THEY WENT IN THE DARK before dawn.
Six hybrid ships, two hundred and forty men and women between them. Bjarni’s longship—Raud-Hrafn, the Red Raven—crewed by forty northmen who had spent two days calling the plan of Einar Tomoe a pirate’s plan, then come to the beach anyway, because northmen will follow a bad fight much quicker than a good argument.
That was the bargain Einar had made in the small hours, when the council’s silence had finally broken—into pieces, not agreement. Bjarni would have his battle. He would take the Red Raven out past the point, alone, in plain sight of the Khan’s van, and run. Slow enough to be chased, fast enough not to avoid capture. He would lead the front of the fleet into the dogleg where the current and the point would splay them out like beads from a broken thread.
“A bait fish?” Bjarni had spat. “The Red Raven, a bait fish?!?”
“The bait fish,” Einar replied, “is the only part the whole enemy fleet gets to watch. If they don’t chase you, nothing works. The song, when they write it, starts with the bait.”
Bjarni had laughed. Once. Like an axe into wet wood. Finally, he agreed. And the plan was set without anyone having surrendered…too much.
Aritsune had taken the shore. Four hundred in ranks along the beach, the way of the Dazaifu—the last wall, if the wall was needed. He had not blessed the fleet. He had stood in full armor as they cast off, motionless. Einar, watching from the stern, understood it was not withholding. It was a man standing watch over the part he could not partake in.
THE DOGLEG AT KUROSHIMA was a crook in the strait where the headland shouldered into the current. The water there ran fast and confused, and the tide-rips showed white even in the calmest weather. The six hybrids lay along the inside of the bend, masts unstepped, low in the water, sixty oars to a ship steadying them against the current.
They waited.
And waiting at sea is unlike waiting on land. On land, a still man can lean heavily on something. At sea, the boat moves under him with every breath, the oars work without rest, the water slaps against the hull, and there is nowhere for fear to have a seat.
Einar stood in the stern, counting in his head: the wind, the current, the fuse-lengths on the pots, the number of men who would not come home.
Torkel sat beside the forward throwing arm with his hand resting on the cane cradle, as a man rests his hand on a dog.
The sun came up red. Then the signal—a shield raised on the headland above, flashing once, twice—and a moment later the Red Raven rushed around the point with her sail straining, the wide horizon behind her.
Einar had known the numbers. He had said them aloud in the hall. But seeing it was always a different beast.
The sea behind the point was full. Less a fleet and more a country that had taken to the waves. The transports came in a mass without edge, sail on sail on sail, high-sided, wallowing, crammed to the gunwales with men and horses, and more behind them. Until the mass blurred into the haze. And the haze might have been more still. The sound stretched across the water before the ships: a low, vast, animal noise, as though the strait itself was clearing its throat.
The Red Raven raced before it like a gull before a storm-front.
She did her work. The great fleet—forty, fifty ships, spread wide and eager—hauled their wind to chase the little longship with the red sail like a pod of killer whales. They ran into the dogleg separated by speed, the fast ones ahead, heavy ones laboring in the tide-rip. Each one alone.
Einar, mouth dry, raised his arm.
“Now,” he said without shouting. The crews were watching, and they went.
SIXTY OARS TO A SHIP took the water as one. The hybrid crafts came around the shoulder in a line, and the first Mongol transport met them where the current ran hardest.
The transport was enormous up close. High as a house, sides hung with leather shields, deck a crowded harvest of helmets and the eyes of horses. The men on it were leaning to see the fleeing longship ahead of them. Most failed to grasp what the six low ships were until the fire-pots came.
The throwing arms sounded like a sharp, wooden cracks. Like a doors slamming across the world. Six arms, six pots, long arcs of trailing smoke.
Then the transport’s crowded deck burst into flame. A spreading rash, pitch-fed, leaping the leather shields. The horses went mad first, then the ship went mad with them.
“Oars!” Einar ordered, and the hybrid dug away, along the burning flank with a spear’s-length to spare. The transport’s heat hit his face like a hand.
They helped it burn.
Then they burned the second.
And then the third.
It was not a battle, at first. It was work. The bamboo cradle and the throwing arm. Two hundred and forty doing what they had ten thousand times in the harbor. At speed. In smoke. Turn, throw, pull away. The ugly ships turned inside where the transports needed half a mile. A man on a hybrid’s deck could watch a transport’s crew try to turn and know, with breath to spare, exactly how it would fall.
By midmorning the dogleg was a furnace.
Eleven transports burned or burning. Two more run aground on the rocks where Aritsune’s bow-men could hit the men in the surf. The water was full of the floating dead and half-dead.
The great fleet behind halted its approach.
That was the moment Einar felt it, at the edge of the smoke. The monstrous horde that was the Khan’s armada…slowing…bunching…its van’s eagerness slain before its eyes.
The dogleg had become a throat. And the throat was on fire.
Eleven ships.
