Chapter 12:
Chapter 12: Fall of the Lake City
Going Back to Kaguya
Interlude: Laughing at Funerals
I've laughed at funerals myself, for what it's worth. Took me a long time to admit that out loud to something I was actively holding a cannon on. Not because grief struck me as funny — nothing about it ever has — but because a certain kind of laugh comes out of a person standing too close to something too large to hold any other way, and I've had eleven hundred years of practice standing next to things too large to hold. I didn't tell Lune that. It would've taken the observation and worn it like a medal, and I wasn't in the mood to hand it one.
What actually stayed with me from that exchange wasn't the laugh. And it was the defensiveness underneath it — gone before I could get a clean look — the first time in this whole recitation Lune had sounded like it minded being misread. Every other chapter, it let me call it cruel and simply agreed, almost eagerly, the way a man agrees to an insult he finds flattering. First time it pushed back on the word instead of collecting it.
I don't know yet what to do with that. Eleven hundred years of a god being comfortable in its own cruelty, and one plague ship it apparently didn't build is the thing it wants credit for not causing. I asked it, half testing, whether it wanted me to believe there were degrees to this. Some deaths it owned. Some it merely witnessed and grieved alongside, same as I would.
It didn't answer that one directly. Just looked at the muzzle a while, and then said, quieter than before, "I never said I don't grieve them. I said I don't get to claim credit for the ones I didn't do. Those aren't the same sentence, comet, and I'd thank you to stop treating them like they are." I wrote that one down. Still deciding what column it belongs in.
Fall of the Lake City, 1519–1521
Lune went quiet for a moment before this one started, its eyes drifting somewhere past my shoulder, and when it spoke again there was less performance in the wind-up than I'd heard from it in five hundred years of listening.
"This next one. I want you to notice the water. Just the water." It looked back at me, direct, none of the usual theater in it. "Tell me you don't see what I saw."
Kami no Tsuihou had trained as a warrior from the age of fifteen in the ward's war-school, the way most freeborn boys of the lake city did, learning the war-club and the throwing spear under instructors who measured a young man's worth less by his birth than by how many times he got back up. Never the fastest of his cohort. Never the strongest. But he had a stubbornness his instructors noted and approved of — the kind that meant he was still standing, still swinging, long after boys with more natural gift had tired and stepped back.
He remembered the city whole, before any of this — canals at dawn with mist sitting low over the water, the first traders poling their canoes toward the market before the heat set in, the smell of maize turning on every cookfire up and down his street. His mother's voice, calling him in before dark, impatient and fond in the same breath. He hadn't thought about that voice in years, not until the sickness took her in the first wave, and he found himself standing outside a house gone suddenly too quiet, not knowing what to do with his hands.
By the time the white man's army from the sea, and their thousands of allied warriors, first appeared on the causeways, two years before the final siege, he'd already earned a modest reputation as a man who didn't break easily. Worth more, in that city in those years, than almost anything else a man could be known for.
The city that had raised him was, by the time the last siege closed, a city eating itself from the inside while an army stood at its edges finishing the job from the outside. The smallpox had arrived with the invaders the year before and swept through a population that had never built any resistance to it, killing by some counts a third of the capital before a single man of the white army from the sea crossed onto the causeways for the final assault. Whole households found dead together. The canals that once carried produce to the great market now carrying bodies, because there weren't enough living hands left to bury them properly. The two kinds of dying, siege and sickness, arrived close enough together by the end that nobody left standing could tell anymore which had actually broken the city first, or which one to hate more. He fought anyway, through all of it, because the alternative was watching, and watching had never once been in his nature in any life the thread had given him.
Kavan fought beside him through most of that final siege — trained in the same ward's war-school as boys, though it was the war itself, not the school, that actually made them close, in the way of men who've kept each other alive enough times the counting stops mattering. By the retreat toward the causeway the two of them had stopped needing to shout to coordinate a shield, moving the way men move after enough weeks fighting together that the movement stops being a decision. Kavan had lost a brother to the sickness three weeks earlier and hadn't said a word about it since. Not even the night Kami no Tsuihou found him sitting alone by a cookfire long after the others had slept, staring at nothing. He just sat down next to him without a word, and Kavan, after a long while, put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
That was the entire conversation. But it was enough. No room left in a single day, by then, to grieve everything the siege was handing out, so men grieved in fragments. Sideways. In gestures instead of words.
