It was a cold, bright afternoon, with the wind coming off the sea.
The tide was out, and the wet sand below the fishing boats stretched flat and grey for a hundred yards, shining.
Snow still lay on the hills behind Kokura.
Musashi stood at the edge of the water with his back to the island and his long cloth bundle at his feet.
They went out onto the beach in the afternoon, when John could stand.
Musashi had two practice swords of oak in a cloth.
He gave one to John and kept one, and walked out onto the wet sand below the tide line, and turned, and waited.
Kiku stayed up by the boats with her arms folded inside her sleeves and her cross hidden.
The fisherman’s children sat on the rollers like birds on a wire.
“He says, come,” said Kiku.
John had held a bayonet.
He’d been taught to stick a sack of straw at Étaples by a sergeant who screamed.
He’d never held a sword in his life.
He gripped the oak in both hands, the way he’d seen it in woodcuts, and stood there, and felt like a fool.
Musashi came.
John pushed.
The beach went thick.
The waves stopped mid-curl.
Musashi’s sword was coming down at his head in a long, slow, honest arc, and John watched it, and had all the time in the world to see where it would land, and to decide to step left, and to start to step.
His body started to step.
His body, which was a lab assistant’s body on its fourth day out of fever, moved exactly as fast as it always moved.
He was halfway into the step when the arc changed.
It didn’t change much.
A turn of the wrists, half a hand.
Musashi had seen his weight go, and simply followed it.
The world came back on four, and the oak hit John across the left shoulder hard enough to put him on his knees in the surf.
He knelt there with the sea round his legs and his shoulder screaming, and blood on his lip, and the cold coming into his fingers.
Musashi stood over him.
He didn’t look triumphant.
He looked interested.
He said something, quite long.
Kiku came down the beach to hear it.
“He says you saw it,” she said.
“He says he watched your eyes, and you saw the cut before he made it, the whole of it, like a man who has seen it already.
He has never seen eyes do that.” She listened again.
“But you move late.
Your eyes are a samurai’s.
Your body is a farmer’s.
And because your eyes see so early, your body thinks it has time, and is lazy.” Musashi said something else and she nearly smiled.
“He says it’s the worst combination he has ever seen.
Like a hawk tied to a pig.”
“Thank you,” said John, from the surf.
“Again,” said Musashi, in Japanese, and John understood that word without help.
* * *
He did not understand, at first, how badly he had lost.
He thought it was the fever.
He thought it was the sword, which he had never held.
He thought, while he sat in the surf getting his breath, that if he only pushed harder and earlier, and started his step the moment the arc began, he would be clear.
He was wrong, and he knew it on the second bout.
He Held as soon as Musashi’s back foot moved.
He had four counts.
In the first count he saw the whole cut, as before, coming at his right side this time, low.
In the second count he started to move his sword across to block it.
He watched his own hands.
They moved as they always had, at the speed of a man in an ordinary world, which inside the Hold was the speed of a man in treacle.
Then the world snapped back to full speed, and Musashi, who had seen John’s hands begin to move a quarter of a second before he should have been able to, simply changed the angle of the cut and went round the block.
It hit John on the hip.
That was the problem in one blow.
The Hold let him see early.
It did not let him move early, not more than a little.
And a master who watched him closely could see the little that he did, and use it.
Seeing early only made him easier to read.
Leonardo said it.
A man who can read the whole page and turn it no faster than anyone else.
They did it nine times.
Nine times John Held, and saw, and moved, and was too slow, and was hit: the shoulder, the ribs, the wrist, the side of the head, a cut to the thigh that would have taken his leg off with steel.
On the fifth time he tried to cheat, to push his body faster inside the Hold the way he’d done once in the basement, and felt something in the back of his knee tear like wet paper, and fell before the oak even reached him.
On the ninth he didn’t Hold at all.
He just watched, with his ordinary eyes, and got hit anyway.
When it was dark Musashi stopped.
He picked up the oak sword from where John had dropped it and wiped the sand off both of them with the cloth and wrapped them.
John lay on his back on the beach and looked at the first stars and shook with cold and hunger and couldn’t stop.
Musashi crouched beside him.
He spoke for a long time, slowly, with pauses, and Kiku sat on John’s other side and gave it to him in pieces.
“He says the woman told him a thing she didn’t mean to.
She said you will do great harm in many places.
So you will live a long time, and go to many places, and you will need to fight in all of them.