They have a thousand.
But no fleet on earth sails willingly into an inferno.
THE MONGOLS WERE NOT FOOLS and, by noon, they proved it.
The next ships through the dogleg were not transports. They were war-junks—lower, cleaner, crewed by those who knew water. They came through three abreast, close-hauled, ignoring the bait entirely, archers ready.
The first volley flew over Einar’s head like a flock of birds and, behind him, he heard, arrows slice into men. One screamed in the north-tongue. Another, absurdly, cursed in the dock-tongue. And there was laughter.
Then the second volley came.
“Close them,” Einar said. “Or they slice us to pieces at their leisure.”
The span between their leisure and our only chance was four hundred yards of arrow-struck water, and the hybrids took it at a dead run of oars. Men fell at the benches and others stepped over them, took the looms and pulled.
The craft called Ours reached the nearest war-junk first and laid herself alongside. The grapnels flew and the two crews met across the gunwales in the way that had not changed since men first floated logs into other men’s logs.
Einar’s ship was half a bowshot behind her. He saw Sadaie’s son—the carpenter’s boy, nineteen, the one who had carried the split bamboo that day on the beach—go over the junk’s side in the first rush. Einar did not see him again. He saw the junk’s soldiers, armored, disciplined, killing in ranks. And Einar coldly confirmed with his eyes what he anticipated with his mind, that the Mongols had brought the shore-folk’s own way of war across the sea with them.
Then Einar’s own bows grated against the junk’s quarter, and the world shrank to the width of a gunwale.
The smoke was sharp. Blood and the stench of scorched horsehair. And it lay in the lungs like a hand.
Torkel died at the throwing arm. A junk’s soldier came across the grapnels among the crew. The old shipwright let go of the arm, took up the oak mallet he shaped the cane cradles with and died with it in his hands as he killed the foe, in a carpenter’s stance with a carpenter’s tool.
The junk’s crew wisely cut the grapnels and the two ships yawed apart with men stranded on both decks. Einar stood alone at his own gunwale, across ten feet of churning water from a Mongol officer about his own age, bloodied, exhausted, and for one breath the two of them simply stared at each other. Then an arrow took the officer in the throat and the breath ended.
FIRE REACHED THE OURS.
Few saw which pot did it. No matter, a fire at sea belongs to no one once it blazes. The flames took the Ours amidships and her crew—northmen, shore-folk, and half-and-half, all mixed. They fought the fire until the mast went, then they fought their way off her. She burned down to the water with her cane cradles still holding their pots, faithful to the end.
It was in the smoke, with the Ours burning astern, the oars dead in the water and the men around him waiting, that voices of the dead came back to Einar one last time.
Fate is fixed…
Duty, heavier than a mountain…
He had heard those words his whole life as wisdom. He heard them now as two roofs against the same storm, two ways of saying it has already been chosen for you. But neither roof covered this deck. The men watching him were yet to meet their fate. They were alive and waiting.
“Einar!” Bjarni called across the water. The Red Raven had come back into the dogleg, against every order, sail half-tattered by arrows, her crew were pointing east, past the burning ships, and shouting.
The Khan’s fleet was turning.
Not fleeing. Turning—the whole endless mass of it, hauling its wind with a slow, unbearable dignity, off to sea. To regroup. To anchor somewhere out of the throat’s reach. To count its dead. To return tomorrow or the day after, in greater force, in a different place, less eager than today.
They had not won.
They had cost the Khan a morning, and eleven ships, and his appetite for this particular stretch of water. And perhaps, some pride.
It was, Einar knew with the clarity that comes after the haze, more than any man alive had managed against that fleet since it sailed.
THEY LIMPED HOME on the evening tide. Five hybrids and the Red Raven, dragging rigging.
Sixty-one dead, their names read out in the harbor in both tongues, one by one, as the ships came in. And Einar heard, in the reading, that nobody had separated the lists. Different lives, yet dying as one.
Aritsune’s ranks were still drawn up on the beach—had stood there all day, spears upright, facing a sea that never reached them. As the first hybrid’s keel ground the sand, the old exile raised one fist. And his four hundred shouted as the Dazaifu’s armies had shouted on the shores of a hundred years.
Then Bjarni, standing in the Red Raven‘s prow, blood to the elbow, hoisted his axe and roared back the northmen’s thunder and the thunder spread deep and wide through the rest of his people.
And somewhere down the beach, the dock children began a chant of their own, high and ragged and half a beat behind both armies, in the tongue that belonged to no grandmother:
HA-TA-TA! HA-TA-TA! HA-TA-TA!!
The wind was rising. Out beyond the headland, beyond the drifting smoke and the burned keels and the sea they had held for one day, it came off the open strait from the southwest and it smelled of rain, and of something bigger than rain, still days away, rising over the warm water.
Einar stood on the sand with the pitch-smoke in his clothes and let the wind come to him. He read it, and said nothing.
