Three hundred years of command, and only one thing keeps me awake.
Not recruitment. The Water Court never lacks for soldiers — a shrimp-house child is born knowing how to grip a spear. Not morale either. Go look at my barracks: the tide-orders have rotted to mush and the drills have not stopped a single day. Good soldiers. The East Sea has never lacked good soldiers.
What keeps me awake is the order-scroll at my belt.
When the gate was sealed, I took the order with my own hands. The turtle minister who carried it up had half his shell split open. He managed three words: Seal it. Hold. Then he pressed this scroll into my claws and sank. He never surfaced again.
The scroll is silk; the writing, ink. For the first hundred years, every character stood clear: By imperial decree the gate is sealed. General So-and-so of the shrimp host shall garrison it, and shall let ( ) pass the gate.
You see the blank. There lies the ruin of me.
Three hundred years of seawater, and every other character survives — but the one word after "let nothing," the word that says what must not pass, has blurred into a bloom of ink that no eye can resolve.
Let nothing — of what kind — pass?
If it reads let nothing from outside pass, then our spears should face the open sea, and the enemy comes from the deep. If it reads let nothing from inside pass, then our spears should face the gate, and the true charge of this garrison is what lies locked behind it. One character — and the entire disposition of my lines reverses.
In my younger years I was certain it was the first. A sealed gate implies an enemy without, surely. I set my hardest crab-guards in the outer line, spearpoints levelled at the deep. We held so for a hundred years and more. From the deep — nothing ever came.
Then, slowly, I stopped being certain.
Because the gate sounds. At no fixed hour, a single dull concussion rolls up from the gate's foot — so heavy that spear-hafts buzz in the grip at fifty fathoms' distance. And at every sounding, the chains on the gate wind themselves one notch tighter. Three hundred years on, those chains are drawn a full ring thinner than the day they were forged. Not slack. Taut. What manner of gate needs locking tighter and tighter with time?
A thing trying to get in does not require that.
A thing trying to get out does.
I have never told the troops. A soldier needs to know where to point the spear, not why. But I redrew the lines in quiet: the outer rank stands as ever — and inside it I raised a second rank, spears toward the gate. Both directions held. An old general has few arts, but he knows this one: where the order has blurred, you fill in the missing word with your own life.
A few days ago the children from the shore asked passage through to the palace — tracing the lost Sea-Calming Treasure, they said. By the letter of the order I should have barred them. But I unrolled the scroll and read it once more: let ( ) pass. Squint as I might, that blurred character does not look like the character for people.
I let them through. And before they went, I untied the red tassel from my own spear and bound it round the wrist of the boy with the medicine basket.
Old custom of the Water Court: whoever passes the gate bearing a general's tassel moves under that general's warrant. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong on my head.
The boy asked me: old general, what is locked at the bottom of the gate?
I said: lad, I have guarded it three hundred years, and I want to know as badly as you do.
Go in. Look closely on my behalf. And if you do see it clearly —
come back and tell me which way my spears should have been facing, all these three hundred years.