The year was 1274, and the Mongol fleet stretched across the horizon like a dark wound upon the sea. From the cliffs of Hakata Bay, the Japanese defenders watched in silence as hundreds of vessels moved toward their shores.
General Shimazu's ostensible reason for calling his men back from the shoreline was to reorganize their formations, though every soldier knew the truth — they were outnumbered and afraid. The Mongols had already demonstrated their terrible discipline, their poisoned arrows cutting down samurai who had expected honorable single combat.
Yet the samurai held. For two exhausting days they fought, bleeding the invaders inch by inch across the black sand. The young warrior Kenji had dreamed of epic glory since boyhood, having memorized every verse of the great battlefield poems his grandfather recited by firelight. Now, standing knee-deep in the surf with a broken spear and three arrows in his shield, he understood that glory was not grand at all — it was simply surviving until sunset.
Then came the storm.
The old priests had prayed for weeks, and the heavens answered with a fury that no man could have summoned alone. The typhoon shattered the Mongol fleet against the rocks throughout that terrible night, and by morning the sea was full of wreckage and silence.
Kenji sat on the shore afterward, unable to sate his thirst though he drank from every stream he found. Something vast had passed through him — through all of them — and left a hollow where fear had lived.
Japan called the storm kamikaze. The divine wind. They would not forget it for a thousand years.