Authors: Yuya Sato
They all were going to die within moments. Thinking not of the many deaths, and acting almost entirely on reflex, Kayu Saitoh rushed forward. The same seemed true of Ume Itano, whose face was dominated by fear but whose body advanced with courage. In the clearing, the two women stood in Hikari Asami’s path. The bear was gaining on her.
“That’s enough,” Kayu Saitoh shouted. “We’ll take it from here.”
Whether or not she heard Kayu Saitoh’s voice, Hikari Asami dropped to the ground. The bear jumped over her body and barrelled ahead toward Kayu Saitoh and Ume Itano. The bear, kicking up snow as it charged, was right in front of Kayu Saitoh. For an instant, she thought their eyes met. She readied her spear. The weapon hardly inspired confidence that it could stand up to the bear, but it was too late for such thoughts now. She thrust the spear forward. Bested by the force of the beast’s charge, the wooden spear shattered into splinters. Something flew past the edge of Kayu Saitoh’s vision, and it took her a moment to realize it was Ume Itano.
Suddenly, all sound was gone.
All that existed in the noiseless space was Kayu Saitoh and the bear. Their faces were close enough that they could touch. She could see in detail each and every hair on its face. She saw the bear’s little eye, its only eye now, and in it she saw her own reflection. She could smell the bear’s odor, the pungent stench of blood and grease and dirt and trees and snow all mixed together and rotting. Kayu Saitoh could feel the bear, and in her thoughts a single image came into view, much like the one she had pictured the third time she had faced the bear. But she ignored the vision even as it unfolded in her mind. She punched with her right fist, hoping to crush the bear’s only eye. She couldn’t tell if she did or not. Her view suddenly turned crimson, and her hearing came back with a ringing that tore through her entire body. Caught by the bear’s charge, she had been flung into the air. She landed hard on the ground, flipping and rolling, scattering snow. When she finally came to a stop, a long distance separated her from where she had been standing. She lifted her head and, disregarding the blood spurting from her nose, she looked for the bear.
She saw the beast, given over to total rage now, charging with breakneck speed toward the trap, and she saw Masari Shiina standing at the open doorway.
The leader’s hair and white robes fluttered in a gust of wind from the bear’s rush. Her hair lifted, revealing her single right eye, an eye that gazed fixedly at the bear. A smile was on her lips. It was a graceful smile worn only by those who had found victory.
The bear ran straight into the trap, bringing Masari Shiina along with it.
Hono Ishizuka, Usuma Tsutsumi, and Hotori Oze immediately closed the structure’s heavy door. Then, and without hesitation, they began trying to push over the fire basket, but it wouldn’t tip over. Wood cracked as the bear pummeled the walls from within.
Masari Shiina’s desperate shout came from inside. “What are you doing? Burn it down!”
Kayu Saitoh wanted to help tip over the basket, but the strength had left her, and she couldn’t even stand up. At first, she was enraged by her helplessness, but when she saw the tears running down Hono Ishizuka’s face as she battled with the fire basket, confidence in the woman quelled her temper. The fire basket collapsed in short order, and the blazing heap of firewood fell onto the building’s roof. Before long, Kayu Saitoh saw a tiny flame peeking out from the thick smoke, and the next thing she knew, the fire had crawled along the top of the structure, and the trap was up in flames. From within the trap came rumbles and shakings from the bear’s attacks and the reverberations of Masari Shiina’s raucous laughter. Each time the bear struck, the walls jolted unsteadily. Where she lay in the snow, Kayu Saitoh willed the trap to burn quickly.
Burn quickly,
she prayed,
burn quickly, burn quickly, burn bigger.
The flames covered the roof but hadn’t spread throughout the structure. Despite the black smoke climbing into the sky in dramatic plumes, the fire itself failed to spread with any sort of haste. Hono Ishizuka, Usuma Tsutsumi, and Hotori Oze stared into the flames, and from their expressions they too seemed to be praying. Meanwhile, the bear continued to batter at the walls. Kayu Saitoh wished she could move, but she was utterly incapacitated and could do nothing but watch the events unfold while blood streamed from her nose. A tendril of fire reached along the roof and down to one of the walls. In seconds, what had been more hyperbole than fire had now spread across the entire building.
Flames engulfed the trap.
