. The thought made Kayu Saitoh shudder.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t take you too long to pick up the knack,” Hatsu Fukuzawa said to Kayu Saitoh, misinterpreting her contemptuous stare and placing a hand on Kayu Saitoh’s shoulder in friendly encouragement. “Why, four years ago, when I first arrived at Dendera, I couldn’t do anything for myself.”

  “Yeah, and I was the one who showed her how to throw the wadara. She was useless at first, and now look at her!” said Somo Izumi, her breath visible in small white clouds. “Even teaching others!”

  Kayu Saitoh observed with detached contempt as the other old women talked excitedly at the scene of their triumphant catch, but then a stabbing, painful realization hit Kayu Saitoh: that she was not detached, she was now one of them; she was along for the hunt, doing the same work for the same reasons.

  Upon her return to Dendera, Kayu Saitoh was tasked with butchering the coney. Kayu Saitoh hated the idea of being idle more than anything else in the world, so she immediately set about her assignment. However, Dendera was utterly lacking in anything that could be described as proper tools or even the technology to make them. The old women of Dendera had, back in their Village days, spent their working lives in the fields and never had the opportunity to pick up any useful skills. That was why the “houses” in Dendera were worse than crude stables.

  Still, it had been thirty years since Mei Mitsuya had founded Dendera.

  That was thirty years’ worth of accumulated knowledge.

  That was thirty years’ worth of accumulated skills.

  Working under Hatsu Fukuzawa’s supervision, Kayu Saitoh hung the coney upside down, then peeled the skin from its body down to its head before pulling off its limbs and using a jagged piece of black flint—Dendera’s version of a knife—to open the coney up. Kayu Saitoh was entirely inexperienced at butchery, and the crude blade wasn’t up to much, so it wasn’t long before the area was a mass of blood and a foul odor permeated the air, as Kayu Saitoh had accidentally ruptured the animal’s innards.

  “Not bad at all for your first effort,” Somo Izumi said with approval in her voice.

  “Yep, you’ve definitely got the knack,” Hatsu Fukuzawa said, nodding. “You’re a quick study, you are, Kayu.”

  “I just don’t like the idea of not being able to pull my weight, that’s all,” Kayu Saitoh mumbled.

  “Ha, don’t you worry about that! You’re still a youngster!” Hatsu Fukuzawa said. “Why, so long as you’ve got your five senses, you’re fine and dandy!”

  “Five senses?” Kayu Saitoh asked.

  “Yep. Dendera’s full of old women, don’t forget. Some of them can’t even move anymore,” said Hatsu Fukuzawa.

  “What happens to them when they get like that?” Kayu Saitoh asked.

  “Happens? What do you mean, what happens?” Hatsu Fukuzawa replied. “We take care of them, of course. What else?”

  What else indeed? How could they possibly abandon those who had already been abandoned? The fifty old women who lived in Dendera couldn’t Climb the Mountain. Their path to Paradise was blocked forever. If the inhabitants of Dendera started forsaking their own when they could no longer fend for themselves, why, that’d make Dendera no better than the Village. No, that would never happen here.

  As Kayu Saitoh used the snow outside to wash the coney blood off her hands, she acknowledged to herself that in this one thing, at least, Dendera had got it right. Then, another entirely different thought occurred to her. A thought that now seemed so obvious that she wondered why she hadn’t asked about it before, however unused to using her head she might be.

  “Did you lot, by any chance, rescue Kura Kuroi from the Mountain?” she asked, raising her head from the snow.

  “Kura Kuroi, huh? The one who Climbed the Mountain last year, right?” Somo Izumi said, brushing her white hair away from her face with her hand. “Sure we did. No worries. I was the one who discovered her, in fact.”

  “But Kura was—”

  “Yeah, she’s still bedridden,” said Somo Izumi. “Can’t be helped, I suppose, if she was like that back in the Village too.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about!” Kayu Saitoh hissed.

  “Huh?”