One day.
They had bought, perhaps, one day.
ON THE THIRD DAY, they burned the northmen’s dead, and buried the shore-folk’s dead on the same day, the two rites happened fifty paces apart on the same beach, at the same hour, because no one could think of a reason to do otherwise. And all were too tired to invent one.
The pyres went up first. Torkel among them with his mallet, or rather the new mallet, because the old one had not been found and the shipwrights worked through the night so he would not go into the fire empty-handed. The flames took the pyres while the wind was still low. And the smoke went up straight. And the northmen sang.
Down the beach, the shrine’s little bronze bell rang over the rows of the covered dead, and the shore-folk’s priestess led the chanting. Sadaie knelt with his wife before the smallest of the shrouded shapes and did not make a sound. Yet the silence was rich with honor…and grief.
Then something thing happened that no one planned.
The northmen’s song ended, and in the stillness after, some of the northmen—the younger first, then the others—walked fifty paces down the beach and stood at the back of the shore-folk’s mourning, bareheaded, out of the way, not chanting, nor understanding the words, simply standing. And when the chanting ended, many shore-folk walked up the beach to the pyres, and stood the same way with the northmen who remained, while the flames cracked and sparks rose to the heavens.
Nobody spoke.
Or decided anything.
The two silences merely reached across the fifty paces and met. That was the rite—neither northman or realm, invented in an afternoon by those too grief-struck to remain apart. And it had no name.
Einar’s mother stood beside him at the pyre’s edge. Her head still bare with mourning, and the firelight danced on it. After a while, in the north-tongue she said, loud enough for the men nearest to hear: “He made beautiful things. The cradle held the pot as a hand holds an egg.”
Bjarni, standing close, answered in the tongue of the realm, poorly, with words in the wrong order: “He was my father’s friend. He was mine.”
Neither of them looked at the other.
ARITSUNE FOUND EINAR at dusk, at the harbor’s edge, where the five hybrids lay beached and carpenters’ lamps were already lit along their hulls.
“The Khan has anchored off Iki,” the old man said. “The fishers say he is building, not repairing. Lashed platforms, three ships wide, so the sea cannot string him out again. When he comes back, there will be no dogleg for you, Einar. He will come as a wall.”
“Yes,” Einar said.
“You cannot burn a wall.”
“No.”
Aritsune looked at the five ugly ships for a long time. The lamps moved along their hulls. Northman shipwrights and shore carpenters working the same keels by the same light, passing tools back and forth without words, the way Torkel and Sadaie had.
“When I was young,” Aritsune said, “I served at the Dazaifu when the clan Tachibana fell. I was one of the voices for striking their names. I believed that the realm is a wall, and a wall survives by having no gates.” He paused. “I have spent thirty years in the exile I helped to make, watching a gate hold back the sea.”
Einar said nothing.
“When the Khan comes back as a wall,” Aritsune said, “the ranks on the beach will not stop him either. So...” He straightened, settled his shoulders, and was once more the retainer of the Dazaifu. Precise, unhurried. “…teach my bow-men the throwing arms. They will hold the headland above the dogleg, where your ships cannot reach and the wall must be slowed. It is not—” the faintest hesitation “—a proper formation. But it is a good fight.”
He bowed. A small one, between men who have work to do. Then he went up the beach toward the lamps, and Einar stood alone with the tide going out under the dark.
It would have to be enough.
EINAR CLIMBED THE HEADLAND before first light, as he had five days before.
The village was below and behind him. The longhall’s smoke, the paper walls, the dock where the children were already shouting in their tongue.
The Khan was out there, building his wall of lashed ships. The ranks would not stop them. The fire-pots would not stop them. Every plan Einar had was a plan for slowing a flood, a bleeding, and everyone in Hata knew it. The carpenters’ lamps had burned all night anyway.
But the wind had changed in the dark.
He felt it the moment he reached the headland’s crown. He stood, let it come to him, and read it. It was unexpected and hard to find the words for.
Southwest.
Stronger than yesterday.
Climbing—and warm, with a warmth that did not belong to the season. And under the warmth a smell he knew from a dozen summers of his father’s people and his mother’s alike: the smell of the sea drawing a deep breath. Far beyond the strait, beyond Iki and the Khan’s anchored wall, the sky to the southwest was the color of a bruise. And it was moving.
His mother had a word for such a wind. The shore-folk had used it for a hundred years, for the great storms that rose out of the warm southern water and fell upon these islands—the wind that sank fleets, the wind that had no master and answered no Khan.
Kami-kaze, she would have said. The divine wind.
A typhoon.
He stood on the headland with the dawn climbing up red behind him and the bruise-colored sky rising out of the south, and he thought of the Khan’s wall of ships, anchored in open water, in the path of the sea’s divine wind.
Three days, the wind said. No more.
And as Einar trod once more down the weathered path, he finally found the word for what the sea smelled like…
…hope.
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