And you can’t fight.” Kiku listened.
“He says he is going to the island in the fourth month to kill Kojiro or be killed.
If he lives, he will be bored after, because he always is.
He says you are the least boring thing to happen to him in ten years.”
“Is he offering to teach me?”
Kiku asked.
Musashi looked out at the island on the black water.
He didn’t answer for a long time.
“He says,” Kiku said finally, “that he doesn’t teach.
He has never had a student.
Students want to know things in words.” Musashi said one more thing, and stood up, and walked away up the beach towards the town without looking back.
“He says: but you don’t have words here anyway.
So come to the house in the morning.
Early.
Bring your own rice.”
* * *
“Why does he do it?” John asked, on the way back up the beach.
He was leaning on Kiku and hating it.
“Teach me.
He said himself he doesn’t.”
Kiku thought about it for a while before she answered.
“I think he’s lonely,” she said.
“Don’t tell him I said that.
He would cut my head off.” She steadied him over a coil of rope.
“Every man he meets is either afraid of him or wants to kill him.
The ones who want to kill him die.
The ones who are afraid of him bore him.
You’re the first man in years who looked at him and saw something he didn’t expect to see.” She glanced up at John.
“And you got up nine times.
That interests him. Get faster updates on g.com.
He’ll want to know how many more.”
“So will I.”
“Then eat.
You’re the colour of rice paper.”
At the edge of the village, by the drying racks of seaweed, she stopped and turned to face him, and John saw her look round first, quickly, to see who was near.
“There are things you need to understand about Kokura,” she said, “and you need to understand them before you go to that house tomorrow.
The lord of this province is Hosokawa Tadaoki.
His wife was a Christian.
She died twelve years ago, in the wars, rather than be taken hostage.
He loved her.
So he lets the Fathers stay here, and the church, and he looks the other way.” She lowered her voice.
“But the Shogun in Edo doesn’t look the other way.”
“And Lord Tadaoki has just been told by the Shogun in Edo that the Christian faith is forbidden in his lands.
The Fathers are frightened.
I’m a Christian, and I talk for foreigners, and now I am talking for the strangest foreigner in Japan, who has an enemy who walks through walls.” She almost smiled.
“I should go home to my mother in Nagasaki.”
“Probably.”
“Yes.
Probably.” She pushed the door open for him.
“I’ll come to Musashi’s house tomorrow too.
Someone has to tell you when he’s insulting you.”
Ume fed him that night without being asked.
She put a bowl of millet and dried fish in front of him, and when he had finished it she put down another, and then a third, and stood in the corner with her arms folded and watched him eat as if he were a sick ox that had finally decided to live.
The children watched from behind her legs.
The youngest, a girl of about four, came out after the third bowl and touched the bruise on his wrist with one finger, very lightly, to see if it was real.
“Itai?” she said.
He knew that word by now.
Gosuke said it every time he hauled a net.
Does it hurt?
“Itai,” John agreed.
She nodded seriously, satisfied, and went back behind her mother.
When the family slept he lay awake and did what Leonardo would have wanted.
He tested himself.
He took Salai’s knife from his belt and held it at arm’s length over the matting, the way he had held the pencil in the basement, and let go, and pushed.
Four counts.
The knife turned slowly in the brazier light.
His fingertips went cold, and the warm wet came onto his lip, the same as always.
Nothing had changed.
Florence had not made it longer and the Step had not made it shorter.
Four counts was what he had, and every one of them still cost him.
He caught the knife on the fourth count, by the handle, a foot above the floor.
Then he wiped his lip on his sleeve so Ume would not see the blood in the morning, and lay down again.
A hawk tied to a pig, he thought.
Well.
He hasn’t seen the pig try yet.
In the night, on the fisherman’s floor, John lay with his shoulder and his knee and his ribs throbbing in turn like a chime of bells, and held the gold coin in his fist, and thought about a woman who had come to this beach before him and known exactly where he’d land.
He hadn’t known himself.
He’d only drifted.
He’d followed a noise.
So she can see where I’ll go, he thought, before I can.
He opened his hand and looked at the coin in the last of the brazier light.
The fine lines on its face weren’t rings of a tree, he saw now.
They were too regular.
They were a diagram, very small: a coil wound round a spindle, the windings counted, and beside it, in letters so tiny he had to tilt it to the coals, a name he had last seen written on a laboratory door in London.
HARTLEY.