The pull ran west that whole campaign, toward open water and, past it, toward everything he had no name for and would never learn one for. He kept fighting toward the causeway with the clear, uncomplicated head of a man who has, for once, been given a direction that agrees with the one his orders already point him in — general retreat and private longing running the same line for the first time in this entire endless wheel, close enough to feel like mercy. He let himself believe it, for most of that last brutal day of street fighting, in a way he rarely let himself believe anything the thread promised.
It wasn't. He went down two streets short of the causeway, a crossbow bolt through the throat, close enough to the lake that if he'd fallen a different direction he'd have died with the water actually in view.
He felt it before he understood it — a hard punch under the jaw, then a warmth spreading fast where warmth had no business spreading. He didn't think of the city, or the siege, or two years of believing the thread meant something. He thought of the water. All the water still between him and it, crossed and never reached. Then nothing.
That was the part that killed him, in the end. Not the crossbow bolt. The believing.
Kavan caught him as he fell. Said his name once, low, more reflex than hope by the time it left his mouth.
"Kami no Tsuihou."
Nothing in Kavan's voice but grief, plain and unremarkable, the same grief he'd have said any of his brothers-in-arms' names with — for a man he'd fought beside three years and would mourn quietly, without ceremony, for however many years the fall of that city left him to mourn in.
"Two streets." Lune's bound hands opened slightly, an old measuring gesture with nothing left to measure. "I didn't measure it out to be cruel. I want to be clear about that, for once. I only noticed, after, how close it had been. That's all. I noticed."
I didn't say a damn thing right away. In eleven hundred years I had never once heard the Moon offer an unprompted correction to its own boasting, and I wasn't going to interrupt whatever this was long enough to let it remember how to stop. It sat there under the cannon, waiting, its expression doing something I didn't have a word for yet.
"You noticed," I finally said, "and you still called it a good one, back when it happened."
"I did." A pause, longer than any that had come before it — long enough that I watched its throat move once, twice, against the muzzle before it found the rest of the sentence. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't. I'm only telling you that I noticed the water too, and it didn't feel the same then as it does saying it out loud to you now."
I've laughed at funerals myself, for what it's worth. Took me a long time to admit that out loud to something I was actively holding a cannon on. Not because grief struck me as funny — nothing about it ever has — but because a certain kind of laugh comes out of a person standing too close to something too large to hold any other way, and I've had eleven hundred years of practice standing next to things too large to hold. I didn't tell Lune that. It would've taken the observation and worn it like a medal, and I wasn't in the mood to hand it one.
What actually stayed with me from that exchange wasn't the laugh. And it was the defensiveness underneath it — gone before I could get a clean look — the first time in this whole recitation Lune had sounded like it minded being misread. Every other chapter, it let me call it cruel and simply agreed, almost eagerly, the way a man agrees to an insult he finds flattering. First time it pushed back on the word instead of collecting it.
I don't know yet what to do with that. Eleven hundred years of a god being comfortable in its own cruelty, and one plague ship it apparently didn't build is the thing it wants credit for not causing. I asked it, half testing, whether it wanted me to believe there were degrees to this. Some deaths it owned. Some it merely witnessed and grieved alongside, same as I would.
It didn't answer that one directly. Just looked at the muzzle a while, and then said, quieter than before, "I never said I don't grieve them. I said I don't get to claim credit for the ones I didn't do. Those aren't the same sentence, comet, and I'd thank you to stop treating them like they are." I wrote that one down. Still deciding what column it belongs in.
Fall of the Lake City, 1519–1521
Lune went quiet for a moment before this one started, its eyes drifting somewhere past my shoulder, and when it spoke again there was less performance in the wind-up than I'd heard from it in five hundred years of listening.
"This next one. I want you to notice the water. Just the water." It looked back at me, direct, none of the usual theater in it. "Tell me you don't see what I saw."
Kami no Tsuihou had trained as a warrior from the age of fifteen in the ward's war-school, the way most freeborn boys of the lake city did, learning the war-club and the throwing spear under instructors who measured a young man's worth less by his birth than by how many times he got back up. Never the fastest of his cohort. Never the strongest. But he had a stubbornness his instructors noted and approved of — the kind that meant he was still standing, still swinging, long after boys with more natural gift had tired and stepped back.
