THERE WAS A WEIRDNESS in the wind.
Einar Tomoe stood on the headland above Hata harbor, dawn breeze in his face, and under the salt and the cold there was smoke. Not woodsmoke. Burning pitch. And under that, something fouler. Horses, dung, and ten thousand unwashed men.
He let it come to him. His breath went deep, then slow, then quiet, welcoming the wind.
Below, the village was waking. Smoke from the longhall’s roof-hole. Paper walls sliding open in the shore houses. Children at the dock shouting in the tongue old men on both sides pretended not to understand—half north, half shore, all Hata.
The wind said west. Three days’ sail, maybe two.
Last night the seabirds had come inland in shrieking thousands, and this morning the pitch rode the air. The Mongols had taken Tsushima. Now they were coming here.
Einar opened his eyes.
The fleet lay at anchor below. Two longships, lean, dragon-prowed. Four broad-beamed atakebune. And between them the six hybrids—clinker-straked like the keels of his father’s people, wide of beam like the shore-folk’s craft, square sails rigged to turn fast. His mother’s father had called them ugly…until the day they outran a pirate squadron in the strait and left it burning on the water.
Einar put on his helmet. The kabuto, horned. Warriors of the mainland called the horns a joke. The northmen called them worse. He stopped listening the day he killed his first man while wearing them.
Fate is fixed, his father said the winter he died. The way others say goodnight.
Duty is a mountain, old Saito answered, at the funeral, drunk, but meaning every word. Death, lighter than a feather.
Einar had been standing between them his whole life. As he did now.
Below, the shrine bell began to ring. The one for storms…and for death.
Einar trod down the weathered path.
THEY ARGUED IN THE LONGHALL because the northmen would not fit in the shrine and the shore-folk would not argue on a dirt floor. For thirty years the hall had been the compromise. It belonged to neither, which meant it belonged to Einar.
He sat at the fire-pit’s head and let them ramble.
Bjarni Kettilson spoke first, as was his right: broad, red-bearded, loud, a sailor to the marrow. He knew the shore-tongue well enough yet refused to use it on principle; a woman in the third row translated softly.
“The fleet is at Tsushima. I say we don’t wait to be slaughtered in our beds. We sail tonight, take the strait in the dark, hit them at dawn while they’re strung out on the water, and send them down with songs they can hear in Hell.”
The northmen’s benches stamped. Somebody shouted the old war-name of Kettil’s first crew. Bjarni stood in it, glowing—a man offering the gift he most wanted: a death worth the singing.
The shore-folk’s side of the hall did not move. They sat in rows as neat as rice fields, but their stillness was not agreement.
Lord Fujiwara no Aritsune rose when the noise calmed. He had been a retainer of the Dazaifu once, before the exile, and carried it like a scar. He spoke in the tongue of the realm, precise, and unhurried. This time it was the northmen who required an interpreter.
“The honorable Bjarni proposes we row two hundred men against the fleet of the Great Khan. The fleet that burned Tsushima in a day. I do not question Bjarni’s courage. I question whether the Khan will notice our deaths, or simply sail through them.”
The northmen’s benches growled.
Aritsune waited until silence returned.
“The Khan’s ships are transports. They must land. On the water they are many. While landing on the beach, they are standing in surf, in armor, their horses crying beneath them. There is a correct way to receive such a landing. We hold the shore in formation. We die in ranks, in our proper places, and the mainland will know that Hata did not shame the realm.”
He sat.
The shore-folk bowed their heads.
Einar stood and the hall quieted.
“Bjarni.” North-tongue first. “We hit their van with eleven ships. How many ships does the Khan have?”
Bjarni’s jaw loosened, “Hundreds.”
“And men?”
“Thousands.” A pause. “Tens of thousands, the fishers say.”
Einar continued, “Then we die in the first hour, the fleet burns behind us, and our families watching from this beach.” He let it sit. “Your plan is a good death, but a terrible fight.”
Einar turned and shifted into his mother’s tongue, half the hall leaned forward as he did.
