Chapter 1: The Sea Battle

Off the coast of Hakata Bay, in the seventh month of the eleventh year of Bun’ei — the year the English would one day call 1274 — the sky over the Genkai Sea began to keep a secret.

The sky had been wrong since noon.

Tetsuya Nagai had seen storms before — had ridden out squalls off the coast of Kyushu that snapped masts like dry reeds — but this was a different animal entirely. The clouds over the Genkai Sea had gone the color of a fresh bruise, and the wind kept changing its mind, gusting from the north, then dying, then clawing back in from the west as if the sky itself couldn’t decide which direction to be angry from.

He stood braced on the deck of the Kaiun-maru, one hand on the gunwale, the other resting on the hilt of his sword out of habit rather than need. Around him the fleet stretched black against the darkening water — hundreds of ships, the pride of the Yuan emperor’s armada, carrying Mongol horsemen who had never learned to love the sea, Korean sailors who knew it too well, and Japanese samurai like himself, sworn to turn this invasion back onto the beaches it had come from.

They had done it, more or less. Three days of fighting off Hakata Bay, and the invaders had been driven back to their ships, bloodied and short on the will to try the beaches again. Tetsuya’s arms ached with the exhaustion of a man who has killed more people before breakfast than most see in a lifetime. He should have felt triumphant.

Instead he felt the wind change again, and this time it did not change back.

“Captain says we make for open water,” said Hideaki, dropping down beside him at the rail. Hideaki was young — too young, Tetsuya sometimes thought, to have already killed a man — but he fought like someone twice his years and complained like someone half of them. “Says a storm like this, better to ride it out with sea room than get thrown onto our own coast.”

“Your captain is not wrong.” Tetsuya did not look away from the horizon. Something about it nagged at him that he couldn’t yet name — a wrongness underneath the ordinary fury of a typhoon, like a note played half a step off true. “But I don’t think it will matter where we ride it out.”

Hideaki laughed, the nervous laugh of a young man who wants to be told he’s wrong. Tetsuya didn’t tell him that.

By the time the first wave broke over the bow, laughing had stopped being anything anyone did.

The storm came down on the fleet less like weather and more like judgment. Ships that had survived three days of Japanese arrows and Japanese steel came apart in the water like they were made of paper — the Mongols’ flat-bottomed river transports first, never built for open sea, capsizing in the swells with men still lashed to the rigging. Tetsuya lost sight of the ships to either side within minutes, the rain turning the world into a gray smear broken only by lightning and the white teeth of the waves.

He tied himself to the mast because it was that or be swept over the side, and for a long time there was nothing to do but hold on and breathe when he could and not breathe when a wave decided otherwise.

It was during one of the not-breathing moments, half-drowned and half-blind, that he saw the light.

It didn’t belong to the storm. Lightning was blue-white and gone in an instant; this was a seam of gold-green fire that opened in the black water off the port bow and simply stayed, widening, throwing a light upward through the rain that turned every falling drop into a spark. The wind that came off it was different too — not colder or warmer, just other, in a way that made the hair rise on Tetsuya’s arms beneath his soaked armor.

He heard Hideaki cry out, the words lost to the wind. He heard the mast groan. And then the wave that had been building beneath the ship for the length of that impossible light finally broke, and the world turned over.

The English Channel