He remembered the city whole, before any of this — canals at dawn with mist sitting low over the water, the first traders poling their canoes toward the market before the heat set in, the smell of maize turning on every cookfire up and down his street. His mother's voice, calling him in before dark, impatient and fond in the same breath. He hadn't thought about that voice in years, not until the sickness took her in the first wave, and he found himself standing outside a house gone suddenly too quiet, not knowing what to do with his hands.
By the time the white man's army from the sea, and their thousands of allied warriors, first appeared on the causeways, two years before the final siege, he'd already earned a modest reputation as a man who didn't break easily. Worth more, in that city in those years, than almost anything else a man could be known for.
The city that had raised him was, by the time the last siege closed, a city eating itself from the inside while an army stood at its edges finishing the job from the outside. The smallpox had arrived with the invaders the year before and swept through a population that had never built any resistance to it, killing by some counts a third of the capital before a single man of the white army from the sea crossed onto the causeways for the final assault. Whole households found dead together. The canals that once carried produce to the great market now carrying bodies, because there weren't enough living hands left to bury them properly. The two kinds of dying, siege and sickness, arrived close enough together by the end that nobody left standing could tell anymore which had actually broken the city first, or which one to hate more. He fought anyway, through all of it, because the alternative was watching, and watching had never once been in his nature in any life the thread had given him.
Kavan fought beside him through most of that final siege — trained in the same ward's war-school as boys, though it was the war itself, not the school, that actually made them close, in the way of men who've kept each other alive enough times the counting stops mattering. By the retreat toward the causeway the two of them had stopped needing to shout to coordinate a shield, moving the way men move after enough weeks fighting together that the movement stops being a decision. Kavan had lost a brother to the sickness three weeks earlier and hadn't said a word about it since. Not even the night Kami no Tsuihou found him sitting alone by a cookfire long after the others had slept, staring at nothing. He just sat down next to him without a word, and Kavan, after a long while, put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
That was the entire conversation. But it was enough. No room left in a single day, by then, to grieve everything the siege was handing out, so men grieved in fragments. Sideways. In gestures instead of words.
The pull ran west that whole campaign, toward open water and, past it, toward everything he had no name for and would never learn one for. He kept fighting toward the causeway with the clear, uncomplicated head of a man who has, for once, been given a direction that agrees with the one his orders already point him in — general retreat and private longing running the same line for the first time in this entire endless wheel, close enough to feel like mercy. He let himself believe it, for most of that last brutal day of street fighting, in a way he rarely let himself believe anything the thread promised.
It wasn't. He went down two streets short of the causeway, a crossbow bolt through the throat, close enough to the lake that if he'd fallen a different direction he'd have died with the water actually in view.
He felt it before he understood it — a hard punch under the jaw, then a warmth spreading fast where warmth had no business spreading. He didn't think of the city, or the siege, or two years of believing the thread meant something. He thought of the water. All the water still between him and it, crossed and never reached. Then nothing.
That was the part that killed him, in the end. Not the crossbow bolt. The believing.
Kavan caught him as he fell. Said his name once, low, more reflex than hope by the time it left his mouth.
"Kami no Tsuihou."
Nothing in Kavan's voice but grief, plain and unremarkable, the same grief he'd have said any of his brothers-in-arms' names with — for a man he'd fought beside three years and would mourn quietly, without ceremony, for however many years the fall of that city left him to mourn in.
"Two streets." Lune's bound hands opened slightly, an old measuring gesture with nothing left to measure. "I didn't measure it out to be cruel. I want to be clear about that, for once. I only noticed, after, how close it had been. That's all. I noticed."
I didn't say a damn thing right away. In eleven hundred years I had never once heard the Moon offer an unprompted correction to its own boasting, and I wasn't going to interrupt whatever this was long enough to let it remember how to stop. It sat there under the cannon, waiting, its expression doing something I didn't have a word for yet.
"You noticed," I finally said, "and you still called it a good one, back when it happened."
"I did." A pause, longer than any that had come before it — long enough that I watched its throat move once, twice, against the muzzle before it found the rest of the sentence. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't. I'm only telling you that I noticed the water too, and it didn't feel the same then as it does saying it out loud to you now."
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