Chapter 10: Hakata Bay

Interlude: The Mercy Question
I didn't have an answer for it either. Told Lune so, which I think surprised us both. Sixty-some years into this arrangement, cannon under its chin, a tally in my head, a fairly settled sense of which of us was asking the questions and which one owed the answers. "Which was crueler" wasn't a question I'd expected to actually sit with. Wasn't rhetorical, coming from Lune. And it wanted the answer.
I thought about fifty years of good hands and a walled garden and a book of poetry open to a page about migrating birds. Thought about what fifty years costs a person who spends every one of them a few degrees short of whole. Still couldn't rank it against a quick death and an unmarked grave the way I'd have liked to. That bothered me more than the chapter itself had. I'd built this whole watch on the premise that I'd know cruelty when I saw it — that the categories would hold if I just paid close enough attention. Kami no Tsuihou didn't hold. He sat right on the line, fifty years of it, and made a joke of my categories just by having lived them.
I asked Lune, eventually, whether it had known which one it was doing when it pressed that thread back down under Physician Lin's thumb. Mercy or cruelty, chosen on purpose. Or had it just done the thing in front of it and let the centuries sort out what to call it after. And it said it genuinely didn't know, and for once I believed it meant genuinely. "I've had eleven hundred years to get comfortable not knowing," it said. "You've had sixty-two. Ask me again in a thousand."
I didn't like how much sense that made. I kept the cannon where it was. And, for the first time since the throne room started, I wrote nothing down about that exchange in the log I keep. Not because it wasn't worth recording. Because I wasn't sure yet which side of the ledger it belonged on. Unlike Lune, I still mind getting that wrong.
Hakata Bay, 1281
Lune's shoulders came up, something almost like eagerness in it — an old, familiar posture I recognized from the days before any of this, back when cruelty still looked good on it.
"Now here's one where I actually did the honest work. A whole typhoon, built to order."
Before any of that, he was just a fisherman's son who fished. His father had gone under in a squall eleven years back, close enough to shore that the whole village heard his mother's screaming, and after that it was the two of them and the boat and whatever the strait handed over that day. He was out on the water before first light every morning of his life he could remember, and back before the sun got high enough to matter, because his mother had a bad hip by then and somebody had to haul the nets before the market thinned out. He never once complained about it, not because he was saintly, but because it had simply never occurred to him there was another way to live.
He gave her the best of every catch without being asked — set it aside on the walk up from the boat, out of habit, the way another man might set aside a coin. She fed him too much at every meal and told him he was getting soft around the middle, which he wasn't, and mended his nets by lamplight while he slept, which he pretended not to notice so she could go on pretending she didn't need to. He was twenty-two and had never once slept a night outside that house. The other young men in the village teased him for it, gently, the way you tease someone for a thing you also privately envy. He didn't mind. He'd have chosen that life again every single morning, if anyone had ever thought to ask him whether he wanted it.
Kami no Tsuihou was a conscript that year. Handed a spear he'd never asked to hold and told which direction to point it, standing ankle-deep in cold surf while a Mongol fleet blackened the horizon like a second, wrong coastline stitched onto the real one. The census-takers had come through his village that spring with a quota and a list, and his name was on it, along with every other man between fifteen and forty whose family hadn't paid or prayed their way off the roll. A fisherman's son who'd never held anything sharper than a gutting knife, and the spear they gave him at the muster point was a full hand's width too long for him, so he spent the first two days of drilling simply learning not to trip over the end of his own weapon.
From the very first day of drilling, Saburō stood two spears down the line from him — a broad, easy-laughing man from two villages over who'd apparently decided, on no evidence Kami no Tsuihou could identify, that they were going to be friends whether he liked it or not. He had a joke about the spear's length he refused to let die — something about how the imperial armory must have measured every recruit for height and then issued the weapons to whoever stood next to them instead — and he told a version of it every single morning for two months, slightly worse each time, until it stopped being funny on its own merits and became funny only because it was Saburō, delivering it with the same wounded sincerity as if it were new. By the time the fleet was actually sighted, Kami no Tsuihou could predict the joke's wording almost to the syllable, and had come, despite himself, to need hearing it every morning the way some men need coffee.
The fleet, when it came, didn't look like something a spear was any kind of answer to. Chroniclers would later argue over the exact count — some said nine hundred ships, some closer to four thousand once every transport and supply vessel was counted — but no number said aloud on that beach captured what it actually was to stand ankle-deep in cold surf and watch a horizon fill in, hull by hull, hour by hour, until the line where sky met water simply stopped existing and became fleet instead. And the noise reached shore before the ships did. A low continuous groan of timber and rope and thousands of men, underlaid by drums that didn't match any rhythm a mortal heart wanted to keep pace with. Some of the conscripts around him were praying. A few were being quietly, unashamedly sick into the sand. Saburō, for once, wasn't joking.
Kami no Tsuihou had a burn in his chest that had been building for three days straight by the time the drums started. Not new, exactly. Sharpened — the way a low fever sharpens into a real one right before it breaks. Started as a warmth he could ignore while drilling. Grew into something he found himself pressing a hand against without meaning to. By the morning of the landing it had become a pull so specific he could've pointed to the exact ridgeline it wanted without looking. Made the war in front of him feel, absurdly, like something happening to somebody else. A scene he'd wandered into on his way toward whatever the burn actually wanted.
