Chapter 13: Dejima

Chapter 13: Dejima
Interlude: What Changes and What Doesn't
I've spent eleven hundred years being very careful not to hope for anything from Lune. Hope is exactly the kind of leverage a god like that knows how to use, and I'd watched it use worse leverage on better men than me for longer than most civilizations have existed. So I want to be honest about what happened after the lake city: some small, traitorous part of me hoped anyway. Two streets. I noticed the water too. A god that had spent five hundred years performing every cruelty like a man showing off a trophy had just, unprompted, told me a story about noticing its own handiwork and not liking the taste of it after.
I don't know if that's change. Turned the question over enough times now I've stopped expecting a clean answer. Could be exactly what change looks like in something that's had eleven hundred years to get very good at pacing itself — the truth arriving in careful, survivable doses instead of all at once, because even a god can only carry so much confession before the weight of it becomes its own kind of danger. Or it could be nothing more than the oldest trick I know. A performance of vulnerability precise enough to earn exactly the reaction it wants, at exactly the moment it wants it, from the one audience left in the universe still paying close enough attention to notice.
I told Lune, evenly, that noticing wasn't the same as caring, and I wasn't lowering a cannon over a sentence. It said it hadn't asked me to. "I'm not telling you this to be forgiven, comet. I gave up wanting that a long time before you were even a rock. I'm telling you because I'm tired of being the only one who remembers what the water looked like." I didn't answer that.
Not sure there was an answer that wouldn't have cost me something I wasn't ready to spend yet. The cannon stayed where it was. But I noticed, too — my hand hadn't tightened on it once through that entire exchange. I've been sitting with what that might mean ever since.
Dejima, 1600s
Lune moved through this one quieter than any before it — no lift of the chin, no old performing posture, just its eyes fixed somewhere on the middle distance the whole way through, like something practiced was starting to cost more effort than it used to.
Kaguya was a noblewoman that century, folded into silk and protocol behind walls built specifically to keep a woman like her from ever wanting anything the walls couldn't also provide. A whole household of women trained to anticipate her needs before she voiced them — Osen, the eldest of them, had served the family since before Kaguya was born and could read a change in her mood from the set of her shoulders alone, a skill she'd never once been thanked for because it had never once been needed as visibly as it was that spring. A garden she wasn't permitted to walk in unescorted. Three rooms she'd memorized every knot in the floorboards of from a childhood spent mostly indoors. And an ache in her chest none of them had a remedy for, because none of them had ever been told it existed.
She kept it the way she kept everything the household didn't have a use for — folded small and put away, taken out only at night, alone, when the moon was high enough to see from her window and she let herself wonder, without ever quite admitting she was wondering, what direction it was actually pulling her toward. Osen noticed the nights she stood too long at that window. Said nothing about it either. The way a good servant learns which silences to keep.
Lord Tsukikage began visiting that spring. A minor aristocrat with some official license to deal with the foreigners penned at Dejima. Pleasant company by every account, patient at Go in a way that made losing to him feel less like losing and more like being taught something. He came twice a month, sat across the board from her in the receiving room with the ease of a man who had nowhere else in the world he needed to be, and always brought something small from the trading post — a length of foreign cloth, a folding fan painted with a bird no artist in Japan had ever seen alive, once an inkstone and a pen carved from some pale wood she didn't recognize, the nib cut in a style none of her own tutors had ever shown her.
"The gaijin make strange, beautiful things," he told her, setting the pen in her palm with both hands, the way a man presents something he's genuinely pleased to have found. "I thought of you the moment I saw it."
Their games ran long, most visits. He played a patient, unhurried Go, willing to let a match stretch two hours if she wanted to think a move through properly, and unlike every other man who'd ever sat across that board from her, he never once let her win out of courtesy — which she found, to her own surprise, was the thing she looked forward to most. "You'll never improve if I hand it to you," he told her once, when she accused him, half laughing, of taking the game too seriously against a woman who'd never leave these walls to play anyone else. "And I'd rather you improve. I don't know why that matters to me as much as it does. But it does." She thought about that sentence longer than she admitted to Osen or to herself, turning it over on nights when sleep wouldn't come — that specific warmth of being wanted to improve rather than simply wanted.
She never once wondered why a nobleman with access to Dejima's trading floor would think of her, specifically, in front of a foreign pen. She only knew the ink smelled faintly of a place she'd never been, and that holding it, some nights, the ache in her chest went warm instead of hollow, for reasons she didn't examine any harder than she examined anything else that made the days easier to get through.