A loud roar came from inside. Kayu Saitoh could no longer hear Masari Shiina’s laughter. The bear’s howls and the bear’s howls alone rang throughout Dendera. In them, Kayu Saitoh heard confusion, and she knew the beast was scared. Her lips broke into a smile. Gone were the sounds of the bear striking the walls; maybe beating at walls covered in bright red flames was too painful, or maybe the bear had breathed in too much smoke to move. The blaze intensified, now one single massive fire. And the bear was confined inside it. The trap burned and burned, and the heat reached Kayu Saitoh, even at her distance.
“We’ve won,” she muttered, almost delirious, as her face warmed. “We’ve won. We’ve won. We’ve won. We’ve won. We’ve won.”
The image of the blazing trap seared itself into her memories. But that wasn’t enough for her. She was struck by a desire to more fully bask in those flames. Dutiful to this desire, Kayu Saitoh attempted to push herself up with her arms. She didn’t move. Or rather, she moved, but part of her didn’t—her right arm. Thinking this odd, she looked to the side and saw her elbow bent in an unnatural direction. Running up her palm was a vertical gash, from which various veins protruded. A large chunk of tissue had been gouged out around her elbow, exposing cloudy white fat; bloody pink flesh; tattered, half-translucent muscle; and even bone. And then she couldn’t see anything. Darkness abruptly consumed her vision, and then there was nothing.
Throughout the day, Kayu Saitoh awoke several times. She couldn’t hold her head steady, and everything was red. She couldn’t make out anything around her, but from the dullness in her typically sharp hearing and the weariness in her body, she realized she had a fever, and then she lost consciousness again. The next time she came to, she noticed that straw covered her body, but she didn’t understand why. She thought she might be dreaming, but in her dreams she was almost always her younger self, so she quickly rejected that notion. She felt as if in a haze in which but one thing was clear and adversarial: pain. Someone lifted up her limp right arm. She didn’t know who it was, but she saw white robes and knew it had to be one of the other women. Two others flanked the woman holding her arm. Kayu felt her pain grow. Her right arm felt like it was on fire. But despite this intense pain, she felt nothing beyond her elbow. Amid pain and terror, she tried to scream, but cloth had been stuffed into her mouth, and she couldn’t. Her breath came from her nose mixed with streams of snot, and she cried the sticky tears of a fearful child, but these did not amount to a scream. As this went on she battled the severe pain, when suddenly a new type of pain came upon her, mixed with a peculiar coldness. She tried to get a look through her tear-filled eyes and saw enough to realize that the women were placing snow where part of her flesh was missing. The snow quickly melted into red droplets that splattered down to the floor. One of the women muttered that it wasn’t working. For some reason, the voice sounded like it was coming from far away, which confused Kayu Saitoh, but she was more interested in finding out what exactly wasn’t working. She opened her eyes wider to try to get a better grasp of the situation. When she did, she saw the glitter of a stone dagger. The dagger ate into her flesh and pain shot through her. She howled. But the dagger kept working, and she heard the sound of it cutting wetly through her living tissue. Her vision went red, leaving only her physical senses and the pain to tell her what was happening to her body. Through her anguish, she strained her eyes to see and to free herself from the terror of not knowing. But what happened next triggered her sense of smell more than her sight. One of the other women held something in her hand that gave off the odor of burning wood. Then she saw that it was indeed a piece of wood with a red, smoldering tip. Simultaneous with the stench of charring flesh, her pain burst like a bubble and her teeth clamped down by reflex. The cloth in her mouth prevented her from biting her tongue off, but several of her teeth chipped badly. But in that moment, Kayu Saitoh hadn’t the luxury of noticing such details. Each time the woman applied and removed the wood, flesh adhered to it and was ripped away. Kayu Saitoh screamed and cried cloudy tears, but that alone wouldn’t empower her to endure the pain. Moreover, she lost the ability to comprehend why she should have to endure it. She tried to raise her left arm to slap away the burning wood, but she couldn’t move it. Her legs, her left arm, and her head were all being held down by the women. Kayu Saitoh resisted fiercely. But their grasps were firm, and with most of her strength gone, she couldn’t escape. Meanwhile, burning wood scorched her exposed tissue again and again. In time, the pain exhausted her. Before long Kayu Saitoh lost consciousness again, and this time she really did dream. As was to be expected she was now a girl, in a time before her face and neck were wrinkled and her palms and soles were riddled with cracks and her teeth and ears were enfeebled with age, a time when she was beautiful and lived beautifully. In her dream Kayu Saitoh was running through an open field, laughing for the sheer joy of laughing, even though in her actual past there had been precious few scenes like this one, if any. Her actual past had consisted of tilling half-barren fields, sitting in her house sorting the beans, babysitting for her younger brother, and reaching maturity so that she could bear a child. That was how her actual youth had gone. There hadn’t been time to run through the fields laughing. Still, Kayu Saitoh never thought of herself as unfortunate.
