He came out of the dark into water again, and this time it was the sea.
Cold, black, salt, and a wave on top of him before he knew which way was up.
He went under and came up and went under, and the Step-sickness took his legs at the knee so they didn’t kick properly, and for a long few seconds he thought, quite clearly, this is a stupid way to die after all that.
Then his hand hit sand.
He crawled.
A second wave picked him up and threw him onto a beach and left him there, coughing salt, in a grey dawn with snow on the hills above him.
Pines.
Black rocks.
A fishing boat pulled up on rollers, with a painted eye on the bow.
And far out on the water, a low island, flat as a hat brim, with a few trees on it.
He knew that island.
He’d seen it in a book of woodcuts in Hartley’s library, the winter before the war, when he was nineteen and still reading for pleasure.
Funashima, the caption had said, called Ganryujima.
Japan, he thought.
Oh, God.
I don’t speak a word.
Then the fever came up over him like the tide, and he stopped thinking.
* * *
He worked it out later, the way he had worked out Florence.
He had not had an anchor this time.
The astrolabe was on Leonardo’s trestle in the Sala del Papa, where he had left it.
So he had done the other thing, the thing he had only guessed was possible: he had listened for a loud moment and let himself fall towards it.
A moment became loud, he thought, when a great many people were waiting for it, or when something enormous was about to happen to one person who mattered.
A battle.
A death.
A duel that men would write about for four hundred years.
He had heard steel on wood, thousands of strokes, and a man breathing, and he had followed the sound the way a sapper follows a cable in the dark, hand over hand.
It had brought him close.
Not exactly.
A few weeks early, and into the sea instead of onto the beach.
Drifting, he decided, was like firing a gun at night at the sound of another gun.
You hit the right field.
You did not hit the right man.
And he had arrived, again, with only what he wore and carried.
His Florentine clothes, sodden.
His boots.
The watch on his wrist, still going.
Salai’s little knife on his belt.
Tom’s letter in its wallet, wet through but legible.
And Leonardo’s red notebook inside his shirt, which had been in the sea with him.
When he could finally hold it, he found the leather swollen and the pages stuck together in clumps.
He spent a whole morning separating them with Salai’s knife, by the brazier, one at a time.
Leonardo’s ink was made of oak galls and iron and had sunk into the paper like a dye.
It had run at the edges, but it was all still there, backwards, every line.
He was three days on the floor of a fisherman’s hut.
He remembered very little of it: a woman’s hard hand under his head, a bowl of something hot and grey, children staring round a doorpost, and every so often a man who wasn’t the fisherman standing over him in the doorway with his arms folded, looking.
On the fourth day he woke clear.
The fisherman’s wife was gone.
In her place, kneeling on the matting by the brazier with her hands in her sleeves, was a young woman in a plain dark kimono with a small wooden cross on a cord round her neck, half hidden in the collar.
“You speak Portuguese?” she said, in Portuguese.
“No,” said John, in Italian.
“Some Latin.
Italian.”
She thought about it.
“Slowly, then,” she said, in an Italian made of Portuguese and Latin and stubbornness, and it turned out that if they both spoke very slowly and used their hands they could understand each other about two words in three.
“I am Maria Kiku.
I work for the Fathers at the church in Kokura.
I talk for them, to the people, and for the people, to them.” She looked at his wrist.
“The fisherman found you.
The Fathers sent me.
And someone else came by himself.”
She looked at the doorway.
The man was standing in it again.
He was about thirty, not tall, but broad through the chest and very still, with his hair pulled back roughly and tied, a beard of a few days, and clothes that hadn’t been washed in some time.
He wore two swords.
His hands were large and quite relaxed.
He looked at John the way a farmer looks at a horse he’s been told is fast.
He said something.
Kiku translated it, slowly, and then said it again, as if she didn’t quite believe it.
“He says: so you are the man who falls out of the sea.”
* * *
That was all, that first day.
Musashi said it, and looked at John for a while longer, and went away down the beach without another word.
“Who is he?” said John.
Kiku looked at him as if he had asked who the sun was.
“In Kokura, everyone knows,” she said.
“He’s a fighter.
He goes from town to town and fights the best man in each one, and he has never lost.
He’s staying here as the guest of a retainer of the Hosokawa lord, Lord Tadaoki, who rules this province from the castle.
In the fourth month he’s going to fight the lord’s own sword teacher, Sasaki Kojiro, on that island.” She nodded through the open door at the flat island on the sea.
“Everyone in Kokura will watch.
Many people think he’ll die.