  “Kura was like me. She wanted to Climb the Mountain. She couldn’t wait. She believed with all her heart that she’d enter Paradise. That was all she wished for,” Kayu Saitoh said. “And you had to go and mess all that up for her.”

  “Huh. You think I’ll believe that someone actually wanted to die? For real?” Somo Izumi responded without missing a beat.

  “Kayu?” Hatsu Fukuzawa spoke now with a startled expression on her face. “Are you telling us that you actually believed in all that stuff? That you weren’t just delirious from the cold?”

  “Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along! And you should all be ashamed of yourselves for clinging to your pathetic little lives!”

  “Say that again, why don’t you?” Hatsu Fukuzawa growled and lunged for Kayu Saitoh, but Kotei Hoshii thrust an arm out to hold her back.

  “What are you doing?” Kotei Hoshii asked r
eproachfully, locking arms with Hatsu Fukuzawa. Then she turned to Kayu Saitoh. “And you. Listen to yourself. So you really wanted to die, huh? That’s a sneaky way of putting it. It makes you feel better to tell yourself that, does it? And yet here you are. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just as much part of Dendera as anybody else here. You’re one of us now.”

  “One of you? Who asked you to save me?” This time it was Kayu Saitoh who raised her arm ready to lunge, and as she did so Maka Kikuchi barrelled into her, knocking her to the ground.

  “Hey. I already told you once. No violence,” Maka Kikuchi said in an uneasy voice as she sat on top of Kayu Saitoh’s back. “If the others catch you fighting there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “And let me tell you something else,” Somo Izumi said to Kayu Saitoh, looking down at her as she lay pinned to the ground. “Kura Kuroi was grateful that we rescued her. She thanked us!”

  “You’re lying!” Kayu Saitoh spat.

  “She’s not lying,” Hatsu Fukuzawa answered. “I heard Kura say so too with my own ears. She said ‘thank you’ as she was being carried to Dendera.”

  “Lies …”

  Back in the Village, Kayu Saitoh had always kept her interactions with other people to a bare minimum. There were hardly any people around to spend time with anyway, and Kayu Saitoh had never been one for talking much in the first place, and besides, she was so busy with her daily chores that there simply wasn’t time to stand around gossiping. She was able to snatch and savor rare moments of blank respite in between chores perhaps, but other than that it was a case of work until time for sleep and then work again. That said, once she had grown too old for fetching water and she’d been assigned to household chores, she did then finally have a little spare time to her self. Not much, but more than before, certainly.

  That was when Kayu Saitoh finally made her first-ever friend, Kura Kuroi.

  Kura Kuroi was only a year older than she, so Kayu Saitoh had been aware of her since girlhood, but Kayu Saitoh had never really had the opportunity to get to know her. Owing to a sickness of the organs, Kura Kuroi spent most of her days asleep indoors. As an invalid unable to perform any useful work, Kura Kuroi was seen as something of a burden by the other Villagers, who had to shoulder her share. As Kayu Saitoh grew older and found that her own body was slowing down, she found that she could empathize with Kura Kuroi’s incapacity, and one day, when she finally had some free time to herself, she went to pay Kura Kuroi a visit, the first of what became many. During these visits Kayu Saitoh would listen to Kura Kuroi talking with joyous expectation of the time when she could Climb the Mountain and finally be free, and then one day Kayu Saitoh discovered a new emotion stirring inside her that she had never experienced before, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on what exactly that emotion was. She was old by then, you see, and when you are old it’s hard to truly accept a new idea, even when you want to. As a result, Kura Kuroi ended up Climbing the Mountain before Kayu Saitoh had the opportunity to understand this new, recently awakened feeling that now dwelled inside her. Usually, whenever an old person was about to Climb the Mountain, Kayu Saitoh would be filled with envy and impatience for her turn, but when Kura Kuroi’s time came about it was different, and Kayu Saitoh found that both her mood and thoughts were disturbed, ugly. She felt like she had been left alone. That her husband had Climbed the Mountain three years earlier was a factor in her newfound loneliness.