The house where Musashi was staying stood in the samurai quarter of Kokura, inside the outer moat of the castle, in a lane of white walls and tiled gates.
It belonged to a senior retainer of the Hosokawa named Nagaoka Sado, a grey, courteous man who had known Musashi’s father and who had offered the swordsman a room until the duel, as a host offers a guest a bed for the night: it was an honour, and it was also a way of keeping an eye on him.
John came to the gate at dawn on the first morning with a small cloth bag of rice that Ume had given him, because Musashi had said bring your own.
The gatekeeper looked at the bag, and at John’s height, and at his Florentine boots, and shut the gate in his face.
Kiku arrived ten minutes later and got it opened again.
It took her a long time, and a great deal of bowing, and at one point a short sharp sentence in a voice John had not heard her use before.
The gatekeeper bowed back, very low, and let them in.
“What did you say to him?”
“That you are the swordsman’s guest, and that if he made the swordsman come to the gate himself, the swordsman would not be pleased.” She brushed her sleeves straight.
“It’s true.
It’s also the only thing everyone in this town is afraid of.”
* * *
That first week, John learned more about Kiku than he did about the sword.
The sword was simple, in its way.
Musashi met him in the yard behind the house at dawn and hit him with oak until the sun was well up, and then said one word, which meant enough, and went inside to eat.
That was the whole of the lesson.
John learned nothing from it yet except where his body was slowest, which was everywhere.
Kiku was not simple at all.
She was twenty-six.
She had been born in Nagasaki, the daughter of a merchant who traded with the Portuguese ships and had been baptised with his whole household when she was two.
At ten the Jesuits had taken her into their school at Arima, with forty other children, to learn Latin and Portuguese and music and the catechism, because the Fathers needed Japanese who could speak for them.
She had been good at it.
She had been better at it than the boys, she said without any modesty, and the Fathers had not known what to do with a girl who was better than the boys, so they had sent her to Kokura to interpret for the mission there.
“I’ve been here five years,” she said.
“I talk for the Fathers when they preach, and I talk for the people when they confess, and I talk for the merchants when the ships come.
I know everyone’s sins in this town and how much rice they owe.” She smiled slightly.
“That’s why the gatekeeper let you in.”
Her Italian was not really Italian.
It was something she had built herself, from the Latin of the Mass and the Portuguese of the ships and the few Italian Jesuits she had known, and she spoke it slowly and carefully, like a woman crossing a stream on stones.
John’s Italian was four hundred years ahead of hers in places and a hundred miles away in others.
Between them they made a language that nobody else in the world spoke.
By the end of the week they were good at it.
She also began to teach him Japanese.
She did it the way Musashi taught the sword, by hitting him with it until he learned.
She pointed at things and said their names and made him say them back, all day, on the way to the house and on the way back, in the market, in the fisherman’s hut in the evening.
Mizu, water.
Kome, rice.
Ken, sword.
Mō ichido, again, which he heard from Musashi a hundred times a morning.
She corrected his pronunciation without mercy.
When he got a word right she said nothing.
When he got it wrong she said it again, louder, as if he were deaf.
“You’re a terrible teacher,” he told her on the fourth day.
“I’m a wonderful teacher.
You’re a terrible student.
You hear a word and you try to understand it.
Don’t understand it.
Just say it.” She pointed at a dog.
“Inu.”
“Inu.”
“Again.”
He found that he liked her very much, and that she was much cleverer than he was about almost everything that mattered here.
He also found that she was frightened, all the time, in a way she never let show in her face.
She wore the wooden cross on its cord inside her collar now, not outside.
She did not go to the church by the main street but by the back lanes.
When a samurai passed them in the road, she stepped aside into the ditch further than anyone else did, and bowed lower, and kept her eyes on the ground until he was gone.
“Is it the Shogun’s order?” John asked her, on the sixth day.
“It’s everything.” She walked on for a while before she said more.
“Two years ago, in Nagasaki, there was trouble between the Portuguese and a lord who serves the Shogun.
A ship was burned.
Men died.
Since then, Edo has been angry with everything foreign.
This spring the Shogun forbade the faith in his own lands, the cities he rules directly.
Not here yet.
Lord Tadaoki still lets us be.” She glanced at John.
“But a lord who lets the Christians be while the Shogun is angry is a lord who has to be careful.
And the people who serve him know it.”
“So a Christian woman who walks around town with a foreigner…”
“…is a woman who should be more careful than she is.” She didn’t smile.
“Yes.”
* * *
The town noticed him.
He had expected that.
He had not expected how much.
Children followed him in the street, at a distance, in a crowd that grew every day.
