The three young men at the gate of Nagaoka Sado’s house wore the dark blue jackets of the castle school, and each had two swords in his sash and a long oak practice sword over his shoulder.
The one in the middle was perhaps nineteen.
He had a broad, handsome, arrogant face and the shaved crown of a man who had come of age last year and wanted everybody to know it.
Kiku stopped ten paces short of them.
John stopped beside her.
“His name is Tsuda Gennosuke,” she said quietly, without moving her lips.
“His father is a captain of the castle guard.
He’s Kojiro’s favourite student.” She listened as the young man called something down the lane.
“He says he has heard that a foreign demon goes to this house every morning to learn the sword.
He says he would like to see how much it has learned.
Here.
Now.
With oak.”
John looked at the three of them.
He thought it through quickly, as he would have before going over a parapet.
He had been in Japan for three weeks.
He had held a sword for twelve days.
Every morning Musashi hit him a hundred times, and every morning he could stop perhaps two of those blows.
He had four counts of Hold in him, and they would show this boy everything John was about to do a quarter of a second before he did it, which against a trained swordsman was worse than nothing.
If I fight him, I lose.
In the street, in front of his friends.
And then they’ll come every morning.
“Tell him no,” he said.
“He’ll call you a coward.”
“Tell him I’m a guest in this house, and I fight when my host says I fight.
Not before.”
Kiku told him.
Tsuda laughed, and said something short, and the other two laughed with him.
Kiku did not translate it, which told John all he needed.
Then the gate behind the three young men opened.
Musashi stood in it.
He was barefoot, with his hair tied up roughly and a bowl of rice in one hand and chopsticks in the other, as if he had come out in the middle of breakfast, which he had.
He did not look at John.
He looked at the back of Tsuda’s head until Tsuda felt it and turned round.
For a moment nobody said anything.
Then Musashi spoke, quite mildly, round a mouthful of rice.
Kiku translated in a whisper.
“He says: you want to fight someone in this house.
Good.
I’m in this house.
I’ll fight you.
Now.
Here.
With oak, since you brought oak.” Musashi took another mouthful and chewed it.
“He says: or you can wait ten days, and watch me fight your teacher, and then decide whether you still want to.”
Tsuda’s face had gone white and then red.
He was brave.
John saw that.
He was standing a sword’s length from the most dangerous man in Japan with two friends who had taken a step back, and he did not take a step back himself.
But he was not stupid either.
“After the island,” he said.
“After the island,” Musashi agreed, and went back inside with his rice.
The three young men walked away down the lane.
As they passed John, Tsuda looked him full in the face and said one quiet sentence.
This time Kiku translated it.
“He says, after the island, whichever way it goes, he’ll come back for you.”
Kiku let out her breath slowly.
“He’s never done that before,” she said.
“Come out to the gate for anyone.”
“He did it for his host,” said John.
“Nagaoka’s gate.
Nagaoka’s guest.
If I’d fought in the lane and lost, it would have been Nagaoka’s shame too.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Kiku looked at him with her head on one side.
“You’ve been here three weeks,” she said, “and you already think like them.” She did not sound as if she meant it kindly or unkindly.
“Come.
He’ll want to hit you now, to make up for the rice going cold.”
* * *
For the next ten days Musashi did not train.
John had expected him to.
He had expected the swordsman to be in the yard at dawn and dusk, cutting at the air, preparing.
Instead Musashi slept late.
He ate a great deal.
He went out into the town and looked at things, at the boats in the harbour, at a potter at his wheel, at the way the tide came in over the flats by the island.
In the afternoons he sat in the room Nagaoka had given him with a brush and a block of ink and painted.
Once John saw what he was painting: a bird on a dead branch, a few strokes, nothing else.
He painted it eleven times and burned ten.
The lessons went on.
Musashi still met John in the yard at dawn and hit him with oak.
But he did it in his sleeping robe, half awake, and it was clear that it cost him nothing at all.
“Ask him,” John said to Kiku, on the fifth day, “why he doesn’t practise.
Kojiro’s the best swordsman in the west of Japan.
Everybody says so.”
Kiku asked.
Musashi put down his brush.
“He says Kojiro has been practising for twenty years.
Ten more days won’t change him.
Ten more days won’t change me either.” She listened.
“He says the fight is already over.
It was decided when Kojiro agreed to fight on an island at a time someone else chose.
Now there’s only the walking out to it.”
“And if he’s wrong?”
Musashi heard the question in John’s voice before Kiku translated it, and smiled his short crooked smile.
“He says, then you’ll need a new teacher,” said Kiku.
“And he says Kojiro’s sword is three feet long, and a sword like that is a beautiful thing, and a man who owns a beautiful thing is always thinking about it.” Musashi said one more sentence and picked up his brush again.