“Lord Aritsune. If we hold the beach in formation, how many can we put in ranks?”
“Four hundred and thirty,” Aritsune said. “Every man and half the women.”
“And the Khan lands in waves of how many?”
Aritsune stayed silent.
Einar waited.
“Five thousand in the first wave,” Aritsune muttered. “If the accounts are true.”
“We break the first wave. Break the second, if the gods are feeling generous. The third wave steps over our bodies.” Einar kept his voice level. “Your plan is also a good death…and a terrible fight.”
The hall was still as pines.
“There is a third way,” Einar said. “And you are all going to hate it.”
EINAR TOLD THEM about the strait.
Narrow water. A dogleg where the current ran hard around the headland. The Khan’s transports were beamy, high-sided, overloaded. They were built to carry horses and siege engines, not to turn. In open water that meant little. In the dogleg, in a quartering wind, it meant a thin line over two miles, each ship alone the moment it rounded the point.
“The longships can’t fight them. The atakebune can’t catch them. But the mixed ships—the ugly ones, the ones that are neither—they turn in that water like a knife in snow. We don’t face their fleet. We meet one ship at a time in the dogleg. Six against one. We burn it and are gone around the point before the next one’s through.”
He stopped.
It was Bjarni who broke the silence, and not about ships.
“Run and burn. Run and burn.” He shook his great head slowly. “Where I come from, we have a word for men who fight like that.”
“Where you come from is the bottom of the sea off this beach. Thirty years drowned. I know the word, I’ve heard it my whole life.”
That landed, and Einar saw his mother go still. A wound had been touched.
Aritsune rose.
“The lord Einar’s plan is clever,” he said, making the word sound like a disease. “A pirate’s plan. Fire and flight. No formation, no proper way to die. But I should not be surprised. Cleverness of this kind runs in his family.”
The hall went cold.
“My family,” Einar said.
Aritsune bowed toward the second row—a perfect bow, that draws more blood than a blade. “The clan Tachibana held the Dazaifu’s trust for three generations. They lost it in one season, foolishly receiving the ebisu with courtesy instead of arrows. For finding third ways.” He straightened. “They were exiled and their names were struck. Now the lady Sanae’s son stands before us, the same sickness in his mouth.”
No one moved.
Einar looked at his mother, who was looking at the fire, and waited until his voice would come out level.
“Then I am my family’s son,” he said. “And the question stands. The Khan is two days out, and there are three choices: Bjarni’s death, Lord Aritsune’s death, or the dogleg. And the ships don’t care.”
He sat down.
The fire cracked.
Outside, wind with the stench of war wafted through the pines, and the hall said nothing for a long time.
Nobody agreed. Nobody left either.
The shrine bell rang twice, for the night watch.
IN THE MORNING, Einar went to the harbor alone, and began.
He worked on the nearest of the six hybrids, the one with no name in either tongue, the one the children called Ours. He hauled the clay fire-pots up from the storehouse one at a time and he set them in a row along the gunwale. Then he began rigging the throwing arm the shipwright had once sketched for him.
The tide went out. The gulls worked the mudflats.
Old Torkel came first, the northman shipwright, toolbox on shoulder and an expression that said he had his own business of his own that had nothing to do with any council. He did not speak to Einar. He climbed aboard, looked at the throwing arm, grunted—which from Torkel was a lecture—and began re-cutting the pivot.
By midmorning there were a dozen. By noon, forty. No one announced anything. The shore-folk came with cord and canvas, the hall-women came with tar, and the work swallowed them as the sea swallows rain. Bjarni was not there. Aritsune was not there. Einar noted both absences. Said nothing. And worked.
THE PROBLEM CAME at the mounting of the second arm.
The fire-pots had to sit until the moment of throwing. The sea would be rough in the dogleg, and a pot that rolled loose was a funeral. Torkel had built the cup. It was good northman work, oak and iron, but it was wrong. Too deep and stiff, for a ship that sat still.