On the third day one of them threw a stone, which hit him on the back of the neck, and the others shrieked and ran.
Old women stopped talking when he passed.
A man selling roasted chestnuts at the bridge over the moat stared at him with open loathing and then sold him a bag for three times the price, and Kiku made him give half of it back.
Worst were the samurai.
They did not stare.
They did not do anything at all.
They looked straight through him as if he were not in the street, and once a young one with a shaved crown and two swords at his belt spat on the ground a foot from John’s boots, without breaking his stride, and walked on.
“He’s one of Kojiro’s students,” Kiku said quietly.
“From the castle school.
They all know whose house you go to every morning.”
John watched the young man walk away.
He thought about it the way he would have in a trench.
A student of the man Musashi is going to fight.
Spitting at the man Musashi trains.
Ten days before the duel.
“They think I’m a spy,” he said.
“They think you’re a foreign sorcerer Musashi has hired to put a curse on their teacher.” Kiku looked at him sideways.
“Which, given what I’ve seen you do, is not the stupidest thing anyone in Kokura has ever thought.”
* * *
She ate with them at the hut most evenings, because the Fathers’ cook was a bad cook and Ume was a good one.
One night, when Gosuke had gone out to his nets and the children were asleep, John saw her take something from her sleeve and slip it over her left hand.
It was a string of plain wooden beads, dark and polished, the kind he had seen old women in the market counting as they walked.
“That’s not yours,” he said.
“It’s Buddhist.
A juzu.” She turned it on her wrist.
“I bought it in the market last month.
When I go out to the farms, to talk for the Fathers, I wear this on my wrist and the cross inside my collar.
Then anyone who looks sees a good Buddhist woman going about her business.” She looked at it.
“My mother would be ashamed of me.”
“Would she?”
“No.” Kiku was quiet for a while.
A fever, in a summer when the ships were late.
My mother has run his business ever since, with my brothers.
She sells Portuguese wine to Japanese lords who aren’t supposed to like it, and Japanese lacquer to Portuguese merchants who pay too much.
She is the most practical woman in Nagasaki.” She smiled a little.
“She would say: wear the beads, Kiku.
God can see your collar.”
“And what do you say?”
“I say I’m a coward.” She said it plainly, the way she said everything.
“And I say that a dead interpreter is no use to anyone.
Both are true.” She took the beads off again and put them away.
“Eat your fish.
Tomorrow I’ll teach you the words for coward and useful.
You should know both.”
* * *
On the eighth day he did something useful.
The Fathers had a clock.
It was a Portuguese table clock in a gilded brass case, with a bell inside that struck the hours, and it had been a gift to the mission from a merchant in Macau.
It was the only mechanical clock in Kokura, and possibly in all of Buzen province, and for a month it had not worked.
The Fathers did not know how to mend it.
Nobody in Kokura knew how to mend it.
They had been going to send it to Nagasaki by ship.
Kiku mentioned it at the hut one evening, as a sad thing.
John asked to see it.
She took him to the mission the next morning by the back lanes.
It was a small wooden church with a cross on the roof, a garden, and a house for the two Fathers, a Portuguese named Diogo and a Spaniard named Pedro, both grey and tired.
Father Diogo looked at John with deep suspicion, an Englishman being a heretic by definition, but he brought out the clock.
John opened the back.
It took him an hour.
The trouble was a broken tooth on the wheel that drove the striking train, and a mainspring that had been wound too tight by someone who did not know when to stop.
He could not make a new tooth.
He did not need to.
He put his thumb on the wheel, and pushed backwards into the brass, the way he had with Leonardo’s copper bowl, and felt the cold come into his hand.
Under his thumb the brass remembered being whole.
The tooth grew back.
Nobody saw.
Father Diogo was looking at the mainspring, and Kiku was looking at Father Diogo.
John eased the mainspring, cleaned the pivots with a feather and a drop of oil, and closed the back.
Then he set the hands to the hour by the sun in the garden, and wound it, gently.
It ticked.
At the next hour, it struck.
Father Diogo crossed himself.
Father Pedro laughed out loud.
And Kiku, standing in the doorway with her hands in her sleeves, looked at John’s thumb, which had gone white to the knuckle, and then at his face, and said nothing at all, then or afterwards.
On the way back she said only: “You will tell me one day.
What you are.”
“One day,” said John.
“Good.” She nodded, satisfied, as if they had agreed a price.
Then she stopped dead in the lane.
At the gate of Nagaoka Sado’s house, where John went every morning, three young samurai were standing in a row with their arms folded, waiting.
The one in the middle was the man who had spat at John’s feet.
He had a long oak sword over his shoulder, and when he saw John coming down the lane, he smiled.