In the dream, Kayu Saitoh became aware of a mysterious sound. Then she noticed a small vibration accompanying the sound. She craned her supple, unwrinkled neck and looked to the sky. Seeing nothing unusual amid the cloudless blue, she assumed she must have imagined it. She giggled, gently shaking her youthful cheeks. In reality, it was the sound and vibration of the women smashing her protruding bone with a fist-sized rock. With each strike, the bone cracked deeper, and the impact shook ripples through the surrounding flesh, from which dripped a mixture of blood and fatty tissue. Her skull shook with each vibration, and this contributed to her reawakening. That very same moment, the rock came down again, and Kayu Saitoh opened her eyes wide. Her body shook enough to scatter her pooled-up tears into the air. Each time she was struck, she passed out, returning to her smiling youth. But the very same thing brought her back to consciousness. Amid this cycle, her mind whirled, and the already blurry line between dream and reality clouded further. In the end, she experienced both simultaneously: reality, where she gushed sweat and gasped in pain, and the dream, where she giggled and looked up at the sky. Eventually, when the work had been done, with her bone smashed completely, her arm removed, and the protruding end of the bone shaved off, Kayu Saitoh had exhausted all of her senses, and everything was a haze. Thoughts and awareness came only in intermittent fragments. But even in this state, one precious, unwavering part of her held on to a single idea: she didn’t want to die. The idea had taken firm root without her noticing. This idea—that she didn’t want to die—sustained her as she took deep breaths and slid back into the dream. In the dream, she was, as she almost always was, in the time of her youth. She wore a bright kimono and was filled with happiness just by looking at the world around her, at the birds and the butterflies. With a gentle smile, she walked peacefully through the Village. It was a dream of much beauty. It was a dream of much yearning. She may or may not have experienced it in her real life, but Kayu Saitoh was powerless to deny the beauty of it or how much she yearned for it.
The dream ended, and she opened her eyes.
Five women—Hono Ishizuka, Hikari Asami, Ume Itano, Usuma Tsutsumi, and Hotori Oze—were looking down at the freshly awakened Kayu Saitoh.
“How long was I out?”
Her voice sounded like she hadn’t spoken in a hundred years, but the women seemed to understand her words. Hono Ishizuka gave her a small nod. With something flickering in the woman’s expression, she replied that it had been three days. Kayu Saitoh felt disappointed in herself and rebuked herself for being so useless that she would sleep for three entire days during such a grave time. Though she had just awoken, her thoughts were clear. She had been able to perceive the women’s aura of torpidity, and Dendera’s air of stagnation. In these she sensed the drifting weariness that came after the end of things. In the women’s eyes she immediately spotted the color of the new state of things: the murky blue color of fear.
“What happened to the bear?”
At Kayu Saitoh’s question, the murky blue in the women’s eyes darkened further, and their heads lowered. These were the eyes of people unable to imagine what the next day would bring. Kayu Saitoh stared at the women in silence, but soon Usuma Tsutsumi answered, her lips trembling as if she were about to cry.
“It escaped.”
“It escaped?” Kayu Saitoh couldn’t understand. “What are you talking about? It was trapped in all those flames.”
“The fire spread too quickly.” Usuma Tsutsumi pressed both hands against her own head. “All that burned was the trap itself. The bear broke through the weakened walls … and escaped.”
“What, the bear is just fine?”
“It looked burned, but it escaped anyway. The damned thing escaped.”
“It’s over. It’s all over,” Hono Ishizuka said, pressing her hands to her head as well. “Masari and all the others—they died for nothing.” She groaned. “It was all for nothing. Dendera is finished.”