"The Exiled by God—"
Saburō only got that much out before the noise of the beach swallowed the rest of whatever he meant to say — a question, an order, a plea to come back and hold the line — and by the time the sound would have reached him, Kami no Tsuihou was already running the wrong direction, toward the tree line, toward whatever the thread had been promising him for three days. Nobody else stopped him. In that noise, one more man running looked like every other man running, and Saburō, who might have been the only man on that beach who'd have chased him, had his own spear to hold and his own drums to answer.
He didn't run silently. Something tore out of him partway across the sand that wasn't words, wasn't anything his own throat had ever made before — a sound with nothing behind it but pure frustration, the kind that comes from a soul too small to hold what's being asked of it and too proud to call the noise it's making a scream. He didn't know what he was running from or toward. Only that whatever had a claim on him had never once explained itself, never once asked, and some raw, ungovernable part of him hated it for that with nowhere honest to put the hate. If this was some god's doing, in a life he hadn't chosen and hadn't been consulted about, he wanted no part of paying for it — screamed that much into the wind, uselessly, at nothing that could hear him except, perhaps, the one thing that could.
He made it almost to the trees.
She was inland, three ridgelines from the coast, blind, sweeping the same stone steps she'd swept every morning for longer than she'd been sighted for. Her name was Fuyu, though almost no one at the shrine used it anymore, herself included — she'd been the blind girl who swept the steps for so many years running the two facts had fused into one word. She woke before the other women, every morning without exception, and swept the forty-one stone steps from the gate to the inner shrine in the same order, corner to corner, a routine so old her hands had long since stopped needing her attention for it.
She hadn't always been blind. Until she was six she'd had ordinary eyes, brown, her mother used to tell her, before her mother stopped being alive to tell her anything at all. What took the sight came out of the water on an ordinary afternoon while she waded for shells at the tide line — something with teeth, something none of the other children present could agree on describing the same way twice, gone back under before anyone got a clear look at it. It caught her once, low on her left side, just under the ribs, and let go. The fever that followed lasted eleven days and left her blind on the twelfth, and left, at the exact place the thing's mouth had closed on her, a scar she could still find with two fingers without needing to search for it.
That was where the ache lived too, or seemed to — close enough to the old scar that she'd settled on the tidiest explanation available to her years ago and never once revisited it. Old wounds ached in weather, in age, in whatever mood a body settled into on a given afternoon, and hers simply ached more than most, on account of what had made it. Nobody had ever told her different. She had never once thought to ask.
When Chiyo, the eldest of the shrine women, once gently asked whether something was troubling her, Fuyu said, "It's nothing," in the flat, practiced tone of a woman who's said the same two words so many times they've stopped being a lie and become instead a kind of shelter. Chiyo didn't ask again. Decided, privately, that some griefs a woman carries don't need a name to be respected. Left it there.
The wind that came in off the water that afternoon was the kind the coast had, historically and occasionally, produced on command against invading fleets — the kind sailors would spend the next seven hundred years calling divine, for reasons that had nothing to do with the one man it also happened to catch. It arrived first as a change in the quality of the light, a greenish dimming that made the birds go quiet all at once, then as a wall of pressure that flattened the grass on every ridgeline between the coast and the shrine within the space of a few breaths. It didn't distinguish between the ships it was sent for and the one man running the other way, toward the trees, toward her, toward nothing he was ever going to reach. He drowned reaching east, close enough to shore that a stronger swimmer might have made it — if the same wind hadn't also been busy sinking a hundred larger ships that afternoon and had any attention left over for one.
On the second ridgeline inland, at the exact moment the gust reached its worst, Fuyu's broom stopped moving. Not a large stop. Nothing Chiyo, three steps below her, even noticed. Just a half-second where her hands forgot the routine they'd never once forgotten before, while something under her ribs pulled tight enough to steal the breath out of her, and then, as the wind moved on past the shrine and out across the next ridgeline and the next, let go again. The way it always did.
The way it had for as long as she could remember, without ever once resolving into anything she could have called an answer. She picked the broom back up. Finished the forty-one steps in the same order she always did, corner to corner. Told herself, because it was the only thing she'd ever told herself, that it was nothing.
"A divine wind that protects a nation," Lune said, and for just a moment it looked genuinely pleased with itself again, the closest thing to its old self I'd seen in longer than I wanted to count, "and also, incidentally, disposes of one inconvenient exile. I'll admit I enjoyed the economy of it."
"You enjoy everything that costs you nothing."
"Most gods do, comet." Its eyes found mine and held there, unbothered. "I'm not aware that's a distinguishing feature."
I asked it, before I let the moment close, whether it knew what became of the friend — Saburō, spear joke and all, still holding his line when the wave took the rest of the beach apart. Lune went quiet in a way that had nothing performative in it, which from Lune was its own kind of answer.
"I know," it said, eventually. "And no. I won't tell you." I told it I hadn't taken it for the sparing kind. "I'm not being kind, comet. I'm being decent, which isn't a thing I get many chances at, so let me have this one." It wouldn't be moved past that, not by the cannon, not by sixty-two years of owing me answers.
"It has nothing to do with me," it said. "Nothing to do with any god, mine or anyone else's. Purely a mortal thing, start to finish, and it's ugly enough that I'd rather you go on thinking better of your own species a while longer. Some things are better left unlearned, comet. Even for one of us."