Sailing Into Tokyo Bay
The air in the brig was thick with the stench of bilge, damp oak, and my own sweat. Heavy iron shackles bit into my wrists as the Portuguese caravel pitched gently on the swell. Above, the muffled thud of sailors’ boots rattled the ceiling beams, but inside my dark timber cell, I had only my fury—and Senhor Silva’s insufferable smirk—to keep me company.
“They are savages, I tell you!” I spat, hurling my chains against the oak floorboards. “The creatures we met on that secluded beach yesterday were barely men! Clad in straw mats, clutching primitive bamboo sticks, cowering in dirt huts on a desolate strip of rock! You boasted of a grand eastern empire ruled by powerful shōguns, yet you dragged me across the globe in chains just to barter with wretched rustics!”
Silva leaned back against the damp bulkhead, lazily adjusting his silk doublet. “You saw three fishermen on a foggy shore, Master Thomas, and believed you had unraveled an empire. The Nihon-jin are no savages.”
“I know what my eyes revealed to me!” I shouted, the iron collar scraping my neck. “They have no steel, no proper rigging, no knowledge of Christ or king! A single English galleon could lay waste to their entire coast!”
Silva let out a low, pitying laugh, shaking his head with an unsettling intensity. “A galleon? Oh, Englishman, your pride is almost tragic. You speak of steel and canvas as if they are the peak of God’s creation. What lies beyond this bay is not a kingdom of wood and earth. It is sorcery. It is magic made manifest.”
“Magic?” I scoffed. “Have you lost your mind to sea fever, Portuguese?”
“I speak no fable!” Silva implored, stepping closer, his voice dropping to a fierce, trembling whisper. “They have bound the very lightning into glass! They build mountains that glow in the dark without flame, and forge iron leviathans that swim the deep without a single breath of wind. The Shogun’s domain does not obey the laws of earth or God as you know them. It is a world where men play at being deities, where time itself bends to their grand designs. You call them savages because you cannot comprehend that we—with our muskets and black powder—are the true ants beneath their heel.”
“Finery and lies,” I hissed, though a cold dread began to gnaw at my gut. “Show me this ‘magic’ or cast me into the sea!”
Silva’s mouth twisted into a dark smile. He pulled a heavy iron key from his belt and unlocked my irons. The metal clattered loudly to the deck.
“We drop anchor in their great harbor this very moment,” Silva whispered, gesturing toward the hatchway where a piercing, unnatural glare seeped down the ladder. “Come, Master Thomas. Step onto the deck. Look upon the shore with your own eyes, and tell me what manner of man commands a city like this.”
I dragged myself up the ladder and stepped onto the open deck, squinting into the blinding light—only for the breath to be torn violently from my lungs. Before us stretched no feudal harbor of wood and thatch, but a terrifying, impossible ocean of gargantuan spires made of dark silver and mirror-glass, shooting up into the heavens like the ribs of a fallen god. Unnatural glowing glyphs and moving, color-drenched visions thirty stories high danced across the faces of the towers without torch or flame, while beneath them, sleek black iron leviathans cut through the waters of Tokyo Bay without a single sail or oar. High above, suspended bridges spanned miles of open sky, carrying endless streams of roaring metal carriages that moved with demonic speed, while mechanical dragonflies buzzed amidst clouds piercing the stratosphere. My mind shattered against the terrible, divine geometry of it all; we were not men meeting another nation, but insects crawling into the kingdom of gods who had stolen the sun, forged sky-reaching mountains out of glass, and built a world centuries beyond my comprehension.
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