Kojiro has a sword as long as a man is tall, and he has never lost either.”
“And he came here because of me?”
“He came here every day.
Three days.
He stood in the door and looked at you while you were sick.” Kiku shivered slightly.
“The fisherman’s wife wouldn’t go to bed.”
She stayed that afternoon, because the Fathers had told her to find out who the foreigner was.
John told her as much as he could without lying, which was not much.
He was English.
He had been in Italy.
He had come by sea, alone, and his ship had sunk.
All of it was true in some way.
She listened with her hands in her sleeves and her head on one side, and he could see her deciding that none of it was the whole truth and that she would wait.
In return she told him where he was.
It was the third month by the Japanese reckoning, which John worked out was early in April 1612.
The town of Kokura stood a mile up the coast: a castle of white walls and black roofs on a stone base, with the samurai houses round it and the merchants’ streets below, and a harbour full of boats.
This beach belonged to a fishing village of twenty houses.
The fisherman who had found him was called Gosuke.
His wife was called Ume.
They had five children, and they had fed him for three days on their own millet without being asked.
“I have nothing to pay them with,” said John.
Kiku looked at his wrist.
“You have that.”
“Not this.” He covered the watch with his hand.
“Anything but this.”
So he gave Gosuke the brass buttons off his Florentine doublet, all six of them.
Gosuke turned them over in his palm, looked at the little lion stamped on each one, and bowed to the floor.
Kiku said it was too much.
John said it was not nearly enough.
* * *
Musashi came back the next morning, as the sun was coming up over the sea, and this time he sat down.
His name was Miyamoto Musashi.
He said it as if it ought to mean something, and when it obviously did, from John’s face, he seemed neither surprised nor pleased.
They sat in the fisherman’s hut with the brazier between them, and Kiku in the middle, and the fisherman’s children listening outside the paper wall, and Musashi talked.
He talked in short pieces and waited for each one to be put into Kiku’s strange Italian before he went on, and he watched John while she did it.
“In the winter,” Kiku said, “a woman came to him.
Not Portuguese, not Spanish.
Taller than him.
With short hair, like a man’s, and clothes like no one’s.
She came to the house where he is staying, at night, past the guards, and they didn’t see her.”
John’s mouth had gone dry.
“She knew his name.
She knew he will fight Sasaki Kojiro on the island, in the fourth month.
She knew what weapon Kojiro would bring and how long it would be.
She said…” Kiku stopped.
Musashi said something sharp, and she went on.
“She said that in the spring, a foreigner would come out of the sea on this beach, with a little clock tied on his wrist.
And she said…”
“Go on.”
“She said he should kill you.
While you are sick.
Before you wake.” Kiku’s face was very still.
“She said you will do great harm, in many places, for a long time.
She gave him money.
Gold.”
Musashi reached into his robe and took out a coin and put it on the matting between them.
John picked it up.
It was gold, heavy, thick as a florin, and new, the edges sharp.
On one side was a pattern of lines like the rings of a tree, very fine, almost a fingerprint.
On the other side was a number pressed small into the rim.
2041.
He put it down.
“Why didn’t you?” he said.
“Kill me.”
Kiku asked.
Musashi laughed, short, through his nose, and answered.
“He says he doesn’t kill for women he doesn’t know.
And he says that a man who walks past guards is a man who has a reason for not doing her own killing, and he wanted to know what it is.” Kiku hesitated.
“And he says: also, he was curious.
He has fought sixty men.
All the same.
He wanted to see one who was not the same.”
John looked at the coin on the matting.
Then he looked at Musashi.
“Tell him thank you,” he said.
“Tell him I’m sorry she wasted her gold.”
Kiku translated.
Musashi grunted, which John would learn meant almost anything.
He picked the coin up again and turned it over, and then, to John’s surprise, held it out.
“He says it isn’t his,” said Kiku.
“It was paid for a job he didn’t do.
A man who keeps money for work he refused is a thief.” She hesitated.
“He says you should have it, because it’s about you.”
John took it.
It was heavier than it looked.
He put it in the wallet with Tom’s letter.
“Ask him,” he said, “why he’s still here.
If he wanted to see whether I was different, he’s seen me.
I’m a sick foreigner on a fisherman’s floor.”
Musashi listened, and smiled for the first time.
It was a short, crooked smile, with one side of the mouth only.
“He says he hasn’t seen you yet,” said Kiku.
“He’s seen you lie down.” Musashi got up, picked up the long cloth bundle he had brought with him, and went out into the sun.
“He says, when you can stand, come down to the water.
He wants to see you stand.”