Kami no Tsuihou met the same Lord Tsukikage across the trading floor at Dejima, where the man held some minor license to inspect and appraise goods coming off the Dutch ships before they cleared for the mainland — a role that put him, twice a month, in a small warehouse room with the handful of foreigners permitted to handle the transactions directly. By every account the mercenaries traded among themselves, an unusually generous inspector, prone to pressing small courtesies on the men whose goods he examined. Once, running a cloth sample between his fingers, he'd handed a folded silk square to Kami no Tsuihou without any particular ceremony. "A gift, for your trouble today." Kami no Tsuihou took it, thanked him in the broken Japanese he'd picked up over eleven years on the island, and only noticed, much later, alone in his room, that the square carried a perfume unlike anything he'd smelled before. Something floral and cool, faint enough he had to hold it close to be sure it wasn't his imagination.
He couldn't have said why it made his chest ache the way it did that night — low, warm, no name for it. He kept the cloth anyway. Folded at the bottom of his sea chest. Told no one, including Hendrick, that he'd taken to unfolding it some nights just to breathe it in.
Neither of them ever learned whose perfume it was. Neither of them ever learned there was a whose to ask about.
Hendrick, who bunked across the narrow room from him and had spent eleven years on that island without once, by his own count, feeling anything he couldn't explain, had arrived on the same Dutch ship as him originally — two frightened young clerks assigned bunks across from each other and told, in the flat way company men were told things, that they'd likely spend the rest of their working lives on that one fenced island and ought to make their peace with it early. They had, in a manner of speaking. Hendrick taught him enough Dutch card games to fill the long evenings. And he taught Hendrick enough Japanese to haggle a better price out of the mainland traders than any other clerk on the island managed. Not friendship exactly, in either man's telling. More the loyalty that grows between two people serving the same sentence in the same small room for over a decade.
Hendrick noticed the change in him before anyone else did. And the way he'd started standing at the seawall after dark, facing a direction that had nothing to do with the trading routes or the ships or any of the things a sensible man on Dejima had reason to think about. Noticed, too, though he never said so, how the change had started around the same time as the little gifts from the inspector, and drew, privately, a conclusion that was wrong in every particular except the sense that something in his roommate had shifted toward a direction none of the company's charts accounted for.
"You'll get yourself shot standing there." Hendrick told him more than once, and meant it kindly. Once tried, clumsily, to talk him into a game of cards instead. Kami no Tsuihou turned it down — first time in eleven years — gently, without explaining why.
The night he finally went into the water was moonless. Struck him, walking down to the wall, as either a mercy or a joke, and he never did decide which. He stood at the seawall a long while first, longer than any night before it, feeling the pull sit in his chest steady and total in a way it had never quite managed to be in eleven years of quieter tugging, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that he'd already made the decision some time before his feet had. The edict, the fence, the guards walking the mainland shore in their predictable rounds — none of it had ever once occurred to the thread as an obstacle worth respecting, any more than an ocean or a monsoon or a century of palace walls ever had. It didn't understand distance the way a Sakoku edict did. Never had, in any life, in any water. Didn't start now.
"Kami no Tsuihou—"
Hendrick called after him once, low, more alarm than anger, already too late to matter — just the name of the man he'd shared a room with for the better part of a year — and he'd spend the rest of his own life on that island trying, and failing, to explain to anyone who asked what had actually happened to him.
The mainland guards who shot him did it without hesitation, the way men do a job they've been trained to consider simple. Fast. Procedural. Without malice on either end of the cannon. But the closest thing to an accident the wheel had produced in seven hundred years, if an accident can be built out of a hundred years of decree sitting patiently in wait for exactly one man to test it.
Kaguya never learned his name, translated or otherwise. Lord Tsukikage stopped visiting not long after, without explanation, the way pleasant acquaintances sometimes simply do, and she found she missed the Go more than she expected to, and the pen even more than the Go, and never once connected the quiet, sudden loneliness that followed his absence to anything at all.
"That one wasn't even mine." Its bound hands had gone still in a way I hadn't seen from it before. No idle testing of the restraints. Nothing.
"The shooting wasn't." I let that sit a second before the rest of it. "The games were. The pen was. Whatever the hell you had him carrying around in his sea chest for the last year of his life was. You want to tell me about Lord Tsukikage, or should I."
Something crossed Lune's face just then that I hadn't seen from it before, not once in eleven hundred years of watching it. Not shame exactly. Close enough to it that I almost didn't recognize the shape. "I liked that one," it said finally, quiet. "I want to be honest with you about that much. I liked sitting across a board from her.
I liked bringing her things. I told myself, for a while, that it didn't count as cruelty if I actually enjoyed her company — as if the enjoying were the point, and the two of them never knowing what they were holding was just a detail I happened to also find funny." Its eyes moved slowly around the throne room — the cracked stone under its own bindings, the scorch marks where the guards had stood, all of it — like it was seeing the place for the first time rather than the eleven-hundred-and- somethingth. "I built a system once, a century prior, and told myself that was the cleanest work I'd ever done. This is the one where I stopped believing that. I just didn't say so out loud until now."