IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · 1515 · THE GULF COAST OF MEXICO
Obsidian and steel
No storm in our history ever carried a fleet whole across the Pacific. This is the fable where one did: two thousand soldiers of Japan’s civil wars set down on the Aztec gulf coast in 1515, four years ahead of Cortés.
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1515 · THE GULF COAST
No bridge of causes leads to the timeline recorded here. The atlas shelves it with the fables, where the question is never how, only what then. In 1515 Japan is forty-eight years deep in the wars called Sengoku. A coastal lord sends two thousand men to sea against a rival clan. A storm out of the Kuroshio takes the fleet east and does not give it back. When the ocean is finished with them, the lookouts raise a coast no chart of theirs contains: palms, cook smoke, and a stepped pyramid standing over the trees. It is the gulf shore of Moctezuma the Second’s Mexico, and Cortés is four years away.
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