The Bells

憂き世

I'm raking sand when the bells start.

The alarm bells ring, all of them at once, overlapping and frantic. My hand stops mid-stroke. Seijiro sleeps in the lower quarter. Seijiro sleeps in a rented room above a noodle shop three streets from the southern docks. The southern docks are where the smoke is coming from.

I drop the rake.

From the garden wall I can see the harbor. Fire is spreading across the mooring berths where the garrison airships hang over open air, flame running up silk and timber above the clouds. Black smoke in columns. Orange light where it's still supposed to be dark. The customs house is down there. The market stalls. The noodle shop.

My father's compound has stone walls two feet thick. Protocols for everything, including what happens to his daughter when the bells ring: interior room, locked door, jitō standing guard, wait. The jitō are my father's handmaids. They smile and bow and send notes to his desk about where I was and who I spoke to and whether I tried the garden gate again. My whole life. My whole life watched by women who are paid to pretend they like me. My father calls my skin porcelain. He means it as a compliment. He means: don't touch, don't use, don't take outside the display case.

Seijiro's door doesn't lock properly. I know because I've jiggled that handle in the dark, trying not to wake the woman downstairs.

I've known him two months. Two months of sneaking out after the watch change, pulling my cloak low through alleys that smell like frying oil and shōki exhaust.

The first night, I climbed down the vine on the east wall. Bare feet on stone, silk hitched above my knees, heart going so fast I could feel it in my teeth. Open air at my back. The drop off the terrace somewhere below my heels. The vine has been growing there since my mother planted it. Nobody prunes it because nobody thinks a governor's daughter would use it.

He was waiting in the alley below. I dropped the last few feet and he caught me, hands on my waist, steadying me like women fell out of the sky for him on a regular basis. He didn't kiss me. He looked at me. Then he reached up and tucked a lotus blossom behind my ear. He'd been standing in a dark alley holding a flower, waiting for me, and the confidence of that, the absolute certainty that I would come, should have made me furious.

I kissed him instead. His mouth tasted like rice wine and he smiled against my lips and I was done.

He makes me laugh. He makes me stupid.

I'm standing in my dead mother's garden, inside the walls where my father had her killed, and the attack bells are ringing and my hands won't stop shaking.

The lower quarter doesn't have walls. The lower quarter has wooden buildings packed tight on the island's lip and a dock that catches fire every dry season. If something is burning at the harbor, it's burning through the lower quarter first, through the noodle shops and the rope makers. Through the rented rooms.

A crack carries up the hill, something I've never heard. Then a roar, deep enough to punch through the garden walls. The window in my bedroom rattles. Another crack. Another.

My father has been drilling those men for three years. They will form up and they will put it out and the lower quarter will probably lose a few buildings and a few people and I'll be back at this rake by morning.

My cloak is on the hook beside my door. I pull it. Down the corridor, past the silk screen my mother painted, past Itsumi's room. Itsumi who will notice I'm gone in twenty minutes and send a note to my father's desk in her careful handwriting. She'll describe the time, the direction, the state of my hair. I could write the note for her.

I go down the east corridor, onto the lower terrace, and I start running.

The bells are still going. The smoke is getting thicker. I run faster.