The shore-folk’s master carpenter, a quiet man named Sadaie, knelt by the mount for a long time. Then he rose, went to his boat, and came back with a length of split bamboo and a coil of rice-straw rope. He set them beside Torkel’s iron fittings, and pointed.
Torkel looked at the bamboo like an insult.
Sadaie did not have the north-tongue. Torkel did not have the shore-tongue. So Sadaie simply did the thing. He took the bamboo, flexed it over his knee, let it spring back, and then he took Torkel’s great callused hand, laid it on the wood, and flexed it again, so the old shipwright could feel the give and return.
Torkel stood very still. His beard hid whatever his mouth was doing.
Then he took the bamboo to his bench. An hour later the cup sat in a cradle of split cane that yielded to the sea and held the pot as a hand holds an egg. It was neither northman work nor shore-folk’s work, and it was better than both.
Einar watched from the mast-step and allowed the smallest of smiles to cross his lips.
EINAR’S MOTHER CUT HER HAIR in the evening.
She did it herself, on the shore house step, with the small bronze mirror and the shears. She did it in an old way of her clan—a way for the dead. The black weight of it came down in sections and she laid each one across her knee, palms flat, as though setting something that mustn’t be woken.
Einar sat down beside her. The light was leaving. Somewhere up the beach a hammer kept its slow count.
“Mother.”
“Mmm.”
“Aritsune said the clan’s names were struck.”
“They were.” The shears opened and closed. “All of them. Mine was struck before I was sent here, so that I would arrive as nothing and could be nothing. It was meant as a mercy.” A pause. The shears stopped, started again. “There was no secret kept from you, Einar. There was nothing to tell. A struck name is an absence. One does not hand one’s child an absence and call it an inheritance.”
The hammer counted. The gulls had faded with the dark.
“I never asked,” he said.
“No.” And now, for the first time, something in her voice was uneven. It was small, and it had been there for thirty years. “You never asked. You are your father’s son. Northmen do not ask after such things; they assume the past is the sea and a man swims or sinks. I let you be his. It seemed…” the shears paused “…a kinder theft.”
She laid the last section of hair across her knee. Her head was bare to the lamplight now, mourning of a clan that no longer existed, honoring dead no one else would honor.
“The Khan’s fleet is one day out,” Einar said.
“Yes,” said his mother. “The stench is rising.”
THE BOY FOUND EINAR at the night watch.
He was ten, maybe eleven. One of the dock pack, half and half like most of them now. His grandfather’s red hair and his grandmother’s eyes, and a name in each tongue that he answered to depending on which grandmother was calling. Without asking, he sat on the gunwale next to Einar, because the dock children had never once asked for permission.
“Is it true,” the boy said, “that the Khan has more ships than there are fish in the strait?”
“Who told you that?”
“Everyone.”
“No,” Einar replied. “There are more fish.”
The boy considered this with the total seriousness of his age.
Out on the dark water the watch-fires burned in their row and beyond them...past the headland…past Kuroshima…past Tsushima and its burned villages, the sea lay black all the way to the Khan.
“Einar.” The boy was swinging his heels against the hull. “When you die—” he asked the way children ask such things, “—where do you go? The hall-men say you go to the corpse-hall and fight all day and feast all night. My grandmother says you go to the western paradise and there is no fighting at all, ever, and everyone is kind.” He swung his heels. “Which one’s for us?”
A breeze brushed the rigging. Fire-pots stood along the gunwale in their cradles, each yielding a little to the harbor’s breathing.
“I don’t know,” Einar said. It was the most truthful answer he had given in days.
The boy accepted the response as he received the one about the fish. He clearly had not expected a grown man to know and was simply confirming it.
The boy slid off the gunwale. “Well,” he said, in the mongrel dock-tongue with an accent that belonged to no grandparent, “I guess the Hata-folk will figure it out when we get there.”
He went up the beach toward the lamps, toward the smell of cooking fires and two languages arguing over supper in the same room.
Einar lingered a while longer.
The tide turned under the hulls. The wind rose off the sea, and he read it without thinking. West. Steady. Full of pitch…and horses…and men.
One day out.