“He says, think about that, while I paint my bird.”
On the eighth evening John asked him the other question.
He had been carrying it for a week.
“I can see a little of what’s coming,” he said, through Kiku.
“Not my own.
Other people’s.
If I touch a man’s hand, I see where he may be in a few days or weeks.
Not for certain.
What’s likely.” He held out his hand, palm up, across the matting.
“If you want, I’ll look.
I’ll tell you whether you come back from the island.”
Kiku translated it slowly.
She looked at John’s hand while she did it as if it were a snake.
Musashi looked at it too.
He did not move for some time.
Outside, Nagaoka’s servants were lighting the lanterns along the veranda one by one.
Then he picked up his teacup and drank from it, and put it down, and said something short.
“He says no,” said Kiku.
“Why?”
Musashi answered at more length.
Kiku listened with her head bowed.
“He says: if you tell me I live, I’ll walk out to the island like a man who has already won, and a man like that is careless.
If you tell me I die, I’ll walk out like a dead man, and a dead man is slow.” She paused.
“He says a swordsman must not know what will happen.
Only what is happening.
That is the whole of his art.” Musashi said one more thing, and almost smiled.
“And he says: you should learn it too.
You look ahead too much.
John took his hand back.
Musashi poured him tea, which he had never done before, and they sat and drank it without saying anything more while the lanterns were lit.
* * *
On the morning of the duel the whole of Kokura went down to the shore.
Lord Tadaoki had forbidden it, Kiku said.
He had ordered that no one was to watch, so that neither side could claim afterwards that there had been a trick or a crowd to shame the loser.
Nobody paid any attention.
By the hour of the dragon there were people all along the beach from the fishing village to the river mouth: fishermen, merchants, farmers who had walked in from the hills, samurai in their best jackets standing apart in their own groups.
Gosuke and Ume were there with all five children.
Old women had brought rice balls wrapped in leaves.
* * *
On the thirteenth day of the fourth month, Musashi was late for his own death.
John stood on the beach at Kokura with Kiku and three hundred other people and watched the island.
It was a still morning, the sea like pewter.
A boat had taken Sasaki Kojiro out at the hour of the dragon, with his officials and his famous long sword, the one the woman from 2041 had described to Musashi to the inch.
The boat had come back without him.
On the island, a small figure in a red jacket walked up and down the sand.
An hour passed.
Then most of another.
“He does this,” Kiku said.
She’d learned more about Musashi in six weeks than she wanted to.
“He says the other man should have time to be angry.”
“Does it work?”
“He’s still alive.”
Musashi’s boat came out from the headland a little before noon, rowed by a boatman with his back bent.
Musashi sat in the stern.
Even from the beach John could see he was doing something with his hands, working at a piece of wood with a knife.
“The oar,” said John.
Kiku looked at him.
“He’s carving the spare oar,” John said.
“Into a sword.
Longer than Kojiro’s.”
He didn’t know how he knew.
He’d read it in the woodcut book, probably, years ago, and forgotten.
It came up now out of nowhere and sat in his mouth like a stone, and he watched the boat run up on the island’s beach exactly as the story said, and Musashi jump down into the shallows with the wooden thing in his hand, and the red jacket come running down the sand with the long blade flashing as it cleared the scabbard, and the scabbard thrown away into the sea.
You’ve lost, Kojiro, John thought, because that was the line in the book.
Why would a winner throw away his scabbard?
The two figures met at the water’s edge.
It was very quick.
From the beach it looked like nothing, like two men passing in a street.
Then the red jacket was lying on the sand and Musashi was walking back to the boat.
The crowd made a noise, a long low sound, not a cheer.
Kiku crossed herself inside her sleeve.
John found he’d been gripping the gold coin in his pocket so hard the rim had cut his palm.
He’d known exactly how it would go, and it had gone exactly that way.
And he’d still not been able to breathe.
* * *
Tsuda was on the beach too.
John saw him afterwards, when the crowd was breaking up and drifting back towards the town in silence, with the other students of the castle school around him.
Some of them were weeping.
Tsuda was not.
He stood at the edge of the water with his oak sword in his hand and stared across at the island, where men from the castle were lifting Kojiro’s body into a boat.
Then he turned his head and looked up the beach.
Straight at John.
He did not say anything.
He did not need to.
Musashi came to the house that evening with blood on his sandals and didn’t mention the island at all.
He ate his supper.
He washed.
Then he came out into the yard where John was waiting, as he waited every evening, with an oak sword in his hands, and he picked up his own, and stood in front of him.
“Now,” he said, in Japanese, slowly, so John would understand.
“Now I have time for you.”